White Sup Nat 2 Bak

819 post 3x mass shooter

NO MERRI

SEE RACISM

SEE FASCISM TRUMP MILLER 3 XENO IMMIGRATION GRT

SEE NEO-NAZI real heritage am

primary on Whitmer plot

see racism and tag rcism

SEE XIAN NAT'L

SEE WHITE NAT'L /SUPREME

see domestic ctr-terrorism FAIL

see gt replacement, manifesto

see mass shooter

see neo-nazi

SEE GORKA FAIL

see civil war (REQ ETHNO AND OR RELIGIOUS IDENTITY TRIBALISM

see just plain nazi

see infiltration/active duty

BAK 11 26

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Emily Kennard and Liz Goodwin @ The Washington Post: Social account linked to former Mike Collins aide posted slurs, calls for violence

A congressional staffer who has worked with four representatives over the past four years, including GOP Senate hopeful Rep. Mike Collins (Georgia), appears closely tied to an anonymous social media account that denigrates female politicians, promotes political violence, calls for an end to democracy and laments the existence of civil rights laws, among other views, a Washington Post analysis of the account found. Details shared in posts on the account connect it to 25-year-old Jonathon Hatzistefanou, who works as a legislative assistant for Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Florida) and served as a former staff assistant for Collins, the Georgia Republican locked in a bitter fight for a Senate seat with Sen. Jon Ossoff (D).

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rww

09/30/2026

byKyle Mantyla

Jesse Leon Rogers is offering "Training for Reigning" courses to help right-wing Christians "restore rule and righteousness in the earth."
Sean Feucht claims the people of Minnesota "have been hijacked with toxic empathy" for Muslims and LGBTQ people.
White nationalists were outraged over an ad from Gov. Sarah Huckabee-Sanders touting the state's welfare-to-work requirement and James Fishback was eager to capitalize by rushing to Arkansas to hold a press conference.

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an 9 26

Phil Williams @ Confront The Hate: Don’t Have the Right Blood? You’re Not a Real American, Far-Right Influencer Argues

C.Jay Engel helped popularize the term “Heritage American.” Now, he’s pushing the discredited theory of “blood memory.”

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HNN GMAIL 4 26

How an Animators’ Strike Led to the Making of Song of the South

Vicky Osterweil

On the intersection of labor contract, nationalism, and white supremacy within Disney Studios. (Literary Hub)

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an 2 26

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led by Secretary Kristi Noem, hired 21-year-old Peyton Rollins — a former U.S. Labor Department employee — to help manage its social media accounts. But the hire is now being scrutinized by the New York Times, which reports that Rollins made posts on Labor Department accounts that "raised internal alarms over possible white-nationalist messaging."

Times reporter Evan Gorelick, in an article published early Wednesday morning, February 11, explains, "Mr. Rollins has spent most of the past year giving the Labor Department's social media pages a makeover in Mr. Trump's image. Current and former employees said career staff members had been pushed aside after Mr. Rollins' arrival and rarely, if ever, crafted social media posts once he took control. Instead, Mr. Rollins personally posted social media content, which he has included on his personal website."

Recent federal government posts, according to Gorelick, "have used evocative imagery, some reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s, with phrases like 'Restore American Greatness' and 'he globalist status quo is OVER.'"

"During the period when those posts were made," Gorelick reports, "the department's social media following exploded, even as colleagues warned superiors that the department's accounts could be seen as promoting white-supremacist rhetoric, Nazi imagery and QAnon conspiracy theories. Some employees who have since left the Labor Department said that the agency's posts had grown increasingly questionable."

Gorelick notes that according to "dozen internal e-mails and Microsoft Teams conversations obtained by The New York Times," Rollins' co-workers "expressed personal discomfort with the posts, cited data showing engagement with right-wing extremists, and urged a more moderate messaging style."

Former Labor Department employee Egan Reich, who spent 15 years with the agency before leaving in April 2025, told the Times, "It's incredibly chilling and disappointing, and I do feel it diminishes the work my colleagues and I did over the years to educate people about the government."

AN 2 26

In his new book "To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right," author Christopher Mathias takes a look at the growth of white nationalist groups in the United States and the role that anti-fascist activists play in fighting them.

President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies are declaring that antifa is a "terrorist organization"; antifa, however, is not an actual organization, but rather, a network of leftists who say their goal is to defeat fascism "by any means necessary," to borrow a phrase from Malcolm X. Many right-wing media outlets confuse antifa with Black Block Anarchists, who are a separate movement.

Mathias talked to antifa activists extensively when doing research for his book. In an excerpt republished by Talking Points Memo on February 3, the author describes a meeting between five white males in a diner in Washington State called 13 Coins; four of them were white nationalists, but the fifth was an antifa activist doing undercover research on them. And they had no idea that he wasn't at all sympathetic to their views.

During the vetting process, according to Mathias, the white nationalists would use the n-word; if someone was offended, that would expose them as a possible "infiltrator."

In the diner, according to Mathias, white nationalist "Anthony" (not his real name) "said the word loud and clear, rising above the clatter of the crowded restaurant, maybe loud enough even for their Latina waitress to hear."

"The sheer force of that word — those two syllables that, when spoken in succession from a white man's tongue, instantly invoked centuries of slavery, lynchings, and burning crosses — would make any 'anti-fascist' spy squirm in their seat, he argued," Mathias explains. "The fear of infiltrators was real. It was why national leadership encouraged members not to know each other's real names, to stick to pseudonyms. Were an infiltrator to discover anyone's actual identity, they'd be liable to lose their jobs, their scholarships, their girlfriends, be kicked out of their homes. Some might go to prison. Every member knew they stood to lose it all…. There was no hesitation. One by one, everyone at the table obliged, saying the word loud and clear."

According to Mathias, the "legacy of these anti-fascist infiltrations ran deep, sowing mistrust in the organization — everyone always on the lookout for the next mole."

"They finished eating and asked for the bill, prompting Anthony to launch into a rant about tipping," Mathias reports. "He refused to tip non-white waitresses, he said, like the waitress they had now, the one who had sweetly served them cheeseburgers and fries, and who, if she'd heard them using racial slurs, hadn't done anything about it. When it came time to pay, everyone agreed with Anthony: no tip. Satisfied with their decision and exhausted from their training, the group then walked out of 13 Coins and bid farewell to one another…. A short time later, though, one of these white men circled back to 13 Coins, parked, and walked inside."

Mathias continues, "His demeanor was different. Something gentler than before. He looked for the waitress, but she wasn't anywhere to be found, so he found the manager instead. 'Please give this to the waitress,' he told the manager, who was Black, pressing $300 into his hand. 'Please make sure she gets all of this and tell her I said sorry.' He started to leave but then stopped himself, asking the manager to pass along one more message. 'Please tell her that those guys I was with,' he said, 'please tell her those guys aren't my friends.'"

RWW

11/19/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck @ CNN: Trump pick for deputy UN job questioned loyalty of American Muslims

President Donald Trump’s pick to be the US deputy representative to the United Nations, former Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce, for years promoted inflammatory, anti-Muslim and conspiratorial claims, including suggesting that former President Barack Obama was a secret Muslim bent on harming America.

Gabe Kaminsky and Tanner Nau @ The Free Press: Nick Fuentes’s Plan to ‘Infiltrate Politics’ and Subvert the GOP

The white nationalist streamer is building an organization to pressure Republicans by developing ‘elite human capital’ and ‘mapping out’ his pro-Israel foes.

Mark Silk @ Religion News Service: On the right, Judeo-Christian values are out and Christian nationalism is in

As someone who has been studying the use of ‘Judeo-Christian’ in American public discourse for over 40 years, I can say with confidence its usage has come full circle.

Brian Kaylor @ Public Witness: Christ the Christian Nationalist Sunday?

On Thursday (Nov. 13), the Michigan House of Representatives passed a resolution to officially declare Nov. 23 as “Christ the King Sunday” in the Mitten State. The resolution, which passed without debate on a voice vote that did not seem to draw any opposition, declares that the lawmakers “honor and acknowledge Christ’s Kingship within every aspect of life.”

Julia Ornedo @ The Daily Beast: Trump Loyalist Laura Loomer Issues Treacherous 2028 Prediction

The far-right activist called on the GOP to address its “Nazi problem.”

Phil Williams @ News Channel 5: Meet the neo-Nazi targeting kids online, teaching them to hate and to prepare to kill

Jon Minadeo courts kids in video chat apps, berating children of color, encouraging white kids to arm themselves for 'race war.'

I LOVE HITLER, GAS THE DEMS, NBA = ZOO

an sn 10 25

A Politico article about a leaked group chat of Young Republican leaders from across the country making racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments includes two people from Arizona, one of whom has documented ties to the white nationalist groyper movement.

The group chat of top officials in Young Republican Federation chapters from across the country, dubbed “RESTOREYR,” was leaked to Politico, which reported on a litany of comments made by participants. Offensive comments included making racist remarks about Black people, talking about putting Democrats in gas chambers, forcibly raping their enemies and more. The chat includes more than 250 slurs and one person saying “I love Hitler,” according to Politico.

One of the members of the chat was Arizona Young Republican Chairman Luke Mosiman, 25, who was alleged to have made racially charged comments about Black people and even floated an idea of linking their opponents in an election over control of the Young Republican National Federation to white supremacist groups — before saying it could backfire because it could result in the Young Republicans they needed to win the elections instead backing their opponent.

The Young Republican National Federation released a statement following the Politico report condemning the comments and calling for those involved to resign “from all positions within their state and local Young Republican organizations.”

In Kansas, the chairman of the state’s Republican Party announced that their Young Republicans chapter, which was involved in the chat leaks, was shut down. And he Arizona Republican Party came out strongly against the “disturbing language” used by Young Republican leaders in a statement released shortly after the story was published Tuesday

IFrame Content

But Mosiman and the Arizona Young Republicans resisted the call that he and Rachel Hope, whose comments in the group chat were also mentioned in Politico’s story, resign. In a written statement released late Wednesday, the group instead cast Mosiman and Hope, who is the organization’s events chair, as victims, saying they “firmly reject any involvement in the ongoing political witch hunt targeting fellow Young Republican members.”

Their statement called it “disheartening” to “witness the double standard” displayed by their opponents within the conservative movement. They also lashed out at critics, saying some have failed to condemn violent texts by Virginia Democratic Attorney General candidate Jay Jones or social media posts celebrating the death of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, who was killed last month.

However, the group did condemn “Nazi ideology,” though its statement fell short of acknowledging what was said or apologizing for it.

“We express our sincere regret and unequivocally condemn any rhetoric that could be interpreted as sympathetic to Nazi ideology,” the statement says. The lengthy statement also says that the group has concerns over the way the messages were obtained and their validity.

Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has claimed online, posting a sworn affidavit, that the chats were leaked by Gavin Wax, a staffer in Trump’s State Department who formerly led the New York Young Republican club, whose own problematic chats were revealed in 2023.

Mosiman has been viewed by some as a rising star in Arizona conservative politics, but he also has close ties with the far-right and had courted controversy long before the group chat.

Hitler’s birthday

In April 2022, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar was listed as a “special guest” at an event in Tempe scheduled for April 20, a date that is revered by white supremacists and neo-Nazis because it is Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

The event had been organized by the American Populist Union, a white nationalist group that is closely aligned with groypers, the name for a group of young, male white nationalists who strive for their ideas to become a part of the Republican mainstream and are largely followers of white nationalist Nick Fuentes. In 2021, Gosar was the first elected official to speak at Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference.

After the Mirror reported on Gosar’s promotion and anticipated attendance at the event and spurred national media coverage, Gosar pulled out. His office said he was never planning to attend, even though he promoted it on his social media accounts.

Mosiman attended, and was later featured in photos posted by APU and in. Mosiman also follows a number of accounts connected to the groyper movement on his X account.

“Like it or not, Nick Fuentes is becoming a force in the GOP, you all need to understand that,” Mosiman said in a March 2021 tweet. “Stop acting like it’s a few nut cases, it’s not. Ignoring it isn’t working.”

Mosiman went on to say that he wasn’t a Fuentes supporter but he had watched his “Afpac speech” and it “was not bad.”

In that 2021 AFPAC speech, Fuentes called the Jan. 6 insurrection, where seven people died, “lighthearted mischief” and stressed white nationalist talking points. Mosiman was also photographed in September 2021 protesting U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly by the groyper-aligned Arizona College Republicans United. The photograph was posted in Instagram with the caption “CRU executed a protest with Groypers against Senator Mark Kelly.”

Far-right YouTuber John Doyle, one of the featured speakers at the April 2022 APU event, organized a “Stop the Steal” rally in Michigan with Fuentes and has posted highly misogynistic content, such as saying that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Doyle, along with other members of APU, were also in attendance at the first 76Fest, which one of its organizers dubbed “Hitler Youth, without the Hitler.”

Mosiman also promoted an event in December 2021 that he called “one of the most based events of the year” which was being put on by Republicans for National Renewal, which has ties to ethno-nationalism, and co-hosted by APU.

That event brought local politicians face to face with a host of far-right extremists, including a number of prominent groypers.

APU has denied ties to white nationalism or knowledge of the significance of the date of its 4/20 event.

TPUSA and Arizona lawmakers

But Mosiman’s involvement in Arizona politics goes beyond the groyper movement.

Online, Mosiman often interacted with many local politicians, and in recent years started coming to the defense of conservative youth organization Turning Point USA.

“I used to be not a huge fan of TPUSA, but after seeing hard working and effective conservatives like (Austin Smith) and (Tyler Bowyer), I changed my mind,” Mosiman wrote on X in 2022, referring to two of the Arizona-based group’s leaders.

Both Smith and Bowyer are listed as members of the advisory team for the Arizona Young Republicans chapter that Mosiman leads. TPUSA did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Neither did Nancy Cottle, Republican state Rep. Matt Gress and GOP state Sen. Jake Hoffman, who were also listed as advisory board members.

The website for the Arizona Young Republicans went offline on Wednesday, but archived snapshots were still online.

“Without a doubt, Turning Point Action had the most meaningful grassroots impact on Arizona,” Mosiman wrote on X on Nov. 11, 2024, shortly after last year’s election. “Hats off to (Tyler Bowyer) and his phenomenal staff.”

Bowyer is the Chief Operating Officer of Turning Point Action, the political action arm of Turning Point USA.

TPUSA has long been a target of the groyper movement ,but in recent years has seen itself move farther to the right and courting controversy for hiring racists.

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mma

As mass deportation intensifies, right-wing media expand their aim to include American citizens

MAGA volk: Right-wing media personalities are expanding their hostility toward undocumented immigrants and now are targeting naturalized and native-born citizens in an assault on American identity

Written by Jason Campbell

Research contributions from John Whitehouse

Published 08/25/25

Since its inception, the MAGA movement has focused energy on trying to purge the United States of people who do not have legal status in the country. The Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts accelerated this summer after passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, alongside the opening of new migrant detention centers. Now, MAGA media are extending that hostility toward immigrants to take aim at naturalized and native-born citizens in an assault on American identity itself.

This weekend, MAGA personality Jack Posobiec shared a meme asking Americans what kind of “stock” they are, and suggested that new citizens are somehow less “American” than others. Lest anyone doubt his intent, on Monday morning, he shared it again. (“Foundation stock” is a term used for animal breeding, for what it’s worth.)

Citation

Via @JackPosobiec

The notion of certain Americans being less “American” has escalated in right-wing media in recent months.

In July, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh launched an attack on Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) for proposing legislation, The Dignity Act, to allow certain undocumented immigrants to apply for legal status. During his tirade, Walsh said Salazar is “not American” and should “go back to Cuba” — a startling claim given that Salazar is an American citizen who was born in the United States.

In a follow-up rant, Walsh doubled down on his attacks and argued that citizenship does not give a person equal claim to American identity “as someone who's lived in the country their entire life, who speaks the language, respects the culture, has ancestral ties to the country and its history."

Salazar is not the first U.S. citizen to have their national identity come under assault in recent months. After winning the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, Zohran Mamdani was attacked across the right-wing media ecosystem. Many of these smears focused on his Islamic faith or his political views, but some targeted his status as a naturalized citizen. Right-wing pundit Jack Posobiec said Mamdani is “not an American,” and the Article III Project’s Will Chamberlain wrote: “Denaturalize and deport Zohran Mamdani."

Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh has received similar attacks. Posobiec also claimed Fateh is “not an American,” while Walsh acknowledged that Fateh “was born in America, but he’s not actually an American."

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has long been a target of right-wing media. In April, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk said Omar has not “assimilated to America” and is instead trying “to infect the United States of America with her radical, anti-American Mohammadism, amongst her extreme leftist beliefs."

On Newsmax, Mercedes Schlapp attacked another common target for right-wing media, saying “I’m thinking that maybe they should deport Rashida Tlaib."

To put a fine point on the issue, there is a demographic thread that unites Salazar, Mamdani, Fateh, Omar, and Tlaib — they are all non-white citizens. As Kirk’s executive producer and co-host, Andrew Kolvet, declared last month: “Just by stats, by history, yeah, [being] white probably helps be an American.” He then called for an “immigration moratorium” in the United States.

While hostility to undocumented immigrants also characterized President Donald Trump’s first administration, the current racially focused rhetoric on the right has been building for years.

In 2022, an 18-year-old gunman killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York. He left behind a 180-page racist manifesto filled with hateful rants about the “great replacement” conspiracy theory — once relegated to the fringe of online discourse — which argues that white people in the U.S. are being intentionally replaced with non-white foreigners. Three years after the Buffalo attack, claiming “the great replacement is real” is no longer a fringe idea; it’s a bedrock talking point in right-wing media.

This mentality is linked with growing suggestions that the United States is not “a nation of immigrants,” as Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy argued in July, but “a nation of settlers.” Some personalities are even attacking the Statue of Liberty; Walsh claimed the famous poem at its base, which offered haven to “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” “in no way represents any kind of core American value."

MAGA attacks on Americans’ identities also extend to religion. Kirk said that Islam is “not compatible with Western civilization” and “fundamentally is at odds with the fiber and the DNA of our existence, of our birthright” under the U.S. Constitution, which “cannot coexist with Islam.” Muslims are dangerous, according to Kirk, plotting to “conquer” the United States “whether by sword” or “having a lot of babies.” And this view seemingly extends into the Trump administration, where Christian nationalist figures fill Trump’s religious liberty commission.

In the MAGA consciousness, America is not a melting pot but a homogenous identity, a MAGA “Volk,” and anyone else’s protections of legal immigration status or even citizenship can be removed at any point. This is why we see growing calls from the right for curtailing dual citizenship and demands to end all immigration into the United States. Kirk recently said that “America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that."

It’s not only immigrants and Muslim Americans who right-wing media are seeking to target. For MAGA, Democrats and the left are also incompatible with American identity. Kirk claimed that Democrats “don’t love the United States of America. They are at war with the American republic. There is no appealing to their higher angels. … There’s only the lower demons of the Democrat Party.” Fox’s Jesse Watters accused Democrats of “straight-up treason” over immigration policy. Laura Ingraham suggested Democrats opposing the Trump administration are trying to start an “armed rebellion,” and Newsmax’s Chris Plante asked, “At what point are they to be declared a terrorist organization?"

Manufacturing the friend-enemy distinction through political rhetoric and then enforcing that divide throughout society is an integral aspect of fascism: Those loyal to the regime are considered friends while those opposed are cast into the outer darkness, treated as enemies of the state, traitors, or parasites on the body politic. By calling into question the citizenship of immigrants, Muslims, and anyone who opposes the MAGA ideology, the right’s assault on American identity under the Trump administration is shaping a chilling new reality for our country.

And the MAGA assault on American identity is not just rhetorical — the angry rants on podcasts and social media platforms today could become White House policy tomorrow. Trump has mused about deporting U.S. citizens found guilty of a crime. Right-wing media have likewise campaigned to denaturalize and deport citizens.

“Not everyone in this country is an American,” said Walsh, “even the ones with legal status."

We’re seeing the end result of that mentality now: MAGA media want the Trump administration to target those with legal status next. Charlie Kirk made that clear, connecting all of these threads when he said, “If you're not an American, that's fine. Go back to your place of origin. … Just go back. Hasta la vista. But we have a culture to protect. We have a country to love. No man can serve two masters. Christ our Lord said that. We have a heritage to preserve."

### The right-wing media campaign to denaturalize and deport American citizens

:{03/26/25

### Fox's Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters on the FBI raid of John Bolton: “Some people say it's retribution. I say, who cares?”

:{08/22/25

### Charlie Kirk says he can’t find “Christ-like compassion” for long-term immigrants who don’t speak English

08/22/25

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kinda lost it on epstein?!

rww

Finally, Nick Fuentes encourages white men to aspire to greatness, like Ted Kaczynski, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin: "We are dangerous. We are fearsome. We are a martial race."

an 5 25

MAGA is furious at the Episcopal Church for refusing a directive from the federal government to help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status.

Newsweek reports the church submitted its refusal days after almost 50 South Africans arrived at a U.S. airport under a fast-tracked refugee program that appears to only serve white south Afrikaners. Other groups, including Black Sudanese refugees fleeing religious violence — who are also from Africa — are not similarly fast-tracked.

The new arrivals are minority descendants of mainly Dutch and French colonial settlers who created the segregationist system of apartheid in 1948, which allows white people to legally steal land and resources from the majority Black population, who were relocated to segregated overcrowded, townships of lean-tos and shacks.

Data show 73 percent of privately owned land in South Africa is white-owned despite white people comprising only 7 percent of the population. In corporate South Africa, white individuals also occupy 62 percent of top management positions while 17 percent of leadership roles are held by Black managers.

IFrame Content

Critics say Trump’s decision to expedite resettlement of Afrikaners bypasses an onerous refugee system that leaves thousands from conflict zones stuck in a years-long vetting processes and dangerous conditions.

Rev. Sean W. Rowe, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, confirmed in a letter to church members that the government contacted the church and expected it to resettle some of the South Africans under terms of a grant. But Rowe said the request posed a moral dilemma for the Episcopal Church, which has deep ties to the Anglican Church of Southern Africa and counts the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu — an outspoken apartheid opponent — among its spiritual forebears.

"In light of our church's steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step," Rowe wrote. “… Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government."

Right-wing figures roasted the Episcopal Church, with conservative political activist Charlie Kirk posting on X: "I guess you aren't a refugee if you are white. According to the Episcopal Church Jesus doesn't love white people."

Conservative commentator Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who settled a lawsuit with families of Sandy Hook victims after calling the mass shooting a “hoax”, wrote: "All Federal Funds MUST Be Pulled From The Episcopal Church. It's Time To Enforce The Separation Of Church And State."

Read the full Newsweek report here.

an 525

no lnx

'Sad white boys': Fear as Trump terror adviser shrugs off threat from 'inside the house'

Members of a neo-Nazi group pose with shields during 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, in 2017. (Karla Cote/Flickr)

Jordan Greenand Raw Story May 03, 2025

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was removed this week but a key Trump counterterrorism official remains in place at the White House — and he's planning a change in strategy to focus on jihadists rather than white supremacist groups that one leading expert said remain a significant domestic threat.

"The call is coming from inside the house," said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. "We all understand why the right doesn't want to tackle domestic violent extremism — it's their base."

The Trump official is Sebastian Gorka, an Anglo-Hungarian-American academic who spent seven months in the first Trump White House as a national security strategist before being removed. Closely connected to Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Gorka's far-right views have proved consistently controversial. His return to the White House generated protests from former Trump advisers, who called him names including “conman” and “clown.”

Regardless, Gorka is promising a new policy focused on “killing jihadis,” thereby downplaying, if not altogether abandoning, a Biden-era emphasis on white supremacist threats.

Now deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism in the National Security Council, Gorka is by his own estimation an expert on “Middle Eastern jihadism, al-Qaida [and] ISIS.” His X biography includes the acronym “WWFY&WWKY,” which stands for “we will find you and we will kill you.”

This week, Gorka wrote for Breitbart News that Trump has “already engineered a complete reversal in American counterterrorism policy.”

Gorka recounted a meeting with Trump and Waltz during the second week of the new administration. Gorka and Waltz laid a map on the Resolute Desk, showing a cave complex in northern Somalia that was being used as a base by ISIS, Gorka said.

“Kill them, and kill them now,” Trump said, according to Gorka. Thirty hours later, he said, the men were in the Situation Room “watching living hell rain down” on the caves.

'Back to the basics'

Speaking last week at Semafor’s World Economy Summit, Gorka said the new counterterrorism plan, expected to be ready in the coming month, will be “utterly, completely” different from the strategy under Joe Biden. Gorka said the new plan will “go back to the basics,” as “the majority of threats we face are jihadi terrorists.”

In his preface to the 2021 National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, Biden highlighted white supremacist attacks: the 2015 massacre of Black worshipers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that was targeted for supporting immigrants, and the 2019 slaughter of Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex. by a gunman who echoed the Trump epithet “invaders.”

Though it cited an array of violent ideologies, the national strategy asserted that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (principally those who promote the superiority of the white race) and militia violent extremists are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats.”

Like other officials in the Trump administration, Gorka has said little if anything publicly about the threat posed by violent neo-Nazi accelerationists, who seek to bring about the collapse of society through mass shootings and industrial sabotage.

But Gorka has in the past downplayed white supremacy. In 2017, as an adviser in the first Trump White House, he told Breitbart, where he was previously a national security editor, that where terrorism was concerned, white supremacy was not a problem. Three days later in Charlottesville, Va. a man who had rallied with the white supremacist group Vanguard America drove a car into a group of peaceful anti-racist protesters, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the attack “domestic terrorism.”

Gorka could not be reached for comment for this story. Lewis, from George Washington University, worried that a national strategy on terrorism that erases references to racial motivation might discourage FBI agents from seeking authorization to investigate white supremacist plots.

“In the face of overwhelming statistical evidence, there is a complete unwillingness to acknowledge the reality, because it would fly in the face of their narrative,” Lewis told Raw Story. “It’s not going to go away. We can put our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not happening. There’s still going to be mass shootings, even if we don’t acknowledge that they’re motivated by white supremacy, and the FBI just calls them ‘sad white boys.’

“If anything, the complete inability of the administration to even acknowledge the problem will afford these individuals a more permissive environment to recruit, radicalize and carry out attacks.”

'Growing threat'

In his recent article for Breitbart, Gorka charged that the Biden administration “ignored the growing threat of global jihadism.”

Under the Biden administration, the FBI arrested an Afghan national who allegedly planned a mass casualty attack on Election Day in the name of ISIS. In total, Lewis said, 10 ISIS supporters were arrested in the U.S. in 2024.

On New Year's Eve, a man inspired by ISIS used his truck to attack revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people. Before that, Lewis said, the last lethal jihadi attack on U.S. soil occurred in 2019, when a Saudi airman taking courses at Naval Air Station Pensacola murdered three U.S. sailors.

Since then, avowed white supremacists have carried out mass shootings targeting African Americans in Buffalo, N.Y., resulting in 10 deaths, and Jacksonville, Fla., with three deaths.

In terms of disrupted plots, a review by Raw Story found that since 2021, the FBI has disrupted at least three attempts to attack the power grid by white supremacists affiliated with the Terrorgram Collective, a group recently designated by the State Department as a global terrorist entity. In the same period, the FBI disrupted at least six plots by white supremacists to carry out lethal attacks against police officers and LGBTQ+ people.

Gorka has also promised changes in emphasis on resources used to counter terror groups. For Breitbart, he wrote that the centerpiece of Trump’s counterterrorism approach will be “allowing our special operators, the intelligence community, and the bravest warfighters in the world to deal death to those who have the blood of Americans on their hands or who are plotting to murder our citizens.”

ProPublica, however, has reported that the new administration has cut nearly 20 percent of the workforce at a Department of Homeland Security center responsible for “strengthen[ing] the nation’s ability to prevent targeted violence and terrorism nationwide, through funding, training, evidence-based resources and increasing public awareness across every level of government, the private sector, and local communities.”

NOW READ: Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff

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On Wednesday, April 2 in a Dallas suburb, 17-year-old high school student Austin Metcalf was fatally stabbed at a track meet by Karmelo Anthony, also 17. Anthony, who admitted to fatally stabbing Metcalf, is facing murder charges but says he acted in self-defense when they got into a fight.

In an article published on April 25, Salon's Amanda Marcotte details the ways in which Jake Lang — who was among the January 6 Capitol riot defendants and is now running for the U.S. Senate in Florida — and right-wing media outlets are exploiting the case and turning it into a racial issue.

"Metcalf was white. Anthony is Black," Marcotte explains. "Lang saw an opportunity and leapt into action. After circulating a flyer with Metcalf's face labeled 'Protect White Americans,' Lang descended on this Texas suburb to lead a rally painting Black Americans as a near-existential threat to white Americans. When Jeff Metcalf, the victim's father, called Lang during the rally, the former inmate now running for State Secretary Marco Rubio's Florida Senate seat, got visibly excited."

According to Marcotte, Austin Metcalf's father, Jeff Metcalf, was not impressed by Lang's "racist stunt" and asked him to stop using photos of his son.

IFrame Content

"Lang is a clown, but he is not an outlier," Marcotte laments. "The whole of right-wing media, including Fox News, has decided to make a spectacle of this case, with endless, breathless coverage painting this single situation as symbolic of what they view as a racist war on white people. It's useful agitprop for MAGA, which desperately needs a distraction from (President Donald) Trump's failures and falling approval ratings."

Marcotte continues, "It's gross, and it's coming at a high cost for the families involved and the larger community, ratcheting up racial tensions and sowing paranoia, all over a case that is already heart-wrenching enough…. Tellingly, the right-wing noise machine can't even articulate the injustice that needs to be remedied here. Anthony was arrested and is being held accountable. There is not a smidgen of evidence that police and prosecutors aren't taking this case seriously…. The deafening outrage is about shutting off the brains of the audience, keeping MAGA audiences in a state of racist paranoia, so they don't think about how Donald Trump's incompetence is hurting the economy and national security."

Lang, according to Marcotte, "did not react well to Jeff Metcalf telling him to step off."

"After the grieving father embarrassed Lang in front of reporters," Marcotte observes, "Lang posted on X that Metcalf is an example of 'White Weakness & Submission' and that Metcalf would 'hand his daughter over to be raped.'"

Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.}:

rww

Lana Lokteff Wants To Repeal The Civil Rights Act To Keep Black People Out Of 'All Our White Spaces'

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Extremist video

02/26/2025

Kyle Mantyla

White nationalist Lana Lokteff says we have to "repeal the Civil Rights Act" to stop black people from invading "all our white spaces": "All of this because they couldn't drink [from] the same water fountain or use the same toilet. Was it really that big of a deal?"

RWW

02/11/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Malcolm Ferguson @ The New Republic: Steve Bannon Finally Admits to Border Wall Grift in Guilty Plea

The former Trump adviser has admitted to swindling the Donald Trump’s MAGA base in the ultimate scam.

Will Bunch @ The Philadelphia Inquirer: What Elon Musk wants is worse than you think

Few, if any, seem to understand what Musk, DOGE, or their hands-off patron in Trump truly want. It’s true that massive cuts in the programs that empower middle-class Americans will mean more money for things that Musk, Trump and their allies want, including more tax cuts for the super-rich and a large deportation army. But a community of folks who pay attention to Silicon Valley — the new center of power, not Washington — says the bigger idea is darker and much more sinister.

Noah Lanard @ Mother Jones: Elon Musk Keeps Boosting White Nationalists on X

One user Musk amplified frequently attacks Black people and has said he is “impressed” by the Holocaust.

Angry White Men: White Nationalist Explains How He Tries To ‘Fish’ For Attention From Elon Musk

Recently, X owner and Trump ally Elon Musk shared a post by Vincent James Foxx — a longtime antisemite and white nationalist. In a livestream for the far-right video-sharing platform Rumble, Foxx explained how he tailored his posts in an attempt to get Musk’s attention, and said that he’s trying to “fish” for more.

Corbin Bolles @ The Daily Beast: Trump’s MAGA Media Enforcer Is Having ‘the Time of His Life’

Donald Trump’s FCC chairman Brendan Carr is boasting to friends that he is having “the time of his life” after launching an all-out attack on the media, the Daily Beast has learned.

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On his first night back in the White House, President Donald Trump granted broad pardons to roughly 1500 defendants who were involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building — including those who violently attacked police officers. Trump also commuted the sentences of 14 defendants, resulting in members of far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys being released from prison.

Journalist Ban Makuch, reporting for The Guardian, warns that "far-right activists and neo-Nazis" are feeling encouraged by Trump's second presidency are determined to "take advantage of the popular awakening of American fascism."

In a Telegraph post, Makuch notes, a neo-Nazi wrote, "Get the bag, infiltrate existing institutions with power, build new institutions while we have breathing room, and tear down anything leftist…. The left is exhausted, extremely unpopular, and has been divested from by their tech bro backers. Now is the time to openly advocate for ourselves. Now is the time to go from defense and survival towards organizing and swift action."

READ MORE:[Anger as Trump set 'to make every American pay even more' with Colombia retaliation

Neo-Nazis groups that are feeling more optimistic, according to Makuch, include The Base and the Aryan Freedom Network.

Joshua Fisher-Birch of the Counter Extremism Project told The Guardian, "These groups see the next four years as a mix of positives and negatives but overall, as an opportunity to enlarge their movement. Extreme-right groups are focusing on mass deportations and seeking to win over potential recruits by concentrating on this issue."

Makuch notes, however, that neo-Nazis are deeply suspicious of the federal government and view Trump as a "race traitor" because he has Jewish grandchildren. The president's daughter, Ivanka Trump, was raised Presbyterian but is a convert to Judaism, and her husband, Jared Kushner, is Jewish.

Fisher-Birch told The Guardian, "Several groups are enjoying fascism being in the public sphere and what they view as liberal and left-wing panic and distress over (Elon) Musk's salute. Several others have noted that they have not benefited from the alliance with big tech and that major social media platforms are still removing their content.”

===

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The United States' 2024 presidential race will go down in history as incredibly polarizing.

Vice President Kamala Harris led a diverse coalition that ranged from liberals and progressives to centrist Blue Dog Democrat to right-wing Never Trump conservatives, and many of her supporters on both the left and the right slammed Donald Trump as dangerously authoritarian and a threat to democracy. But it wasn't enough to get Harris past the finish line, and President-elect Trump defeated her by roughly 1.5 percent in the popular vote while picking up 312 electoral votes (according to the Cook Political Report).

Christian nationalists and white fundamentalist evangelicals have been celebrating Trump's victory, which they view as a major triumph for their agenda. And they aren’t the only ones on the far right who are feeling emboldened by Trump's return to the White House.

In an article published on January 6, 2025 — four years after the violent 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building and 14 days before Trump's second inauguration — The New Republic's Spencer Sunshine details the enthusiasm that white nationalists and neo-Nazis are feeling.

"Active clubs — white supremacist MMA training gyms — are in full flourish, and have even expanded overseas," Sunshine reports. "While they've had limited public activism, observers worry they could soon transform into a fully-fledged fighting force. A new wave of swastika-waving neo-Nazis has emerged, too. The media-friendly Blood Tribe, who use striking aesthetics and a confrontational approach, were early promoters of the pet-eating rumor."

Sunshine adds, "A Columbus, Ohio march by their splinter group Hate Club 1488 grabbed so much attention that even President Biden denounced it."

According to Sunshine, Blood Tribe — along with Patriot Front and the antisemitic Goyim Defense League — "represent a new, flourishing neo-Nazi movement — one that will likely continue to grow during Trump's second term."

Trump has vowed to pardon the January 6, 2021 rioters, and he hasn't ruled out the possibility of pardoning those who were charged with violent offenses.

Sunshine warns that these pardons could encourage far-right groups to engage in acts of violence, from militia groups to white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

"Pardons for the leaders of violent groups, such as the Proud Boys' (Enrique) Tarrio, will undoubtedly result in their group's revival," Sunshine predicts. "It will also signal Trump's approval of street violence, potentially reviving the mass street brawls with antifascists during Trump's first term, such as those seen in Portland, Oregon."

Sunshine continues, "As far-right grassroots remain mobilized, the next four years will likely be an environment where far right individuals and groups can be fully activated and function as Trump's foot soldiers — legally or otherwise."

READ MORE:[January 6 rioters are 'political dissidents' declares spouse of Trump Cabinet nominee

*Read Spencer Sunshine's full article for The New Republic at this link.

===

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Some supporters of the Oath Keepers have vehemently denied that there is anything racist about the far-right militia group, insisting that non-whites are welcome as members.

But according to The Guardian's Jason Wilson, Robert Kinch — leader of an Oath Keepers spinoff group called Oath Keepers USA — has called for a "race war." And Kinch, a former Las Vegas homicide detective, has maintained his ties to law enforcement, Wilson reports.

In an article published on January 6, 2024 — the fourth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building — Wilson explains, "The revelations about Robert 'Bobby' Kinch, now of Duck Creek, Utah, come from public records, online materials and the work of a longtime infiltrator of the patriot movement in the Pacific Northwest, who provided vital evidence to the Guardian captured inside Kinch's home. The findings show that four years on from January 6, the Oath Keepers, who played a central role in fomenting that day's insurrection in Washington, have not disappeared, but have continued quietly adding law-enforcement officers to their ranks."

Wilson warns that President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House "may encourage the likes of Kinch to bring their movement back into the spotlight, as the incoming administration promises to carry out unprecedented mass deportation of immigrants and to take on Trump's perceived opponents, whom he has described as 'the enemy within.'"

Wilson doesn't mention the infiltrator by name, citing "fears of retaliation." But the Guardian reporter notes that the person "spent several years from 2021 in contact with multiple, interconnected and overlapping anti-government 'patriot movement' groups in the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West."

Wilson reports, "Their trove of archived materials includes chat logs, documents and media files, and has been made available to the Guardian and other news organizations by the whistleblower and pro-transparency non-profit, Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets). The materials also include first-hand photographs and recordings of direct interactions with anti-government leaders who believed that the infiltrator was a like-minded activist, and who accepted them into their inner circles."

Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) told The Guardian, "These disclosures show once again how police departments aren't taking the threat of extremists in the ranks seriously."

{===}:

Nazi Germany had admirers among American religious leaders – and white supremacy fueled their support - Alternet.org

White nationalist Keith Woods brags about “huge money coming in” from YouTube Super Chats while streaming with Nick Fuentes

08/29/24 mma

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north Carolina's State Board of Elections has decided to allow Joseph Gibson III — a House GOP candidate and convicted felon with alleged neo-Nazi ties — to remain on the ballot, "finding that his citizenship rights had been restored," News & Observer reports.

State House GOP Caucus Director Stephen Wiley, according to the report, "first raised the alarm about Gibson after finding out he had been convicted of several felonies, including robbery, while living in Connecticut." He then found Gibson has "ties to a neo-Nazi organization," saying, "He's got pretty despicable views and doesn't have any room in polite society as far as I'm concerned."

News & Observer notes, "A report from the Anti-Defamation League describes Gibson as a 'white supremacist and anti-government extremist,' and "says that the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) described Gibson as 'one of our members in NC' and supported his campaign online."

Gibson calls the GOP's opposition to his candidacy "political assassination."

The newspaper reports:

*Gibson was initially removed from the ballot by the Rockingham County Board of Elections on Jan. 3. The board found that he had been convicted of a felony in Connecticut and had not 'presented evidence that his rights have been restored.' The board also said that Gibson failed to appear at his own hearing. He appealed to the state board, which sent the case back to Rockingham, asking the board to determine if Gibson’s citizenship rights had been restored.

*The Rockingham board then approved Gibson’s candidacy on party lines, with all Democrats voting in favor and all Republicans voting against. In the board’' decision, it said that Gibson had completed his probation in 2008 for crimes committed in Connecticut and had not been convicted of a felony in North Carolina since.

*Parnell then appealed back to the state board, which ruled in Gibson's favor on Tuesday.

News & Observer also notes, "Wiley anticipated this result," saying, "I fully expect us to lose and for Mr. Gibson to remain on the ballot — and then I fully expect Rep. Pyrtle will be able to handily beat him on the primary date."

*The News & Observer's full report is here (subscription required).

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in Franklin, Tennessee (an upscale Nashville suburb), MAGA Republican Gabrielle Hanson's chaotic mayoral campaign ended in defeat when, on Tuesday, October 24, Democratic incumbent Ken Moore enjoyed a landslide reelection and won by around 59 percent.

Hanson, a Franklin alderperson and local real estate developer, ran as a severe culture warrior. She had tried to block a gay pride event in the spring, and according to the Daily Beast, she wouldn't disavow some white supremacists who supported her. But in the end, Franklin voters rejected her extremism.

The Daily Beast's Josh Fiallo, in an article published on October 25, stresses that Hanson's "myriad scandals" were "too much to stomach."

Fiallo explains, "Tuesday's result puts a cap on a chaotic campaign for Hanson, who seemingly found herself embroiled in new controversies weekly on the home stretch of her election bid…. She loudly lambasted the city for planning to install historical markers about historical racial injustice in the area — memorials she deemed to be 'racial terror' markers. She was grilled for threatening to retaliate against a local airport for supporting a Juneteenth festival and was slammed by Nashville cops for spreading false information about a horrific mass shooting at the city's Covenant School."

Hanson, Fiallo notes, "cozied up to white supremacists," including members of a group called the Tennessee Active Club.

"Despite calls from local politicians," the reporter explains, "Hanson never disavowed the group, which was spotted carrying Nazi flags at a drag brunch in Cookeville, Tennessee, earlier this year. She insisted she didn't invite the group to her forum personally, but Active Club members disputed that, saying they were invited over concerns related to 'Antifa.' Hanson's initial efforts to distance herself from the group didn't last long — she was photographed Wednesday grinning next to the hate group's leader, Sean Kauffmann, who has described himself as being an 'actual literal Nazi.'"

Fiallo adds, "In an October 10 board meeting, Hanson claimed she didn’t disavow the group because they were against Antifa. She strangely said to city officials in the meeting, 'This is exactly the seeds that you sowed, and your harvest is now here.'"

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journalist and author Wesley Lowery explained on Saturday's edition of The Saturday/Sunday Show withJonathan Capehart how the American white supremacist movement has evolved away from "big organizational, hierarchical groups" such as the Ku Klux Klan into a peppering of acts of vigilante violence throughout the United States.

"So one thing that's very interesting right, is that there's a historian, David Chalmers. He writes 'the definitive history of the Klan' in a book called Hood Americanism. And he writes that for most of its history, the Klan and other white supremacist groups were dispositionally conservative, meaning that they were winning. We lived in a white supremacist society. Their goal was to keep things the way they were," Lowery recalled.

"But following the entrance of our country into multiracial democracy in the late Sixties, their tactic changes," Lowery continued. "They become radical and revolutionary.They're no longer winning, they're losing. And so now they're fighting to restructure the country back to the way it was. Now that justifies more aggressive violence or aggressive acts of terror.We start to see the rise of these extremely complex groups who are literally trying to spark a race war."

Lowery noted that "beyond that, they shift — white supremacist leader Louis Beam writes in the Eighties — they shift to a quote-unquote 'leaderless resistance model.' We think about this as quote-unquote 'lone wolves' very often, that their aim is to build these bureaucratic systems and goals and membership organizations. But their aim is to put their toxic propaganda out into the world via the internet, via pamphlets, via television shows, via the mainstream politics, so that an individual can become radicalized."

Lowery also cited recent examples of these occurrences.

"We see this with Timothy McVey. We see this with Dylann Roof. We see this with the shooter in El Paso and in Buffalo. They're not members of these big organizational, hierarchical groups," Lowery said. "They — these are white Americans who have racialized prejudice, who locate the writings and the message boards of these, of these violent white supremacists. And what their marching orders are, become very clear, and then they carry them out."

Watch MSNBC's clip below or at this link

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https://www.rawstory.com/patriot-front-2661411800/

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/anatomy-smear-campaign-how-right-wing-media-neutralized-pentagon-effort-address-white

no lnx vids

Anatomy of a smear campaign: How right-wing media neutralized a Pentagon effort to address white supremacy in the military

Right-wing media smeared the Pentagon official mitigating white supremacy in the military. Now his unit has been abandoned.

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 05/25/23

Right-wing media outlets and personalities leveled repeated attacks against a modest Pentagon initiative created in 2021 to address high levels of white supremacy in the military, ultimately neutralizing the effort and leading to the unit’s abandonment. The conservative campaign was directed atmilitary veteran Bishop Garrison, who led the Countering Extremism Working Group, which has now “vanished virtually without a trace,” according to a recent report from CNN.

Garrison was tasked with identifying and addressing the type of extremist views that would be later espoused by Jack Teixeira, who recently stole and leaked a trove of classified information to impress his private online community. Teixeira, currently in custody and potentially facing a 25-year sentence, reportedly believed that the United States was heading toward a “race war” that would pit white people against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people.

CNN reports:

As the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.

CNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.

The U.S. military has a long history of white supremacism in the ranks, including among veterans who have started or joined far-right terrorist groups after their service. More than 80 people charged with participating in the January 6 insurrection had ties to the military, primarily as former service members, according to CBS News.

The apparently successful right-wing effort to sideline Bishop’s group follows the standard conservative playbook of smearing Democratic government officials who are Black, LGBTQ, Muslim, or from other marginalized groups as internal enemies, and it will also likely serve as a template for future, similar campaigns. Right-wing media outlets have spent months convincing their consumers that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS are persecuting conservatives, with the clear aim of operationalizing these federal agencies against these media figures’ opponents — exactly what they wrongly accuse the Biden administration of doing. This programming dovetails exactly with Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which claims to be exposing a governmentwide conspiracy to throttle conservative activists and ideas. The committee has so far failed on its own terms, but Jordan remains undeterred.

Anatomy of a smear campaign

On February 16, 2021, Garrison was appointed to a newly created role to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on how to reduce and mitigate the threat of white supremacy in the U.S. military. The announcement went largely unremarked upon in both mainstream and conservative media for several weeks.

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Then on May 5, conservative website Revolver published a story headlined “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.” The site's founder, Darren Beattie, tweeted the piece out, highlighting the quote “The Biden administration has just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military." (Beattie was fired from the Trump administration in 2018 after CNN discovered that he had attended a white nationalist conference two years prior.)

The following day, Fox News Primetime’s host Pete Hegseth devoted a segment to Garrison’s appointment,describing Garrison’s effort as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists."

Video

CitationFrom the May 6, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Hegseth then referred to Garrison as “the Pentagon's newly minted MAGA purge man” and cribbed Revolver’s line nearly verbatim but without attribution.

“How do I put this?” Hegseth asked. “The White House just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military, past, present, and future."

A day later, Beattie appeared on Hegseth’s program to discuss Revolver’s piece, which largely consisted of Garrison’s tweets and other writings and social media posts.

Video

CitationFrom the May 7, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Beattie framed the issue by calling Garrison’s working group an example of “the most disturbing trend in American politics,” which is “that increasing swathes of our own national security apparatus have been repurposed and redeployed domestically against American citizens.”

Days later, conservative media websiteJust the News published a story that highlighted Hegseth’s comments from his initial segment.

On May 13, Revolver published another piece on Garrison with the factually incorrect headline “‘Free Speech Is A Digital Black Plague’: Bishop Garrison is Key Mercenary in Biden’s Dark War Against The First Amendment.”

Despite the quotation marks in the headline, the piece doesn’t include any evidence that Garrison wrote or spoke that exact phrase. Instead, the piece links to an op-ed Garrison published about the dangers of ideological polarization in news consumption leading to the spread of bad information, a fitting if ironic topic given Revolver’s mischaracterization of his stance. It’s true he described what he characterized as partisan echo chambers as a “digital black plague” that poses a danger to social cohesion, a relatively pedestrian observation common among mainstream commentators.

The next day, Beattie appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to discuss Garrison’s purview more broadly.

Video

CitationFrom the May 14, 2021, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Underscoring the siloed, self-perpetuating conservative media echo chamber, Bannon introduced the topic by claiming, “I’m seeing it everywhere — Just the News has got it, the great Pete Hegseth had it, then he had a second night with you on it,” before asking Beattie for an update.

Beattie then recycled his website’s misleading framing with a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, substituting Garrison’s actual point about information silos with the false claim that he opposed free speech protections more broadly.

Beattie described Garrison’s purported role “in the Biden administration’s dark war on the First Amendment. We’ve uncovered a article of his calling, basically, the free speech digital environment that would include War Room, that would include Revolver, but also in his words includes the Sinclair Network and Fox, as a ‘digital black plague’ — those are his words to describe the digital free speech environment that enables the American people to see narratives that oppose the official narratives on COVID, on the election, and now on [the insurrection of] 1/6.”

One day later, Fox News’ Jesse Watters picked up the story, interviewing Hegsethabout Beattie’s reporting, adding another link in the human-centipede-esque food chain of bad information.

Video

CitationFrom the May 15, 2021, edition of Fox News' Watters' World

Watters introduced Garrison as being “in charge of bringing critical race theory into our Armed Forces,” adding, “They’re calling him the Pentagon's hatchet man because his job is to purge patriots from the ranks.”

“This is about, Jesse, as scary as it gets,” Hegseth responded. “I mean, really this is, this truly is a purge of patriots. They're using January 6 as the ultimate justification.”

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Two days later, former Fox News marquee star Tucker Carlson discussed Garrison on his prime-time show.

Video

CitationFrom the May 17, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson referenced Revolver’s posts before characterizing Garrison as “an activist type” and “a lunatic.”

“Now — and this is the point — he is one of the most powerful officials in the U.S. military,” Carlson added. “Democrats in Congress are thrilled as they watch this. Their party now has all the tanks and drones.”

The campaign against Garrison continued at that pace for weeks, misleading framing and bad information congealing into an impenetrable narrative of conservative persecution. Beattie returned to War Room, right-wing Epoch TV covered the story, Carlson aired another segment on it, and Hegseth continued to beat the drum on Fox News.

As late as October 2022, Beattie referenced Garrison on War Room as an antecedent to a supposedly even more “outrageous” Pentagon commission on recommending changes to military bases named after members of the Confederacy.

Taken as a whole, this process clearly demonstrates how right-wing media will vigorously oppose efforts to mitigate widespread white supremacy and later defend the subsequent, predictable outcomes that ideology and set of power relations produces. As but one example, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson defended Teixeira’s actions by misleadingly casting him as a whistleblower when in fact there is no reporting to suggest he ever meant for the information he stole to be made publicly available. The fact that Teixeira’s bigoted beliefs went unnoticed and undisciplined by the military is a feature, not a bug, of this dynamic.

There are fair criticisms to be made about the larger White House initiative, such as asking what it would mean to root out white supremacy from an institution that has been at the forefront of U.S. empire expansion, directed primarily at nonwhite populations, since at least the Mexican-American War. Needless to say, conservatives were making the exact opposite critique, arguing that attempts to decrease the spread of white supremacist beliefs among service members are inherently illegitimate.

That the boilerplate backlash was successful despite being led by such mediocrities as Pete Hegseth and Darren Beattie — whom Bannon recently derided as a man-child — does not speak particularly well of the Biden administration. It also suggests that these demonization campaigns can potentially succeed absent any shimmering talent leading the charge, instead relying on mid-level functionaries in the larger conservative ecosystem repeatedly hammering the point home.

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Texas mall shooter wore neo-Nazi symbol and shared 'white-supremacist content online': report

Maya BoddieMay 07, 2023

The man who murdered eight people using an AR-15 at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, Saturday likely identified with neo-Nazi beliefs,The Washington Post reports.

Allen resident Mauricio Garcio,according to The Post wore a "patch on his chest" at the time of the shooting that read "RWDS," meaning "Right Wing Death Squad," a "phrase popular among right wing extremists, neo-Nazis and white supremacists."

Additionally, NBC reports Garcia "interacted with neo-Nazi and white supremacist content online."

READ MORE: All extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing radicals

Last year, an Anti-Defamation League's Center (ADLC) on Extremism report revealed "all extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists," adding, "More than four out of five extremist-related murders last year were committed by white supremacist right-wing extremists."

The report also noted "nearly all extremist-related mass killings were committed by right-wing extremists, and warns the number of those mass murders 'is of growing concern.'"

An official familiar with the matter told NBC not only did Garcia engage with neo-Nazi content online, but he also posted such content himself.

Regarding the issue of gun violence specifically pertaining to Texas, The Post reports:

In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 4,613 firearms-related deaths in Texas. The state's annual death toll from guns has increased steadily since 2014.

Led by Abbott, Texas has moved in recent years to loosen restrictions on firearms. In 2021, the state began allowing permitless carry so residents can carry handguns in public without a license. The state 'does not specifically put restrictions on who can carry a long gun such as a rifle or shotgun,' according to a Texas government website.

READ MORE: Gavin Newsom takes aim at Texas gun laws

ADLC's report added the "main threat in the near future will likely be white supremacist shooters," noting, "The increase in the number of mass killing attempts, meanwhile, is one of the most alarming trends in recent years."

READ MORE: Robert Reich breaks down the Texas law that protects gun manufacturers from discrimination

The Washington Post's full report is available at this link (subscription required). NBC's report is here.

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/power-grid-substations-accelerationism-white-nationalism

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A new report from the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism reveals that all extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists. More than four out of five extremist-related murders last year were committed by white supremacist right-wing extremists.The report finds that nearly all extremist-related mass killings were committed by right-wing extremists, and warns the number of those mass murders "is of growing concern."

"All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds," the ADL’s Center on Extremism (COE) reports, "who typically commit most such killings each year but only occasionally are responsible for all (the last time this occurred was 2012)."

"Left-wing extremists engage in violence ranging from assaults to fire-bombings and arsons, but since the late 1980s have not often targeted people with deadly violence."

The report adds: "White supremacists commit the greatest number of domestic extremist-related murders in most years, but in 2022 the percentage was unusually high: 21 of the 25 murders were linked to white supremacists. Again, this is primarily due to mass shootings. Only one of the murders was committed by a right-wing anti-government extremist—the lowest number since 2017."

Last year, COE notes, "domestic extremists killed at least 25 people in the U.S., in 12 separate incidents. This represents a decrease from the 33 extremist-related murders documented in 2021 and is comparable to the 22 extremist-related murders in 2020. It continues the recent trend of fewer extremist-related killings after a five-year span of 47-78 extremist-related murders per year (2015-2019)."

The Associated Press, pointing to the "especially high number" of extremist killings "linked to white supremacy" reports they "include a racist mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 Black shoppers dead and a mass shooting that killed five people at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado."

The "main threat in the near future will likely be white supremacist shooters, the report found," The AP adds. "The increase in the number of mass killing attempts, meanwhile, is one of the most alarming trends in recent years, said Center on Extremism Vice President Oren Segal."

In a separate article on that LGBT nightclub mass shooting, Club Q, also published Thursday, the AP reports the "22-year-old accused of carrying out the deadly mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs in November ran aneo-Nazi websiteand used gay and racial slurs while gaming online, a police detective testified Wednesday."

"Anderson Lee Aldrich also posted an image of a rifle scope trained on a gay pride parade and used a bigoted slur when referring to someone who was gay, Detective Rebecca Joines said."

an 2 23

Professor, historian and author Kathleen Belew, one of the United States’ top experts on white supremacist and white nationalist terrorism, has often stressed that violent, racially motivated attacks shouldn’t be viewed as isolated incidents, but as part of a broader movement. And when Belew made a Monday night, February 6 appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” she explained how a Maryland woman’s alleged role in a plot to attack five energy substations in the Baltimore area fits into the overall “white power” game plan.

Earlier in the day, law enforcement officials had announced the arrest of Maryland resident Sarah Beth Clendaniel, who, they allege, conspired with fellow white supremacist Brandon Russell in that plot. Clendaniel and Russell, according to officials, hoped to completely disable energy infrastructure in Baltimore and deprive the city of electricity for an extended period of time.

During her conversation with Maddow, Belew emphasized that this was not an isolated incident. White supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis, according to the professor, are targeting energy infrastructure in general — not just in Baltimore, Maryland.

Belew, author of the 2019 book, “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” told Maddow, “The electrical part may be new, but infrastructure attacks by this movement are not new. This is a strategy that was pioneered by a group called The Order in 1983…. Infrastructure attacks are one kind of violence among several others that are all laid out in a strategy in common in order to bring about what the movement seeks, which is the overthrow of the United States and the creation of a white ethno-state — mass violence against communities of color and even genocide against non-white peoples.”

According to Belew — who teaches at Northwestern University in the Chicago suburbs — attacks on energy infrastructure and the January 6, 2021 insurrection are both part of the “white power” game plan.

Belew told Maddow, “Infrastructure attacks sit next to a show of forced violence like the January 6 attack on the Capitol and mass casualty violence like the Oklahoma City bombing. All of these exist together within one broad ideology in the white power movement.”

Watch the full video at this link.

blindsided Jan 6 b/c routinely ignored?! twitter saw shitsorm violence coming, but not fusion ctrs?

just security timeline https://www.justsecurity.org/74138/incitement-timeline-year-of-trumps-actions-leading-to-the-attack-on-the-capitol/

Later reports suggest that DHS officials were directed to make sympathetic statements toward Rittenhouse. It is unclear whether these directions originated at the White House or within the DHS press office, NBC reports.

September 8, 2020: Brian Murphy, a whistleblower in the Department of Homeland Security submits a complaint that claims that the two most senior DHS officials tried to suppress threat assessments of white supremacy because it would reflect poorly on President Trump.

The complaint alleges that acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli wanted Murphy to “ specifically modify the section on White Supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups.” The complaint also alleges that DHS leadership asked Murphy to “modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and ‘anarchist’ groups.”

The complaint garners wide media attention.

an 7 22

there was another shooting massacre over the weekend, this one in Highland Park, a picturesque, affluent and majority-white suburb of Chicago, where mass violence of the kind experienced during a Fourth of July parade isn’t supposed to happen on account of Highland Park being picturesque, affluent and majority white.

Mass violence of this kind is supposed to happen in places like Philadelphia, which did experience a shooting during a fireworks display, sending hundreds of spectators fleeing, but that has gotten none of the attention that the Highland Park shooting has gotten on account of Philadelphia, which is majority Black, being where violence is supposed to happen on account of being majority Black.

Evidently, Robert E. Crimo III doesn’t get it.

The 22-year-old, who appears to be white, perched himself atop a building along the holiday parade route with a “high-powered rifle” to shoot into the crowd, killing six and wounding 40. Per the *Post*: “At least two long bursts of rapid gunfire left five people dead at the scene and sent hundreds of people fleeing in panic, leaving a wake of overturned lawn chairs, coolers and strollers. … One spectator, a father, put his young son in a dumpster for safety as he scrambled to find and shield other family members while bullets rained down.”

I’ll talk more about the shooter after the story has been reported out, although we learned on Tuesday that Crimo had planned the attack for weeks, USA Today reported. The details of his case don’t matter, however, as much as the larger contours they fit in. As I’ve said, all shooting massacres, in one way or another, are a violent reaction to the politics of liberal democracy making it possible to elect the first Black president, who then ceased being subject to the law and became instead the enforcer of it.

That’s impossible for people who see “the law” as the same as white.

So impossible, they feel crazy.

Shooting massacres are the result of “the natural order of things” being turned upside down in a country where “the law” is not the law so much as the law is a white man with a gun. In such an upside-down world, it’s only “natural” for some Americans (ie, usually white men who cannot and will not tolerate “their country” turned upside down) to seek “justice” by “taking the law into their own hands.”

This pattern has held steady since at least 2012, after the Sandy Hook massacre, when the Republicans made a permanent choice. They could do the truly conservative thing – enacting laws that would regulate the distribution of firearms for the purpose of promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty for all. Or they could recognize the obvious – that liberal democracy and the rule of law in the hands of a Black man had become the enemy.

The writer David Frum once famously said that "if conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”

That’s close, but more precisely: if the champions of white power become convinced that they cannot win democratically, theywill notabandon white power, nor will theyonly reject democracy.

They will go to war with it, replacing law and orderwith anarchy and chaos so that respectable white people doubt democracy, too.

Since 2012, the GOP has built on the structures of white power already in place in police departments around the country. (These structures are why cops can arrest Robert Crimo without incident, but shoot Jayland Walker 60 times, killing him, for no crime at all.)

They radically expanded the number of people with the authority to enforce the law by deputizing every white man willing to wield a gun. They got around the old constraints on law enforcement that were acceptable to respectable white people by resorting to vigilantism.

With easy access to guns, and permission to carry them virtually anywhere, Republicans created conditions for wave after wave of mass death that has for years been tearing apart civil society.

I don’t think the respectable white people who populate places like Highland Park are champions of white power. If choosing between a liberal Democrat and a fascist Republican, I’m confident they’d make the right choice. But respectable white people, who determine so much of the direction and scope of our national politics, are nonetheless the principal beneficiaries of white power. They are the property owners, the bourgeoisie, the social class elected officials turn to when charting a respectable position on any given issue.

As the principal beneficiaries of white power, respectable white people are more often than not insulated from or immune to the consequences of a political party’s decision to go to war with democracy. (It’s a one-sided war that involves “soft targets” like parades.) They are, that is, all the way up to when they are not.

I think that’s the case with the Highland Park massacre. White-power violence first came for immigrants, then Black Lives Matter, then LGBT-plus people. And now, those who had least expected it. “If this can happen here, I promise it can happen anywhere. This is the last place I would ever imagine something like this happening.”

Will respectable white people understand that the Republicans are responsible for the chaos and anarchy, for the upheaval of the established order? Or will they turn to the Republicans to protect them from the chaos and anarchy that the Republicans created?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/patriot-front-2657558190/

an 6 22 no lnx

PB t shirt gangs of NY DDL

Report details the chilling ways far-right extremists are recruiting military veterans

Members of the Proud Boys in Raleigh, North Carolina in November 2018, Wikimedia Commons

Alex Henderson June 24, 2022

From a mass shooting in a Buffalo, New York supermarket on May 14 to the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in October 2018 to a plot to kidnap and possibly murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — not to mention the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building — the United States clearly has a problem with White supremacist and White nationalist terrorism. And one of the places where racist extremists, according to law enforcement officials and national security experts, are trying to recruit new members is the U.S. military.

Reporter Sonner Kehrt, in article published by The War Horse on June 23 and republished by Navy Times that day, takes an in-depth look at White power groups that are trying to convert veterans to their cause. And her piece points to Chris Buckley, an Afghan War veteran, as an example of a veteran who racists targeted for recruitment.

After serving in Afghanistan, Kehrt reports, Buckley was incredibly angry — angry because of the death of a close friend and fellow veteran in Afghanistan, angry because of the severe back pain he was living with because of a training accident. And Buckley was attracted to the anger expressed by a Facebook group, not realizing, at first, that the people he was chatting with online wereKu Klux Klan members. Buckley joined the KKK in 2014, but he has since distanced from that terrorist group.

“With the help of a former extremist, Buckley left the KKK,” Kehrt explains. “Today, he works with Parents for Peace, an organization dedicated to supporting families and friends trying to help loved ones leave extremist groups. He points to his experience in the months and years after he left the Army National Guard as an example of why a disproportionate number of veterans are vulnerable to extremist recruitment efforts.”

Buckley, interviewed by The War Horse, warned, “I would rival KKK recruiters to that of any military recruiter I ever talked to…. I was looking for something to be a part of something. I needed a mission.”

Buckley, according to Kehrt, is hardly the only military veteran who has been vulnerable to recruitment by White supremacists and White nationalists.

“The data that does exist suggests the problem is growing,” Kehrt reports. “Statistics from the Center for Strategic & International Studies show that 6.4% of all domestic terror plots and attacks in the United States in 2020 were committed by active-duty or reserve service members — a tiny percentage, but up from 1.5% in 2019. A 2019 poll by Military Times found that more than 1 in 3 troops surveyed reported seeing direct evidence of White nationalism within the military.”

Kehrt continues, “That’s also up, from 1 in 4 in 2017…. While the total number of veterans who join extremist groups is still very small, they play an outsize role in these groups, particularly in militia-style organizations. (Researcher) Amy Cooter and other experts have found that, very roughly, 30 to 40% of militia members have military experience.”

Because there are so many different far-right extremist groups in the U.S. in 2022 — from Patriot Front to the Proud Boys to the Oath Keepers to the Boogaloo Bois to Patriot Prayer — the KKK, which has a long history of terrorism, doesn’t receive as much attention as it did in the past. But Buckley warns that the KKK is still a threat, although they have changed some of their tactics.

Buckley told The War Horse, “They’re doing away with the ‘let’s protest in public with pointy hats and robes.’ The KKK is shifting towards a more militia-style environment.”

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an 6 22

NO LNX

Talk of secession in Texas means political violence is already here. Thanks to SCOTUS, there will be more

Blackboard with "Texit"written on it (Shutterstock).

John Stoehr June 23, 2022

The Texas Republican Party issued its platform Monday. Among other terrible things, it called for the Lone Star State to secede from the US.[and UN]

This was met with mixed reactions from liberals. On the other hand, some said great – good riddance!On the other, some said secession would mean the abandonment of people who are already on the margins of society. As my friend, the historian Thomas Lecaque said: “Every time you say ‘let them secede,’ slap yourself in your stupid overprivileged face.”

I think there’s a third perspective.

Right-wingers know they’re winning

Liberals do not, perhaps cannot, see that political violence is normal in this country. Political violence, in fact, is so ubiquitous that one could say it constitutes the political reality of the American experience. We all live inside white power. Serious challenges to it are met violently. There are always serious challenges to it. Political violence is always already normal.

Violent reactions to democracy, however, usually backfire, politically speaking, unless political conditions prevent them from backfiring.

I don’t know exactly what those conditions would be, but they surely involve polarization over the fundamentals of America – over whether it’s a white man’s country. When these conditions allow, political violence stops backfiring. First, it will be tolerated. Then, it will be encouraged.

That tells us something.

That the right-wingers are winning.

And they know it.

We have been tolerating subversive political violence since at least 2012. As I’ve argued, every shooting massacre is in one way or another part of the white-power reaction to Barack Obama’s historic twin victories. The GOP has since then gotten the public tied up in knots over the ins and outs of the Second Amendment. That’s deadlocked public opinion long enough to push political violence as a means of state-level social control.

Forward to 2022, after the J6 coup, to see the evolution from tolerating subversive political violence to encouraging overt political violence.

Indeed, as of this writing, the Supreme Court has issued a ruling that will encourage more overt political violence. In a 6-3 opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court struck down a 108-year-old New York state open carry law, saying it was too restrictive of Second Amendment rights.

Eric Greitens, a Missouri Republican running for the Senate, made an ad in which he’s holding a shotgun and inviting voters to go RINO hunting. A GOP challenger to Nevada’s Democratic attorney general reportedly told a friend: "This guy should be hanging from a fucking crane.” Couy Griffin, a rightwing organizer with influence on Donald Trump, has often said that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” The former president reportedly said hanging Vice President Mike Pence wasn’t a bad idea.

All of this is to say talk of secession does not come from nothing.

There is a context. That context features the evolution from subversive political violence to overt political violence. We should remember that.

Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, an anti-Trump Republican, said that political violence is coming. So is a sustained period of democratic instability. But we’re already in that period. We have already seen the evolution from subversive political violence to overt political violence.

That’s why the Texas GOP now formally supports secession.

Talk of secession is a consequence of political violence – especially political violence that is now working in the Republicans’ favor.

Indeed, they appear to believe political violence not only doesn’t backfire anymore – it’s now a political asset. Whatever political violence the future holds will be an expansion of overt political violence that’s already here.

Secession-talk is a sign that they know they’re winning.

Refresh liberalism

As usual, liberals missed it.

They tend to think political violence is unusual, an interruption of normal life. There’s more to this thinking than the basic human longing for peace.

Unlike rightwingers – unlike anarchists, Marxists, communists, even some progressives – liberals do not seek out conflict, because liberals do not see politics as war by other means. Politics is about problem-solving.

To liberals, politics is about process, strategy and established rules and norms. And anyway, labeling peace as normal, and violence as abnormal, pits those encouraging violence against those favoring the status quo.

Which is to say, pits rightwingers against conservatives.

But in order to insist that political violence is abnormal, (white) liberals must pretend that white power is not the political reality we inhabit. By pretending white power has nothing to do with it, (white) liberals end up legitimating the status quo – which is, as I said, already politically violent.

Our precious norms won’t stop political violence.

They’re already politically violent.

Indeed, by insisting on preserving established rules and norms, liberals paper over the root problem, which is that white power constitutes our political reality. In this way, liberals, I think without meaning to, hasten rather than circumvent the destabilization of American democracy.

As I said, Kinzinger thinks that’s coming.

No, it’s here.

Liberals think they are addressing political violence. They think that by appealing to peace, law and order, they are seizing the advantage.

They aren’t.

The more they stick to “the rules,” the worse things get. Politics isn’t war by other means. It’s about problem-solving. But when liberalism’s solutions aggravate things, perhaps it’s time to refresh liberalism.

Secession, seschmession

As I said, on the one hand are those welcoming the Texas Republican Party’s support for secession. Good riddance, wrote the Post’s Dana Milbank. On the other hand are those saying no liberal should welcome such a thing, as the human tool of secession would be horrific.

Both sides are missing the political violence that has made talk of secession seem real, credible and plausible (though entirely illegal).

It’s that political violence we need to focus on.

We need to admit it’s here – that it’s been here.

And liberals need new ways of thinking about it.

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an 6 22

as the House Select Committee prepares to begin public hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, far-right groups including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are slated to be a topic of discussion.

At the same time, both of those groups’ leaders are facing criminal charges of seditious conspiracy. They are alleged to have worked together “to oppose by force the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Those charges can be difficult to prove in court. But regardless of the outcome of any prosecution that alleges these groups worked to overthrow the government, our research has shown that the more committed members of these and other extreme right-wing groups believe that the U.S. government, as currently constituted, is illegitimate and should be overthrown and replaced with one that is based on white supremacy.

Violent racism

Proud Boys have identified themselves as “Western chauvinists” who focus on opposing political correctness and white guilt. But these claims have generally been seen as cover for deeper racist and antisemitic sentiments. For some Proud Boys members, this group was a steppingstone to more extreme groups, such as The Base.

Like any street gang, the Proud Boys as a national group is made up of semi-autonomous chapters of varying numbers and abilities. They are in different degrees of contact and coordination with other chapters [3x after stand by?] . It’s not clear the level of interest – or capability – that most members have in actually following through with overthrowing the government.

Oath Keepers is an anti-government group that calls itself a “militia” focused on defending the Constitution and fighting tyranny. Former Oath Keepers spokesman Jason Van Tatenhove stated that the group is actually “selling the revolution,” meaning that the group is pushing conspiracy theories and propaganda to facilitate confrontations with federal law enforcement.

While members of the Proud Boys have concentrated their confrontations on anti-fascists or other protesters, Oath Keepers have participated in several armed standoffs against the government.

In 2014, the Oath Keepers joined an armed standoff between far-right patriot groups in Nevada on behalf of Cliven Bundy. In 2015, Oath Keepers showed up heavily armed in Ferguson, Missouri, during protests over the killing of Michael Brown. And in 2016, Oath Keepers were present at the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

Members of the Proud Boys, along with others, march toward the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.]

A challenging road

Historically, prosecutions of seditious conspiracy charges succeeded against militant Islamist or Marxist groups.

But prosecuting far-right groups has tended to be much more difficult. In 1988, Louis Beam, a figurehead in the white power movement, and 13 white supremacists from groups such as the Aryan Brotherhood and the Ku Klux Klan were acquitted of conspiring to kill a federal judge and an FBI agent and plotting to overthrow the federal government to establish an all-white nation in the Pacific Northwest.

In 2012, charges of seditious conspiracy against members of Hutaree, a militant far-right Christian nationalist group, were dismissed after the judge concluded the government had not proved there was an actual conspiracy.

But it is clear from the charges stemming from the Jan. 6 insurrection – involving hundreds of alleged participants – that police and prosecutors are taking seriously the threat of violent action by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other far-right groups against individuals, organizations and local and national governments.

Matthew Valasik, Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Alabama and Shannon Reid, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of North Carolina – Charlotte

an 5 22

senate Republican Minority Whip John Thune of South Dakota immediately poured cold water on a just-passed House bill to help fight rising domestic terrorism, in the wake of his past weekend’s massacre of ten Black people in Buffaloby a self-avowed white nationalist and antisemite and a California church shooting deemed a “politically motivated hate incident” by local law enforcement.

The House bill passed with all Democrats and just one Republican voting for it. 203 Republicans voted against the legislation that would establish new offices across three federal agencies to help identify and combat domestic terrorism. Three of the Republicans who voted against the legislation are original co-sponsors of the bill, and many who voted for a very similar bill two years ago voted against this bill Wednesday. The final tally was 222-203.

CNN’s Manu Raju reports Senator Thune, the second-most-powerful Senate Republican, is “skeptical the domestic terrorism bill that passed the House will get 10 GOP senators,” which it would need to pass, assuming all 50 Democrats vote for it.

He noted that it was a ‘pretty party-line vote.’ Said he had not studied the details of the bill yet but noted the outcome in the House makes him think it is ‘largely a partisan bill.'”

Republicans have a long history of blocking any attempt to curtail or get out in front of preventing domestic terrorism, despite – or because of – the vast majority of extremist-related murders are committed by right-wing extremists.

Republicans’ opposition to addressing right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism goes back at least as far as 2009, when, as Wired reported, “an analyst at the Department of Homeland Security focusing on far-right extremist groups” published this report about the danger of right-wing extremism. Outrage was so dramatic DHS was forced to retract it.

In 2016 Politico reported Congressional Republicans also in 2009 “succeeded in pushing to shut” down a DHS program, an intelligence unit “called the Extremism and Radicalization Branch.” Its mission? “Studying and monitoring sub-sections of the population for potential signs of ideological and political radicalization.”

an 5 22

The latest mass shooting, which claimed the lives of 10 Black victims in Buffalo, N.Y., has reignited concerns about dangerous rhetoric perpetuated by far-right media and conspiracy theorists.The Guardian's Cas Mudde recently explored how right-wing media and Republican lawmakers have contributed to this ongoing problem.

"The problem is, we can talk endlessly about better regulating social media or calling for even more funding and powers for public and private 'counter-terrorism' organizations, but none of that will make us safer as long as the broader conservative movement embraces and propagates far-right propaganda," wrote Mudde, who is also a professor for the University of Georgia's School of Public and International Affairs. "This is a point worth repeating, even if I and others have made it many times before."

Mudde went on to validate his point by highlighting how the Buffalo shooter's manifesto echoed dangerous talking points from far-right media. The disturbed terrorist referenced concerns about "the Left," America's "open borders," and immigration.

"The so-called 'manifesto' of the terrorist included a lot of the standard tropes of the far-right, including the so-called Great Replacement Theory. Often linked to antisemitism, this conspiracy theory holds that 'the Left' is supporting 'open borders' to replace the 'original people' with 'immigrants,' who are inferior and therefore easier to control. Variants of this theory go back to at least the original Populists of the mid-19th century, but in its current iteration it has been around since the start of the 1980s postwar far-right in Europe."

He also expressed concern about Republican lawmakers' conflicting position on this topic. "Since the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, I have had various informal conversations with people who work in Congress or in other state agencies about the far right," Mudde wrote. "They tell me that they want to talk about the threat it poses, but then rapidly narrow the focus to 'online radicalization' and violent groups with scary names like Atomwaffen Division or Feuerkrieg Division.This is not just because these groups get disproportionate attention in the media and the counter-terrorism industry, but because they are politically safe. These groups are so extreme that they are out of bounds for almost all political elites, even on the right. But they are also small and marginal."

He added, "This is not the case for most other more mainstream actors and ideas of the far right. In fact, their power is now so great in Washington, that it is almost impossible to come up with a term that is acceptable to both sides of the political spectrum. Republicans are skeptical about terms like 'far-right' and 'racism,' fearing this would include groups and ideas they sympathize with. This is not without reason."

"The Grand Old Party has become a far-right party that advances racist arguments in both implicit and explicit form. And many organizations within the broader “conservative” movement have followed suit, from Fox News to Turning Point USA."

With the direction the Republican Party is going toward, Mudde emphasized the reality America is facing as he offered a piece of advice to President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

"The sad reality is that fighting the far right has become a highly partisan affair in the United States," Mudde wrote. "Any attempt to make this a bipartisan effort means watering down of measures and limiting them to the most extremist fringes. If Biden and the Democrats really want to fight white supremacy, including institutional racism, they must do it without the Republican party."

edit bd 4 22

I’ve come to believe no one knows exactly why candidates win or lose elections for public office. We say we do. We don’t, though.

We would know why Candidate X defeated Candidate Y if we had direct knowledge of every single cause and effect accreting toward one irrefutable end. We can’t know, though. Our brains are limited.

Explanations for what happened are always after the fact. So they are never exact or complete or conclusive. And it can’t be otherwise – this is how it will be until we can see the world from God’s point of view.

As a storytelling species, we end up making everything that happened before the end fit the end. Why do we tell these stories? Well, again, the end is all we know for sure. Maybe we just like stories. Anyway, do you like thinking about how much of life is determined arbitrarily?

This is not to paper over obvious errors in campaigning. However, it is to say that even a campaign run “perfectly” can end in defeat. Terry McAuliffe got more Democratic voters to show up for this year’s race for Virginia governor than any Democratic candidate ever. He still lost.

For all the above reasons, I have sympathy for the Democrats running for reelection. I’m particularly sympathetic to Democrats holding seats in swing districts. They can’t know how the race will end. Every choice is like swimming to the surface after being underwater while upside down and blindfolded. They can’t afford to retrofit chaos and chance.

That doesn’t stop the Democrats’ liberal critics. For them, the way to beat the Republicans is obviously obvious. Democracy is facing an existential crisis! The Republicans are stoking political violence by calling opponents pedophiles! That goes for their own, too! They lie and lie and lie! All you gotta do is tell swing voters the whole truth!

Case in point is Kevin Kruse, a superlative historian and very loud and very confident critic of Democratic orthodoxy: “You'd think this would be an easy call for Democrats -- the GOP attacks aren't just baseless; there are many examples of pedophiles and sex traffickers in the GOP! -- but Democrats never miss a chance to miss a chance.”

To me, Kruse represents a genre of writing, found mostly on Twitter, in which the Democrats never do what they should be doing if they cared about beating back the tide of right-wing authoritarianism.

When the Republicans say the quiet part out loud (eg, that state legislators plan to steal the next presidential election), these critics call on the Democrats to pounce. When the Democrats dodge though, and instead stick with kitchen-table stuff, like the cost of health care, their critics say they don't have the guts. Welp, they say, we’re doomed.

I think liberal critics of the Democrats fail to think about something the Democrats think about. The voters they need to keep the Congress don’t know democracy is in crisis, don’t believe democracy is in crisis or kinda-sorta perhaps maybe don’t mind if democracy is in crisis.

It depends.

It depends on what the Democrats offer.

For these voters, it’s difficult to accept the fact that the Republicans have gone full fascist. It’s so hard it’s easier not to. And that’s easy, because, well, these people are not far from where the Republicans are. That’s what happens in a society organized by white supremacy.

That’s what the Democrats understand.

White supremacy is on the Republicans’ side.

So: What do you say to people who don’t believe the Republicans are dangerous? What do you say to people who believe democracy is fine now that the former president is out of power? What do you say to people who are already leaning toward the Republicans, because, you know, whiteness, but open to giving the Democrats a fair hearing?

You avoid “hot buttons” issues.

If you don’t, you lose.

You talk about the cost of health care.

If you do, you might win.

By urging the Democrats to do what they think the Democrats should be doing without respecting them enough to appreciate the stakes involved, these liberals critics reveal their faith in the American people.

A totally misguided faith.

They seem to think these swing voters will do the right thing once presented with the facts. I don’t know why they would when it’s easier, and more pleasurable, to believe the dulcet lies of white supremacy.

Look, the critics might be right. They might be wrong.

But let’s be honest.

The Democrats are asking respectable white people who are indifferent to suffering, who are immune to the painful outcomes of white supremacy and who are perhaps open to the Republicans suggesting that democracy has gone too far to vote for them.

That’s a huge challenge.

Let’s respect it.

4/22 edit bd

I don’t follow what every Democrat says. No one can. There’s no way for me to know whether the tenor and tone of their collective rhetoric changed last week. But it felt like it got stronger, sharper and angrier.

Consider Brian Schatz.

The Hawaii Senator took to the Senate floor to scorch his colleague Josh Hawley of Missouri, who’s been holding up appointments to the Department of Defense that are necessary to America’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before he signs off, he said, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin must resign for his “failures” in Afghanistan.

Schatz said that’s rich coming from a guy who raised his fist in solidarity with the J6 insurrectionists and who voted to acquit the former president for the high crime of extorting Ukraine’s president.

“This comes from a guy who before the Russian invasion suggested that maybe it would be wise for [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy to make a few concessions about Ukraine and their willingness to join NATO.”

He added:

“They withheld lethal aid until, unless Zelenskyy released false smears against Joe Biden's son. Then [Hawley] voted to exonerate President Trump for this. So spare me the new solidarity with the Ukrainians and with the free world, because this man's record is exactly the opposite.”

His tirade amazed those of us longing for the Democrats to take a strong stand against the Republican Party’s lies and bad faith. Perhaps we’ll see more now that Greg Sargent put a brighter light on it.

The Post columnist interviewed Brian Schatz on Friday. “Democrats need to make more noise,” the Senator conceded. “We have to scream from the rooftops because this is a battle for the free world now.”

Let’s not forget what Schatz said, however.

He said Hawley is “doing a very specific thing.”

“He is damaging the Department of Defense.”

So far, Schatz is the only Democrat seeing what needs seeing.

Though he says he’s outraged by the US pullout from Afghanistan, Josh Hawley is also attacking, directly, the military leadership itself. (He won’t move on appointments until the secretary of defense resigns.)

Demanding Austin’s resignation is not a “reasonable request,” Schatz said. It can’t be. The point is sabotaging civilian control of the military.

You read that right.

The point is cleaving the ranks. The point is to create conditions in which military personnel feel inspired to take action that’s favorable to the Republicans’ (perhaps the former president’s) return to power.

They are picking up where the J6 insurrection left off. But next time, it won’t be a mob of schlubs. It will be an army of highly-trained insurgents bent on restoring whiteness to the center of the republic.

At gunpoint.

Everyone should see what Schatz sees.

So I interviewed Fred Wellman, founder of Beer Hall Projectand a 20-year Army veteran who served when Secretary Austin was General Austin. I called Fred after US Rep. Matt Gaetz failed to humiliate the secretary in testimony before the House Arms Services Committee.

Fred said: “A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.”

Matt Gaetz and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Thoughts?

My main frustration has always been with the “performance wing” of the Republican Party. They don’t want to govern. They want to act.

In this case, Matt Gaetz tried convincing people that “wokeism,” or trying to get a more diverse American military force, is hurting our ability to fight wars. It shows how monumentally stupid he is.

He's dragging culture wars into national defense. That he does so while sitting on the House Armed Service Committee is outrageous.

It’s a committee responsible for oversight of the men and women in uniform, but it’s oversight partially provided by someone as monumentally asinine as Matt Gaetz – that’s just disgusting to me.

Good point. When a country sends people overseas, the presumption should be that leaders will take that responsibility deadly seriously. Deadly serious responsibility is the opposite of Matt Gaetz.

I'm a 20-year Army veteran. I rose through the ranks to be a lieutenant colonel. I retired after Desert Storm and three Iraq tours. I’m the son of a World War II Marine veteran. My son is an Army veteran. My son-in-law continues to serve in the National Guard.

But not everybody can serve.

Less than 7 percent of our nation is veterans. Less than 1 percent serve at all. Less than one-third of the eligible population is capable of serving. I'm talking about fitness, criminal record, mental health, etc. This is the reality of maintaining and growing an all-volunteer force.

That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the officer corps. That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the pilot corps. That's the point of welcoming all races and creeds. As Secretary Austin said, anybody who's eligible, who has the capability to serve, should be welcomed even if they're non-binary, gay, straight, whatever.

If they're capable of serving, of meeting the physical and mental requirements we need in our military, we've got to open our arms.

There are just not enough white dudes left.

When you have someone like the Florida congressman directly attacking that, that turns away possible recruits. Gaetz is literally undermining those who serve and who may serve in the future.

Sounds like you’re angry?

I amangry.

The Matt Gaetzs and Marsha Blackburns of the world are openly undermining good order and military discipline with a culture war for political effect. A representative sitting on the Armed Services Committee should understand the challenges of an all-volunteer force.

Civilian oversight of the military matters even though those civilians may never have served, may not have been qualified to serve. People like me, people like Secretary Austin – we understand that. Someone who rose to the rank of four-star understands he’s going to answer to some 25-year-old kid on the Armed Services Committee.

That's the nature of it.

But what frustrates me is the lack of respect for the office and a lack of respect for the military as an apolitical and non-political entity.

One of the biggest fears of our founding fathers was a standing army. They didn't want one and that undermined efforts early on in the republic because of rebellions. We had no army to address them.

Even Washington was like, man, we need an army.

A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.

The troops love Trump, they believe, but the troops are being failed by “woke” leaders. Where the fuck do you think the leaders are? You don't just magically make a general. Secretary Austin started as a fucking second lieutenant. He rose through the ranks. This is dangerous.

I do not say this lightly.

This is incredibly dangerous.

They attack the military leadership as“woke”because they're trying to cause a break in the ranks. They're literally undermining good order and military discipline deliberately to break the chain of command.

I've never seen that in my lifetime.

You’re describing national security risk. Is that overstating it?

No, I don't think so.

The very nature of our republic relies on an apolitical military every American knows serves them, no matter their race, creed, religion, color, region, political party, whatever. Our republic depends on everyone knowing a standing army is not a threat to the country.

Many in the Republican Party are super-fans of Putin, let's be honest.They're having CPAC in Hungary, for God's sake, a country led by a rightwing dictator, a Putin fan. Imagine a scenario in which they’re in power and we can't fight because they’ve undermined the military.

It's terrifying to think where this could go.

I've seen reports of white nationalism gaining traction in the ranks of the military. There's an effort from above to deal with that.

I learned in military science 101 at West Point that an all-volunteer force is a direct reflection of our society. You raised your children for 18 years before they get into the military. I give them 12 weeks of basic training. That won’t overcome 18 years of raising them as racists.

All I can do is ensure they don't act on those beliefs and undermine good order and military discipline. If they do behave inappropriately, we use the separate military system to discipline them appropriately and remove them from the military as they're no longer a threat.

But we do know white nationalist and patriot front-type groups have been actively sending “their troops,” if you will, into the military for military training. Right-wing nationalist groups are infiltrating the ranks and recruiting veterans after they get out of the military.

At one point,10 percent of Jan6 cases were United States military and veterans. One of them is an active-duty Marine Corps major!

How horrifying that is.

Talk about the fundamental tension between universal values, like honor, and individual interest, like investment in whiteness.

Some really extreme right-wing politicians say universal values are an attack on conservative thought. It's not against conservative thought.

Conservative thought should mean taxes and “pulling up my bootstraps and raising myself up by going into the military” – that's fine.

Saying Black people are inferior soldiers, assaulting the ranks, inciting homophobia and transphobia and attacking fellow service members – That’s not conservative. That’s extremism, white nationalism.

That needs to be stomped out.

There have been several surveys of service members saying the biggest threat they face isn’t Muslim terrorists. It’s extremism in the ranks....

// jd vance immigration?

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/laura-loomer-believes-her-white-nationalist-views-will-get-her-elected-to-congress/

4 22

an 3 22

he far right has a long history of attacking environmentalists as “tree huggers,” railing against green energy and denying that climate change exists — even though countless scientists have offered concrete proof that it does. Former President Donald Trump, a strident defender of fossil fuels, even made the ludicrous claim that coal is much cleaner than green energy and that wind turbines cause cancer.

Being conservative doesn’t automatically mean being totally opposed to environmentalism. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started under President Richard Nixon. But among far-right Republicans of the MAGA variety, hating environmentalists is a badge of honor. Nonetheless, there are times when the far right and environmentalism intersect, and National Public Radio (NPR) journalists Ari Shapiro, Matt Ozug and Casey Morell discuss that unlikely combination in an early April report.

“Conservative leaders, from Rush Limbaugh to former President Donald Trump, have certainly denied climate change in the past,” the NPR reporters explain. “But today, a different argument is becoming more common on the conservative political fringe…. On the podcast ‘The People's Square,’ a musician who goes by Stormking described his vision for a far-right reclamation of environmentalism.”

Stormking argued, “Right-wing environmentalism in this country is mostly — especially in more modern times — an untried attack vector. And it has legs, in my opinion.”

Shapiro, Ozug and Morell cite Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich as an example of a Republican who made a right-wing environmental argument. Railing against illegal immigration, Brnovich argued, “We know that there's information out there that says that every time someone crosses the border, they're leaving between six and eight pounds of trash in the desert. That trash is a threat to wildlife. It's a threat to natural habitats.”

The NPR reporters go on to note that in 1998 and 2004, “anti-immigrant factions tried to stage a hostile takeover of the Sierra Club's national board” but “failed.”

According to Hampshire College’s Betsy Hartmann, fearing the destruction that climate change is causing fits in with the “doomsday” element of the far right.

“If you have this apocalyptic doomsday view of climate change,” Hartmann told NPR, “the far right can use that doomsday view to its own strategic advantage.”

Shapiro, Ozug and Morell describe the intersection of far-right views and environmentalism as “ecofascism” and consider it a “problem” that will continue to grow.

“The problem is visible now, and there is time to address it,” they write. “But the longer people wait, the harder it's going to be.”

aha: // heartland reverse engr: we will be destroyed by evil dems, so therefore they did not win/will not rule? thus voter suppression is unfair (unAmerican in trad sense) but necessary ; mypillow guy sent gunmen to polls?

an 3 22

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/far-right-biden-presidency/

a Georgetown University history professor is shedding light on the real reason why far-right Republicans still believe the unfounded claim that President Joe Biden's presidential win was illegitimate.

While its no secret that election conspiracy theories and false claims of widespread voter fraud have run rampant since former President Donald Trump lost his bid for re-election, there is a reason why Republicans "are convinced the outcome of the election was illegitimate regardless of whether or not there were specific procedural irregularities."

In an analysis published via The Guardian, Thomas Zimmer, a Georgetown University history professor with a concentration on the United States' democracy, referenced a controversial essay written from the perspective of a far-right conservative.

The essay, titled “ ‘Conservatism’ is No Longer Enough,” was penned by conservative writer Glenn Ellmers for The Claremont Institute's right-wing publication, American Mind.Zimmer notes:

"It is notable that Ellmers makes no claim that the 2020 election was 'stolen' – he doesn’t allege manipulation, voter fraud, or conspiracy, and in fact explicitly acknowledges that more people voted for Biden than for Trump. He does not peddle conspiracy theories. Yet Ellmers maintains that the outcome of the 2020 election is illegitimate and must not be accepted."

Zimmer then highlighted another key takeaway from Ellmer's piece:

"Ellmers is outraged precisely because he accepts the fact that a majority voted for Biden, that 'authentic Americans' have become the minority in a country which they are supposedly entitled to dominate. Here we have a striking glimpse of the depth of despair underlying the pervasive siege mentality on the right. What’s scandalous about the 2020 election, in this interpretation, is not that it was “stolen”, but that “un-American” forces straightforwardly won."

Zimmer's analysis also delved into the disturbing ideology behind the majority of Republican voters' thinking in regard to Biden being an illegitimate president.

"What is most alarming is the underlying ideology that leads so many on the right to consider Democratic victories invalid – even if they concede there was nothing technically wrong with how the election was conducted," Zimmer wrote. "It has become a core tenet of the Republican worldview to consider the Democratic party as not simply a political opponent, but an enemy pursuing an 'un-American' project of turning what is supposed to be a white Christian patriarchal nation into a land of godless multiracial pluralism."

Zimmer added, "Conversely, Republicans see themselves as the sole proponents of 'real' America, defending the country from the forces of radical leftism, liberalism, and wokeism."

He went on to explain Republicans' beliefs of the Democratic Party. "Even if they don’t subscribe to the more outlandish conspiracies propagated by Trumpists, many Republicans agree that the Democratic party is a fundamentally illegitimate political faction — and that any election outcome that would lead to Democratic governance must be rejected as illegitimate as well."

222 an

anec or quiet part loud?

READ:Woman at city council meeting declares herself a 'proud white supremist': That 'means you’re a patriot'

===

an me 1 22 https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/paul-gosar/**

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/26/paul-gosar-far-right-republicans

Over the last two years, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) has emerged as a heavy favorite among far-right conservatives. [GUK?] As an avid supporter of former President Donald Trump, Gosar has managed to gain more than 90 endorsements as the midterm election season approaches.

During a recent rally, Gosar spoke before a crowd of right-wing supporters as he declared to be “considered the most dangerous man in Congress."

“This is where it all began,” Gosar said prior to Trump taking the stage. “This is where we questioned: ‘Was there fraud? Absolutely. Was it enough to overturn the election? Absolutely.’”

At the same event, per The Guardian, the Republican lawmaker also echoed the stance of other right-wingers who have criticized critical race theory (CRT), the military and food shortages. Last but not least, he pivoted toward a Trump favorite: voter fraud and illegitimate elections.

So what makes Gosar different from other Trump-supporting Republicans?

Per The Guardian, Gosar is "the kind of politician that Trump – who is embarking on a series of rallies to try to cement his allies’ power in the Republican party – is increasingly seeking to support."

"Gosar has extensive links to white nationalists and Capitol rioters and, many observers say, represents a dangerous new breed of Republican politician, who would have once been considered fringe, but whom Trump is increasingly making central to Republican party politics."

Joe Lowndes, a political science professor at the University of Oregon who also co-authored the book "Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity," weighed in on the rise of Gosar. “We no longer have an ability to make a clear delineation between the right and far-right in the Republican party,” said Lowndes.

He went on to explain how Gosar's rise underscores the problem within the Republican Party as Trump-like figures are taking center stage. The issue appears to be one that Republicans will be haunted by for quite some time.

“The Trumpist wing of the Republicans isn’t just ascending – it’s the dominant wing of the Republican party. It’s the dominant wing not just in national politics, but in state and local politics as well,” said Lowndes. “The Republican Party has committed itself to a party of minoritarian rule, figuring out ways to rule in the long term without having majority support of voters.”

===

2018? 30 pp

https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/CR_5154_25YRS%20RightWing%20Terrorism_V5.pdf

grab

...White supremacists are responsible for most of the racial and religious targeting. Virtually any person or institution associated with a nonwhite race can be a potential target for white supremacists, but African-Americans, Hispanics, and multi-racial couples/families have been the most common groups victimized. The most frequent religious targets were, not surprisingly, Jews and Muslims (including non-Muslims perceived as Muslims). Actual or perceived immigrants, as well as LGBT targets, were also subject to victimization. Abortion-related targets, typically clinics that provide abortion services as well as the people who work at such places, were also common.

While anti-abortion extremists were the extremists most likely to attack abortion-related targets, other rightwing extremists, most noticeably white supremacists, also occasionally attempted such attacks. Right-wing extremist have also taken aim at a variety of other targets. Commercial targets have included various businesses and, in particular, financial institutions. Infrastructure targets include a wide range of installations, from refineries to dams to water supplies. In some cases, extremists have simply targeted crowded public areas, hoping to cause significant human casualties....

===

rww 921

a night of canvasing begins with a group of angry, white men.

Dressed in matching T-shirts and hoodies emblazoned with the phrase “Active Club,” the masked white nationalists wield a starter pack of extremist paraphernalia: stickers that read “FCK ANTIFA” and “Defend the White Race,” posters promoting a “nationalist lifestyle,” stencils etched with racist slogans, and black spray paint. They disperse, plastering stickers on lamp posts, billboards, and the occasional statue. They replace Black Lives Matter slogans with smatterings of hate messages and promises to “reclaim America.”

Among the scattered propaganda is a blue poster imploring readers to start their own active clubs—spaces for white men to train in combat while openly embracing white nationalism through street activism and publicity stunts. “Now is all we have,” read the poster. “Join the fight.”

Various videos and photos posted online by the group show this scene play out over and over again. You might even have seen these posters across small-town USA: Seymour, Indiana; Coeur d’Alene Idaho; Cheyenne, Wyoming—or even across cities like Denver and Philadelphia. These calls to actions are not the work of misguided teenagers but the persistent effort of infamous white nationalists like Robert Rundo, who spent years sowing the seeds of hate while building a global following for his neo-Nazi fight-club initiatives.

By using combat sports as a medium to recruit, radicalize, and discipline white nationalists disenfranchised by mainstream conservative politics, Rundo is able to create physical and digital spaces where extreme right political ideologies can flourish. He also joined forces with like-minded white nationalist groups such as Patriot Front and Revolt Against Tradition, which has allowed Rundo to rapidly expand his network and spread his active club ideology across North America.

The Rise of Active Clubs

The chaos that took place in Berkeley on April 15, 2017, was among the worst the city had seen in years. For approximately three hours, protesters for and against then President Donald Trump brawled at a “Patriot Rally” on the streets surrounding Civic Center Park, armed with pepper spray, smoke bombs, sticks, and wooden dowels. Seven attendees were hospitalized with injuries while 20 people were arrested, according to Berkeley police.

Among those arrested was Rundo, who arrived in Berkeley with members of his Rise Above Movement white nationalist group, and was later taken into custody on suspicion of battery on a police officer and for resisting a police officer. The charges were dropped after an Alameda County deputy district attorney determined that there was not “enough evidence to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt.” It took more than a year for the Department of Justice to bring federal charges against Rundo and three other RAM members for their alleged involvement in political rallies across California, claiming that they “violently attacked counter-protesters, journalists and a police officer.”

According to the complaint filed by federal officials in October 2018, Rundo and three other RAM members were allegedly involved in “violent attacks” at the Berkeley rally, which included Rundo punching a defenseless person and a police officer. The complaint also noted that RAM members celebrated the assaults in Berkeley, which prosecutors say included one member posting photos of himself attacking people and of other RAM members assaulting counterprotesters with their combat sports training.

The 2018 federal complaint followed the filing of an indictment in federal court that led to the arrest of four other RAM members on rioting charges related to their participation at the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 at which a counterprotester was murdered. The four men, including RAM co-founder Ben Daley and UCLA doctoral student Michael Miselis, pleaded guilty and were sentenced for their crimes. The RAM defendants in California were luckier. While many expected Rundo and the three other defendants to face jail time—one RAM member even pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge—a district judge dismissed the charges against them in 2019, claiming that the federal statute used to prosecute the members infringed upon their First Amendment rights to free speech.

Prior to the string of arrests, the California-based RAM boasted more than 50 members who trained in various combat sports such as mixed martial arts and boxing, which they later applied during street fights and protests. The group rose to prominence in 2017, when they began attending political rallies and targeting anti-fascist activists. They infiltrated protests and disrupted proceedings by fighting with those opposing their ultra-nationalist ideology. They concealed their identities using skull face masks and goggles, and went into rallies with their hands wrapped in tape in preparation for physical altercations. They then glorified their antics in propaganda videos posted on social media.

rapeugees"

RAM members at an “anti-Sharia law” protest in San Bernardino, California.

RAM’s penchant for MMA and underground fight clubs is one of the main things that distinguishes it from various other white supremacist groups in the United States. It has also helped RAM expand beyond the borders of the U.S., recruit new members, and network with other neo-Nazi groups dabbling in MMA around the world.

While four of RAM’s most prominent members remain in jail since being indicted on Charlottesville rioting charges, Rundo left the United States after having his case dismissed in California and has spent the last few years trying to further his white nationalist agenda and rebuild the fighting community that had been diminished by federal prosecution. After moving to Eastern Europe, Rundo founded a far-right propaganda outfit known as theInternational Conservative Community,which boasts a network of neo-Nazis around the world, with groups in Greece, Poland, Sweden, Hungary, Russia and Canada. The ICC is behind the **propaganda campaign for Kyle Rittenhouse**, the 17-year-old charged with the fatal shooting of two protesters during an anti-racism demonstration in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Rundo’s campaign included spreading artwork depicting Rittenhouse with the caption, “Kyle was Right.” The ICC has planted stickers, large-scale graffiti work, and banners emblazoned with Rittenhouse’s image across Europe and North America. In Serbia, where Rundo was living in 2020, the group painted a picture of an armed Rittenhouse standing proud with a Schwarze Sonne (German for Black Sun) as his backdrop; the symbol, also known as a sonnerad, is used by a number of with far-right groups that traffic in neo-Nazi ideologies. The painting in Serbia was featured alongside a Confederate flag and a picture of a deranged-looking Homer Simpson cartoon character aiming a gun, with the caption “KILL YOUR LOCAL ANTIFA SCUM.”

It was around this time that Rundo began encouraging his followers to form their own “Active Clubs,” which he defined as a “small group of comrades who share our values of identity.” The aim of such groups is to “focus on physical fitness” and “create displays of defiance that show your community that our culture will not be erased.”

“The active club is not so much a structural organization as it is a lifestyle for those willing to work, risk and sweat to embody our ideals for themselves and to promote them to others,” Rundo wrote on his Active Club Telegram channel. “The active lifestyle is the counter to the left’s culture of apathy, addiction, and vice. Get active today in your area and be the change you want to see.”

Members of Colorado’s “Front Range Active Club” training in combat sports. Credit: Front Range Telegram

Rundo later started the “Active Club Podcast” with Denis Nikitin, a Russian neo-Nazi considered to be the godfather of the extreme-right MMA scene, where they teach fellow nationalists how to form their own hate groups. Nikitin, who rose to infamy after launching the neo-Nazi MMA organization and clothing brand known as White Rex, has also been banned from entering any Schengen-area European countries. However, while Rundo boasted on the podcast about the “perks” of living in Eastern Europe, the extremist was expelled from Serbia after Bellingcat outed his location in Serbia. The Serbian daily Blic reported that on Feb. 11, 2021, Serbian police escorted Rundo to the Trbušnica-Šepak border pass, which connects Serbia to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Rundo’s luck in avoiding prosecution, however, may soon come to an end. On 4 March, 2021, the LA Timesreported that a US Federal Appeals Court had reinstated rioting charges against Rundo and three accomplices from RAM, ruling that they could be tried for their roles in riots in California in 2017. Despite facing potential arrest, Rundo remains active on Telegram, the social media platform popular among the extreme right, where continues to espouse his vision for the evolution of white supremacy.

“White Nationalism 3.0”

In a December 2020 essay entitled “The Idea Behind ‘Active Club,’” Robert Rundo laid out his argument for why his fellow angry white men should start their own neighborhood fight clubs.

“As most institutions give little or no regard for white youth today, Active Clubs’ role will fill that gap,” Rundo wrote, adding that active clubs promote camaraderie, identity formation, and “awaken racial bonds between kin” as they engage in fitness activities, combat sports training, and the “thrill and excitement” of spreading right-wing propaganda in the form of flyers, stickers, and graffiti. Rundo theorized that by spreading their message through propaganda posters and stickers, it will serve as a “critical revelation,” letting “our own know the fight is not over.”

Rundo also dictated that the clubs must remain small and local, explaining that it will make it more difficult for the media and law enforcement officials to shut down the entire operation. “Even if the system and their dogs manage to put out one fire, it will lead to minimal results,” he wrote.

Rundo’s guidelines suggest he has learned from his mistakes with RAM. Initially, the white nationalist group, the first prominent example of an active club in North America, had 50 members and was active on mainstream social media, which made it easy for researchers to identify its members. The modern iteration of the active club, which Rundo sometimes refers to as “white nationalism 3.0,” is different. The groups are local, self-contained, and are careful about the images they publish online. They take part in fitness activities together and focus on local activism—spreading stickers, posters, and banner drops—instead of taking part in rallies and demonstrations where they may be identified.

Rundo also launched a media outlet called Media2Rise, which he claimed would “counter” liberal narratives. Over the past few months, the former MMA fighter has used this platform to publish “Sons of the Founders,” described as a “documentary” about Patriot Front—an offshoot of the white supremacist Vanguard group that trains in “hand-to-hand combat.” The propaganda film, which follows Patriot Front members during their demonstrations held this year on the Fourth of July in Pennsylvania, underscores the growing (and highly concerning) ties between like-minded extremists such as Rundo and Patriot Front.

Patriot Front members holding up an ‘Active Club’ banner

To date, Rundo’s active clubs have formed across the United States, including in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. An active club has even launched in Quebec and Ontario, the latter of which was recently renamed to “Action 14,” a reference to the 14-word neo-Nazi slogan “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The rebranding leaves no doubt that the group is more than a fitness club for like-minded individuals but rather a white nationalist propaganda outfit that indoctrinates white men into the nationalist cause.

When prospective members questioned Action 14’s decision to rebrand in the public chat, arguing that it was “setting up the group to be targeted,” the club’s leadership shrugged off the concerns. “The name gives us a new look, and a clear signal to those on our side as to what we are about. It allows us to go national without splintering into 13 different groups, one for each province. We are a National Active Club now. Action 14 is the banner we all organize under,” the administrator said. However, the group eventually rebranded to “Active Club Canada” after what the administrator said was a “detailed discussion” among the founders.

“Tell your friends, wherever they are in Canada, that we are organizing workouts near them! If we don’t have one set up already in your area, you can rest assured that we will soon! This is the place to reach out to us. If you are a White man, looking to meet other Pro-White Brothers in a fitness setting, Active Club Canada is the place for you!” the group’s administrator posted on Telegram.

‘Active Club Canada’ aka ‘Action 14’ members posing during a workout session in Ontario.

While Rundo would likely disagree with the Ontario active club’s decision to go national, he is no doubt delighted to know that his propaganda outfit masquerading as a fitness and martial arts counter culture group is spreading. The extremist organizer had previously written about the importance of combat sports as a “weapon” for white supremacists, as well as a way of building a community of like-minded individuals. “The nationalist movement was never built on idle talk but on those with iron will who didn’t back down,” he wrote in a 2020 essay. “In a time of weak men it only takes some effort to rise above all. Combat sports is that way up.”

Indeed, MMA and combat sports’ idolization of hypermasculinity, its penchant for violence, and its emphasis on wellness based lifestyles is well suited to far-right groups whose members object to progressive society’s supposed decadence and degeneration. Many white nationalist and far-right groups espouse “straight-edge” lifestyles focused on clean eating, a disciplined physical fitness regimen, and abstention from drugs and alcohol. Many such groups lionize white, muscular, male bodies, using them as models for future generations. MMA’s training regimen is also appealing to members of far-right groups because it offers them structured tutelage that they believe is necessary to defend their homeland.

Writing in her acclaimed book “Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right,” Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss stated that “MMA becomes a powerful incubator for the far right when these ideas of masculinity—the notion that being a man is achieved through violent confrontation, domination, and physical intimidation of opponents—are layered onto far-right ideology about immigrant invasions and defense of the nation.”

This is exactly what Rundo hopes to achieve with his active club initiative. And as his fascist fight clubs continue to spread across the United States, so does his message of hate.

===

http://www.thewaroneveryone.com/

at end sez most surprise was jnx xian ID?

Chapter 1: The Eternal Fascist

There is nothing new under the sun. In this chapter, you’ll learn about “Ur-Fascism”, and how humor and irony have historically been used to enable its rise.

Chapter 2: An American Fascist Faith

The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting, the Poway Synagogue shooting, the Olympic park bombing and dozens of other terrorist attacks all have one thing in common- Christian Identity. In this chapter, we delve into a cultic belief system at the heart of American fascism.

Chapter 3: The Apostle of Fascism

William Luther Pierce is the most important Nazi you’ve never heard of, and his work has helped inspire a generation of terrorists- right up to the present day.

Chapter 4: How to Build an Army

Louis Beam was once a normal American soldier. But in the wake of the Vietnam War, he would painstakingly craft a vicious fascist insurgency. When Beam’s ground-level activism met Pierce’s propaganda, the result was the birth of a terrorist movement that still stalks us to this day.

Chapter 5: The Hidden Civil War

Inspired by Beam and Pierce, a young man named Bob Mathews attempted to spark a Second American Civil War. Whether he succeeded or failed is still up in the air.

Chapter 6: The Perfect Soldier

In his life and death, Timothy McVeigh represented the best-case scenario for the kind of warriors Louis Beam wanted to inculcate through his “leaderless resistance” strategy. His story is a tale of triumph for American fascism.

Chapter 7: The Digital Reich

This is where we are now: an era where a distributed network of individual extremists are able to radicalize each other and inspire acts of violence worldwide. This is not the result of an unhappy accident, or an unforeseen consequence of the digital era. It’s the result of decades of careful planning.

===

The Unforgiven': New indictment charges 16 in a white supremacist gang of murder and kidnapping

Alex Henderson

July 15, 2021

In the United States, the threat of White supremacist violence not only comes from national organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations, but also, from local groups. In Florida, according to NBC News...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/murdoch-family/fox-corp-ceo-lachlan-murdoch-endorses-tucker-carlsons-white-replacement-theory

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/proud-boys-2651289599/

raw story

White supremacists on Telegram are organizing a series of simultaneous rallies under the banner of "White Lives Matter" in major American cities scheduled for April 11, with active participation and promotion in some locales by members of the Proud Boys.

The rallies mark a rare instance of overt white nationalists openly mobilizing in the streets since the constituent organizations of the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally were severely hobbled the following year by sustained opposition in the streets from antifascist counter-protesters, litigation, infighting and organizational dysfunction. For the Proud Boys, whose members are facing serious federal charges for conspiracy to disrupt the transfer of executive power during the assault on the US Capitol, participation in the "White Lives Matter" rallies reflects a brazen determination to maintain a street presence and an apparent diminishing concern about being branded as racists.

The @whitelivesmattermarch channel that created the framework for local racists to organize dozens of spinoff rallies was launched on the social media platform Telegram on March 25. The rallying cause of the simultaneous demonstrations — "to raise awareness for whites being the victims of massive interracial crime" — is a false claim that lies at the heart of white supremacist propaganda. In a "Q&A" post, the anonymous user behind the @whitelivesmattermarch channel directs potential supporters interested in learning "more about anti-White hate" to another channel that is comprised solely of items relating homicides and other violent crimes with photos of white victims and Black perpetrators.

The specific rallies are organized by locals creating new Telegram channels using the initials of states or cities. In some cases, the channels for local rallies appear to be little more than trial balloons to gauge local interest. The creator of the @WLMSouthCarolina channel, launched on March 25, posted: "Lets [sic] get a count of where everyone is, comment your city." As of Tuesday, the channel had picked up 24 subscribers, but no one had commented. Among the more active channels, Ohio and Oregon have attracted around eight unique users calling out their hometowns to try to settle on a central gathering place.

In a channel set up for the DC-Maryland-Virginia region, two self-identified Proud Boys users eagerly talked up the rally. Others in the chat openly identified as white nationalists through their words, usernames or catchphrases in their Telegram bios. "I am a Fascist," wrote a user named "James Dagny," who also shared a documentary about American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell in the chat. A user named "Blaine" chose the Nazi slogan "Blood & Soil" for their bio. Someone whose username celebrates the gas used by the Nazis to murder Jews in gas chambers during the Holocaust, wrote, "I'm in."

In the chat, a Proud Boy account under the username "Joe Bonadio" responded to the self-identified fascist user by commenting, "I'm with ya!"

Another Proud Boy account under the username "HEFF" commented, "#fuckantifa proudboys will be the there in plain clothes or not."

Hampton Russel Oulette, the president of the Northern Virginia chapter of the Proud Boys, posted in response to HEFF: "POYB." The acronym stands for "Proud of your boy" and is used by the gang as a salute or signal of approval.

Oulette, whose Telegram handle is "GOV.HAM-OMLETTE," told Raw Story in a Telegram message that he personally doesn't think the "White Lives Matter" rallies are "a good look."

"But I'll do whatever my brothers decided to do," he wrote. "I've voiced my opinion but loyal to my guys so its [sic] it's up in the air. I personally don't wanna March with any hate groups or be associated."

He added, "There are other chapters going."

Oulette claimed to not know who is organizing the rallies.

"Was just asked to monitor it… so we are not caught off guard to what's going on in our state," he wrote somewhat cryptically. "We like to know who's doing what here… we have an event coming up just not 100% on the day."

The DC-area Proud Boys are not the only ones interested in the rallies.

A user named "DIRT2º posted in the discussion hosted by "White Lives Matter – 04/11": "Need someone from bama that I can help organize."

User "BACONndEGGS," whose avatar includes the initials W-L-M inside the Proud Boys' traditional wreath, hailed a message from the host channel declaring that "white people will not bow down" with the Proud Boys salute: "Uhuru."

Since their founding in 2016, Proud Boys leaders and rank-and-file members have strenuously objected to being described as "white supremacist" despite some members including Chairman Enrique Tarrio participating in the Unite the Rightrally and rallying alongside neo-Confederate groups. But Megan Squire, a computer scientist at Elon University who monitors right-wing extremist groups, said it's not all that surprising to see them now openly associating with white nationalists.

"To use one of their phrases, 'The mask slips,'" Squire said. "Underneath, they are who they are, and this is who they are. The question is, were the Proud Boys always that way or did it happen halfway through? A lot of times these guys will say, 'You pushed us to this, with all the de-platforming.' That's patently false. The history is the Proud Boys have been promoting very thinly veiled white supremacy. They called it 'Western chauvinism.' It's white supremacy — shocker. Now, we can call it what it is, and they can call it what it is."

The "Black-on-white crime" narrative promoted by the "White Lives Matter" rallies is a timeworn appeal by white power groups.

In a 2018 article for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Senior Research Analyst Cassie Miller called it "the biggest lie in the white supremacist propaganda playbook." A large part of its staying power is that it's deeply rooted in the American psyche. As Miller pointed out, false and harmful claims about Black people being inherently violent have formed the core justification for "slavery, lynching, Jim Crow and various forms of mass incarceration."

In recent decades, the "Black-on-white crime" falsehood has received a signal boost from Jared Taylor, a Yale-educated academic who produced The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Violence in America, a 1999 report that was updated in 2005 and again in 2016. Taylor drew his statistics from the "1994 Crime Victimization Survey released by the US Department of Justice, but Miller noted that Taylor's claim that crime has a racial and biological basis overlooks the obvious culprit.

"On average, African Americans were — and remain — far poorer and more likely to live in disadvantaged neighborhoods than whites," Miller wrote. "Concentrated poverty has a criminogenic effect: lack of access to jobs, increased idle time and poorer educational opportunities all increase one's chances of engaging in criminal behavior, and the effect is the same for Black and white people. One study released three years before The Color of Crime, found that when sociologists controlled for structural disadvantages, there were significant differences between crime rates in Black and white communities."

Another fallacy promoted by Taylor over the past several decades, which is being recycled through the "White Lives Matter" planning chats, is that crimes committed by Black perpetrators against white victims uniformly qualify as "hate crimes," but Miller noted that "few would meet the FBI's hate crime definition of an 'offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity."

The slogan "White Lives Matter" was originally promoted in neo-Nazi circles in 2015 and 2016, as an obvious cooptation of Black Lives Matter. Although lacking originality, it simultaneously mocks Black people killed by the police and substitutes white people as supposed victims.

In a video circulated by the @whitelivesmattermarch host channel, a bearded white man dressed in a hunting jacket intones, "For far too long, the media has ignored some of the most heinous and grotesque crimes committed against our people." After a standard recitation of white victims of violence by Black perpetrators, the narrators concludes, "These are a few names that most people've never heard of. Yet you'll hear 'George Floyd' and all these other people who're criminals. You know, everybody knows who Trayvon Martin was. Everybody knows who Breonna Taylor was. So why does the world know their names, but not the name of our victims?"

The words are uncannily similar tosome of the writing in a manifesto by Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white man who murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, SC in 2015.

Roof wrote in his manifesto that the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin prompted him "type in the words 'black on white crime' into Google, and I have never been the same since that day." The search led him to the Council of Conservative Citizens, one of the many white supremacist groups whose website included a section on white victims of crimes committed by Black people.

"There were pages and pages of these brutal black on White murders," Roof wrote. "I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored."

Another video shared by the White Lives Matter host channel displays text reading, "The great replacement can no longer be called a 'conspiracy theory.'" White supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Va. in August 2017 chanted, "You will not replace us." Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslim worshipers in mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, entitled his manifesto "The Great Replacement." The white supremacists who carried out massacres in a synagogue in Poway, Calif. and Walmart in El Paso, Texas that same year likewise referenced a "great replacement" in their respective manifestoes.

Despite hijacking the "Black Lives Matter" slogan, the "Q&A" message for the rallies disavows any equivalency, rejecting the idea that the rallies are "BLM for White People."

"Marxism is at the core of the anti-White narrative," the document states. "The principles that WLM should follow are those of God, Nature and Nobleness. WLM is a glimpse into the glorious past of White Europeans."

Comically, some of the members of the public chats are unintentionally transparent about their desire to clean up their image in the hope of broadening their appeal.

"The test will be if we are able to get the masses of people who attended the StopTheSteal rallies to come," a user named "Culture War Criminal" wrote in one of the discussion chats. "If we can pull this off and advocate White advocacy this will be a massive step forward."

Another user named "Project Algiz" advised: "Also, remember to keep it optical. True. But optical. For example, I made a decent video yesterday but removed it because I said 'n*****' twice. While I think of us can appreciate this sentiment, it will certainly chase away fence sitters and would-be supporters due to us confirming their suspicions that we may be a 'raAaAaAacist organization.'"

But other users appear to be completely unconcerned about optics.

The White Lives Matter Philadelphia channel celebrates former Mayor Frank Rizzo as "the only White Man who stood up openly here against the Black Riots instigated by Jews in order to destroy White Philadelphia and America!" The channel includes posts quoting from the 1940 Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, photos of police officers using a German shepherd to attack a Black protesters and "American Nazi Stormtroopers in Center City" Philadelphia in 1962. A post with maps showing demographic changes in Philadelphia from 1940 to 1960 pledges: "The Whites can and will reclaim Philadelphia from these Jews and then we can make this city and country all White again."...The open chats in the planning threads for the White Lives Matter rallies appear to be heavily infiltrated by antifascists posing as Nazis and urging people to stay home to avoid doxing. The infiltration is causing justifiable paranoia and making it difficult to tell who is who....In the group chat for Anchorage, Alaska, the host affirmed a user named "Jedi counselor" on Monday.

"I share the same sentiment as you my friend," the host wrote. "I'm tired of the cowardice."

"Jedi counselor" replied: "Right and we need to make an army and take back the west coast and take this matter into our own hands."

Then they added: "It's time to say fuck the cops because they are not doing anything about [it]."

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an 321

no lnx

White supremacist live-streamer arrested by FBI — and his followers are scared they're next: report

Matthew Chapman and Raw Story March 03, 2021

On Tuesday, The Daily Beast reported that the FBI arrested a prominent white supremacist live-streamer in a dawn raid in Florida.

"FBI agents, working with Fort Lauderdale police and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, arrested Paul N. Miller, 32, on one charge of being a 'convicted felon in possession of a firearm,'" reported Will Sommer. "Miller's neighbors in Fort Lauderdale's Riverside neighborhood reported hearing flashbangs during the raid, which took place around 5 a.m. ET, local TV station NBC 6 reported. One neighbor described seeing law enforcement officers carrying out a box that appeared to have 'a shotgun on the front or an AK.'"

"You could see the flash happening, so I went and looked outside and saw smoke coming down the street. I actually peeked my head out and talked to one of the guys with the night vision (headset) on. He was like 'it's safe now'," said local Chase Robinson. He was booked into the Broward County Jail and faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Miller amassed some 40,000 followers through the Telegram messaging app, which he used to make white supremacist broadcasts that included him "dressing up as characters like the Joker or Nintendo's Mario, then hurling racial abuse at strangers, including children, through the randomized chat app Omegle."

"Miller's Tuesday arrest sent shockwaves through internet extremist circles," said the report. "Miller had recently sold patches promoting his channel to his supporters, with his arrest raising fears among other extremists that the FBI could access his customer files and find out their own names and addresses. In messages captured by extremism researcher Hilary Sargent, Miller's supporters worried about the possibility that they could soon become FBI targets themselves."

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nb terms commonly used to descrive trump and insurr (1st reporter that used forced to resign back in the day?)

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/right-wing-violence-2650079928

During the past two years, U.S. counterterrorism officials held meetings with their European counterparts to discuss an emerging threat: right-wing terror groups becoming increasingly global in their reach.

American neo-Nazis were traveling to train and fight with militias in the Ukraine. There were suspected links between U.S. extremists and the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group that was training foreigners in its St. Petersburg compounds. A gunman accused of killing 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 had denounced a “Hispanic invasion" and praised a white supremacist who killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and who had been inspired by violent American and Italian racists.

But the efforts to improve transatlantic cooperation against the threat ran into a recurring obstacle. During talks and communications, senior Trump administration officials steadfastly refused to use the term “right-wing terrorism," causing disputes and confusion with the Europeans, who routinely use the phrase, current and former European and U.S. officials told ProPublica. Instead, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security referred to “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism," while the State Department chose “racially or ethnically motivated terrorism."

“We did have problems with the Europeans," one national security official said. “They call it right-wing terrorism and they were angry that we didn't. There was a real aversion to using that term on the U.S. side. The aversion came from political appointees in the Trump administration. We very quickly realized that if people talked about right-wing terrorism, it was a nonstarter with them."

The U.S. response to the globalization of the far-right threat has been slow, scattered and politicized, U.S. and European counterterrorism veterans and experts say. Whistleblowers and other critics have accused DHS leaders of downplaying the threat of white supremacy and slashing a unit dedicated to fighting domestic extremism. DHS has denied those accusations.

In 2019, a top FBI official told Congress the agency devoted only about 20% of its counterterrorism resources to the domestic threat. Nonetheless, some FBI field offices focus primarily on domestic terrorism.

Former counterterrorism officials said the president's politics made their job harder. The disagreement over what to call the extremists was part of a larger concern about whether the administration was committed to fighting the threat.

“The rhetoric at the White House, anybody watching the rhetoric of the president, this was discouraging people in government from speaking out," said Jason Blazakis, who ran a State Department counterterrorism unit from 2008 to 2018. “The president and his minions were focused on other threats."

Other former officials disagreed. Federal agencies avoided the term “right-wing terrorism" because they didn't want to give extremists legitimacy by placing them on the political spectrum, or to fuel the United States' intense polarization, said Christopher K. Harnisch, the former deputy coordinator for countering violent extremism in the State Department's counterterrorism bureau. Some causes espoused by white supremacists, such as using violence to protect the environment, are not regarded as traditionally right-wing ideology, said Harnisch, who stepped down this week.

“The most important point is that the Europeans and the U.S. were talking about the same people," he said. “It hasn't hindered our cooperation at all."

As for the wider criticism of the Trump administration, Harnisch said: “In our work at the State Department, we never faced one scintilla of opposition from the White House about taking on white supremacy. I can tell you that the White House was entirely supportive."

The State Department focused mostly on foreign extremist movements, but it examined some of their links to U.S. groups as well.

There was clearly progress on some fronts. The State Department took a historic step in April by designating the Russian Imperial Movement and three of its leaders as terrorists, saying that the group's trainees included Swedish extremists who carried out bombing attacks on refugees. It was the first such U.S. designation of a far-right terrorist group.

With Trump now out of office, Europeans and Americans expect improved cooperation against right-wing terrorists. Like the Islamist threat, it is becoming clear that the far-right threat is international. In December, a French computer programmer committed suicide after giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to U.S. extremist causes. The recipients included a neo-Nazi news website. Federal agencies are investigating, but it is not yet clear whether anything about the transaction was illegal, officials said.

“It's like a transatlantic thing now," said a European counterterror chief, describing American conspiracy theories that surface in the chatter he tracks. “Europe is taking ideology from U.S. groups and vice versa."

The Crackdown

International alliances make extremist groups more dangerous, but also create vulnerabilities that law enforcement could exploit.

Laws in Europe and Canada allow authorities to outlaw domestic extremist groups and conduct aggressive surveillance of suspected members. America's civil liberties laws, which trace to the Constitution's guarantee of free speech spelled out in the First Amendment, are far less expansive. The FBI and other agencies have considerably more authority to investigate U.S. individuals and groups if they develop ties with foreign terror organizations. So far, those legal tools have gone largely unused in relation to right-wing extremism, experts say.

To catch up to the fast-spreading threat at home and abroad, Blazakis said, the U.S. should designate more foreign organizations as terrorist entities, especially ones that allied nations have already outlawed.[long]....

an 121 alexh

The word "fragile" is often used to describe liberal democracies, which can take an authoritarian turn and cease to be democratic — for example, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Hungary under Viktor Orbán. Journalist Felix Salmon, in a sobering article published by Axios on January 8, analyzes recent events and lays out a list of reasons why he believes that the United States' democracy is more "fragile" than ever.

President-elect Joe Biden, the Axios reporter warns, is inheriting a country that finds itself in a "state of chaotic tribalism."

Salmon explains, "Americans, who are used to being winners, now look around and see a country that can't secure its own seat of government, that struggles to distribute a vaccine, that was cyber-looted by Russia, that was half a year late with a stimulus plan both sides wanted, that can't even orchestrate a peaceful transition of power…. This is weakness, not strength. The democracy that President-elect Biden will take over is tattered, archaic, precarious."

Salmon's article was published only two days after the U.S. Capitol Building, on January 6, was stormed by a violent mob of far-right extremists (including White nationalists[CF WT FACIAL RECOG ACTUAL NAZI) who were determined to prevent Congress from ratifying Biden's Electoral College victory. The mob only succeed in delaying Congress' vote, and both branches of Congress certified the Electoral College results. But the very fact that the extremists broke into the Capitol Building and ransacked it shows how much of a powder keg the U.S. has become politically. twt

salmon laments that according to a CBS News poll, big chunks of the U.S. population buy into debunked conspiracy theories and don't believe that Biden is legitimately president-elect.

"The consent of the governed lies at the heart of American democracy, but Biden will lack that fundamental authority," Samon writes. "40% of Americans and 80% of Trump voters say they believe Biden is not the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — the greatest proportion of holdouts in the history of American polling. 145 members of Congress, including seven senators, voted to throw out Pennsylvania's Electoral College votes — a move designed to hand victory to the loser of the election."

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, told Axios, "You can't lump U.S. democracy in with Canada, Germany and Japan anymore. We're now midway between them and Hungary."

Salmon stresses that there is no guarantee that a liberal democracy will remain a liberal democracy.

"Presidential democracies — think France and Brazil — are prone to crisis at the best of times," Salmon warns. "None has lasted nearly as long as America's. It was fragile and old even before Trump was elected, burdened with an anachronistic Electoral College, a dangerously long transition between election and inauguration, and a deeply gerrymandered quilt of state and federal constituencies."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/white-supremacist/

alexh

Although terrorist attacks by far-right white supremacist and white supremacist groups existed long before the Trump era, the last four years have found such groups emboldened. And according to Associated Press reporter Amy Forliti, one plot that white supremacists had in mind for the Summer of 2021 involved attacking power stations in the southeastern United States.

Forliti reports that in an affidavit that was "mistakenly unsealed," the FBI alleges that an Ohio-based teenager and informant said he wanted the white supremacists to fast-track their plot if President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. In addition to winning 306 electoral votes, President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote.

The NBC News reporter explains, "The teen was in a text group with more than a dozen people in the fall of 2019 when he introduced the idea of saving money to buy a ranch where they could participate in militant training, according to the affidavit, which was filed under seal along with a search warrant application in Wisconsin's Eastern U.S. District Court in March. The documents were inadvertently unsealed last week before the mistake was discovered and they were quickly sealed again."

Forliti notes that the teenager "also shared plans with a smaller group about a plot to create a power outage by shooting rifle rounds into power stations in the southeastern U.S. The teen called the plot 'Lights Out,' and there were plans to carry it out in the Summer of 2021, the affidavit states."

The teenager, according to Forliti, allegedly received a text from a white supremacist in Texas who said, "Leaving the power off would wake people up to the harsh reality of life by wreaking havoc across the nation." [NOVEL? TERROR?]

"The affidavit says the Ohio teen also spoke numerous times about creating Nazi militant cells around the country like those of the neo-Nazi network the Atomwaffen Division," Forliti explains. "Atomwaffen Division members have promoted 'accelerationism,' a fringe philosophy espousing mass violence to fuel society's collapse. More than a dozen people linked to the group or an offshoot called the Feuerkrieg Division have been charged with serious crimes in recent years."

Jennifer Thornton, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of Ohio, told NBC News that she couldn't offer more information about the plot but said, "we want to emphasize that there is no imminent public safety threat related to this matter."

The Trump era has seen some vicious attacks by White racists, from a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas on August 3, 2019 aimed specifically at Latinos to the October 27, 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. And earlier this year, a combination of white nationalists and militia extremists, according to the FBI, planned to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and possibly kill her.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/white-supremacist-donor-trump/

Trump continues to deny that he is a racist but his ties to the white supremacists and extremists that his presidential campaign refuses to sever ties with and denounce have raised more questions about his beliefs.

While most presidential campaigns typically decline financial donations and endorsements from people and organizations they do not align with, that has not been the case for the Trump campaign.

From small donations to thousand-dollar donations, American Bridge 21st Century compiled a report based on Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings that revealed approximately 30 white supremacists, bigots, and extremists donated directly to Trump's official re-election campaign and multiple other political action committees (PACs) including the Trump Make America Great Again Committee and Trump Victory, according to The Huffington Post.

Here is a list of the white supremacists and extremist Trump supporters who have donated to the president's re-election campaign.

Steven Alembik
James Allsup
PamelaGeller
Skylor Jernigan
Laura Loomer
Michael Masters
K.C. McAlpin
Peter Zieve

In total, extremists have donated a total of $120,000 since 2015, including about $50,000 donated for Trump's 2020 re-election campaign. Reports about these donations come less than two weeks before the upcoming election and one month since Trump bombed the first presidential debate and faced heightened controversy for his refusal to denounce white supremacy. In fact, during the final presidential debate, Trump claimed he was the "least racist" person in the room.

Around the same time, another White House staffer Julia Hahn, was exposed as having a deep connection with the white supremacist movement. Kyle Morse, an American Bridge 21st Century spokesperson, weighed in on the Southern Poverty Law Center report.

"Any white supremacist would be proud of the way Donald Trump has run his White House and campaign," Morse told the HuffPost. "That's why they are forking over cash hand over fist to reelect the most openly racist president in modern history."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/expert-on-far-right-extremists-warns-the-kidnapping-plot-against-gretchen-whitmer-wont-be-the-last-white-nationalist-terror-threat/

Once again, the ludicrous claim that radical Islamists have the market cornered on terrorism — and that far-right white nationalists and extremist militia groups don't pose a major threat in the United States — has been exploded by the cold, hard facts. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, this week, announced that six members of a far-right militia group, the Wolverine Watchmen, had been arrested in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and possibly murder her. Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago history professorand an expert on far-right white nationalists, has a dire warning in an op-ed for the Washington Post: the U.S. can expect similar plots in the months ahead.

Belew, author of the book "Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America," explains, "This isn't just a one-off event or the work of a few mad actors — it's part of a rising tide of white power activity, one that poses an imminent danger to American democracy. The Department of Homeland Security's threat assessment report, released earlier this week after a long wait, made that clear: white power movement violence and affiliated extremism is, by far, the greatest terrorist threat to our nation."

That isn't to say that the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security shouldn't keep a close eye on far-right Islamists like ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria). The deadliest terror attack in U.S. history, the 9/11 attacks of September 2001, was carried out by members of al-Qaeda. But the second deadliest, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, came from the white nationalist/white supremacist side of terrorism. And Belew points out that in 2020, white nationalist terrorism has posed a greater threat than radical Islam in the U.S.

"Not only does this kind of extremist violence outstrip any violence carried out by what President Trump has referred to as 'Antifa and the left,' but white power violence now also exceeds the threat of radical Islamist terror," Belew emphasizes. "The DHS assessment makes clear that '2019 was the most lethal year for extremism in the United States since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.'"

Islamophobes like Pamela Gellar and Jihad Watch's Robert B. Spencer have repeatedly made the false claim that there is something uniquely violent about Islam, which is nonsense — most Muslims don't embrace far-right jihadist ideology. And Islamophobes typically downplay the terrorist threat posed by white supremacists and white nationalists, trying to paint Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh as a "lone wolf." But as Belew stresses, the Oklahoma City attack was by no means an anomaly.

"That bombing, the largest deliberate mass casualty on mainland American soil between Pearl Harbor and 9/11, is still not well understood by Americans," Belew explains. "People still think of it as the work of lone wolves or a few bad apples. But the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people — including 19 young children — was the work of the white power movement, a coordinated social network that brought together Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, militiamen, radical tax resisters, separatists and others in outright war on the federal government. The evidence of the bombing as part of this movement is extensive and irrefutable."

Belew goes on to warn that having "studied the earlier white power movement for more than a decade," she is "very concerned that more violence is imminent."

"The evidence is there, but it's easy to overlook if you don't connect the various alarming details," Belew explains. "The attempted kidnapping of Whitmer is linked to the call to arms of the Proud Boys, the underground training of other white power groups, the militias and Boogaloo Boys on the march and the string of mass shooters motivated by this ideology."

Belew adds, "In the new Michigan case, the FBI's transcripts reveal a highly volatile set of plots that included bombings of multiple targets and a coded reference to attempted murder. In white power discourse, kidnapping people for 'trial' is often followed by references to lynching. Whitmer might easily have been assassinated by this group."

According to Belew, the COVID-19 pandemic is making white nationalists, white supremacists and white militia groups even more unhinged.

"We now encounter a new urgency among white power activists, who have capitalized upon the Trump Administration's many green lights, the anti-mask movement and the social anxieties of pandemic and racial justice protest to launch new campaigns of violence," Belew warns. "This is a movement expressly dedicated to the violent overthrow of the United States and the destruction of democracy and its institutions. We have to stand against it."

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https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scholar-explains-how-the-conservative-movement-transmits-sanitized-versions-of-white-supremacist-ideology/

paul r salon

As the longest sustained period of racial justice protests in American history segues into the heat of election season, dark shadows have appeared, from the vigilante killing of protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin — and widespread conservative defenses of the teenage accused murderer — to ludicrous charges against protesters, including "terrorism," to the Trump administration's crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it "anti-American," and Attorney General Bill Barr's call for protesters to be charged with sedition.

So much for the notions that Donald Trump has no ideology, or, for that matter, that getting rid of him will make America great again. In July of 2016, I wrote about why such views were myopic: "Trump advances core paleoconservative positions," researcher Bruce Wilson told me, including "rebuilding infrastructure, protective tariffs, securing borders and stopping immigration, neutralizing designated internal enemies and isolationism."

Trump's record as president has been surprisingly consistent for such an erratic figure, with his purely rhetorical support for infrastructure as the most notable exception. And therein lies a key to the current moment: With infrastructure removed from the equation — the most broadly popular position Trump's ever embraced — the remaining white nationalism stands out in stark relief, highlighted in the frenzied push toward violent confrontation around the election, and beyond.

Dr. James Scaminaci III has just published a report about the long historical genesis of this recent push for Political Research Associates, "Battle With Bullets: Advancing a Vision of Civil War." Scaminaci has a PhD in sociology from Stanford and has worked as a civilian intelligence analyst with expertise on the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and organized crime. So the spread of social chaos, internecine violence and associated enabling ideologies is a subject he's familiar with.

Scaminaci traces the roots of culture-war and race-war narratives as far back as the Haitian revolution of the early 19th century. He observes that Steve Bannon nurtured those carefully at Breitbart News and they have played a key role in radicalizing Trump's base over the past five years, to the point where some of his supporters are visibly preparing themselves for violence. Some parts of this story have been relatively well covered, but Scaminaci provides a much more integrated and historically extensive account of how we reached our present state. I reached out to him recently for an interview by email to discuss some of his key insights and how they provide us with a much clearer picture of the forces pushing America toward civil war. The following has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

In your article, you write: "Over the last several years, a narrative around the threat of civil war — and more specifically, a racial civil war — has been growing on the Right." You observe that this comes in different versions and has deep historical roots, dating back to the colonial era. Before getting into the details, why is it important to recognize this history and learn about it?

I wanted to convey that what we are seeing now on the right wing has a long history, a history that is either overlooked or ignored. Jill Lepore and other scholars looking at the right have noted that modern day "patriots" cast themselves as lineal descendants of the founding fathers and the American Revolution — that they are revolutionaries against the existing "tyrannical" federal government. But that history is drenched in violence and blood against Black and indigenous peoples. That context cannot be omitted. And the idea that whites are under existential threat from Black folks also needs to be put into historical context.

Second, the right-wing idea that the federal government is "tyrannical" is largely the product of white supremacist politicians, both Republican and Democratic, and intellectuals like William F. Buckley. This was the idea that post-World War II federal support for civil rights was federal overreach, was unconstitutional, and that it upset allegedly harmonious race relations in the South and eventually in the North.

According to white supremacists, the existential threat to white people in the Jim Crow South came from Black folks, whether children or adults, even touching anything that could be shared with whites. A schoolbook touched by a Black child became a Black textbook. Blacks and whites could not share drinking fountains or sit in the same seats on a bus.

What I wanted to portray in "Battle With Bullets" is that whites have long viewed any expression of nonviolent Black agency as an existential threat to themselves that required whites to resort to a brutal, genocidal racial civil war. One can understand the palpable fear of a slave revolt before 1861. But white supremacists have claimed that registering to vote, voting, moving into a white neighborhood after a history of redlining, moving into managerial or foreman positions in the workplace, or being cast as heroes or superheroes are existential threats.

You write that "The most dangerous versions of that [civil war] narrative come from leaders with paramilitary forces, while other appeals seem intended to generate a heightened sense of crisis." Can you give an example of each and then help us understand how the two are related?

Roger Stone is a political operative who has graduated from ratfucking political operations into calling for a civil war or violence or martial law. He is an ideological chaos agent. He can help set the narrative mood for the right wing. As Chip Berlet has written, elites know how to write the score for scripted violence. Somehow, the gunmen always know who to kill. In a similar category are the numerous Christian right leaders who broadcast the same civil war message to their Christian nationalist supporters and followers. I also quoted [Dallas megachurch pastor] Robert Jeffress in the article.

David Neiwert owns the beat on tracking the transmission of fringe ideas to the conservative mainstream. Even a decade before Trump, the ideological lines were blurring.

In 2008, Michael Savage, a right-wing radio host, said, "[T]he white person is being erased from America's future. ... There is a racial element to the immigration invasion." Then Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly claimed, "So now, it's becoming a race war." The Center for American Progress went on to note that O'Reilly claimed that immigration reformers "hate America ... because it's run primarily by white, Christian men" and were seeking "to change the complexion...of America."

That is no different from Jean Raspail's theme in "The Camp of the Saints" or the narrative at The Social Contract, a white nationalist journal which published Raspail's novel. Or Glenn Beck on Fox News in February 2009, airing his racial civil war scenario within one month of the first Black president taking office. Or a variety of Christian Right leaders during the Obama years calling for or suggesting a racial civil war is coming, includingTony Perkins, Larry Klayman and Rick Joyner.

In 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted the "symbiotic dance" between white supremacist groups and John Tanton's hardline anti-immigration movement, as well as the sharing of conspiracy narratives between white supremacists and the "patriot" militia movement.

The conservative movement, both the political and religious wings, transmit sanitized versions of white supremacist ideology. The latter is premised on preparing for, if not instigating, a racial civil war in America.

John Jackson, a scholar who covers "scientific" racism, in a recent article titled, "Going Full Nazi,"asked the question: "[W]hat is the point of drawing a line between the 'mainstream' and the 'alt' right? Perhaps there is no useful distinction to be made." The angry white guys with guns are dangerous because they have weapons of war. But the dividing line between them and the "Fourth Generation Warfare" chaos agents creating a crisis of legitimacy is increasingly blurred.

You write that this rhetoric is rooted in a narrative adapted from the 1973 French novel you just mentioned, "The Camp of the Saints." Can you explain its basic narrative?

The novel has seven key ideas that its critics and proponents have noted. One, mass migration is an invasion. Two, immigrants and refugees are invaders. Three, the invaders will eventually destroy Western culture and replace Western populations. Four, the West's political elites do not have the moral strength to defend the West. Five, the invaders must be physically removed and/or violently repelled. Six, there is a difference between the "real country" and "real citizens" and the "legal country" and "legal citizens." Seven, multiracial, multiethnic or multi-confessional societies are not only unstable but undesirable, and lead to the "balkanization" of societies — a view also imported from Serbian genocidal propaganda into the American and global right.

The main variations within this "Camp of the Saints" worldview are whether the political elites lack moral strength to resist the invasions ("Great Replacement"), enact immoral policies which weaken Western societies to invasion ("demographic winter") or actively collaborate with the governments of the invading migrants to facilitate the invasion (as in John Tanton's network). The other variation distinguishes the neo-Nazis from all the other segments: whether or not the Jews are responsible for the destruction of their societies ("white genocide").

You note that for both France and the United States, the historical roots of this narrative go back to the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. In the U.S. this has produced the "white genocide theory" and in France the "great replacement" theory. What distinguishes them and what draws them together?

The "white genocide" theory is premised on the fear of a Black slave revolt against the white slave-owning society. The "great replacement" theory is based on the fear of massive nonwhite immigration coupled with lower white birth rates leading to a "replacement" of the white population with a nonwhite population, and the transformation of the culture.

White supremacists use the more palatable, more sanitized "great replacement" theory interchangeably and conflate them. But they have different causal mechanisms.

On the other hand, the neo-Nazis and other proponents of the "white genocide" narrative consider any action by Black people to improve themselves, to gain access to privileged white spheres of social action or to more equitably redistribute power and status as an existential threat. "Great replacement" proponents do not share this outlook. Nor do "great replacement" proponents, in general, blame Jews for what they consider to be massive immigration.

You write, "It would be a mistake to see these various 'White Replacement' narratives as isolated from mainstream conservative thought in Europe or America." How has their influence spread through terrorist acts?

In the right-wing information sphere, ideas swirl around, mix, recombine and mutate over time to fit changing circumstances. Raspail's "Camp of the Saints" is foundational to this narrative or worldview. Raspail directly influenced the emergence and popularity of the "great replacement" theory, which is the catchall theory cited by white terrorists.

But Bat Ye'or's conception of the problem — that European elites conspire with Arab elites to produce both subservience to Islam and the "great replacement" — directly influenced the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who was motivated to provoke a decades-long civil war to stop the formation of what Ye'or called "Eurabia." Breivik, as well as the "great replacement" narrative, have inspired numerous white terrorist acts around the globe.

Returning to the American context, How did Steve Bannon and Breitbart spread their influence?

Bannon's principal contribution was to use Breitbart News to mix white supremacist ideology into the Republican Party and the Christian Right, and to heavily promote Raspail's "Camp of the Saints." In 2015 and 2016, Breitbart was the largest driver of ideological influence on the right.

How has this spread through the Trump administration?

The "Camp of the Saints" worldview largely shapes Stephen Miller's approach to immigration issues. Raspail's bottom line was that "the barbarians had to be repelled" either by violence or cruelty or both. Trump's immigration policy has been cruel, and as Adam Serwer noted, "cruelty is the point."

You also call attention to the Christian right's specific variant called "demographic winter," and argue that this has played a central role in evangelical support for Trump and his wall. What should people know about that?

The term "demographic winter" appears to have come from Don Feder, communications director of the World Congress of Families [a far-right, anti-LGBT Christian group]. He is the most prominent WCF official linked to the Tanton anti-immigration network and was apparently influenced by Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" ideas, which circulate widely in conservative and right-wing Jewish circles.

In November 2005, Feder's view of Muslims in France reflected the worldview of Raspail and other "Eurabia" writers. Feder blamed the French riots of that year on "demographic winter," "lax immigration policies" and "brain-dead multiculturalism." Where "demographic winter" differs from Raspail, the "great replacement" and the Eurabia narratives is that liberal elite support for women's reproductive freedom and gay marriage are the principal culprits, in addition to massive Muslim immigration.

What resonates with conservative Christians and Christian nationalists is the idea that Christian (Western) civilization is under threat from nonwhite immigration, Christians are being persecuted in the West and around the world, and only a strong, authoritarian leader building a wall can save them.

Survey data supports my contention that white evangelical Protestants have a "Camp of the Saints" worldview: Seventy-eight percent favor strict limits on "legal immigration," 76% favor "building a [border] wall," 69% support a "temporary" Muslim ban and, 54% favor "preventing refugees from coming into the United States," according to October 2019 PRRI data.

The last section of your article deals with the emergence of the "Boogaloo boys" during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. How can we better understand them in terms of the longer history you've laid out? What lessons need to be learned?

The first lesson to be learned is that Donald Trump and local elected Republican officials, especially the so-called "constitutional sheriffs," have a much closer relationship to the armed wing of the Christian right. Bruce Wilson and David Neiwert have been tracking that.

The second lesson is that Trump is openly orchestrating armed demonstrations of force against Democratic Party governors and mayors.

The third lesson is that it is very easy to take off your camouflage fatigues and put on a Hawaiian shirt and pretend you just got concerned — but not before you spent around $2,000 on a rifle, tactical gear and ammunition. Journalists should stop being so credulous.

The last lesson is that claims that the "patriot" militia support Black Lives Matter protests are preposterous. The BLM protests are not simply about wrongful deaths at the hands of law enforcement — something a majority of whites can see and empathize with.

BLM is calling for reckoning, a "Third Reconstruction" of America — politically, economically and culturally — in the context of a deliberate confrontation with that racist, violent history. Even at the intellectual level of the "Never Trumpers," those potentially most sympathetic to BLM, there is a blindness or an inability to confront that larger American history and the smaller Republican Party history regarding racism. To think that "angry white men with guns" have thought it through is absurd.

What's the most important question I haven't asked? And what's the answer?

I do not know the answer to the question: "Why do scholars and journalists not consider the religious basis of America's long-term crisis of legitimacy in terms of politics and science?" But I would suggest that scholars and journalists have glommed on to the least important of Richard Hofstadter's explanations, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," and ignored his more trenchant analysis in "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," which focuses on the epistemological disruption caused by fundamentalist Protestantism. They also ignore Marty Lipset's and Earl Raab's use of the concept of monism in describing the right wing in "The Politics of Unreason." Those old guys were on to something.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/department-of-homeland-security-acting-secretary-chad-wolf-speaks-at-an-event-at-dhs-headquarters-in-washington-wednesday-sept-9-2020-ap-photo-susan-walsh-dhs-whistleblower-accuses-chad-wolf-of/

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For weeks, Donald Trump ordered a rag-tag mix of border patrol, U. S. marshals, and other elements of federal enforcement—none of them trained to deal with the public—into the streets of Portland, Oregon, where they upped the level of violence, grabbed people off the street without charges, and savagelybeat a group of local moms trying to get them to halt their violence. After some weeks, Trump finally decided he’d done enough to generate footage for his doom-themed campaign commercials (with a few supplements) and took his beat-down squad off the streets.

Understandably, Congress would like to talk to the people who thought that dragging people into unmarked vans, shooting journalists in the face, defying local officials, and filling the streets with banned chemical weapons was a great idea. They’ve asked officials form the Department of Homeland Security to provide witnesses about the incident in Portland, and about ongoing efforts to create a make-believe threat of “antifa terrorists” to justify their actions, while ignoring their own analysisshowing the genuine threat posed by white supremacist groups.

At the same time, Congress is dealing with a whistleblower complaintfrom a former DHS official who says that Wolf ordered him to stop trying to both stop prevent Russian interference, and instead create a false narrative about China and Iran. That same officials says that the white supremacist threat was deliberately played down as DHS suppressed information that might be “embarrassing” to Trump. But the DHS has decided that it doesn’t want to talk about any of this. Instead, it’s refusing to provide witnesses to the House intelligence Committee, setting off yet another conflict between a Congress that needs to know the truth, and a White House that needs to keep the truth hidden.

Failing to cooperate with Congress in any way has become the hallmark of the Donald Trump White House. Statements that re supposed to be regularly provided to the House, are not being sent. Standard briefings are being halted. And from the moment he sat down, Trump has been bypassing Congress entirely with an unprecedented number of executive orders and the use of a national emergency declarationto get around the congressional budget.

as The Washington Post reports, DHS has sent a response to Congress saying that they simply have too many questions. They have “unreasonably broadened their scope” after getting the whistleblower complaint from former DHS official Brian Murphy who says he was twice told to stop reporting about the threat of Russian interference in the election—in spite of compelling evidence that Russia is absolutely interfering in the election. Murphy also reports that he was told to remove statements about white supremacists “to bring them in line with President Trump’s public comments.” Among his claims, Murphy says that a July analysis that showed Russia interfering in a way designed to help Trump was not released because “it was embarrassing to Trump.”

DHS officials have denied Murphy’s charges and claimed they are “looking forward” to an investigation. Except for the part where they cooperate with that investigation.

But DHS has tried to explain to Congress that everything is just fine. Rather than having anyone answer questions, assistant secretary Beth Spivey provided committee chair Adam Schiff with an email in which whistleblower Murphy says that “The acting secretary has never given me any direction on what to do Regarding [sic] threats,” only … it’s not a whole email. It’s just a that text from a larger statement … text that looks suspiciously as if even that tiny scrap has been edited.

Schiff has said the Intelligence Committee will consider “compulsory process” to force witnesses to appear, but so far the House has been unwilling to move forward with steps that would prevent the White House from simply turning any effort to pull in witnesses into a months-long court battle.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/why-many-police-are-barely-distinguishable-from-racist-vigilantes/

Police in America, whose mottos claim to “protect and serve” us, have been openly declaring allegiance with the forces of white supremacy. It is no coincidence that this has become a hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old white suspect in the shooting deaths of two activists in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the days following the police shooting of a Black man named Jacob Blake. Implying that the suspected shooter was acting in self-defense against Black Lives Matter protesters, Trump said, “He was trying to get away from them, I guess, it looks like… He probably would have been killed.” Later, in a Fox News interview, he defended police in a similar manner, saying they were “under siege” and using a golf analogy to explain why they routinely kill unarmed people: “just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot putt.”

Across social media, those claiming to “Back the Blue,” and that “Blue Lives Matter,” have taken their cues from the president and declared Rittenhouse a hero. The 17-year-old idolized police. And they clearly felt comforted by the presence of his armed group.

In a capturing their close collaboration, Kenosha police officers were seen going out of their way to ensure that Rittenhouse and the vigilantes that had gathered in their city had plenty of water. At the same time, they were enforcing the city’s curfew against someone else, announcing aggressively over a bullhorn, “You are a civilian. This area is closed to all. You are trespassing. Leave. Leave now.” Seconds later, the same officer is heard saying to Rittenhouse and his colleagues, “We appreciate you guys—we really do.” If ever there was doubt that police and armed white vigilantes see themselves as part of the same club, this interaction dispelled it.

Later, when the teenager walked toward police with his hands up soon after he allegedly shot protesters, officers ignored him, seeing him as no threat. Many have rightly questioned if law enforcement would have simply ignored a similarly clad Black teenager carrying a rifle that he was clearly too young to legally own.

right-wing extremist armed vigilantes and police officers are cut from the same ideological cloth of American society that feels entitled to patrol the collective behavior of nonwhites, women, etc.While not entirely white and male, both police and armed vigilantes are largely white men. In urban areas in particular, research shows that law enforcement officers are far less racially diverse than the communities they police and are overwhelmingly male. They epitomize the white male authority that armed vigilante groups aspire to. When armed groups show up to protests, police embrace their presence and see them as allies.

A new report published by the Brennan Center for Justice explores the overlap between these two groups at length. Written by former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Michael German, it traces the history of American police, which is more relevant than ever today. “Slave patrols were among the first public policing organizations formed in the American colonies,” writes German. He adds, “Put simply, white supremacy was the law these earliest public officials were sworn to enforce.” Judging by police actions, especially over the last several months, this historical framework of policing appears to be intact hundreds of years later. Even the FBI has warned that “White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence,” and German points out that in internal documents, the Bureau warns of the “active links” between extremist groups and law enforcement officials.

Trump is hardly responsible for creating the mess we find ourselves in. But he has ended the very modest police reforms that were put into place under Obama, and law enforcement has in turn signaled that it appreciates Trump. In fact, the National Association of Police Organizations, which had previously endorsed Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden in 2008 and 2012, has now switched its support to Trump.

What’s worse is that there are few elected officials offering us protection from racist police violence, let alone armed white vigilantes. It is no coincidence that so many fatal incidents at the hands of police have taken place in liberal, Democrat-run cities where politicians pay lip service to safety but give a free pass to police. Even in liberal California, the Democrat-dominated state legislature could not bring itself to strip officers of their badges when they commit crimes.

Within such a context, the disproportionate killing of Black Americans by police is rightly condemned as the ugly hallmark of a violently racist society. When Trump supporters claim that Black people are only killed because they resist instead of acquiescing to brutality, they conveniently overlook the fact that police manage to preserve the lives of white people who fight back when arrested.

From California to New York and everywhere in between, police treat Black and Brown people like target practice at best, and animals at worse. A Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy-turned-whistleblower has detailed the existence of a violent gang within the department called the Executioners, which he said requires aspiring members to kill someone or commit other violent acts as an initiation rite. Two sheriff’s deputies implicated in the shooting death of an 18-year-old Latino man named Andres Guardado were apparently prospective members of the gang. Guardado was shot five times in the back. In New York, a video emerged recently of Rochester police covering the head of a Black man named Daniel Prude with a hood and suffocating him to death. Prude was naked and defenseless in the middle of the street when he was killed like an animal.

These are only two examples out of countless violent incidents where police have claimed the lives of people of color. And such incidents are precisely why white conservatives support and defend police. They see law enforcement as keeping Black and Brown masses in check. They see their own armed groups as supplementary paramilitary forces to bolster law enforcement. And they see Trump, their president, supporting these cozy ties and close collaboration.

Against a well-armed police force linked to white supremacists, what chance do communities of color have at leading dignified lives free of police harassment, targeting, and killing? According to German, “the Justice Department has no national strategy designed to identify white supremacist police officers or to protect the safety and civil rights of the communities they patrol.” And this is precisely how Trump likes it.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/white-supremacists-are-invading-american-cities-to-start-a-civil-war

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in his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, Barack Obama said: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” If it was true then, it certainly isn’t true now. We are a nation on the edge of an increasingly hot civil war, one in which white supremacists are invading American cities, fomenting violence, and the overtly racist president they support sees the violence as benefiting him politically.

For the last two decades at least, Democrats have labored under the notion that if they were just reasonable enough, they could heal sharpening political divides in America. Meanwhile, Republicans spent the same time period inflaming every cultural resentment they could, maximizing racist, sexist and homophobic resentments among primarily white men. Republicans worked overtime to try to set urban and exurban populations against one another, disempowering and disenfranchising city dwellers through gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Donald Trump added kerosene onto the flaming bonfire built by Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes. He won the GOP primary not be being something radically different, but by accurately reflecting the existing dispositions of the Republican base. He embodies their ethos heart and soul, and they reward him with intense loyalty even as the economy begins to collapse and 180,000 Americans die in a pandemic he has ignored.

Many like David Neiwert have long predicted this would end in violence, but were largely dismissed. Conservatives are now both more desperate and more cocksure than ever before. As more Americans started living in cities, as the racial complexion of the nation diversified, as young people locked out of housing, trapped in debt and forced into dead-end jobs realized the need for a radical rethinking of the social and economic contract, and as a larger percentage of white people went to college and by extension became increasingly inoculated from the very worst forms of bigotry, the hold of conservative elements over the country has weakened. The Right has lost the culture war. American corporations, solicitous of the economic patronage of younger trendsetters and growing families, have established ever more left-leaning branding (at least on social and environmental matters.)

at the same time, however, political structures designed to empower the minority of conservatives in America to rule over its liberal majority are maintaining an apartheid-style government. The electoral college has put a conservative in the White House twice in the last two decades despite losing the popular vote, and threatens to do so again. The Senate majority belongs to conservatives who nonetheless control mostly rural states with a minority of the U.S. population, and the presence of the filibuster makes real change all but impossible even if Democrats were to retake the chamber. Gerrymandering ensures that the House of Representatives and state legislatures are stacked in favor of exurban dwellers and conservatives, with the result that even when Democrats do attain victory, those legislators are perforce more moderate than the majority of the Democratic base. And, of course, widespread voter suppression maximizes the disenfranchisement of urban progressives. Protected by these structures and with Donald Trump as president, conservatives feel that they are empowered to rule regardless of what majoritarian democracy would suggest.

The protests against police violence are reflective of this broader trend. Most police do not live in the cities they serve. They tend to be extremely culturally conservative and out of touch with the values of the taxpayers who fund them. In New York City, one of the nation’s most progressive enclaves where the president no longer dares to tread, the police union defiantly endorsed Donald Trump. Police violence against racial minorities has been a longstanding problem for decades, and one that has started to receive national attention through the diligent efforts of activists and through the presence of ubiquitous video technology to capture actions that in years past would have been sanitized in one-sided police reports. But it’s also the reality that in the age of rightwing radicalization, a large segment of the police have come more than ever to see themselves as occupying warrior forces in cities whose culture is threatening and alien to them. And the citizens of those cities know it and feel it– as psychological torment, legal harassment, financial hardship from court costs, and as scars on their bodies.

Protests in this context are inevitable. And why not? The people of America’s cities have a right to demand action from their city leaders. It’s a problem for America’s cities to sort out, as citizens demand that their representatives fear their political power as much as they do that of the police organizations.

But conservative white supremacist extremists are not content to allow that to play out. An empowered urban citizenry is a direct threat to their power, an acceleration of their loss of control. The “Boogaloo” movement wants to instigate a civil war along largely racial lines precisely to settle accounts before they suffer any further cultural or demographic declines.

So a few days ago a radicalized Trump-supporting teenager drove across state lines armed for a violent confrontation against protests, and murdered two people and injured a third. He did so after being welcomed by local police, given water, and ignored when he attempted to surrender. He is being celebrated in right-wing circles for doing so, and so-called “Christian” groups are funding his legal defense.

Yesterday, convoys of out-of-town trucks and SUVs bearing Trump flags stormed into Portland with the intent of creating confrontation. They allegedly rolled through groups of protesters in their vehicles, shooting projectiles and pepper spray into the crowds. In the ensuing violence, one of the far-right Trump supporters was shot and killed.

The Portland murderer should, of course, be brought to justice. There is no excuse for deadly violence. But all of this is happening because white supremacists are invading American cities with the express intent of starting a civil war. President Trump sees them as “very fine people” who are on his side. He sees the violence as politically beneficial, a useful cudgel against Democratic nominee Joe Biden–even though the violence is happening while Trump himself is president, not Biden.

Trump’s election theme is that Americans won’t be safe in a Biden presidency. The opposite is true. Americans won’t be safe as long as a white supremacist president is leading a movement of bigots to incite a civil war, and attempting to ensure that the majority of Americans with cosmopolitan, egalitarian values remain politically disenfranchised and under the thumb of those who fear and despise them.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/white-supremacists-are-using-the-protests-to-stoke-racial-tensions-while-trump-and-bill-barr-help/

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white supremacists are using the protests to stoke racial tensions — while Trump and Bill Barr help

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly July 29, 2020

The day after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers, peaceful protesters took to the streets. But the first serious incidence of violence came two days later on May 27th when a masked man started breaking windows at an auto parts store.

That set off a chain reaction of looting, fires, and rioting. Three days later, Attorney General Bill Barr made a statement, saying that “In many places it appears the violence is planned, organized and driven by anarchic and far left extremist groups using Antifa-like tactics, many of whom travel from outside the state to promote the violence.” The president echoed those remarks.

On Tuesday, we learned something about the so-called “umbrella man” in the video above.

A masked man who was seen in a viral video smashing the windows of a south Minneapolis auto parts store during the George Floyd protests, earning him the moniker “Umbrella Man,” is suspected to be a member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang seeking to incite racial tension in a demonstration that until then had been peaceful, police said…

A subsequent investigation revealed that the man was also an associate of the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a small white supremacist prison and street gang based primarily in Minnesota and Kentucky.

Police have also connected the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood to an incident in which a Muslim woman and her daughter were harassed in Stillwater, Minnesota by a group of men wearing white supremacist insignia.

Last weekend, something similar happened in Richmond, Virginia.

Riots in downtown Richmond over the weekend were instigated by white supremacists under the guise of Black Lives Matter, according to law enforcement officials.

Protesters tore down police tape and pushed forward toward Richmond police headquarters, where they set a city dump truck on fire.

If we add all of that to the involvement of the far-right anti-government group Boogaloo Boys, it becomes clear that much of the violence we’re seeing on the streets is coming from two groups: (1) law enforcement, and (2) far-right/white supremacist groups. But as the president and attorney general defend the use of force by law enforcement to “dominate” the streets, it is significant that neither one of them has called out the actual extremists who are involved.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/11/far-right-coronavirus-protests/

At THIS POINT, it’s become a staple of dark humor to observe that 2020 has been the year in which the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seemingly decided to descend on the United States. Yet even before our fears of war, pestilence, and economic collapse began taking physical form, one could already observe morbid symptoms spreading within the extremities of our body politic. The strongest sign of a looming social illness has been the rebirth and spread of extremist ideologies — beliefs not long ago dismissed by liberal triumphalists as relics of historical memory.

Mutated through new information technologies and drawing strength from feelings of economic and demographic dislocation, fascist and sectarian ideologies have found a home in the hearts of members of a new generation of Americans.

Whether most people have connected the dots or not, a violent struggle is already playing out. Over the past few years, a steady drumbeat of massacres have been carried out by extremists associated with the new far-right. These attacks have targeted synagogues, mosques, and communities where immigrants are concentrated. In their wake, the shooters left behind manifestos damning a world that they claimed was shrinking in space for people like them.

What these ideologues drifting within the currents of this movement have really been waiting for, however, is a real crisis, one that would give them an opportunity to put their ideas of racial warfare and ethnic purification into full effect. That crisis is here.

The combination of the coronavirus and the sudden collapse of the American economy has given society an exogenous shock unseen in generations. The pandemic and the social tensions it has unleashed are likely to supercharge the forces that gave rise to the new far-right extremism, even as they produce countervailing energies that could revive the best promises of liberalism.

Engaging in political predictions is a foolish, high-risk, low-reward activity. But having followed the iterations of this new extremist ideology at home and abroad — and grappled with the fact that there is a pool of young men who have proven themselves willing to die for it — it strikes me as irresponsible to not advise people to brace for what is on the horizon.

ALTHOUGH SOME HAVE yet to accept it, the U.S. is in the midst of an unstoppable cultural and demographic transition into multiculturalism. The natural challenges entailed in such a shift should not be ignored. It is incumbent upon everyone to do their part to make it a success, while ensuring that everyone feels they have a place in this country.

This demographic shift, though, has also given rise to serious anxieties among some within the majority community — anxieties that helped enable the rise of a white nationalist named Donald Trump to the presidency. These majoritarian sentiments are likely to escalate as minority groups grow to embrace their own forms of racial consciousness, often based on redressing past injustices suffered at the hands of the majority.

The current wave of national protests was triggered by a killing with strong sectarian overtones — another Black man killed by a white police officer. From a historical perspective, countries that have experienced wholesale economic collapse at the same time as exploding ethnic tensions have often had a difficult time dealing with that, to put it mildly. The United States still has a lot of resources at its disposal to handle these challenges, but the gravity of the present situation should not be understated.

Americans are experiencing levels of unemployment unprecedented in their modern history. According to some estimates, nearly half of these jobs may never return. At the same time, stunning acts of symbolic cultural transformation are playing out in real time. As statues of polarizing figures tied to America’s European founding come crashing down one after another, often with the support of liberal white Americans, the political project of those on the extremes — particularly white nationalists — is simultaneously jeopardized and emboldened.

On the surface, it seems that events are driving the U.S. in the opposite direction of white nationalist goals and that they will likely taste defeat. But, on the other hand, a structural collapse of American society that fractures it along ethnic lines is the prerequisite for their own dark vision of a society purified by the fires of racial violence.

“One of the things that white nationalists have always been interested in is imposing their own understanding of time: a narrative of what the past looked like and what the future should look like,” said Alexandra Minna Stern, the author of “Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination.” “In that sense, the coronavirus and the protests have destabilized time. History is being rewritten and the marginalized are being recognized.”

“For white nationalists, this is a crisis as well as an opportunity,” Stern said. “In their opinion, movements like Black Lives Matter are a form of identity politics par excellence. If it is succeeding and gaining currency, then in their view white racial consciousness might rise as well.”

This is not to equate the Black Lives Matter movement with white nationalists of course. But amid the roiling social changes we are now witnessing, many of them progressive, far-right identitarians also see an opportunity at hand.

IT SHOULD GO without saying that it is a choice to view things from an ethno-nationalist perspective. In the U.S., that choice is today not an obviously popular one. A large proportion — perhaps even the majority of the tens of millions who came out into the streets in the unprecedented protest movement triggered by the killing of George Floyd — were white Americans. It remains to be seen how long this support will last, but the spontaneous outrage over the murder of an unarmed Black man by a white police officer is noble and encouraging.

However, those white people who are ethno-nationalists — and there are many of them — will likely view these developments much more darkly: as a sign that they are on the verge of being displaced from their privileged historical role in American society, or, even worse, reduced to a marginalized minority. In a country with loose social bonds and easy access to weaponry, it doesn’t take many people thinking that way to do serious harm.

If you peer into the shadows, you can already see the contours of a threat that will be with us for years to come. In early May, a group of men, described by prosecutors as having “U.S. military experience,” were arrested and charged with trying to spark violence as part of a broader plot to cause the collapse of the federal government and trigger a civil war. A number of shootings and car-ramming attacks carried out during the recent protests should signal that there are people ready for their most extreme beliefs to reach praxis.

Armed Vigilantes Antagonizing Protesters Have Received a Warm Reception From Police

Even more ominously, for a state hollowed out by years of elite corruption, there are signs that law enforcement agencies and the U.S. military have been infiltrated by individuals adhering to far-right ideologies. If a serious crisis comes, history suggests that it will be people like this — with access to training and guns — whose defection to the side of the extremists would have the most dire implications.

At the same time, just as it is wrong — dangerous even — to promote essentialized racial categories that lump together huge numbers of diverse people, it would be a mistake to impute onto the far-right movement a unity that it does not possess. Not all of the various subgroups are willing to engage in violence nor do they all hold the same views on every issue. To the extent that the far right can be described as having a unified perspective, it is on the issues of race and immigration. On this count, the spread of the coronavirus and the minority-led protest movement in the U.S. are two sides of the same coin: both products of globalization, which is the one force that they are united in their desire to destroy.

We should expect the far right to continue waging this battle to undo globalization with whatever tools are at its disposal, legal and illegal, violent and nonviolent. Those of us who have to live with the reality of a complex, cosmopolitan world — including the tens of millions of Americans and Europeans of minority backgrounds whose very existence and identity is a product of that reality — must negotiate an appropriate response. The one thing we can’t do is fall into a trap of believing that this conflict doesn’t exist, or that it can be ignored.

“For those whose ultimate goal is a multipolar world where everyone is siloed and in their own place, recent events are seen as a rebuke against globalization,” said Benjamin Teitelbaum, an expert on the far right at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the author of a new book about former Trump guru Steve Bannon called “War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers.”

“If one takes the view that the primary expression of decadence in our age is cosmopolitanism,” said Teitelbaum, “the only way to survive that age is through a militant anti-cosmopolitanism.”

===

720 rww

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/youtube-%e2%80%8bbans-six-big-white-nationalist-channels/

YouTube Bans Six Big White Nationalist Channels

cdv

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/matrix-4-writer-breaks-down-the-clash-between-trumps-right-wing-revolution-and-the-democrats-wishful-thinking/

Matrix 4’ writer breaks down the clash between Trump’s right-wing revolution and the Democrats’ ‘wishful thinking’

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon June 3, 2020

The American people are in pain. There have been days of protest and civil unrest in many American cities following the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by the Minneapolis Police Department on Memorial Day.

This article was originally published at Salon

These convulsions in the American body politic are not just the result of one more murder of an unarmed, surrendered black man by a white cop, televised before the world like a New Age lynching. America’s problems are vast.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 108,000 people in the United States, with the total number of cases now approaching 2 million. Donald Trump and his administration have responded with malevolent indifference. These deaths are but another entry in a social Darwinist ledger where the “useless eaters” are being left to die for “capitalism” — and in service to Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

Now the American people are struggling through a second Great Depression, in which tens of millions cannot pay their rents or mortgages, or feed their families. Republicans have only offered a pittance for ordinary people amid this global economic disaster — a onetime payment of $1,200 — while giving big corporations and the richest citizens trillions of dollars of the American people’s money.

Overall, there is a sense that something is deeply wrong in this country and this society, which elevated a racial authoritarian demagogue and avatar of corruption to the presidency. Many Americans feel ashamed by how their country now appears before the world. There is great potential for positive change in America, but to this point no great hero or leader has emerged. That vacuum is what makes Trump’s power so great. Even though he lacks a great mass movement after the model of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, he commands cult-like followers who will carry out his every wish.

Trump is an authoritarian and neofascist, who only knows how to destroy and not create. He is not a unifier but a divider. Like other leaders of that ilk, Trump uses violence, chaos and pain as a primary means of expanding and securing power.

For Trump and the Republican Party, America’s pain is a target of opportunity for their gangster capitalist agenda.

Trump has used “stochastic terrorism” to encourage violent threats by his followers and enforcers against prominent Democrats like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump has also targeted nonwhite people, Muslims, immigrants and “liberals” in general with violent threats.

Trump has made reference to “Second Amendment solutions” as a way of inspiring right-wing militias and other paramilitaries to attack his perceived enemies. As seen with his recent declaration of “MAGA Night,” Trump would like to mobilizes white supremacists and other right-wing terrorists as his street hooligan enforcers.

Trump has urged his armed followers to threaten or perhaps overturn the governments of Democratic-led states and cities if they do not bow to his will by ending public health measures designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. To some extent, they have been successful: The Michigan state legislature was recently forced into recess by such threats of violence.

This week, Trump has threatened to invoke a 200-year-old law called the Insurrection Act to crush the protests and civil unrest which has burst forth in response to the killing of George Floyd. This is one more step in Trump’s effort to create an autocratic pseudo-democracy where he rules indefinitely. Martial law would be the most efficient way for Donald Trump to use a “state of emergency” — his personal Reichstag-fire moment — as a way to end America’s constitutional democracy and the rule of law.

Donald Trump has his knee on the throat of American democracy, just as surely as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had his on the throat of George Floyd.

In a recent article for the Intercept, Bosnian-born novelist Aleksandar Hemon — also the co-writer of the forthcoming “Matrix” sequel — warns that the United States is careening towards ethnic violence, civil war and self-destruction under Donald Trump. The “most important and troubling symptom,” he writes, is the rising atmosphere of conflict “meant to culminate in transformative, cathartic violence; this marks the beginning of collective self-actualization.” Hemon continues:

As we bear witness to armed white American militias storming or protesting outside government institutions, it is clear that the chaos and tragedy of Covid-19 are being used by Trump and the GOP to enhance the conflict and accelerate the birth of a new, greater America. At the heart of every nationalist mythology is some kind of a rebirth, usually bloody and requiring sacrifices, preferably of the weak and the doubtful. …

For many of my fellow ex-Yugoslavs, it was instantly clear that once the GOP and Trump committed to conflict and destruction, they could never afford to quit, for that would constitute a tactical error leading to an irreversible defeat. They now have no choice but to follow their trajectory to its logical extreme, which must be victory and rebirth at all cost. They will kill if they have to, or at least let Covid-19 do it.

When armed Trumpists pretend to be a happening of good people who demand the end of the lockdown, anti-fascist ex-Yugoslavs don’t necessarily see an American version of murderous Serbian paramilitaries. What we see with heart-clenching clarity is that the familiar nationalist strategy of perpetually inciting conflict is advancing along a predictable trajectory.

In our recent conversation, Hemon warned that Donald Trump and the far right are engaged in revolutionary politics where compromise is not possible because they are preparing for armed conflict, while Joe Biden and the Democrats are only worried about the normative strategy and tactics of electoral democracy. Hemon also described Trump as leading a death cult organized around white supremacy and the related existential insecurities of the white men who are attracted to such politics. Like other death cults, Trump’s supporters are willing to kill and die in his name, believing it will lead to personal rebirth and glory.

Hemon also shared details on a proposed project he developed with Lana Wachowski and David Mitchell in 2017, about a United States ruined by Trump-like demagogues, civil war, environmental disasters and — believe it or not — a pandemic. As usual, our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So many people are in a state of terror and fear right now. From my perspective they should have been afraid at least four years ago in response to Trump. Why were so many people in denial about the dire dangers of Donald Trump and what he represents? Why are they so late in realizing the reality of the situation? It was all so obvious.

The fight is not over. This moment with Trump, the other members of the global right-wing and the virus is going to have consequences across many areas of our lives. We are struggling just to stay alive right now. There are going to be severe consequences from all the forces coming together that no one can quite predict.

The virus allows Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians to accelerate a total reconfiguration of their respective societies. Such leaders are not fighting the virus so much as they are fighting to radically change society to serve their far-right agenda. That goal and agenda is not always visible to many people.

Donald Trump keeps saying that he is a “war president.” That claim is being misinterpreted by most observers in the mainstream news media. What Trump really means is that he is an authoritarian and the rule of law does not apply to him. Trump is able to hide his true intent because he floods the zone with chaos, distractions and lies. In most important ways, Donald Trump is open about his plans.

This is part of a strategy. The global right and its leaders want to make everything meaningless. They want people to “fish in murky waters,” as the saying goes back in my home of Yugoslavia. One headline by itself would stand out and the public would understand the danger. People either understand the entirety and wholeness of this dangerous situation or they choose not to. If the public cannot see the big picture, they will also not be able to see how the smaller parts fit together as a whole. It all seems like one isolated series of events after another. For those who cannot see the big picture, it is a maelstrom and they lack perspective to make sense of it all.

Another element of Trump’s authoritarianism — and this is why the mainstream media is still unable to effectively grapple with this crisis — are the threats against reporters and journalists, where he calls them “fake news” and “human scum”. Journalists have also been attacked and killed in America under Trump.

There is an inability to grasp the magnitude of the catastrophe. Before the war in Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia, the catastrophe of war was so huge that people were too fearful to imagine what was happening because that would have meant — as turned out to be the case — that their entire way of life, the very structure of life, would be destroyed. If the people in Bosnia or the former Yugoslavia were then to have acknowledged or understood the magnitude of the catastrophe it would have meant making choices about changing their lives. This would have helped them to keep their agency. But too many of them waited, therefore losing their agency, and the catastrophe of the civil war and ethnic cleansing made the decision for them.//AGW

This is a frightening proposition to a lot of people. That meant, in case of their war, they would have to get up and leave their lives and not take much for themselves. And so one finds oneself in a situation where you see that there is a catastrophe unfolding and say, “But what am I going to do now?”

Difficult decisions must be made. And it’s terrible. It is a horrible proposition. People start negotiating with reality to avoid the catastrophe and the real possibility of death. In this country at present that looks like, “Maybe it’s not that bad? Maybe Biden is going to fix it? Maybe somehow Trump is going to turn presidential all of a sudden? Maybe the Republicans actually do love this country? Maybe I should wait to see what happens, and decide in a month?”

With Trumpism the news media has to change the entire way in which they interpret and engage with reality. The American news media, for the most part, cannot do it. They cannot make that pivot. The rules are different with an authoritarian such as Donald Trump.

At the same time, the advantage of Trump and his movement is that they do not care about reality or the truth. They are a death cult. They are not afraid to die. The Trumpists and Republicans are excited and motivated by the possibility of remaking reality itself, because they are in revolutionary mode. The Democrats and everyone else are, by comparison, trying to find a magical way to retain the status quo. Which, even if the status quo was somehow good enough, is now impossible to salvage. The American right’s, and the global right’s, revolutionary process is far too advanced at this point.

What guidance would you give the average person about maintaining perspective and reorienting themselves to this new reality?

People are struggling with the logistics of life, just staying on the surface and not drowning. Given the circumstances with the economy and the state of the world I would not blame anyone for that. But there has been this longstanding notion that America is a stable society. It is a country with its own deep tradition of checks and balances. In America, however deep the social injustice and inequality, the future was something that could be reasonably anticipated. Even if things were bad, there was a sense of continuity and predictability.

But what is happening now with COVID is that people in the United States simply do not know what is going to happen in a month. The future has become unpredictable. In America, people are now negotiating reality. Having to figure out reality and what is true or not on a basic level is a shocking change for many people in America and some other parts of the world. People are now thinking of the “future” in terms of months and not three or 10 or 30 years in the future. With this disruption in even being able to plan for the future, it takes agency away and gives it to other people and individuals. Someone else is now deciding your fate. Meanwhile, the people on the right have guns and think that they are some type of liberation force. They think they are the ones with the agency and freedom. Being on the left puts you in a position of not having agency in the United States at present.

One person’s dystopia is another person’s utopia. The global right wing has purpose. They have got the guns. They are highly ideological and committed. There is a core group of the global right-wing extremists who are committed to “accelerationism,” destroying society in order to create their own new world.

The right wing is in revolutionary mode because part of every nationalist movement or discourse is a myth of some kind of sacrifice or rebirth in blood and sacrifice. That logic justifies all of their wars and mass killing. Donald Trump has no ideology or understanding of political theory and philosophy. But Trump does have an instinctive understanding of nationalism.

He just said the other day, “Our doctors are at war.” It’s a war that is part of the rebirth of the nation.

Donald Trump and the right wing are in revolutionary mode, but there are so many observers who believe that they are just stupid and insane. These outsiders do not really understand what is happening. They dismiss what the right wing is doing as some type of farce or joke when it is deadly serious.

Revolutionary political parties do not need many supporters or members to succeed. Obsessing over how many people do or do not support Donald Trump is an error. Numbers are not the absolute measure of his strength. The true measure of Trump’s strength is how many people are willing to die for him. How many people in America and Europe are willing to die for a leftist cause? Donald Trump has stormtroopers. We don’t have stormtroopers. It is that simple. The Democrats are so afraid of anyone who even appears that they might just be a tiny bit radical. Even something like national health care is treated as too radical. The Democrats are not preparing for a fight; they’re preparing for a vote. Those are not the same things. It is not enough. And it is probably useless in the long run, when the Democrats are up against a revolutionary right-wing movement.

The other part of the equation is the people who are willing to kill for Donald Trump and his movement. Moreover, Trump’s supporters have been killing their “enemies” here in the United States through mass shootings and other violence. Those murders, assaults and other violence have been a feature of Trump’s regime. Unfortunately, the mainstream news media has not been consistently reporting on it because such outcomes are now normalized.

A large number of people who are willing to die for Donald Trump are also willing to kill for him. These Trump supporters are willing to sacrifice their previous morality and to be reborn through an act of blood and sacrifice in service to him. The military is very important here. During the wars in the former Yugoslavia it came down to who controlled the military. In the United States, people on the left are saying, “Well, if it really gets that bad, the military will intervene and save us.” We are at a point where people on the left in the United States are hoping for military intervention — as though that’s a good thing. What will the United States military do? I don’t know.

The Democrats really believe they can just vote Trump out of office. They are not properly organizing for all possibilities and in response to what the right wing is doing.

We hope that Biden will get elected and then somehow we’ll return to some status quo from before and pre-Trump democracy will be restored in some way. That’s just wishful thinking. Totally wishful thinking. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and the right wing and the Republicans are preparing for a showdown.

Trump and the broader right are now saying that people should sacrifice themselves for “the economy” by dying from the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, those who should die are the elderly and others who are vulnerable to the disease. This is social Darwinism. It is fascistic. That logic should be abhorrent but there has been little outrage from the American people.

I don’t know what could constitute enough outrage and opposition. There has to be change at the end. Otherwise it is just yelling at the wind. Moreover, what is needed now to counter Trump and his movement is more than just objections — it must be a vision and an alternative plan. There must also be a movement that is created out of that rage and anger in order to follow through on the necessary work and struggle.

Being angry is a precondition, I suppose, for some kind of radical or at least committed action. But it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. There is plenty of outrage. What is lacking is a framework for what to do with that outrage. Democrats are afraid of that outrage. Whatever happens with Trump and the 2020 election, and afterwards, the United States is going to be radically different than before. The question becomes, who wins? Trump and the revolutionary right wing, or the left and the Democrats?

Suppose Joe Biden and the Democrats win. Who in their sane mind thinks that will lead to a radical correction to the country? Who really believes that Donald Trump and his enforcers are just going to drop their weapons and go home? That is not going to happen. The United States is heading towards a conflict. This conflict cannot be resolved politically. I believe that it may have to be resolved extra-politically.

I initially accepted the fact that some people voted for Trump in 2016 because they are straight-ticket Republican voters. I think that is a horrible decision, but I can understand it on a certain level. But to continue to support Trump at present given the authoritarianism, corruption, white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction and malevolent negligence is to be complicit. Trump’s supporters are now active agents of fascism. I have suggested in my writing and interviews that people of conscience and other good people should not interact in any way with Trump supporters, even if they are members of the family. How have you made such decisions?

I agree. Trump’s supporters are participating in a project that directly impacts my life, my family and the people I love in a very negative and dangerous way. We are past the point of understanding with Trump and his supporters. That moment was gone a long time ago. Any intelligent, active citizen understands the consequences of their actions. The whole idea that somehow these white people voted for Donald Trump while not meaning to be racist is just nonsense. If they somehow did not know that Donald Trump is a racist, then it is their responsibility to find out. Now it is evident because Trump is a rabid white supremacist who is aligned with the worst racist elements in the country. To support Donald Trump is to be complicit with white supremacy. It is to actively support a white supremacist project.

I do not talk to Donald Trump’s supporters. They are my enemies. I want them to go away and not be anywhere near me. I do not want to “unite” with such people in this country. I do not care if they live in the same country as me. Donald Trump’s supporters are my enemies and I want them gone from my life. And that’s a hard thing to say. Countries break up over such things. This is imaginable in this country now. And what is imaginable is possible.

You have written about the ethnic conflict and civil war in Yugoslavia and your fears of how such a thing is now on the horizon in the United States. How are people — especially young men — seduced and radicalized into committing such acts of violence?

It is empowering. It flatters their masculine power. Nationalism and fascism are always masculine political projects. This is why misogyny is always an aspect of any kind of nationalism. Fascism and nationalism also empowers old men. And in the context of white male supremacy, the advances of people of color and women were imagined as somehow disempowering white men. These white men became disgruntled. They lost jobs. But the problem with that white male anger is that it ignores that black and brown people lost their jobs too from deindustrialization, neoliberalism, globalization and related forces. The anger and sense of loss and feeling that they do not have agency was compensated for by uniting behind Donald Trump.

I always took Trump seriously. He was always capable of reaching this point. It’s not that he’s exceptional. It is rather that the conditions were right for Trump to win the presidency because he embodies this vulgar, blatant misogyny, sexism and arrogance. His psychopathic characteristics exactly match the fantasies of fascism.

There is another aspect of Donald Trump’s popularity among his followers. There is something terribly reassuring to a certain type of person that one can be stupid and lazy and so openly unpleasant and still become president of the United States. By comparison Barack Obama had to be a saint. He had to be perfect, Harvard-educated and wise. But Trump’s white supporters hated him intensely. Trump restores a certain type of faith in white supremacy for his supporters because someone as stupid and bad and lazy and evil as Trump can become president of the United States. Trump’s supporters now know that the worst of them can still be president. That must be terribly reassuring.

Donald Trump’s narcissism and other mental pathologies exactly match the collective pathology of white nationalists. Trump is a natural-born white supremacist because in any other context he is an idiot and a psychopath.

You are one of the co-writers of “The Matrix 4.” The Age of Trump, and now this pandemic and associated economic collapse is a surreal living nightmare. Could you have sat down and made up such a story? Would it even be believable?

With the same writers I worked with on “The Matrix 4,” we developed a spec script in December of 2017. The premise of the project was the disintegration of the United States and what happened afterward, as seen through the lives of several characters over 25 or so years of time in the story. Anything imaginable is possible. In our story there was a pandemic, environmental collapse, random violence, militias and rogue governors of different states.

I am sure people are writing science fiction stories based in this current moment, and his gets us back to politics in this moment and the power of imagination. I believe that many people cannot accept what is happening and are in denial because they lack imagination. They cannot make sense of the headlines because their minds eliminate so many possibilities about what is happening in the world right now — and what will happen in the future.

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As White Supremacists Try to Remake History, Scholars Seek to Preserve the Record.

Full Text AvailableNews

By: Pettit, Emma. Chronicle of Higher Education. 8/20/2019, Vol. 65 Issue 39, pN.PAG-N.PAG. 1p.

Subjects: WHITE supremacy movements -- United States; MASS shootings; RACISM; RADICALISM; IMMIGRANTS -- United States; UNITED States; TRUMP, Donald, 1946-

===

520 she's baaaaccccccckkkk.

https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmax-hired-white-nationalist-sympathizer-michelle-malkin

conservative media outlet Newsmax TV announced on May 21 that it was hiring far-right blogger and white nationalist sympathizer Michelle Malkin.

Malkin has a long history of promoting racist and anti-Semitic claims and conspiracy theories. For instance:

Malkin has advocated for racial profiling and defended the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
A former Fox contributor, Malkin said on Fox & Friendsthat allowing Muslims into Western societies would be “suicide.”
Malkin said on Fox News that migrant caravans traveling toward the U.S. from Central America were “coordinated globally” by “menaces inside and outside of our country.”
Malkin appeared onFox & Friends promoting the same anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that motivated the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. The attack resulted in the deaths of 11 people. ...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-white-supremacists-take-encouragement-from-government-leaders/

~ stay

https://mobile.twitter.com/jysexton?lang=en

Jared Yates Sexton

@JYSexton

Hoosier, Political Analyst, Assoc Prof, Prev in NYT, TNR, AMERICAN RULE: HOW A NATION CONQUERED THE WORLD BUT FAILED ITS PEOPLE 9/15

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/nick-fuentes-tries-tiktok-as-new-outlet-to-spread-white-nationalist-content-immediately-gets-banned/

DOCTOROW / 8:19 AM FRI, JAN 24, 2020

The Guardian has outed the true identity of the mysterious founder of the Base, a white nationalist terror group

The Base is a white nationalist terror group that made the news when three of its members were arrested and accused of planning to start a civil war at this week's gun rally in Virginia by murdering cops and opening fire on the pro-gun protesters. Read the rest

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-radical-rights-terrorist-faction-has-long-followed-the-anti-communist-blueprint-from-the-1960s

no lnx many

The radical right’s terrorist faction has long followed the ‘anti-Communist’ blueprint from the 1960s

Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos February 3, 2020

Far-right terrorist gangs are all in the news these days, thanks to the recent arrests of members of The Base for planning to cause violence at the Richmond, Virginia, gun rally of Jan. 20, as well as to murder a couple believed to be antifascists in Georgia. But this is hardly the first such operation in the United States.

Their history, in fact, offers some real-life context about the nature of more recent iterations, including Atomwaffen Division and the Rise Above Movement, as well as The Base, not to mention Friday’s sentencing of would-be domestic terrorist Christopher Hasson. Gather ‘round, then, for the saga of Robert DePugh and the Minutemen—probably the progenitor of what we would now call a modern-day, far-right militant terrorist group. And like all of them, the Minutemen wrapped themselves in the flag.

First, let’s be clear: We’re not talking about those Minutemen—the border vigilantes who prowled the Mexico border during the first decade of the 2000s. I am talking about an even earlier iteration of a right-wing action/terror organization supposedly inspired by the Revolutionary War heroes, concocted by a vitamin salesman in the late 1950s.

Robert Bolivar DePugh was a Missouri man, born in 1923, who gained some wealth through a veterinary drug firm called BioLabs, which specialized in a vitamin for dogs that promised to increase their lifespans. In the mid-1950s he also began producing a malt-flavored, ultra-compact storage food designed for human consumption, called Minuteman Survival Tabs. You can still find a version of these tabs in stores today....

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neo-nazis-virginia-gun-rally_n_5e221a24c5b63211761391ad

no lnx pix vid

6 Suspected Neo-Nazis Have Now Been Arrested In Lead-Up To Virginia Gun Rally

The men are all alleged members of The Base, a white supremacist group that hopes to start a race war.

By Sebastian Murdock

George Bush Praises ImmigrationGeorge Bush Praises Immigration

Six neo-Nazis have been arrested just days before a gun rally in Virginia is expected to draw thousands, including far-right extremists.

Three Georgia men were arrested Friday on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and participating in a criminal street gang as members of The Base, a white supremacist group that seeks to start a race war. The suspects are Luke Austin, Michael Helterbrand and Jacob Kaderli, The Associated Press reported.

The men are accused of seeking out antifascists to kill, and were planning to “overthrow the government and murder a Bartow County couple,” the Floyd County Police Department said in a statement.

Left to right: Luke Austin Lane, Jacob Kaderli and Michael Helterbrand are all suspected neo-Nazis who allegedly planned to t

FLOYD COUNTY POLICE DEPARTMENT]

Left to right: Luke Austin Lane, Jacob Kaderli and Michael Helterbrand are all suspected neo-Nazis who allegedly planned to target and kill antifascists.

Atlanta Antifascists, a group that works to confront and expose fascists throughout Georgia, told HuffPost the news of the arrests “underscores that organized white supremacists remain a threat to our communities.”

“Targeting people as members of our group has become a favorite pastime of violent white supremacists,” Atlanta Antifascists said. “Many of these people are not even connected to organized antifascism at all — they simply have become caught in the crosshairs. This is part of a concerted attempt by fascists to create a general attitude of terror and paranoia. We extend our solidarity to all members of the community targeted by white supremacy and fascism and encourage everyone to watch out for each other and keep each other safe.”

The arrests came a day after three other suspected neo-Nazis affiliated with The Base were arrested in Maryland. One of the men, Patrik Mathews, fled Canada earlier last year after his white supremacy ties were discovered. A former reservist in the Canadian Army, Mathews trained as a combat engineer and is an explosives expert.

Patrik Mathews fled Canada after his white supremacy ties were discovered.

RCMP

Patrik Mathews fled Canada after his white supremacy ties were discovered.]

Authorities said Mathews is a top recruiter for the terrorist group and was allegedly planning to start violence at Monday’s gun rally in Virginia along with accomplices Brian Lemley and William Bilbrough IV. Police found guns and more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition during the arrests.

Monday’s rally in Richmond is expected to draw thousands of people who oppose recent gun control bills introduced in the state legislature, including one that would require universal background checks for firearm purchase and another that would limit people from buying more than one handgun per month.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) declared a temporary state of emergency on Wednesday banning all guns from the state Capitol grounds amid threats of violence from far-right extremists.

“We have received credible intelligence from our law enforcement agencies of threats of violence surrounding the demonstration planned for Monday, January 20,” Northam said in a tweet. “This includes extremist rhetoric similar to what has been seen before major incidents, such as Charlottesville in 2017.”

Organizers of the rally, anti-gun control group Virginia Citizens Defense League, falsely accused Democratic leaders of inviting violent groups to the rally following the temporary ban on guns.

“[Democrats] would love for it to degenerate to ‘violence, rioting, and insurrection’ in order to smear gun owners,” the group said in a statement. “Has the Democrat leadership actually invited violent groups to attend for the purpose of disrupting our peaceful assembly?”

Hours after the statement, three of the suspected neo-Nazis were arrested. The VCDL did not respond to a request for comment.

Professor of history explains why the myth of the first Thanksgiving is a prop for white nationalism — and needs to go

History News Network

Even today, the Thanksgiving myth is one of the few cameos Native people make in many schools’ curriculum.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-conservative-establishments-nightmare-is-only-just-beginning/

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The conservative establishment’s nightmare is only just beginning

Written by Matthew Sheffield / Washington Monthly November 22, 2019

Richard Viguerie, the conservative activist who invented direct-mail marketing, once said that “fear and anger are much stronger motivations than support for a cause.”

The Republican Party is now finding that out first-hand as it’s battling a white supremacist insurgency for the hearts and minds of Generation Z.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

The ranks of the “alternative right” political movement were decimated in the aftermath of the August 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Many of its top leaders faced arrest, lawsuits, or were banned from online fundraising and social media platforms.

But after two years in the political wilderness, white nationalist activists have managed to regroup thanks to a new effort to attack on the highly lucrative right-wing infotainment industry that has sprung up around conservative think tanks, Fox News, and talk radio.

Unlike the original alt-right, which was mostly driven by lone trolls collaborating ad hoc on social networks, the far-right resurgence is being led by a single figure:Nick Fuentes, a 21-year-old YouTube pundit who originally made a name for himself as a host on the Right Side Broadcasting Network. He was fired from that post in 2017 for saying it was “time to kill the globalists” at CNN for allegedly being unfair to President Donald Trump.

Since starting his own YouTube program (called “America First” after Trump’s slogan) shortly after his sacking, Fuentes has amassed a following that is just as dedicated and belligerent as the original alt-right via a re-calibrated message. Rather than using Hitler memes, Germanic sculptures, and mocking religion, Fuentes serves up a steady diet of Christian nationalism and hatred of immigrants, secular people, and Muslims.

Over the past several weeks, Fuentes and his fans—who call themselves “Nickers” and “Groypers” after a cartoon toad that serves as their mascot instead of Pepe the Frog—have been tapping into conservative Christian anxieties and melding them with concerns that President Donald Trump has failed to deliver on his campaign promises of mass deportations and a “big beautiful wall” on the Mexican border. Their preferred mechanism of attack has been to overwhelm question-and-answer sessions following the speeches of mainstream conservative figures.

These appearances are typically organized by groups like Turning Point USA, Young Americans for Freedom, and the College Republicans. Their purpose is to recruit young adults into the conservative movement. It’s not an easy task, however, as surveys increasingly indicate that socialism and pluralism have more appeal to students than unregulated capitalism and Christian nationalism.

Taking advantage of the fact that conservative college events are often sparsely attended, Groypers have easily mobbed the events—especially those of 25-year-old Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk—to ask questions designed to embarrass the speakers and question their fealty to the conservative cause. In addition to invoking biblical injunctions against homosexuality, the hecklers have questioned whether the Republican Party can have a long-term future absent a complete stop to legal immigration and some sort of deportation of existing immigrant citizens.

Their crowd manipulation tactics—which are very similar to practices taught for decades at the conservative Leadership Institute—have succeeded over the past several weeks at embarrassing Kirk, Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a Republican from Texas, and Christian nationalist commentator Matt Walsh. In response, event organizers have often curtailed audience participation.

For the most part, the national press ignored the protests and the burgeoning insurgency until the Groypers employed the same tactics at a Nov. 10 event where Donald Trump Jr. was touting his new book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.

Reports from the scene in Los Angeles indicated that the Groypers comprised about a third of the audience for the event and utterly dominated the proceedings. Even before the presidential son took the stage, Nickers began booing and jeering as an event staffer announced that Don Jr. and his girlfriend, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, would not be taking any questions after their remarks.

The taunts, which also included audience members laughing at inappropriate times in a manner similar to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker character and chants of “America First,” grew so loud that Don Jr. stopped speaking as he tried to figure out what was going on. Guilfoyle lashed out at the audience, claiming they were not making their parents proud and that they probably couldn’t get dates. Eventually, the couple and a silent Kirk exited the stage as the Fuentes fans kept booing.

Since then, the scene has repeated itself at several other events, particularly those of Kirk. He and many other conservative figures have been forced to answer inconvenient questions about various topics including past criticisms of President Trump, transgender rights, and immigration. More often than not, Kirk has faced overwhelming audience jeers and has struggled to respond.

It remains to be seen what the commander-in-chief, who is reportedly extremely sensitive to embarrassment, will think of all this but one thing is clear: the conservative establishment’s nightmare is just beginning.

Long before Trump came along, conservatives have had a complicated relationship with extremism, both encouraging and shunning it.

William F. Buckley, founder of National Review and the most prominent early conservative figure, began his political career denouncing Dwight Eisenhower and atheist professors at Yale. His magazine published several pieces defending Jim Crow and South African apartheid.

Over the years, he often told supporters that they should always support the “furthest right” candidate that they believed to be electable, setting up a perpetual cycle of GOP candidates who constantly assert that they, alone, are the “true conservatives” out to save the nation from Republicans in Name Only (RINOs).

In fairness, Buckley strenuously opposed the John Birch Society, a conspiracy group funded by Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch, which was highly popular among the conservative grassroots. And National Revieweventually relented and came out against segregation and apartheid.

Former president Ronald Reagan also had a decidedly mixed record on racial matters, spending decades opposing sanctions on South Africa for apartheid and the creation of a national holiday to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. but eventually taking liberals’ positions on the two matters. He was also recently revealed to have privately referred to African United Nations delegates as “monkeys” who were uncomfortable wearing shoes.

Conservatives were also more than willing to welcome Strom Thurmond, the one-time segregationist senator who broke from the Democratic Party as it began supporting civil rights for African-Americans. Young Americans for Freedom, the group that preceded today’s Young America’s Foundation, hailed Thurmond as a “Man of Courage” in 1964 before he broke with his racist positions.

Many conservatives also had no problem with George Wallace, the Alabama Governor who ran for president on segregationist platforms. Richard Viguerie—who still is raking in the GOP direct-mail money today—handled Wallace’s fund-raising in 1976.

In light of the many ways in which conservative leaders were willing to side with them on particular issues, white nationalists have sought to openly enter Republican politics for decades. Jared Taylor and his American Renaissance magazine were big promoters of Ron Paul’s presidential runs. As I’ve written previously, many alt-right activists were also strong Paul supporters before branching off to start their own movement. Former Klansman David Duke has repeatedly run as a GOP candidate in his native Louisiana but been rejected by party leaders.

Progressives have long accused Republican strategists of trying to communicate indirect messages of support to white racists through the party’s infamous “Southern Strategy” which succeeded at turning the South away from its decades of loyalty to the Democratic Party. Few GOP strategists have ever been transparent about these efforts, but one who discussed them honestly was Lee Atwater, the widely successful consultant who passed away in 1991.

Ten years before his death, while firmly ensconced within the Reagan White House, Atwater gave an anonymous interview (the audio recording was published posthumously) in which he stated definitively that Republicans used race to appeal to Southerners but did so in an effort to gradually wean them from bigotry in favor of small-government appeals.

According to Atwater, the idea only worked because whites favorable to segregation understood that cutting the government would disproportionately harm African-Americans.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*****, n*****, n*****,’ he told interviewer Alexander Lamis, a Case Western Reserve political scientist. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*****’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N*****, n*****.’”

More recently, numerous reports have exposed the role of the late Thomas Hofeller, a redistricting expert who worked for many Republican organizations over the years, in masterminding GOP state legislatures’ successful attempts to use race as the primary factor in congressional redistricting. Journalists have also exposed Hofeller’s covert advocacy for a new Census question about citizenship which he believed would suppress Hispanic responses and thereby harm Democrats.

The ascension of Donald Trump from wrestling sideshow to the heights of Republicanism has greatly increased the prominence and power of racists within the party. The 2015 launch of his presidential campaign with portrayals of most Mexicans as rapists and murderers electrified the white nationalists who had formerly supported Ron Paul’s quixotic efforts and they began flocking to the billionaire, producing hundreds of thousands of memes and trolling comments in his favor.

“White nationalists have always sought to inject their ideas into conservative politics, Fuentes is just the latest person to be doing it,” Howard Graves, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center told me. “What’s different now is that is that they feel emboldened by our commander-in-chief.”

Steve Bannon, who eventually became Trump’s campaign chairman, very carefully nurtured the online fascists. Referring to them as his “killing machine,” he threatened to use them as a force against any faction hoping to deny Trump the presidential nomination at a brokered convention. Bannon also boasted that he was fashioning Breitbart News into “the platform for the alt-right” as his editorial protégé Milo Yiannopoulos allowed racist activists to line-edit articles.

Once in office, Trump pandered to extremist supporters in numerous ways including his efforts to ban all Muslims from immigrating to the United States, break up families of unauthorized immigrants, and enact legislation exempting far-right Christians from any law they felt restricted their freedom to discriminate. Most infamously, Trump, acting on Bannon’s advice, repeatedly claimed that “very fine people” had attended the fascist-organized Unite the Right rally in support of Confederate memorials.

Recently, Stephen Miller, Trump’s top adviser on immigration was revealed to have regularly promoted white nationalist talking points to a Breitbart News reporter. He is one of a number of Trump staffers who have been revealed to have ties to racist groups.

The growing closeness between the extremist right and Republican elites during the Trump era and the recrudescence of white supremacism has prompted several prominent conservative figures to try to take active measures to block the incursion.

Fuentes himself became a target of Turning Point USA after students at Iowa State University invited him to give a speech under the TPUSA banner in March.The event attracted controversy and put Fuentes on the group’s radar permanently. Kirk’s organization further aroused the anger of Nickers in September after it cut ties with one of its social media advocates after she appeared at a private event with Fuentes.

Egged on by Fuentes’s insults and a pre-existing infiltration campaign of a small alt-right group called the American Identity Movement, far-right young men began crashing TPUSA head Charlie Kirk’s lavishly funded “Culture War” college tour events in early October and the Groyper rebellion was born.

As the campaign has gathered steam, Sebastian Gorka, the former Trump national security adviser who now hosts a daily radio program also called “America First” became the first prominent conservative outside of TPUSA to attack Fuentes as racist. Ben Shapiro, a talk radio host and co-founder of the conservative website Daily Wire, condemned Fuentes as a “garbage human being” during a lengthy speech to Stanford University students earlier this month.

But the denunciations have done little to curb the insurrection, in part because Republicans have spent 50 years building their entire political edifice around implicit appeals to white Christian identity, granting at least some built-in support to anyone claiming to stand up for far-right Christians.

This lesson was made crystal clear during the 2016 Republican presidential nomination contest when Donald Trump kept amassing support among conservative fundamentalists despite his utterly irreligious demeanor and the many denouncements he faced from religious activists who supported Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). None of that mattered, however, because Trump promised that if he became president, “Christianity will have power.”

“The Christian right has been remarkably effective at maintaining a market and culture of people who are fed hateful messages and that makes it almost inevitable that white nationalists would tap into that, especially during a time when many of those people feel like they are an embattled minority,” Graves, the researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center told me.

Fuentes, who identifies as a traditional Catholic and is partially of Hispanic descent, is perfectly able to wrap his arguments in the Christian supremacist argot that has become central to almost all Republican rhetoric. He’s also been careful to disclaim the label white nationalist even as he has conceded that it could accurately describe his views.

While many in the “Nicker Nation” are obviously racist, it’s unclear what percentage of the people who’ve been disrupting conservative speeches are fully onboard with a white supremacist agenda. In fact, several of the questioners who have challenged establishment Republicans appear to be black or Hispanic.

The idea that minority Republicans would want to support a white nationalist makes little sense until one realizes that Fuentes is fond of using coded language to hide messages intended only for racists, a practice frequently referred to within the alt-right as “hiding your power level.” (He has slipped up a several times, however, including going on a profane and anti-Semitic rant in August and once joking about racial segregation.)

As might be expected, Fuentes’s dog whistles are based on more up-to-date references than Atwater’s. Several of his fans were confused by them during the Nov. 5 broadcast of his “America First” show, when he used a coded reference to praise Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the racist Daily Stormer blog, a key figure in the original alt-right who has tried to re-brand himself from a neo-Nazi into a soldier for Christ.

But the sly reference, couched as a shout-out to Daily Wire podcast host Andrew Klavan, confused some of Fuentes’s viewers.

“I know that Andrew Klavan from Daily Wire has been very supportive,” Fuentes said in response to a viewer question. “And I appreciate that … I really do appreciate his support, I think he’s very funny, I love what he writes. He’s very funny, very talented writer, Andrew Klavan of Daily Wire. And I appreciate his support, I think it’s been very helpful. I think Andrew Klavan has been right about this country from the beginning. I think he’s been right about this—the things he’s been saying for the past two years, particularly about the right wing has been so true and we are vindicated together, Andrew Klavan from Daily Wire and me.”

Not everyone watching the show could hear the dog whistle, however.

“Why are you CRINGE shilling for Andrew fake Christian Klavan,” a commenter on Fuentes’s live stream wrote.

“Daily Wire? Isn’t that Ben S?” another wrote, referring to Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro.

Many of the viewers understood the reference, however, correctly pointing out that Fuentes was not actually praising Klavan.

“Are you people stupid? He’s obviously talking about Anglin but framing it as Klavan,” a third fan replied.

“People are soo dumb who actually thinks [sic] he’s talking about Andrew Klavan,” said another.

For his part, Anglin seems to have understood the reference. He responded to the praise on the Daily Stormer by posting a meme of two men bowing to each other.

Fuentes’s habit of mostly sticking to standard-issue conservative talking points and masking his more extreme messages—including one in which he joked about the Holocaust through a Cookie Monster metaphor—has also led several prominent conservative figures to lend him their support. Michelle Malkin, the Asian-American columnist and former Fox News commentator, has repeatedly praised Groypers and Fuentes specifically for advocating against immigration, arguing that endorsing some of their views does not mean endorsing all of them.

“Here’s my message to the new generation of America Firsters exposing the big lies of the anti-American open borders establishment and its controlled opposition operatives: If I was your mom, I’d be proud as hell,” she said during a Nov. 14 speech at UCLA. In her remarks, she also condemned Shapiro as “creepy” and “cringe” for calling Groypers losers just days earlier.

Alex Jones, the dietary supplement kingpin and radio host, has also expressed support for Fuentes, inviting him twice onto his InfoWars platform to attack Charlie Kirk. Cassandra Fairbanks, a popular social media personality and writer at the right-wing conspiracy site Gateway Pundit, has also tweeted in support of Malkin’s position that conservatives should stand up for Fuentes’s ability to speak, even if they don’t like some of his statements. Ali Alexander and Wayne Dupreee, black conservatives who have built a following among Trump fans, have agreed with this sentiment.

The conservative establishment’s attempts to fight back against the growth of white nationalism have also been weakened by the fact that many of its voters have come to realize that American conservatism as presently constituted is heading for electoral extinction. Exit poll data from 2018 indicates that white Americans were the only racial group in which a majority voted for Republicans, but only by a slim margin. Fifty-four percent of people of European descent said they voted for a GOP House candidate while 44 percent picked a Democratic one. Among Hispanics, 69 percent went Democratic as did 90 percent of African-Americans.

Numeric analysis suggests that it is Republicans’ anti-government views and practice of white Christian identity politics that are driving voters away. African-American were formerly a Republican voting bloc but that changed after conservatives took over the GOP in the 1960s and forced the party to oppose civil rights and back massive spending cuts. A similar process, much less remarked upon, has happened among Asian-Americans, most of whom consistently voted for Republicans until the 2000 election and George W. Bush’s decision to re-brand the GOP as the party for Christians.

As a demographic group, it is difficult to speak generally about Asian-Americans since they come from so many dissimilar countries. But the one generalization that can be made about the fastest-growing racial group is that today’s Asian-American population is significantly less Christian than in prior decades. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, 66 percent of Asian-Americans were Christians in 1990. By 2008, this number had declined to just 38 percent.

The decline of Christianity among Asian-Americans has had an impact on their voting habits. In the 2018 election, 77 percent voted for Democratic House candidates.

But even younger whites are turning away from the GOP. In the 2018 election, only 43 percent of European-Americans between 18 and 29 voted for a Republican House candidate. That’s a decline from the 47 percent who voted for Trump in 2016, and the 51 percent who voted Republican in 2012.

Instead of facing the uncomfortable reality that Americans don’t like their policies and presentation, most conservatives have simply ignored the party’s demographic dilemma, offering insulting platitudes to racial minorities while utterly ignoring the concerns of secular young whites.

“Here’s how we look into the future,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw replied when asked about the GOP’s long-term future by a Fuentes supporter at a Nov. 4 event. “We don’t lie to minorities and tell them that we’re going to solve all of their problems. We tell them that they are included in this country and that the only colors that matter in this country are the red, white, and blue—that identity politics has no place in this nation.”

While the Republican party itself issued an “autopsy report” after the 2012 election that indicated the party needed to do more to appeal to people who were not white, the document’s recommendations were utterly ignored by Trump in his 2016 campaign and ever since then.

With conservative elites unwilling to talk about modifying some of their unpopular policy positions, the resulting vacuum in the conservative discourse has been mostly filled by immigration opponents who have been arguing that the GOP must stop legal and illegal immigration or risk electoral apocalypse. It’s a partisan-oriented, proto-white supremacist argument that some of the right’s biggest stars have repeated many times.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham has been one of its biggest boosters. During her Nov. 6 program she blamed “foreign-born” people for enabling Democrats to take control of Virginia’s state government. Last August, she said that “the America we know and love doesn’t exist any more” thanks to “demographic changes” brought on by legal and illegal immigration.

Her colleague Tucker Carlson has also repeatedly pushed the same line. In December 2017, he claimed that Democrats were using a “flood of illegals” to force a “demographic replacement” which would bring them new voters. In July 2018, he asserted that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country.” This past April, Carlson warned Democrats were trying to “change this country completely and forever” through immigration.

The two Fox News stars’ repeated statements about immigration and the GOP’s future are eerily similar to ones made by Fuentes. During his November 17 show, he called legal immigration a “critical threat to the Republican party” that will “make us unable to win a national election ever again.” This past August, Fuentes argued that both parties were seeking a “systematic replacement of the people that constitute the country.”

Besides sounding like two of Fox News’s most popular prime-time hosts, Fuentes also has similarities to some of his most vociferous critics in the conservative establishment.

Sebastian Gorka, the former Trump aide and current radio host who first condemned Fuentes, has his own history of accusations of fascist sympathies. Like Fuentes, Gorka has also called for executing people he believes have betrayed America.

Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, another one of Fuentes’s critics, has also made comments very similar to the embattled YouTube star.

While he currently argues that Republicans should not care about increasing non-white immigration levels and slams Fuentes supporters for saying otherwise, Shapiro had a very different stance in a 2014 video in which he argued that granting citizenship to undocumented immigrants was “absolute lunacy” that would doom the GOP because Hispanics “lean left on big government.” Three years later, he argued that Stephen Miller, the Trump aide who spread white nationalist material at Breitbart while Shapiro worked there, “knows what he’s talking about on immigration.”

In some cases, Shapiro’s statements appear to be even more radical than Fuentes’s expressions.

In 2014, he did an interview with a white nationalist podcast in which he argued that Jewish media executives were trying to wage a “war on Christianity.” During the conversation—which was bundled alongside a promotion for a separate interview with white nationalist academic Kevin MacDonald—Shapiro repeated several anti-Semitic tropes but directed them only at secular or “leftist” Jewish people.

“There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood who feel the obligation—they have a perverse leftist view of history pushed by the Soviet Union that what really destroyed Europe was Christianity. It was not fascism, it was not communism, it was not leftism, it was Christianity,” he told host Lana Lokteff. “And therefore, the cure for intolerance is to bash the hell out of Christianity.”

“There certainly is a war on Christianity, it’s coming from some people who are secular Jews, it’s coming from a lot of leftists,” he continued. “Most Jews in America don’t care about Judaism.”

Ironically, Red Ice Creations, company which produced the show, is the former employer of Patrick Casey, the leader of the American Identity Movement which has been the boots-on-the-ground in the Groyper insurgency.

In the same broadcast, Shapiro also warned that entertainment studios seeking to condemn racism and sexism and include positive minority characters in their products are actually engaging in an insidious plot to “pervert” Americans’ minds as part of a “very subtle war on white males in our society.”

“What they want is they want to destroy the foundations of American society,” Shapiro said, speaking of media executives. “There’s no question that this is what they want. I mean this has been the case for the left since the 1960s.”

Shapiro has also endorsed ethnic cleansing in Israel of Muslims and Christians, writing in 2003 that forcibly removing Palestinians elsewhere is “an ugly solution, but it is the only solution” in the Middle East. Fuentes does not seem to have ever called for non-violent removal of Americans who are not white but Richard Spencer, one of the alt-right’s first figureheads, has. In the years since, however, Shapiro seems to have turned against the idea of ethnic cleansing.

The Daily Wire did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this piece

While most conservative pundits and activists appear blissfully unaware that their beliefs are generally unpopular, right-wing election consultants have long struggled to overcome this problem in their efforts to obtain winning electoral coalitions. Yet, rather than moderating their positions to appeal to centrists who disagree with conservative ideas on economics, religion, and social policy, they have opted instead to appeal to white religious fundamentalists who are anxious about a country that’s become more educated, secular, and tolerant since the 1960s.

Murray Rothbard, one of the most influential figures in early libertarianism who was also heavily involved in GOP politics, described the concept in a shocking and prescient 1992 essay that touted David Duke and Joe McCarthy as the exemplars of an “outreach to the rednecks” strategy that would build a coalition of racist fundamentalists, business leaders, and anti-government ideologues under a platform of “America First.” Donald Trump, who employed McCarthy’s lawyer and repeatedly refused to disavow Duke, only slightly updated the playbook for 2016.

Expanding the Republican political tent to protect and include extremists was profitable for the GOP in the short-term. Among other things, conservatives’ effective use of religion and race as distractions from unpopular economic policies has enabled them to keep the United States as the only wealthy country in the world without universal health-care for decades.

But the conservative coalition’s days are numbered. In the last five presidential elections, the GOP has won the presidential popular vote only once. The white Christian identity politics which Republicans have long offered as an emotional inducement to voters is of no value to the majority of Americans who now want religion out of politics. Young people, meanwhile, are more interested in voting for democratic socialism than worshiping capitalists with Ayn Rand.

Despite its advocates’ claims of believing in “timeless principles,” American conservatism is actually a historical anomaly, one made possible by its host country’s geopolitical struggle with the atheistic and communistic Soviet Union. As that struggle fades into the mists of time, so do Republicans’ electoral victories.

The prudent, and indeed the conservative, approach would be to refashion American conservatism into something decent—a Republican Party that would promote efficiency while expanding the social safety net to support families, protect workers from exploitation, reduce immigration by improving life in other countries, and reject religious and racial bigotry while also making some space for people with traditionalist religious views.

In the face of overwhelming evidence that Americans want something different than what they’ve been offering, however, the powers-that-be on the right have resorted to gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement to forestall the inevitable.

But now, in addition to facing pressure from the center and the left, conservative elites are now feeling the heat from angry white Christians who have been promised everything for 50 years while receiving very little in return. Nick Fuentes and the Groypers may seem like a social media sideshow now, but in truth, they are only the beginning of a series of troubles that will destroy the Republican Party from within even as it’s caught within a demographic death spiral.

While the president’s consistent verbal appeals to Christian and white racial grievances was enough to get him the far-right’s loyalty in 2016, the serial humiliations of Donald Trump Jr., TPUSA, and their allies demonstrate that the resurgent alt-right wants more and that conservatives’ disingenuous attempts to portray themselves as free speech absolutists can easily be used against them. David French, a conservative writer and activist who has often been targeted by the alt-right, almost exactly described a year ago what the Groypers are doing today:

“Hatred for political correctness has yielded an unhealthy fascination with and admiration for pure defiance. Young voices pride themselves on fearlessness and place attitude over thought in their words and deeds. They troll online and at school to ‘trigger the libs,’ and nothing triggers the libs more than defiance on matters of race. … If the ethos of the defiant Right is never, ever to accede to either a leftist or (what is, arguably, more hated) an ‘establishment’ or ‘elite’ conservative critique, then it’s easy to see how bigots can flourish.”

Fuentes has echoed this sentiment in his own way repeatedly, including during the same November 5 episode in which he endorsed a neo-Nazi. In the segment, he vowed to continue embarrassing the conservative establishment, regardless of the impact on Republicans’ 2020 chances.

“We’re not asking for anything that is not just and owed to us,” he said. “Unless and until Charlie Kirk and these others are willing to give us what we deserve, which is a seat at the table in Conservative Inc. or the conservative movement or whatever, they allow us to spread our message in the same marketplace of ideas that they do, then this will continue. And if it’s a liability then so be it.”

Perhaps links can serve to substantiate this. Who faced arrest, who was banned from online fundraising, and who was booted off social media platforms?

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/they-are-racist-and-some-of-them-have-guns-inside-one-white-supremacist-group-hiding-in-plain-sight/

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They are racist — and some of them have guns: Inside one white supremacist group hiding in plain sight

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1079286779 CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA - August 12, 2017: Members of a white supremacist group at a white nationalist rally that turned violent resulting in one death and multiple injuries.

Written by ProPublica November 9, 2019

In the hours after the slaughter in El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 3, a final toll emerged: 22 dead, most of them Latinos, some Mexican nationals. A portrait of the gunman accused of killing them soon took shape: a 21-year-old from a suburb of Dallas who had been radicalized as a white supremacist online and who saw immigrants as a threat to the future of white America.

While much of the country reacted with a weary sense of sorrow and outrage, word of the mass killing was processed differently by members of Patriot Front, one of the more prominent white supremacist groups in the U.S.

In secret chat forums, some Patriot Front members embraced the spirit of the anti-immigrant manifesto left behind by the accused gunman. Others floated false conspiracy theories: the CIA was behind the murders; the accused killer was actually Jewish. Still other members cautioned that the group had its own “loose cannons” to worry about. It would be a bad look if the next mass murderer was one of their own.

But there was little, if any, regret over the loss of life.

“It shouldn’t be hard to believe that the group facing the harshest oppression from our ruling elite are producing shooters,” one Patriot Front member wrote. “White men are being slowly destroyed in a way calculated to produce resentment and a sense of helplessness. Of course, some of them decide to lash out.”

Several Patriot Front members alerted others to the need to be careful, for the killings in El Paso would likely make the group a target of the FBI.

“Watch your backs out there,” one wrote.

Patriot Front was formed in the aftermath of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. While many on America’s far-right cheered the rally, its violence struck others as a public-relations debacle for the white nationalist brand that was sure to attract greater oversight by law enforcement.

Patriot Front aspired to help chart a new way forward: spread propaganda espousing its version of a nascent American fascism; quietly recruit new members worried about a nation overrun by immigrants and a world controlled by Jews; avoid talking about guns or violence online, but engage in a mix of vandalism and intimidation to foster anxiety; wear masks in public and communicate secretly.

“The organization is not about its members,” the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, once wrote to its members in the secret chats. “It is about its goals. Each person behind the mask is just another awoken member of the nation, who could be anyone who’s had enough.”

ProPublica spent several months examining the makeup and operations of Patriot Front, which records suggest numbers about 300 members.

While the group is careful not to talk about guns online, two members in the last year have been arrested with arsenals of illegally owned high-powered rifles and other weapons. While many of the group’s propaganda “actions” are legal exercises of free speech, its members have been arrested in Boston and Denver in recent months for acts of vandalism. In Boston, three members engaged in a nighttime propaganda effort last winter were arrested on suspicion of weapons possession and assaulting a police officer. What the group touts as political protests have felt to those targeted like acts of menace, as was the case in San Antonio, Texas, last year when Patriot Front members filmed themselves trashing an encampment of immigration activists.

One person whose establishment was targeted by Patriot Front in recent months spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing the group’s return.

“Ordinarily would you call the police if somebody put a big sticker on your door? No,” the person said. “However, once you find out what this is all about, and who is involved, and what they are promoting? Then, yeah, now we are in hate speech space.”

To the Southern Poverty Law Center, Patriot Front is a white hate group and a genuine criminal threat. To some of the more avowedly violent neo-Nazi groups in the U.S., Patriot Front is a laughable collection of clowns and cowards, content to chat online and put up stickers while a race war awaits.

But for law enforcement, gauging how serious a threat Patriot Front might pose is difficult. Patriot Front shares qualities both with groups engaged in real domestic terrorism and with fringe political groups.

Asked about the group, the FBI issued a statement that reflected these complexities and the limitations they place on police agencies.

“When it comes to domestic terrorism, our investigations focus solely on the criminal activity of individuals — regardless of group membership — that appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce the civilian population or influence the policy of the government by intimidation or coercion. We would encourage you to keep in mind that membership in groups which espouse domestic extremist ideology is not illegal in and of itself — no matter how offensive their views might be to the majority of society.”

Rousseau, a Boy Scout and high school journalist before he founded Patriot Front, has much the same profile as the accused gunman in El Paso, Patrick Crusius: both grew up in middle-class suburbs of Dallas — Crusius in Allen, Rousseau 35 miles away in Grapevine; both were seen as unremarkable teenagers before being inculcated in their racist ideology online; both talk of a desire to reclaim America for “true” or “pure” patriots; both regard immigrants as a poisonous and present danger.

In the days after the rampage in El Paso, Rousseau told his members in the secret chats that such acts of wholesale violence were not for him. While fascist causes like Patriot Front’s could survive the blowback from such killings, he said, real success for the group would come from spreading its ideology and increasing its numbers. Of the alleged El Paso shooter, Rousseau wrote in a chat, “He’d have made more progress toward his goals by swallowing the first round in his magazine instead.”

In the months of chats obtained by ProPublica, Rousseau is by turns amateur philosopher and historian, as well as the group’s sole spokesman and its online policeman. He warns members that they will be kicked out if they don’t stay busy — pasting up flyers and conducting banner drops, joining street actions and posting regularly in the chat forums. He has put together a security guide to help Patriot Front members stay anonymous. He waxes admiringly about certain far-right groups in Europe, and he sees them as a model for how to become more serious political players in the years ahead. He has the secret chats routinely deleted, and he tells members to avoid ever writing or saying anything that might later be of interest to a prosecutor.

“It should be known,” he wrote to members recently, “that political dissidents are subject to unjust scrutiny.”

Pete Simi, a professor at Chapman University in California and an expert on white supremacists in the U.S., said Rousseau’s stewardship of Patriot Front is deeply familiar.

“It is very common for the leadership of these groups to disqualify violence, while doing things that are encouraging violence,” Simi said. “It is part of their strategy to avoid liability, while simultaneously promoting hate. When they say they are not violent, this is a lie. They are promoting violence by their goals.”

“Thomas’ Biggest Fear Is Someone Doing Something Crazy”

To gain an understanding of Patriot Front — its origins and ambitions, both the careful talk and the criminal behavior of its members — ProPublica examined hundreds of online postings, interviewed a person who infiltrated the group, obtained police records, reviewed its leader’s public statements online and in a variety of far-right podcasts, collected video material recorded both by the group and members of the public, and traveled to the homes of its founder and two of the members who had recently been arrested.

The person who infiltrated Patriot Front in recent years — posting in the group’s chats and accompanying it in its propaganda actions — sketched out a portrait of its members, which appear to be exclusively male:

They come from seven or eight regional “networks,” and the vast majority of them are recruited online; the typical member is around 25 years old and can be from blue-collar backgrounds or be working as “white-collar tech geeks”; many of them are gamers; few have wives or girlfriends; they can look like “the nerdy boys that sit next to you in high school,” but they clearly sympathize with “right-wing terrorism.”

The person who infiltrated Patriot Front said he applied for membership on the group’s website — the one with the mission statement written by Rousseau. American democracy was dead. The government had been taken over by Jews and other “elites.” Land claimed by descendants of the country’s original white settlers had been surrendered to immigrants of color. The dream was of a white ethnostate, in which all that was good and true and pioneering about the America of long ago could be restored.

The person who gained entrance to the group said Rousseau was one of three Patriot Front members who interviewed him on the telephone when he applied. He was asked to explain his political evolution, to say which political figures he hated and admired most, to state the circumstances in which the use of violence would be OK and to articulate the greatest threat to America. He was told Mussolini’s “The Doctrine of Fascism” would be required reading.

The chats reviewed by ProPublica show Rousseau spends lots of time online pressing members to take part in targeting streets, parks and colleges with the group’s propaganda. He and others delight in seeing their actions reflected in the SPLC’s nationwide map recording acts of hate and in the media. Last spring, the group tried to stage protests in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s offices in multiple cities, including New York.

“One minute of action is better than 10,000 books on ideology,” Rousseau told his members.

Rousseau, still a teen when he founded Patriot Front, makes clear in the secret chats reviewed by ProPublica that he is in charge, though he’s happy to go without a formal title.

“The title commander gives me bad flashbacks,” he wrote in a chat once. “If I absolutely had to have a title, it would probably be general director. But my name works just fine for now.”

The chats show some members regard Rousseau as a disciplined and effective spokesman for the group, and they appear to heed his repeated scoldings about preserving their anonymity.

“The enemy cannot attack you if they do not know who you are,” Rousseau wrote.

Using the pseudonym Samuel, a member from New York expanded on the idea in response.

“I would say the biggest accomplishment of masking up is obfuscating our total numbers,” he wrote. “We can make them feel as if there are thousands of us when it’s only a few hundred, and we could be anyone and no one. Next time they are at the CVS and see a white kid with a neat haircut, it could be us. Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.”

Rousseau, when he isn’t criticizing members who violate the ban on talking about guns or violence, can often be found policing the group’s ideological thinking. Nazism, however popular among members, can’t now be the goal, Rousseau said.

“This is not Germany, this is not the 1930s,” he chastised. “Get a grip on the fact that we’re activists, not re-enactors trying to scratch some self-indulgent itch for a political fantasy.”

Rousseau conducts his online leadership from the home he shares with his divorced father in Grapevine, a largely white, solidly middle-class city between Dallas and Fort Worth. ProPublica went to see Rousseau there this summer, and we found the shades drawn in every window and a rusting boat filled with fallen leaves on the property.

Rousseau came to the door, but he closed it quickly and would not talk. The following day, the red sports car in the driveway had been reparked, making it hard to see the lone license plate on its rear end.

Interviews with people in and around Grapevine — those who went to school with Rousseau, those who participated in the Boy Scouts with him, a man who dated his mother — produced a unanimous sense of surprise that he’d started an organization committed to an all-white America.

He’d mixed easily with the diverse array of students at his high school, and while he was against gay marriage, he was regarded more as a nice, conservative boy than a threat. He wore his hair long, in braids or a bun, and was obsessed with working out and the state of his physique.

At the student newspaper, he wasn’t regarded as an impressive writer, but he won a national award for editorial cartooning. Classmates saw him as a lazy student and a bit of a loner, but he had a knack for argument and a stubborn streak about never being wrong. The school had its share of racial incidents, but he was never involved and wasn’t seen as condoning them.

When Donald Trump was elected president, some senior boys at the school made a show of chanting, “Build a wall.” Rousseau, for his part, was certainly an ardent Trump supporter — he wore a Make America Great Again hat and carried a Trump lunchbox. But his enthusiasm wasn’t seen as menacing.

“He seemed Republican, but he didn’t seem crazy, said one fellow student.

To someone who was with him in Boy Scouts, Rousseau seemed serious about the organization, and he was elected patrol leader. At the same time, Rousseau could be difficult with adults, developing what the person called an “authoritarian defiance.”

“I’m saddened,” the person said of Rousseau’s embrace of white supremacy.

Simi, the professor at Chapman University, said enough research exists on modern-day white supremacists to develop a profile: young men, isolated and angry in some way despite their relatively privileged upbringing in middle class or affluent circumstances, and vulnerable to invitations to join up with others with similar grievances.

In years past, Simi said, groups like Patriot Front used to recruit potential new members by waiting outside schools for the last children to leave, the loners wandering off long after the final bell. Now such groups don’t have to work so hard to find targets. They have the internet, Simi said.

“It is a central aspect of these groups to take the frustration and anger and combine it with the special feeling and insights of being part of a group,” he said.

Rousseau, then just 18, was in Charlottesville in 2017, marching in the “Unite the Right” rally as a member of Vanguard America. The Anti-Defamation League calls Vanguard America a neo-Nazi group formed in 2016 that, like Patriot Front after it, was chiefly engaged in spreading propaganda. James Fields, the white supremacist convicted of murdering a young protester at the Charlottesville event, was photographed there carrying a Vanguard America shield, though he was not a member of the group.

Vanguard America splintered after the debacle in Virginia. Some wanted to abandon efforts to disguise their Nazi leanings and simply be brazen in their public look and violent aims. Rousseau took a different tack, and he started Patriot Front as an ostensibly more strategic, savvy, careful alternative. It would embrace more homegrown symbols — the flag, the bald eagle and patriotic language. Such shifts might attract a wider membership.

“I did go to Charlottesville. Some bad activism there,” Rousseau wrote in one of the secret chats. “I’ve done my part to learn from my mistakes.”

While Rousseau publicly and in the chats reviewed by ProPublica disavows violence, some Patriot Front members have shown support for a white supremacist group that embraces it: the Rise Above Movement. Eight RAM members have been arrested on charges related to violence in Charlottesville and in California.

“Gotta love RAM,” a Tennessee member said in the chats. “I hope they see us as 100 percent allies.”

In the chat logs, a Patriot Front member from Texas provides a list of addresses for 11 people in prison or under house arrest, referring to them as “POWs.” The list includes four members of RAM, numerous men arrested for violence in Charlottesville including Fields, and an imprisoned white supremacist in California. The Texan urged Patriot Front members to write to the prisoners and provided links to send some prisoners money directly. He also listed a donation link for a fund tied to Augustus Sol Invictus, a lawyer known for defending white supremacists.

Later in the chats, a member from New York shared a link to a white supremacist online fundraiser, saying proceeds would be given to a legal fund for RAM. He then chimed in that nearly $2,000 had been donated. “When they crack down we double down and become stronger,” he said. “Hail Victory!”

Observers of white hate groups credit Rousseau as a talented in-fighter, and they portray his breakaway from Vanguard America as a shrewd coup.

According to the person who infiltrated Patriot Front, Rousseau worries greatly about his members making the worst strategic mistake: carrying out an act of terrible violence. It would end his group, he has said.

“Thomas’ biggest fear is someone doing something crazy,” said the person who infiltrated Patriot Front.

“We Are Regular People”

Jakub Zak was in bed in the Chicago suburb of Vernon Hills when police, accompanied by his father, shook him awake. The police had been told that Zak, 19, was a member of Patriot Front, and that he might have a stash of illegal guns.

“He appeared nervous and tried to cover a few items on his bed as he put on his blue jeans,” police records say.

The police, though, had a clear view of what couldn’t be hidden: a gun safe meant for rifles, as well as magazines of ammunition on the bedroom floor.

Zak asked his father to make the police leave. His father would not.

“I advised Jakub that we would like for him to be cooperative, and explained to him cooperation goes a long way,” one detective wrote in a formal report, dated April 2018. “I explained to him the decision is for him to make, and he should think what is best for him.”

Zak spoke with his father and then offered the code for the safe. If there were guns in the house, the police wrote, Zak’s father wanted them out.

The police found a loaded 9 mm pistol and then, in a second safe, four more guns, including three high-powered semiautomatic rifles. The police records show Zak’s only concern was whether he could get his case for carrying the guns back after their confiscation.

It is unclear when or how Zak joined Patriot Front. The initial tip sent to law enforcement identified him as a member, one who often posted in the secret chats under the pseudonym “Hussar.” Postings under that name — portions of which were first published by Unicorn Riot, a media organization — suggest Zak was a frequent participant in the group’s propaganda efforts in the streets.

Online, Zak posted a mix of Patriot Front slogans and images — “America: Revolution is tradition”; “Deport them all.” But there was also much more explicitly violent material: a young black man lying prone on the street and about to be stomped; a Glock pistol.

Zak, who had no prior criminal record, ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor gun possession charge and was sentenced to probation. Whether local police referred his case, and his affiliation with Patriot Front, to any other law enforcement agency is unclear.

But the basic facts of Zak’s case amount to one of the hard-to-identify, hard-to-quantify, hard-to-assess threats in the U.S. today: an enthusiastically racist young man exposed to a steady diet of like-minded white supremacists, who doesn’t find it terribly hard to get his hands on dangerous weapons. Crusius, the accused El Paso killer, had no prior record; he lived with his grandparents; his mother is reported to have anonymously called law enforcement, worried once her son had bought a gun, even if it was legal; the parents of a classmate of Crusius’ told a local news organization in Dallas that their son had been encouraged by Crusius to join him in a white supremacist group.

In a brief interview at their home in Vernon Hills, Zak’s parents would not let him be interviewed.

“There is nothing to talk about,” his mother said, claiming he was not a member of any white hate group. “He is going through rough times, and he is in a better place now. I don’t want to start anything. He is getting his life together and planning [for] the future.”

“We are regular people,” his father added.

Concerns about how effectively federal authorities have been in thwarting the threat of white supremacists extends back years, covering both Democratic and Republican administrations. In recent months, though, there has been a series of arrests suggesting that federal and local authorities are being more aggressive.

In a recent report, the Department of Homeland Security took care to restate the balance law enforcement has to strike.

“The Department must take care, while addressing the scourge of violence, to avoid stigmatizing populations, infringing on constitutional rights, or attempting to police what Americans should think,” the report said.

Last February, a Patriot Front member, Joffre Cross, was arrested on gun charges in Houston. At a probable cause hearing, authorities said they got on to Cross through phone records belonging to a white supremacist in Texas who was convicted on assault charges this year.

Cross, 33, fits what experts see as another familiar profile for potentially violent white supremacists: a former Army soldier whose association with white supremacists dates back to his active-duty days. Disaffected former soldiers are a prime recruiting target for white hate groups, prized for their gun and bomb training and their possible access to weapons. Cross, while on active duty, was convicted on drug charges and imprisoned for five years. As part of the investigation, the authorities developed information that he was eager to secure weapons for white supremacist groups.

Cross, who has pleaded not guilty, was charged with felony weapons possession after police found guns and body armor in his home.

“If you don’t know me,” Cross once posted on Instagram, “consider this your trigger warning.” Cross and his attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Cross is a regular participant on the Russian social media platform VK, whose terms of service about extremist content are not strictly enforced. His posts are rife with Nazi videos, Holocaust denial material and white supremacists beating protesters.

One post reads: “Help more bees; plant more trees; save the seas; shoot refugees.”

In the Patriot Front chats, Cross continued to post even after his arrest.

“We have to build a foundation that can weather any storm, anything they throw at us,” he wrote last April. “We just have to keep pushing.”

“In the Aggregate They Are Disturbing”

It was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 2019 when 20 or so masked members of Patriot Front made their way onto a corner of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. They set off flares and smoke devices, delivered a short speech using a megaphone and fled. The police report said it lasted all of three minutes.

Blakely Lord, a high school English teacher, managed to capture the incident on video. In brief, she called the episode “profoundly disturbing.”

“I chose to film because you feel helpless,” Lord said. “I’m a dumpy middle-aged English teacher. I’m not going to get out my sword and face them down.”

She added, “I do think it’s a narrative people need to be thinking about: these little incidents may seem unimportant, but in the aggregate they are disturbing.”

Such disturbances — masked flash mobs, defacing property, distributing propaganda — are the day-to-day work of Patriot Front. Screaming outside an anarchist book fair in Texas. Plastering stickers across multiple store fronts on a busy block in Denver. Parading with flares at night in apublic park in Boston. Posting an “America First” sticker at a gay pride center in Vermont. All in the last year.

Members give one another tips about where to place posters and stickers legally, and they urge one another to wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. But in practice, Patriot Front members frequently target storefronts or places of worship, which is vandalism. Additionally, many colleges and universities, another favorite target for postering, prohibit flyers from nonstudent groups. White supremacists see campuses as a strategic location for flyering: a place to recruit potential members while attracting press coverage to amplify their propaganda.

In Columbus, Georgia, three months ago, two Patriot Front members posted flyers on and around a local synagogue, Temple Israel. “Reclaim America,” read one. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of victory,” read another. And the address of Patriot Front’s website was printed at the bottom of the flyers. The temple’s leadership became aware of Patriot Front’s history and said it was clear the synagogue and its members were targeted because of their faith.

“To me, the sinister aspect is this particular group disguises themselves as patriots, Tiffany Broda, the temple’s president, told the Ledger-Enquirer last July. “Yet they are a hate group, a nationally recognized hate group. And though we don’t want to give them publicity, we think that it’s important to bring this out of the shadows.”

“Jews have been a part of Columbus almost since the founding of our city, which is almost 200 years ago,” Rabbi Beth Schwartz added. “We will remain vigilant as a congregation, vigilant as a Jewish community. We don’t hide our heads in fear.”

Patriot Front members make clear in their chats that such actions — almost always recorded by one of the masked members — have multiple aims: to frighten, to provide material for their own propaganda efforts on social media, and to recruit. The drive to recruit might help explain why college campuses are Patriot Front’s most common targets.

Late last month, Patriot Front launched what it claimed were coordinated actions to distribute flyers and stickers and posters at more than 100 campuses across the country. The group posted on Twitter what it said was evidence of success at 90 schools.

Michael Loadenthal, a visiting professor of sociology at Miami University in Ohio, said Patriot Front had recently been targeting the school.

“Fascists having a public presence is organizing; this is recruitment,” Loadenthal said, adding that the simple idea that “white supremacists are individually radicalized people in their basement at home is wrong.”

“They are a network,” he said. “No particular node is dangerous until they are.”

Simi, the professor in California, said Patriot Front had hit the campus of Chapman University three times in a single month recently. The school, he said, had set up a permanent conference dealing with the nation’s southern border, and Patriot Front had singled out posted materials related to the conference to be defaced or covered up.

“People on the campus get intimidated,” Simi said.

He said the school had to add security cameras and police protection.

“This is part of their strategy,” Simi said of Patriot Front. “These are things they want to happen.”

===

salon

n OVEMBER 4, 2019 11:30PM (UTC)

Former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos published a leaked audio recording that he claims shows white nationalist leader Richard Spencer shouting racist slurs and threats after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

Yiannopoulos, who reportedly worked with white supremacists to mainstream their rhetoric through Breitbart News before he lost his job there, published the audio in a blog post. The audio, which Yiannopoulos claimed was confirmed by a source close to Spencer, appears to capture the prominent white nationalist unleashing a flurry of slurs aimed at Jews and African Americans after the murder of Heather Heyer at the 2017 rally. The audio has not been verified by Salon.

Yiannopoulos wrote that the audio was recorded at an “emergency meeting” following Heyer’s death. Heyer was killed by white nationalist James Fields, who drove his car into a crowd of protesters. After the rally, President Trump was accused of emboldening white nationalists when he claimed there were “very fine people on both sides” of the rally.

“My ancestors f**king enslaved those little pieces of f**king sh*t,” the man identified as Spencer shouts in the audio recording. “They don’t do this to f**king me. We’re going to f**king ritualistically humiliate them.”

“Little f**king kikes,” the audio continues. “They get ruled by people like me. Little f**king octaroons.”

The audio includes a threat to return to Charlottesville repeatedly.

“We are coming back here like a f**king hundred times,” the voice in the recording says. “I am so mad. I am so f**king mad at these people. I am coming back here every f**king weekend if I have to. Like this is never over. I win. They f**king lose. That’s how the world f**king works. I rule the f**king world. Those pieces of sh*t get ruled by people like me.”

“We are going to destroy this f**king town,” he added.

“It is not clear why Spencer was blaming Jews and black people for the death,” Yiannopoulos wrote.

Spencer, who has advocated for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” of nonwhite Americans, rose to prominence after a string of glowing profiles that touted him as a “dapper white nationalist” trying to “make racism cool again.” After the 2016 election, Spencer was recorded giving a speech in which he declared as members of the audience gave the Nazi salute. He was later recorded being punched in the face at Trump’s inauguration, prompting endless debate over whether it was appropriate to “punch Nazis.” Spencer helped popularize the term “alt-right” to obfuscate the racist ideology behind the movement.

Yiannopoulos has his own ties to Nazism and was banned by Twitter for inciting online mobs. In a leaked message, he recently complained that he could no longer “put food on the table” without access to mainstream social media platforms.

Yiannopoulos told Newsweek that he shared the audio out of a mutual “hate” between the two men.

"I have always publicly hated Spencer, and he has always publicly hated me,” he said. “He thinks I'm a degenerate race-mixing kike and I think he's a knuckle-dragging racist in a cheap suit.”

The audio was first published by the far-right group “Daily Groyper.” The group suggested that the leak was in response to a recent rift among white nationalist groups.

The audio leak prompted a new round of criticism aimed at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who personally intervened to prevent the social network from banning Spencer’s account, according to The Wall Street Journal. A Twitter employee told Motherboard earlier this year that the social network has been reluctant to create an algorithm that would effectively police white supremacist content on the website “because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/what-connects-the-white-supremacist-ideology-of-so-called-white-nationalists-to-extreme-misogyny-victimhood/

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What connects the white supremacist ideology of so-called white nationalists to extreme misogyny? Victimhood

Written by Lauren Schiller / Salon October 27, 2019

For Jessica Reaves, the journey into the most hateful reaches of the internet began after the 2018 van attack in Toronto. A white male in his 20s plowed his vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians, killing 10 and injuring 16. After he was arrested, the driver told police that an online community of involuntary celibates, or “incels,” had radicalized him.

“That was definitely not the first time that we’d seen someone who identifies as an incel . . . act out against women violently, strike out against them, murder them,” says Reaves, who, as editorial director at the Center for Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), monitors extremists across the ideological spectrum. “But it was a sort of turning point in the sense that people were starting to really pay attention to this issue.”

Jessica recently joined me on my podcast and radio show “Inflection Point” to discuss the disturbing discoveries she made in compiling the ADL report “When Women are the Enemy: The Intersection of Misogyny and White Supremacy.”

“The [Toronto] van attack led me to start looking at some of these message boards where incels spend a lot of time,” Reaves told me. “And I noticed how frequently their language mirrored the language that I saw on white supremacist message boards, their language about women.”

When we think about white supremacy in the U.S., certain images come to mind: swastikas, burning crosses, white hoods, shaved heads. But lately, the image of the white supremacist has evolved into a more clean-cut persona: the “white nationalist.”

“There is no difference. No. White nationalism is just a sort of prettified version of white supremacy,” said Reaves. “They may try to differentiate themselves by saying, ‘Oh, well, as a white nationalist, I believe that white people should have their own space.’ But in fact, it all just comes back to ‘I believe that white people need to be separate because I believe they are superior and different and better in all of these different ways. And I want my own country based on race.’”

How is the white supremacist ideology of so-called white nationalists connected to the misogyny of incels? They all see themselves as victims of the feminist movement.

“There’s just a constant state of grievance among misogynists and among white supremacists,” Reaves said. “The beef with feminism and feminists is that women are attempting to take away, take stature away from white men. And this victimhood narrative is just pervasive throughout white supremacist ideology and misogynist landscapes. So this is one of the things that connect them, in the sense that, ‘OK, all of these opportunities, all of these things that I’ve theoretically worked for, these things that are supposed to be mine,’ — and this is the white man talking — ‘are being threatened by advances by women and advances by people of color.’”

Another anti-equality sentiment that both ideologies share is the strict enforcement of binary gender roles.

“White men in the white supremacist movement want women who are fertile. That’s their most important function,” Reaves said.”They are, you know, breeders who can create the next generation of white warrior babies. And then after that, they’re supposed to be supporting their husbands. They’re supposed to be building and keeping a beautiful home. And then, of course, raising all these many white children. So that’s the set of demands that are placed on women in the white supremacist movement.”

Meanwhile, the incel and online misogynist movements, broadly known as the “manosphere,” want women to go back to their “places.”

“They say they have their own views of how women should behave, but it’s all very retrograde,” Reaves said. “Like it’s 1950 all over again. Women need to know their place. Women need to understand that men are in charge, women are taking too many liberties with the way they dress, the way they speak, the way they run for public office. So there’s very much a need to contain women and that’s true across the board. There are just different ways of expressing it in the white supremacist community versus the misogynist manosphere.”

Ultimately, Reaves wants people to see that misogyny is a dangerous element of extremist violence that has been long overlooked and needs to be reckoned with.

“We just need to elevate misogyny into this space where people are taking it seriously, where people are calling it out for what it is and where people are recognizing that it has a real-life impact,” said Reaves. “It has impact on women’s bodily autonomy in terms of domestic violence. It has an effect on women’s ability to go to a hot yoga class or walk down the street in Toronto or to belong to a sorority in you know, Southern California, these are all places where men have attacked women because they have felt that women were not treating them the way they deserve to be treated. Specifically, that they were not having sex to the extent that they felt they deserved.”

For Reaves and the ADL, extremism is a product not of hate but of the refusal of our society to face our own history of institutionalized violence against women and people of color.

“We are a country founded on white supremacy. We are a country founded on misogyny,” said Reaves. “There are so many things that are formed, the backbone of this country — in our society— that we have to deal with. And we have never dealt with any of these things.”

Hear more of my conversation with Jessica Reaves, Editorial Director of The Center on Extremism at ADL, in the latest episode of “Inflection Point.”

If you want to learn more about how to identify and respond to misogyny, check out the Inflection Point toolkit:

Get more stories of how women rise up on the “Inflection Point” podcast, help us crowdfund our new season, and come on over to The Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small, daily actions.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/white-supremacists-see-escalating-tensions-in-small-north-carolina-town-as-an-opportunity-to-radicalize-armed-neo-confederates/

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White supremacists see escalating tensions in small North Carolina town as an opportunity to radicalize armed neo-Confederates

Written by Jordan Green / Raw Story October 20, 2019

Neo-Confederate activists and antiracists clashed briefly in Pittsboro, NC, a town west of Raleigh, on Saturday, when a man wearing a “Trump 2020” hat and a face mask attempted to drive a front-end loader festooned with Confederate flags down a street where the two groups were facing off.

After antiracists blocked the driver, a local man identified as Sam White, neo-Confederate activists spilled into the street demanding that he be allowed to pass. Neo-Confederates, at least one of whom was armed with a holstered pistol, and antiracists engaged in shoving and grabbing before police separated the two groups and cleared the roadway.

For weeks, Pittsboro has been the scene of increasingly tense confrontations between neo-Confederates, many of them armed, and antiracists, after the Chatham County Board of Commissioners voted 4-1 to give the United Daughters of the Confederacy an Oct. 31 deadline to remove the Confederate monument in front of the Chatham County Historic Courthouse — at the center of a roundabout in the middle of town. A conglomeration of neo-Confederate groups led by the Virginia Flaggers responded about a month ago by erecting a Confederate flag across the street from Horton Middle School, a historically black school named for Moses Horton, a former slave and published poet. The move has been received by many townspeople, black and white, as a deliberate act of racial intimidation.

A scuffle broke out in Pittsboro after antiracists blocked a masked man on a front-end loader with Confederate flags pic.twitter.com/SdBgPgm7dY

— Jordan Green (@jordangreentcb) October 19, 2019

The escalating conflict over the monument has attracted the attention of overtly white supremacist groups who see an opportunity to radicalize neo-Confederate groups that claim that they are not racist and are merely motivated by a desire to protect “heritage.” Members of the League of the South, a group that advocates the creation of a white ethno-state in the former states of the Confederacy and took part in the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. two years ago, have shown up in Pittsboro on three previous occasions.

Saturday’s rally also caught the attention of Billy Roper, a neo-Nazi organizer in Arkansas, who warned his followers that antiracists would attempt to tear down the Confederate monument. Roper promised in a post in advance of the rally that he would have a report this weekend on his podcast about “the accelerating situation in Pittsboro.” Accelerationism is a concept embraced by an array of white power groups, including Atomwaffen, that violence and chaos is desirable because it will hasten the collapse of society and bring on a race war.

Antiracists march thru Pittsboro, NC to counter-protest neo-Confederates opposed to the removal of a Confederate monument #Pittsboro pic.twitter.com/ljIqhUsVRy

— Jordan Green (@jordangreentcb) October 19, 2019

Pittsboro lies on a political and cultural fault line in North Carolina, with a split between the more progressive residents in the urbanizing northeast corner closer to the Triangle — the urban area comprised of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill — and more rural, conservative areas to the west. Chatham County was narrowly carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016, while in some rural precincts Trump earned as much as 88.8 percent of the vote. After protesters tore down Confederate monuments in Durham and Chapel Hill, and the city of Winston-Salem removed its monument, neo-Confederates view the impending removal of the monument in Pittsboro as a dangerous tipping point.

“The conflict was unavoidable, given what’s happening across the nation, and what’s happening in the Triangle,” said Randy Voller, the former mayor of Pittsboro and former North Carolina Democratic Party chairman. “We’re the next logical place. The added fuel to the fire is the notion of putting up a Confederate battle flag across from a historically black school. They know that the Confederate flag is negative iconography, and they’re trying to use it as leverage to get the county commission to back down from removing the monument.”

The “Pittsboro Confederate Monument Rally” was advertised as taking place in front of the historic courthouse at noon. Antiracists from Chatham County and across the Triangle region responded with a “unity march” to a parking lot across from the courthouse beginning at 10 a.m. The unity march, which drew about 200 antiracists, represented a compromise between local residents rooted in nonviolent traditions and more seasoned activists from the Triangle who uphold a principle of de-platforming to make neo-Confederates feel uncomfortable.

Kirsten Coleman, one of the speakers at the rally, recalled attending Northwood High School in Pittsboro and seeing the Confederate soldier atop a pedestal in front of the historic courthouse.

“Every single day that was what I had to face, and see that this town was not welcoming to me or my people,” Coleman said. “This is a clear indication that we have never been welcome here. And yet it is a place where we have built our families. We have worked tirelessly, and yet we have never been welcomed. I want a place, a nation — not just in Pittsboro, but all across the United States where we can live up to the principles that some of the founding fathers put into the Constitution about all men being equal.

“We as people of color have to circle that statue and deal with the intimidation,” she said in an interview afterwards. “We’re not going to be intimidated anymore. We’re going to discard the fear and intimidation. We’re going to get our rights.”

The promised neo-Confederate rally never transpired at the historic courthouse. Instead, they gathered at the Confederate flag site across from the middle school over the course of the day, reaching a peak of about 60 people. After the antiracist rally across from the courthouse, antiracists dressed in black massed across the road, with the auxiliary antiracist gathering outnumbering the neo-Confederates two to one.

The League of the South did not play a prominent role in Saturday’s flag rally, although James Shillinglaw, who attended a conference co-hosted by the League of the South in June in Tennessee, showed up.

League members have conspicuously displayed their flag at previous rallies in Pittsboro, and on Oct. 5, a North Carolina activist displayed the League flag, along with a black “Q” flag from a pole on his truck at the site across from Horton Middle School.

The “Q” flag, which is embraced by League members and more extreme members of the neo-Confederate movement, honors William Quantrill, a Confederate guerilla leader who led an 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kans., resulting in the massacre of civilians and burning most of the town.

Howard Graves, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Quantrill’s campaign holds a particular relevance for current-day neo-Confederates and white secessionists.

Graves said that Michael Hill, the president of the League of the South, has “said about Charlottesville that it should suffer the same fate as Lawrence, Kansas. That encapsulates the view that any municipality that goes against Confederate values should suffer violence, full stop.”

“With Pittsboro, it seems like there are protesters that have centered on this iconography,” Graves added. “We’re seeing them incorporate this more into their identity.”

In addition to an array of neo-Confederate groups, including CSA II, ACTBAC NC and Heirs to the Confederacy, Saturday’s flag rally attracted several members of the Hiwaymen, a far-right group with an anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ stance that participated in the Unite the Right rally and a Patriot Prayer gathering in Portland, Ore., along with at least one member of the Proud Boys.

Responding to a statement by the rally organizers that League of the South members would not be welcome n Pittsboro on Saturday, Hiwaymen leader Billy Helton angrily declared on Facebook Live: “We will stand with LOS. We will stand with Billy Roper.”

While insisting that he and the Hiwaymen are not white supremacists or “Jew-haters,” Helton told his audience they agree with the League and Roper on a couple points. “And that’s keeping our society together and putting Christianity out front, and protect our history and heritage,” Helton said. “Sorry, if you ain’t into that, you can go to hell.”

On Saturday, Pittsboro resident Crystal Wright surveyed the neo-Confederate flaggers with dismay.

“They have hidden motives,” she said. “There are things that are very dark here.”

She recalled that on Sept. 28, a North Carolina neo-Confederate activist named Tom Parnell pointed at a black antiracist protester and said, “I got a rope for you.

“If you’re standing out here for this monument, what correlation does a rope have?” she asked.

Artis Johnson, who was also standing across the road from the neo-Confederate flaggers on Saturday, confirmed that he was the recipient of the racist threat.

Tempers flared as the afternoon wore on. Twice after the front-end loader festooned with Confederate flags was turned back by counter-protesters, antiracists crossed the road to the side where the neo-Confederate flaggers were gathered. In one instance, they stole a Bible, and Molly Conger, an antiracist from Charlottesville taunted them by tearing the pages out and lighting it on fire, while admonishing, “Sweetie, I looked and I didn’t see anything about the defense of the Confederacy. Are you sure you got the right version?”

Later, after the two groups dared each other to fight, antiracists crossed the street to oblige, and Proud Boy Jay Thaxton shoved an antiracist before police broke up the altercation.

The taunts continued from one side of the road to the other. Among those still itching for a fight was Johnson.

“Meet me in the fucking grass, bitch,” he yelled across the road. “I’m from a fucking slave family.”

Joran Green is the senior editor at Triad City Beat, an altweekly in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina.

Impeachment is the latest chapter in the battle between democracy and white supremacyby Carol Anderson

The connections aren’t as obvious, but America’s front lines remain the same as they’ve always been.

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katherine belew bring the war home

ppl circulate between on the surface distinct strands (eg neo nazim xian ID and _ so at conf burn cross and swastica and then have xian _ speech); sometime org switch based on persona;ity? or skillset need

lone wolf dangerous idea b/c ignores network/social aspect

// we think of okla city as lone wolf? anti-gov't but meant to incite race war a la turner diaries; white homeland eg NW US never end pt, but like TD aim is white world/genocide

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-september-16-2019/

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Leaked e-mails reveal the ways white nationalists have infiltrated right-wing media: report

Written by Alex Henderson August 30, 2019

Much of the racism that comes from the right-wing media uses dog whistles rather outright slurs. But in a report for Splinter News, journalist Hannah Gais addresses the ways in which white nationalist views have successfully infiltrated some right-wing media outlets — and screenshots of leaked alt-right e-mails published with Gais’ article aren’t the least bit subtle in their racism and anti-Semitism.

“Indeed, there is a burgeoning underground network of group chats, message boards and e-mail chains serving as the breeding ground for incubating white nationalist ideas, and as a forum to strategize around how to launder those ideas through mainstream conservative publications,” Gais reports. “And, judging from a large series of messages from one of those e-mail groups obtained by Splinter, it’s working.”

Gais cites some links between right-wing media and white nationalists, noting that in September 2018, for example, The Atlantic reported that Scott Greer (former editor/columnist for the Daily Caller — which was co-founded by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson) had written for white nationalist Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal under the name Michael McGregor.

Gais reports that Splinter has obtained a “trove of e-mails from a private white nationalist group chat” that Jonah Bennett, a formerDaily Caller employee, was a big part of. Bennett, according to Gais, “repeatedly used his perch at the site” to incorporate extremist viewpoints “into an ostensibly mainstream publication.” Those 2015-2018 e-mails, Gais reports, demonstrate that white nationalists “have steadily increased their influence within the conservative media infrastructure.”

On the surface, Gais writes, Bennett’s career seems like that of a “run-of-the-mill” conservative. But the 2015-2018 e-mails came from a private thread called Morning Hate, which according to Gais, was “steered in large part” by an extremist named John Elliott — and where participants “were free to make their racist opinions known, while laying the groundwork for leading their double lives, of sorts, in more mainstream conservative institutions.”

In the thread, Gais reports, participants used code words for racial slurs — for example, “Alaskans” for the n-word when insulting blacks, or “Hawaiians” as a substitute for “Hebes” when insulting Jews. “Our Good Friend” referred to Adolf Hitler, while “Our Good Friend’s Son” referred to Donald Trump. The code names were outlined in an e-mail dated December 17, 2015.

Splinter News published screenshots of some of those e-mails with Gais’ article, and the bigotry was overt. For example, a December 26, 2016 e-mail from Elliott contained the subject heading, “Take a shower, Jew Boy,” and Bennett was among the many recipients.

In a screenshot of a January 7, 2016 e-mail, Morning Hate is seen praising “Our Friend” — that is, Hitler — for being “way ahead of his enemies” in 1932. And in a May 12, 2017 e-mail, Morning Hate discusses friendly interactions with white nationalist Richard Spencer.

Gais describes Elliott as “the most prolific and undoubtedly the most well-connected” Morning Hate participant, noting that he had a history of “helping libertarian and conservative journalists make their way into the media world by placing them at various affiliated media organizations for internships.” But the Morning Hate e-mails, Gais observes, “show that Elliott was leading something of a shadow life.”

Gais wraps up the report by asserting that the alt-right has become an integral part of right-wing media.

“People like Bennett and Elliott have long been aware of the weaknesses of conservative institutions, and it is through this knowledge that the ‘alt-right’ has, far from disappearing, made itself an almost indispensable part of the American conservative movement,” Gais stresses. “It has, in that sense, succeeded well beyond its proponents’ vile, hate-fueled dreams.”

https://theconversation.com/white-nationalists-extreme-solution-to-the-coming-environmental-apocalypse-121532

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White nationalists around the world are appropriating the language of environmentalism.

The white nationalist who allegedly massacred 22 people in El Paso in early August, Patrick Crusius, posted a four-page screed on the chatroom 8chan. In it, the shooter blames his attack on the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and the impending “cultural and ethnic replacement” of whites in America.

Crusius also refers directly to the lengthy manifesto written by Brenton Tarrant, who allegedly murdered 52 in March in attacks motivated by Islamophobia on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Christchurch shooter called himself an “ecofascist” who believes there is no “nationalism without environmentalism.” The El Paso shooter titled his rant “An Inconvenient Truth,” apparently in reference to Al Gore’s 2006 documentary warning about the dangers of climate change. He also praised “The Lorax,” Dr. Seuss’ classic story about deforestation and corporate greed.

The prominence of environmental themes in these manifestos is not an oddity. Instead, it signals the rise of ecofascism as a core ideology of contemporary white nationalism, a trend I uncovered when conducting research for my recent book, “Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination.”

The roots of ecofascism

Ecofascists combine anxieties about the demographic changes they characterize as “white extinction” with fantasies of pristine lands free of nonwhites and free of pollution.

Ecofascism’s roots trace back to early 1900s when romantic notions of communion with the land took hold in Germany. These ideas found expression in the concept of “lebensraum” or living spaces, and in attempts to create an exclusive Aryan fatherhood in which “blood and soil” racial nationalism reigned supreme. The concept of lebensraum was integral to the expansionist and genocidal policies of the Third Reich.

There is a long thread that ties xenophobia to right-wing environmentalism. In the U.S., strains of ecofascism appeared in the incipient environmental movement, espoused by racialists like Madison Grant, who in the 1920s championed the preservation of native flora including California’s redwood trees, while demonizing nonwhite immigrants.

After World War II, in the name of protecting forests and rivers, nativist organizations opposed to arrivals from non-European countries stoked fears of overpopulation and rampant immigration.

A meme popular online among the far-right and ecofascists is “save trees, not refugees.” Often ecofascist memes take the form of emojis like the popular Norse rune known as Algiz, or the “life” rune. This rune, favored by Heinrich Himmler and the SS, is one of many alternative symbols to swastikas that circulate online to dog whistle neo-Nazism allegiances.

Deep ecology

Many ecofascists today gravitate toward “deep ecology,” the philosophy developed by the Norwegian Arne Naess in the early 1970s. Naess wanted to distinguish “deep ecology,” which he characterized as reverence for all living things, from what he viewed as faddish “shallow ecology.”

Jettisoning Naess’ belief in the value of biological diversity, far-right thinkers have perverted deep ecology, imagining that the world is intrinsically unequal and that racial and gender hierarchies are part of nature’s design.

Deep ecology celebrates a quasi-spiritual connection to the land. As I show in my book, in its white nationalist version only men – white or European men – can truly commune with nature in a meaningful, transcendent way. This cosmic quest fuels their desire to preserve, by force if necessary, pure lands for white people.

White nationalists today look to the Finnish ecofascist Pentti Linkola, who advocates for stringent immigration restriction, “the reversion to pre-industrial life ways, and authoritarian measures to keep human life within strict limits.”

Reflecting on Linkola’s ideas, the white nationalist webzine Counter-Currents impels white men to take ecofascist action, saying that it is their duty to “safeguard the sanctity of the Earth.”

Antonio Basco, whose wife Margie Reckard was murdered during a shooting at a Walmart store, touches a white wooden cross bearing the name of his late wife, at a memorial for the victims of the shooting in El Paso, Texas. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez]

Why partisan labels don’t apply

This background helps to explain why the Christchurch shooter called himself an “ecofascist” and discussed environmental issues in his rambling screed.

The El Paso shooter offered more specific examples. In addition to mentioning the “The Lorax,” he criticized Americans for failing to recycle and for wanton waste of single-use plastics.

Their crusade to save white people from erasure through multiculturalism and immigration mirrors their crusade to preserve nature from environmental destruction and overpopulation.

The conventional wisdom in the public is that environmentalism is the province of liberals, if not of the left, with its commitments to environmental justice and carbon neutrality.

Yet the ubiquity of environmental concerns among white nationalists shows that distinctions between liberal and conservative are not necessarily germane when assessing the ideologies of the far-right today.

If current trends continue, the future will be one of intensified global warming and extreme weather patterns. There will be an increase in climate refugees, often seeking respite in the global north. In this context, I think that white nationalists will be primed to merge the prospect of climate calamities with their anxieties about white extinction.

Census projections indicate that around 2050 the U.S. will become a majority nonwhite country. For white nationalists, this demographic clock ticks more loudly each day. Both the Christchurch and the El Paso shooters invoke the “Great Replacement” theory, or the distorted idea that whites are being demographically outnumbered, to the point of extinction, by immigrants and racial others.

Given the patterns I see emerging, I believe that the public needs to recognize ecofascism as a dangerous cloud gathering on the horizon.

tags:

Climate change

Racism

Apocalypse

Environmentalism

White nationalism

White nationalists

Christchurch mosque attacks

El Paso shooting

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/targeted-for-violence-here-are-some-groups-that-white-nationalists-have-singled-out-for-terrorist-attacks-in-the-trump-era/

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Targeted for violence: Here are some groups that white nationalists have singled out for terrorist attacks in the Trump era

Written by Alex Henderson August 9, 2019

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson set off a major controversy earlier this week when he made the ridiculous claim that white supremacy is merely a “hoax” and a “conspiracy theory” — an assertion he made only days after an August 3 terrorist attack in El Paso, Texas that left 22 people dead. According to police, the fact that most of the victims had Hispanic names was no coincidence: the suspect, in a manifesto published online before the attack, made it clear that he specifically targeted Latinos in order to fight what he saw as an “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The attack was hardly an isolated incident but rather, was among the many terrorist attacks that white supremacists and white nationalists have carried out in the Trump era.

Far from being the “hoax” or “conspiracy theory” that Carlson believes it is, white supremacy and white nationalism are a terrorist movement often motivated by the Replacement Theory — which claims that white Anglo Saxons around the world are under attack from blacks, Latinos and others who seek to “replace” them. White supremacists and white nationalists have a long list of groups they view as their enemy, and not unlike ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria), al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and other violent Islamists who claim that they are defending Islam — never mind the fact that they have murdered and terrorized countless Muslims — they view acts of terrorism as acts of self-defense.

Here are some groups that white supremacists and white nationalists have targeted for terrorist attacks in the Trump era.

1. African-Americans

To countless African-Americans who are having a hard time keeping up with their bills despite working two or three jobs and putting in 50 or 60 hours a week, the notion of “black privilege” that white nationalists promote is beyond ridiculous. But perception can become reality to extremists, and in the minds of white nationalists, African-Americans have had it too good for too long. Terrorist attacks against African-Americans certainly didn’t start in the Trump era: the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), recently described by the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as “a terrorist organization if ever there was one,” goes back to 1865. But in recent years, terrorist attacks aimed at African-Americans have had a resurgence.

In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama made history by becoming the United States’ first African-American president. Having a two-term black president was deeply disturbing to racists, who responded violently. On June 17, 2015, when Obama was serving his second term, white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African-Americans at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. And other attacks followed in the Trump era. On March 20, 2017, white racist James Harris Jackson randomly murdered Timothy Caughman (a 66-year-old black man) in Manhattan as “practice” for future killings he had in mind. And in October 2018, a white nationalist randomly murdered two older African-Americans at a Kroger grocery store in Louisville, Kentucky (Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones) simply because they were black.

2. Jews

White nationalists are big on symbolism, not unlike violent Islamists. Al-Qaeda viewed the World Trade Center as symbolic of the Americanism they hated; to Roof, similarly, Mother Emanuel symbolized black oppression of whites — and when the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was targeted for a white nationalist terrorist attack on October 27, 2018, symbolism was very much at work. Eleven people were killed, and the suspect, according to police, believed he was fighting Jewish efforts to “replace” white Christians. Before that, during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, white nationalists were chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

3. Latinos

The El Paso terrorist shooting of August 3, 2019 was by far the deadliest anti-Latino attack of the Trump era, but it wasn’t the first time Latinos were singled out for hate. In late July, a mass shooting occurred at the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California; police said the white attacker had cited a white supremacist text and complained about “hordes of mestizos” being at the event. In 2018, a report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino found that 34 hate crimes against Latinos were reported in the United States’ largest cities during the first two weeks after the 2016 presidential election.

4. Muslims

To the majority of Muslims, ISIS, al-Qaeda and Boko Haram are vicious, cruel organizations that twist and pervert the words of the Qu’ran and can make life hell in Muslim countries; to white nationalists, they represent Islam on the whole. And in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Islamophobia of white nationalism asserted itself on March 15, 2019 with two attacks on mosques that resulted in 51 deaths. White nationalists in the U.S. feel a kinship with white nationalists in other parts of the world, and when a mosque in Escondido, California was set on fire later that month, graffiti by the suspect referenced the Christchurch attacks.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/white-supremacists-responsible-for-all-race-based-domestic-terrorism-incidents-in-2018-doj-blocked-report/

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Explosive report says the Trump admin blocked data revealing that white supremacists were responsible for all race-based domestic terrorism incidents in 2018

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement August 9, 2019

The Trump administration has known since at least April that alleged white supremacists were responsible for every single act of race-based domestic terrorism in the U.S. in 2018, yet not only took no action to combat the growing right-wing violent extremism, but actually substantially reduced or even eliminated funding and programs that combat white supremacist extremism, violence, and terrorism – and then blocked the data from reaching the hands of Congress.

“Domestic Terrorism in 2018,” a document (embedded below) prepared by the State of New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security Preparedness, “shows 25 of the 46 individuals allegedly involved in 32 different domestic terrorism incidents were identified as white supremacists,” Yahoo News’ Jana Winter and Hunter Walker report.

That document finds there were “32 domestic terrorist attacks, disrupted plots, threats of violence, and weapons stockpiling by individuals with a radical political or social agenda who lack direction or influence from foreign terrorist organizations in 2018.”

The report was “circulated” throughout the U.S. Dept. of Justice “and around the country in April just as members of the Senate pushed the DOJ to provide them with precise information about the number of white supremacists involved in domestic terrorism.”

The Justice Department, under President Trump’s hand-picked Attorney General Bill Barr, refused to hand over the data or the document to Congress.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in January of 2019 had already compiled a report, announcing that, “Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S., ADL Finds.”

ADL reported that “Right-wing extremists were linked to at least 50 extremist-related murders in the United States in 2018, making them responsible for more deaths than in any year since 1995, according to new data from the ADL.”

1995 was the year domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, slaughtering 168 people and injuring more than 680 others.

“The tally represents a 35 percent increase from the 37 extremist-related murders in 2017,” ADL reported, “making 2018 the fourth-deadliest year on record for domestic extremist-related killings since 1970. Last year saw the highest percentage of right-wing extremist-related killings since 2012, the last year when all documented killings were by right-wing extremists.”

Why the Dept. of Justice and the White House blocked the data from reaching Congress is now yet another investigation Congress should take up.

Here’s the document the DOJ refused to hand over to Members of the House and Senate:

Domestic Terrorism in 2018.pdf by Kelli R. Grant on Scribd

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/coalition-of-church-leaders-warn-against-christian-nationalism-and-its-connection-to-white-supremacy/

One need only spend some time listening to Sister Mary Scullion (a liberal/progressive Catholic nun and activist in Philadelphia), Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg or members of an African Methodist Episcopalian (AME) congregation to realize that not all Christians identify with the brand of far-right Christian fundamentalism that President Donald Trump has been pandering to. And a group of at least 17 church leaders, united under the name Christians Against Christian Nationalism, has issued a dire warning about the dangers of far-right “Christian nationalism.”

In an official statement, the church leaders took issue with the Christian Right’s incessant attacks on other faiths and efforts to bring about a Christian fundamentalist theocracy in the United States.

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tucker laura I etc fox soft peddle gateway drug overton window?

AN 819

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/revealed-us-state-department-official-exposed-as-a-white-nationalist-organizer/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-and-right-wing-media-are-peddling-an-apocalyptic-ideology-of-a-civilizational-conflict/

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Trump and right-wing media are peddling an apocalyptic ideology of a civilizational conflict

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 6, 2019

It has been seventeen years since John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. One of the central themes of the book was to cite demographic data about the so-called “browning of America” and note that it was the left that was positioned to benefit from the fact that non-Hispanic whites would eventually become a minority in this country.

In the years since the book was published, a lot of liberals (including one of the authors) came to question the premise that “demography is destiny.” While those on the right have publicly panned the book’s analysis, there is a way in which it has become the foundation of what we are witnessing from Donald Trump and his enablers.

Two years ago, I wrote about the connection between the president and white supremacists, including this quote fromRichard Spencer.

“Trump, on a gut level, kind of senses that this is about demographics, ultimately. We’re moving into a new America.” He said, “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” but he did believe that Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have – that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon.”

More than a year before Trump was elected, Spencer—a spokesperson for white supremacists—explained that the “Trump phenomenon” was based on the fear white people have about the changing demographics in this country.

As Courtney Hable explains, the El Paso gunman was inspired by “the white supremacist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory that white people are being systematically ‘replaced’ by people of color through mass immigration.” She goes on to document how Fox News has been pushing that narrative relentlessly.

The subtle shift in how this narrative is being presented is that personalities like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have re-framed the demographic changes away from being the inevitable destiny of this country so that they can blame it on immigration. The El Paso gunman caught on and described immigrants as “invaders” flooding into the United States.

Thomas Kaplan documents how that is exactly the language being employed by the Trump campaign on social media.

President Trump’s re-election campaign has harnessed Facebook advertising to push the idea of an “invasion” at the southern border, amplifying the fear-inducing language about immigrants that he has also voiced at campaign rallies and on Twitter.

Since January, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word “invasion” — part of a barrage of advertising focused on immigration, a dominant theme of his re-election messaging.

I would not normally read an article titled, “White Terrorism Shows ‘Stunning’ Parallels to Islamic State’s Rise” because it sounds exploitative. But Max Fisher, who has a reputation as a thoughtful and serious journalist—especially on matters related to terrorism and propaganda—is the author. Here is what he wrote.

Many scholars of terrorism see worrying similarities between the rise of the Islamic State and that of white nationalist terrorism, seen most recently in the carnage in El Paso, Tex.

“The parallels are stunning,” said Will McCants, a prominent expert in the field.

And they are growing more notable with each new attack.

Experts say that the similarities are far from a coincidence. White nationalist terrorism is following a progression eerily similar to that of jihadism under the leadership of the Islamic State, in ways that do much to explain why the attacks have suddenly grown so frequent and deadly.

In both, there is the apocalyptic ideology that predicts — and promises to hasten — a civilizational conflict that will consume the world. There is theatrical, indiscriminate violence that will supposedly bring about this final battle, but often does little more than grant the killer a brief flash of empowerment and win attention for the cause.

There are self-starter recruits who, gathering in social media’s dark corners, drive their own radicalization. And for these recruits, the official ideology may serve simply as an outlet for existing tendencies toward hatred and violence…

The feedback loop of radicalization and violence, once triggered, can take on a terrible momentum all its own, with each attack boosting the online radicalization and doomsday ideology that, in turn, drive more attacks.

The apocalyptic ideology of a civilizational conflict is being peddled by the president of the United States and his enablers in right-wing media via the great replacement conspiracy theory. The use of indiscriminate violence as a response travels around the underbelly of social media in places like 8chan.

Americans who don’t pay attention to right-wing media and have no exposure to radicalized social media forums have no idea this kind of thing is happening. They simply wake up one day to see that yet another mass shooting has taken place. When Democrats point the finger of blame at Trump and his enablers, it can appear as if it’s just another example of the politicization of tragedy.

That’s why it is important for people to learn about what’s going on. The use of the word “invasion” over 2,000 times on Facebook by the president’s re-election campaign is no accident. It is a calculated strategy to incite the kind of reaction we just witnessed in El Paso.

As Fisher notes:

It is nearly impossible to eradicate a movement animated by ideas and decentralized social networks. Nor is it easy to prevent attacks when the perpetrators’ ideology makes nearly any target as good as the next, and requires little more training or guidance than opening a web forum.

It will take time and a concerted effort to deal with those decentralized social networks that have developed. But it all begins by exposing the president as the man behind the curtain who is inflaming the situation.

3 mass shoot shift pov?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/right-wing-writer-calls-for-all-out-war-on-white-nationalist-terrorism-in-stunning-op-ed-on-conservative-website/

The party line among many people in the right-wing media, from Fox News to AM talk radio, has been that white nationalist violence is nowhere near as serious a threat as Islamist terrorism. Media Matters has repeatedly demonstrated that Fox News has had a much more alarmist tone when reporting on Islamist violence than it has had when acts of terrorism were committed by white supremacists or white nationalists. But following an act of racist terrorism that left 20 people dead in El Paso, Texas, a leading conservative writer,the National Review’s David French, vehemently stresses that white nationalist terrorism is every bit as dire a threat as ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria).

“The United States is now facing a deadly challenge from a connected, radical, online-organizing community of vicious white-nationalist terrorists,” French warns in a National Review article. “They are every bit as evil as jihadists, and they radicalize in much the same way. And just like the ISIS terrorists our nation and our allies have confronted in the great cities of the West, they use the most modern of tools to advance the oldest of hatreds.”

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