TROLL thug ALT RT 3

11/17

SEE FOUR XIAN

will distinguish from troll cyber

also just new alt rt 3/18

see proud boys

see troll caucus

own trigger the libs

just kidding

---

820 i stopped using this tag (btw, thug orig referred to thugswarm serengetti flak tactic of coord on msg bd/chatroom) as messaging moved out of chans? morph to boogaloo? but with kyle kenosha, pretty clearly still active/more virulent

morph more after kkk lawsiit?

see militia, qanon, trumpista

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an 8 26

...DR. STEPHAN LEWANDOWSKY: Well, um, I can — that's a very good question. I have partial answers, but only partial. This is, you know, something we don't fully understand. First of all, if you look at internet trolls and their personality profiles, you find that they score very high on what's called the dark triad of personality: psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and — I forget the third one.

ROZSA: Narcissism?

LEWANDOWSKY: Yeah, probably. The dark triad — that's what it's called. So we know that trolls take pleasure in trolling, which means getting other people upset. And I think that's what we're observing here — this is basically trolling behavior. So would these people score high on the dark triad? I would think yes, but I don't know of any data that's done a personality profile specifically of MAGA voters. We do have it for trolls, though — I have data on that. People have published research on it, and the similarities are just overwhelming. So I'd be very surprised if these were well-adjusted, nice people.

...

neo nazi ads 1 26

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MUSK WE WILL BE SLAUGHTERED GT REPL

ZUCK NEED MORE MALE ENERGY

CYNTHIA MILLER IDRISS SP AM UNIV POLR EXTR LAB

WHEN CANNOT TELL TRUE FROM FALSE, HARD TO SEE RT WRONG HANNAH ARENDT

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AN 12 25

Far-right extremists have been organizing online since before the internet – and AI is their next frontier

How can society police the global spread of online far-right extremism while still protecting free speech? That’s a question policymakers and watchdog organizations confronted as early as the 1980s and ’90s – and it hasn’t gone away.

Decades before artificial intelligence, Telegram and white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ livestreams, far-right extremists embraced the early days of home computing and the internet. These new technologies offered them a bastion of free speech and a global platform. They could share propaganda, spew hatred, incite violence and gain international followers like never before.

Before the digital era, far-right extremists radicalized each other primarily using print propaganda. They wrote their own newsletters and reprinted far-right tracts such as Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and American neo-Nazi William Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries,” a dystopian work of fiction describing a race war. Then, they mailed this propaganda to supporters at home and abroad.

I’m a historian who studies neo-Nazis and far-right extremism. As my research shows, most of the neo-Nazi propaganda confiscated in Germany from the 1970s through the 1990s came from the United States. American neo-Nazis exploited their free speech under the First Amendment to bypass German censorship laws. German neo-Nazis then picked up this print propaganda and distributed it throughout the country.

This strategy wasn’t foolproof, however. Print propaganda could get lost in the mail or be confiscated, especially when crossing into Germany. Producing and shipping it was also expensive and time-consuming, and far-right organizations were chronically understaffed and strapped for cash.

Going digital

Computers, which entered the mass market in 1977, promised to help resolve these problems. In 1981, Matt Koehl, head of the National Socialist White People’s Party in the United States, solicited donations to “Help the Party Enter The Computer Age.” The American neo-Nazi Harold Covington begged for a printer, scanner and “serious PC” that could run WordPerfect word processing software. “Our multifarious enemies already possess this technology,” he noted, referring to Jews and government officials.

Soon, far-right extremists figured out how to connect their computers to one another. They did so by using online bulletin board systems, or BBSes, a precursor to the internet. A BBS was hosted on a personal computer, and other computers could dial in to the BBS using a modem and a terminal software program, allowing users to exchange messages, documents and software.

With BBSes, anyone interested in accessing far-right propaganda could simply turn on their computer and dial in to an organization’s advertised phone number. Once connected, they could read the organization’s public posts, exchange messages and upload and download files.

The first far-right bulletin board system, the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, was established in 1984 by Louis Beam, a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. Beam explained: “Imagine, if you can, a single computer to which all leaders and strategists of the patriotic movement are connected. Imagine further that any patriot in the country is able to tap into this computer at will in order to reap the benefit of all accumulative knowledge and wisdom of the leaders. ‘Someday,’ you may say? How about today?”

Then came violent neo-Nazi computer games. Neo-Nazis in the United States and elsewhere could upload and download these games via bulletin board systems, copy them onto disks and distribute them widely, especially to schoolchildren.

In the German computer game KZ Manager, players role-played as a commandant in a Nazi concentration camp that murdered Jews, Sinti and Roma, and Turkish immigrants. An early 1990s poll revealed that 39% of Austrian high schoolers knew of such games and 22% had seen them.

Arrival of the web

By the mid-1990s, with the introduction of the more user-friendly World Wide Web, bulletin boards fell out of favor. The first major racial hate website on the internet, Stormfront, was founded in 1995 by the American white supremacist Don Black. The civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center found that almost 100 murders were linked to Stormfront.

By 2000, the German government had discovered, and banned, over 300 German websites with right-wing content – a tenfold increase within just four years.

In response, American white supremacists again exploited their free speech rights to bypass German censorship bans. They gave international far-right extremists the opportunity to host their websites safely and anonymously on unregulated American servers – a strategy that continues today.

Up next: AI

The next frontier for far-right extremists is AI. They are using AI tools to create targeted propaganda, manipulate images, audio and videos, and evade detection. The far-right social network Gab created a Hitler chatbot that users can talk to.

AI chatbots are also adopting the far-right views of social media users. Grok, the chatbot on Elon Musk’s X, recently called itself “MechaHitler,” spewed antisemitic hate speech and denied the Holocaust.

Countering extremism

Combating online hate is a global imperative. It requires comprehensive international cooperation among governments, nongovernmental organizations, watchdog organizations, communities and tech corporations.

Far-right extremists have long pioneered innovative ways to exploit technological progress and free speech. Efforts to counter this radicalization are challenged to stay one step ahead of the far right’s technological advances.

Michelle Lynn Kahn, Associate Professor of History, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

===

MMA tag

https://www.mediamatters.org/stories-and-interests/alt-right-and-pro-trump-trolls}:

AN 5 24

The GOP over the last decade, Reuters noted in March, has transformed into a "Republican electorate that is more isolationist, more skeptical of globalization, more suspicious of the electoral process and more likely to view Democrats as a threat than it was when former President [Donald] Trump launched his first run for the White House in 2015."

University of Virginia Center for Politics analyst J. Miles Coleman said the stark changes "reflect an electorate that has become more populist, both feeding off of Trump's populism and influencing the broader party." Now, he added, "It's hard to see the (party) going back to nominating Mitt Romney-type candidates."

In a Tuesday, May 7 op-ed published by MSNBC, columnist Charlie Sykes discusses the right-wing's shift through the eyes of conservative ghost writer Nancy French.

French's new book, Ghosted: An American Story, according to Sykes, is "a powerful and horrifying account of how a once fringe movement, the alt right, has come to occupy the central seat of the Republican Party."

The book reveals "the vicious racist attacks against her and her family after she and her husband, David French, a well-known conservative commentator who is now a New York Times columnist, broke with Trump," the Bulwark founder notes.

Sykes writes:

*In late 2015, online trolls seized on the existence of their daughter Naomi, who the Frenches had adopted from Ethiopia, as an attack tactic. In her book, French recalls the moment she saw the picture online: a photoshopped image of 7-year-old Naomi “in a gas chamber, with Donald Trump — wearing a Nazi uniform — pulling a lethal gas lever.”

*There was more. Other online trolls photoshopped the girl’s face onto images of enslaved people and identified her with racial slurs that don’t bear repeating here.

French writes in her book, "The alt right tried to inflict as much personal pain as they could on us, in the most intimate ways possible. These radicalized Trump supporters harassed us, mocked us, maligned us, and believed we should lose our jobs, and — at least according to our email inboxes — our lives."

"This casual racism and brutality was not pushed by a fringe element,” French emphasizes. "It had become the main political strategy of many conservatives. These people spouting conspiracy theories and shouting invectives were now embedded, wrapped up, and intertwined with mainstream Republicans."

Sykes notes:

In 2019, the Trump-supporting magazine American Greatness published a blatantly racist poemtitled 'Cuck Elegy,' which accused 'parasites' of surrendering to the 'mocha-skinned' and 'low-life reprobates.'* In case the references were too subtle, the magazine accompanied the poem with a photo of David and Naomi French.

The same year, "the Aspen Institute featured a panel that included both French and Christopher Buskirk, the editor and publisher of American Greatness, titled'Can the Republican Party Survive the Alt Right?' (In the spirit of transparency, I helped moderate that panel.)," Sykes emphasizes. "French writes that Aspen’s decision to invite the publisher of American Greatness to talk about the alt-right 'was akin to asking an arsonist to give advice on putting out fires,' adding, 'but they did not ask me for my advice.'"

*Sykes' full op-ed is available at this link.

===

all hail the troll king

// alt rt

https://www.alternet.org/musk-trump/

an 12 22

no lnx twt pix

It was too laughable not to share it: On his Twitter knockoff site Truth Social, Donald Trump posted on Wednesday about a "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT tomorrow," which included a video of him dressed as a superhero shooting lasers out of his eyes.

It's what the kids online call "cringe" — and oh man, it couldn't have been more perfect for the online churn of public mockery. I'm on a Twitter diet, but I totally sent this dumb image to my friends, so we could join in the hilarity. So many questions! Is Trump really so delusional about his physical form that he thinks he looks like Superman? How can his fans not perceive that he does not, in fact, look like that? The lasers-out-of-the-eyes thing is directly out of the "Dark Brandon" meme liberals use to celebrate Joe Biden's accomplishments. Does Trump not know how desperate he looks, trying to bite Dark Brandon's style? How dumb is he anyway?

Trump has not returned to Twitter, even though Elon Musk reinstated his account and publicly begged him to come back.But he managed to dominate Twitter on Wednesday anyway, as one liberal hater after another retweeted screenshots of the superhero meme, making sure that every Beltway journalist was well aware of Thursday's "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT." The silliness of it guaranteed much more coverage than if Trump had tweeted out a vaguely normal picture of himself.

Unsurprisingly, the actual announcement was not just underwhelming but an even higher degree of self-pantsing:

But here's the part we cannot ignore: Trump is going to sell a lot of those dopey digital trading cards. As viral marketing campaigns go, this one was a solid win. Not only did all that liberal dunking garner news coverage and dramatic social media spread, but he also conveyed an important message to his supporters: Those liberal elites are laughing at you. And the way to strike back, proving that you're in on the joke and making the liberals cry, is to buy this worthless crap and send Donald Trump more of your money.

Since my book "Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself" was published in 2018, its central thesis — that the modern right is motivated by an obsessive desire to troll the left — has become a lot more widely accepted. Just this week, Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent pointed out that Musk has gotten into the troll business because he understands that "for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself." By tweeting repulsive things and drawing liberal outrage and condemnation, Musk can get more engagement while sucking in more fans who love how angry he makes their perceived enemies.

But what is too often overlooked in these discussions is how much this empire of trolling relies on the right's inferiority complex. At the root of the trolling mindset is defensiveness. Conservatives perceive, not always incorrectly, that liberals are laughing at them for being a bunch of tasteless rubes with boring sex lives and expanding beer guts. This perception does not motivate a desire toward self-improvement, but instead a longing for revenge, mostly in the form of imposing their grossness on the supposedly more refined existence of those they despise.

This inferiority complex is why the term "elite" has become common currency on Fox News. They don't use it accurately — say, to describe those who hold excessive wealth and power, but as a swipe at the perceived progressive values of college-educate cultural tastemakers in coastal cities. It explains how Musk, who until very recently was ranked as the richest man in the world, can get away with styling himself as a populist hero. Childish as it may be, Musk and his fanboys are still agitated about their perceived rejection by the Cool Kids.

The slavish fandom that people like Musk and Trump attract is generally confusing to folks on the left, because those two guys are such embarrassing losers. Trump's superhero meme has its brother in Musk's recent bout of social media thirst:

It was already pathetic enough that Musk has been reduced to begging right-wing douchebags to like him. The items in that image make it worse, creating a virtual bingo card of terminal dweebness: Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. A painting of George Washington that was uncool when our grandparents were kids. A fake gun. In order to get the women of Tinder to swipe left faster, all you'd need would be a pet iguana and a decorative sword. (Arguably, the vajra on the table of a non-Buddhist counts for the latter.)

But it's a mistake to conclude that Musk's fans simply fail to understand how uncool the Tesla CEO has revealed himself to be. He's created a cult of dork solidarity around him, one committed to a "Revenge of the Nerds"-style fantasy of ruining Twitter for all those blue-checked people who make them feel bad about themselves. That doesn't just appeal to those who already identify as conservative, either. Musk's cult is part of a larger ecosystem that seeks to redirect angry young men toward fascist politics. Musk may be running Twitter into the ground financially, but as a right-wing political project, his takeover of the company is going great: He's adding 200,000 new followers a day.

In his recent book "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind," journalist Robert Draper explains that, in his many conversations with Trump voters, it became clear that they were not confused about the actual nature of Donald Trump's personality. In fact, he writes,"the MAGA faithful adored their emperor without clothes." As he told Salon, "everything that we would ordinarily view as a vice they found to be to be virtuous," often precisely because it pisses off liberals so much.

you see this all the time on social media, when conservatives make jokes about how liberals hate the "bad orange man." In making that joke, they're indicating that they know Trump is a weird-looking guy who wears orange makeup every day and also that, by any reasonable standard, he sucks. But none of that detracts from his allure in the slightest. He's basically a human pile of dog poop they get to rub liberal noses in, an animated and endlessly whiny punishment they can inflict on those who make them feel insecure.

Shame is an odd emotion. It can sometimes motivate a person to slow down or stop behaviors that cause it. Just as often, however, it can backfire, creating a defensive reaction that causes the person to double down. Trump's dumb superhero meme is a good example of the latter tendency in action. Liberals have mocked conservatives for years for their hero worship of Trump. But rather backing down, they just go at it harder — admittedly, with a bit of ironic distance — by churning out cartoonish images that reimagine Trump as Superman or Elvis or Rocky or some other masculine icon.

Of course these folks are still suckers. They may think they're sticking it to the liberals, but as usual Trump is just squeezing them for cash. But as long as they keep nursing their grievanceover real or imagined liberal mockery, Trump fans will never quite be able to see how much the bad orange man has been using them all along.

===

an 12 21

...Bombarded with criticism for his childish stunt, the 35-year-old Schmeck told the Oregonian, “Now, I am being attacked for utilizing my freedom of speech.”And Obeidallah slams Schmeck for painting himself as a victim.

“Schmeck is now doing the cliché conservative move of saying he's being unfairly criticized because people have slammed his ‘joke’…. Aww, poor ‘victim’ Schmeck,” Obeidallah argues. “Apparently, he thinks he should be able to tell Biden to basically go f**k himself while on a family-friendly holiday call,but no one should be able to take issue with his actions. Sorry, that's not how freedom of speech works.”

Obeidallah continues, “If you want to troll a president to apparently make others on the right happy, you can expect criticism. If you don't want criticism because you are painfully thin-skinned, then don't say ‘Let's go, Brandon’ on a live Christmas Eve special. It's as simple as that.”...

===

10 21

...

A federal lawsuit against the organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which has rattled hate groups and white supremacist leaders, goes to trial this month.

:{:{}:

The suit already has helped to dismantle some of America's most well-known white supremacist groups, and it has financially crippled one leader of the so-called "alt-right," the white supremacist and nationalist movement that came to prominence under President Donald Trump.

"It's very stressful, and very costly," said Richard Spencer, one of the defendants in the lawsuit and the former de facto leader of the "alt-right," in an interview. "This level of pressure is definitely scary."

Oath Keepers: Hack exposes law enforcement officers who signed up to join anti-government Oath Keepers

White supremacist recruiting: How podcasts have become the backbone for white supremacist recruiting

Video: 'White supremacy is terrorism': Biden condemns terrorism in address]

Lawsuits have long been used to dismantle or bankrupt the engines of hate in the U.S., including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.

"We know that civil lawsuits work in holding accountable extremists by going after their finances and their operations," said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of the nonprofit civil rights group Integrity First for America, which is backing the lawsuit. "That has been true for decades."

But even when those groups have been crippled, white supremacists have adapted, going underground and surfacing with new organizations and leaders.

An alleged conspiracy to Unite the Right

The Unite the Right rally, held on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, was a watershed moment for the white supremacist movement in the United States.

Coming the summer after the election of a president who kickstarted his political career by pushing a racist conspiracy theory, the event put American hatred on full display.

Clean-cut white men marched across the University of Virginia campus carrying tiki torches and chanting, "Jews will not replace us." Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, brandishing shields emblazoned with Nazi symbols, chanted racist and antisemitic slogans as they fought the removal of a Confederate monument.

Fights between white supremacists and counter-protesters broke out. Neo-Nazi James Fields drove his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer. Fields was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.[19 hurt some badly?]

Heather Heyer attack: Neo-Nazi James Fields gets life plus 419 years for murder in Charlottesville

Integrity First's wide-ranging lawsuit alleges that the leaders of the white supremacist movement engaged in a conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence against nonwhite and Jewish people during the Unite The Right rally.

"The violence in Charlottesville was no accident," the lawsuit states. "Defendants spent months carefully coordinating their efforts, on the internet and in person. They exhorted each other: 'If you want to defend the South and Western Civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August' and 'Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz.'"

:{:{}:

The lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages for the plaintiffs, with the amount to be decided by a jury.

The defendants are a "who's who" of the extremist right: Jason Kessler, a key organizer of the event; neo-Nazi podcaster Christopher Cantwell; Nathan Damigo, a white supremacist who founded the group Identity Evropa; Spencer; and a host of other extremist leaders and groups.

Richard Spencer: Suit has been 'crippling'

Despite briefly rising to prominence at the outset of the Trump presidency, the last four years have proven brutal for the "alt-right," a political movement that mixes racism, white nationalism, antisemitism and populism. That's thanks in part to the pressure of the case, filed in October 2017.

:{:{}:

Spencer has no illusions about the state of the movement he helped create. "The 'alt-right' is dead,"he said in an interview last month.

:{:{}:

Last week, Spencer acknowledged that the Integrity First lawsuit has taken a toll.

:{:{}:

Along with the constant stress, the lawsuit has cost thousands of dollars to defend, Spencer said. In June 2020, he told the court that the case has been "financially crippling." Now he's representing himself in court.

White nationalist Richard Spencer (center) and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Emancipation Park after the

The plaintiffs – a minister, students and other Charlottesville residents – have won default judgments against seven[1 did not show b/c dropped phone in toilet] of the 24 defendants, with the penalties to be decided by the jury. The court has issued five-figure fines against three other defendants for failing to produce evidence or show up for court hearings or depositions, court files show.

... usatoday

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/proud-boys-2652973184/

salon

The right-wing media company Censored.TV, launched by Proud Boys founder (and VICE Media co-founder) Gavin McInnes in 2019, is "laying off all its staff," according to one of its hosts, onetime alt-right superstar Milo Yiannopoulos. For the moment, however, the site remains live. Censored.TV website hosts content posted by various conservative personalities behind a paywall, accessible to subscribers who pay $10 a month.

It remains unclear whether the site will keep trying to produce content without paid staff or will close down. "Sad news! You may have heard the rumors that Censored.TV is laying off all its staff," Yiannopoulos wrote on Telegram on Wednesday morning. "This week, I was told there's no longer enough money for my producer, despite the thousands of subscribers I've brought into the network. I love Gavin and will always be grateful to him for hosting my show when no one else would. In the meantime, I am entirely without any regular source of income. ...They paid me late 11 months out of the last 12, so I suppose I should have seen it coming."

Yiannopoulos didn't return Salon's request for comment[twt

mcInnes' entire site will reportedly no longer have any production or editorial staff, which would seem to make producing new content problematic. "I am told the whole editorial team is gone, and the shows are all getting stripped back to bare bones,"

Yiannopoulos, who now identifies as "ex-gay," added. "Gavin has fought tooth and nail to keep the company alive, and I wish him well and pray for his continued success."Yiannopoulos hosted a Friday night program on Censored.TV called "Friday Night's All Right,"which frequently far-right ideology with absurd hijinks, such as inviting white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes on the show to pour alcohol on himself, in an apparent effort to lure subscribers.

Other "stars" who host programming on the Censored.TV platform include right-wing hoax artist Jacob Wohl, anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer and the anonymous online troll known as "CopperCab." Loomer didn't return Salon's request for comment on the future of her respective program on the website.

In a Wednesday afternoon interview with Salon, Wohl argued that Yiannopoulos' claims about the far-right media company lacked nuance and it was only Yiannopoulos' staff that was laid off due to subpar program ratings. "Censored TV isn't going anywhere," Wohl told Salon. "None of the staff, besides the staff that worked on Milo's show, have been, in fact, laid off or furloughed," he added.

Wohl further took problem with Yiannopoulos' claims that the network didn't pay out the far-right pundit on time for his work. "I have never had anything show up late from Censored TV," Wohl, known for his sticky relationship with the truth, further told Salon.

Yet, there is plenty of reason to take Wohl's claims with a grain of salt, as the duo (Yiannopoulos and Wohl) have become bitter enemies after Yiannopoulos threatened to kill Wohl associate, Jack Burkman's dog "Jackie Jr." over an unpaid speaking fee stemming from an appearance made at one of Wohl's meritless press conferences.

Late on Wednesday night, in an email to Salon, McInnes wrote, "completely false," apparently contradicting the claims made by Yiannopoulos.

McInnes started Censored.TV shortly after his sudden departure from Glenn Beck's The BlazeTV (Blaze Media) in December 2018, which was never clearly explained. "Blaze Media no longer has a relationship with Gavin McInnes, and per company policy, cannot comment on personnel matters," Beck's media group tweeted out at the time.

While the future of McInnes' media company hangs in the balance, the Proud Boys, the extremist men's group he founded, has etched its name into history. "Established in the midst of the 2016 presidential election by VICE Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys are self-described 'Western chauvinists' who adamantly deny any connection to the racist 'alt-right,'" the Southern Law and Poverty Center notes. McInnes left the Proud Boys in 2018, around the time the group began to be identified with street violence, and more than two years before it became infamous for numerous members' involvement in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

what the Far-Right Fascination With Pinochet’s Death Squads Should Tell Us

Christopher Ketcham

When Trumpists use images of the “Hoppean Snake,” offering “free helicopter rides,” they’re advocating a program of extermination.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/psychopath/

new study published in the latest edition of "Personality and Individual Differences" highlights the relationship between psychopathic tendencies, pathological personality traits and prejudicial views. Research suggests people with "calloused, deceitful, and manipulative interpersonal styles" are more prone to align with the beliefs of right-wing authoritarianism, according to PsyPost.

Sandeep Roy, a doctoral candidate with a major-applied focus on clinical psychology at the University of North Texas, explained the correlation between the two.

"My interest in the relationship between pathological personality traits, such as those captured by psychopathy, and prejudicial tendencies originated from my experiences working with offenders in the Arizona correctional system prior to graduate school," said Roy.

He added, "I noticed offenders who were elevated in psychopathic propensities, as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003), frequently used racial epithets to denigrate me and other staff. When I began studying this personality disorder more in my graduate training, I noticed a paucity of literature relating psychopathy to prejudice."

Roy went on to explain what inspired his research as he noted his concern about the uptick in "hate-based violence" in recent years. The study focused on the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale-Short Form (SRP-SF) which broke psychopathy into four distinct categories: "a manipulative and deceptive interpersonal style, callousness and lack of empathy, impulsivity, and overt antisocial tendencies."

"Given the increase in hate-based violence in the last few years, I wanted to explore if certain personality traits traditionally studied in the realm of clinical psychology may be predictive of prejudice and provide empirical research on this understudied topic," he explained. "Psychopathy is particularly relevant to prejudice given that facets of the disorder, such as callousness or lack of empathy, are predictive of prejudicial tendencies."

The latest research findings are said to align with previous studies conducted in Austria which highlighted how some people with seemingly "dark" personality traits had an increased likelihood to support right-wing political views and beliefs.

Roy's research also noted a direct correlation between psychopathic tendencies judgmental views. During an interview with with the publication, Roy further explained his findings.

Roy said, "The findings of the study suggest that psychopathic traits, particularly the calloused and deceptive traits, are robustly associated with the tendency to prefer a society that keeps marginalized groups low in status and power and are also predictive of the propensity to use aggression towards violators of traditional social norms, both of which are salient predictors of a variety of prejudicial attitudes."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Peter Brimelow

Brimelow wrote four op-eds for the Caller in 2017. He is a “zealous promoter of white-identity politics”whose anti-immigrant website VDare.com is “popular with the alt-right” and, by Brimelow’s own admission, publishes white nationalist writers, according to The Washington Post. Brimelow was a guest at the home of Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s chief economic advisor, in August. His first piece for the Caller, in March 2017, defended Rep. Steve King’s (R-IA) racist remark that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

Jason Kessler

The Caller :{contracted:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-numeric:normal;text-decoration-skip-ink:none"):}: with :{Kessler}: in spring of 2017 “to contribute reportage,” and he produced three pieces for the site. The Caller suspended its relationship with him in May 2017 after ProPublica reported that Kessler “is supportive of white supremacist groups” and had “praised fascist and racist organizations.” Kessler subsequently organized the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, which featured white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The site removed Kessler’s :{author page}: and all his pieces shortly after Media Matters reached out for comment about his relationship with the site.

Ian Smith

Smith wrote dozens of op-ed pieces for the Caller between 2014 and 2017, many of which call for harsher restrictions on immigration. Following Trump’s election, he joined the Department of Homeland Security, where he attended White House meetings on immigration policy, before resigning last month “after he was confronted about his ties to white nationalist groups.” Smith had also written for National Review and The Hill“during the period he was in communication with white-supremacist groups,” the Postreported.

Milo Yiannopoulos

In November 2017, the Caller published what it described as the “first installment in [a] new weekly column” from Yiannapoulos, a notorious troll who worked with the “alt-right” to smuggle white nationalist ideas into Breitbart.com articles. Following an outcry, Yiannopoulos and the Daily Caller’s opinion editor, Robert Mariani, were fired.

Moses Apostaticus

In August 2016, the Caller published a piece by the pseudonymous writer Moses Apostaticus titled “The Alt-Right: Young White Men Sick of Being Hated,” in which he criticized the idea that “white men being as proud of their race and identity as black men or white women is profoundly disturbing.” He contributed more than 20 op-eds to the website over the next eight months, under headlines like “Go Home, Barry Soetoro” and “Donald Trump Is America’s Julius Caesar.” In May, Vox.com’s Jane Coaston pointed out Apostaticus’ history of anti-Semitic commentary.

Ilana Mercer

The Caller published roughly 30 pieces from Mercer between December 2016 and November 2017. Her first piece, “The Curious Case of America’s Waning Whites,” argued that white birth rates are declining due in part to “systemic racial demonization” of poor whites. And her last, “Why Hatred of Whites is Here To Stay,”pushed the myth that white South Africans are experiencing genocide. The SPLC previously reported on Mercer’s writing for the Caller.

Ian Miles Cheong

A former Daily Caller contributor who last wrote for the site in May, Cheong “appeared on an alt-right podcast two months ago alongside hosts from the white supremacist podcast network The Right Stuff during which he told the hosts that he supported both nationalism and socialism,” according to Right Wing Watch.

Dave Brooks (added 5/2/2019)

In April 2019, Daily Caller News Foundation managing editor Dave Brooks was fired after BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray inquired about email correspondence suggesting he had contacts with white nationalists. The emails show that after Breitbart fired Katie McHugh for bigoted tweets, Brooks asked her whether she would “have any interest in working for [white nationalist publication American Renaissance] if I talked to Richard?” and saying that “I also know [white nationalist] Jared Taylor has been looking for an investigative reporter.” Brooks told Gray, “I am not friends, professionally or personally, with these people. I inquired on [McHugh’s] behalf through people I knew, and I haven't spoken to any of them in years.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/what-the-kenosha-shooter-tells-us-about-donald-trumps-america

C d V

Events this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, are no surprise. They follow an all-too familiar social script in America.

On Wednesday, a 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin from his home in Antioch, Illinois, not far away. Rittenhouse did this in response toonline appeals from a right-wing militia group to “protect” businesses, property and lives in Kenosha from “rioters.” In reality, the protests in Kenosha over the last week have come in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man who was unarmed and shot seven times in front of his children. Blake is reportedly now paralyzed and handcuffed to a hospital bed. There are credible reports that at least some of the violence in Kenosha has been committed by white supremacists or other right-wing agitators who are trying to discredit and undermine peaceful protests against police brutality and other forms of social injustice.

Rittenhouse was armed with an AR-15 military-style rifle. Under the laws of Illinois, where he lives, Rittenhouse is too young to own such a weapon. He also violated the law by traveling across state lines with a firearm.

As shown by his Facebook page and other social media, Rittenhouse was obsessed with guns and the police. He also supports the Blue Lives Matter movement — an implicitly racist response to the human and civil rights campaign Black Lives Matter.

rittenhouse is also an ardent Trump supporter. There is evidence that he was in the front row at a Trump rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

Vice interviewed several former high school classmates of Rittenhouse and they describe a young person indoctrinated by the right-wing media machine:

Kyle Rittenhouse loved cops, guns, President Trump, and “triggering the libs,” according to some of his former classmates at Lakes Community High School in Lake County, Illinois. His clothes were often branded with pro-police slogans, and he carried a Blue Lives Matter phone case, one student said.

Some of his classmates joked that he’d be a mass shooter one day. “I personally believe he went to Wisconsin with the intent to kill,” said one former classmate, who asked not to be identified out of fear for their safety….

Rittenhouse was also known as a “ride or die” Trump supporter. “If you said anything bad about Trump, he’d threaten you,” Joe said. In January, Rittenhouse even traveled to Iowa, where he had front row seats at a Trump rally, Buzzfeed reported. “Kyle was the type of kid to wear a MAGA hat or other apparel just for attention, or to “trigger” people,” Joe added.

Another one of Rittenhouse’s classmates said he used to refer to the school, located in a Chicago suburb, as “libtard af.”

“Kyle was kind of shy from what I remember, but he was definitely in your face and pushed his views hella,” they said. “Like one of those kids that liked ‘triggering libtards.'”

In Kenosha, Rittenhouse wandered through the crowds of protesters and sought to ingratiate himself with local police officers and other law enforcement. They appeared to be receptive to Rittenhouse’s overtures. As police have consistently done when white right-wing militias and other white right-wing extremists have appeared at protests against police brutality or the Trump regime, local cops evidently viewed Kyle Rittenhouse as one of the “good guys.”

Later in the evening, Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot and killed two protesters, and injured another, in a series of confrontations whose precise details remain unclear. It appears from video collected by the New York Times that the second and third shootings occurred as people tried to detain him for having initially shot a man in the head, killing him.

After these shootings, Rittenhouse ran away and apparently trying to surrender to police, who ignored him. He then escaped to his mother’s home in Illinois, where he was arrested on Thursday by local law enforcement.

Rittenhouse’s right-wing defenders are predictably claiming that his actions were all in “self-defense.” As legal experts have pointed out, Rittenhouse acted in a premeditated manner by going to Kenosha with a high-powered rifle and looking for trouble. Any such claim of self-defense is highly dubious.

Can you imagine what would have happened if Kyle Rittenhouse were Black or brown or Muslim? Again, the script is well-worn and obvious, but its truth must still be highlighted because of what it says about the color line and justice in America. In that scenario, the mainstream media, (white) politicians and others would of course be summoning a great moral panic about “bad culture” and “terrorism” and “social pathologies.”

With Kyle Rittenhouse there will be no such breathless news coverage with its questions such as:

Who, how and what is radicalizing white men to commit such acts of domestic terrorism and mass shootings?
What is Donald Trump’s role in encouraging political and other violence by white men and boys? What of Fox News and the broader right-wing echo chamber?
Is something wrong with the white family? Why are their sons and men so violent?
What should law enforcement and white politicians do about white crime?
Where are the white fathers in the white home?
When will white leadership step up and stop white right-wing domestic terrorism?
Is white American culture pathological? Why are white people so violent?

There are other parts of this cultural script as well.

When innocent Black and brown people are killed by police or white vigilantes, every part of their lives is publicly scrutinized in order to make them, the victims, responsible for their own murders.

Kyle Rittenhouse will be humanized and depicted as a tragic soul. Perhaps as a cherubic innocent or a “good kid” who somehow went wrong despite his parents’ best efforts. There will be calls for empathy and sympathy because Rittenhouse is “just a child” and we should respect his and the family’s privacy during this horrible time.

Trayvon Martin was 17 years old, the same age as Rittenhouse is now, when he was killed. Tamir Rice was only 12. Black children and other young people are seen, in the white gaze, as somehow always being “adults.”

The “adultification” of Black children and the infantilizing of white men — Donald Trump’s adult sons are frequently described by the news media as “kids” or “boys” — is one of the most obvious and insidious ways through which white privilege works in America for the purposes of legitimizing police and other violence against innocent people.

As I wrote here at Salon in 2015:

When a white person commits an act of mass violence he or she is “a lone gunman,” “mentally ill” or “disturbed.” White men commit a disproportionate percentage of the mass shootings and domestic terrorism in the United States. Yet their actions are never taken to be reflective of white men as a group. The mere suggestion of this basic fact is met with outrage by Republicans and the right-wing news entertainment complex. However, when an “Arab” or a “Muslim” commits a crime, said event is processed by the White Gaze as an indictment of an entire population and to summon the bogeyman of “Muslim terrorism.”In all, whiteness is freedom from collective responsibility and indictment; to be the Other is an a priori assumption where the actions of one non-white person means that all members of the group should be punished and made suspect.

Kyle Rittenhouse’s apparent vigilantism and political violence are the logical and predictable result of the energies summoned up by Donald Trump and his agents.

Trump, his regime and their compliant news media have repeatedly depicted nonwhite people, Democrats, liberals, progressives, Black Lives Matter supporters, anti-fascists and the majority of Americans who oppose him as un-American “terrorists” who should be destroyed.

Trump, the Republican Party, and their media use “stochastic terrorism” to encourage such violence while denying responsibility for what follows.

The shootings in Kenosha occurred simultaneously with this week’s ghoulish, racist, lie-filled, death-cult celebration at the Republican National Convention, which should be no surprise. Kyle Rittenhouse may have imagined himself to be a great soldier in Trump’s personal army as he waded through a sea of “evildoers.”

New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz describes this dangerous situation:

Before Trump’s emergence, some of the most powerful interest groups within the GOP coalition already viewed the Democratic Party as a threat so catastrophic the imperative of keeping it away from power would justify most any means of resistance.

Trump has certainly cultivated his party’s authoritarian elements more energetically — and delegitimized his opposition more shamelessly — than any other 2016 presidential candidate was liable to do. But regardless, thebasic fact remains that the GOP is — and has been — dominated by a movement that sees the Democratic Party as an internal enemy of the United States and any election that a Democratic president wins as illegitimate by definition

In sum, Kyle Rittenhouse channeled the juvenile, lethal, immature and simple-minded masculine fantasies of fascism — and he represents a broader cultural and political crisis in America in other ways as well.

Rittenhouse’s apparent shooting spree in Kenosha exemplifies the way that Donald Trump has served as a type of permission function for the darkest forces in American society by continually encouraging violent and other anti-social behavior by his followers. It would seem that Kyle Rittenhouse was listening closely.

As the United States further succumbs to Trump’s neofascist authoritarian movement, historian Timothy Snyder’s warnings about paramilitaries and police become even more ominous. He wrote this in his recent book “On Tyranny”:

Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

Kyle Rittenhouse is only 17, but that too is instructive. He is an example of how the average age of right-wing extremists is decreasing. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that recent incidents of far-right violence have involved perpetrators with an average age of about 26, “markedly younger than white supremacist killers who came before them.” As with radical Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida, social media and other online technologies are being used to radicalize (white) right-wing extremists in the Age of Trump.

Christian Picciolini, a former extremist and the founder of the global disengagement network called the Free Radicals Project, explained this process of radicalization to Salon via email:

The pressure cooker America is dealing with today is the culmination of 400 years of human rights violations by white supremacists against marginalized and disenfranchised American people being swept under the rug. To top it off, for the last four years we have an administration that is working against any progress that has been made toward equity and a dialogue of progress, in many cases putting forth outright white nationalist policies in the face of that progress. Now, we’re facing a dire multi-layered situation with protests against those racist policies and the killing of unarmed black Americans, a heated election coming up, mass job loss and economic hardship, and a pandemic with no real end in sight.

All this uncertainty and raw emotion and fear, not to mention the plethora of guns and vigilantism occurring on the streets, plus the propaganda, fake news, and misinformation radicalizing people who are spending most of their time online these days, I fear we are in a critical juncture for the future of our nation.

As Election Day 2020 approaches, there will be more political violence by right-wing extremists. Such violence will be committed by random individuals, as well as coordinated by militias and other paramilitary groups. The goal will be to create widespread mayhem and upheaval in order to keep Donald Trump’s white supremacist, authoritarian regime in power indefinitely.

Even if Trump is defeated on Election Day and leaves office peacefully in January, his foot soldiers and other fanatics will not go away. They will fight a rearguard action against Joe Biden’s administration and the multiracial democracy it represents.Kyle Rittenhouse’s alleged actions are another warning of what awaits us in the months and years ahead, a reality for which most Americans are not prepared. Whether Donald Trump wins or loses in November, his most extreme loyalists will still be with us, seeking to exact revenge and make Trump’s nightmarish vision of America into reality.

---

https://www.thetrace.org/2020/06/boogaloo-gun-ammunition-marketing-facebook-instagram/

in mid March, Fenix Ammunition, an ammunition manufacturer in Michigan, saw its daily online sales rise from :{$4,000 to $40,000:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

The coronavirus pandemic had :{boosted demand for guns:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: and ammunition around the country, and Fenix was reaping the fruits of the national following it has cultivated since its 2016 launch. In addition to record high civilian demand, Fenix also counted at least three local police departments, a law enforcement training center, and KelTec, one of the :{leading rifle manufacturers:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in America, among its clients.

But Fenix’s March profits were also driven by an aggressive social media campaign led by its owner, Justin Nazaroff.

For months, Nazaroff had been posting memes to his company’s Facebook and Instagram pages referencing the “boogaloo,” slang for the armed uprising that a loose assortment of preppers, Second Amendment activists, and anti-government extremists is getting ready for — and in some cases trying to accelerate.

“I’ll be honest, it drives sales,” Nazaroff said in April of his company’s marketing practices. “People think it’s funny. People click on boogaloo memes. It’s something that gun people enjoy joking about.”

“You can look up any firearms social media influencer and probably find them using the term boogaloo at some point in time,” he added. Nazaroff cut off communication after a police department notified him of our records request seeking information about sales to Fenix and emails referencing boogaloo.

The word itself is a reference to the 1984 movie, “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” but the imagined sequel would be a second civil war. Sometimes re-tooled as “big luau” or “big igloo” (adherents often don floral Hawaiian shirts or insignia bearing cartoon igloos), the concept :{reportedly}: originated on 4chan, the anonymous image board that’s long been a meeting place for the alt-right. While some spreaders of boogaloo memes claim to see them as provocative fun, their mushrooming popularity has concerned experts on extremism. They fear that the concept has re-energized the American militia movement and given anti-government extremists a rallying cry.

Boogaloo is not a true movement in the sense that there is little — if any— structure or leadership. Adherents even seem to have :{different visions:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: of what a civil war would accomplish. But to the extent that there is a central idea animating the boogaloo’s largely white, right-wing supporters, it’s that armed combatants will kick off a full-fledged rebellion to topple the federal government. “They don’t have a lot of beliefs other than they really like guns, they really hate cops, and they want some sort of revolution,”said Megan Squire, a computer scientist who researches online extremism at Elon University. “You pretty much have to be weapons-trained and interested in weapons to be a boogaloo adherent.”

In the past month, at least seven people with boogaloo ties have been arrested for attempting or carrying out violence at recent protests. On June 6, Air Force Sergeant Steve Carillo allegedly shot two Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s deputies, killing one. He was arrested after scrawling the word “boog” in blood on the hood of a stolen car alongside phrases from memes that are popular in boogaloo groups. Carillo was also charged with shooting two guards outside an Oakland, California, courthouse during protests a week earlier. One died. That morning, Carillo had posted to Facebook: “Go to the riots and support our own cause. Show them the real targets. Use their anger to fuel our fire. Think outside the box. We have mobs of angry people to use to our advantage.” A boogaloo patch was recovered from the van that he used that day. A suspected accomplice was also arrested after confessing to the FBI.

On the day of the Oakland shooting, :{three men}: were arrested in Las Vegas on suspicion of possessing homemade explosives and on charges of conspiracy to commit an act of domestic terrorism near protests. Though they have since pleaded not guilty, the criminal complaint against them noted boogaloo ties. And, in :{South Carolina}:, two men with boogaloo connections were separately arrested on charges of looting and attempting to incite a riot.

At least two more boogaloo supporters were arrested for the possession of illegal firearms in :{Oklahoma}: and :{Tennessee}:. In :{Colorado}:, police seized multiple weapons from one boogaloo supporter at a protest, but did not make an arrest.

On June 26, Attorney General William Barr created a task force aimed at fighting extremism, and in a memo he singled out boogaloo supporters, as well as members of the left-leaning antifa.

Even before the protests, several boogaloo supporters had attempted to incite violence. In March, a Missouri man who planned to bomb a hospital in what he called “operation boogaloo” shot and killed himself before he could be arrested by the FBI. In April, a member of several boogaloo Facebook groups was arrested in Texas, live streaming as he searched for police to kill.

“Boogaloo boys,” as they call themselves, have been spotted at protests following the killing of George Floyd, both marching with demonstrators and as counter-protesters. Some have also been :{discussing:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: how to use the protests to encourage violence. The varied response is indicative of supporters’ lack of a unifying ideology.

Their fixation on guns and tactical gear makes boogaloo supporters attractive clients for gun sellers. And hashtagged social media posts are an effective way for weapons dealers to boost their brands. Firearms sellers are not allowed to purchase ads on Facebook, though some have:{found ways around this}:, but they can use their official pages to reach niche audiences.

When COVID-19 lockdowns seemed to validate adherents’ expectations of government overreach, use of the term boogaloo exploded on mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Reddit. In April, the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit that monitors activity on major online platforms, documented 125 boogaloo Facebook groups with over 72,000 members. More than 60 percent had been created since February — the same time that Fenix’s use of boogaloo-related hashtags peaked, according to data from the company’s Instagram page.

Around the same time, a review posted on Fenix’s Facebook page revealed that the company was sending stickers to online customers that featured the “boogaloo flag,” a black and white American flag with a floral Hawaiian stripe and a cartoon igloo instead of stars. When contacted, the reviewer said he had found the company by searching for competition-grade ammunition, and that the sticker helped cement his loyalty to Fenix.

[pix]A Fenix Ammunition Instagram post that blends boogaloo memes and marketing. [Instagram / fenixammo]

A December 19, 2019, post on Fenix’s Instagram page, which has nearly 34,000 followers, shows the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster photoshopped so that he’s holding an AR-15 and wearing night-vision goggles. “B is for Boogaloo” is written over the bright yellow background. “And V is for Virginia,” read Fenix’s caption, which went on to offer “free shipping on ammunition, body armor and medical products” sent to the state. The offer lasted through a January 20 rally to oppose new gun laws, one that sparked a state of emergency order from Governor Ralph Northam as :{armed militias}: and white nationalist groups implored their members to attend the demonstration.

In the days before the rally, members of a neo-Nazi group called:{ The Base }:were arrested after federal agents said two of them discussed opening fire on the rally. An FBI affidavit claimed the group wanted to use the event to start the boogaloo, which some neo-Nazis see as a race war or civilizational collapse. There is no evidence that The Base acquired ammo from Fenix, and on June 25, Fenix posted on Instagram about our reporting, writing: “Our company wants nothing to do with anyone claiming to be a Nazi, or a white supremacist. We’ve banned people from our page for saying such things in the past and we’ll continue to do so in the future. The Boogaloo is for everyone. “

Since October 2019, Fenix has made over 100 posts using hashtags and imagery related to the boogaloo. Many were linked to events like the Virginia rally, national anti-lockdown demonstrations, and recent anti-racism protests. “This is what the politicians and media fear the most” read a June 5 post showing a diverse group of protesters holding a boogaloo flag on a city street.

In another post, Fenix responded to a suggestion that looters target white neighborhoods, like Novi, Michigan, the Detroit suburb where Fenix is located. The response included a picture of four high-powered guns with the comment “send bachelors.”

The Trace has identified 35 more dealers and manufacturers of firearms or tactical supplies across the country that have posted references to the boogaloo on social media. They range from small town stores to multi-million dollar manufacturers of AR-style weapons, like the South Carolina-based Palmetto State Armory.

Instagram search still recommended these #boogaloo-related hashtags on June 24.

We also reviewed the online presence of 548 federally licensed firearms dealers in Michigan, :{where armed protesters converged on the state Capitol}:, and identified 48 with active social media profiles. Six of those posted memes or hashtags referencing the boogaloo. Eight promoted insignia from militia groups like the Three Percenters, an armed anti-government group with chapters around the country. Another six promoted coronavirus conspiracy theories or encouraged disobedience against state lockdown measures. Three made suggestive posts about shooting looters during the protests

Instagram no longer allows searches for #boogaloo and some related hashtags on its site. However, as of June 24, if you typed #boogaloo into the search bar, it still autofilled suggestions of related hashtags. After being asked about this by The Trace, a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram and has been criticized for its :{failure}: to rein in boogaloo content, said, “The hashtag #boogaloomemes was already blocked and we’ve since further blocked #boogalooboys, #boogaloocrew, and #boogalootime given the amount of content using these hashtags that violated our policy.” The spokesperson added, “we continue to remove content using boogaloo and related terms when accompanied by statements and images depicting armed violence. We are also preventing these pages and groups from being recommended on Facebook.”

Boogaloo marketing isn’t limited to social media. Some companies, like Fenix, sell boogaloo-themed merchandise. For instance, in February, Palmetto State Armory sold a limited run of custom boogaloo-themed AK-47-style guns, finished with Hawaiian patterns, mimicking the shirts boogaloo supporters have adopted as an unofficial uniform. They also advertise boogaloo T-shirts on Facebook. Palmetto State Armory CEO Jamin McCallum did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

Hoplite Armor, a body armor manufacturer in Kalispell, Montana, sells a Hawaiian-patterned plate carrier — a kind of bullet-proof vest — as a part of its “Aloha Line” of products. The traditional flowers have been replaced with a blood-stained bauhinia flower, which adorns the Hong Kong flag frequently carried by protesters there.

During an interview, Hoplite’s owner, Lyman Bishop, said he was inspired to make the shirt on a trip to Hawaii, and not because of the boogaloo. Yet a September 27, 2019 Facebook post introducing the plate carrier was tagged with #boogaloo. The company’s page, with more than 142,000 followers, has continued to use the hashtag as well as associated language and imagery. Bishop is currently a long-shot candidate for governor of Montana on the Libertarian Party ticket, running on an apocalyptic platform that suggests violent secession.

In spite of significant anti-police sentiment among boogaloo boys, Fenix’s website lists four Michigan police departments as major clients, as well as the law enforcement training center at Schoolcraft College.

Records from police departments in the small cities of :{Dowagiac}: and :{Berkley}: showed receipts from Fenix totaling $4,899 and $18,076, respectively, since 2017. The Grosse Ile Police Department confirmed that it had records of purchases, but has yet to release them. The Northville Police Department denied buying ammunition from Fenix, and a records request returned no receipts from the company. The Schoolcraft training center confirmed it had purchased ammo from Fenix, but refused to say how much.

All of the organizations said they had no knowledge of Fenix’s support for boogaloo, and don’t have policies on checking suppliers’ social media accounts. Fenix’s social media posts have been largely pro-police, sprinkled with some criticism of police brutality, including the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.

Interviews with firearms dealers revealed a host of reasons for posting about the boogaloo or selling related merchandise.

Chris David, the owner of Route 6 Guns, a small shop in Torrington, Connecticut, said that he posts about boogaloo for his company’s 650-odd followers because he believes in the movement’s libertarian messaging. “It’s a lot more mainstream than I think people give the movement credit for because of the portrayal that it’s just this group of people that have these violent intentions, which is just not the case,” said David.

David successfully lobbied for a spot on a list of pro-boogaloo companies in one of Facebook’s largest boogaloo groups, which, as of June 8, no longer appears in Facebook searches. It’s unclear whether this is because the group was made secret or if it was taken down by Facebook.

All five firearms and armor dealers that agreed to be interviewed for this story denied that their posts should be interpreted as calls to violence. Nazaroff likened spreading the memes to being an ammunition seller: He said he’s aware of the possibility that his product may be used in violent crimes against innocent people. “That’s the nature of the product,” Nazaroff said. “There’s nothing to be done about that. It doesn’t mean that my company shouldn’t exist.”

“It’s literally an internet joke. It’s like ‘Harambe,’” said Dimitri Karras of Firearms Unknown, which sells “:{ghost guns}:,” unserialized but legal firearm parts that can be assembled by customers at home. “I’m a Marine who’s fought in two wars. I have a dark sense of humor. That’s just who I am.”

The use of humor to cover up intentions or shift the boundaries of acceptable discourse has a history in the alt right. In 2017, The Huffington Post published :{excerpts}: from the style guide for the Daily Stormer, one of the largest white supremacist websites, instructing supporters to employ jokes instead of screeds, noting that the latter may be a “turnoff” to potential converts.“The reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor,” it stated, “and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points.” According to historian Elaine Frantz Parsons, the use of :{humor}: as a way to destigmatize extremist ideologies dates back at least to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan.

Whether the inflammatory memes that boogaloo supporters share reflect their true beliefs can be hard to pin down — and some experts say that’s by design.

Nazaroff, for instance, said he considers himself a liberal libertarian and boogaloo “prepper.” He believes in the possibility of civil war, but like other arms dealers interviewed for this story, stressed that the memes shouldn’t be taken seriously. But Cassie Miller, a researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said: “They pretend that it’s a joke. In some ways that’s to conceal just how serious and sometimes dangerous the ideas that they’re pushing are."

===

why are i/we not using alt rt tag anymore?

maga hatters?

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/

trump trains?!

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/

no lnx pix twet

The term disinformation tends to conjure up images of Twitter bot armies with thick Russian accents, but the disinformation landscape in 2020 is a lot more complex. While Russia has great expertise in roiling U.S. political waters, it isn’t the only foreign actor in the disinformation and trolling games. The Oxford Internet Institute issued a report finding “evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns which have taken place in 70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28 countries in 2017.”Social media companies have removed content with disinformation campaigns originating in Saudi Arabia, China, and Iran.

Iranian Facebook post targeting Americans. (Source: Facebook)

But homegrown disinformation is a much bigger problem, starting with President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and extending into a vast network of pro-Trump super PACs, right-wing media outlets, and an organized army of MAGA warriors happy to amplify every lie, false conspiracy, and misdirection online. Domestic disinformers have adopted tactics deployed by Russia and other hostile actors in 2016, optimizing them for 2020.

The lessons of 2016 haven’t been lost on the legions of far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theorists who have their own web-based video and audio shows. With the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout posing threats to Trump’s reelection, the president’s online far-right boosters have taken up disinformation messaging designed to discredit the judgment of public health officials and scientists on the severity of the pandemic and the resulting COVID-19 disease. For instance, Rodney Howard-Browne, a Florida megachurch pastor who convened large church services in defiance of social distancing orders, claimed that the pandemic was “planned” at a 2019 New York event hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And Rick Wiles, a religious-right broadcaster and font of anti-Semitic lies, suggested that the coronavirus emergency may have been “staged” to shut down the U.S. (Despite ample documentation of Wiles’ conspiracy-mongering and anti-Semitism, he is regularly granted press credentials by both the White House and the Trump campaign.)

In fact, MAGA-world influencer Brenden Dilley, whose YouTube channel has more than 12,000 subscribers, laid bare the MAGA disinformation playbook last year when he baldly asserted, “It doesn’t have to be true; it just has to go viral.” In that episode of his show, he used the example of the false claim that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was then running for the Democratic presidential nomination, had a racist knick-knack on display in her kitchen. On a more recent edition of his YouTube show, he reiterated that reasoning when explaining why he was advancing a false story about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.

Right Wing Watch

@RightWingWatch

MAGA life coach Brenden Dilleypraises Trump for baselessly suggesting that Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of an intern: "It doesn't matter if it's true. This is how you fight back against people who are trying to destroy you."

Embedded video

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11:14 AM - May 4, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

180 people are talking about this

The Trump campaign and pro-MAGA super PACs have made it clear that the old rules of politics no longer apply, and their base now largely believes in an alternative reality. The president spreads and amplifies so much disinformation on his Twitter feed that it’s nearly impossible to keep up, and GOP elected officials for the most part now follow suit. Republican operatives have built disinformation tactics into their strategies.

Trump Campaign Facebook ad with misinformation.Facebook refused to take this ad down per their policy not to fact check political ads on their platform. (Source: Twitter, Judd Legum)

Trump’s online supporters can’t merely be dismissed as bots. His online fanbase is overamplified but made up of actual individuals happy to spend considerable time and resources getting pro-MAGA messages out into the ether. Social media researcher Erin Gallagher has a fascinating piece on #TrumpTrains, self-organized cells of Trump fans working in Twitter direct messaging groups to spread Trump’s rhetoric and recruit new supporters to the cause.Gallagher was able to get a #TrumpTrain “conductor” to go on the record about how the #TrumpTrains are organized, recruiting volunteers or “riders” to tweet pro-Trump content in large volume at the direction of “conductors.”

Facebook groups and pages are another hub for pro-Trump disinformation. Writing for Media Matters, social media researcher Natalie Martinez details how the far-right propaganda machine operates on Facebook, “On Facebook, right-wing meme pages play a vital role in condensing and recycling far-right talking points and keeping the MAGA base engaged online. These pages regularly post extremist content, arguably violating Facebook’s hate speech content policy, and often exploit tragic events in the news cycle, images of veterans, and violent anti-immigrant rhetoric for likes and shares.” Multiple candidates running for office as Republicans have been caught participating—some as page administrators—in right-wing Facebook groups.

===

***

audio: https://medium.com/team-human/the-undercurrent-of-extremism-with-brian-hughes-599ac1e56063

text:

https://medium.com/team-human/we-are-not-the-virus-we-are-the-kamikazes-dadae917e5a2

53:26

‘The Undercurrent of Extremism’ With Brian Hughes

On the underlying drive fueling so much of today’s violent extremism

Douglas Rushkoff

Apr 22

Playing for Team Human today, Graduate Assistant at the Polarization Extremism and Radical Innovation Lab at American University, Brian Hughes.

Hughes shares with us the underlying drive fueling so much of today’s more violent extremism along with how we can mitigate some of its impact. How can we reconcile issues of identity that are tied to structural conditions of racism and sexism? How do we achieve solidarity?

In his opening monologue, Rushkoff discusses how Covid-19 is a kamikaze attack of human biology against systems that threaten our very survival.

Read the written version of Rushkoff’s monologue on Medium:

https://medium.com/team-human/we-are-not-the-virus-we-are-the-kamikazes-dadae917e5a2

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/deradicalization-in-the-deep-south-how-a-former-neo-nazi-makes-amends/

Deradicalization in the Deep South: How a former neo-Nazi makes amends

Written by DJ Cashmere / YES! Magazine January 9, 2020

...But even as she was leaving, the movement was transforming. Quite intentionally, the neo-Nazis were becoming less obviously threatening in order to become more dangerous. AsChristian Picciolini, another formerwho was in the movement at the same time as Martinez, once told NPR, “our edginess, our look, even our language was turning away the average American White racist, people we wanted to recruit. So we decided then to grow our hair out, to stop getting tattoos that would identify us, to trade in our boots for suits and to go to college campuses and recruit there and enroll to get jobs in law enforcement, to go to the military and get training and to even run for office.”

Michael Jensen has spent the last five years studying individuals who have radicalized in the United States and committed illegal acts motivated by their extremist belief systems. A senior researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, his dataset stretches back to 1948 and has information on over 2,000 radicalized individuals. While it is not limited to any single ideology, one group stands out.

“Far-right perpetrators have committed more attacks in the United States than any other ideological group,” Jensen says.

When it comes to the most recent trends, he says, “what we’re seeing really is a movement towards more of an emphasis on this kind of mass casualty terrorism that’s being motivated by far-right extremist ideologies.”

Jensen’s assessment is echoed by several other institutions. A recent report by New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security Preparedness showed that more than half the suspects involved in 32 domestic terrorism incidents in 2018 were White supremacists. And a separate report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) concluded that right-wing extremists were responsible for all but one of the 50 domestic extremist-related killings in 2018.

The ADL report also noted that last year was the fourth deadliest in terms of domestic extremist-related deaths since 1970. In first place is 1995, due in large part to the Oklahoma City bombing, which Jensen identifies as a “big watershed event.” That attack caused an outpouring of research and law enforcement activity to be “focused on the extremist far right in the United States.” Accordingly, “we saw a number of law enforcement operations to disrupt the far right,” he says.

“All of that changed on Sept. 11.”

After the 9/11 attacks, the federal government focused its massive resources almost exclusively on preventing Islamist terror attacks. “All while that’s happening, the extremist far right is still very active in the United States,” Jensen says, adding “they’re not getting the attention that jihadists get.” Until recently, Jensen adds, the media was following suit, making it harder for him and his team to even identify far-right crimes in the first place.

In 2009, a security analyst at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security named Daryl Johnson wrote a report that stated right-wing extremism was “likely to grow in strength,” potentially driven bysuch factors as gun restrictions, economic uncertainty, immigration, a perceived rising influence of other countries that undermines American sovereignty, and the election of the first Black president. Republican lawmakers condemned the report and forced the department to retract it, ushering in an era of virtual silence on far-right violence, and of treating instances of far-right terrorism as hate crimes, which are classified as a lower priority and afforded fewer resources.

Even when the Obama administration reframed its counterterrorism work as “Countering Violent Extremism,” or CVE, few resources went to combatting right-wing extremism. In 2017, the administration issued a $400,000 grant to Life After Hate, a formers-led organization cofounded by Picciolini with which Martinez was volunteering at the time. (Neither is still involved with the group.) But the Trump administration changed the name of the administering office to the Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships, revoked the grant, and slashed the budget and staff.

It’s grueling work, and Martinez isn’t exempt from what she refers to as “fash fatigue”: the exhaustion that comes from fighting facism.

In October 2018, as domestic terrorism incidents continued to mount, they only received a cursory mention in the administration’s National Strategy for Counterterrorism. It wasn’t until the end of the summer of 2019 and the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, that Kevin McAleenan, then theActing Secretary of Homeland Security, issued a Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence that explicitly named White supremacist violence as a crucial threat to the nation. (McAleenan resigned Oct. 11, 2019.)

...

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GAME OVER?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/welcome-to-the-new-mainstream-gop-conservative-website-delivers-sobering-news-about-republicans-descent-into-the-alt-right/

no lnx

'Welcome to the new mainstream GOP': Conservative website delivers sobering news about Republicans' descent into the alt-right

Written by Alex Henderson November 27, 2019

Founded by Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol in December 2018, The Bulwark has become a refuge for conservatives who are disdainful of Donald Trump's presidency. And contributor Laura K. Field, in a November 27 article, delivers some sobering news to The Bulwark's right-wing anti-Trump readers: the alt-right fringe has become the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Most of The Bulwark's readers probably knew that already, but Field (who has held faculty positions at Georgetown University and American University) offers a lot of evidence to drive the point home. Under Trump, Field laments, alt-right figures like Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller have become "the face of today's conservatism and today's Republican Party."

Field demonstrates the prominence that extremists have achieved in the GOP by discussing an event held during Donald Trump Jr.'s recent book tour in support of "Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us." The writer notes that when the tour took Trump Jr. to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Trump Jr. and the group Turning Point USA were described as "mainstream conservatives" - and Trump Jr. was heckled by supporters of antisemite Nick Fuentes.

"This shift in language represents a victory for Don Jr., as well as for the extremists who attacked him," Field explains. "Now that Junior has been upstaged by the neo-fascist far right, he gets to be cast as mainstream. And if Turning Point USA counts as establishment, it means that the extremists aren't so far out there anymore. It's a win-win for them all."

Field goes on to say that many of the people who defined "movement conservatism" in the past have been marginalized in the modern GOP.

"You don't have to lionize the old GOP to see that many of the think tanks, magazines and intellectuals that made up movement conservatism since the Reagan years have slid into irrelevance under Trump, while talk radio and Fox News have grown in influence," Field observes. "Individuals and organizations dedicated to defending Trump and promoting Trumpism have prospered."

Field also laments that recently, "e-mails were leaked that definitively proved Stephen Miller's white supremacy, and not a single Republican member of Congress has joined the call for his resignation."

The leaked e-mails that Field is referring to were exchanges between Miller and journalist Katie McHugh, formerly of Breitbart News, in 2015 and 2016. Some of the e-mails show Miller recommending that McHugh use white nationalist websites like VDare and American Renaissance as sources of information.

Field wraps up her article on a troubling note, warning that extremists such as Fuentes won't be disappearing from the GOP anytime soon.

"The extreme environmentalists and Green New Dealers are fighting for the future of life on this planet; Nick Fuentes and his ilk want a white Christian ethnostate," Field writes. "That conservatives today aren't reeling at this difference tells us all we need to know about the successes of the alt-right…. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new mainstream GOP."

IRL // provoc

1119

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/opinion/ilhan-omar-rashida-tlaib.html

no lnx

Opinion

The Online Cacophony of Hate Against Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib

We found that they were in the cross hairs of a tiny band of Islamophobes long before Trump’s tweets.

By Lawrence Pintak, Jonathan Albright and Brian J. Bowe

Dr. Pintak, Dr. Albright and Dr. Bowe are the authors of a study by the Social Science Research Council on anti-Muslim sentiment on social media during the 2018 midterm elections.

Nov. 5, 2019

Donald Trump has made the demonization of Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, a key element of his 2020 re-election strategy. But the targeting of Ms. Omar and her fellow Democrat and Muslim member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, started as soon as they became candidates.

We published a study this week that found that, around the 2018 midterm elections, Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib were in the cross hairs of a tiny band of Islamophobes, long before Mr. Trump elevated them in his tweetstorms, and likely before they were even on his radar.

We studied more than 113,000 tweets, posted from early September 2018 to the weekend before the election, that mentioned Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Omar Qudrat, a Republican congressional candidate in California who lost his race.

Ilhan Omar was the prime target. Roughly half of the 90,000 tweets mentioning her included hate speech or Islamophobic or anti-immigrant language. Put another way, almost 60 percent of the network of accounts that mentioned or tagged her had posted at least one tweet containing hate speech or overt disinformation. Almost one-third of the tweets mentioning Ms. Tlaib were Islamophobic or xenophobic. Even Mr. Qudrat, a former military terrorism prosecutor, faced online harassment.

The sheer number and proportion of negative tweets indicate that much of the targeting was done by people or organizations from far outside the districts in which the candidates ran. Our review of profiles of those accounts, which included 2,354 that attacked both women, bears this out.

But the most striking thing we uncovered happened in the months after the election. When we revisited these accounts in July, a significant portion of them were simply gone. Some had been suspended by Twitter for violating standards, such as posting inappropriate content or showing characteristics of bots. Others had been deleted by the account holders. Malicious actors will often remove the accounts that make up their bot networks — like drug dealers tossing burner phones — to cover their tracks.

During the height of the campaign, there were 50,699 accounts in Ilhan Omar’s Twitter network. By July, 14 percent of those accounts were missing. Similarly, in Ms. Tlaib’s network, 11.9 percent of accounts in the network were either suspended or deleted. Still others had gone largely dormant.

A large percentage of these trolls were likely bots or automated accounts run by people, organizations or state actors seeking to spread political propaganda and hate speech. That’s based on telltale iconography, naming patterns, webs of linkages and the breadth of the postelection scrubbing.

This all suggests that this Islamophobic and xenophobic narrative largely originated with a handful of bigoted activists and was then amplified by vast bot networks whose alleged owners never existed. “Ordinary” account holders, many retweeting just one post, were then swept up in the rancorous energy of the crowd.

Yet the manufactured outrage produced by this anti-Muslim cabal turned what was supposed to be Twitter’s venue for social discourse into a one-way digital highway of harassment and hate.

Key themes included Muslims as subhumans or “Trojan horses” seeking to impose Shariah law on America. Ms. Omar’s hijab was a lightning rod; so was Ms. Tlaib’s Palestinian heritage. Forty percent of those attacking Ms. Omar for her comments on Israel also used overtly Islamophobic or xenophobic language, like “@IlhanMN I stand with Israel and denounce Mohammad as a false prophet and Islam the work of Satan.”

“Terrorist” and “jihadi” were among the most frequently occurring words in tweets tagging Ms. Tlaib. Disinformation and unproven allegations originating on obscure blogs, including stories that Ms. Omar supported female genital mutilation and had married her brother, were widely retweeted and picked up by an array of right-wing sites such as PJ Media.

We found something else that was striking. America’s anti-Muslim narrative has long been shaped by an Islamophobic lobby that the Center for American Progress has called “Fear Inc.” Most of those “old school” figures were absent from the hate-filled narrative around Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib, eclipsed by a new cadre of internet-savvy actors that have seized control of the anti-Muslim narrative, including the provocateur Laura Loomer, who has been banned from most social media platforms; Alphanews.com, a crowdsourced Minnesota aggregator; and an array of bots that mask the real faces behind them.

Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, recently announced that the platform would refuse to accept most political advertising, because it “brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.”

But paid advertising is just part of the problem. The online cacophony of hate Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib encountered had nothing to do with political ads. The extent to which trolls controlled the narrative on Twitter, at no cost, raises questions about the nature of public discourse in the age of social media and the challenges for Muslims and candidates from other minority groups seeking a voice in the political process in the 2020 election cycle.

There was no magic to what we did. If we can find the trolls, so can Twitter. If we can single out those using hate speech, so can Twitter. If we can map the bot networks, so can Twitter. This is about the platform taking responsibility and systematically enforcing its own standards, not passing the buck and blaming advertising while ignoring the fact that it is the true currency of Twitter — the tweets themselves — that bring “significant risks to politics” and “the lives of millions.”

Lawrence Pintak (@lpintak) is a professor at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University and author of “America and Islam: Soundbites, Suicide Bombs and the Road to Donald Trump.” Jonathan Albright (@d1gi) is the director of digital forensics at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Brian J. Bowe (@brianjbowe) is an associate professor at Western Washington University.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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no lnx

Here’s how techno-utopianism decayed into alt-right madness

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon October 9, 2019

New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz put his sanity on the line in order to take a deep dive into two parallel worlds: the reactionary universe of the alt-right, and the technological triumphalist paradigm of Silicon Valley. The latter is responsible for selling us a utopian vision of the internet that would (supposedly) bind humanity, yet which instead has stoked political division and created, indirectly, the alt-right. In “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation,” Marantz offers readers an explanation as to how social networks created by idealist techies were co-opted by a rat’s nest of bigots, trolls, and fascists, who exploited the supposed “neutrality” of platforms to spread hate.

Marantz spoke to Salon about his new book and how the internet is changing democracy. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This is a book about how the advent of social media really opened up the social and political discourse in this country to the people that Hillary Clinton aptly deemed a “basket full of deplorables.”

I think the deplorable part was more apt than the basket part. But, yeah.

How much do you think tech matters in the rise of not just the alt-right, but Donald Trump?

Tech matters hugely for the rise of Trumpism and for nationalist populism around the world. That’s not to say that it’s the only source of energy for those movements, and it’s also not to say that there aren’t huge benefits to opening up discourse in all kinds of ways.

I don’t want to paint a monochromatic picture or say that tech has only led to deleterious outcomes or antisocial outcomes, but I think for too long there was this tacit assumption among tech bros, and also just among the general public, that on the whole the internet would make the world more open and connected and set us all free and make it more fair and tolerant and generally be pro-social. And I think we’ve seen pretty definitively that that hasn’t entirely been the case.

What I like about your book is you really do talk about some of the historical antecedents to the rise of social media. This is something that I’ve been boring my friends with, pointing out, you know, it’s not like the printing press didn’t lead to violence, too.

Exactly, right. In fact, it led to many of the same kinds of violence, antisemitism, bigotry, and misinformation. None of this is new. It’s just that we’ve kind of forgotten those lessons of history.

As you said, the tech industry was very idealistic, promoting the idea that social media would connect people, would help spread good ideas. The Arab Spring was a big marketing event for social media, even as it was a real thing in the real world. Why do you think there was an unwillingness to look at the possibility that it would also give rise to hate speech, violence, bigotry, things like that?

Part of it is just that it’s uncomfortable and unpleasant to think about bigotry and hate speech. So people would rather not do it.

I’ve faced that even while reporting this book. I like to think that the book is engaging and even darkly funny. But I’ve had people indicate that they are scared to read it, because they would just rather not think about this stuff.

I think that the only way out is through, which is why I used James Baldwin as an epigraph. Nothing can be changed until it’s faced.

I happen to think this stuff isn’t as depressing as people worry it’ll be, but that’s a separate topic. But yeah, it’s not fun to think about.

Also, we tend to get stuck on this dichotomy of optimism versus pessimism, and I think that’s just the wrong way of thinking about these things. A more useful frame than either optimism or pessimism is what I refer to as contingency.

Tell me more about that.

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I borrowed that concept from the philosopher Richard Rorty, who wrote one of my favorite books called “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.” And contingency, boiling it down a lot, just means we don’t know what’s going to happen. We can’t have a teleological view of the future. We can’t assume that things are pre-ordained to happen in a certain way. We have to look at the facts as they are and make an informed judgment about whether we’re going to inevitably have a more perfect union and inevitably make progress.

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Often we just assume that those things will just happen inevitably. A more contingent view of history would suggest that they don’t happen automatically, and they don’t happen at all if you don’t work for them to happen.

In this book, you often explore your own emotions about institutions versus the “disruption” of the tech industry,and express some longing I think for some of the gatekeeping power that old institutions had before the time of social media. Having gone through the entire process of writing and publishing and now marketing this book, where do you fall on that scale right now?

I see it as a trade-off. By no means do I want to pretend that the whole gatekeeper model was perfect or even very good. It was flawed in all kinds of ways. It was run by upper middle-class white men who didn’t have a very nuanced view of the country for the most part. There were all kinds of problems with corporate control. Nothing about our past should be construed as a golden age.

It’s just that when you tear down all those structures, and don’t even try to even pretend to think about what’s going to replace them, or you replace them with something worse, then the problems don’t get better. They get worse.

Before even there was a term, the alt-right, feminists and social justice activists were observing that social media was allowing uglier forms of bigotry to flourish. A lot of the blame was kind of put on the white maleness of the tech industry, that there was a blindness of the people running it. How much do you give credence to that?

I definitely give credence to it. I think the basic critique that you can’t really readily empathize with people if you don’t have representation of all people within your company, I think is an apt critique.

But I don’t think that it would solve everything if the tech companies had diversity and inclusion statistics that accurately reflected the country. I think that would help, but I think the problems are deeper and more systemic than that.

The discourse around this particular problem has often been one of ignorance, right? There’s a sense that a lot of the white male leaders of the tech industry have progressive values.

Some of them.

On the other hand, you ran into Peter Thiel, at the DeploraBall.Do you think that’s an element of the problem right now? That we just have bad actors in tech leadership?

Well, my critique of Peter Thiel in the book was not based on his support for Trump, although I find his support for Trump extremely regrettable. My critique of him was based on the fact that I tried to engage him in a dialogue about the fundamental problems at Facebook, which arguably could not have become as successful as it is without his early investment. And instead of answering my critiques, he just left and didn’t respond to me at all. And didn’t respond to followup questions during the fact checking process.

So my critique of him is really more substantive. I mean there are lots of Trump supporters in the country, Peter Thiel being one of them. I can debate with them or decry their views, but really my issues with Thiel are that he got rich off of Facebook. I’m just curious whether he knew that there would be all these negative impacts on our society, in addition to the positive ones. And if he did know, why he didn’t do more to stop it?

Shifting over to the systematic issue, in this book you analyzed the concept ofvirality, which you frame in a Darwinian sense. Could you explain that more for some of the readers of Salon?

There’s this concept of the old gatekeeper outlets, specifically the New York Times, that they give you all the news that’s “fit to print”. It struck me that that word, “fit”, has the unintended double meaning. They mean “fit” as in what’s appropriate.

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But social media algorithms, for the most part, are not concerned with what’s appropriate. They’re concerned with what gets engagement. Engagement can be anything. It can be positive engagement like likes, and it can also be negative engagement like hate reads or shares for the reason of saying, take a look at this asshole. Algorithms are neutral with regards to that. Their job is to keep you hooked and keep your brainstem fired up so that you stay on the platform.

That’s what leads to this Darwinian outcome. A Darwinian system, like nature, doesn’t care whether you’re a surviving by being nice or surviving by being red in tooth and claw, as they say. All that matters is whether you pass on your genes.

The same is true in the world of memes, which is a term coined by a very prominent Darwinian biologist to explain how ideas struggle for dominance. These systems create a world in which the way that ideas struggle for dominance is pretty red in tooth and claw.

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On Twitter, if you write a “look at this asshole”, you get yelled at by people saying don’t give trolls attention, that it just raises their profile. The counter argument to that is, if we don’t look at it, we can’t criticize it. How do you kind of feel about the debate? Is there anything that we, as individuals, can do to change the incentive structures of the internet?

To take the first part first, there’s no good answer to the question of how to respond to noxious trolls, because if you give them attention, even negative attention, then you’re feeding them oxygen. If you ignore them, then you are risking seeming complicit. So that’s why that’s such a vexing problem because there really is no good individual answer to it.

Systemically, there are ways to tweak the systems to diminish that kind of stuff, but as a person, I don’t really see an easy way out.

I think the flippant answer that a lot of people land on is to just say, I’m just going to log off, which is really good for your mental health. And I recommend it for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances. But you don’t get to log off of the country, right? So these systems can still be affecting who your president is, and whether you get to live in a country that has environmental regulations and all the rest of it. So you can’t opt out of that.

So let’s talk about some of those trolls, because they are admittedly fun to talk about. You spend a lot of time in this book engaging them as personalities. You went to the DeploraBall. The right wing trolls, they really think of themselves as rebels. It’s both their identity and their justification. But I couldn’t help but think that their ideologies are just old-fashioned racism and sexism, their behavior is like out of a bad beer commercial and their jokes reminded me of the lame jokes from some high school locker room. How on earth are they holding themselves out as rebels?

Yeah, they’re really bad at it. Yet it’s still really effective. It reminds me of the kind of comedian who is not a good comedian but just gets laughs anyway because he or she — let’s be real, it’s usually a he — will just say whatever makes the audience uncomfortable and get those kind of uncomfortable laughs from the crowd. It’s just cheap.

A lot of this rebel attitude is so central to a lot of these people that “The Rebel” is a name of one of their big media companies. This woman, Faith Goldy, got fired from The Rebel. The line she crossed was going on a Nazi podcast during the march in Charlottesville. When she got fired for that, there were commenters online who were saying to the owners of that media company, “You guys should change your names from The Rebel Media to The Conformist Media.”

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And it’s like, so being a Nazi is being a rebel? That’s just a really, really shitty and unoriginal way to be rebellious, in addition to being terrifying and disgusting and all the rest of it.

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When I think of the Nazis, I don’t think of people that were really into rebellion as a concept.

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[Scoffs] Yeah, free spirits.

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One of the interesting paradoxes of the entire alt-right is they often get called contrarian, provocateurs, transgressive, but the values they stand up for don’t remind me of transgression at all. They just remind me of the same old sexism and racism that was socially normative when I was growing up.

Well, they’re transgressive in the sense that they’re saying things that you’re not supposed to say in polite company. That doesn’t make it interesting or cool or original. It does make it transgressive in the sense that you can offend people. You can freak them out. And then, if you created a set of norms within your own little subculture that declares that anybody who ever gets offended or freaked out is therefore triggered and whatever, then okay. By the terms of that self-sustaining logic, you can quote unquote “win”, because you triggered people. But ultimately, you’re not serving any very interesting end other than having a moment of infamy.

There’s a lot of hiding behind the term “free speech”, which is treated as a kind of empty set value, because nobody’s really taking anyone’s free speech away. Why do you think that there’s so much emphasis on topics like free speech and supposed transgression, and very little about the actual content of this “free speech”?

This is part of why I thought it was so important to actually spend hours and months and years of my life hanging out with these people. It wasn’t because I enjoyed it, or because I preferred to get dinner with Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec rather than hanging out with my wife and child. It was because the real way to understand how these people think and talk and interact with each other is just to hang around them for long enough that they forget you’re there.

The free speech thing is one example of that. They can talk about this stuff in the abstract and use language that sounds really principled, but when you hang around for long enough it becomes clear that it’s just a tool they’re using. Like anything else, it’s a weapon.

If they can use “free speech” as a talking point to advance their agenda, they’ll use that. If they can use something else, they’ll use something else.

At no point did I want to be so contrary to the contrarians that I became anti-free speech. It’s just that when you see what’s really motivating them, you can see through their game. But that only happens when you put in the time.

Having spent as much time as you did with them, do you have any advice for readers on self care and mental health management when faced with this vile stuff?

I do think it’s appropriate a lot of times to step away from it and log off. Being a keyboard warrior 24 hours a day is not healthy for anyone. But I also wouldn’t want to live in a world where social media were only inhabited by nihilists and trolls and bigots. So I don’t want all good people in the world to permanently abandon all internet spaces. But I do think it’s worth just stepping back and thinking in a slightly broader way about what is all this and what are we trying to accomplish?

The larger frame of the book is about the hijacking of a national conversation.On any given day, you can sit out all of the trending topics and not weigh in and not even know they’re happening and you will be totally fine. The world will go on without you and you won’t really miss anything.

In a larger, more sustained sense, I do think that part of the job of being a fully engaged citizen of a putative democracy is to have a stake in the national conversation. If part of that or a lot of that is happening online, then so be it. But I think it’s just worth doing with as much of a clear head and a sense of purpose as possible.

Amanda Marcotte is a politics writer for Salon. Her new book, “Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself,” is out now. She’s on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/doesnt-rule-out-potential-mental-issue-says-ocasio-cortez-after-learning-eatthebabies-was-stunt-by-pro-trump-trolls/

no lnx

‘Eat the Children’: Trump supporter’s wild stunt revealed at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez event

Written by Jon Queally / Common Dreams October 4, 2019

After an exchange with a covert Trump supporter during a local town hall event in her congressional district Thursday night kicked off the viral hashtag #EatTheBabies, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for compassion and told right-wingers waging attacks to “knock it off” in the name of decency.

The incident began when a questioner in the audience asked Ocasio-Cortez about the planetary climate crisis. The woman warned that “we only have a few months left” to act and began to speak about the need to eat human babies in order to solve global warming. As the woman spoke, she removed her coat to reveal a t-shirt that read: “Save the Planet, Eat the Children.”

Though it was obvious the congresswoman, her aides, and others in the room were growing increasingly uncomfortable, the woman was treated with sympathy and dignity as the microphone was taken away. Ocasio-Cortez then attempted to address the issues raised while also seeming to reassure the crowd—and the woman herself—that “if we act in a positive way there’s space for hope. We are never beyond hope.”

Following the event, as footage of the incident began to spread online, mostly pushed by right-wing journalists and media operatives, Ocasio-Cortez took to her Twitter account to acknowledge what had occurred.

Hey everyone!

We had a fabulous town hall tonight & I’ll be highlighting some moments from it.

At one point I was concerned there was a woman in crisis & want to ensure we treat the situation compassionately.

Let’s not mock or make a spectacle. &let’s work on Medicare for All!

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 4, 2019

“This person may have been suffering from a mental condition,” she added, “and it’s not okay that the right-wing is mocking her and potentially mak[ing] her condition or crisis worse. Be a decent human being and knock it off.”

Some observers surmised the individual may have been acting the part of someone who was unstable to troll the congresswoman in order to discredit her support for a Green New Deal, but it would have been difficult to know that in the moment. Reporting now suggests the whole thing was staged by a pro-Trump group:

That viral #EatTheBabies video from AOC’s town hall?

The woman was a plant and a pro-Trump fringe group that has been described as “a bizarre political cult” is claiming credit for planning the stunt.https://t.co/FUJP7ojfF6

— Allyson Chiu (@_allysonchiu) October 4, 2019

Gizmodo journalist Matt Novak reports Friday morning that “LaRouche PAC, a far-right group that supports Donald Trump, has taken credit for trolling Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during a town hall meeting yesterday.” According to Novak:

The connection of this stunt to LaRouche was first noted by London-based Matthew Sweet, author of the book Operation Chaos, which looks at conspiracy theorists of the late 1960s, including Lyndon LaRouche Jr., the late cofounder of the group. LaRouche, who was perhaps best known for his antisemitic conspiracy theories, died this past February. LaRouche claimed that Jews were actually funding the KKK and said that the Queen of England wanted to have him killed.

“It is textbook stuff,’ Sweet told Gizmodo via Twitter DM, referring to yesterday’s bizarre stunt. “They have been in this game for decades.”

In a new tweet on Friday morning, Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged that the reporting was likely accurate:

Turns out the woman yelling was a Trump supporter ???????

Doesn’t rule out potential mental issue (Drs do that) but good to know they were not in crisis.

Earlier this year I was stalked & very nearly hurt by a disturbed person. I don’t take chances & immediately try to de-escalate. https://t.co/kgWFvigJhy

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 4, 2019

Others credited AOC for handling the way she did in the moment.

“Ocasio-Cortez handled the situation at her townhall with the same uncommon empathy & class that she has demonstrates in office every day,” tweeted one online observer. “The last thing to do with someone clearly experiencing a mental health crisis is antagonize or shame them. Well done.”

The congresswoman’s Thursday night plea, however, did not keep the provocative hashtag from proliferating in the right-wing echo chamber as Republicans continued to eat it up.

“The Democrats like @AOC want to kill and #EatTheBabies,” declared Omar Navarro, a Republican challenging Rep. Maxine Waters for her seat in California, on Twitter. “It’s a sick plan. Our @POTUS @realDonaldTrump should have an easy time winning in 2020.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-duplicitous-trolls-are-using-tulsi-gabbards-candidacy-to-foment-disruption-and-chaos/

nolnx

ous trolls are using Tulsi Gabbard’s candidacy to foment disruption and chaos

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 23, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard is not going to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. At this point, her polling averageat Real Clear Politics is 1.4%. Nevertheless, conservative media celebrated the fact that Gabbard won the online poll sponsored by Drudge Report after the first round of debates. Similarly, Gabbard won polls from both Breitbart and Drudge after her performance in the second debate. Those results were not replicated by any reputable polling firm.

Not long after the first debate, we learned what had prompted Gabbard’s success in those online polls.

Users from pro-Trump communities on 4chan and Reddit implored fellow members to vote for lower-polling candidates in online polls, specifically Tulsi Gabbard and Bill de Blasio, in the hours after Wednesday’s Democratic debate — a sign that digital manipulation efforts related to U.S. politics and elections remain very much alive.

Users on 4chan’s anonymous far-right /pol/ message board repeatedly posted links to polls across the web, encouraging one another to “blow the polls out” for Gabbard, the congresswoman from Hawaii who has developed a substantial support base among many of its users…

“GIVE HER YOUR POWER,” read one 4chan post from 1 a.m. Thursday, pointing to a screenshot of the still-active Drudge poll showing Gabbard leading.

Charles Davis highlighted some other Gabbard supporters.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is set to have lunch with a prolific conspiracy theorist who argues the mass shooting in Las Vegas was an intelligence operation meant to distract from the Harvey Weinstein scandal — and who is also, by far, the most successful digital fundraiser for her campaign, according to a recent announcement from the Hawaii Democrat’s presidential campaign staff.

In seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Gabbard, while struggling to register in most polls, has attracted a good deal of support from the fringe of both the left and right, especially online. Even former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke tweeted his support. The congresswoman has repeatedly disavowed Duke’s endorsement. The campaign has, however, embraced some of its lesser-hinged fans.

As Davis suggests, Gabbard also garners support from so-called “progressives” on the left. In critiquing the slogan “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” Kathy Copeland Padden complained that, “the Democratic Party has no incentive to take the candidacy of Progressives like Sanders and Gabbard seriously, no matter how loud the people clamor for them.”

Another Sanders supporter,Michael Tracey, has become one of Gabbard’s strongest defenders. Tracey is one of those people who don’t fit nicely into a linear left-right political continuum. He has been associated with news organizations as diverse as The Young Turks and The Federalist. He garnered a lot of attention on Twitter when he accused Representative Maxine Waters of assaulting him.

@MTracey: REP. MAXINE WATERS JUST SHOVED ME

[flashback]

*old woman gently pushes microphone out of her face*@MTracey: *smiles, sup-nods* pic.twitter.com/gYhcsEkUyW

— Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) June 3, 2017

In other words, the label that might best fit Tracey is “shit-stirrer.” He not only denies Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, but once suggested that if Russia did interfere, the American public should be thankful.

These days, Tracey is stirring up some shit that is reminiscent of a myth that was promulgated by Sanders supporters during the 2016 presidential primary: that the Democratic National Committee is rigging the game against Gabbard. At this point, the congresswoman from Hawaii hasn’t qualified for the September debate, with the deadline for doing so coming up next week. Even though the DNC announced the criteria to qualify for this debate back in May, Tracey is suggesting that it was rigged to keep Gabbard out. That message is now being picked up by right wing outlets like American Thinker.

Back in January when Gabbard announced her candidacy, I questioned whether Democrats could trust her. That was primarily based on her support for leaders like Syria’s brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Of equal concern is the fact that she has never denounced the leader of the cult in which her family participated during her childhood. There is also the fact that, while she and her supporters tout her as a progressive Democrat, her record in Congress says otherwise.

While I am sure that there are voters out there who genuinely support Gabbard, it is clear that they make up no more than 1.4% of Democratic primary voters. It is the people who are using her candidacy—with or without her consent—to foment disruption and chaos in the process of selecting a nominee that is cause for concern.

see beran

https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb

very good and funny talk

https://www.c-span.org/video/?463096-1/it-awful

JULY 30, 2019

It Came From Something Awful

Dale Berantalked about his book, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trumpinto Office, in which he profiled the counterculture online hub 4chan.

j peter fr figure ~ nihilism cottage industry conserv rules [// no yank?]

https://www.wired.com/story/dale-beran-it-came-from-something-awful-review/

4chan’s “lol nothing matters”

wired bk of mo:

Respondents recount a transformation that takes place almost entirely online. Led either by their own curiosity or an algorithm, the content they consumed became increasingly extreme, fostering their radicalization and guiding them eventually to TRS. Their responses reveal a pipeline between the alt-lite and racist “alt-right,” with many users explaining that alt-lite figures like Gavin McInneswere the first to introduce them to hardcore, veteran white nationalists.

The two threads, titled “WHAT BROUGHT YOU INTO THE MOVEMENT?” and “Path here beginning from Gavin,” asked posters to reflect on their own “red pill” narratives and provide tips for converting others. “Here’s the challenge,” a user identified as The Somalisher wrote. “Create a list of succession from the Alt-Light to us. I have friends who like Gavin…But I can’t exactly throw [Andrew] Anglinat them.”

The user continued, “It sometimes requires softer steps to ‘radical’ perspectives.”

The two threads refer specifically to bringing people into the fold of TRS and the Daily Stormer, which together serve as the core of neo-Nazism online. TRS, the brainchild ofMike “Enoch” Peinovich, started as a political blog in 2012 and has since transformed into one of the largest alt-right media platforms. It hosts a lively message board called the 504um and dozens of podcasts, the most popular of which are “The Daily Shoah” and news-oriented “Fash the Nation.” The Daily Stormer operates in the same orbit, consciously using humor to indoctrinate its readers.

Together, the two sites have become the preeminent propaganda machines for the alt-right. They’re also some of the most effective spaces for organizing real-world, local groups, called “book clubs” by the Stormer and “pool parties” on TRS.

The alt-right is a motley movement, drawing in people from a number of venues and subcultures. The 107 individuals and platforms mentioned by posters in the TRS threads have been labeled according to their ideology, which include alt-right, legacy white nationalist, alt-lite, mainstream, libertarian, skeptic, men’s rights activist, and conspiracy, in addition to a random category for those not easily classified. This heterogeneity is a boon to the movement, creating a number of avenues for individuals of different taste and predilections to fall within its clutches.

Though both the alt-lite and alt-right reject “establishment” conservatism, the former claims to adhere to civic nationalism — a poorly defined catch-all term for those who embrace nativism but shy away from more radical racist rhetoric — while the latter is explicitly white nationalist. Legacy white nationalists include those like Jared Taylor,Patrick Buchananand Paul Kersey who, although they might be popular within the alt-right, were part of the white nationalist movement before that label emerged.

The number of times each individual or platform was mentioned as an influence was tallied, and those mentioned by three or more posters are listed in the chart below. Disconnected as they might seem, the most cited influences — the “politically incorrect” 4chan board /pol/ and the American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor — hint at two common paths to the alt-right: either through participation in the rampantly racist and misogynistic online trolling culture of 4chan and its offshoots, or through exposure to Taylor’s variety of pseudo-academic “race realism” that couches timeworn racist tropes in the language of science.

Within alt-right spaces like TRS, these two fibers of the movement are woven together — resulting in an ironic, meme-ified version of old-school race science — and embellished with antisemitism.

TRS and the Daily Stormer both argue that, with the right optics and messaging, they can attract a critical mass of followers to the cause and eventually shift what lies within the respectable terms of political debate. The respondents in these threads show how the current media landscape — replete with podcasts, YouTube channels and blogs that contain tempered bits of white nationalist propaganda under the guise of patriotism, “Western chauvinism,” science or hard truths — can aid that agenda, coaxing the “normies” down the path to white nationalism.

tepping stones" and "in-betweeners"

TRS 504um posters describe their radicalization as a gradual process, with charismatic alt-lite personalities like Gavin McInnes introducing them to ideas they would eventually take to their extreme. McInnes, especially, hides under a guise of irony, freely using racial slurs and making incendiary comments about women, Muslims and African Americans in the name of mocking political correctness.

McInnes, who formed the Proud Boys in 2016, has repeatedly insisted the SPLC-designated hate group is simply a right-wing men’s drinking club in the vein of the Elks Lodge, and has taken pains to distance himself from the alt-right. But even he agrees that there’s overlap between his “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys and self-proclaimed white nationalists: “both sides have in common Western chauvinism, they’re not embarrassed by whiteness or whatever, [and] they don’t believe diversity is the end-all and be-all.”

Responses within the TRS threads show how easy it is to slip from the notion that “the West is the best” into believing that western culture is superior because it’s white.Of the respondents in the sample, roughly 15 percent mentioned McInnes as a step in their path to white nationalism or recommended using his videos and writing to convert others. There are more than a few real-life examples of Proud Boys moving into more extreme groups.

McInnes is loathed by many at TRS for being unwilling to take racial politics head-on and “counter-signaling” them, but he’s still credited with helping to cultivate their own belief in white nationalism. In a thread called “Do We Still Hate Gavin McInnes?” a user calling themselves KarlVonBraun came to his defense, writing “I remember first hearing Gavin trash niggers who do that pole/street dance thing on the subway…Basically he says everything short of calling them worthless niggers. I'd literally never heard anyone be brutally honest about what is uniquely nigger behavior while maintaining decorum, without crossing lines you can't cross. It was totally exhilarating.” Another user wrote, “I guarantee that he is still (without meaning to) funneling people into the Alt-Right.”

McInnes is also responsible for introducing a number of TRS users to Jim Goad and, indeed, for much of the writer and podcaster’s recent resurgence in popularity. Goad got his start as a writer in the 1990s producing his own controversial and acerbic independent magazine and, in 1997, published a book in the same vein. The Redneck Manifesto, which begins with a chapter called “White Niggers Have Feelings, Too,” bemoans liberals’ tendency to look down on poor whites and argues, “Multiculturalism is a country club that excludes white trash.” Goad (much like McInnes) began his career as a sort of small-time countercultural celebrity, but his focus on white persecution now earns him widespread praise within the alt-right.

McInnes has hosted Goad on his shows numerous times and, on a list he created of “required reading” on Western culture, included *Redneck Manifesto* together with Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the Westand Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America — both writers who are also mentioned as influences by TRS posters. One respondent called Goad’s book “an early redpill on the malicious anti-white agenda of the left.”

Goad takes advantage of the fact that he’s often treated as a serious literary figure, presenting his extremist views on race as simply thoughtful meditations on politically taboo topics or as an attempt to resist political correctness. He’s used his numerous platforms to perpetuate the myth of white slavery and criticized the “corporate globalist left” for making it difficult for the Daily Stormer to maintain a domain. He even hosted Andrew Anglin, the site’s founder, on his podcast, as well as former Ku Klux Klanlawyer Sam Dickson and the Holocaust-denying author Michael Hoffman.

Goad, who is cited six times by TRS members, disparages “Those who blame Jews for everything.” But in the same breath, he repeats their rhetoric, making him into what one poster calls the “missing link” from people like Gavin to the white nationalist TRS. If you’re trying to red pill a friend and “they like Gavin,” NotDonSilvo wrote, “send them his old podcast with Jim and some of his Taki articles or guest appearances in Gavin’s Compound Media [show].”

Besides his podcast, Goad’s main platform is Taki’s Magazine, an extreme right-wing publication with an irreverent tone that promises its “only ideology is to be against the junk culture foisted upon us by Hollywood and the mainstream media.” Along with Goad and McInnes, it publishes authors like John Derbyshire, who was fired from the conservative National Review after he wrote an article for Taki’s about advising his teenage children to “stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.” It described black people as “ferociously hostile to whites” and is now listed in the “greatest hits” section on Taki’s website.

Taki’s contributors overlap with those at the hate site VDARE, including Steve Sailer — cited four times by TRS users — whose writing is largely dedicated to opposing immigration and drawing a false link between race and intelligence.

Both Taki’s Magazine and VDARE are cited by posters of the TRS threads as “good in-betweeners,” and, together, are cited in more than 16 percent of responses. Both websites, the user Cniva wrote, are “good at presenting racism in a ‘we’re just being reasonable/this is what the science says, why are you acting so upset?’ type of way.”

Race realism

Many members of the forum note that McInnes’s online videos were particularly impactful because they introduce viewers to more extreme figures. “[D]ude i got here from Gavin because there was a time about 2-3 years ago when Gavin would take [sic] to people like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer,” one user posted. In one of his genial interviews with Taylor (who he’s called a “super smart guy”), McInnes allowed the American Renaissance editor to peddle his racist tract “The Color of Crime,” which uses faulty statistical analysis to argue that non-whites are more prone to criminal behavior.

Respondents noted this kind of “race realism” — which relies on pseudoscientific evidence to argue that white people are a superior race — gave them a large push into the white nationalist camp. “If your prospect is an ‘objective’ type,” one forum member offered in a discussion of how to recruit others to their cause, “nothing beats race realism, and I’d say Jared Taylor and Alternative Hypothesis” — a “ human biodiversity” blog that argues race is genetically based — “are the most presentable, accessible, and pertinent in that field.” Another simply wrote, “Once I came across race realism it was over.” Indeed, Taylor is the second-most cited force for bringing people into the TRS/Daily Stormer network, with 20.3 percent of posters mentioning him.

Stefan Molyneux, a YouTube commentator, is also best known for amplifying scientific racism. Among his videos with titles like “Human Biodiversity and Criminality” and “Race, Genetics, and Intelligence,” he argues “skills and abilities have not been distributed evenly by mother nature between various ethnicities,” and multiethnic societies are a “problem” because “the blacks and the Hispanics, they don’t end up acting the same as the white population.” He’s also done a show with Taylor, titled “An Honest Conversation About Race,” that one respondent said they were “able to use” to help their friends and family “open their eyes.”

“These programs I think are the first steps,” they wrote.

The prolific Molyneux has attracted more than 770,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, adding up to more than 230 million views of his videos. He relies largely on charisma, delivering ill-researched and scientifically unsound lectures with a degree of confidence that eases viewers into accepting his arguments.

Molyneux, one TRS poster explained, “remains a great stepping stone between the alt-light and the alt-right.”

“Gavin > Moly > AR [Alt-Right] is common,” another wrote.

The “skeptics” movement — whose adherents claim to challenge beliefs both scientific and spiritual by questioning the evidence and reasoning that underpin them — has also helped channel people into the alt-right by way of “human biodiversity.” Sam Harris has been one of the movement’s most public faces, and four posters on the TRS thread note his influence.

Under the guise of scientific objectivity, Harris has presented deeply flawed data to perpetuate fear of Muslims and to argue that black people are genetically inferior to whites. In a 2017 podcast, for instance, he argued that opposition to Muslim immigrants in European nations was “perfectly rational” because “you are importing, by definition, some percentage, however small, of radicalized people.” He assured viewers, “This is not an expression of xenophobia; this is the implication of statistics.” More recently, he invited Charles Murray on his podcast. Their conversation centered on an idea that lies far outside of scientific consensus: that racial differences in IQ scores are genetically based. Though mainstream behavioral scientists have demonstrated that intelligence is less significantly affected by genetics than environment (demonstrated by research that shows the IQ gap between black and white Americans is closing, and that the average American IQ has risen dramatically since the mid-twentieth century), Harris still dismissed any criticism of Murray’s work as “politically correct moral panic.”

For posters on TRS, Harris’ work blended easily into that of more overtly racist writers like Paul Kersey, whose popular blog, “Stuff Black People Don’t Like,” is reposted on American Renaissance. The site “really gets the noggin joggin and encourages you to search for answers,” one user wrote. Their “biggest stepping stone” was from Harris’ work to Kersey’s blog: “It was there I learned about race realism, IQ, genetics, bell curves, and the economic/political drivers behind the pushing of ‘diversity.’'

han culture

While many on the TRS threads describe becoming fans of specific personalities like McInnes and Molyneux, who most often led them to legacy white nationalists like Taylor and Kersey, nearly as many came up through the more amorphous and anarchic spaces of right-wing digital culture that originated with 4chan. The anonymous “meme factory” traffics in humor and transgression, centering on the “politically incorrect” board /pol/ that nurtured the early alt-right and, especially, its misogyny. Nearly 23 percent of respondents said that chan culture helped them land at TRS.

Many of those who were eventually radicalized by 4chan came there relatively innocently. One user said memes led them to 4chan in the mid-2000s, but they eventually found their way to overtly racist /pol/ after Obama was elected for a second term. Others noted they “ironically” looked at /pol/, or they were led there by the more absurdist “random” board, /b/. One wrote that their friend, who they specified was not right-wing, told them to “surf /pol/ for fun.” “Humor is a powerful drug,” explained a poster who came for the political discussions but “stayed for the racist memes.”

Chan culture was male-dominated and heavily misogynistic. The sexism of these spaceseventually led many into the alt-right. According to one poster, “I always hated feminism and female empowerment, despite liking many elements of the left. When I got older and realized the left was only open to feminists or allies i stopped claiming it.”

This extreme anti-feminism gave fuel to various factions of male supremacy, like Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) and MGTOWs (“Men Going Their Own Way”), who profess to forswear women completely, then complain about them constantly on the internet. Then came Gamergate, a harassment campaign against women in gaming that began in 2014. Anonymous harassers targeted women who worked in or commented on the industry for daring to enter a male-dominated space. Abusers used 4chan and other platforms to organize. After choosing their targets, the mob would dox them, send them rape and death threats, distribute fake pornographic images of them and generally stalk and torment them relentlessly.

It was an extremely important moment in the development of the alt-right, when young men from right-wing online spaces came together in a shared campaign against the “politically correct” culture of the left. One poster described the years 2012 to 2014 as a political “void,” but explained that he was brought back into politics — and entered far more extreme spaces — thanks to Gamergate. After 4chan’s founder Christopher Poole banned discussions of Gamergate from the site, the campaign’s supporters migrated to the more extreme 8chan.

The episode also helped bring figures like Milo Yiannopoulos to prominence. At the time, he worked for a small tech website and was one of the first journalists to cover the story, eventually leading to his job as an editor at the right-wing outlet *Breitbart*. More than 12 percent of users note that Yiannopoulos was part of their alt-right transformation, and often list him in tandem with Gamergate (cited by 8.1 percent of posters).

Alongside /pol/, Reddit was another crucial space in the growth of the alt-right — especially the infamous subreddit r/The_Donald, that arose in support of Donald Trump’s presidency. For some who came to the movement around 2015, it was the first place they went. “I’ve been an openly racist nigger hater since 2010, but I just didn’t know where to find content that was explicitly racist until I stumbled onto T_D and was able to find other stuff from there,” a TRS user wrote.

"Lolbertarians" and Neoreactionaries

Libertarianism is a common path to the alt-right. In fact, it was frustration with libertarianism that led Peinovich to create The Right Stuff. He became a libertarian after reading the works of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, but — after finding sources on human biodiversity — said he realized that libertarianism wasn’t “going to work for everyone” because different racial groups couldn’t be expected to behavior properly without a state to regulate them. TRS’s Ricky Vaughn — unmasked as Douglass Mackeyon April 3 — described a similar trajectory. The one-time Ron Paul supporter eventually rejected libertarianism because it failed to account for many things that “drive current events” like “race, culture, all those kind of things.” He first grew frustrated with feminism, and then, after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, openly embraced racism.

Six posters mentioned Ron Paul as one of their political starting points, and 16 others mentioned libertarianism more generally. One TRS user said that he was a libertarian until he realized that his fellow believers “were fags for being ‘so principled’ with their open borders bullshit, that they ensured their desired society would never come about,” while another wrote they were a “lolbertarian until I realized only white people actually believe that garbage.” One simply wrote that they followed the “standard libertarian to nazi pipeline.”

AnCaps — or anarcho-capitalists — operate in much the same universe as libertarians, advocating for the eventual elimination of the state. According to one poster, “A couple dudes in my online AnCap circle went full bore with ‘you can't have libertarianism with mud genetics’ arguments. I was like ‘nah, that ain't true, and I'll show it ain't true.’ Then within a couple months I was like ‘yeah, that seems to be true. I think I'll go listen to that [William] Pierce guy” — Pierce authored the race war novel The Turner Diaries and is one of the most influential white supremacists in modern American history — “again but with an open mind, maybe if I actually check his claims I'll find out they're true too.’” He decided that Pierce was right.

The Dark Enlightenment is a political theory detailed by an obscure former academicnamed Nick Land in an online manifesto posted in 2012. It is an influential force within the alt-right that, like libertarianism, advocates for the recession of state power, though with different aims. Also known as “Neoreaction” and often shortened to “NRx,” adherents believe that capitalism should be accelerated to the point that corporate powers rule society, allowing natural hierarchies to emerge. They firmly believe in human biodiversity and reject democracy and egalitarianism (“it is easier to believe in Leprechauns than to believe in egalitarianism,” a sidebar on their subreddit suggests). In this essentially feudal society, the superior white race will supposedly rule. In other words, it is a rejection of Enlightenment principles. Many of its central ideas are popular within Silicon Valley, and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannonhas reportedly expressed interest in the philosophy.

Four TRS posters cited the philosophy as an influence, with some embracing the manifesto as they moved away from libertarianism. “Many of the ideological seeds that would make me open to Hitlerism started with Dark Enlightenment,” one person wrote.

While the tenets of the Dark Enlightenment and the manifesto were cited in numerous popular blogs and passed between users in anonymous forums like Reddit, the political philosophy received arguably its biggest boost from Millennial Woes, a popular YouTuber who began his broadcasts from his father’s basement in Linlithgow, Scotland, in 2013.

Millennial Woes, whose real name is Colin Robertson, developed his political views as he was struggling to overcome clinical depression (a subject he meditates on in many videos), and his nihilism became intimately wound up in his politics. In a 2013 video titled “Depression in Individuals, and in Society,” Robertson described the negative-feedback loop that affects people with depression as something that can also plague the larger political culture. Depressed people engage in forms of self-sabotage because they are so used to the idea of failure, he explained, but justify this to themselves and others as a sort of journey in self-discovery — a reflection of the idea “that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Modern liberal society, Robertson claimed, was doing the same thing: slowly destroying itself with experiments in feminism and egalitarianism in the name of achieving some kind of enlightenment.

This landed Robertson firmly in the camp of Neoreactionaries and, eventually, the alt-right. “Equality is bullshit. Hierarchy is essential. The races are different. The sexes are different,” the description of a 2016 Millennial Woes video titled “We Are the Alt-right” read. The video itself presented the viewer with questions like “Are you disturbed by the condition of our societies?” and “Don’t want your daughter to end up in a burka or with a non-white guy?” “What you need,” the text continued, “is a visit to the Alternative Right,” before a long list of alt-right outlets — including TheRightStuff.biz, American Renaissance, Red Ice, Alternative Hypothesis, Stefan Molyneaux, and of course, Millennial Woes — flashed on the screen.

Robertson brought a huge number of followers with him on his journey to the alt-right. His channel currently has more than 47,000 subscribers, while his videos have been viewed upwards of 7 million times. And it seems that Robertson’s trials with depression weren’t only a fundamental part of his political development, but helped attract others looking for support online — apparently an entry point to the alt-right for many. One TRS poster explained that they “Watched a Millennial Woes video on depression (I was miserable). He mentioned various things I had never heard of (neoreaction, Alt Right). I found Richard Spencer. I found TRS. Life completely changed…”

===

https://news.yahoo.com/why-did-rightwing-troll-charles-c-johnson-want-to-meet-with-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-090000636.html

the year 2018 was not an especially auspicious one for Charles C. Johnson, a Holocaust denier whom the Boston Globe has deemed “one of the country's most notorious Internet trolls.”

a Michigan father and son his site had accused of having been responsible for the killing of protester Heather Heyer during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., the year before, despite their having nothing to do with the murder. The murder was actually committed by a white nationalist." data-reactid="23" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In June, Johnson agreed to pay a settlement reported to have been as high as $25,000 to a Michigan father and son his site had accused of having been responsible for the killing of protester Heather Heyer during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., the year before, despite their having nothing to do with the murder. The murder was actually committed by a white nationalist.

That same summer, Freestartr, a site Johnson founded that was used to raise money for Nazis and extremists, shut down. GotNews.com, a font of fake news that he ran, also met its demise.

who had been informally involved with the Trump campaign — remained an influential figure, a kind of right-wing martyr maligned by media and technology elites. Even so, he retained untrammeled access to the highest reaches of the Trump administration." data-reactid="25" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Despite that, Johnson — who had been informally involved with the Trump campaign — remained an influential figure, a kind of right-wing martyr maligned by media and technology elites. Even so, he retained untrammeled access to the highest reaches of the Trump administration.

That much is clear from his surprising exchange with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on June 25, 2018.

“Hi Secretary Ross,” the markedly informal email sent by Johnson that day begins. “Great chatting with you the other day.” Johnson proceeds to say that he would be “speaking before about 30 congressmen on tech issues” in Washington and “would love to meet” with Ross as well.

Ross responded about three hours later, in an email apparently typed from his iPhone. He explained that he had to fly to Wisconsin in order to attend the groundbreaking for a plant opened by Foxconn, the Chinese electronics manufacturer. He urged Johnson to schedule a time for them to meet by going through Macie Leach, a senior adviser to the commerce secretary who had overlapped with Johnson at Claremont McKenna College, a small and prestigious California liberal arts university with a reputation for a conservative student body.

“Sounds good,” Johnson replied, copying several Commerce officials, as well as another email account belonging to Ross. The subject line of his email was “Tech discussion with Sec Ross.”

Ross and Johnson did meet that summer, according to a person familiar with the matter, but Johnson’s request for a subsequent meeting in October was turned down.

It is not known what they discussed, but Johnson is a vocal critic of what he views as bias against Republicans and conservatives in the tech and social media world, while the Department of Commerce oversees the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. President Trump has amplified such complaints, raising them recently in a meeting with Twitter founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey.

well known. Three years before, he had been booted off Twitter for threatening to “take out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson. His fundraising sites welcomed campaigns by neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin." data-reactid="39" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Department of Commerce would not confirm that a meeting between Ross and Johnson took place. Questions remain about why a high-ranking government official would entertain a figure as divisive as Johnson, especially since by late 2018 Johnson’s affiliation with white supremacists and other fringe figures was well known. Three years before, he had been booted off Twitter for threatening to “take out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson. His fundraising sites welcomed campaigns by neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin.

rejected Johnson’s bid to have his Twitter ban lifted. (Johnson may have found a way around the ban; shortly after an exchange with Johnson, this reporter was followed on Twitter by @charles46532569, an account purporting to belong to “charles johnson.” The account followed, and shared messages from, accounts associated with several right-wing figures. Johnson denied to Yahoo News that the account was his, replying with an emoji of a sunglasses-wearing visage.)" data-reactid="40" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The exchange with Ross came several days after a California superior court rejected Johnson’s bid to have his Twitter ban lifted. (Johnson may have found a way around the ban; shortly after an exchange with Johnson, this reporter was followed on Twitter by @charles46532569, an account purporting to belong to “charles johnson.” The account followed, and shared messages from, accounts associated with several right-wing figures. Johnson denied to Yahoo News that the account was his, replying with an emoji of a sunglasses-wearing visage.)

Johnson headed to Washington amid these defeats, though it’s not known which members of Congress he tried to brief, and on what subject. No evident record of such a meeting exists, but Johnson clearly relished the access he had to the Trump administration and conservative members of Congress.

In 2017, he had posted on Facebook, “10 years ago I came to California with $50. I knew no one. Now the money I made and saved from odd jobs, poker, and risk taking has made me a multimillionaire before I turned 30 and bitcoin has hit $10k. Now I hang out with cabinet members and congressmen. What a country.” It is not clear which cabinet members, or legislators, Johnson was referencing.

“It's concerning that a reputed Holocaust denier is familiar enough with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross that he can apparently reach the Secretary via a private email account,” said Charisma Troiano, communications director for Democracy Forward, a progressive group that obtained Ross’s emails through the Freedom of Information Act. “The public deserves to know why.”

Ross’s email address is redacted in the documents reviewed by Yahoo News. However, Democracy Forward had specified in its Freedom of Information request that it sought “all communications sent to or from any nongovernmental email address established, controlled, or used by the Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.” The back-and-forth with Johnson, therefore, had to have been conducted at least in part via an email address affiliated with Ross but not issued by the federal government.

Several high-ranking Trump administration officials have been found to have used private emails for government business." data-reactid="54" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em;">During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump frequently castigated his Democratic competitor, Hillary Clinton, for using a private, off-site email server while serving as secretary of state for President Obama. Several high-ranking Trump administration officials have been found to have used private emails for government business.

In a text-message exchange with Yahoo News, Johnson expressed concern that he would be “falsely” accused “of being a troll or worse,” which made him hesitant to “engage with the #fakenews.”

Johnson later sent a statement denying that he was a Holocaust denier and claiming that he was a supporter of Jewish causes. He also pointed out that one of his lawyers was an Orthodox Jew, presumably as proof that he harbored no anti-Semitic tendencies.

Johnson also depicted himself as a free speech advocate, not a supporter of extremist causes. And he said that he was not the author of the false GotNews.com report about the Charlottesville killing. He said the settlement in the case was for a lower amount than what has been reported elsewhere (that is, $25,000).

who once authored a book on President Calvin Coolidge, would have the standing to discuss with Ross. The Department of Commerce has broad oversight of U.S. trade, though Trump has ceased to seek Ross’s counsel on that issue." data-reactid="58" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em;">Of his exchange with Ross, Johnson would only say it was “a national security matter.” It is not clear what topic pertaining to national security Johnson, who once authored a book on President Calvin Coolidge, would have the standing to discuss with Ross. The Department of Commerce has broad oversight of U.S. trade, though Trump has ceased to seek Ross’s counsel on that issue.

Johnson reached out to Ross again in October 2018, saying he had “something of international import to discuss.” Leach, the senior Commerce adviser, appears to have handled the request, forwarding it from her personal email address to her Department of Commerce one. This time, however, Johnson was not as fortunate as he had been over the summer. “The requested meeting did not occur,” a Commerce spokeswoman said.

Ross remains the commerce secretary, though his credibility has been seriously tarnished by his handling of the Trump administration’s effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census. He is routinely spoken about as on the verge of losing his job.

Johnson’s current occupation is unclear, though he told Yahoo News he wants to be called an “entrepreneur.” The substance of his present-day entrepreneurial activity is unknown.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/a-professor-of-constitutional-law-explains-how-the-alt-right-corrupts-the-constitution

Calls for Probe Into White Supremacy and Domestic Terrorism After Arrest for Arson Attacks on Black Churches

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/11/calls-probe-white-supremacy-and-domestic-terrorism-after-arrest-arson-attacks-black

Civil rights advocates on Thursday called for a serious examination of racist hate crimes and domestic terrorism in the wake of arson attacks on three black churches in Louisiana.

Authorities announced that they had arrested Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old suspect accused of setting fire to three historically black churches in southern Louisiana over the course of 10 days. Matthews, who is white and the son of the deputy sheriff of St. Landry Parish, was charged with three counts of arson.

The NAACP argued that the church burnings, which are reminiscent of several similar incidents which took place throughout the South in the civil rights era, should be investigated as a racist hate crime.

"This is the same domestic terrorism that has been the hammer and chisel used to chip away at the humanity of Black Americans and the suppression of our political power," the group said in a statement.

The group noted that crimes linked to white supremacy have been on the rise since President Donald Trump took office and called on the federal government to lead in the fight against domestic terror attacks:

Since Trump has taken office, we've seen a rise in white supremacy and hate crimes—so much so that we issued letters to push both the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees of the House of Representatives to hold hearings for the resurgence of hate and raced based crimes that are overcoming the nation. Change must come from the top and we will continue to push Congress for additional hearings and concrete next steps to thwart acts of terrorism against communities of color.

Local officials in Louisiana noted publicly that Matthews had beeninterested in "black metal" music, which has beenlinked to white supremacist groups which burned churches in Norway in the 1990s. As Daily Beast reported:

A Facebook page that appeared to belong to Matthews showed he was active in pagan and black metal pages, and that he commented on two memes about far-right former neo-Nazi metal musician Varg Vikernes, who served 15 years in prison for killing a fellow metal musician and burning churches in Norway.

Some on social media cautioned the news media not to suggest that the suspect was simply influenced by an anti-religion philosophy, noting that a potential connection to racism should be investigated seriously.

...twts

twt no lx

So here’s a thing. The cop’s son who is currently under arrest for burning down black churches is into the neo-pagan Viking/Death Metal scene. People are try to angle this as “he wasn’t racist, he was demonic and anti-Christian!” DON’T LET THEM

...

white supremacist faux-Vikings don’t want, like, socialized healthcare or a 100% literacy rate, like Scandinavian countries currently have, they want to rape and pillage and do violence against “impure” people, like the Vikings of their imagination. It’s racist cosplay.

...

Those churches were not burned down because they are churches. They were burned down because they are black churches.

Megan Romer

@meganromer

Christians are not a targeted minority in the US. Black folks are. 3/3 is not a coincidence here or anywhere.

...

===

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/how-white-power-went-viral/507473/

atlantic

no lnx

Sitting on the neon-lit stage, Dave McClure couldn’t contain himself. The 500 Startups founder and investor used his appearance at the Web Summit conference on Wednesday to loudly criticize his own industry for President-elect Donald Trump’s victory:

Technology has a role in that we provide communication platforms for the rest of the fucking country. It’s a propaganda medium and if people aren’t aware of the shit they’re being told; if they’re being told a story of fear; if they’re being told a story of other; if they’re not understanding that people are trying to use them to get to fucking office then, yes, assholes like Trump are going to take office and it’s our duty and our responsibility as entrepreneurs, as citizens of the fucking world, to make sure that shit does not happen.

He’s not the first to place the blame (or credit, depending on one’s view) for Trump’s unexpected win on digital platforms like Facebook, which allowed fake-news sites to proliferate and spread pro-Trump hoaxes such as, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.”

Facebook, where nearly half of Americans get their news, has borne the brunt of the ire, both for creating echo-chambers of partisan news and for failing to promote high-quality information over false drivel. But online extremism researchers say America’s misinformation problem is bigger than Facebook. They are also pointing fingers at sites like 4chan, Twitter and Reddit, online free-for-alls that lack Facebook’s relatively strict stance on hate-speech and have allowed racist communities to flourish in recent years. These forums have grown angrier and more multitudinous since Trump announced his candidacy, and while it’s not yet clear how much they contributed to the triumph of Trump, they certainly lined up behind him.

“When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels,” the journalist Siyanda Mohutsiwa, who said she has been following the so-called “alt-right” forums on Reddit for years, wrote in a Twitter thread earlier this week. “These online groups found young white men at their most vulnerable & convinced them liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood.”

Groups that oppose immigration and political correctness, such as neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the “alt-right,” have bloomed online in recent years. (It’s worth noting that these groups consider themselves distinct, and most don’t use the term “racist;” at most, they prefer the term “racialist.”) A study published in September by George Washington University extremism researcher J.M. Berger found “major American white nationalist movements on Twitter added about 22,000 followers since 2012, an increase of about 600 percent.” Berger found that people who followed white nationalists on Twitter referenced Trump “more than almost any other topic.”

The Nazi and white nationalist accounts in Berger’s sample rarely tweeted about Mitt Romney in 2012, but this year, “three of the top 10 hashtags for both white nationalist and Nazi datasets were related to ... Trump: #trump, #trump2016, and #makeamericagreatagain,” Berger wrote. The most common hashtag was “whitegenocide;” Trump retweeted a user with WhiteGenocide in his username in January.

(Trump’s campaign said the tweet wasn’t related to his personal views. In response to past stories about their white-power supporters, the campaign has said, “We have rejected and rebuked any groups and individuals associated with a message of hate and will continue to do so.”)

It’s impossible to tell how many people were motivated by racism to vote for Trump, who used anti-immigrant rhetoric and, occasionally, white-nationalist memes, all while telling black Americans he would “be your greatest champion.” Other issues, like abortion, the economy, and dissatisfaction with Obamacare also turned out Trump voters. But some Trump supporters were energized by concerns that people of color are somehow overrunning the nation, spreading violence and sucking up precious resources. Eight of 10 people who favor the deportation of illegal immigrants voted for Trump, according to exit polls, and Trump also performed better among voters who said their top issue was immigration or terrorism.

Early on, Republicans who felt white Americans were under threat preferred Trump to his rivals. In a Pew survey in April, those who felt it was “bad for the country” that in 30 years the U.S. will consist mostly of people of color were more likely to feel warmly toward Trump, as were those who felt Islam is violent. Other issues—homosexuality, family values, or economic fairness—didn’t polarize Republicans similarly.

Several mainstream platforms, including Reddit, Twitter, and even Google, all became fertile ground for white-power groups to discuss these ideas, voice support for Trump, and often, recruit new followers, according to Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which monitors online extremism.

Reddit, for example, has long been a racist haven. Keegan Hankes, a research analyst for the SPLC, documented in Gawker how the racist subreddit “GreatApes” was formed in 2013 and grew into a larger network called "the Chimpire," organized by a user calling themselves "Jewish_NeoCon2." Their mission statement, riddled with Nazi references and n-words, mentioned expanding their “sphere of influence.” At the time Hankes was writing in 2015, the Chimpire had grown to 46 subreddits, including two dedicated to discussing Trayvon Martin and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. One of the subreddits, CoonTown, had 3,287 subscribers, ranking it within the top 2 percent of subReddits, Hankes wrote. CoonTown was later banned, but other “WhiteRights” subReddits persist.

Certain corners of Twitter have also become cesspools of white supremacy, Beirich said. In the Washington Post in September, Jonathon Morgan, a researcher of violent extremism, described how alt-right Twitter accounts appear to have become more virulent throughout the year. “The social media content of the alt-right in July was 25 percent more radicalized than it was in January,” he wrote. “And the rate of radicalization is increasing exponentially.” In January of this year, for example, the accounts Morgan monitored rarely mentioned Jewish people. By July, the word “Jewish” in these forums “implies a belief in large-scale conspiracy, racial antagonism and even explicit support for Hitler,” he wrote. The Anti-Defamation League also found an uptick in anti-Semitic tweets in the first half of this year.

For some, even a simple Google search can be a pathway to radicalization. Dylann Roof, who allegedly killed nine people in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last year, was indoctrinated almost entirely online, according to the SPLC. In his manifesto, Roof described typing “black on White crime” into Google, ending up on a racist website, “and I have never been the same since that day.” The third result in a Google search for “Martin Luther King,” for example, is a white supremacist site, “MartinLutherKing.org,” which paints the civil-rights leader as a fraud. (Regarding that site, Google has said, “Our search results are generated objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”)

“Racist propagandists have motivation to put that stuff out,” Beirich told me. “The anti-Semites can flood an area, and there’s no contradictory evidence. There aren’t people out there trying to prove that Jews aren’t running the government.”

Beirich said white supremacists, far from talking amongst themselves online, do try to bring new followers into the fold. Academic literature suggests online white-supremacy groups grow rapidly after launching and use social issues of the day, such as illegal immigration, to build bridges with potential new recruits.

...

Morgan suspects racist forums on mainstream sites like Reddit might be attracting users who are not active white supremacists—at least not at first. “I think it’s a similar pattern to people who end up in jihadist extremism,” he told me. “It’s people who are ostracized and disengaged, threatened by the mainstream culture. To them, it feels good [reading these subreddits] ... it validates the kinds of things you’re not supposed to stay in polite society.”

Unlike ISIS, which targets specific new fighters, Berger writes that white nationalists promote the idea that they are the enlightened ones. They have taken the so-called “red pill,” a Matrix reference to seeing things the way they “really are”—in this case, that widely accepted values, like tolerance and multiculturalism, are actually deeply flawed.

Beirich believes Trump’s presidency may serve as yet another recruitment tactic for these groups. Trump’s past comments about refugees and immigrants, “makes it less ostracizing to agree with racist sentiments. This is in the White House now,” she told me, adding hypothetically, “So why shouldn’t you? What’s wrong with hating Muslims?”

===

troll --> dirty tricks --> crimes?

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/jacob-wohl-is-in-the-hot-seat-again/

no lnx twit

Jacob Wohl is in the Hot Seat (Again)

By Jared Holt | March 13, 2019 2:21 pm

Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman hold a press conference in Arlington, Virginia, on November 1, 2018. (Photo: Jared Holt for Right Wing Watch)

Right-wing activists Jacob Wohl and Ali Akbar appear to have filed false information into a police report in Minneapolis, Minnesota last month while filming a smear video against Rep. Ilhan Omar.

:{:{}:

Wohl, Akbar and anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer traveled to Minneapolis to film a short “documentary” based on unfounded allegations in order to paint Omar as a threat to the country, and to depict Minnesota as unsafe because of a vibrant Muslim community in Minneapolis.

As Minneapolis journalist Tony Webster pointed out on Twitter, the video uploaded last night depicts Wohl and Akbar entering a Minneapolis police office and reporting that they had received a threatening message on Twitter. The video shows a threat that was sent by an account using the name “Drake Holmes” that NBC News’ Ben Collins reported to be controlled by Wohl.

Tony Webster

@webster

Mar 12, 2019

Replying to @webster

In the right-wing ‘documentary’ on Rep. Ilhan Omar released tonight by Jacob Wohl, Laura Loomer, and Ali Alexander, they included this screenshot of a threat they received. There's one problem: NBC News earlier reported that Jacob Wohl created the account which sent the “threat”.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

press supp

After hundreds of BuzzFeed and HuffPost employees lost their jobs last week as both media companies made steep cuts to their staff, a 4chan campaign organized around the phrase "learn to code" targeted newly unemployed journalists on Twitter.

"Learn to code" gained traction on the right from the widespread impression that journalists are elitists who treat layoffs that hit working-class Americans with disdain. Tweeting the phrase at newly laid off journalists was a coordinated campaign to give them a taste of their own medicine.

"Oh the sweet, sweet taste of victory and justice. These vile, soulless pieces of shit are going to have to find actual work now," wrote one 4chan user. "Making them a hero is the goal," wrote another, referencing slang for committing suicide.

Ben Collins, author of an NBC report on the harassment campaign, shared his thoughts on why some conservatives build on these myths: "It...feeds into this larger narrative that 'the news' is one homogeneous organism that is all writing the same thing, that we're all one sentient blob."'

The endgame of these online harassment campaigns generated by the far right is to convey very real threats of violence while convincing outside observers that the victims are weak, overreacting, or deserving of the threats they receive.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/why-cardi-bs-politics-matter-the-rapper-refused-to-be-silenced-and-proved-she-knows-the-best-way-to-neutralize-right-wing-trolls/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/maga-troll-behind-plot-to-smear-mueller-flames-new-racist-birther-movement-against-kamala-harris/

Jacob Wohl, an Internet troll who plotted to smear special counsel Robert Muelleras a sexual predator, has launched a new conspiracy theory falsely suggesting that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is not an American citizen.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Wohl said that Harris should be disqualified from the presidential race because her parents were not born in the U.S. The attack resembled racist “birther” claims that were made against President Barack Obama by President Donald Trump and others.

Jacob Wohl

@JacobAWohl

Kamala Harris is NOT eligible to be President. Her father arrived from Jamaica in 1961—mother from India arrived in 1960

Neither parent was a legal resident for 5 years prior to Harris’s birth, a requirement for naturalization

Kamala was raised in Canada

21.4K

7:38 AM - Jan 22, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

29.1K people are talking about this

In fact, Harris is an American citizen who was born in Oakland, California.

Twitter users quickly ridiculed Wohl after he posted the conspiracy theory. Read some of the tweets below.

Jacob Wohl

@JacobAWohl

Jan 22, 2019

Kamala Harris is NOT eligible to be President. Her father arrived from Jamaica in 1961—mother from India arrived in 1960

Neither parent was a legal resident for 5 years prior to Harris’s birth, a requirement for naturalization

Kamala was raised in Canada

Malik U.

@The_U93

Guess being BORN in Oakland isn’t enough

Jacob Wohl

@JacobAWohl

Jan 22, 2019

Kamala Harris is NOT eligible to be President. Her father arrived from Jamaica in 1961—mother from India arrived in 1960

Neither parent was a legal resident for 5 years prior to Harris’s birth, a requirement for naturalization

Kamala was raised in Canada

OrangeIstheNewIndividual-1

@Ramzl119

Jacob, do you not have a job? I understand it's hard to get hired w/a record and all, but surely even a volunteer position cleaning kennels at the pound might be available? I think you're bored & should harness ur toxic energy for good. Make America great and all...

7:50 AM - Jan 22, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See OrangeIstheNewIndividual-1's other Tweets

Jacob Wohl

@JacobAWohl

Jan 22, 2019

Kamala Harris is NOT eligible to be President. Her father arrived from Jamaica in 1961—mother from India arrived in 1960

Neither parent was a legal resident for 5 years prior to Harris’s birth, a requirement for naturalization

Kamala was raised in Canada

Patrick

@CheeseWhiz

Ooh child, things are not gonna get easier for you...

665

7:52 AM - Jan 22, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

19 people are talking about this

Jacob Wohl

@JacobAWohl

Jan 22, 2019

Kamala Harris is NOT eligible to be President. Her father arrived from Jamaica in 1961—mother from India arrived in 1960

Neither parent was a legal resident for 5 years prior to Harris’s birth, a requirement for naturalization

Kamala was raised in Canada

S.T.H.

@Toddipedia

Aww. How cute... you're creating your very own birther movement.

1,118

7:41 AM - Jan 22, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

29 people are talking about this

Jacob Wohl

@JacobAWohl

Jan 22, 2019

Kamala Harris is NOT eligible to be President. Her father arrived from Jamaica in 1961—mother from India arrived in 1960

Neither parent was a legal resident for 5 years prior to Harris’s birth, a requirement for naturalization

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/white-kentucky-teens-surround-and-harass-native-american-veteran-during-dc-indigenous-peoples-march/

A now-viral video is shining light on repulsive actions by the next generation of MAGA supporters. Students from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Kentucky were apparently in Washington D. C. to take part in the anti-choice “March for Life.” That’s where they came across Omaha Nation elder and American military veteran Nathan Philips. And that’s when these very Christian high school students decided that the best thing they could learn in the nation’s capital was how to express bigotry and hate.

Philips was present to take part in the Washington version of the Indigenous Peoples March, which was organized by the Indigenous Peoples Movement. Other events for January 18th were taking place around the world, from Asia to South America and Oceania to Africa. To accommodate two groups protesting in Washington on the same day, the Indigenous Peoples March moved the location of their rally at the last moment.

However, that didn’t stop Philips from coming to the attention of the Covington students. As the Indigenous Peoples March was drawing to an end, the group of 50-70 uniformly white students, wearing Trump-brand MAGA hats and wielding cellphone cameras, came into the area, and surrounded Philips, effectively blocking his march progress as they mocked his chant and drumming, and taunted him over an extended period. Witnesses describe them as standing inches away from Philips and others, screaming insults, bumping into people, singing over chants, and laughing in people’s faces.

It’s even worse when you see the full mob effect. pic.twitter.com/Oe7Zn5srOB

— Lulu Says (@lulu_says2) January 19, 2019

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/22/i_was_absolutely_afraid_indigenous_elder

also whiskey rebellion

https://www.alternet.org/troll-model-trump-takeaways-hard-art-naming-and-taming-total-jerks

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-internet-gets-hip-to-npc-memes

Right-wing circles online have become increasingly obsessed with “NPC” memes, which they’ve utilized to compare their critics to non-playable characters in video games. The comparison, they hope, serves to ascribe a degree of intellectual apathy to, and dehumanize, those who do not hold their own far-right beliefs.

According to the meme-tracking website “Know Your Meme,” the NPC meme originated on 4chan in a 2016 thread posted to the portion of the site dedicated to video games. The post projects a hybrid of simulation theory philosophy and belief structures held by many conspiracy theorists, who become convinced that they have discovered a “truth” that has broken them from a previously autonomous lifestyle in normal society.

In early September, the meme experienced a brief renaissance on 4Chan’s “politically incorrect” anonymous image board (known online simply as “/pol/”) but appeared to wander out of the spotlight nearly as quickly as it had entered. But since the publication of a Kotaku article explaining the meme last week, users have made a play to replace the term “SJW”—referring to the caricature of a “social justice warrior”—and has given birth to a new tangle of spin-offs. As Cecilia D’Anastasio at Kotaku explains:

In some corners of the internet, NPC is beginning to replace the term “SJW.” According to ex-World of Warcraft dev Mark Kern, NPCs have the following qualities: “Incapable of independent thought. Wants everything done for them. (Quests) Constantly needing coddling (escort quests).” He published his checklist after another developer accused him of being a “right wing hack.” The tweet evidently was meant to compare so-called SJWs to these NPCs.

It’s a now-common refrain on Reddit, with posts on /r/The_Donald saying, “The Left is just a meme of lunacy come to life. They’re just NPCs in the game of life” or, in reference to economic experts widely condemning tariffs, “here we are with one of the best economies in US history. Only brainwashed NPCs believe what ‘experts’ say when those claims are contradicted by reality!.”

Now that the NPC meme has been re-framed as a way to “own the libs,” it’s inspired a new wave of enthusiasm among Trump supporters online. Google Trends shows a massive spike in interest in the meme.

Users at Reddit’s largest pro-Trump forum board have praised the meme’s supposed potency, one user writing, “I guarantee this is demoralizing enough liberals to make a difference on Election Day.” Users adapted the meme to depict NFL player Colin Kaepernick, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, and panel guests on CNN. One user even created a custom snapchat filter that users can apply to transform anyone’s face into the “NPC” meme.

:{The Gift Of Our Wounds:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

Arno Michaelis and Pardeep Singh Kaleka discussed their book, The Gift of Our Wounds: A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate, at the Wisconsin Book Festival in…

1018

Alt-Right Mob Involved in Brutal Beating Outside of Event at New York's Metropolitan Republican Club

By Tom Boggioni, Raw Story

The attack began after "a protester tried to take their MAGA hat they wear brutally kicked and punched." READ MORE»

===

https://www.propublica.org/article/vasilios-pistolis-imprisoned-marine-hate-groups

Marines Move to Tackle Racial Extremists in the Corps

ProPublica

game/hijack ggl fb youtube esp:

Proselytizing Conspiracy Theories

It's not clear who first asked whether or not themassacre at Sandy Hook was a hoax,but that notion was circulating on talk radio among well-established conspiracy theorists within days of the mass shooting. The conspiracy connected multiple well-trodden frames, most notably the presence of a deep state that wanted to limit access to guns and the idea that the news media was operating on behalf of the Obama administration. As conspiratorial thinkers and other digital actors obsessed over the story, they devised a term to dismiss the people who appeared on TV. They called these people "crisis actors."

This concept is linked to an earlier phenomenon that Whitney Phillips documented: RIP trolling. In various message boards, people lamented what they called "grief tourism," referring to the tendency of well-meaning people to post messages on someone's page after they died even when they didn't know that person. In response, trolls used cruel commentary, sick jokes, and harassment to attack anyone who added to the media spectacle surrounding a person's death. RIP trolling was a form of harassment, but it was also a way of mocking how social media and news media created spectacle around death.

By labeling those who had witnessed terroristic gun violence "crisis actors," conspiracy theorists didn't simply seek to undermine those who were sharing their stories. They wanted to troll the news media. Some had a political agenda; others simply wanted to mock the media for its "grief tourism."But collectively, they wanted to seed doubt in the public about the honesty of the media's reporting.

Phrases like "crisis actor" don't spread naturally through word-of-mouth networks, even on social media. To get them into the public lexicon, media manipulators must convince major media amplifiers to work on their behalf.Over the last six years, networks of online antagonists have jumped on every mass tragedy to manipulate the media and propel this term into the mainstream. They use fake accounts on social media to talk with journalists, to ask journalists if there is any truth to the idea that witnesses are really crisis actors. They deface Wikipedia entries.They try to manipulate trending topics and autocomplete on search.But algorithmic systems aren't their target. Journalists are the real target of their digital shenanigans.

Manipulators aren't trying to get journalists to say that witnesses to gun violence and terrorism are actually crisis actors. Their goal is to get the news media to negate that frame?-?and negate the conspirators who are propagating that frame. This may be counter-intuitive, but when news media negates a conspiratorial frame, the people who are most open to such a conspiracy will want to self-investigate precisely because they don't trust the news media. As a result, negation enables a boomerang effect.

Algorithmic systems aren't their target. Journalists are the real target of their digital shenanigans.

Propelling the term into public lexicon is only the first step. Sure, it's fun to celebrate an effort to manipulate major newscasters. But a secondary goal is to get people to search for a term that they've never considered before. Once news media starts negating the concept of a crisis actor, searches for that term spiked. What did they find when they did that search? For example, in the first days after Parkland, they found blog posts and online conversations staged to mock the news media and gaslight the public.

For example, a video from the aforementioned conspiracy theorist focused on crisis actors opens with: "Are we saying the shooting didn't happen? Are we saying they're all actors and that they're faking that something happened? No. The media is saying that. What we're saying is [that] 'School Shooting Survivor Turned Activist dad, Hogg's Father in FBI appears to have been coached.'" This particular video then continues on to imply Anderson Cooper is a well-known CIA operative and describes how CNN fakes things… all to build the case that David Hogg is fundamentally a Democratic Party operative. Viewers may not believe everything, but they are initiated into frames that they've never considered. And that's the point of triggering people to search.

Using search to your advantage relies on what Michael Golebiewski at Bing calls a "data void." When people search for a phrase that does not have natural informative results, it's easy for manipulators to control the results. Take, for example, "did the Holocaust exist?" If no one produces content to combat that frame, what people get when they search for that phrase is conspiratorial. Media manipulators design and exploit data voids. They galvanize around phrases, create digital content around that phrase, and then work to push those phrases into the mainstream lexicon by using news media's instinct to cover something new. When it came to "crisis actors," they knew what search results would appear at the top, especially on YouTube.

Google and Bing rely heavily on legitimate news content to cover up data voids about breaking topics. But YouTube is a disaster. First, there's a lot less content on YouTube, which means that problematic content surfaces to the top faster. Second, YouTube isn't simply a search engine; it's also a recommendation engine that encourages people to view more videos and go on a journey. This is great for music discovery, but not so great when manipulators game the recommendation system to create pathways to extremist content. Third, while newsrooms and text creators have gotten smart about SEO on Google and Bing, they're weak withYouTube, even though it's the primary search engine for the under-25s.

My colleague Becca Lewis is about to release a report that shows how media manipulators have leveraged data voids, recommendation processes of YouTube, and potential recruits' interest in self-investigation to walk people from quasi-mainstream debates to extremism. Through the use of comments, linking, and strategic cross-participation, those who are curious to self-investigate follow breadcrumbs that were designed to promote conspiracy and hate. Unfortunately,most media making organizations don't think about the networked nature of videoor the importance of creating high quality, easily findable content on YouTube....

===

https://www.alternet.org/theyre-not-white-nationalists-theyre-white-supremacists

There was a time when you didn’t run across names like Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, Jason Kessler, Arthur Jones, and Russell Walker in the press as often as you do these days. Who are these fine, upstanding Americans, you might ask? White supremacists, that’s who.

Richard Spencer is the founder and president of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacy think tank located in Alexandria, Virginia. He was a prominent speaker at the infamous Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last year, during which a counter demonstrator, Heather Heyer, was run down by an automobile driven by James Alex Fields, Jr., another white supremacist who killed Heyer and injured 28 others in the incident.

Jared Tayloris the founder and editor of American Renaissance, an online white supremacist magazine published by the New Century Foundation. He is a former board member of Spencer’s National Policy Institute, and is on the board of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a neo-confederate white supremacist organization that is a descendant of the White Citizens Councils, segregationist groups that terrorized civil rights workers in the South.

Jason Kessler is the main organizer of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville last year, and a self-described neo-Nazi and white supremacist.

Arthur Jones is the Republican candidate for Congress in the 3rd District in Illinois, a holocaust denier and former leader of the American Nazi Party. He frequently espouses white supremacist views in his campaign.

Russell Walker is the Republican candidate for state representative in North Carolina’s 48th District. He is a proud racist who has referred to President Obama as “genetically inferior,” and features on his website this statement: “Well someone or group has to be supreme and that group is the whites of the world.”

A disturbingly large segment of the media began referring to these loons as “white nationalists” about the time that they adopted the title, “alt-right” and many of them, including former Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, began expressing support for Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump refused to disavow their support, denying several times to CNN’s Jake Tapper that he even knew who Duke was, or knew anything about “white supremacy.”

"Well, just so you understand, I don't know anything about David Duke. okay?” Trump said. “I don't know anything about what you're even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don't know.”

The “alt-right” is simply a mask white supremacists wear to lend legitimacy to their racism. White supremacists believe that white people make up a superior race, and that all other races are inferior. They make their arguments using genetics, morals, and religion to support their sick beliefs, which they use to justify various “solutions” to the “race problem” in the United States, everything from sending all African Americans “back to Africa” to denying anyone who isn’t white basic civil rights.

Until the last couple of years, it was fairly easy to go through your life and never encounter white supremacist views or hear one of their names. With the sole exception of David Duke, who ran for and won a seat in the Louisiana legislature for a single term back in the late 1980’s, white supremacists didn’t run for office because no political party would have them. Their beliefs were consigned to obscure far-right journals and the distant corners of the online world.

Today, a google search of the name “Richard Spencer” will turn up thousands of stories in mainstream media outlets, everything from local television news programs, to GQ magazine, to Bloomberg, to a long story in Inside Higher Ed exploring the dilemma faced by prominent universities like Ohio State about whether to allow him to speak on campus. The Republican Party, to which white supremacists have recently attached themselves, occasionally disavows them, but there they are, running for office on the Republican line across the nation. White supremacists win Republican primaries. They face Democrats for election to office in November.

White supremacists. Not people who disagree with Democrats on the defense budget, or health care, or trade policy. People who believe that blacks shouldn’t be allowed to vote. People who believe that those whose skin is a different color than white are inferior, lesser human beings.

It wasn’t always this way. Twenty years ago, I was aware of white supremacists and their views, but they weren’t a recognizable part of our national life, or mine for that matter. Then DNA results were published establishing with a high degree of certainty that Thomas Jefferson had fathered the children of his slave, Sally Hemings. As a descendant of our third president, I already accepted that Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children and wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying so. Slave owners had sex with their slaves all the time. That Jefferson had been one of them hardly came as a surprise. I was invited on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” along with quite a few of my Hemings cousins and decided right there during the show to invite them to accompany me to the Jefferson family reunion at Monticello. It was time they were recognized for who they were: descendants of Jefferson just like the rest of us.

We did just that in May of 1999. Together, we attended the reunion and the family meeting of the Monticello Association, and I began what became a four year campaign to get the descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson accepted into the family association. The Jefferson reunion received wide coverage that first year. It was on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Several of my Hemings cousins and I appeared on the “Today Show” and “Good Morning America.” There was television coverage from as far away as Paris, Helsinki, and Bangkok.

That’s when the gates of white supremacist hell opened and I got a better look inside than I had ever counted on. It began during the reunion that weekend. As an author and screenwriter, I was a public figure easily reachable online, and as it turned out, by phone. My email in-box filled up within hours.

RACE TRAITOR. That was the subject line on hundreds of emails, almost always in all-caps. I answered call after call on my cell phone from raving white supremacists, screaming RACE TRAITOR, denouncing me for abandoning the white race and sullying the good name of one of our white founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. The people who called were all men, every single one of them. They were beside themselves with rage. I was a traitor to my family, to the country, and to the white race.

The emails kept coming when I returned home to Los Angeles, and then the letters flooded through the mail slot in the front door. No return address on any of them. About half were composed of letters and words cut from magazines and newspapers and pasted to typing paper. There was RACE TRAITOR, of course, followed in many cases by death threats.

My favorite was one that arrived in an envelope unmarked except for my typed name and address. Inside were two photographs: One was a .45 caliber pistol shot in profile, showing the barrel, trigger, and wooden pistol grip, into which a Jefferson nickel had been embedded. The other photograph was of the same pistol’s barrel in close-up pointed right at me with “YOU’RE DEAD RACE TRAITOR” scrawled in magic marker along the bottom of the photo.

There were more than 100 death threats in the first week, most of them by regular mail, but some by email and on the phone. I stopped keeping count after that. I never called the FBI because I was raised to understand, and trained in the military to believe, that you can count on cowards for one thing: to be too chickenshit to carry through on their empty threats. The death threats petered out after a month or so. My mom and dad and the Army were right. Nineteen years have passed, and I’m still here.

I consider it one of the great privileges of my birth as a Jefferson descendant to have taken the stand I did and become exposed to white supremacy up close and personal. For most white people, white supremacy is an abstract concept. We don’t suffer its effects. But it’s out there, and for Americans of color, and many others, it affects practically everything in their lives.

Voter suppression is real, and it’s a result of white supremacist beliefs. Our current immigration policy is racist and xenophobic and white supremacist at its core. The Jeff Sessions Justice Department’s de-emphasis on civil rights enforcement is a white supremacist policy. Efforts to end affirmative action in admissions at colleges come from a white supremacist urge to cling to power. Right wing attacks on the Voting Rights Act culminating in Shelby v Holder are a result of long-held white supremacist beliefs in the south and elsewhere. Look at where the suit was filed. Look at the states that passed voter suppression laws almost immediately after the decision came down.

Now we have a president who claims not to know who David Duke is, but who can’t wake up in the morning without drawing a white supremacist breath. The Republican Party is fielding numerous candidates around the country who claim white supremacist views. Not the Democrats. The Republicans.

We’re approaching a time in this country when we will have two political parties: The white people’s party, and the Democrats. Impeaching Trump or defeating him in 2020 isn’t going to solve the problem of white supremacy. But voting against the white people’s party and driving their white supremacist followers back into the ratholes they came from is a good start.

===

Henry G

It gets worse. In the age of a bullying Internet culture, the trolling community has now elected one of its own as president of the United States.As the apostle of publicity for publicity’s sake, Trump has adopted the practices of reality TV, building his reputation on insults, humiliation and a discourse of provocation and hate. According to the New York Times, even before the 2016 election Trump had used Twitter to insult at least 282 people, places and things. Not only has he honed the technique of trolling, he has also made it a crucial resource in upping the ratings for the mainstream media which, it seems, are insatiable when it comes to covering Trump’s insults.

===

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060094801

One scientist was called Climate Barbie.

Another was described as an "ugly fake scientist." A third had an erect penis drawn on her car window while she was in the field researching sea-level rise.

Such is the life of many female climate scientists in 2018.

All researchers face the risk of being criticized when speaking publicly about their findings. But women in the field describe being attacked based on their gender. They've endured insults, sexual taunts and degrading comments about their professional acumen. Most of their harassers use social media, email and the phone for their attacks. But there's a fear that it could become physical.

Threats of death, rape and other forms of violence have left a number of researchers feeling concerned for their safety. They worry about opening envelopes with handwritten addresses and answering phone calls from unfamiliar numbers. Anonymous emails that try to entice a response cause agitation.

"We get this additional layer of hate mail, and people, I think, find it easier to put us down because we are women, or feel like they have more right in telling us what is right or wrong despite our expertise, which is always frustrating," said Andrea Dutton, a geologist at the University of Florida and an expert on sea-level rise.

Dutton said she often hesitates to answer the phone after she's quoted in the media. The feeling can last for days, prompted by harassing attacks in the past from unfamiliar numbers.

One prominent researcher who has spoken about being harassed asked not to be quoted in this article. She worries it would trigger a new wave of trolling. Her concern goes beyond online attacks and hateful phone calls. She's worried for her safety.

The attacks aren't new. But some scientists say the harassment they're enduring is becoming more personal, increasingly sexist and less focused on their scientific conclusions. Some suggested that it coincides with rising societal tensions over gender and race, laid bare by President Trump's political rise.

"There is a huge underlying fear of change, and that's spawned the whole 'Make America Great Again,'" said Katharine Hayhoe,director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University.

"When was America great?" she added. "Back when women were in the kitchen and others knew their place, and so because of that, the whole climate change thing, the whole idea that humans could actually interfere with the planet's climate and that fossil fuels were the way that we got great way back in the day, that's what underlies all this, and that's why there is such a mix between gender and climate denial, because it's all coming from the same perceived threat to identity, and position and power and rights."

Online harassers have called her a "sad, little mediocrity," an "ugly fake scientist" and an "old thin-looking hag." They've gone after Hayhoe for sharing her climate research and for her outreach to the evangelical Christian community.

The verbal and written attacks derive mostly from men. That's probably not a coincidence. Studies show that climate skepticism is a male-dominated perspective. Men are less likely than women to accept scientific conclusions about people being responsible for rising temperatures. And they're more likely to overestimate their knowledge of the issue.

Threats aside, some of the most frustrating attacks experienced by Hayhoe are those that denigrate her professionally. Some men talk to her like she's a "certified, Grade-A idiot," she said.

"These same men who are sending me all this stuff and telling me I know nothing, that I'm not qualified and that I'm ignorant, if I were one of the top cancer surgeons in the country, at the same level that I'm a climate scientist and they had cancer, I am sure that most but not all of them would be happy to have me operate on them. They wouldn't be challenging my credentials; they wouldn't be saying, 'I know more about natural cycles than you do.'"

Someone on Twitter called her "Climate Barbie 2.0." There were repeated hang-ups on her voicemail, something she finds particularly disturbing because she's worried the caller might be unstable. Are they angrily dialing over and over again? Other "pseudo-engagers," as Cobb calls them, have written to ask seemingly sincere questions about climate change. One of them called her "stupider than a cow" after receiving her thoughtful response.Public appearances on national television outlets, in particular, bring waves of hatred for scientists. Kim Cobb, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at Georgia Tech, recently appeared on national news programs to talk about the dangers of climate change. Now she's being called a liar over email.

Cobb said this is the reality for female scientists. She has learned to take the nastiness as an indication that her message is reaching people.

"This is a sign of your effectiveness," she said. "You have to take it that way, and when you take it that way, it can push you forward and give you the armor that you need."

Still, she has noticed a shift in the tone of her critics. After she tweeted recently about a bedtime conversation about climate change with her 11-year-old daughter, she was accused of making it up. Some questioned the existence of her daughter and told her she was guilty of child abuse.

The attacks on her motherhood are representative of the vitriol in recent years, she said. In the past, climate deniers would at least try to convince her of their findings.

Now there's mostly rage.

"I do see a shift toward a lack of substance sharing," Cobb said. "So much of the flak from the climate-denial community, I think, was in the form of trying to share graphs to show their point, trying to question you on the validity of the science. And a lot of that was very misguided, of course, but it was still pretending to be substantive, on the data, on the issues themselves. But it seems much of it today has turned completely to ad hominem attacks, these stream of emotionally laden insults with no substance whatsoever behind them, just trying to land one below the belt."

Women who research climate change aren't only facing the threat of harassment from strangers on the internet. A recent report shows that female scientists in academia are among the most at risk to face sexual harassment from their colleagues and superiors.

An analysis this year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine highlighted high rates of workplace harassment for female researchers in sciences, engineering and medicine at universities. The report's authors noted that 58 percent of female academic faculty and staff experienced sexual harassment, making academia second only to the military (with 69 percent) in rates of workplace sexual harassment. They pointed to a number of factors that create an environment ripe for harassment, including a reliance on advisers for career advancement and a "macho" work culture.

Climate scientists do have some legal recourse against the most serious threats.

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund is designed to protect researchers who are victims of harassment. The defense fund also directs scientists to other resources for workplace sexual harassment and offers counseling to help scientists respond to incidents that may be troubling but not illegal. The fund's executive director, Lauren Kurtz, said laws addressing online harassment are "behind the times." They tend to focus on bullying of children, not adult victims.

Reports from women since the fund was created in 2011 fall into two main categories.

Some complaints are similar to the types of harassment faced by men, but "there is a sense of a lack of cooperation on the part of the institution or difficulty raising the issue with their supervisor," Kurtz said.

There's also sexual harassment. The group received a complaint a few months ago from a climate scientist who reported "really odious rape threats" on Twitter.

Sarah Myhre, a paleoceanographer at the University of Washington, blames polarization on climate change for disproportionate threats against scientists compared with other disciplines.

"When you ask people, 'Do you believe in climate change?' what you're asking isn't 'What is your topical knowledge?' it's 'What is your tribalism?'" Myhre said. "Because it has been so hijacked in this partisan dystopic narrative, it leads to misogyny being used to discredit climate science."

One of the most visible climate scientists in the country, Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, said he sees a difference in how female colleagues are treated. Mann said he has been targeted by people who reject climate change for two decades. He has received death threats, has been mailed white powder, and was targeted by fossil fuel and conservative interest groups to be fired or imprisoned. Still, he sees an extra element of vitriol in the way women in the field are treated.

"I can tell you that there is a very large overlap between those who harbor conspiracy theories about climate science and those who express unenlightened views when it comes to matters of ethnicity and gender," Mann said. "In short, yeah — a surprisingly large number of climate deniers are misogynists. And so our female colleagues are at the receiving end of a particularly toxic brew of denialism, conspiratorial ideation and misogyny. It is most unfortunate and most disturbing."

Still, there seems to be an increasing public awareness of the harassment directed at female scientists, observers say. Those who have been harassed say they want more of their colleagues, especially men, to speak out about the problem. That's happening more and more, said Dutton, the geologist at the University of Florida.

"That's what we really need; it can't all come from us," she said. "It shouldn't have to be the victims; that's how we're really going to have change, when it's the other people calling out the bad behaviors, and I have started to see some of that.

"That's heartening."

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/a-year-after-charlottesville-melee-silicon-valley-still-profits-off-extremism

A year ago, Americans watched on in horror as the extremism and hate of the so-called “alt-right”, which had long been festering online, materialized in a very real and terrifying form on the streets of Charlottesville.

In response to the violence, which :{left }::{counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer dead}: and dozens of others injured, tech companies belatedly woke up to the fact that they were effectively providing safe spaces for far-right hate. These companies made promises to the public that they would take action, and soon cracked down on some of the far-right’s most prominent figures and organizations.

Far-right figures were booted off Twitter, domain-hosting companies shut downneo-Nazi forums like Stormfront, and Richard B. Spencer, one of the most immediately recognizable figures in the latest rebirth of the racist white identitarian movement that branded itself an alternative to the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Confederate groups, has been repeatedly kicked from fundraising platforms.

But one year later, many of the most well-documented hate groups and conveners of extremism online are still operating on the backs of some of the largest tech industry giants. The tech companies are aware of this problem, but they seem to have chosen indifference.

One of the most flagrant offenders is Stripe,an online payment processing company that works with some of the biggest names in tech, including Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Salesforce. But such while major content providers Apple, Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube have taken half-measures to give the appearance that they’re cracking down on hate, payment processing systems, and especially Stripe, haven’t even done that much, continuing to allow its purveyors to collect profits via their services.

What makes the inaction of the payment processing companies so infuriating is that they are still readily working with such groups and websites — even those who can’t be bothered to hide their racism and anti-Semitism behind layers of “irony” and “humor,” as do many :{in }::{the ranks of the 2.0 form of white identitarianism}: — despite repeated promises that they would do just that.

Stripe, for instance, is servicing payments for the League of the South, Occidental Quarterly, and Counter–Currents Publishing. The League of the South:{is an openly white supremacist, neo-Confederate group}: that advocates Secession and the creation of a southern theocracy. Its leaders say that immigration “will eventually weaken and destroy our civilization.” (Intriguingly, a whole section of the group’s website is devoted to “Russian Outreach.”)

Counter–Currents Publishing and Occidental Quarterly, meanwhile, have been part of the “intellectual vanguard” of the far-right for decades, flogging books such as “Truth, Justice, & a Nice White Country.” One of the most important figures in this white nationalist “intellectual” sphere is Jared Taylor, who:{sits on the board for Occidental Quarterly}:. Taylor has been a prominent figure on the:{white supremacist scene for more than 25 years}:, and frequently appears:{at far-right conferences}:, including those convened by Spencer.

Former Counter–Currents contributor :{Jason Jorjani}: was:{filmed}: last September by the:{anti-racism group Hope not Hate}: saying that the far-right’s plans will end “with concentration camps and expulsions and war — at the cost of a few hundred million people.”[pix]

The site Gab.ai, a “free speech” social media platform that quickly became a haven for white supremacists banned from more conventional sites like Twitter, also runs its premium account payments through Stripe. Members of Gab Pro can use Stripe processing to profit via the website by offering subscriptions to paywalled content. As indicated by the blue checkmarks next to their handles on the site, Gab Pro members include neo-Nazis:{Andrew Anglin}: of The Daily Stormer, failed Senate candidate:{Patrick Little}: and “Crying Nazi”:{Christopher Cantwell}:, just to name a few. Last week, Gab was forced to remove two posts from Little that contained violent anti-Semitic threats.

As a payment processor, there are two ways for Stripe to facilitate financial transactions between its clients and the banking system: via plug-ins and payment gateways. In the case of payment gateways, Stripe is an active part of allowing the money to move from the client to the banks. For example, when a person decides to donate to League of the South, Stripe will take his credit card information and check it against the banking system. If the information matches, Stripe allows the user’s donation to pass through its “gateway” and into the banking system.

Plug-ins are a bit more complicated. They can be described as a tool that Stripe gives away so that a website can better control its own financing. When Stripe gives away the plugin, however, someone has to sign over bank account details to the website owner or administrator. That, plus the information on the site, gives Stripe a record of who it is working with and on what site the plug-in will appear. [2 pix]

To its credit, Stripe has already removed its service from some sites popular with extremists, including BitChute, FreeStartr, and GoMakerSupport. But the problem appears to be systemic, and when we asked the company about its servicing for other extreme hate groups, we didn’t receive an answer.

In Stripe’s user agreement, under “Prohibited Businesses,” it says it will not service “any business or organization that a. engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property, or engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence toward any group based on race, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or any other immutable characteristic.”

A tech employee familiar with financial processing, who asked us to keep their identity anonymous for fear they may lose their job for speaking with us, told us that Stripe “almost certainly” knows it provides its services to extremists.

“A company like Stripe is going to have employees dedicated to monitoring their brand,” the tech worker told us. “They’re not dumb. They read Twitter. They read the news. If a racist website is breaking their terms of service, it’ll get flagged eventually. The system works slowly … but it’s up to major tech companies like Stripe to enforce their own terms of service.”

Sources close to Stripe say that company has had major internal discussions over how best to handle sites like League of the South, a debate echoed on a wider scale throughout Silicon Valley — seen most recently with the drawn-out drama of Alex Jones getting deplatformed.

On one hand, the sources noted, Stripe is aware that it can no longer advocate complete neutrality. But the company also can’t arbitrarily decide who it refuses to work with, especially considering that on the other side of the coin, Stripe would like to work with some websites — such as websites that publish erotic art and operate in the marijuana business — but can’t because of its current terms and conditions. The sources added that, in their opinions, Stripe had done a good job of booting the organizers of the original Unite the Right from their system, and making sure that they didn’t sneak back in.

As a Business to Business (B2B) company, Stripe prefers to operate quietly, and is more responsive to its more immediately image conscious financial partners. This is where banking regulations come in.

A crucial part of Stripe’s terms and conditions isits Financial Service Terms section, which notes that Stripe partners with Wells Fargo for access to the financial system. Under the 2001 Patriot Act, Wells Fargo signed on to a Know Your Customer regulation, which requires banks and the payment processors they work with to collect information on their users to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

But according to Dennis Lormel, a former head of financial crimes at the FBI, although banks may be obligated to note who they do business with, it is still up to them to decide on an individual basis if the reputational risk of kicking groups or individuals off their platforms is worth it. Because groups like League of the South operate in a legal gray area — endorsing violence but not explicitly spreading it — banks often determine that kicking them off is not worth their time. This is particularly true, Lormel said, as these type of groups have been known to readily sue banks.

...Ive been axed from Patreon, without explanation, warning or notice -- no doubt as part of the ongoing efforts of the Left to deny all platforms to those who reject its agenda. To those who supported me there, thank you, and I'm sorry we couldn't follow through on plans.

...

:{Twitter Ads info and privacy:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:

Other financial processing companies have declared anti-hate policies on their transaction systems, including Patreon, which unrolled:{policies}: that forbid those who engage in hate speech, doxing, illegal activities, and bullying and harassment from using its crowdfunding site to enrich themselves. As a result, some far-right extremists, such as Faith Goldy, have been:{denied access}: to their platforms.

However, Patreon continues to:{allow extremist}: James Allsup, an advocate of white identitarianism, to continue to use Patreon to enrich himself. Allsup this year joined the white extremist group, Identity Evropa, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and in 2017 marched with extremist groups at the Unite the Right convergence in Charlottesville. He also spoke that year at a rally in Washington, D.C., convened by Spencer.

Read: [Richard Spencer Is Begging For Money To Fight Lawsuit Against Him]

For his own part, Richard Spencer told us he’s been unable to reach a human contact at Stripe to talk about the status of his account. He called it “ridiculous” that he has been, as he believes, “singled out as a bad actor” to serve as a public martyr for display to signal that companies like Stripe are combating hate on their platforms.

Spencer says he was cut off from the platform shortly after the Unite the Right converging of far-right groups in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017. The night before the streets of Charlottesville turned deadly, Spencer led a torchlit march to the campus of University of Virginia, steering a column of far-right activists who chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” Some of the marchers attacked a small band of UVA students who mounted a counter-protest.

Spencer told us that he had used Stripe for about five years prior to the ban imposed on him and the National Policy Institute, the innocuously named far-right extremist organization he helms. He said he used the platform to process hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of financial tractions — which he said he conservatively estimates to total at least a $250,000, but speculated it could have been as much a $1 million — for conference registrations, donations and book sales, all without a hitch.

“There are groups that seem quite similar to my operation, and indeed places I’ve written for in my career, that are apparently able to use these payment systems,” Spencer told us, saying he felt it was “unfair” he was “singled out.” He later added, “I have become the poster boy for this,” and compared himself to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been given the boot from many online services. It should be noted that those extremists who still have access to big-tech payment systems could be viewed as Spencer’s competitors.

Kicking white nationalists like Spencer from platforms can have serious implications for their ability to recruit and organize. Spencer said that his operation has experienced large setbacks since he lost access to simple payment processing online.

“I, in a way, have not recovered from the deplatforming since Charlottesville, and everything it entails,” Spencer said. “The payment processing — that is more devastating than the social media. I mean, I would give up my Twitter account if we could maintain something like payment processing that is made so easy through Stripe.”

Spencer told us he had “made some headway in cracking the nut” of payment processing for his group, but when we asked for more details he laughed and said, “I’m not going to tell you.”

***

This article was co-authored by Luke Barnes, a reporter at the progressive online news site, ThinkProgress. His work focuses on Big Tech, far-right extremism and organized crime.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/08/09/seeking-revenge-alex-jones-far-right-trolls-unleash-harassment-verified-twitter-users/220953

no lnx gfx many

Seeking revenge for Alex Jones, far-right trolls unleash harassment on verified Twitter users

A harassment campaign organized on far-right sites targeted journalists and activists with malicious abuse

Blog ››› August 9, 2018 5:12 PM EDT ››› TALIA LAVIN

Sarah Wasko/Media Matters

On Wednesday, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey reiterated the importance of journalists’ presence on the platform when he tweeted, “We can’t be a useful service without the integrity journalists bring.” Some journalists, many of whom have faced relentless harassment on the platform, met Dorsey’s proclamation with jaded skepticism, and for good reason. Following President Donald Trump’s frequent attacks against the press, journalists have become a target for online harassment by the far-right favorites, egged on by prominent figures like Fox’s Sean Hannity, whom Dorsey gave a rare interview to this week. And when the consequences of the anti-press sentiment on the right have turned deadly, far-right message boards users have reacted in celebration.

In fact, at the time Dorsey was underscoring the vital role of the press on Twitter, a coordinated harassment campaign -- seemingly originating from the anonymous message board 4chan and the white supremacist-friendly Twitter alternative Gab.ai -- was targeting users, including dozens ofjournalists, who have been verified by Twitter.

The campaign, organized under the hashtag #VerifiedHate, can be traced back to multiple internet spats that have unfolded in recent days. The first was a determined, bad-faith campaign to force The New York Times to fire newly hired editorial board member Sarah Jeong who had written a number of tweets appearing to denigrate white people. The manufactured outrage over Jeong was dominated by right-wing figures and championed by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who insisted on taking her flippant tweets as deadly earnest “reverse racism.” However, the campaign culminated in frustration as the Times retained Jeong, despite issuing a somewhat equivocal statement. The second episode was Alex Jones getting banned from several tech platforms including Apple, YouTube, Facebook, Stitcher, and MailChimp, which was viewed by right-wing media as evidence of double standards and anti-conservative bias among tech companies.

Faced with the combination of their failure to get a woman of color fired and their ire at tech companies, anonymous social-media users started a campaign to harass verified Twitter users who have in the past sent tweets containing jokes about white people.

The campaign -- targeting particularly those of Jewish descent -- can be traced back to Gab, which harbors infamous white supremacist trolls like Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin. Four days ago, a Gab user posted a collage of verified Twitter users who the person claimed were showing their “white hatred”:

The #VerifiedHate hashtag was also promoted by Gab founder and CEO Andrew Torba, a defender of white supremacist rhetoric who has appeared on Infowars to attack tech platforms:

The idea spread to 4chan, where users called the push to harass journalists and activists “Twittercaust” or the “Night of the Blue Checkmarks,” saying it was an effort “to prove … once and for all that the Journalists, media personalities and celebrities are all a part of a massive anti white (sic) conspiracy!!!”

The trolls also revealed it was a coordinated action, with some 4chan members claiming they were using multiple accounts to push the hashtag:

4chan users posted examples of their coordinated Twitter harassment on the message board, demonstrating ways in which individual tweets could circumvent the platform’s hateful conduct policy that prohibits the usage of slurs:

The trolls particularly singled out individuals of Ashkenazi Jewish descent who had referenced their own whiteness and Jewishness on Twitter:

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One locus of the #VerifiedHate campaign was BuzzFeed journalist Joe Bernstein, who received significant volumes of harassment, including one user who sent him an image of a gun:

On Twitter, the account @meme_america began to promote lists of users whom trolls could harass in the #VerifiedHate campaign and focused on specific journalists like VICE’s Justin Ling, who was subjected to vile comments:

Multiple 4chan users expressed affinity for Alex Jones, and one claimed that, though Twitter hasn't banned Jones yet, the platform has removed other conservative voices and “probably will remove more”:

#VerifiedHate is an example of an open campaign cooked up by right-wing trolls to harass and intimidate verified Twitter users, specifically journalists. If Dorsey really needs journalists to maintain the integrity of his platform, perhaps he should work to suppress campaigns that subject them to threats, intimidation, and harassment and make the social media platform safer to use for everyone.

everything you love will burn

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-You-Love-Will-Burn/dp/1568589948

everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America Hardcover – February 20, 2018

by Vegas Tenold

new rep

once a nuclear move, now common

occupy publish pix and info of cops who used excess force (origin?)

ethics of doxxing of alt rt

anniv of charlottesville (interesting class divide: prepies with prof'l future do not want to be outed but atomwaffen proles do not care b/c see no prof future)

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-8-2018/

Everything You Love Will Burn

Investigative journalist Vegas Tenold reports on white nationalism in America.

https://www.salon.com/2018/02/13/terror-victims-donald-trump-wont-talk-about-people-killed-by-the-alt-right/

Ha heard of Blaze Bernstein? What about Buckley Kuhn-Fricker and Scott Fricker?

Do Casey Jordan Marquez and Francisco Fernandez sound like familiar names?

The answer is almost certainly no. Those are a few names drawn from the list of more than 100 people murdered or injured by the white supremacist "alt-right" movement. The mainstream American news media has not devoted significant coverage to these victims. Why? Because while the rule "if it bleeds it leads" is the corporate media's informal modus operandi, right-wing violence has been increasingly normalized in the era of Donald Trump. Of course, Trump has not spoken the names of any of the 43 people killed by the "alt-right" because the perpetrators are not nebulous black or brown people -- or, worse yet, Muslims.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been documenting the tide of right-wing terrorism and violence instigated by Trump's presidential campaign, and in a backlash against Barack Obama, the country's first black president. The SPLC's new report details that since 2014, there have been "at least 13 alt-right related fatal episodes, leaving 43 dead and more than 60 injured. . . . Nine of the 12 incidents counted here occurred in 2017 alone, making last year the most violent year for the movement."

[T]hese perpetrators were all male and, with the exception of three men, all under the age of 30 at the time they are alleged to have killed. The average age of the alt-right killers is 26. The youngest was 17. One, Alexandre Bissonnette, is Canadian, but the rest are American. While some certainly displayed signs of mental illness, all share a history of consuming and/or participating in the type of far-right ecosystem that defines the alt-right. The "alt-right" is the tip of the spear, and a distillation of the social pathologies and broken civic culture that elected Donald Trump. In essence, the "alt-right" provides the shock troops, and arguably the ideological vanguard, for Trump's and the Republican Party's white identity movement.

What do we know about white supremacists and other members of the so-called "alt-right" movement? A recent working paper titled, "A Psychological Profile of the Alt-Right" by psychologists Patrick Forscher and Nour Kteily offers some preliminary answers.

They are overwhelmingly white and male.

They exhibit the "dark triad" of personality traits which are Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy.

They are radicalized online first through appeals to misogyny and sexism and the lie that white men are "oppressed." From that "men's rights" indoctrination, these white men are then socialized into white supremacy.

They possess little if any reluctance to use violence to obtain their personal and political goals.

They are motivated by racism and not the much discussed and incorrect narrative of "economic anxiety."

They are not "lone wolves" or isolated, stereotypical "losers."

They dehumanize other groups, especially black people, and also believe that white people should have special collective rights and privileges.

Dutch documentary filmmaker Patrik Hermansson infiltrated "alt-right" organizations in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom. During his year undercover, he learned a great deal about their values, beliefs and organizing strategies. Hermansson told the Guardian that he recorded people "who wanted to deport Jews and Muslims and who talked of murdering leftwing opponents, and . . . who boasted of direct links to the Trump administration." A common question I get is: “Aren’t they just doing this for fun?” particularly given the strong online and trolling presence. The answer is no. Jokes and irony are an important aspect of the online spheres where the “alternative right” mobilises but it cloaks an effective means of radicalising young people and getting the message out. Behind the irony and trolling are much more sinister ideas.

Hermansson also warned of the numbing effect of "alt-right" ideology, writing that the group's "extreme views started to feel almost normal" after months spent in their community:

I became desensitised and started to lose perspective of how absurd their ideology was. Ideas that I once reacted viscerally to I could listen to for hours without raising an eyebrow.

Allowing these hateful ideas to go unchallenged normalizes them. It brings about a creeping acceptance: even if you’re fundamentally against these notions you learn to live with them. Indeed, I was told that this is an explicit strategy by some of the leaders of these groups.

As demonstrated by the SPLC report and other research, the values of the "alt-right" offer a magnified mirror-image of the social anxieties and fears of the white voters who support Donald Trump and the current Republican Party. Trumpism is a toxic mix of social-dominance behavior, racial authoritarianism, misogyny, nativism, violence, white supremacy and a hostility towards an increasingly pluralistic and cosmopolitan world. This is why Trump, his party and their captive media will never forcefully condemn white supremacists or take substantive action against them. To reject white identity politics would be to tear the beating heart out of today's conservative movement.

https://www.alternet.org/human-rights/chronicle-white-supremacist-pr-crisis-and-making-hoax

Following the deadly high school shooting that claimed 17 lives in Parkland, FL, news sites and outlets scrambled to report details about the shooter’s identity and motive in a timely manner. Some of those details were manipulated by far-right trolls in efforts to plant misinformation and sow chaos, along the way creating a PR crisis for known white supremacists. It also created a lesson for media to not take attention-seeking extremists at their word.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that Jordan Jereb, the leader of white supremacist militia Republic of Florida (ROF), claimed that suspected shooter Nikolas Cruz was affiliated with ROF. Other outlets quickly picked up the story, causing known white supremacists like The Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin and Traditionalist Worker Party’s Matthew Parrott to go into crisis management mode and distance themselves from ROF and the shooting.

Jereb, who years ago flooded the Southern Poverty Law Center with “pleas for attention,” is somewhat of a joke among extremists, mocked for trying too hard, as he posts content related to the “Read Siege”, which refers to Siege, the collection of writings by neo-Nazi writer James Mason. As Mason’s writings have increasingly become tied to the most violent and deadly factions of white supremacism -- like the Atomwaffen division (which has been tied to several recent killings) -- “establishment” white supremacists are attempting to distance themselves from those who act on their convictions by calling them satanists and “Siegefags”. That was exactly what Anglin did after reports surfaced that Jereb had claimed the Parkland shooter was a white supremacist, claiming it was “a setup” and that the militia was infiltrated by “satanists pretending to be Nazis:”

However, as local authorities found no evidence to back up Jereb’s claims that Cruz belonged to ROF, media outlets started updating their initial reporting on the story. Jereb took to Gab, the social media platform dubbed a “haven for white nationalists,” to recant his statements to ADL and media outlets, blaming it all on a “misunderstanding,” his need for a good night’s sleep, and "the lying jew media":

Meanwhile, trolls bragged on 4chan message boards and other platforms about conceiving and planting the hoax in the chat platform Discord, with the purpose of mocking Jereb -- who eventually played along with the hoax -- and discrediting media outlets. The hoax narrative immediately allowed prominent white nationalists some relief:

[doc]

Trolls interpreted the events as their resounding victory over media, with Anglin claiming on The Daily Stormer that the hoax had been a way of “humiliating the media” and “blowing the credibility of the ADL:”

Cristina López G. is a senior researcher at Media Matters with a focus in Hispanic media and Latino representation.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/02/09/right-wing-trolls-held-panel-complain-about-their-declining-traffic-rates-trump-was-elected/219328

Following declining traffic rates on their websites, an assortment of conspiracy theorists, hoax peddlers, anti-Muslim bigots, partisan activists, and pro-Trump media figures -- who depend on social media to broadcast their messages and profit from their audiences -- convened a panel in Washington, D.C., to claim tech giants like Google, Twitter, and Facebook are “shadow-banning” and censoring them for being conservative and supporting President Donald Trump.

The panel on Social Media Neutrality, put together on February 6 by The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft, featured Right Side Broadcasting Network's (RSBN) Margaret Howell, anti-Muslim bigot Pamela Geller, software developer Marlene Jaeckel, and -- whose site’s content has triggered the Defense Department’s flags for hate and racism. Fox News regular Michelle Malkin and self-proclaimed “guerrilla journalist” (but actual partisan hack) James O'Keefe also made video appearances.

[vid]

The participants were united in their claim that, based on their declining traffic rates since after the election, Facebook, Twitter, and Google must be silencing or "shadow-banning" them. A "shadow-ban" refers to when users are blocked from sharing content to an online community, but can’t tell they have been banned. Hoft took issue with digital platforms warning users that his website contains “disputed articles,” even though his site has a lengthy record of publishing false information.

After expressing her admiration for Alex Jones’ programming at Infowars, RSBN’s Howell accused Media Matters of “orchestrat[ing] a hit” against RSBN’s YouTube channel and being “in cahoots” with tech giants, claiming a Media Matters piece was the reason Facebook removed RSBN’s content for violating terms of service without clarifying which terms of service the platform had considered violated. She also claimed YouTube started censoring RSBN’s videos in the search results and marking videos as “not suitable for most advertisers.” RSBN, according to Howell, was born in reaction to then-candidate Trump’s (false) narrative that mainstream media never showed the crowds at his rallies and twisted his statements out of context. RSBN is also the same network that was once comfortable hiring former Infowars reporter Joe Biggs to host one of its shows, despite Biggs’ awful history of trivializing date rape or encouraging violence against transgender people.

Both Michelle Malkin and Pamela Geller accused social media companies of censoring their platforms, which they’ve used to post anti-Muslim content. Malkin and Geller frequently appear on Fox News to malign entire Muslim communities or demean undocumented immigrants. Geller also accused media and tech companies of removing content critical of Islam because Sharia law, according to her, mandates that Islam not be criticized.

Another panelist, Marlene Jaeckel, a software engineer and self-proclaimed “anti-feminist,” claimed to have been ostracized from Silicon Valley’s female tech groups because of her outspoken support for former Google software engineer James Damore. Damore was fired for writing a 10-page internal memo that Google’s CEO said “advanc[ed] harmful gender stereotypes.” She warned against the dangers of the biases Amazon’s Alexa and other home digital assistants could be giving to children, a theme that has occupied the minds of others on the far-right.

As evident by some speakers’ remarks at the panel, at least some of these right-wing figures are breaking their loyalty to free market capitalism to call for government regulations to stop the companies from removing their content when it violates the companies’ terms of service. However, what they see as the unbridled exercise of their opinions is also what has made it necessary for Twitter, Facebook, and Google to update and revise their terms of service in order to combat fake news and protect its users against extremism, hate speech, and online harassment.

Political allies of these far-right personalities are also helping them advance their conservative victimhood narrative. For example, in January, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) seemingly used O’Keefe’s undercover videos against Twitter (apparently ignoring his long history of deceptive editing and pathetic self-own episodes) to make serious against the social media platform of banning conservatives (Cruz spent most of his timeduring a 2017 Senate hearing questioning social media companies about political bias).

But these social media companies aren’t censoring conservative voices; they are taking action to combat fake news, Russian propaganda, hate speech, and online harassment and not always succeeding. Twitter has vowed to become “more aggressive” in monitoring racism and hate speech in its platform, but has admitted to making mistakes that often continue to enable extremists to smear immigrants and Muslims. YouTube -- which is owned by Google -- is struggling in its campaign to stop allowing content creators who spew hateful views from profiting from the platform, as it has allowed white supremacists to spread their messaging. And it was pressure from right-wing figures that reportedly pushed Facebook to “pull back from human oversight” of its Trending section and “delegate more power to shoddy algorithms,” which could have facilitated the flourishingof fake news and Russian propaganda. Similar right-wing pressure has also pushed Google to end a fact check display in its searches.

While social media companies need to do a better job in crafting and enforcing policies that adequately respond to the challenges that harassment and misinformation present, ceding to the pressure of known harassers and proven misinformers should not be a path they follow.

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/united-states-witnessing-shocking-rise-alt-right-violence

Last August's "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which started with a torchlit mob chanting racist slogans and ended with a far-right activist murdering an anti-racist protester, galvanized national attention toward the growing problem of white nationalists organizing under a new branding term, the "alt-right." The death of Heather Heyer after a young white nationalist named James Alex Fields slammed his car into a crowd drove home that the alt-right wasn't just a bunch of douchebags playing Nazi on the internet, but a serious phenomenon that could include deadly violence.

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Unfortunately, as a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) entitled "The Alt-Right Is Killing People" makes clear, Heyer's death was not an isolated phenomenon. By their estimates, she was the 37th person murdered by someone apparently fueled by alt-right ideology in the past four years. Since Heyer's death, six more people have been killed by alt-right extremists, bringing the total to 43. That same increase in violence has included 67 injuries, including the 19 other people Fields hit with his car in Charlottesville.

“There is this subset of young white men that is radicalizing, and I think a lot of that has to do with perceived status and their own life outcomes," SPLC researcher Keegan Hankes told Salon. Such "disaffected" young men, he said, "are who we are seeing go on to commit these acts." [d frum: gop has sols to certain problems, and will turn any problem into one of those, or ignore it; genuine wackos can be ignored/arrested, but more broadscale issues cannot be ignored that have been capitalized on]

What makes a murderer a part of the alt-right? As Hankes explained, that's often tough to pin down. White supremacists and other alt-right activists "purposefully leave their ideology with fuzzy boundaries," leaving the question of "who’s included and who’s not" deliberately vague. In part this is to create "plausible deniability" if and when alt-right adherents do commit acts of violence. The alt-right movement is "purposefully sprawling," Hankes said, spread out over various sites and social media platforms, channeled through a variety of figureheads, and rejecting more centralized or coherent organizing strategies.

To cut through this uncertainty, SPLC researchers focused on a specific profile: Young white men who have radicalized themselves, usually through the internet. In most cases this means engaging with online propaganda that tells young men or teenage boys that their romantic, social and employment problems are the fault of "social justice warriors" and "political correctness," rather than bad luck or their personal failings. These young men are encouraged to lash out at women and people of color, primarily through online trolling. A few of them, perhaps inevitably, start hungering to do more serious damage in the real world.

The researchers traced this violent trend back to Elliot Rodger, a young man who killed seven people and wounded 14 in a 2014 rampage through Isla Vista, California, before killing himself. Rodger's explicit motivation was to seek revenge against women who had supposedly rejected him sexually, though his first three victims were his male roommates. He had spent a great deal of time on misogynist forums that routinely peddle the idea that feminism has ruined dating and sex for men.

The alt-right is associated more closely with white supremacy than misogyny, but as Hankes explained it, misogyny is "a through-line through the whole ideology" and the alt-right community holds "a general distaste for gender egalitarianism." In fact, alt-right leaders target online forums where young men gather to demonize women and exchange "pick-up artist" tips, using misogyny as the bait to lure young men into a white nationalist ideology. Baiting angry young white men with the idea that men of color are "stealing" all the white women — and that's why they can't get a date — is a common tactic.

It's also an idea that showed up in Rodger's 17,000-word manifesto, in which he wrote, “How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me?" His alt-right fans have seized onto this passage and used it to build up their claim that interracial dating and marriage is tantamount to "white genocide."

Some of the murders on the SPLC's list, such as Dylann Roof's June 2015 mass killing of nine people in an African-American church in South Carolina, have become the focus of massive media attention. Others, such as 21-year-old William Edward Atchison's murder of two students at a New Mexico high school in December 2017, have received relatively little. But they largely fit the pattern: Angry young men who took their grievances to online forums to self-radicalize and then lashed out violently in the real world.

Asked if this pattern resembles the way that Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS work, Hankes agreed, but emphasized differences in how social media networks and web server hosts have reacted to the alt-right. He noted that "several of the big social media companies" manage to get most ISIS propaganda taken down "before it’s even posted to the public." Generally speaking, the alt-right "have been given more leash and have more free range on these platforms."

Last summer's fiasco in Charlottesville, Hankes added, is an example of what alt-right organizers were able to accomplish online: For "so many of those individuals, this was their first rally that they had ever attended. Many of them came from all the way across the country."

To be clear, these young men should not be seen as mindless ciphers who simply absorb a bunch of right-wing memes and rants on Reddit and come out the other side delivering heil-Hitler salutes and committing violent crimes. The alt-right is a true grassroots movement, formed from thousands of disparate young white men telling each other, over the years, that people of color and women are to blame for their problems. It's a movement many years in the making -- that got a huge shot in the arm from the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Trump "puts so much wind in the sails of these guys," Hankes explained. "The disregard for so-called political correctness, this willingness to talk about taboo ideas, this willingness to dog-whistle or make outright racist or xenophobic remarks" all allowed young converts to alt-right ideology to believe they could "actually go make real things in the world happen." It's likely no coincidence, then, that the pattern of killings escalated after Trump's election. Of the 13 separate violent incidents cataloged by the SPLC, 10 of them came in 2017. While the negative publicity resulting from the Charlottesville rally has unquestionably disrupted the alt-right's rise, the bad press is also making its adherents angrier and more aggrieved. That is unlikely to lead to less violence in the futur

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/hate-groups-make-unprecedented-push-to-recruit-on-college-campuses/2018/01/12/c66cf628-e4f8-11e7-833f-155031558ff4_story.html?utm_term=.132339ae6e99

no link pix

Hate groups make unprecedented push to recruit on college campuses

By Joe Heim January 12

White nationalist Richard Spencer speaks at the University of Florida in Gainesville in October 2017. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

White supremacist and neo-Nazi groups in America had a goal for 2017: Leave the virtual confines of online forums and social media platforms, and occupy physical space. It was an objective they shared often and freely in interviews and online postings. They wanted to serve notice that their movement was a force to be reckoned with and its adherents were not simply shadowy Internet lurkers but real people — most of them young and male — who were not afraid to show their faces or proclaim their messages.

It was a decision that led to a year of tumult, violence and even death, and nowhere was that decision felt more acutely than on college and university campuses. They became the primary battlegrounds for far-right groups that sought out the schools for organized rallies and speeches and made them the focus of recruiting efforts. For 2018, the goal of these groups is to expand their reach on campuses, force showdowns over free speech, generate more publicity and win over more adherents.

As the white supremacists continue to flout boundaries of acceptable behavior and engage in activities many students, faculty and staff find menacing, institutions are rethinking, and in some cases rejiggering, policies regarding allowable activities on campus. Schools that have cherished their longtime role as havens for free speech and debate have found themselves drawing lines in response to messages of hate and threats of violence.

Those messages were hard to miss last year. Pamphlets and stickers proclaimed war against diversity and stoked racial division.

“Fighting for White Working Families”

“Take back what is rightfully ours.”

“Preserve your heritage, take up the fight.”

1:15

'Not in our town!' Protesters march against Richard Spencer at University of Florida

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A crowd of protesters marched at the University of Florida on Oct. 19 against white nationalist Richard Spencer who delivered a speech on campus. (The Washington Post)

On campuses large and small, urban and rural, the racist far right made its presence felt like never before with leaflets and banners warning of threats to white supremacy. Swastikas were scribbled on walls of Jewish campus organizations. Bananas were left in front of the dorm rooms of black students.

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The Anti-Defamation League found that in the past 15 months, organizations such as the Traditionalist Worker Party, Identity Evropa, American Renaissance and Vanguard America directed campaigns at more than 200 college campuses in 42 states. The pace of their provocations has only accelerated in recent months. The civil rights group counted 140 reported incidents — displays of organized racist activity — from Sept. 1 through Dec. 18. For the same period the year before, 41 incidents were reported.

All of these organizations have been labeled white-nationalist hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist activity. The Traditionalist Worker Party, American Renaissance and Vanguard America were banned from Twitter in late December as part of the site’s effort to enforce community standards.

Protesters shout and chant during a speech by Richard Spencer at the University of Florida in October. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

Protesters surround and shout at Tyler Eugene Tenbrink, who attended Richard Spencer's speech, as he tries to leave. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

The targeting of colleges and universities was not a haphazard choice by the white-power groups but rather a calculated strategy.

“It’s striking a blow directly at the heart of our foes,” said Matthew Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, a far-right organization that seeks a whites-only nation-state and has been labeled a hate group for its anti-Jewish and homophobic stances and its opposition to racial mixing. “It lets them know that there are people that are radically opposed to them, that aren’t afraid of them, that will challenge them. It shakes their thought that they’ve got the campus environment locked down and lets them know that people who oppose them go to their school or are a part of their local community.”

College campuses, Heimbach said, are ideal for recruiting members and gaining publicity because the presence of the hate groups inevitably creates an outcry on campus and in the community. He said the ranks of his organization have tripled over the past year from 500 to 1,500 members, although The Washington Post could not independently verify that assertion.

In a late-December post on Gab, the social media site popular with many who have been banned from Twitter, Heimbach said his organization and Vanguard America are planning a “combined propaganda drive” at Midwestern universities in the coming weeks.

Despite claims by Heimbach and others, Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said he doesn’t believe their campus recruiting will win over many adherents. But he worries that the aggressive campaigns indicate the groups are feeling emboldened.

“It’s a reminder that these groups feel now is the time to strike,” Segal said. “Whether they are able to recruit thousands or not, they feel the atmosphere is ripe.”

Though the groups had been pushing their on-campus activities throughout 2017, most of their efforts had escaped widespread national notice — then, Charlottesville happened.

On a warm Friday night in August, hundreds of marchers paraded through the University of Virginia campus carrying torches and chanting nationalist and anti-Semitic slogans. They encircled a small group of protesters at a statue of Thomas Jefferson yelling, “White Lives Matter” and “Jews will not replace us!” Within minutes, punches were being thrown and mace sprayed.

White nationalists carry torches while marching through the University of Virginia campus in August. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

The melee didn’t last long, but it set the stage for the following day, when the violence was much worse. A counterprotester, Heather Heyer, lost her life when a car, allegedly driven by a self-described Nazi, plowed into a crowd, killing Heyer and injuring 35 others.

Charlottesville became a hashtag for hate, and the violence there exposed an underbelly of hardcore racism that many Americans had, perhaps naively, imagined didn’t exist anymore. Asked about the violence that week, President Trump insisted there were “very fine people” on both sides, a remark that was widely criticized as a failure to properly condemn groups that trafficked in racial hatred. It was also a remark that encouraged white supremacists who believed the president supported their aims.

White supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke tweeted his thanks to the president for his comments. At the rally in Charlottesville a few days earlier, he told reporters, “We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.”

While Charlottesville drew most of the headlines, racial hatred and violence was on display on campuses and college towns throughout the country before and after that seminal event.

Nathan Damigo, a student at California State University at Stanislaus and the founder of Identity Evropa, was seen in a video punching a woman in the face during a showdown with antifascists in Berkeley in April. Hundreds of students signed a petition saying Damigo’s presence at the school made them feel unsafe. Damigo remains enrolled, according to school officials.

Richard Collins III's graduation gown is draped over front-row chairs at Bowie State University’s ceremony in College Park, Md. (Neal Augenstein/AP)

In May, Sean Urbanski, a white University of Maryland student, was accused of stabbing and killing Richard Collins III, a black student at nearby Bowie State University and a second lieutenant in the Army who was visiting friends on the College Park campus. Urbanski was charged with a hate crime, and police announced they were investigating Urbanski’s connection to a Facebook page called Alt-Reich Nation.

At the University of Florida in October, an appearance by white nationalistRichard Spencerdrew thousands of protesters. Later that day, three of his followers were arrested and charged with attempted homicide after shots were fired during an argument with a group of people protesting his speech.

Sean Urbanski (University of Maryland Police Department)

Spencer has fought to speak at large campuses across the country, but in the wake of Charlottesville, administrators at institutions including Pennsylvania State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Michigan State University blocked his efforts, citing the possibility of violence and enormous security costs.

Schools are altering policies and procedures to deal with the increase in racially based incidents and the growing push on campuses by white-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Following the torchlight march at the University of Virginia, administrators banned open flames on campus without prior approval. In the report it commissioned on how it handled the events in August, the university sounded a warning for schools everywhere.

“Going forward, the University of Virginia and higher education institutions across the nation must be prepared to respond to situations in which violence and intimidation accompany demonstrations and protests,” the report concluded. “It is incumbent upon the university to forge new policies and practices that will prevent it from again becoming a locus of intimidation and violence while recommitting to the principles of free speech at the core of its mission.”

Following the killing of Collins, the University of Maryland created a rapid-response team for hate-based incidents and announced it will hire a hate-bias response coordinator.

“We’re very concerned with the idea that outside groups are targeting colleges and universities for hate based on race and religion and other identity characteristics,” said U-Md.’s chief diversity officer, Roger L. Worthington. “Hate and bias incidents are not new, but certainly in the current national climate, we’re concerned because people are more emboldened to engage in those types of behaviors.”

School administrators across the country and organizations that monitor white-supremacist groups know that many of the tactics they employ are no more than attempts to gain publicity and news coverage. They worry, as many news organizations do, about how much attention they should receive.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Segal recognizes the tension between overcovering and undercovering, but he says schools and news organizations should opt for the former.

“It’s a cliche, but we still believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he

===

A 26-year-old white man who attempted to commit a terror attack on an Amtrak train in rural Nebraska also attended the doomed Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August on the white supremacist side, according to a court document.

St. Charles, Missouri, resident Taylor Michael Wilson has been charged with an attempt to commit terror by targeting an Amtrak train in southwest Nebraska in October 2017. FBI Special Agent Monte Czaplewski, writing in an affidavit attached to the criminal complaint, suggested that Wilson wanted to murder black people. The document suggests that he had weapons, as well as a National Socialist Movement (NSM) business card with him at the time he was arrested.

Wilson entered an engineer's seat of an Amtrak train after midnight on October 22and started "playing with the controls" of the train, according to Czaplewski’s account. No one was injured or killed in the attempted attack.

Newsweekreached out to the NSM for a comment about the revelations but did not immediately receive a response. The group is neo-Nazi in nature, has ties to the more traditional American Nazi Party and has been connected to other elements of the modern, so-called alt-right movement at rallies and events.

:{:{:{[riot gear uniforms wow pix] GettyImages-830755858}:

Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the "alt-right" march down East Market Street toward Emancipation Park during the Unite the Right rally on August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia.CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES}:}:

Wilson traveled with that group to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of last year, according to court documents. There, men chanted “Jews will not replace us” in the college city while marching with tiki torches on August 11, 2017. The following morning, fights broke out between white supremacist and antiracist counterprotesters. Later that day, a white man drove his car into a crowd of people, allegedly murdering Heather Heyer, an anti-racist activist.

The “alt-right,” a deeply anti-Semitic movement that calls for limited immigration, mass deportations and a new state for white, non-Jews only, has been attached to many violent incidents since the Unite the Right event collapsed into chaos. William Edward Atchison, who killed two students at his high school last year, was a regular commenter on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, according to The Daily Beast. Nicholas Giampa, a 17-year-old Virginia boy, allegedly murdered his girlfriend’s parents, Scott Fricker and Buckley Kuhn Fricker, in a shooting incident that took place last month. He had a neo-Nazi social media presence, according to a report by The Huffington Post. The shooter who killed a Douglas County deputy and wounded other law enforcement figures on Sunday was attracted to an “alt-right” ideology, according to a local news reporter.

Wilson, the accused terrorist, was not likely just a casual supporter of alt-right politics. Czaplewski noted in his affidavit that the man also had a photo of a banner broadcasting white supremacist propaganda on his phone.

Within the context of street-level politics, there is some bizarre irony to Wilson’s arrest for attempting to commit terror on an Amtrak train. Figures loosely associated with the “alt-right” movement attempted to blame “Antifa,” or anti-fascist demonstrators, for a fatal Amtrak train derailment that took place in Washington state in December. The story, however, was quickly discovered to be fake news.

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/guide-modern-far-right

On December 6, 1830, Andrew Jackson used his second State of the Union address to defend the Indian Removal Act, the administration’s sole legislative victory. He described the law promulgating the expulsion and resettlement of southeastern Native American tribes as the “happy consummation” of U.S. Indian policy. To his critics who “wept over the fate of the aborigines” — and who, it turned out, accurately predicted the horrors of the forced migrations known collectively to history as the Trail of Tears — Jackson offered an archeology lesson. Any “melancholy reflections” were ahistorical, he said, because the Indians were neither innocent victims nor first peoples, but perpetrators of what Jackson’s modern admirers might call “white genocide.”

Jackson knew this because the evidence was everywhere in plain sight.

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“In the monuments and fortifications of an unknown people, we behold the memorials of a once-powerful race,” said Jackson, “exterminated to make room for the existing savage tribes.”

This reference to a “once-powerful race” was not lost on the American public of 1830. Every schoolboy and girl knew it to be the Lost Race of the Mound Builders, believed to be the continent’s original Caucasian inhabitants. From the colonial era into the twentieth century, it was widely accepted that certain earthen structures and burial grounds proved the existence of “white” or Indo-European peoples who settled North America only to be wiped out by the arrival of Jackson’s “savage (Asiatic) tribes.”

As the country expanded west, the “Moundbuilders” myth had obvious utility: If the Indians destroyed earlier waves of (white) settlers, their own extermination was just another turn of history’s wheel.

In the early 1890s, the U.S. ethnologist Cyrus Vance discredited the theory in a series published by the Smithsonian Institution. But the idea of a pre-Colombian “white genocide” never disappeared. It survived in subcultures, influenced by the occult and Atlantis legends, which clung to theories of lost ancient super-civilizations that, curiously, always seemed to be racially “white.”

In recent decades, as evidence of a richer paleoamerican record than previously realized has come to light, Jackson’s “once-powerful race” has found a new generation of boosters on the far right, where fantasies of “white genocide” distantly past and currently unfolding are an animating obsession.

In the fractured and constantly cross-fertilizing galaxy of extremist conspiracy culture, the white Moundbuilders — now known on the far right as “the Solutreans” — share a stage with other characters from an ancient and racially glorious but “suppressed” past: ancient Nordic-looking astronauts, biblical Aryan giants, Nazi scientists under the South Pole, and the occasional inter-dimensional alien in league with the Jews.

Alt-History Goes Prime Time

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Over the last decade, the History Channel has exploited and fueled the popularization of alternative archeology, or alt-history. Numerous programs on the network showcase ideas that, while not explicitly racist or anti-Semitic, have origins in colonial projects and have been championed (for a reason) by modern extremists.

Take “America Unearthed,” which aired between 2012 and 2015 on H2, a defunct History Channel network. That show’s host, a geologist named Scott Wolter, promoted theories that ancient Celts and Scots settled North America and hybridized Native Americans centuries before Columbus. The details can be found in Wolter’s contributions to Lost Worlds of Ancient America, a 2012 anthology edited by Frank Joseph, born Frank Collin, founder of the National Socialist Party of America. (In 1993, following his expulsion from the party for “impure blood”, Collin became editor of Ancient American magazine and has authored dozens of books dealing with ancient “suppressed” history.) In another episode, when a guest professes admiration for the Knights of the Golden Circle, a group of wealthy Southerners who sought to create a hemispheric slave empire, Wolter just nods. (Wolter has denied that he or his ideas are racist, and claims to be politically liberal.)

Whatever the personal politics of the host, these shows serve as vectors for racist ideas and scholarship, argues the independent scholar Jason Colavito, who has been tracking this cultural crossover and amplification of fringe history for years. In books like Foundations of Atlantis, Ancient Astronauts, and Other Alternative Pasts, Colavito explores and debunks many of the ideas promoted on the History Channel and far right websites alike.

“These shows serve as entry points for discredited nineteenth-century ideas and point viewers toward the sources of extremist pseudo-scholarship and politics,” says Colavito. “The idea that aliens built the pyramids isn’t so funny when it draws young people to websites that quickly switch out aliens for Jews and start talking about gas chambers.”

Shows like “America Unearthed” are heavily discussed on white nationalist alt-history forums, as well as general far right political sites like Stormfront. They are routinely praised for introducing viewers to variations on the Solutrean Hypothesis (see below) and raising the profile of racist pseudo-scholarship.

Consider the H2 series “In Search of Aliens,” which, before its demise, promoted the work of Jan Udo Holey, a German writer whose antisemitic books have been banned across Europe. (Holey’s pen name, Jan Van Helsig, is a blunt Dracula reference, i.e. Jews are bloodsuckers.) The History Channel’s long-running series “Ancient Aliens,” meanwhile, features David Childress, whose books cite and build on the work of James Churchward, who promoted an ancient empire called the “lost continent of Mu,” whose “dominant race” was an “exceedingly handsome people, with clear white or olive skin.”

While the appeal of these theories has roots in Jacksonian justification for Manifest Destiny, their current manifestations are closely intertwined with the venomous persecution complexes that motivate the modern far right .

“Pseudo-histories feed the self-importance and aggrievement of neo-Nazis and alt-right folk,” says Benjamin Radford, a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry who has written widely on pseudo-history and claims of paranormal activity. “They feel their rightful place in the world has been denied them — by ‘Big Archeology', by Jews, by an oppressive government.”

There is another source of the far right’s far-out ideas about ancient history, one that requires no psychologizing.

The Nazi Connection

The basic tenets of alt-archeology and alt-history were foundational to the ideology and program of National Socialism, but the Nazis did not invent them. The Nazi belief in a pure Aryan race with a glorious ancient past and distinct genetic history was central to a transatlantic 19th-century occult scene (that featured a heavy German influence.) After Hitler assumed power, this belief was institutionalized in the form of the Ancestral Heritage and Teaching Society, or the Ahnenerbe, an alt-archeology research outfit founded by Heinrich Himmler and the Atlantis theorist Herman Wirth.

Under the banner of the Ahnerbe, Nazi explorers fanned out across Europe and the globe in search of relics holding (possibly supernatural) hints of ancient Aryan glory. In 1938, a team was dispatched to Iceland in search of the lost Aryan civilization of Thule, which Nazi leaders discovered in an Icelandic epic poem. Among the Nazis’ interests in Thule was the legend of a race of ancient Aryan giants. (Versions of this myth remain common among biblically focused alt-historians like Steve Quayle and L.A. Marzulli.)

Belief in these legends was possible because of the Nazis’ sharp rejection of the Enlightenment. Dismissing the science of racial diversification and the archeological record, they reveled in symbology, myths and legends of “pure” ancient kingdoms that conquered the world under its symbol, the swastika. (This, the Nazis believed, explained the symbol’s presence in both Native American and Indian art.)

The Solutreans and the Original 'White Genocide'

In the U.S., the average member of the far right is likely more familiar with the modern version of Jackson’s Race of the Moundbuilders, known as the Solutreans.

The name is taken from a hypothesis first promoted in the 1930s by the American archeologist Frank Hibben, who discovered arrowheads in North America that pre-dated the earliest Native American culture known at the time, the Clovis. The arrowheads, argued Hibben, resembled those of the Solutreans, a Stone Age people who inhabited southwestern Europe. Most of the field quickly dismissed the similarity as meaningless, but Hibben found adherents among those yearning for a new and more scientifically respectable version of Jackson’s “once-powerful race.” For them, the arrowheads (and other contested findings) prove that “European” Solutreans migrated to America across the northern ice-shelf millennia before “the Mongoloids” (as Solutrean adherents are apt to describe Native Americans.)

There is a second punchline to white nationalists continuing to hold up the Solutreans as victims of a prehistoric white persecution drama: Most scholars believe the Solutreans preceded racial diversification, and their arrowheads are artifacts of a dark-skinned people not long out of North Africa.

Atlantis, Aliens & Ancient Astronauts

In 1882, a decade before the Smithsonian debunked the Race of the Moundbuilders, a Minnesota Congressman and writer named Ignatius Loyola Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. The book provided another and more elaborate theory of an Aryan-looking super civilization that diffused technology to the rest of the world. Donnell’s book, based on mentions of Atlantis by Plato, cut the template for the sci-fi-tinged lost white civilization theories now experiencing a revival on cable television and beyond.

But just as Atlantis theory gained traction following the debunking of the Moundbuilders, so have theories of ancient Aryan astronauts superseded Atlantis with the mapping of the oceans and their floors.

“When there was nowhere left to explore, a group of thinkers started to project these ideas into the sky,” says Colavito, the historian. “Today, ancient astronauts are one of the more elaborate theories in pseudo-history with a racist component.”

In the 1960s and 70s, Erich von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin put a twist on myths about Aryan visitors from a lost civilization predating the last Ice Age. These visitors to Mesoamerica didn’t come from Atlantis but from the sky. Bestsellers like von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods (seven million sold and counting) popularized the idea that Aryan-looking aliens brought science and technology to primitive peoples around the world. In recent years, Graham Hancock has repackaged Ancient Astronaut Theory for a new generation in his bestselling Fingerprints of the Gods, and through steady work as a History Channel talking head.

Today’s far right is divided on Ancient Astronaut theory. On the one hand, it denies agency to brown-skinned peoples, and features Aryan-looking heroes, which they consider good things; but it also deprives ancient (human) Aryans of the accomplishments credited to them so lavishly in Atlantis and other theories.

Consider the case of Patrick Chouinard, a prolific writer who operates the alt-history sites RenegadeTribune.com and ancientaryans.com. (The latter site’s symbol, the Norse rune, was also the logo of the Nazi Ahnenerbe.) Like the Nazis, the sites are dedicated to recapturing a lost, pure Aryan civilization — one respectful of, but not dependent on alien life. In September, Chouinard cast a critical eye on the upcoming tenth season of the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, in an article titled “Are Ancient Aliens Theorists Selling Our People Short?”

Chouinard believes they are. He cites an old episode of the H2’s In Search of Aliens in which the hosts, Giorgio Tsoukalos and David Childress (see above), explore the alleged mystery of some “elongated skulls” discovered in Peru. Chouinard scoffs at the hosts’ conclusion that the skulls belonged to aliens. Rather, he argued, reconstructions “show a very Nordic facial structure with [a] huge cranium.” This could be proof, furthermore, of “a separate branch of the White race the went along its own evolutionary path over 5,000 years ago.”

And who, you might wonder, does Chouinard believe is behind the Ancient Alien Theory that is “selling his people short”?

“The Jews,” writes Chouinard, “are using … the ancient alien camp to confound our race to the point that we deny our own accomplishments. The White race did not need ancient aliens to build our ancient civilizations, or to found other civilizations in remote corners of the Earth. Our race is capable of so much more.”

In 2018, it is dangerous in alt-ancient history circles to completely discount Ancient Aliens. Chouinard knows this. Rather than risk alienating his readers, he concedes, “It is very possible that visitations from extraterrestrials did happen in ancient times, [but] I will not conclude that the majority of our accomplishments as a race can be attributed to extraterrestrials.”

UFOs & “Refracted” Anti-Semitism

Massive and hopelessly intricate cover-ups. Nefarious alien races with gnomish physical features. Tales of secret Nazi super-technologies. It was always inevitable that the UFO and far right scenes would end up in bed together. UFO culture cast a shadow over everything in the postwar years, and as noted above, the far right has never been a stranger to the supernatural.

In Culture of Conspiracy, the historian Michael Barkun locates the early 1990s as the decade this convergence accelerated. Books like William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horseand journals published by Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn described UFO conspiracies that fit snugly into the New World Order conspiracy template, heavily influencing that decade’s militia movement. (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was reportedly a fan of Cooper’s radio show.)

But the seeds of this union are much deeper in the postwar record. One of the most important early UFO writers in the early 1950s, William Dudley Pelly, was an American occultist and fascist; his most important disciple, George Hunt Williamson, produced Byzantine UFO theories that incorporated anti-Semitic themes. Williamson’s 1958 book, UFOs Confidential, claimed every government on earth was under the control of a handful of (mostly Jewish) “international bankers,” which for some reason the author believed included U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Pelley and Williamson’s successors are not always or even often so blatantly anti-Semitic. But the fingerprints of anti-Semites are visible in the works of influential modern UFO writers like Jim Marrs and Jim Keith. These fingerprints appear in what Barkun calls “refracted racism and anti-Semitism,” in which old tropes are repackaged as an episode of the X-Files. This repackaging often includes not very subtle distinctions between “benevolent” aliens (tall, Aryan-looking) and “malevolent” aliens (short, grotesque, often in league with “international bankers”).

More than anyone else, the British conspiracist David Icke has popularized the Alien version of New World Order conspiracy. The former sportscaster’s elaborate theory is the Sgt. Peppers album-cover of the genre, featuring the Masons, the Vatican, the Illuminati, the House of Windsor — everyone is there. At the center of the theory is an alien race of lizard people from the fifth-dimension. Though Icke has always denied trafficking in anti-Semitism, he has endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the famous forgery and foundational text of modern anti-Semitism — choosing to call it “The Illuminati Protocols.”

This is Barkun’s “refraction,” in action, and Icke’s shadow is long indeed, visible across the far right media spectrum.

Hollow Earth, Secret Nazi Labs & the South Pole

Another inevitable development in postwar conspiracy subculture was the rise of a belief in secret Nazi bases underneath Antarctica. The idea of a “hollow” or “inner” earth was a key tenet of nineteenth-century occultism, and in the postwar years it reemerged as a setting for escaped Nazi scientists working in secret technology and weapons labs.

The legend took root during the mid-1970s, nurtured by the Canadian neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel, who argued that Nazis invented flying saucers and had taken their breakthrough technology to bases deep under the South Pole.

The Third Reich was interested in a possible base at the South Pole, and a few high-level Nazis did escape to Argentina, whose national territory includes a slice of Antarctica extending to the South Pole. Zundel and his successors have infused these facts with Victorian inner-earth legends, and then marinated them over multiple viewings of the 1968 B-flick, They Saved Hitler’s Brain. Versions of the theory remain popular on neo-Nazi alt-history sites, and in recent years British tabloids like the Mirrorand Daily Star have found click-bait gold in spreading them.

The story’s persistence led Colin Summerhayes of Cambridge University’s Polar Research Institute to look into the matter. In a 2006 edition of The Polar Record, Summerhayes presented his heavily footnoted and researched conclusion that secret Nazi bases do not exist, and have never existed, on or below Antarctica.

As exhaustive as it was, it is unlikely Summerhayes’ study had much impact among the theory’s adherents. It was, after all, competing with an ever expanding glut of “hidden history” books, podcasts and websites. One of many such titles to appear that year was SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazi's Incredible Secret Technology, penned by Joseph P. Farrell, a prolific alt-historian and regular on Red Ice Radio.

not exactly alt rt? evang?

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/war-christmas-really-proxy-war-white-supremacy

The war on Christmas is a myth. Yet so many Republicans, Donald Trump voters and other conservatives are apparently obsessed with it. Why is this?

Today's conservative movement is masterful in its ability to use emotional appeals to manipulate its public with the goal of achieving and maintaining political power. As Richard Hofstadter observed more than five decades ago, American conservatives are also anti-intellectual and especially prone to believing in conspiracy theories.

Movement conservatism also has a deep disdain for facts. Empirical reality is an obstacle and inconvenience that stands in the way of advancing a political worldview that operates more like a religion than an ideology based in reason and fact.

Republicans and the conservative movement also command Fox News and a right-wing echo chamber that function as one of the most effective propaganda operations in modern history. Republican voters have literally been conditioned and trained by their news media and other trusted voices to believe things that are not true.

There is the power of weaponized religion in the form of right-wing Christianity, whose adherents believe that they are oppressed in America by liberals, gays, Muslims, atheists, "secularists" and any other group identified as an enemy other. Of course this is not true: white Christians are the most powerful and dominant group in American society. But again, the allure of Christian fascism -- and contemporary American conservatism -- is rooted not in reason but rather in fantasy.

There is another dimension to the "war on Christmas" and the broader right-wing obsession with the culture wars. Both are examples of white identity politics and a deep desire (and effort) to maintain the cultural and political power of white right-wing Christians over all other groups. In many ways, the war on Christmas is actually a proxy war for white supremacy.

How is white supremacy advanced by the right-wing "culture war" narrative? How are Donald Trump and the Republican Party using the "war on Christmas" to advance their goals? Why are so many white Americans attracted to such fictions? Is Donald Trump a white supremacist, or are his views best described in some other way? How are young white men and others being radicalized into violence by white supremacists and other right-wing groups? Is it possible for white people to divest themselves from white privilege, or whiteness more generally?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with University of Oregon sociologist Randall Blazak. He is one of the country's leading experts on the neo-Nazi and white supremacist movement. Blazak also spent several years infiltrating and studying neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist hate groups. He is the author of several books and is the chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime.

A longer version of this conversation can be heard on my podcast, which is available on Salon’s Featured Audio page.

How do you think Donald Trump was able to win the presidency?

America has experienced huge demographic changes in the last 50 years.

For a lot of people, it’s great. There are more opportunities, especially if you’re a woman or a person of color or you’re a gay or transgender person. These are exciting developments.

But there are a lot of people who feel left out by all those changes. This is especially true of straight, white, working-class men who feel that their picture of the American Dream is gone. They are right. It is gone. There is a much more even playing field in America and those men feel a loss of status. When I started studying skinheads in the late 1980s, they were responding to the first wave of Reaganomics -- people being laid off from the factory as well as policies such as affirmative action and gay rights. White men, especially the "white working class," were seeing this assault on their status.

What are the white men who voted for Donald Trump and support the Republican Party and the "alt-right" upset about? White men are the most powerful group in the country, if not the world. Why the rage?I believe it was CNN that asked candidate Trump, “When is the 'again' in your slogan: Make America Great Again”? He said it was the early 1950s. Of course, for a lot of Americans, it wasn’t great in the early 1950s. Gays and lesbians were forced into the closet and women were forced into drudgery. Jim Crow ruled the land. America in 1952 was not a great country. But if you were a straight, white working-class male, you had the American Dream unchallenged. That is the nerve that Trump touched and it explains both his popularity and the public resurgence of white supremacists.

It’s largely about perception. If you think about the concept of white privilege, it is largely invisible to those who benefit from it.When the realities of white privilege are pointed out and the bubble of "meritocracy" and "hard work" is punctured it feels uncomfortable. The privileged like the bubble. One of the beautiful things about privilege is not having to confront the fact that you have an unfair advantage. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person; it is just a reality that has to be acknowledged.A lot of white people get very defensive because they think it’s about their character and that somehow they’ve done something bad.

Are you surprised by the ways the language and beliefs of neo-Nazis and white supremacists have been mainstreamed by Trump, the Republicansandthe right-wing media?

Several years ago I tried to sound the public alarm about the Tea Party movement and how its narratives and logic were similar to that of white supremacists. For example, their focus on Obama as the Muslim outsider, or images of him with a bone through his nose. The conspiracy theories and "fake news" narratives being circulated by the right wing into the mainstream media are especially concerning. I just reread Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and it is eerily similar to what we hear in Trump’s attacks on the free press.

You spent many years studying white supremacist organizations. How are their members radicalized? The mainstream news media loves to talk about the "radicalization" of Muslims, but not much about that same dynamic as it applies to white men.

This happens in at least two ways. The first is, someone who is in need of a way of looking at the world is given a paradigm. For example: "This is how the world works. This is how the world is being taken away from you." Dylann Roof was told that he couldn't get a date because black men were taking away all the white women. The next step is an action plan. It’s one thing to have an analysis. The next is: "What do you do about it, now you know how the world really works?”

For the skinheads that I studied, their action plan was race war: We’re going to take America back. We’re going to intimidate "those people" out of "our" neighborhoods. We’re going to purge the country from the global Jewish conspiracy that’s depriving us of our natural-born power. This logic speaks to a lot of young people, especially young males who have a simplistic way of thinking about the world. It speaks to their simplistic, dichotomous understanding of the world as a zero-sum game: "Somebody is gaining so I must be losing. Here is the action plan." The simple way to do that is through violence.

Where does the racist ideology comein?

It is almost secondary. Racism is a tool. It is not like they join these groups because they’re racist. They join this world and racism becomes a way of empowering themselves. It is primarily about gender, and white males feeling that their world is being taken away from them. The thing about thealt-right is that during the Obama years they existed online. They complained and trolled and promoted rape culture. But what they did was not effective in the outside world. Sitting at their computers, they could create this alternative universe where they felt empowered. Then Trump comes along and opens the metaphorical door, and they spill out into the streets.

Do you think Donald Trump is a white supremacist?

It is easy to talk about Nazis and KKK members and not look at how white supremacy is one of the primary ways through which American society is organized.

On the day of the Charlottesville murder, I was asked on CNN what I would say if I were Donald Trump's speechwriter. Although I gave another answer, what I wanted to say was that I don’t think he gets it. I don’t think he’s smart enough. I don’t think he understands the reality of the persistence of racism in 2017 America. To be clear, I do not think that Donald Trump organizes his life as a white supremacist. But I do think that Donald Trump is a white supremacist, because he does not challenge his own racism. That is an observation that I would apply to all white people who do not take a look in the mirror and reflect about how they benefit from white supremacy. If you participate and benefit from that system, you are in fact a white supremacist.

How does the right-wing obsession with the nonexistent "War on Christmas" relate to white supremacy?

With Trump there is a normalization of white supremacist rhetoric. "Merry Christmas," in the right-wing context of the supposed War on Christmas, is a push-back against multiculturalism. Trump voters and other conservatives who respond to that language believe it is a political statement to say "Merry Christmas" because they feel their country, and everything sacred about it, is being taken away. The people who cling to the War on Christmas talking point do not have the skills to manage social change in a way that would actually make their lives better.

How do you communicate with people who are so drunk on white identity politics and the psychological wages of whiteness? Is it possible to get them to divest from whiteness and invest in a sense of shared humanity with others?

There are those people who are stuck in the extreme. But if you think of it as a continuum, there are a lot of people between us and them who can be won over. That even applies to neo-Nazis I have met, who are now on the other side. There are ways of breaking through. Part of breaking through is asking where the vision of the world embraced by a neo-Nazi radical, or even the people who want to "Make America Great Again," really go? What does it mean in practice? If you can have that conversation, all of a sudden their worldview starts to crack a little bit.

There is another dimension to this conversation as well. There is a concept known as "performative allyship" which applies to any issue where you are not the one who benefits from the liberation that you care about. I could show up, as a straight person, in support of gay rights and then I go home and pat myself on the back and I hope somebody says, “Thank you for being there because I don’t have to be there.” Right? There is this performance of being an ally that doesn’t really involve risk, it doesn’t really involve challenging, it doesn’t really involve reflection.

The next piece of the puzzle is that we need to get white people who are showing up for anti-racism activities, for example, to look in the mirror and ask, “Why am I doing this? Do I really want to upset the apple cart of white privilege and white supremacy? Or do I want a pat on the back for being down and showing up at the Black Lives Matter rally?”

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com.

https://www.alternet.org/books/interview-christian-picciolini

how to fix

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/fcc-chairman-ajit-pai-alt-right-sympathizer-net-neutrality

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 along party lines to repeal an Obama-era regulation to preserve net neutrality, defying Silicon Valley executives and consumer advocacy groups, not to mention the will of the people. A recent University of Maryland survey finds that more than 80 percent of registered voters oppose the FCC's plans.

The move will fundamentally transform the internet as we know it, allowing corporate behemoths like Verizon and Comcast to manipulate loading speeds and charge customers a premium for access to individual websites and apps. Adding insult to democratic injury, circumstantial evidence suggests the man who cast the deciding vote, Ajit Pai, sympathizes with the so-called alt-right.

Back in November, the FCC chairman and Trump appointee unveiled his plans to junk the net neutrality rules established in 2015, arguing that websites and social media platforms, rather than internet service providers (ISPs), posed the greatest threat to an open internet. At the time, Pai singled out Twitter for blame.

“The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate," he told the R Street Institute, a libertarian-minded think tank. "And to say the least, the company appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or deverifying conservative users’ accounts as opposed to those of liberal users. This conduct is many things, but it isn’t fighting for an open internet."

It's difficult to know exactly who Pai had in mind, but Slate's April Glaser notesthat Twitter recently deverified the accounts of several prominent white supremacists, including Laura Loomer and Jason Kessler. The former is a YouTube sensation on the alt-right who was recently banned from Uber and Lyftfor her Islamophobic tweets, while the latter was one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. In October, Kessler was indicted on a felony perjury charge after falsely accusing a man he'd assaulted of attacking him first.

"What’s weird about Pai’s comments is that while these are all figures on the right, conservatives don’t typically count them among their ranks," Glaser writes. "And while conservatives do sometimes cast themselves as ideological victims of Silicon Valley's overreach, there have been no recent deverifications of prominent right-wing figures, 'conservative' or otherwise, not known for promoting hate. In other words, according to Pai, the demotion of racists on a social network is a bigger deal than an action that could radically change the architecture of—and who succeeds on—the internet."

Weirder still is the video Pai released Wednesday in conjunction with the Daily Caller assuring millennials that they can still "gram their food" and "post photos of cute animals" if net neutrality is scrapped. (In May, he made a separate appealto America's youth by reading aloud the meanest tweets about his proposals, a nod to the popular segment on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!") When he's not wielding a fidget spinner and assuring viewers they can still binge-watch "Game of Thrones," he can be seen doing the Harlem Shake next to a woman named Martina Markota, a far-right conspiracy theoristwho has speculated that Hillary Clinton's former campaign chair ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a Washington pizzeria.

Before joining the Daily Caller, Markota appeared in a video for the Proud Boys, a self-described "Western Chauvinist" men's club with ties to the alt-right, where she claimed that the (thoroughly debunked) Pizzagate was real. “This is not something I’m making up because I’m trying to...put in my fantasy version of what’s going on and interject it into these email scandals," she says at one point. "This is independent of the campaign. I know what cheese pizza is."

Pai, the son of Indian immigrants, has been a subject of racist attacks himself in recent months, some of them bearing the hallmarks of the alt-right. "We all have the power to murder Ajit Pai and his family," an FCC commenter wrote in May. "Jk jk." No one stands to lose more from the repeal of net neutrality rules than the patrons of websites like 4chan and Reddit, which internet service providers will soon be able to slow to a crawl, so it's difficult to imagine white nationalists embracing Pai as an ally, and vice versa.

And yet. After the FCC chairman pleaded his case that social media networks were suppressing free speech, he earned the effusive praise of far-right radio host Matt Forney and Andrew Torba of Gab, a platform where users "are generally free to be as racist or anti-Semitic as they’d like without fear of being reprimanded or censored," according to Slate.

It's possible, even probable, that Pai was unaware of Martina Markota's history before he recorded his latest video for the Daily Caller. But the fact remains that Jason Kessler got his start as a contributor for the right-wing publication, and Pai had no reservations about lending it his imprimatur. With a White House that has excused and enabled white nationalists at every turn, no one in the Trump administration has earned the benefit of the doubt.

===

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/far-right-trolls-are-manipulating-twitter

InOctober, a notorious right-wing troll quietly launched an "operation" aimed at suspending progressive voices from Twitter.The plan was to use the platform’s mechanisms for reporting abuse in order to silence those he perceived as attempting to censor right-wing voices. With Twitter’s cooperation, and by taking out-of-context tweets that could have been made in sarcasm, the project has now become another successful entry in the playbook online trolls are using to silence progressives.

On December 6, a user on Gab -- a social media platform resembling Twitter which has been dubbed a “haven for white nationalists” -- commented in a “live topic” dedicated to Roy Moore (a tool similar to Twitter’s trending topics) and reminded fellow Gabbers of “project Titty Twister:”

A notorious right-wing, pro-Trump troll, known online as “Microchip,” launched Operation “Titty Twister” in late October, and called on his followers to report a list of progressive accounts to Twitter, which they claimed were “responsible for all bans and lockouts of Right wingers on Twitter.” Microchip planned to use Twitter’s blanket enforcement of anti-harassment policies to get those accounts suspended or banned:

Around the same time as Microchip’s call to arms, Gab founder Andrew Torba also encouraged his followers to engage in fraudulently mass-reporting accounts on Twitter to “cause chaos:”

The strategy seems to have intensified after Twitter announced major policy changes in late November and moved to suspend or remove verified badges from the profiles of users who had posted white supremacist rhetoric and other hateful speech. Though it is unclear how many accounts have been banned or suspended as a result of this far-right troll operation, Twitter did lock the account of Buzzfeed writer Katie Notopoulos for 10 days over a six-year-old sarcastic tweet. Other far-right trolls, like Mike Cernovich and Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, are now targeting comedian Michael Ian Black for tasteless jokes he made years ago.

The fact that far-right trolls have succeeded in manipulating Twitter has undoubtedly emboldened them, as it signifies to them that their disinformation strategies work. And the problem will continue for Twitter especially because the social media platform has applied the same one-size-fits-all metricin the application of its anti-harassment policies. As Notopoulos noted while recounting her locked account saga:

Twitter is getting played. They’re trying to crack down on the worst of Twitter by applying the rules to everyone, seemingly without much context. But by doing that, they’re allowing those in bad faith to use Twitter’s reporting system and tools against those operating in good faith. Twitter’s current system relies on a level playing field. But as anyone who understands the internet knows all too well, the trolls are always one step ahead.

trump retweet 3 ~islam videos fake from UK RW

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/white-supremacist-sharia-law

Christianna Silva

Posted with permission from Newsweek

White supremacists want to take over everything — even the thing they hate the most: Islam's Sharia Law.

White Sharia—as coined by a former Marine blogger—is still anti-Muslim, but seizes on orthodox Islam's ideal of obedient women and turns it into its own movement, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.

White Sharia started as an online meme by Sacco Vandal, the ex-soldier and white supremacist, who wrote on his blog that feminists and a falling American patriarchy are resulting in men losing their "barbarity."

"Whites did not conquer the entire Earth by being nice or civilized; Whites conquered the world by sailing into foreign lands and taking those lands by force," Vandal wrote.

And he says White Sharia can help white men become men again, and that the U.S. needs to regain its "extreme patriarchy."

But what started as an online trolling mechanism to bring attention to the idea that feminists are hurting the alt-right movement turned into something much more aggressive.

“They don’t like Muslims, but they don’t have a problem with what are regressive treatment of women,” Heidi Beirich, the director of Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, told Newsweek. “They have come to the position that Sharia law is turning women into baby factories and turning them back into the home, and they’re fine with that.”

This phrase begun gaining popularity only in the past few months. Many believe its rise to popularity is due to the #MeToo movement, in which dozens of women have come out against powerful men with sexual misconduct allegations. “The reason you’re seeing [white Sharia] a lot more recently is this social movement against sexual harassment,” Beirich said. “These are people who don’t believe the concept of sexual harassment exists.”

Vandal seems to agree with Beirich. He wrote on his blog that men should be able to "rape, pillage, and plunder" once again.

“The Muslim world is the only civilization left on Earth today where an extreme and rigidly codified patriarchy still exists," he wrote. "Sharia law, though practiced today by some of the world’s most despicable races, is the only living example of anything that even remotely approximates the patriarchal society that Western man once had himself.”

The blog post was written in June. The #MeToo movement didn't start until last month, when Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. Still, Beirich says, the movement has propelled White Sharia beyond an online meme and into something more serious.

“In the last month or so, after Weinstein, is moving beyond a troll and into a slogan,” Beirich said. “I can’t even think of another example of this. I think they’re just trying to be provocative—to get people to start talking about these issues. In a way it’s racist marketing.”

Not everyone in the movement agrees that it’s a term white supremacists should be claiming. One critic wrote an article titled “Whigger Sharia,” in which he said “advocating ‘white Sharia’ is, in most cases, probably just a childish troll.”

Vandal summed up his argument by writing, "When I say we will have White Sharia in White Afghanistan [aka rural America] one day, it means that we will have an extreme tribal patriarchy in the ethnostate."

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-new-york-times-so-sympathetic-nazi-sympathizers

Alt-right troll, master of the self-own, practitioner of self-macing, and part-time holocaust joke maker, Baked Alaska (a/k/a Tim “Treadstone” Gionet) was banned from Twitter this week for being an all around vile nazi-sympathizer. After having a meltdown at an In-and-Out Burger parking lot and yelling at random strangers he attempted to created a “secret” account which was quickly banned as well.

Twitter has finally got around to sort of maybe trying to tame its runaway nazi problem. The rules are still arbitrary and opaque but at least they finally decided to decertifying celebrity white supremacist Richard Spencer–though they couldn’t bring themselves to actually ban him. This, one assumes, would just be too far.

op ed:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/10/10/conservatives-are-the-real-campus-thought-police-squashing-academic-freedom/?utm_term=.3b13293c02fd

many link not:

Last week, I sent a string of relatively uncontroversial tweets in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre, in which I sought to answer a question about mass shootings in the United States:Why are these crimes almost always carried out by white men? “It’s the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid,” I tweeted, before then diagnosing a sense of double entitlement — as white people and as men — that, when frustrated, can occasionally lead to violent consequences.

My argument was not new, but rather reflects decades of research on how race and gender function in our society. To be both white and male is to be subject to a potent cocktail of entitlement to economic and political power, and to dominate nonwhite and female bodies. When that entitlement is frustrated, it can lead to what the criminologist Mike King calls “aggrieved whiteness,” an ambient furor based on the idea that white Americans have become oppressed victims of politically correct multiculturalism.

[I invited Ann Coulter to speak at UC Berkeley. Here’s why.]

In my view as a researcher and professor of politics, these tweets were neither provocative in tone nor controversial in content. Rather, the insight they provided felt all the more pressing now that President Trump has brought this aggrieved whiteness into daily headlines. As a scholar and teacher, giving context and depth to contemporary debates is an important part of what I do, and it’s a calling I take seriously. But more and more, professors like me are being targeted by a coordinated right-wing campaign to undermine our academic freedom — one that relies on misrepresentation and sometimes outright lying, and often puts us and our students in danger.

This time, the outrage machine geared up as it often does, with a minor conservative media outlet — in this case, the Daily Caller — chopping my tweets up into a misleading mishmash that transformed a nuanced diagnosis of white male frustration into an attack on white people in general. When the Daily Caller posted the article to Facebook, moreover, the intention was clearly to incite: “Absolutely unforgiveable” (sic) read the post, which by now has been shared nearly 2,000 times and commented upon more than 3,000 times.

Hate mail and death threats began to roll in.“I will beat your skull in till there is no tomorrow.” “Soon all you p-----s will get exactly what you deserve.” “Do the world a favor, and kill yourself … I’ll help you find death sooner than later.” One called me a “pig f---er like Obama,” adding homophobic slurs for good measure. Many called me a “cuck” — a favorite racial and sexual insult of the alt-right — while others urged me to move to North Korea or Venezuela. One “love note from a WHITE American” wrongly identified me as a “greasy South American a--hole.”

From there, the contagion was rapid, with Stephen Bannon’s Breitbart News and even Milo Yiannopoulos’s own website running their own cribbed copies of the same story. Then came FrontPage, the Blaze, the College Fix and the campus mercenaries at Turning Point. Soon, the manufactured story had hit the conspiratorial fringes of Infowars and online forums across the right: from “blue lives matter” to those preparing for the inevitable rapture.

[Could everyone please stop melting down about college kids?]

Finally, the story crossed the mainstream-fringe barrier at its most permeable point: Fox News. Fox claimed that not only do I blame Trump for the Las Vegas massacre, but that I even somehow blame the victims. Threatening emails increased to a flood. An invitation to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show arrived in short order, only confirming the insular nature of the machine, which amplifies to a furious roar the same small group of voices. I declined.

I am by no means the first, and will not be the last target of this kind of smear campaign by conservatives aimed at academics. In every case, it is the same right-wing media outlets leading the charge, and campuses are increasingly the target. Universities and colleges have become the perfect target for such crusades: Purportedly hotbeds of multiculturalism, “safe spaces” and political correctness, campuses represent everything the resentful right is afraid of. At the same time that the right-wing media smears professors like myself, decrying our tenure and demanding our heads, they breathlessly chronicle the supposed intolerance of the left when confronted with provocative campus tours by Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and others.

TROLL thug ALT RT 3

what the Far-Right Fascination With Pinochet’s Death Squads Should Tell Us

Christopher Ketcham

Peter Brimelow

Jason Kessler

Ian Smith

Milo Yiannopoulos

Moses Apostaticus

Ilana Mercer

Ian Miles Cheong

Dave Brooks (added 5/2/2019)

It Came From Something Awful

Further Reading

In this article

tepping stones" and "in-betweeners"

Race realism

han culture

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