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A New Book Explores Antifa’s Spy Network | HuffPost Latest News
inside The Antifa Spy Network
Donald Trump’s fascism builds on generations of racial supremacy. A new book goes inside the secretive antifa groups fighting for freedom.
By Matt Shuham
:
|Updated Jan 30, 2026
Anti-fascists in 2018 march near the site of a makeshift memorial where Heather Heyer was killed at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the year before.
Win McNamee via Getty Images
At a diner next to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, five men took turns loudly saying a racial slur to prove they are bona fide members of Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization.
Sometime later, one of them returned, alone, with a $300 tip and a message for their server, a woman of color: “Those guys aren’t my friends.”
The man, “Vincent,” was one of several “antifa” spies around the country who had gone undercover in fascist groups. Over several months, he worked out, hiked and camped with a group of committed white nationalists. He joined them as they dropped propaganda banners and vandalized public artwork depicting people of color.
Months later, in the middle of a nationwide Patriot Front video call, Vincent started playing a recording of “Bella Ciao,” the Italian anti-fascist anthem. “You guys really forgot to remove the antifa spy’s access?” he taunted them.
While embedded with Patriot Front, Vincent expropriated reams of previously unknown membership data and logistical information that allowed other anti-fascists, in anonymous collectives around the country, to “dox,” or publicly identify, the group’s members. These collectives vandalized extremists’ vehicles, alerted their neighbors and employers — and, step by step, worked to shrink their influence in American public life. Similar infiltrations have hit several neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups around the country over the years.
For years, the journalist — and former longtime HuffPost reporter — Christopher Mathias chronicled these efforts, cultivating sources from antifa groups across the country, verifying the information they gathered, and publicly outing cops, teachers and members of the military who led secret double lives as neo-Nazis and white power activists. (Mathias and I reported several stories together for HuffPost, including about Donald Trump’s fascism.)
Mathias’ new book, “To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right,” takes readers behind the scenes of the fight to push back against the rising tide of fascism since Trump entered the political sphere over a decade ago.
Some may think the antifa movement is just about punching Nazis in the street, but as Mathias’ book explores, it’s about a lot more than that. It builds on generations of activists fighting for civil rights and pushing back against racial domination in the U.S. “To Catch A Fascist” takes a look back at this long history through today, as Trump’s second term delivers armed, masked federal agents to communities nationwide, stopping people at random because of their skin color and accents.
“Throughout history, when fascists wear masks, they do so in hopes of creating a world in which they won’t need masks at all,” Mathias told me this week. “I think it is an alarming and scary prospect to consider a world in which [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents feel comfortable not wearing masks.”
More observers than ever seem to be saying, “Yes, it’s fascism.” But Mathias and plenty of others have been saying that for a while. He spoke to HuffPost about antifa’s “fundamentally hopeful … struggle against impossible odds,” modern fascism, and what connects Minneapolis and Charlottesville, Virginia.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you think about the interplay between street-level fascist thugs committing violence and what it means for the most powerful government in history to be a fascist government?
Reporting and researching this book made me completely rethink what fascism is and the way we talk about it. So much punditry over the last 10 years, during the Trump era, has revolved around this question: “Is it fascism? Could it happen here? Is it happening here?” And there was always this impulse to suggest that, “Once we reach a certain point, it’s fascism.” Once it’s analogous to Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany, then we can call it fascism.
What’s really interesting from the militant anti-fascist perspective is that there’s not a certain threshold we cross before things become fascist. Throughout American history, fascism has been a fact of life for many people.
There is a mythology we tell ourselves as Americans that we defeated fascism in World War II. And obviously, yes, the U.S. Army — my grandfather was part of that — defeated the Nazis. But the U.S. Army was also a segregated army. It was a colonial army. And when Black soldiers fighting in segregated units returned to the United States, they returned to Jim Crow and, later, mass incarceration. If you were, for example, a Black man swept up in mass incarceration, unjustly incarcerated for years and years of your life, what is the material difference between that experience and the experience of living in a fascist state the way we talk about it, in Europe? I would argue that it’s kind of negligible — that is a fascist experience.
So this is basically my way of saying, I’m glad people are calling what’s happening now fascist. And I think what is happening now is an intensification of these underlying social arrangements, these underlying dynamics of domination, and making those dynamics more and more explicit.
One of the foremost scholars of fascism, Robert Paxton, initially decided not to call Trump a fascist when he came to power in 2016. After Jan. 6, 2021, he revised that assessment and declared Trump a fascist. Obviously we’re at a point now where — there are just so many elements that point to calling Trump a fascist. I mean, he’s threatening to invade Greenland, and he has a secret police force raiding people’s homes [without warrants]. So it’s pretty blatant by this point.
A lot of your book is a corrective of the use of the term “antifa” and particularly how it’s become an all-purpose bogeyman for Trump and the right. To them, “antifa” is an “outside agitator,” but also they’re destroying their own communities. They’re “super soldiers,” but they’re also feminine, blue-haired transgender socialists. Talk about that label “antifa” and how it became so useful for propaganda on the right. Is it to create a pretext to confront racial justice activists while armed?
Totally. What’s really important context is that no one in America knew what the fuck antifa was before 2017.
And all the sudden, with Trump’s inauguration, you have Richard Spencer
in Washington, D.C. And then, as the far right is emboldened and mobilized across the country — in places like Berkeley and Gainesville and Lansing and Charlottesville, where Nazis felt like they could go on the street and make their presence known — all of a sudden there are these leftists, radical leftists, sometimes wearing all black, punching these Nazis. And these videos obviously go viral, and there’s a thousand explainers in the media about who these Nazi punchers are, and they are antifa.
[After the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville,] Merriam-Webster adds “antifa” to its dictionary, Oxford Dictionary short-lists “antifa” for its “word of the year.” That’s how, suddenly, the word became part of our lexicon, through this militancy. So most of the public associates antifa with just Nazi-punching. But in reality, that tactic — physical confrontation — represents a really tiny percentage of the work antifa does.
So in 2017, suddenly everyone knows who antifa is. And something really interesting happens after Charlottesville — when the right and MAGA finds itself on the defensive [because] Trump has called them “very fine people,” and it’s become obvious that this MAGA coalition includes Nazis, that these Nazis are very violent, and that they just killed someone in Charlottesville.
There is a pseudonymous pro-Trump troll called Microchip who starts a viral petition to the White House to designate antifa a domestic terror group. And Microchip gives this fascinating interview to Politico that’s incredibly frank and upfront about why he’s doing this. He knows that the White House can’t designate antifa a terror group because there’s no statute for that. That’s not the point. The point, as he puts it, is to set up antifa as a punching bag, and to distract and deflect from the right’s very real violence, and create this false equivalency where, “Yeah, we have our extremists, but look, the left has their extremists too!” Which is an absurd equivalence, of course. The far right has killed hundreds by this point over the previous couple decades, and antifa, at this point, hasn’t killed anyone.
And what happens throughout 2017, 2018, 2019 is, you have these far-right and MAGA influencers — guys like Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Andy Ngo and a lot of other people — who create conspiracy theories about antifa.
After nearly every mass shooting in America — even before America knew who the shooter was or what their motives were — they would rush to fill that information vacuum with baseless claims that the shooter was antifa. Even if later it proved that the shooter was actually a white supremacist, by that point, the waters have been muddied and people are confused.
Antifa gets blamed for natural disasters, for wildfires. There’s a rumor that antifa “super soldiers” are going to behead white parents. It’s absurd, and again, this is all to distract and deflect from the right’s escalating violence in America.
“To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right,” by former HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias, will be released next week.
Atria Books
[Eventually,] there’s a bit of a lull in the way the antifa bogeyman is used, but then in 2020 it’s repackaged as a response to the George Floyd uprisings. MAGA, Trump — they blame antifa for fomenting these mass, historic uprisings, which, again, is absurd. Yes, its practitioners did take part in the uprisings, but their numbers are so small that they would never have the power or organizing capacity to foment uprisings like that.
Moreover, those uprisings, as we know, were created and led by the communities that they were in, and they were Black-led uprisings. And that’s why MAGA and Trump blamed antifa for these uprisings in a big way — to distract from the very real grievance at the heart of the protest, which was for cops to stop murdering Black people.
It was also a tactic to sow division on the left — entangling the left in debates about tactics and so forth. The way they wield that label, they eventually start calling anyone they want antifa. And that’s just a way of designating someone as outside the realm of political respectability. When you do that, you are creating a pretext for that person to be targeted, either by state prosecution or by vigilante violence, which we saw a lot of in 2020.
Fast forward to 2025, Trump claims to designate antifa a domestic terror group — which, again, is an effort to label this burgeoning uprising against his agenda as outside the realm of political respectability and worth repressing.
Talk about the difference between “antifa” as a term and anti-fascist as an ideology or description.
When I say “antifa,” there is an important distinction to make. Antifa, yes, is just the shortening of the word “anti-fascist.” A lot of liberals and centrists will point to that fact as a way of saying, “Well, aren’t we all antifa?” It’s kind of a way of saying, “Antifa isn’t a real thing,” or that it doesn’t exist. But that’s not true. Antifa, as a word, refers to a very specific kind of militant radical tradition of combating the far right “by any means necessary.”
And when I talk about antifa, these are activists who practice a political tradition that believes in a few basic tenets: First, that, yes, sometimes fascists need to be confronted in the streets, sometimes violently. Fascists should be given no platform to speak or organize. That means revoking permits for them to speak in cities or parks, or de-platforming them from social media.
Another important tenet is that the state and law enforcement cannot be trusted in this fight. And that essentially means they view the government and law enforcement as inherently white institutions that will collaborate with and support fascists.
Antifa didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It emerged from preexisting networks of anarchists, socialists and communists — largely from a tradition born in the ’80s and ’90s to kick Nazis out of the punk scene, and the formations of groups like Anti-Racist Action and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, and they basically developed those tenets we talked about, those points of unity when combating the far right.
Q {You mentioned that there’s a tendency to say, “Well, I’m anti-fascist, and my grandfather was anti-fascist in World War II.” But you get into the history of anti-fascists, of doxing fascists, in the book, and the history traces back well before either of those words existed — before doxing existed, before the word fascist existed. You go back to investigative journalist Ida B. Wells. You go back to Walter White, who investigated lynchings in the early 20th century for the NAACP. You go back to Frank Schwab — the mayor of Buffalo who revealed the identities of 18,500 people who were members of the KKK in the area, posting their names at the city’s police headquarters — and the undercover detectives who infiltrated the Klan. Why was it so important to you to get into that history of very specialized resistance to racial domination?}:
So Langston Hughes made this point. “Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us,” [Hughes said in 1937, at the Second International Writers Congress in Paris.]
What I find frustrating about the discourse about fascism in America, again, is this mythology we tell ourselves that we’re the good guys who defeated the fascism. Robert Paxton, the scholar of fascism I mentioned, has described the Klan as the proto-fascist organization, right? Nazi Germany looked to Jim Crow laws in America for inspiration for its own race laws in Germany. America, in many ways, was fascist before the word fascist existed.
“Throughout American history, fascism has been a fact of life for many people. ... America, in many ways, was fascist before the word fascist existed.”
- Christopher Mathias
What I found so compelling about efforts to unmask the First and Second Klans was, first, just how insanely brave that work was — people really putting their bodies on the line.
Edward Obertean, an undercover police officer who infiltrated the Klan in Buffalo, was murdered afterwards by a Klan member.
The history of white supremacy in America is marked by periods where its most ardent practitioners wore masks, and periods when they didn’t need to.
The First Klan is born to destroy Reconstruction. There’s an amazing effort to unmask them, and it’s successful in a lot of ways in destroying the Klan. But part of the reason that Klan dissolves is also because they were successful. They could trade the anonymity of the hood for the anonymity of the lynch mob.
The Second Klan, same kind of thing — an amazing effort to unmask them that goes a long way in destroying the Second Klan. But again, they were also dissolved, in a way, because they were successful. The 1924 immigration law is passed, the Johnson-Reed Act — and Johnson, the congressman, by the way, was in the Klan — and created these immigration quotas, which, incidentally, are the quotas that restrict immigration to Northern Europe, and is kind of what the modern far-right, including Stephen Miller, wants to go back to.
For me, it was really important to tell those stories, because I actually find them really inspiring. The people doing this work didn’t wait on anyone to save them. They understood that we have to save ourselves, and they didn’t always get to see the fruit of their work. The work they did would contribute to later victories.
Q {You talk a lot about antifa’s work as modern-day journalists. In my opinion, the anonymous collectives that comprise your description of antifa are some of the most skilled journalists working in the country today. That might be a surprise to readers, but to folks who have covered the “extremism” beat, they know. I mean, how many of your own stories that were published in HuffPost stemmed from that sort of work? Reading your book, it was striking to me how much projects like “Panic! In the Discord” or “Ignite The Right” sound like “The Panama Papers” — that is, collectives of journalists working together on a large project. Talk about the skill of these folks as journalists, and whether you think they get their due.}:
No, I don’t think they get their due. There is still this presiding snobbery in journalism that says you have to write for this outlet or that outlet to be considered a journalist. There’s also what I would consider an antiquated notion of objectivity around journalism that says that people doing the type of research that antifa does couldn’t possibly be journalists. I push back against that in the book and am upfront in the intro about the fact I, myself, subscribe to militant anti-fascism.
I do not think that objectivity exists or that there is a “view from nowhere” to report on masked secret police abducting my neighbors. And that is the perspective that antifa also takes. And if we are to consider journalism, first and foremost, to be in the public interest and for the public good, then I think journalism should be explicitly anti-fascist. The investigations that antifa did over the last 10 years were absolutely remarkable sometimes. I talked to one anti-fascist who read through 60,000 tweets to collect enough little morsels and clues and bread crumbs to unravel a Nazi’s identity.
You compared the leaks of Nazi chat messages to The Panama Papers, which is a really apt description. It goes grossly underappreciated that Unicorn Riot, the independent news outlet, created an absolutely remarkable database for leaked white supremacist chat messages — millions and millions of these messages that were open-source material that anti-fascist researchers across the country could mine and look through to figure out who among their neighbors is a Nazi. And that’s a remarkable story and a remarkable feat of journalism.
Talk about the source relationships that you have with anti-fascists. I take it you’ve been talking to some of these folks, unnamed sources of yours, for a decade, or at least many years. How did those source relationships develop over the years, and how have they changed you as a reporter?
It took a long time to gain the trust of anti-fascist sources. They are, understandably, wary of the press. And also, I take their trust in me very seriously, because there are fascists out there that want to harm them. So it’s important for me to protect their identities. And, of course, the state also wants to target antifa, so it adds an extra level [of concern].
But yes, I’ve been talking to so many people for upwards of a decade now. For the book, I ended up talking to about 60. What is most striking for me is that almost everyone involved in this work started doing it after personal brushes with fascists in their communities.
One anti-fascist I talked to a lot, her friend lost someone in the El Paso Walmart massacre, which inspired her to start doing this work.
One of the things that prompted me to do this book was seeing them do that work — neither for glory or acclaim — and also seeing diminishing returns when they were doing the doxes; for a while there, they were getting Nazis fired from their jobs and there was real accountability. But then, something started to shift, and occasionally there were towns where they didn’t care that they had a Nazi as a neighbor. And so I started to talk to anti-fascists about what that meant for American politics in general.
You spoke about inciting incidents for people to get involved in this work. You were at “Unite The Right” in Charlottesville in 2017. You sawDeAndre Harris being beaten. Can you talk about that as an inciting incident for a lot of journalists of the far right and the effect it had on you?
Anyone who was in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017, had their lives irrevocably changed afterward. For me, it was the beginning of this long kind of reporting journey into this new, insurgent fascist movement — and then, eventually, into the anti-fascist opposition. But more generally — on a visceral, emotional level — when you see, up close, that kind of vile racism and bigotry so comfortable with itself in public, you start to realize how urgent the need is to fight back against it.
Especially in reporting this, I had a front-row seat to seeing how what we considered fringe in our politics actually wasn’t that fringe at all, and that the Republican Party was becoming the party of the Nazis that marched in Charlottesville. So, it’s just a radicalizing process. There’s no way around it.
What would you say to folks in Minneapolis today, who, I think you would argue, are looking at a different form of fascist violence, a traumatic sort of street violence, except this time it’s performed by the federal government?
I cannot stop thinking about the similarities between the uprising against ICE in Minneapolis and the uprising against all the fascists that were taking to the streets in 2017 through 2020. They’re embracing the same organic, grassroots tactics that are not dependent on law enforcement or the government, which, in Minneapolis, has kind of abandoned them. They have to do this on their own.
And they’re doing all the stuff that anti-fascists were doing to Nazis a few years ago — which was following them, monitoring them, identifying them, doxing them, pressuring businesses and hotels not to host them. They’re doing noise demonstrations outside of hotels. They are creating a social cost for being in ICE, for being part of the secret police, for being part of la migra, which is really heartening and really remarkable and really brave, and the similarities are really striking.
You talked to an ex-member of Patriot Front in the last chapter of this book, and he essentially laid out the argumentfordoxing. He explained that when people think of Patriot Front, “the first thing they think is, ‘If I join Patriot Front, I will be doxed.’” On the other hand, he noted, once unmasked, fascists sometimes dive further into those communities as a support network.
There is also the question of, what happens when the social stigma around white supremacy is gone? Given the strength of fascism in America today, given its position inside the U.S. government, if antifa 10 years ago saw what was going to happen, do you think there would have been a change in tactic? How are these tactics changing now?
There’s this debate over whether antifa was successful. Because, obviously, they destroyed all these fascist groups. But of course, now, we have a much broader mass fascist movement, MAGA. It’s an interesting question, and I don’t have a clear answer.
But what antifa does at the local level is an insurgent form of community self-defense, and it was an urgent, pressing political tactic — or style of politics — that prevented Nazis from being comfortable in specific places, the streets. And in that way, it was really successful.
But you also have to remember, antifa is an incredibly small subculture — a small phenomenon or movement. It would never have had the members to stop what is happening now. That said, like I was saying with Minneapolis, we are seeing an adaptation of militant anti-fascist tactics on a bigger scale.
I personally think that those kinds of tactics, if replicated on a big enough basis, could be really effective. And I’ll say that there’s a reason MAGA — Kristi Noem, Trump — are so scared of efforts to dox ICE agents. And that’s in part because MAGA saw what doxing did to the alt-right. And doxing, again, is dependent on leveraging a societal taboo against explicit white supremacy. And I think doxing, identifying ICE agents, for example, is an important part of creating and maintaining a taboo against being in ICE.
I think it will be important now to let people in ICE know that they are the Nazis in this movie, and that in a generation, they will be depicted as villains in the movies their kids watch. We are already seeing public opinion turning against ICE. A [YouGov poll taken the day immigration agents fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis showed 19% of Republicans and 46% of American adults overall indicating support for abolishing ICE.] That is remarkable.
I quote an anti-fascist in the book saying that anti-fascism is fundamentally hopeful, that it’s a struggle against impossible odds. And I find that example of anti-fascists over the last few years, actually, very inspiring for this fascist moment that we’re in right now.
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no lnx
Alternet
Trump's MAGA America revives a Confederate nightmare
Ku Klux Klan initiation at Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia. June 1949. KKK men in full white masks and gowns lead new members wearing small face masks. Shutterstock/ Everett Collection
Thom Hartmann January 22, 2025
Welcome to your first full day in the new Confederate States of America.
Much like the old CSA, the new CSA (also known as MAGA America) is devoted to:
— Making American as white as possible,
— Stripping women and minorities of political and economic power,
— Gutting workers’ rights,
— Rigging election outcomes,
— Leaders nakedly taking bribes,
— Using a phony veneer of Christianity to justify brutal policies,
— Making queer people invisible,
— Reconfiguring schools for indoctrination,
— Having militias terrorize minorities and their opponents, and,
— Maintaining a government of, by, and for rich white men.
Never in American history has a group of morbidly rich white men this large or with anything close to this net worth sat to watch a president get sworn into office, and never before have so many billionaires been in a president’s cabinet.
Trump has been openly selling legislation; for example, he recently told a group of fossil fuel CEOs that, if they’d give him a billion dollars, he’d gut the nation’s environmental laws that they don’t like.
Seeing the opportunity, the nation’s richest people have flocked to Trump’s side, each presumably hoping for their own desired federal subsidies or an end to regulations, government lawsuits, or anti-trust actions.
And, of course, they all want more tax cuts.
The Immigration Act of 1924 limited people coming into the country based on race; each year’s immigrants must be selected in a way that maintained the racial ratios that existed in 1890 (before the big wave of swarthy southern European immigrants, most Italian and Greek, that came here during the three decades between 1890 and 1924).
In 1965, Congress passed a new immigration law that ended the racial/country quotas, leading to a rapid increase in Black and Brown immigrants entering the country legally. Combined with illegal immigration, Reagan’s amnesty, and birthright citizenship for their children, the browning of American picked up speed to the point where 2014 was the first year when nonwhite children outnumbered white kids in the nation’s public schools.
To end this trend and make America white again, Trump has, at various times, proposed that America no longer allow immigrants from majority Black “shithole countries,” banned immigration from majority-Muslim countries, will harden the southern border, and last night signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship.
The 14th Amendment defines birthright citizenship, saying:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Trump’s lawyers are arguing that people here without documentation are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of American law because they’re not here legally. Therefore, they say, their children born here are also not “born subject to the jurisdiction” of American law and thus not citizens.
They plan to take their argument to the Supreme Court, where it may receive a favorable hearing. If successful, they might even have a case for stripping citizenship from and then deporting tens of millions of mostly Hispanic American citizens whose parents were undocumented.
Our MAGA Supreme Court majority has already succeeded in several steps toward this goal, by ending abortion rights and gutting both civil rights and voting rights laws.
Four GOP-controlled states are considering charging women who get abortions with murder, and Republicans on the Supreme Court have already functionally outlawed affirmative action and given states the power to make voting harder for Black, Hispanic, and Native American people.
Vice President Vance has written to the Justice Department demanding that they begin to enforce the moribund Comstock Act, which would outlaw the mailing of abortion and birth control medications, among other things (including porn).
Meanwhile, DEI programs in both government and the corporate world are being ended to once again allow companies with white leadership to give preference to white men up for jobs or promotions. Looking at the composition of Trump’s incoming administration and cabinet, it’s reasonable to assume that nonwhite people must be willing to play the role Samuel L. Jackson did in Django Unchained if they want a position.
In his last administration, Trump put the virulently anti-union lawyer Eugene Scalia (son of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) in charge of the Labor Department. His current nominee, former Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, has a more mixed record, but she won’t be setting the administration’s labor policy: Trump will.
The same Trump who told Elon Musk on a live X event:
“You’re the greatest cutter. I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ’That’s OK. You’re all gone.'”
Musk laughed and said, “Yeah.” Bezos is also virulently opposed to unionization of his Amazon workplace, and Trump has a long history of avoiding hiring companies with unions to do work on his properties.
When the plantation oligarchs ended democracy in the Old South during the 1840-1860 era, they continued to allow elections. But white men who voted (they were the only ones allowed to vote) for anybody other than the oligarch’s men often lost work, were beaten, and even sometimes lynched.
Republicans today are a bit more sophisticated, but their ability to rig elections has endured.
In the years immediately following the Republicans on the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, over 1600 polling places were closed by Republican-controlled states, most in Black neighborhoods. GOP-run state after state passed laws making it harder to register to vote, allowing challenges to voters and purges of voting rolls, and making it easier to refuse to count mail-in votes from cities with Democratic majorities by claiming signature mismatches.
Reporter Greg Palast estimates that if this had not happened and every eligible voter was allowed to vote and every vote cast was counted, Kamala Harris would today be president.
Republicans also work hard to select their voters, rather than allowing voters to select their representatives. While Democratic states have largely abandoned gerrymandering — which could have given Democrats a majority in the House today — Republican states have doubled down on the practice year after year.
Donald Trump has rolled out a new meme cybercurrency that will allow any billionaire, company, or foreign country to shovel as much money as they want into his own personal pockets, presumably in exchange for whatever government contract, subsidy, or help they can negotiate with the new president.
The Confederacy, organized and run by a small handful of plantation oligarchs, was also notoriously corrupt, and state governments in the Old South often ran on a naked bribe system.
Slaveholders in the Old South used Christianity to justify their inexecrable practice. Today’s MAGA Confederates are no less hypocritical.
Jesus never once mentioned homosexuality or abortion, although he was explicit that preachers shouldn’t pray in public and that the only way to join Him in heaven was to feed the hungry, heal the sick, welcome the stranger, house the homeless, and visit those in prison.
None of that matters, though, to the sanctimonious hustlers running megachurches and appearing on TV and radio; their only goal is to increase their own wealth and power. And Trump, who didn’t even bother to put his hand on the Bible when he was sworn in, promises to gift them with money and prestige so long as they keep delivering their parishioners to the voting booths for Republicans.
Republicans across the nation have succeeded in banning thousands of books that feature or even contain queer characters or discuss homosexuality or transsexuality from schools and libraries. They’re also launching legal efforts — with the explicit support of Clarence Thomas — to outlaw gay marriage and adoption, with the ultimate goal of sending queer people back into the closet as they were prior to the 1980s.
Trump, meanwhile, promises to only recognize two sexes, essentially outlawing trans people.
Republicans are proposing in their platform to micromanage school curriculum nationwide by “defunding schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination.”
This appears to include removing references to our nation’s history of slavery, patriarchy, and white supremacy; rewriting economic and social studies textbooks to make them more billionaire-friendly; and attacking socialism and communism in ways that may cause students to think that Social Security and similar programs are wrong.
In the Old South it was the Ku Klux Klan and the slave patrols.
Today there are dozens of white supremacist groups and independent militias, all devoted to white supremacy and Christian nationalism. Trump’s pardons of the criminals involved in January 6th tells us he’s committed to having the militias that support him rebuild their ranks and get back out onto the streets, but this time on his behalf.
And his continued opposition to gun control signals that, like dictators throughout history and most recently in Hungary and Russia, he wants them armed and dangerous.
The bottom line is that the oligarchy of the old Confederacy never really went away and arguably has just taken over the United States 164 years after they first fired on Fort Sumpter, this time with “Tech Bros” replacing plantation owners.
The big question now is whether they’ll be able to hang onto the wealth and power they’ve managed to seize with this election. Oligarchy, after all, is usually a transitional form of government because people get so angry about the government doing everything for the rich and powerful and little to nothing for them that they demand change.
Popular discontent rises until the oligarchs either slam down an iron fist to crush it with violence and thus flip the country into the type of tyranny you see today in Russia, or citizens overcome the oligarchy and restore democracy, as happened in Ukraine when Paul Manifort’s guy (and Putin’s friend) was deposed by the people in 2019, replacing him with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Which way will it go in America? Unless Trump gets really violent really fast (a possibility), we’ll probably know with the results of next year’s midterm elections…
bk tv 2023
aFever in the Heartland](https://www.c-span.org/video/?531272-3/a-fever-heartland)
Pulitzer prize-winning author Timothy Egan spoke about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s in Indiana.
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/kentucky-cops-release-kkk-member/
6 23 raw
kKK members pulled guns on pro-LGBTQ protesters — but Kentucky officers let them go free: police docs
https://omny.fm/shows/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/part-one-everyone-hates-the-klan
p2 fail phone DL) https://omny.fm/shows/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/part-two-everyone-hates-the-klan
https://omny.fm/shows/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff
cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
As long as there’s been oppression, there’ve been people fighting it. This weekly podcast dives into history to drag up the wildest rebels, the most beautiful revolts, and all the people who long to be—and fight to be—free. It explores complex stories of resistance that offer lessons and inspiration for us today, focusing on the ensemble casts that make up each act of history. That is to say, this podcast focuses on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
ok, still a floor/shame?
Gov. Ron DeSantis is facing a scandal as Hurricane Ian approaches Florida.
"Gadsden County religious leaders are demanding a local commissioner and Gov. Ron DeSantis 'come forward' to address allegations that the commissioner resigned last Friday after a photo surfaced purportedly showing him wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood at what could have been a Halloween party years earlier," the Tallahassee Democrat reported. "Jeffrey Moore, a Havana resident and former Department of Revenue employee, was appointed by DeSantis in late July and abruptly resigned from the post in Florida’s only predominantly Black county after the photo began circulating in the local community."
Moore is the past chairman of the Gadsden Soil and Water Conservation District.
"The local clergy will hold a press conference in front of the Gadsden County Courthouse, 10 E. Jefferson St., at 11 a.m. Wednesday to ask Moore and DeSantis to own up to the photo or deny it," the newspaper reported.
Moore did not list a reason for quitting in his resignation letter.
"Moore did not respond to questions about his resignation, the photo or the KKK outfit. In an email to the Tallahassee Democrat, he said he was "in the middle of hurricane preparations" and would be in contact on Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning," the newspaper reported. "As of late Tuesday afternoon, he has not replied."
an 620
Man accused of driving his truck into a Virginia protest is an ‘admitted KKK leader’: prosecutorAlex Henderson
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/11/03/greensboro-massacre-white-nationalism-klan-229873
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// 80's death squads
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/4/greensboro_massacre_40th_anniversary
take our country back from commies and nwords; willing to spill lots of bllod; death to klan chant; undercover cop car, infromant took pix, communicate w/ FBI; no cops helped hurt (arrented those trying to help) 40 yrs ago
Remembering the https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/11/03/greensboro-massacre-white-nationalism-klan-229873 of 1979, When KKK & Nazis Killed 5 People in Broad Daylight
11/4/19 DN 2 trials all wht no convictions 5 kia 10 hurt
Hundreds gathered this weekend to mark the 40th anniversary of the Greensboro massacre, when 40 Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis opened fire on an anti-Klan demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five anti-racist activists in a span of 88 seconds. Those killed were members of the Communist Workers’ Party. Ten other activists were injured. No one was convicted in the massacre, but a jury did find the Greensboro police liable for cooperating with the Ku Klux Klan in a wrongful death. Local pastors in Greensboro are now calling on the City Council to issue an apology for the events that led to the 1979 killing. We speak with Dr. Marty Nathan, the widow of Dr. Mike Nathan, who was killed in the 1979 Greensboro Massacre.
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white citizens councils
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/171836
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https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-29-2019/
bring the war home author sez kkk and neo-nazi could no coop b/c of fought wwii, but in 80's meld? ~ symbols?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/time-for-the-ku-klux-klan-to-night-ride-again-alabama-newspaper-runs-repulsive-editorial-urging-the-kkk-to-target-democrats/
formerly respected said kpfa?
February 14, the Democrat-Reporter, a local newspaper in Linden, Alabama, ran a hideous editorial calling for the return of the KKK. On Monday, publisher Goodloe Sutton confirmed that he was the author of the racist screed, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.
“Time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again,” wrote Sutton. “Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama … this socialist-communist idealogy [sic] sounds good to the ignorant, the uneducated, and the simple minded people.”
“Slaves, just freed after the civil war, were not stupid. At times, they borrowed their former masters’ robes and horses and rode through the night to frighten some evil doer. Sometimes they had to kill one or two of them, but so what,” continued Sutton. “Seems like the Klan would be welcome to raid the gated communities up there. They call them compounds now. Truly, they are the ruling class.”
When confronted by the Advertiser, Sutton was completely unremorseful and actually doubled down, suggesting the KKK should start lynching people again.
“If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we’d all been better off,” said Sutton. “We’ll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them.” The population of Washington, D.C. is 48 percent African-American.
It’s not bad to lynch people in D.C., said Sutton, because “these are socialist-communists we’re talking about. Do you know what socialism and communism is?” The KKK, he added, “didn’t kill but a few people” and “wasn’t violent until they needed to be.”
Sutton depicts the KKK as if they were just a bunch of economic populists sticking it to the man, supported by former slaves. In fact, they were quite the opposite — a racial terrorist organization founded in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to intimidate newly freed slaves trying to exercise their civil rights.
The KKK existed in three “phases”. The first KKK in the 1860s was a paramilitary group in the South that enforced white supremacy with murders and assaults; the second KKK in the 1920s was a political movement of millions across the whole country that rallied to oppose (and often turned violent against) anything that wasn’t traditional, white, Protestant dominance of American culture; and the third KKK in the 1960s arose to oppose the civil rights movement, and relied on firebombings of black churches and the homes of activists to spread fear. The KKK continues to this day, albeit as a few thousand scattered members of disjointed, often opposed groups.
American society had supposedly moved, if certainly not beyond racism itself, then at least beyond the expression of overt support for white supremacy. Unfortunately, as Sutton demonstrates, some people yearn for the days when racial terrorism was a constant and ever-present force.
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behind the mask of chivlry nancy mclean yale stanley fascism is set of strategies, not an ideology
kkk said union jewsih polt (to integrate?)
unions connect us across race; fascism sep via race or gender.
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-11-2018/
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https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/24/bring_the_war_home_the_long
Nearly one year since hundreds of torch-bearing white supremacists held a deadly march and rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has reiterated Trump’s defense of the violent white supremacists, saying, “I think what’s important about that conversation is, it’s not that one side is right and one side is wrong. Anybody that is advocating violence, we need to work to mitigate.” Organizers from Unite the Right, the group that held the rally in Charlottesville, have announced they will hold a repeat rally on the anniversary of last year’s deadly event, with plans to descend on Washington, D.C.. For more on white supremacist violence in the United States, we speak with Kathleen Belew, assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. Her new book is titled “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.”
VN vet mercenaries in c am death squads?
somoza son trained in US?
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sonali uprising 7/12 8 am KKK created 1921 at montecello; statue put up in charlotteville? 1921, 1924
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The Klan has never been the sole or even principle point of intersection for US fascism; formal, official Americanism has always been the lynchpin. During the 1920s, the US’s great industrial and finance moguls, from Hearst, Ford, Du Pont, and GM to the house of JP Morgan, Jr., went fascist, and big business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a leading purveyor of Americanist propaganda, joined them. In 1923, after Mussolini’s March on Rome, the counsel of NAM delivered a speech to their convention called il Duce an “extreme leader, not only converted by the lightning stroke of intelligence and falling from his error like Saul of Tarsus from his horse, but leading through the streets of a reunited country a great body of citizens,” liberating Italy from “the blighting hand of radical socialism.”
pg 145https://books.google.com/books?id=sWB9BgAAQBAJ julian barnes, prez CoC, Nam lawyer
Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America
By John Patrick Diggins
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rebranded
https://thinkprogress.org/dylann-roof-white-collar-white-supremacy
Roof, the white supremacist who shot nine African Americans at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston last June, was found guilty of 33 separate federal charges last week. He faces the death penalty.
Roof acted alone, but the massacre he committed was not an isolated incident. Other white supremacist shooters from the past five years included Wade Michael Page, who fatally shot six people and wounded four others in a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin in 2012; and Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., who killed three people at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas in 2014.
News reports have often described Roof and the perpetrators of similar massacres as “self-radicalized” “lone wolves.” But these attacks don’t emerge out of vacuums. Page got involved in neo-Nazi activities at a U.S. Army base. Miller was the leader of the now defunct White Patriot Party; he was first introduced to white supremacist ideas through his father, who gave him a copy of The Thunderbolt, published by National States Rights Party activist Ed Fields.
Robert Futrell, sociology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and co-author of “American Swastika, Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate,” said the term “self-radicalization” ignores how networks of white supremacist groups create a culture that radicalizes people like Roof.
“There is nothing totally isolated about this. That person enters a culture that people are creating and perpetuating,” Futrell said. “And there is nothing totally ‘self’ or loner about that. So whether he’s reading something on NPI [the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist organization] or CCC [the Council of Conservative Citizens] or any other website, and talking to people and chatting, that is a social and interactive experience.”
How white supremacists become radicalized
As Roof’s manifesto shows, his interest in white supremacist websites began after he learned of the George Zimmerman case. Roof read the CCC website and became concerned about what he believed to be an epidemic of black-on-white crime. This fear of a white genocide radicalized Roof, experts on white supremacist networks say.
There are a lot of avenues for people like Roof to get involved in white supremacist networks, but two of the key ways stand out: normalization, and getting drawn in through other issues, such as anti-immigrant sentiment. Men can be drawn into white supremacist movements through misogynist circlesas well.
“What they’re doing is connecting things that are culturally familiar to us and linking them to an ideology that is extreme,” Futrell said, referencing the use of memes — such as the “moon man” meme, and the promotion of a music scene and merchandise to draw in supporters.
“It makes a difference when the form is familiar, because then people might take another step in and then another step in, out of curiosity. It won’t hook most people but it will hook some, and Dylann Roof might be one of those,” Futrell added.
The network of white supremacist groups may be loose, but their ideologies easily reinforce each other. Religiously inflected racist groups, those who call themselves white supremacists, militia members, sovereign citizens, anti-immigration activists, and others express many of the same “conspiratorial anxieties,” Futrell said.
“They’ve been able to intensify extremist theories about racial genocide and the federal government declaring martial law and all of these ideas, so it’s hard to really talk about them as a movement in the old-school sense that you have organizations and they protest,” Futrell said. “Because they’ve been moving back from that for a while.”
Roof proves that ‘cleaned up’ white supremacy still produces violence
“The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens,” Roof wrote in his manifesto.
The Council of Conservative Citizens, founded in the 1980s, is a successor organization to the anti-integration Citizens Councils of America, or “white citizens councils.” As The Atlantic noted last year, it was considered a “more respectable alternative” to the KKK. CCC also has a history of involvement from prominent politicians, such as Trent Lott, a former U.S. Senator (R-MS) and Bob Barr, a Libertarian former Congressman (GA). The group is considered a more sanitized version of other white supremacist groups.
Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, said, “The interesting thing about the Dylann Roof radicalization is that the CCC is actually a relatively mild website in the realm of hate sites.”
“People thought, ‘Oh the sort of cleaned-up white nationalism of the Council wouldn’t inspire violence.’”
When it comes to the ideology behind them, however, Beirich doesn’t see any difference between CCC, NPI, and less “mild” white supremacist outlets.
“[Before Roof] people thought, ‘Oh the sort of cleaned up white nationalism of the Council wouldn’t inspire violence,’ but the truth is whether it’s cleaned up guys in suits spouting white supremacist propaganda or websites like Daily Stormer … both kinds of sites have had followers and people who read them that have been moved to commit violent acts,” Beirich said.
Although the CCC tried to distance itself from Roof after the shooting, it didn’t back off of the rhetoric that apparently inspired Roof to take action. NPI — which was founded by Richard Spencer, who also coined the term “alt-right” — has also mentioned genocide on its website. “The Return of the Repressed,” an essay by the late Samuel Francis featured on its research page, holds up the Rwandan genocide as a warning to white people:
At a time when anti-white racial and ethnic groups define themselves in explicitly racial terms, only our own unity and identity as a race will be able to meet their challenge. If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us as the Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda or as Robert Mugabe has threatened to do to whites in Zimbabwe, they will do so not because we are “Westerners” or “Americans” or “Christians” or “conservatives” or “liberals,” but because we are white.
Warnings of “white genocide” are what radicalized Roof, Beirich said.
“I think in many ways it is the most damaging [of rhetoric on white supremacist sites]. It’s what got Dylann Roof to go on his shooting spree. It’s what made him view white people as under assault,” Beirich said.
As the National Policy Institute continues its mission to normalize white supremacy — which experts say has been going on for a few years now — there is a danger of underestimating white supremacists’ capacity for violence. The glamorization of Richard Spencer through profiles that describe his “prom-kind good looks,” tweets that present NPI as the “new think tank in town,” and un-examined use of the term “alt-right” all imply that NPI is less harmful to people of color than other white supremacist groups.
Although white supremacist websites may claim that they don’t wish to commit violent acts or force segregation, that’s more of a legal disclaimer to discourage police scrutiny and distance themselves from any “lone wolves” that may interact with their website, Beirich said.
“When you’re talking about genocide of one group, then what’s the response to genocide? It’s violence.”
For example, on Friday, the Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin encouragedharassment of Jewish when people he falsely claimed were harassing Spencer’s mother. Anglin wrote, “NO VIOLENCE OR THREATS OF VIOLENCE OR ANYTHING EVEN CLOSE TO THAT.” In the same post, he included photos, email addresses, and social media accounts of a peace organization in Whitefish, Montana, where Spencer’s mother lives.
Similarly, at an NPI press conference held in Washington DC in November, Spencer said, “We’re against any direct threat of violence.” At the same press conference, Jared Taylor, editor of white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, said, “white supremacy is presumably the desire of whites to rule over other people, and I don’t think there’s anybody in this room who has that desire.”
These statements, while designed to comfort people, accomplish exactly what white supremacists hope to achieve, which is to normalize their ideas by making the groups that support them appear benign.
When asked whether supporters are expected to expected to read between the lines of essays comparing a multicultural society to genocide, Futrell said, “They not only expect it. They know it is happening, absolutely. That is the strategy and it’s an effective one … When you’re talking about genocide of one group, then what’s the response to genocide? It’s violence and putting down the group that you think is committing the genocide. So they know and they expect it to happen, but they’re just are becoming more savvy in how they characterize it.”
The similarities between NPI and CCC are quite clear, Futrell added, because they both trade in “white-collar white supremacy.”
“They’re doing the same thing,” Futrell said. “This is all about sanitizing the kinds of extremist rhetoric by making it appealing to moderate and mainstream conservative whites, by talking about white pride and Eurocentric heritage preservation.”
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