Richard Spencer ALT RT
this is really long
see npi
ALT RT 2
merri ok
odd poland and hungary ban?
related to horowitz guy?
capt 11/17 619
bak 8 24
===
---
RWW 12 25
---
meme-wars 2022
infighting --> he supports biden and ukraine war now?
wiki talk
Tablet (magazine) in their 'News & Politics' section. This doesn't appear to be a opinion piece, and the author, Joshua Tait, is a PhD historian who has contributed to published academic work specifically on far-right politics in the US (ISBN 9780190877590). Here's the specific relevant quote from the source: In that respect, [Richard Hanania's] evolution has mirrored the strange career of Spencer who, in the wake of Charlottesville, has attempted to distance himself from his leadership of the alt-right, rebranding himself with public statements attacking Trump, and voicing support for NATO and the Biden White House. The current wording in the article seems like a reasonable summary of this source.
===
3 arts on newsweek
Richard Spencer Reiterates Support for Biden, Disavows 'Useless' and 'Traitorous' GOP - Newsweek
no lnx
richard Spencer Reiterates Support for Biden, Disavows 'Useless' and 'Traitorous' GOP
Published Aug 25, 2020 at 1:27 PM EDT
By Jocelyn Grzeszczak
Newsweek Fellow
White nationalist Richard Spencer reiterated his support for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden Tuesday, days after a spokesman for the Biden campaign rejected Spencer's endorsement.
Replying to a tweet Tuesday morning, Spencer wrote that he recognized how "ineffective, useless, and traitorous the GOP is," reaffirming his decision to vote for Biden in the November election.
Spencer, one of they key figureheads of the alt-right movement, initially voiced his plan to vote for Biden Sunday, tweeting the following day that "Liberals are clearly more competent." The messaging appeared to be a stark change in thinking for Spencer, who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016.
Spencer reiterated his support of the former vice president while responding to a tweet from professor and author Michael Rectenwald, who wrote Monday that Spencer's decision could be explained through Spencer's "rightwing collectivism."
"Spencer is a collectivist, and he found that Trump is not. But Biden and the Democrats are collectivists," Rectenwald wrote.
Collectivism is a movement which prioritizes the needs and goals of an entire group rather than those of individuals. Right-wing collectivism, as demonstrated during the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is "fascism, or, in its German form national socialism, nazism," writes professor Deirdre McCloskey in the preface to Jeffrey Tucker's book "Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty."
Spencer responded to Rectenwald's tweet Tuesday morning, agreeing with him but adding that Trump's 2016 messaging was "patently collectivist."
"This—along with being a chaotic, wrecking-ball force—was what made [Trump] unique and worth supporting," Spencer responded.
Spencer continued in another tweet, arguing that the GOP and Trump, and specifically his campaign's slogan "Make America Great Again," are still "'collectivist'" because the Republican Party "messages to 'normal white people,' with heavy Southern evangelical inflection."
Now, four years later, Spencer said he realized how "ineffective, useless, and traitorous the GOP is."
Newsweek contacted Spencer for further comment, but did not hear back in time for publication.
Richard Spencer
White nationalist Richard Spencer, who popularized the term "alt-right" speaks at the Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts on October 19, 2017 in Gainesville, Florida. Spencer reiterated his support for Democratic presidential candidate... More Joe Raedle/Getty
Spencer, 42, has been credited with creating the term "alt-right," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), who called him "a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old."
"America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity," Spencer said during a November 2016 event where he led a crowd in "hail Trump" chanting. "It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us," he said.
Spencer also spoke during the "Unite the Right" rally, which former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who endorsed Trump in 2016, also attended. Biden specifically criticized the event, which left one woman dead, in a video when his presidential campaign launched in April 2019.
"I wrote at the time that we're in the battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that's even more true today. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation," Biden said in the video.
Andrew Bates, the director of rapid response for Biden's campaign, replied to Spencer's tweet Sunday endorsing the Democratic candidate.
"When Joe Biden says we are in a battle for the soul of our nation against vile forces of hate who have come crawling out from under rocks, you are the epitome of what he means," Bates wrote. "What you stand for is absolutely repugnant. Your support is 10,000% percent unwelcome here."
===
8 24
Richard B. Spencer - Wikipedia
richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 11, 1978)[2] is an American neo-Nazi, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and white supremacist.[3][4] Spencer claimed to have coined the term "alt-right" and was the most prominent advocate of the alt-right movement from its earliest days.[3][5] He advocates for the reconstitution of the European Union into a white racial empire, which he believes will replace the diverse European ethnic identities with one homogeneous "White identity".[6][7][8]
Spencer has advocated for the enslavement of Haitians by whites and for the ethnic cleansing of the racial minorities of the United States,[9] additionally expressing admiration for the political tactics of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell.[10][11] He was a featured speaker at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, among other neo-Nazi rallies that he has headlined.[12]
Spencer has repeatedly used Nazi gestures and rhetoric in public. In early 2016, Spencer was filmed giving the Nazi salute in a karaoke bar, and leaked footage also depicts Spencer giving the Sieg Heil salute to his supporters during the August 2017 Charlottesville rally.[13] After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Spencer urged his supporters to "party like it's 1933," the year Hitler came to power in Germany.[14]
In the weeks following, Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews.[15] At a conference Spencer held celebrating the election, Spencer cried: "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!"; subsequently Mike Enoch led a number of Spencer's supporters in performing a Nazi salute and a chant similar to the Sieg Heil chant.[16][17] In early-to-mid-2017, when Spencer's following was at its height, his supporters would give him the Sieg Heil salute when he entered a room.[18]
Following the Unite the Right rally, Spencer has been involved in several legal issues. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, during which an alt-right supporter drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring at least 19 others,[19][20][21] Spencer was sued as part of Sines v. Kessler for allegedly acting as a "gang boss" and inciting the killing.[22][23]
On November 23, 2021, the jury found Spencer liable on two counts and were unable to reach verdicts for another two, awarding $25 million in total damages.[24][25] Three supporters of Spencer were charged with attempted homicide following his October 2017 speech at the University of Florida.[26] Following an appeal by the Polish government, he was banned from the Schengen Area in 2018,[27][28] having been banned previously in 2014 after being deported from Hungary.[29][30][31]
Spencer has frequently contradicted his own previous statements about his beliefs and ideals; in one text exchange in 2022, he told a journalist that he "no longer identifies as a white nationalist."[32][33][34][35] As of 2024, he was still operating the web-based white nationalist publication Radix Journal.[36]
Early life
Richard Bertrand Spencer was born in 1978 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of ophthalmologist Rand Spencer and Sherry Spencer (née Dickenhorst), the heiress to cotton farms in Louisiana.[37][38] He grew up in Preston Hollow, Dallas, Texas.[39] Spencer attended St. Mark's School of Texas, then Colgate University for one year before transferring to the University of Virginia.[37][39]
In 2001, he received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia and, in 2003, a Master of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago.[37][39] From the summer of 2005 into 2006, Spencer attended Vienna International Summer University.[39] From 2005 to 2007, he was a PhD student in Modern European intellectual history at Duke University:{. He joined the Duke Conservative Union, where he met future President Trump's senior policy advisor Stephen Miller:(style="background-color:#ffbb16"):}:**.[37][39] His former website says he did not complete his PhD at Duke in order "to pursue a life of thought-crime".[39]
Activities
Early activities
From March to December 2007, Spencer was the assistant editor at :{The American Conservative magazine.[39] According to founding editor Scott McConnell, he was fired from The American Conservative because his views were considered too extreme.}:[40][39]^ Spencer spoke about the Duke lacrosse case and credits it with changing the course of his career.[41] From January 2008 to December 2009, he served as the executive editor of Taki's Magazine, a libertarian online magazine published by Taki Theodoracopulos.[39][42] He has claimed credit for coining the term alt-right in 2008 in order to differentiate himself from "mainstream American conservatism", although Paul Gottfried argues that both he and Spencer created the term.[43]
In March 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, a website he edited until 2012.[29] In January 2011, he became the owner and executive director of Washington Summit Publishers.[39] In January 2011, Spencer became president and director of the National Policy Institute (NPI), a White supremacist think tank based in Virginia, which was once run from his mother's $3 million summer house.[44][29] George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, has described NPI as "rather obscure and marginalized" until Spencer became its president.[45]
Spencer was invited to speak at Vanderbilt University in 2010 and Providence College in 2011 by Youth for Western Civilization.[46][47] In 2012, he founded Radix Journal as a biannual publication of Washington Summit Publishers.[42][29] Contributions have included articles by Kevin B. MacDonald, Alex Kurtagić, and Samuel T. Francis.[29] He also hosts a weekly podcast, "Vanguard Radio".[29]
In 2014, Spencer was deported from Budapest, Hungary. Under terms of the Schengen Agreement, he was banned for three years from 26 countries in Europe after trying to organize the National Policy Institute Conference, a conference for White nationalists.[29][30][31]
Alt-right leader
On January 15, 2017, the day of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Spencer launched the AltRight Corporation and its website altright.com, another commentary website for alt-right members.[29] According to Spencer, the site is a populist and big tent site for members of the alt-right.[48] Swedish publisher Daniel Friberg of Arktos Media is co-founder and European editor of the site.[49]
The Southern Poverty Law Center of the United States describes the common thread among contributors as antisemitism, rather than White nationalism or White supremacy in general.[50][51] Contributors to AltRight.com have included Henrik Palmgren and Jared Taylor.[52][53] On February 23, 2017, Spencer was removed from the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he was giving statements to the press. A CPAC spokesman said he was removed from the event because other members found him "repugnant".[54]
[
](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:White_supremacists_clash_with_police_%2836421659232%29.jpg)White nationalist protesters clash with police during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
On May 13, 2017, he led a torch-lit protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, against the vote of the city council to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War.[55] Spencer and David Duke were among those who led the crowd in chants of "You will not replace us," and "Blood and soil".[56][57][58] Michael Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, called the protest "horrific", and stated that it was either "profoundly ignorant" or intended to instill fear among minorities "in a way that hearkens back to the days of the KKK".[55][57][59]
In August 2017, Spencer was listed as an organizer on posters promoting the Charlottesville, Virginia, Unite the Right rally. It attracted counter-protesters, and violence broke out. One rightist drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing one woman and wounding 30 so severely they needed hospital treatment.[12]
In November 2017, Twitter removed from Spencer's account the blue checkmark that, reported The Washington Post, "the company gives to prominent accounts to help readers ensure they are authentic". Spencer told The Post he was worried this would lead to Twitter banning people like him.[60] He later joined the social network Gab.[61]
In November 2019, Milo Yiannopoulos released an audio recording of Spencer using racist slurs immediately after the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Spencer said he did not recall making the remarks, but did not deny the voice on the recording was his (see #White identity).[62][63][64]
A 2022 publication by the Southern Poverty Law Center stated "Spencer's efforts to stage events, and the alt-right movement around him, crumbled in March 2018" following violence outside a Michigan State University event where Spencer was speaking. Following this, Spencer largely ceased to be an effective leader of the movement.[36]
Public speaking
Short clip of Spencer speaking in November 2016
During a speech Spencer delivered in mid-November 2016 at an alt-right conference attended by approximately 200 people in Washington, D.C., Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German and denounced Jews.[15] Audience members cheered and gave the Nazi salute when he said, "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!"[15][65] and extended his right arm with a glass to toast that victory.[66]
Spencer later defended their conduct, stating that the Nazi salute was given in a spirit of "irony and exuberance".[67] It was later reported that Spencer had given the Nazi salute at a karaoke bar in April 2016.[13] Additionally, in 2017, sources indicate Spencer pressured followers to give him the Sieg Heil salute when he entered a room. Leaked texts indicate that those who refused to give the Nazi salute to Spencer, such as Jason Kessler, were stigmatized within the movement.[18]
Groups and events which Spencer has spoken to include the Property and Freedom Society,[68] the American Renaissance conference,[69] and the HL Mencken Club.[70] In November 2016, an online petition to prevent Spencer from speaking at Texas A&M University on December 6, 2016, was signed by thousands of students, employees, and alumni.[71] A protest and a university-organized counter-event were held to coincide with Spencer's event.[72]
Richard Spencer speaking about The "Alternative Right" in the United States in 2010 – video by Property and Freedom Society
On January 20, 2017, Spencer attended the inauguration of Donald Trump. As he was giving an impromptu interview on a nearby street afterwards, a masked man punched Spencer in the face, then fled.[73][74] A video of the incident was posted online, leading to divergent views on whether the attack was appropriate.[75]
Shortly after the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, the University of Florida denied Spencer's request for a September 2017 speaking opportunity, citing public safety grounds after opposition from students and locals of Gainesville, Florida.[76] Due to safety reasons, he was also denied speaking requests at Louisiana State University and Michigan State University in August 2017.[77][78] In September 2017, Cameron Padgett, who tried to book Spencer, sued MSU; he was represented by Kyle Bristow, an MSU alumnus.[79][80]
On August 16, during a television interview with Israeli Channel 2 anchor Danny Kushmaro, Spencer claimed that "Jews are vastly over-represented in... 'the establishment', that is, Ivy League educated people who really determine policy".[81]
Spencer's National Policy Institute, David Duke, Stefan Molyneux, and American Renaissance magazine were among the white nationalist outlets banned by YouTube from their platform in late June 2020 for not following the platform's policies on hate speech.[82]
Public response
Speech at the University of Florida
After the University of Florida's August 2017 denial of Spencer's request to speak the following month, Floridian lawyer Gary Edinger threatened to sue the university for violating the First Amendment by prohibiting Spencer from speaking despite being a publicly funded institution. The university subsequently reached an agreement with Edinger allowing Spencer to speak on October 19, 2017.[83] Florida Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency for Alachua County on October 16, saying: "I find that the threat of a potential emergency is imminent" as a result of Spencer's appearance.[61][84]
On October 19, 2017, Spencer spoke at the Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts on university grounds. In addition to Spencer, the speakers included Elliott Kline (using the pseudonym "Eli Mosley") of Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group from California, and Mike Enoch, a white nationalist blogger.[85][86] The event's security costs reportedly amounted to an estimated $600,000.[87] It drew about 2,500 protestors, vastly outnumbering Spencer's supporters.[88][89]
The speech, which was Spencer's first public appearance after the Charlottesville rally, was disrupted by loud protests.[90][91][92] When drowned out by chants from the audience, he grew visibly frustrated, stating that the protestors were interfering with his freedom of speech. He added: "You are all engaged in what's known as the heckler's veto." According to Clay Calvert, director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, non-violent protesting, booing and suggesting that the speaker leave was not a heckler's veto in law. The speech and the concurrent protests were largely peaceful.[89][93]
Later that day, three of Spencer's supporters were arrested on felony charges following an alleged discharge of a firearm, directed at protestors leaving the event. The three suspects were residents of Texas who had traveled to Florida to hear Spencer speak. According to the Gainesville Police Department, they had shouted "Hail Hitler" and gave Nazi salutes immediately before the alleged attack. Authorities said that two of the suspects had known links to extremist groups.[94] The men had participated in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally, where Spencer had been scheduled to speak.[95][96] All three were charged with attempted homicide.[97]
In the aftermath of the October 19 events, Ohio State University declined Spencer's request to allow him to speak on campus, citing "substantial risk to public safety". In response, a lawyer representing Spencer's associate and organizer of his speaking tour filed a lawsuit against the university.[98]
Opposition in Montana
The National Policy Institute think tank, AlternativeRight.com, and Radix Journal all use the same mailing address in Whitefish, Montana.[99]
In 2013, a dispute with neoconservative lobbyist Randy Scheunemann at Whitefish Mountain Resort in Montana drew public attention to Spencer and his political views.[100]
In 2014, a pro-tolerance group affiliated with the Montana Human Rights Network rallied against Spencer's residency in Whitefish. In response, the city council approved a non-discrimination resolution.[101]
In December 2016, Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, Republican Senator Steve Daines, Democratic Senator Jon Tester, Democratic Governor Steve Bullock and Republican Attorney General Tim Fox condemned a neo-Nazi march that had been planned for January 2017.[102] The community of Whitefish organized in opposition to the event, and the march never occurred.[103] Also in December 2016, Spencer announced he was considering an independent run for Montana's at-large congressional district in the 2017 special election, although he ultimately did not enter the race.[104][105][106]
European Union bans
European governments and media have responded to his visits. During his speaking tour in Hungary in 2014, Spencer was mocked by the Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság for his call for "a white Imperium" through a revival of the Roman Empire, and for his claim to be a "racial European", ideas that the newspaper called contrived and without any basis in European history.[107] In the aftermath of his visit, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán pressed through legislative measures which banned his entry and condemned Spencer.[108]
The government of Poland has also banned him from entering the country and condemned Spencer,[109] citing his Nazi rhetoric, the anti-Polish and anti-Slavic racism of the Nazis, and the Nazis' genocide of Slavic peoples during World War II.[27] In July 2018, Spencer was detained at Keflavík Airport in Reykjavík, Iceland en route to Sweden and was ordered by Polish officials to return to the United States; the successful effort of the Poles to ban Spencer from other parts of Europe arises from the Schengen Agreement.[110]
Views
White identity
Spencer believes in white pride and the unification of a pan-European "white race" in a "potential racial empire" resembling the Roman Empire.[6][7][8] In an interview with CNN, he was criticized for an apparent inconsistency or lack of clarity in his definition of white, with his interviewer saying that Spencer defined Syrians as white in the context of Steve Jobs's role in developing the iPhone, but described them as a non-white presence in Europe in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis.[111]
In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League called Spencer a "leader" in white supremacist circles, and said that after leaving The American Conservative, he rejected conservatism, because he believed its adherents "can't or won't represent explicitly white interests".[112]
While being interviewed by David Pakman, he was asked if he would condemn the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler; he refused by saying: "I'm not going to play this game", while stating that Hitler had "done things that I think are despicable", without elaborating on which things he was referring to.[113]
In a 2016 interview for Time magazine, Spencer said he rejected white supremacy and the slavery of nonwhites, preferring to establish America as a white ethnostate.[114] He also advocates the creation of a white ethnostate in Europe that would be open to all "racial Europeans".[6][7][8][115][116] Jason Wilson in The Guardian has argued that Spencer and other white nationalists are appropriating some elements of socialist rhetoric to critique a "notion of capitalism centered on stereotypes of Jews".[117]
According to political scientist Tamir Bar-On, Spencer defends "racialist and anti-Semitic agendas" of the Old Right under a new metapolitical guise, acting as a cultural influencer rather than a direct political actor, and using various media outlets to "disseminate his views to ordinary people in an accessible manner".[118]
Audio of Spencer speaking in Charlottesville in August 2017 was leaked by Milo Yiannopoulos in November 2019, in which Spencer reacted to the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally and the death of Heather Heyer; in the recording, Spencer says: "We are coming back here like a hundred fucking times. I am so mad. I am so fucking mad at these people.
They don't do this to fucking me. We are going to fucking ritualistically humiliate them. I am coming back here every fucking weekend if I have to. Like this is never over. I win! They fucking lose! That's how the world fucking works. Little fucking kikes. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octaroons ... my ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit. I rule the fucking world. Those pieces of fucking shit get ruled by people like me. They look up and see a face like mine looking down at them. That's how the fucking world works. We are going to destroy this fucking town."[63]
Ethno-nationalism
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Spencer has advocated for a white homeland for a "dispossessed white race", and called for "peaceful ethnic cleansing" to halt the "deconstruction" of what he describes as "white culture".[42][119][120] To this end he has supported what he has called "the creation of a White ethnostate on the North American continent", an "ideal" that he has regarded as a "reconstitution of the Roman Empire".[115][116]
Spencer claims to be a "white Zionist" and praised Israel's Jewish nation-state law,[121] saying: "Jews are, once again, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future, showing a path forward for Europeans."[122] His position was described as disingenuous as the alt-right does not usually support Zionism.[123]
Prior to the UK vote to leave the EU, Spencer expressed support for the multi-national bloc "as a potential racial empire" and an alternative to "American hegemony", stating that he has "always been highly skeptical of so-called 'Euro-Skeptics'".[124]
Nazi rhetoric
Spencer has made frequent use of Nazi rhetoric and gestures in his public speeches.[27] He called Donald Trump's 2016 presidential election "the victory of will", a phrase evoking the title of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), a Nazi-era propaganda film.[15] Spencer urged his supporters to "party like it's 1933," the year Hitler came to power in Germany.[14] In the weeks following, Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews.[15]
At a conference Spencer held celebrating Trump's election, he mentioned the "mainstream media" in those terms: "or perhaps we should refer to them in the original German: Lügenpresse", meaning 'lying press' or 'press of lies', a term frequently used by Joseph Goebbels in Nazi propaganda.[125][126] Spencer ended his speech with: "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!", and a number of his supporters gave the Nazi salute and chanted in a similar fashion to the Sieg Heil chant.[16][17] Spencer also admires George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, for using "shock as a positive means to an end".[10]
Support for Donald Trump
Spencer supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.[15] Following Trump's appointment of Steve Bannon as chief White House strategist and senior counselor, Spencer said Bannon would be in "the best possible position" to influence policy.[127]
By 2018, however, Spencer had distanced himself from Trump, saying on Twitter that "the Trump moment is over, and it's time for us to move on." The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that, around the same time, the white nationalist movement as a whole was dissatisfied with Trump's presidency, particularly because they believed Trump had failed to put a stop to non-white immigration into the US.[128]
In a July 2019 interview on CNN, he called Trump's tweet about four congresswomen (telling them to "go back" to where they came from) "meaningless", as he believed Trump was practicing a "con game" in not clearly developing a white nationalist agenda. He stated that Trump was merely providing "tweets that are meaningless and cheap and express the kind of sentiments you might hear from your drunk uncle while he's watching [Sean] Hannity."[129]
In 2020, following the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, Spencer said that he regretted voting for Trump.[130] In August of that year, Spencer said he would be voting for Joe Biden and the straight Democratic ticket in the 2020 election. "The MAGA/Alt-Right moment is over. I made mistakes; Trump is an obvious disaster; but mainly the paradigm contained flaws that we now are able to perceive. And it needs to end," Spencer wrote. "So be patient. We'll have another day in the sun. We need to recover and return in a new form." The Biden campaign renounced his support.[131][132]
Gender roles
During the 2016 United States presidential election, Spencer tweeted that women should not be allowed to make foreign policy.[133][134] He also stated in an interview with The Washington Post that his vision of America as a white ethnostate includes women returning to traditional roles as childbearers and homemakers.[135][136] In October 2017, when asked his opinion on American women having the right to vote, he said: "I don't necessarily think that that's a great thing" after stating that he was "not terribly excited" about voting in general.[134]
Spencer opposes same-sex marriage,[137] which he has described as "unnatural" and a "non-issue", commenting that "very few gay men will find the idea of monogamy to their liking".[138] Despite his opposition to same-sex marriage, Spencer barred people with anti-gay views from the National Policy Institute's annual conference in 2015.[139]
Health care
Spencer supports legal access to abortion, in part because he believes it would reduce the number of black and Hispanic people, which he says would be a "great boon" to white people.[37] Spencer also supports a national single-payer health care system because he believes it would benefit white people.[140][141]
Christianity
Spencer is an atheist,[142] although he also believes that the Christian church previously held some pragmatic value, because Spencer believes that it helped unify the white population of Europe. He opposes traditional Christian values as a moral code, due to the fact that Christianity is a universalizing religion, rather than an ethnic religion. Spencer references his views on Christianity as being influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.[37][143][144]
Citing Nietzsche's criticism of anti-Semitism and nationalism, Scott Galupo writing for The Week, Sean Illing for Vox, and Jordan Harris for The Courier-Journal have described Spencer's interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy as incorrect.[143][145][146] Spencer's Radix Journal has promoted paganism, running titles such as "Why I am a pagan".[147] Spencer has also described himself as a "cultural Christian".[148]
Geopolitics
Spencer states he voted for Democrat John Kerry over incumbent Republican George W. Bush during the 2004 United States presidential election, because Bush stood for "the war".[149]
Spencer criticized President Trump's administration for escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran. In January 2020, Spencer tweeted: "To the people of Iran, there are millions of Americans who do not want war, who do not hate you, and who respect your nation and its history. After our traitorous elite is brought to justice, we hope to achieve peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness."[130]
Spencer has advocated for the US pulling out of NATO, and called Russia the "sole white power in the world". His former partner, Nina Kouprianova, under her pen name Nina Byzantina referred to herself as a "Kremlin troll leader" and regularly aligned to Kremlin talking points, with ties to Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right ultranationalist Russian leader in the Eurasianism movement and writer of Foundations of Geopolitics. The webzine founded by Spencer in 2010, called Alternative Right, accepted direct contributor pieces from Dugin.[150] Kouprianova has translated several books written by Dugin.[151][152] The books were later published by Spencer's publishing house, Washington Summit Publishers.[153]
Libertarianism
In the late 2000s, Spencer was involved in the libertarian movement, supporting libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul[154] and hosting him at his discussion club, the Robert Taft Club.[37] Spencer later disavowed libertarianism as incompatible with white nationalism, and in 2017 he came into conflict with libertarians after reportedly attempting to "crash" an International Students for Liberty conference.[155]
Current self-description
Spencer has frequently contradicted his own previous statements about what he believes and how he identifies himself ideologically. In a single text exchange in 2022, he told a journalist for the feminist website *Jezebel* that he "no longer identifies as a white nationalist." In June 2022, he described himself on Bumble as "politically moderate".[32][33]
Influences
According to political scientist Tamir Bar-On, "Spencer's key intellectual influences are largely those thinkers concerned with winning the 'cultural war' against egalitarianism, liberal democracy, capitalism, socialism, and multiculturalism," citing Nietzsche, the German Conservative Revolution (including Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger), French New Right theorists like Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, along with other far-right figures such as Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Aleksandr Dugin, and "US right-wingers with a penchant for race-driven politics or anti-Semitism" like Sam Francis, Jared Taylor, and Kevin B. MacDonald.[156]
Legal issues
Sines v. Kessler
See also: Sines v. Kessler
In June 2020, Norman K. Moon, the federal district judge presiding over Sines v. Kessler, a civil rights lawsuit that stemmed from the violence at the Unite the Right rally in 2017,[157] allowed Spencer's lawyer, John DiNucci, to withdraw from the case, on the grounds that Spencer owed DiNucci a significant amount in legal fees, and also was not cooperating with him in preparing the case; Spencer thereafter represented himself. At the time of DiNucci's withdrawal, Spencer also faced a $500 fine and two weeks in a county jail in Montana if he did not pay over $60,000 he owed to the guardian ad litem representing his children's interests in Spencer's ongoing divorce proceedings there. Ultimately, Spencer avoided going to jail after settling the debt.[158]
On November 23, 2021, the jury reached a mixed verdict in the case. Along with the other defendants, Spencer was found liable on two counts; civil conspiracy under Virginia state law, and race-based harassment or violence.[24] The jury deadlocked on the remaining two charges of conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence, and whether defendants had knowledge of the conspiracy and failed to prevent it from taking place.[157][159] Jurors awarded more than $25 million in total damages, with Spencer personally liable for $700,000 in punitive damages.[24][25] Spencer stated he would appeal the judgement, saying the "entire theory of that verdict is fundamentally flawed." Roberta Kaplan meanwhile said that the plaintiffs' lawyers plan to refile so that a new jury can decide on the deadlocked claims.[160]
Personal life
In 2010, Spencer moved to Whitefish, Montana. He says he splits his time between Whitefish and Arlington, Virginia,[115][161] although he has said he has lived in Whitefish for over 10 years and considers it home.[162] As of 2017, Spencer was renting an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia.[163] He moved out in August 2018.[164] Prior to his marriage, Spencer's dating history included Asian women,[165] which he has said predates his white nationalism, though this evaluation is disputed.[166]
Spencer married Nina Kouprianova in 2010, with whom he has two children.[167] He separated from Kouprianova, a Russian-Canadian with Georgian roots,[168] in October 2016;[40] in April 2017, Spencer said he and his wife were not separated and were still together.[169]
In October 2018, Kouprianova accused him, in divorce documents, of multiple forms of abuse.[170][171][172] Kouprianova provided hours of recordings and text messages to the press in order to substantiate her allegations.[171] Court documents detailed emotional abuse, financial abuse, and violent physical abuse, including when Kouprianova was four months pregnant, and frequently in front of their children.[173] According to media reports, the recordings and text messages show Spencer telling his wife that he will "fucking break [her] nose," encouraging her to commit suicide, and apologizing for previous incidents of physical abuse.[174] A caregiver to the children testified in court about Spencer's abuses towards both her and Kouprianova.[174] Spencer denied all allegations made against him, and was not charged with a crime.[174]
References...
===
tablet says troll but speculative?
When Joe Biden says we are in a battle for the soul of our nation against vile forces of hate who have come crawling out from under rocks, you are the epitome of what he means. What you stand for is absolutely repugnant. Your support is 10,000% percent unwelcome here.
Quote
Richard Spencer
@RichardBSpencer
·
Aug 23, 2020
Replying to @MattRayLiberty
I plan to vote for Biden and a straight democratic ticket. It’s not based on “accelerationism” or anything like that; the liberals are clearly more competent people.
==
xitter
richard Spencer
@RichardBSpencer
For what it's worth, I actually think Putin is being truthful when he claims that he prefers Biden to Trump, because Biden is more "stable and predictable."
One of the odd things about "Russia-gate" is that, in some key areas, Trump was more hostile towards Russia than Obama: sanctions were never lifted and lethal aid to Ukraine was authorized under his administration. Some of this happened without Trump being aware of it; perhaps Trump was motivated, in part, to prove that he wasn't a "Manchurian candidate" or "Putin's puppet." Regardless, it happened. Once in office, Biden lessened sanctions ... but, of course, that all changed with the invasion of Ukraine.
Obviously, in other areas, Trump was wildly more pro-Russian, at least rhetorically, than any Democrat. The best example is Trump's agreeing with Putin—over the protests of his own security apparatus—on Russia's innocence in election interference. This was likely motivated by vanity, Trump's insistence that "only he" could win in 2016. Trump's recent crass comments on NATO fit the bill: Trump cares about himself and has no real loyalty to institutions or alliances.
What exactly Putin expected from Biden in February 2022 remains a mystery. Perhaps he thought that, much like Obama in 2014, he'd be passive or paralyzed? Perhaps he believed that the American empire was effectively finished after Biden's messy withdrawal from Afghanistan? I don't think he desired a clean break with the West. Justifying the Ukraine invasion as "de-Nazification" was, to some degree, a way of legitimizing the invasion in the eyes of the West. Regardless, a clean break is what he got, and he has largely accepted it.
The thing about Trump is that he doesn't just have a "mad man" theory of diplomacy and nuclear deterrence. He is, in fact, a mad man! You could plausibly argue that Trump would sign off on Putin's annexation of much or all of Ukraine ... and you could, with equal plausibility, argue that Trump would nuke Moscow if any conflict arose. He is genuinely an unstable and unpredictable leader. Here the "personal is political": The reality of Trump's malignant narcissism affects his actions.
Overall, I don't think Putin would mind Biden in office. He'll continue to reach out to the Right, if only to stir up shit, create division, and weaken his adversary. That said, the notion that Trump offers a fundamentally different strategy vis-à-vis Russia—and not just unpredictable bombast—is an illusion.
===
25 million $
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/charlottesville-verdict/
Returning a verdict against dozens of white supremacist leaders and organizations who organized Unite the Right, a Virginia jury has awarded millions in damages to nine plaintiffs who were injured in the violence during the chaotic rally that ended with a car attack by James Fields.
The defendants were found liable in four of six counts, including a Virginia state conspiracy claim that they subjected the plaintiffs to racial, religious or ethnic harassment or violence. But the mixed-race jury deadlocked on a major claim in the civil case against the organizers, whether they engaged in a conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence.
The plaintiffs presented evidence over the course of the four-week trial showing that the defendants meticulously planned the Unite the Right rally on the digital chat platform Discord. While the ostensible reason for the rally was to support two Confederate monuments slated for removal in Charlottesville, the organizers' private communications revealed that their true inspiration was a violent rally four months earlierin Berkeley, Calif. and that they hoped to bait left-wing opponents into the streets, and as primary organizer Jason Kessler put it, "fight this shit out."
The evidence showed that Kessler quickly reached out to Matthew Heimbach, an avowed fascist and antisemite who led the Traditionalist Worker Party and had already organized a coalition of "hard right" white supremacist groups that included League of the South, the National Socialist Movement and Vanguard America. All the organizations sent members to Charlottesville, and the leader of Vanguard America wound up providing a shield to Fields before he drove his car into counter-protesters.
After securing a commitment from Spencer — then the most famous figure in the alt-right movement that emerged on the coattails of Donald Trump's 2016 election — for the headlining speaker slot, Kessler wrote in a phone text: "We are raising an army, my liege, for free speech but the cracking of skulls, if it comes to it."
:{The plaintiffs also presented evidence that :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Elliot Kline, both a lieutenant to Spencer and a leader of Identity Evropa,}::{ organized Unite the Right alongside Kessle}:r. Kline's former girlfriend, Samantha Froelich, testified that he was obsessed with exterminating Jews, saying he would "gas the kikes forever." Robert "Azzmador" Ray, a contributing writer for the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, mentioned in a Discord chat in the month prior to Unite the Right that had "just got done with an hourlong chat with some of the organizers and I feel better about the thing. The plan is the same: Gas the kikes." After macing counter-protesters at the Aug. 11 torch march, Ray reported to his fellow neo-Nazis: "I personally literally gassed half a dozen kikes."
Counsel for the defendants argued that Fields car attack was not reasonably foreseeable or intended by the defendants, who anticipated only pushing and shoving, or, at most, fist fights, but the jury evidently didn't buy it. The defendants all testified that they did not know Fields and had not seen him prior to his appearance at the Aug. 12, 2017 rally.
Plaintiff Natalie Romero was injured in Fields' car attack, which left her with a fractured skull, a cleft lip, persistent headaches and trouble maintaining balance. Romero and co-plaintiff Devin Willis were among a small group of University of Virginia students who linked arms around a statue of Thomas Jefferson during a torch march in which white nationalists made monkey noises at them and threw lit torches at their feet while macing, punching and kicking others. All the plaintiffs, who include a pastor, a landscaper, a paralegal who recently passed the bar exam, testified that they have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of physical injuries or emotional distress.
As she and a dozen or so counter-protesters linked arms around statue, Romero described the sound of the approaching torch marchers as "almost like thunder, like the earth was growling." She recalled that they chanted "Blood and soil" and "White power."
"There's another that I hate repeating," Romero testified. "I like, hear it in my nightmares. If my phone buzzes, I hear the same cadence, the 'You will not replace us.' That one is just so terrifying to hear the whole time."
===
times of israel
White supremacists condemn Ukraine conflict as a ‘brother war’; some blame Jews
Far-right extremists decry killing of white people in war, don’t pick a side overall; but the theme of supposed Jewish puppet masters is a recurring one
By Luke Tress5 March 2022,
An antisemitic meme espousing conspiracy theories that was posted in a far-right Telegram chat on March 4, 2022. (Screenshot)
White supremacists around the world have largely condemned the violence in Ukraine as a “brother war” between two white European countries, researchers of extremism have said.
Opinions about the war are varied, and it’s not clear if the majority of far-right extremists side with Russia or Ukraine, but most sympathize with Ukrainian civilians. Some have blamed Jews for the conflict, calling it a conspiracy.
“The overarching narrative or agreement, if there was one, is the idea of this being a ‘brother war,’ so basically a white Christian nation versus another white Christian nation, and that is something a lot of these groups have spoken out against,” said Callum Farley, an investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League.
The ADL released a report on Thursday detailing the extremist response to the war, mostly based on public and private chats and statements by the far-right, white supremacists, and others.
There is no clear blame for the war’s outbreak among the far-right. Many white extremists are upset by the Russian army’s killing of white, Ukrainian civilians. Graphic footage of attacks on Ukrainian cities has circulated in far-right chat groups on the Telegram messaging application.
The Times of Israel
Some believe NATO pushed Russian President Vladimir Putin into invading, or say he was trying to save Ukrainians from the European Union.
Tying into the “brother war” idea is a narrative that the war is a Jewish conspiracy to harm white Europeans, involving both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“It’s the idea that since President Zelensky’s Jewish… the conspiracy is rising that Putin is being controlled by the Russian oligarchs, who are also Jewish allegedly, and so essentially it’s a Jewish conspiracy to pit these two white nations against each other to kill white people,” Farley said.
US white supremacist David Duke has repeatedly framed the conflict as a Jewish conspiracy to kill non-Jews.
The racist White Lives Matter organization wrote in a post, “Between the Jewish led Ukraine & NATO and the jewish led Russia, choose White Ukrainians and White Russians. End the war, call out the international clique of anti-Whites and their involvement on both sides, sentencing Whites to genocide yet again. White Racial Unity. That’s it. The only take you can have as a pro-White.”
A white supremacist image calling for an end to the Ukraine war that was posted in a chat room on March 3, 2022. (Screenshot)
Indiana Active Club, another white supremacist group, said, “Whether you support the Ukrainian or the Russian side of this conflict, remember that every fallen white man is a loss to European people as a whole.”
One post in a fascist channel said, “The innocent people of Ukraine and Russia are caught in a zog war from both sides. Whites lose, Jews win.” The acronym “zog” is a white supremacist term referring to a “Zionist occupied government,” a conspiracy about Jewish power.
Many on the far-right have admired Putin’s Russia as a powerful, white, Christian nation, according to the ADL report. American white supremacist Richard Spencer has called Russia the “sole white power in the world.”
But some have soured against Putin for the invasion and for his claimed goal of “denazification” of Ukraine. He has also been condemned for fighting against the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian army unit with neo-Nazi ties, for allegedly causing non-white refugees to move to Europe, and for fielding Muslim soldiers in the Russian army.
The extremist American Futurist outlet, referring to Nazis as National Socialists, wrote, “If you’re [National Socialist] and you’re supporting Putin who is literally invading a country with a listed reason of destroying [National Socialist] groups like Azov battalion then your pretty fucking retarded.”
An antisemitic meme espousing conspiracy theories was posted in a far-right Telegram chat on March 4, 2022. (Screenshot)
One post on a fascist Telegram channel said, “This invasion will result in nothing but dead Europeans at the behest of Russian Jewish oligarchs.”
“I’m sorry Azov got duped into fighting for the Jewish Ukrainian president, and abandoned. They trusted a Jew,” it said.
“They’re killing other whites. They are being manipulated to kill other whites. By Jews,” another post said.
Some extremists have started calling Putin “Jewtin” and saying he was hiding a Jewish background.
Others are ambivalent, saying Kremlin control is better than that of other Western countries and blaming “NATO aggression” for the war.
American extremists who support Russia tend to do so out of antipathy toward the Biden administration, State Department, NATO, and liberal order, and not for ideological reasons, Farley said.
The far-right US commentator Nicholas Fuentes wrote, “I know it’s not exactly politically correct but I support tsar Putin’s right to denazify the illegitimate state of Ukraine!”
“I want China to take back Taiwan, I want Russia to take back Ukraine, if for no other reason than it’s time for America to be humiliated,” Fuentes said.
Some of the more extreme groups support the Azov Battalion by releasing contact information for those who want to join it or donate money, and expressing the hope it will carve out a Nazi state in the conflict. Others criticized the battalion for fighting for a Jewish president.
Many expressed admiration for Ukrainian troops in one white supremacist chat, with a post in the channel lauding the militias that said, “Real blood and soil nationalism. This is what it looks like.”
White supremacists have also claimed “Africans and Muslims” were exploiting the war to “sneak” into Europe as refugees. Mainstream news reports in recent days have said minority refugees faced racism while trying to cross Ukraine’s borders to flee the violence.
Sunni Muslim extremists have sided against Putin due to his involvement in the Syrian Civil War, and have criticized Muslim Chechen fighters for joining Russia.
The Islamic State and al-Qaeda terror groups have stayed quiet, calling both Russia and Ukraine “unbelievers” and “crusaders.” A user in an Islamic State online chat called on its supporters in the conflict area to “collect weapons” and “attack the crusaders.”
===
MA chic U alt rt doc
===
newsweek no lnx
Unite the Right Five-Year Anniversary: Where Key Players Are Now
Published Aug 11, 2022 at 3:00 AM EDT
Updated Aug 11, 2022
By Nick Mordowanec
Staff Writer
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in one death, numerous injuries and footage that shocked a nation and sparked major discussion due to various racial and nationalistic overtones.
Since the events of August 11 and 12, 2017, legal action has resulted in life imprisonment and millions of dollars in restitution after members of Unite the Right—described as a white supremacist group consisting of the alt-right, Klansmen, neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis—took to the streets with antisemitic chants including "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us."
The rally was conducted, according to group leaders and participants, to protest the removal of a statue of former Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The event brought together far-right extremists from at least 39 states, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and from other countries such as Canada, Sweden and South Africa.
In the years since the rally, key members of the group, including Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler and Christopher Cantwell, have been legally obligated to pay nine civil trial plaintiffs $25 million in compensatory and punitive damages for physical and emotional injuries.
Spencer, who said in 2020 that he voted for President Joe Biden, is the leader of the National Policy Institute and has been described as a prominent white nationalist. He has remained relatively quiet since his trial.
Kessler was a Unite the Right event organizer, while Cantwell was convicted of assaulting protesters.
On October 11, 2017, the lawsuit Sines v. Kessler was filed by attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn. It alleged that multiple individuals associated with Unite the Right had violated the 1871 Ku Klux Act and other Virginia state laws, seeking compensatory and punitive damages against each defendant.
Court records show that on July 9, 2018, a judge rejected the defendants' motion to dismiss the case. Four months later, the defendants were ordered to hand over devices and social media accounts as part of the discovery process.
On January 6, 2020, defendant Elliott Kline—also known as Eli Mosley—surrendered himself to U.S. Marshals. On May 26, 2020, defendants Kline, Matthew Heimbach, and Vanguard America were ordered to pay plaintiffs a collective $41,300.
Court records also indicate that Burt Colucci, leader of the neo-Nazi group National Socialist Movement, was ordered to turn in his devices in 2020.
On November 23, 2021, about one month after the trial began in the Western District of Virginia, an 11-person jury sided with the nine plaintiffs—consisting of students, clergy, protestors and innocent bystanders—who were injured in 2017.
Seven of those plaintiffs were directly injured as a result of the actions of James Fields Jr., who drove his car into a large group of peaceful protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Fields was found guilty of first-degree murder in December 2018 and later received multiple life sentences for state and federal charges.
Charlottesville Unite the Right rally fifth anniversary
Thursday marks the fifth anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in one death and numerous injuries. Above, a memorial in Charlottesville honors victim Heather Heyer, 32, who was killed... More Bill Tompkins/Getty Images
The plaintiffs were April Muñiz, Chelsea Alvarado, Devin Willis, Elizabeth Sines, Marcus Martin, Marissa Blair, Natalie Romero, Reverend Seth Wispelwey and Thomas Baker.
"It has been a long four years since we first brought this case," plaintiffs said in a statement last November, according to the civil rights nonprofit Integrity First for America. "Today, we can celebrate the jury's verdict finally holding defendants like Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell accountable for what they did to us and to everyone else in the Charlottesville community who stood up against hate in August 2017.
"Our single greatest hope is that today's verdict will encourage others to feel safer raising our collective voices in the future to speak up for human dignity and against white supremacy."
Read more
Take It From the Black Robin Hood: Biden Is More Racist Than Trump
House Republicans All Vote Against Neo-Nazi Probe of Military, Police
Masked White Supremacist Group Marches Through Boston, Stirs Outrage
The verdict was described as "a loud and clear message" in a joint statement made by Kaplan and Dunn, adding that the nation's laws "will not tolerate the use of violence to deprive racial and religious minorities of the basic right we all share to live as free and equal citizens."
Former President Donald Trump, who is weighing a 2024 presidential run, said following the Unite the Right rally that there were "very fine people on both sides."
In Bob Woodward's book Fear, Trump reportedly called his response "the biggest fking mistake I've made."
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe wrote an op-ed in 2019 saying Trump's comments in the aftermath showed that Trump "chose that day to come out as a white supremacist. He chose that day to come out as a dyed-in-the-wool, unapologetic racist."
The Democratic McAuliffe lost his reelection bid for governor in 2021 to Republican Glenn Youngkin.
Carla Hill, director of research for the ADL, told Newsweek that as of July 2022, there have been 131 white supremacist murders since the Unite the Right rally, including 21 shootouts with police. Through March, there have been 23 white supremacist terror plots, and through June, there have been 10,476 antisemitic incidents, Hill said.
She said that while many rally participants were not affiliated with any particular group, and many membered groups compose a small portion of extremist movements, the Unite the Right rally in 2017 "caused a major change in tactics."
"Overall, there was a retreat from preannounced public activity with focus turned towards anonymous activism such as podcasts, propaganda distributions and unannounced flash demonstrations," Hill said. "Blame and finger-pointing was rampant, and many groups refused to work together or support each other's events as they had in the months leading up to Unite the Right.
"This is not to say that the white supremacist movement is in decline. It isn't. New white supremacist groups and networks have formed since Unite the Right," Hill said. "But the alt-right, the organizing force behind Unite the Right, is much less visible today."
Hill also said that a series of violent attacks that followed Unite the Right has been troubling, including deadly white supremacist shooting rampages in Parkland, Florida; Pittsburgh; Poway, California; El Paso, Texas; and Buffalo, New York. She specifically mentioned the evolution of The Proud Boys, ideologies of "incel" individuals and the proliferation of conspiracy theories such as those commonly perpetrated by QAnon.
"It's a good reminder that the extremist landscape is ever changing," Hill added.
===
https://www.yahoo.com/news/lawsuit-over-charlottesville-unite-rally-080025307.html
no lnx pix
lawsuit over Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally has crippled white supremacist groups, leaders
White nationalist Richard Spencer (center) and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Emancipation Park after the "Unite the Right" rally was declared an unlawful gathering Aug. 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the "alt-right" clashed with anti-fascist protesters and police as they attempted to hold a rally in Emancipation Park, where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was slated to be removed.
A white supremacist with a Nazi tattoo leaves Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 12, 2017.
Flowers and notes are left in memory of Heather Heyer, who died after she was struck when a car plowed into a crowd protesting the 'Unite the Right' rally on Aug. 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Va.]
Firefighters from northern Idaho and eastern Washington participate in fire training on July 11, 2001, climaxing with the destruction of the church structure at the former Aryan Nations compound in Hayden, Idaho. The only other structure then remaining at the compound was the former residence of Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, which also was to be used for firefighter training.
Supporters of US President Donald Trump protest inside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. - Demonstrators breeched security and entered the Capitol as Congress debated the a 2020 presidential election Electoral Vote Certification. ]
Civil trial over deadly 'Unite the Right' extremist rally to begin in Charlottesville
White nationalist Richard Spencer (center) and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Emancipation Park after the "Unite the Right" rally was declared an unlawful gathering Aug. 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the "alt-right" clashed with anti-fascist protesters and police as they attempted to hold a rally in Emancipation Park, where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was slated to be removed.
Will Carless
October 17, 2021
In this article:
Richard B. Spencer
American white supremacist, conspiracy theorist, and neo-Nazi
Donald Trump
45th President of the United States
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.
Meanwhile, several of the groups named in the suit have fallen apart.
Vanguard America, the neo-Nazi group that Fields marched with, fragmented after the rally. So did the Traditionalist Workers Party, a white supremacist group. Cantwell is in prison after being convicted of extortion. Identity Evropa rebranded, and in May 2020 defendants Matthew Heimbach and Elliott Kline each were ordered to pay fines of more than $12,000.
At least two defendants are in hiding: Andrew Anglin, who founded the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer and has another multi-million dollar judgment against him from another lawsuit, and his webmaster Robert Ray, who goes by "Azzmador" and disappeared from view last year after the suit was filed.
"This case is about ensuring that these folks are effectively bankrupted and dismantled," Spitalnick said. "The fact that so many of these defendants have already been marginalized in the movement is a testament to how accountability can work."
In that respect, the Charlottesville case follows a long history of using lawsuits to disrupt hate groups.
A compound razed and movements flattened
An extraordinary series of photographs from 2001 shows the demolition of the Aryan Nations compound outside Boise, Idaho. In one, a yellow digger chews into a massive swastika painted on a roof. In another, a guard tower is flattened by the same machine.
The compound was razed after the Aryan Nations was bankrupted in 2000 by a lawsuit brought by an Idaho attorney and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
That case was one of almost a dozen such lawsuits filed by the SPLC against various groups over the last 20 years.
Firefighters from northern Idaho and eastern Washington participate in fire training on July 11, 2001, climaxing with the destruction of the church structure at the former Aryan Nations compound in Hayden, Idaho. The only other structure then remaining at the compound was the former residence of Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, which also was to be used for firefighter training.
More
"Every one of our cases led to the dissolution of a group," said Heidi Beirich, who once led the SPLC's Intelligence Project. Now she's co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. "It's a very effective tactic."
The land that once housed the group is now a public park.
In the 1980s and 90s, the SPLC filed lawsuits against several chapters of the KKK on behalf of plaintiffs who had been intimidated or threatened. The lawsuits caused those chapters to file for bankruptcy or shut down.
Beirich said she applauds Integrity First for bringing such a broad lawsuit against so many defendants. The SPLC cases typically tackled one organization or chapter at a time, she said.
Like the SPLC lawsuits, the Charlottesville case is based on more than the mere speech of hate groups, which is protected, Beirich said. It alleges the defendants engaged in illegal actions, including harassment and assault.
Ku Klux Klan Act invoked in lawsuit over insurrection
The suit against the Unite the Right organizers appears to have opened new legal fronts in the fight against extremism.
In late August, seven officers from the U.S. Capitol Police sued Trump, his longtime adviser Roger Stone and members of far-right extremist groups, alleging they conspired to use violence on Jan. 6 to attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election
That lawsuit relies on the same statute used in the Charlottesville case – the federal Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a Reconstruction-era statute that allows individuals to sue when they are injured by conspiracies.
"Unfortunately, the KKK Act is experiencing something of a renaissance," said Karen Dunn, co-lead counsel on the Charlottesville lawsuitwith Roberta Kaplan. "But we are glad it exists because this is exactly the kind of conduct it is meant to address."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lawsuit over Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally goes to trial
===
blk female student thugswarmed when elected to student gov't? at ivy league now in boden admin? civil KKK suit ~ charlottesville indiv and groups 10 21 trms
https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-show-10-25-21-n1282354
===
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/richard-spencer/
broke trial
===
https://twitter.com/olgaNYC1211/status/1248436809870249989/photo/1
ton-that hack malware phish ggl pAx dickinson bix insider, weeve stormer
==
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/clearview-ai-facial-recognition-alt-right_n_5e7d028bc5b6cb08a92a5c48
long many lnx pix docs?
Far-Right Helped Create The World’s Most Powerful Facial Recognition Technology
Clearview AI, which has alarmed privacy experts, hired several far-right employees, a HuffPost investigation found.
By Luke O’Brien
04/07/2020
Advanced facial recognition technology poses a mortal threat to privacy. It could grant the government, corporations and even average citizens the ability to capture a photo of anybody and, with a few keystrokes, uncover all kinds of personal details. So when The New York Times published an exposé about a shadowy facial recognition firm called Clearview AI in January, it seemed like the worst nightmare of privacy advocates had arrived.
Clearview is the most powerful form of facial recognition technology ever created, according to the Times.With more than 3 billion photos scraped surreptitiously from social media profiles and websites, its image database is almost seven times the size of the FBI’s. Its mobile app can match names to faces with a tap of a touchscreen. The technology is already being integrated into augmented reality glasses so people can identify almost anyone they look at.
Clearview has contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, BuzzFeed reported earlier this year, and FBI agents, members of Customs and Border Protection, and hundreds of police officers at departments nationwide are among its users.
With the coronavirus pandemic increasingly throwing the country into chaos and President Donald Trump moving to expand domestic surveillance powers ? in theory, to better map disease spread ? Clearview has sought deeper inroads into government infrastructure and is now in discussions with state agencies to use its technology to track infected people, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Even if you’ve never heard of Clearview, you likely have an online presence — maybe a friend or a relative has posted a photo of you to Facebook — which means you’re probably in its database. Clearview’s CEO and co-founder, Cam-Hoan Ton-That, and his associates chose to mass-violate social media policies against scraping accounts to build an image warehouse of unprecedented size, as several outlets have noted recently.
What hasn’t been reported, however, is even scarier: Exclusive documents obtained by HuffPost reveal that Ton-That, as well as several people who have done work for the company, have deep, longstanding ties to far-right extremists. Some members of this alt-right cabal went on to work for Ton-That.
Clearview stated that it had immediately parted ways with some of these people when HuffPost reached out for comment for this story, but the pervasive links between the company and the alt-right can’t be simply dismissed as a few bad apples.
Big Brother, it turned out, was wearing a MAGA cap.
A Mysterious Hacker
Little is known about Ton-That, a 31-year-old Australian hacker who moved to San Francisco in 2007. He made a name for himself two years later by unleashing a computer worm that phished the login credentials of Gmail users. Ton-That showed no remorse after journalists traced the worm to him— he simply set up another phishing site.
By 2015, he had joined forces with far-right subversives working to install Trump as president. They included Mike Cernovich, a Trump-affiliated propagandist who spearheaded the near-deadly Pizzagate disinformation campaign; Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a neo-Nazi hacker and the webmaster for The Daily Stormer; and Pax Dickinson, the racist former chief technology officer of Business Insider who went on to march with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In this far-right clique, two of Ton-That’s associates loomed larger than most thanks to their close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and Trump adviser: Jeff Giesea, a Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes, and Charles “Chuck” Johnson, a former Breitbart writer and far-right extremist who reportedly coordinated lawfare against media organizations with Thiel. And according to new documents obtained by HuffPost, Johnson appears to have received funding from Thiel for a startup that the Southern Poverty Law Center would label a “white nationalist hate group.” (Johnson has filed suit against HuffPost in Texas over a January 2019 article about his visits to members of Congress to discuss “DNA sequencing.”)
People involved with Clearview appear to have gone to great lengths to conceal their links to the company and each other. Johnson, for instance, does not appear on any of the incorporation documents and has left little public trace of his association with Ton-That beyond a Facebook post. But multiple far-right sources who know Johnson told HuffPost that he and Ton-That were in close contact at least as early as 2016, and that Johnson told them he was working with Ton-That on facial recognition.
Johnson told one source late that year that he viewed the technology as a way to potentially “identify every illegal alien in the country.” In early 2017, Johnson introduced Ton-That to another source, saying he was a gifted coder he’d hired to build the facial recognition tool. Around the same time, Johnson stated on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.”
Video and private messages obtained by HuffPost confirm that Johnson and Ton-That were collaborating on far-right schemes in 2016; by early 2017 at the latest, they were in contact about scraping social media platforms for the facial recognition business. At least two people who worked for Johnson took jobs with and worked for Clearview until late March, when the company claims to have severed ties with them after HuffPost reached out with questions.
Thiel himself has an obvious interest in mass surveillance: Palantir, his data-mining behemoth, aggregates enormous amounts of personal information about immigrants and undocumented workers, and it provides the analytical tools for ICE raids. In 2017, Thiel became one of Clearview’s earliest investors. He did not respond to questions sent to him and his spokesperson.
Like other tech products scaled in dodgy ways, Clearview may have grown too big to rein in. Every time police use Clearview, they upload images of people they’re trying to identify ? even child sex abuse victims ? to Ton-That’s unregulated and ever-expanding database, where they are stored indefinitely.
No federal laws exist to govern the use of facial recognition. “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, told the Times.
Clearview also appears to spy on law enforcement searches. After a Times reporter had police officers run her photo through the app, the officers received calls from Clearview representatives asking if they were speaking to a journalist. The potential for abuse is vast.
“The fear is that the kind of authoritarian control this [tool] will grant will wind up in the hands of the wrong people,” said Liz O’Sullivan, the technology director at the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
Like, for instance, a Clearview contractor who is fond of disseminating Third Reich propaganda about Jews. The same extremist, with whom Ton-That now claims to have parted ways, was instrumental in helping sow disinformation from Kremlin operatives in 2016 to assist the Trump campaign. A Clearview “investigator” who appeared to work for the company until late March is part of a D.C.-based white nationalist crew that gathers in secret.
Yet another Clearview employee who left the company after an inquiry from HuffPost is a Croatian-born extremist who wrote in 2015 that he “wholeheartedly endorse[s] racism, racialism, ethnocentrism, Islamophobia, Eurocentrism and anti-Semitism.” Writing under a pseudonym on various blogs, he had embraced the possibility of balkanizing America, which could allow authoritarian states such as Russia or China to fill the power vacuum.
“For a stable and sustainable global order to exist,” he wrote, “the United States Government as we know it must be destroyed.”
A White National Convention
In July 2016, far-right extremists descended on Cleveland for the Republican National Convention. The alt-right’s intellectual figurehead, Richard Spencer, was there, as was Cernovich. So was Johnson, who at the time was running GotNews, a site that employed white nationalists to crank out race-baiting content for Trump supporters. Peter Brimelow, the publisher of the white nationalist VDARE, showed up. British political saboteur Milo Yiannopolous attended a “twinks for Trump” party that featured anti-Muslim speakers such as Pamela Geller and Geert Wilders.
One night, Spencer attended a dinner with Johnson and other members of the far-right at an upscale Italian restaurant. He found himself sitting at a table with Ton-That, a striking figure with long black hair. The hacker arrived at the dinner with Johnson after they’d caused a minor fracas. They’d harassed Michelle Fields, a former Breitbart reporter who’d had her arm roughly grabbed at a Trump rally a few months earlier by the candidate’s then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. At the RNC, Johnson chased after Fields in the street until her fiancé shoved him away. The incident was captured in a video uploaded to Johnson’s GotNews YouTube channel. In the background, you can see Ton-That with Johnson, laughing as Fields scrambles away. (Fields worked for HuffPost at the time.) Over dinner that night, the hacker was more subdued.
“He was smart,” Spencer told HuffPost of Ton-That. “He was into this esoteric reactionary sphere stuff. I remember he was talking about celibacy and the priestly order being celibate and thinking for the group and not having mundane concerns.He was into quasi-Catholic neo-trad[itional] reactionary type stuff.”
The neoreactionary movement, also known as “NRx” or “Dark Enlightenment,” is a geeky subset of the racist, misogynistic far-right that has festered in Silicon Valley’s libertarian circles for over a decade, especially within the cryptocurrency community. Its members revere Thiel, microdose LSD and gussy up totalitarian ideas with a pseudo-intellectualism that creates a moral pretext for them to undermine ? “engineer,” they might say ? democracy. With tech skills and access to vast wealth, they have an influence that has eluded the bookish young men in Spencer’s orbit. Ton-That had been affiliated with this neoreactionary confederacy since before the 2016 RNC.
The movement’s high priest, Curtis Yarvin, is a programmer who goes by “Mencius Moldbug” and has a cryptocurrency startup funded by Thiel. Yarvin, who seemingly endorses slavery and has written approvingly of apartheid, has argued the U.S. would be better off if ruled by a CEO-king. To make this happen, he advocates for a soft coup. Among neoreactionaries, Trump is often referred to as the “God-Emperor” who will restore order to an immigrant-flooded nation under the thumb of a progressive media-academic complex ? “global Jewry,” in neo-Nazi-speak.
Giesea, whose ties to Thiel go back decades, organized the dinner in Cleveland. As a student, he edited Thiel’s libertarian newspaper, The Stanford Review. He later worked for Thiel’s first hedge fund, and then for Koch Industries’ public affairs office. Thiel put up seed money when Giesea started his own company.
Ahead of the 2016 election, Giesea worked closely with Cernovich to help organize a social media insurgency that could direct the far-right’s energy toward a singular purpose: getting Trump elected. Their network amplified extremists, besmirched opponents and disseminated Kremlin-boosted disinformation.
Jeff Giesea talks politics in a Periscope video.]
In a “How to Fund the Alt-Right” guide posted online in 2016 under an alias Giesea used, donors were encouraged to give money to white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations. (“Not me at all,” Giesea said. “I don’t know who did that.”) The guide stressed the importance of anonymity and recommended donors use Bitcoin and PayPal, the online money transfer company founded by Thiel.
Spencer said Giesea donated $5,000 ? the maximum amount that didn’t require donor disclosure to the IRS ? to his white nationalist organization, the National Policy Institute, in 2016. (“No comment,” Giesea said.) Spencer told HuffPost that he later came to feel as if Giesea was trying to use the energy of the alt-right for political subversion and profit.
Auernheimer, the neo-Nazi hacker, described Giesea in a private Discord chat as a “major investor providing help to racists … a hugely connected dude … with lots of business interests who was supporting [T]rump stuff.” (“That’s not true,” Giesea said.)
At Giesea’s dinner in Cleveland, conversation turned, inevitably, to building the ethnostate, according to Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor who attended the event and has since renounced far-right extremism. A group of Hispanic waiters in earshot looked on warily. Someone at the table apologized to them. The waiters laughed nervously. Then the extremists, Ton-That among them, set out into the night to put their plans into motion.
Chuck Johnson’s Online Hatefest
If you were a hip far-right elitist in 2016, the online place to be was a Slack channel Johnson set up for WeSearchr, a now-shuttered crowdfunding platform he had launched. In private messages between Johnson and McHugh from 2015, Johnson described a meeting with Thiel that year to pitch his crowdfunding idea.
“Thiel gave me all the money I need,” Johnson said. “[W]rote me a check on the spot.”
Thiel declined to comment.
WeSearchr raised bounties for alt-right causes and would soon earn the designation of “white nationalist hate group” from the SPLC.
Johnson had a well-deserved reputation as a troll, but he was also a central node in a web of extremists. And he had many enemies ? the social media companies that took away his platforms, the news outlets that exposed him, the liberal society that he was convinced had allowed minorities to get into Harvard at his expense.
“When I met Chuck, I wondered why we weren’t weaponizing people like him,” Giesea told BuzzFeed.
Giesea belonged to Johnson’s WeSearchr Slack. So did Cernovich. And so did Ton-That.
Altogether, there were about 400 people in the channel, according to McHugh, who was a member and provided HuffPost with several dozen messages from the channel. The group was a who’s who of racist political saboteurs and moneyed terraformers of society, with a sprinkling of alt-right celebrities like George Zimmerman, who joined the channel in June 2016 and was auctioning off the weapon he used to kill Trayvon Martin. Johnson, who had deemed Zimmerman a “great man,” published a GotNews post to drive up the price of “the mighty gun that slain the dindu.”
Far-right politics brought George Zimmerman and Chuck Johnson together, as illustrated by this social media post of the two discovered by Little Green Footballs, a blog that has been tracking Johnson for years.]
Ton-That shared his far-right views in the WeSearchr Slack, as well as online more broadly. He has since deleted his social media accounts, but archives of his Twitter exchanges from 2015 and 2016 show him spreading anti-liberal talking points and Islamophobia, as well as amplifying figures like Yiannopolous.
He was clearly reading/listening to pretty trashy conservative media, and/or pretty trashy conservative people.
Ben Wheeler, a coder in New York, about Clearview co-founder Cam-Hoan Ton-That
Ben Wheeler, a coder in New York who met Ton-That in 2015 through programmer pals, called out the Australian for tweeting far-right conspiracies in the run-up to the 2016 election.
“He had some very inaccurate takes on [Hillary] Clinton, he was clearly reading and talking to people in the Breitbart vein,” Wheeler wrote in a message to HuffPost. “[A]s an example of her corruption, he pointed to the ways he said the Clintons used Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to embezzle money. I looked that up and it was one of those almost certainly false claims from one untrustworthy source. He was clearly reading/listening to pretty trashy conservative media, and/or pretty trashy conservative people.”
One of these people was likely Andrew Auernheimer, the webmaster for The Daily Stormer, the most popular neo-Nazi website. Another member of the WeSearchr Slack channel and a close collaborator with Johnson, Auernheimer devoted ample time to boosting both Johnson’s crowdfunding platform and his extremist friends.
Aurenheimer told HuffPost that he had “never heard of” Ton-That.But in 2015, he appeared to interact publicly with him on Twitter to bemoan the number of liberals in academia, a conversation HuffPost was able to piece together by looking at replies to the two alt-right members that remain online.
Auernheimer spoke often of his desire to slaughter Jewish children, start a race war and destroy the United States. He landed in federal prison in 2013 on identity fraud and hacking charges. After his conviction was vacated on a jurisdictional technicality, he reentered society with a giant swastika on his chest. He declared himself a neo-Nazi on The Daily Stormer and called for government agents and their families to be assassinated. He left the country and vowed revenge on America. “I plan on coming back with an army, be it human or automaton,” he wrote. He now claims to be based in Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova aligned with Moscow and beyond the reach of U.S. extradition treaties.
Andrew “weev” Auernheimer publicly declared himself a neo-Nazi in 2014 in a post on The Daily Stormer, which included this picture.]
Like Ton-That, Auernheimer also had an interest in biometrics. Around the time of the 2016 RNC, he told a friend that he was “working on facial recognition, specifically about black people.” When contacted by HuffPost, Auernheimer clarified that he’d been “building a racial, not facial, recognition project [that] took characteristics from the entire body, not just the face.” At the time, the system had been too costly to mount on drones, he said, but he planned to revisit the idea soon. Auernhemier could not provide any proof to support his statements. Ton-That told HuffPost that Clearview had nothing to do with the neo-Nazi.
“I never met him and he did no work for the company,” Ton-That said.
But Auernheimer had worked closely with Johnson for years, and he, too, claimed a connection to Thiel. A month after being released from prison in 2014, Auernhemier told a hacker friend in direct messages that he was “meeting with Peter Thiel’s right hand.” (Auernheimer denied making this claim, but HuffPost authenticated the messages with their recipient. Thiel didn’t respond to questions for this story.)
That same year, Auernheimer teamed up with Johnson to mine the leaked database of the Ashley Madison infidelity website for kompromat. They partnered again in 2015 to publish covertly recorded smear videos of Planned Parenthood officials. (Auernheimer told HuffPost he and Johnson “have nothing to do with each other” and are “radically opposed politically and socially.” HuffPost obtained numerous friendly emails they had exchanged.)
Johnson frequently collaborated with Giesea as well. In one especially inglorious caper, they arranged for Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers and Barack Obama’s Trump-supporting half-brother Malik to appear at the 2016 general election debates. “Malik Obama, getting him to endorse Trump, they brought him to Giesea’s apartment and just gave him cash,” Spencer said. “At least, that’s what Giesea told me.” (“I don’t recall any of that,” Giesea told HuffPost.)
When HuffPost reached Malik Obama in Kenya to ask if he’d taken money from Johnson and his associates to promote Trump, Obama responded by saying, “Donald Trump is the best president America ever had and Charles Johnson is my friend.”
But Johnson always had bigger plans than Malik Obama. He’d filled his black book with the names of far more important people whose coattails he could ride: Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas; xenophobic commentator Ann Coulter; Blackwater founder Erik Prince; high-profile attorney Alan Dershowitz — and Ton-That, whose technical ability offered Johnson a different pathway to power. They were the same age, with the same focus, fighting the same internet culture war.
In one WeSearchr Slack exchange, Johnson linked to an article about the aggressive stock trading habits of Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), calling her “one of the best day traders ever.”
“Of course,” Ton-That replied, “it’s a chink.”
They also agreed on target selection.The WeSearchr Slack members reserved a good portion of their animus for Gawker, a publication that had aggressively covered Thiel and his business interests. Thiel had furtively bankrolled numerous lawsuits against the blog ? the most notable being an invasion of privacy case filed by former professional wrestler Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea after Gawker published a portion of sex tape he was in.
The alt-right backed Thiel to the hilt. WeSearchr co-founder Pax Dickinson urged members of Johnson’s Slack channel to compile a list of Gawker employees and feed it to neo-Nazi trolls on far-right websites such as 4chan. “Let them do the contacting,” Dickinson wrote of the trolls, seemingly aware that his plan could lead to harassment.
Johnson had his own vendetta against Gawker, which had covered him critically and in one instance mocked him over a rumor that he defecated on a floor in college. Johnson had sued Gawker for defamation and later reached a confidential settlement with the blog. “In a just world, I’d have them killed,” Johnson said of Gawker and its CEO, Nick Denton. “But we are not there yet.”
Johnson, however, was in a position to crowdfund a WeSearchr bounty to sniff out plagiarism at Gawker, an ultimately fruitless quest. Ton-That, whom Gawker had also covered critically after his phishing scams seven years earlier, jumped at the chance.
“[W]ho else is working on gawker plagiarism & wants to collaborate?” he messaged the channel at the beginning of June 2016. “[I]’m scraping all their articles right now.”
On June 10, 2016, Gawker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and put up its assets for sale. A few days later, Cernovich posted a photo of Ton-That and Johnson having a meal, both of them flashing the “OK” sign that has become a popular hand gesture for white nationalists in the Trump era.
Chuck Johnson and Hoan Ton-That flash the “OK” sign over a meal in 2016.]
When BuzzFeed confronted Ton-That about the photo, he claimed he was “only making the Okay sign in the photo as in ‘all okay.’” That August, Ton-That messaged the WeSearchr channel with an idea to crash a “funeral” party Gawker employees were throwing to mourn the demolition of their publication. “Wish I had a hulkomania shirt,” he wrote.
It was during this period of his life, ensconced among extremists online and off, that Ton-That began building the company that would become Clearview.
In 2016, the Australian hacker brought on two unnamed engineers to help him on the project, according to The New York Times. Ton-That refused to give HuffPost their names. One helped design a program to scrape images of faces from a range of sites and social media platforms, often in violation of their policies. The other created a facial recognition algorithm.
The Birth Of ‘Smartcheckr’
On election night, Ton-That partied with Johnson and Dickinson in New York amid a sea of red MAGA caps. Two days later, Johnson posted a news story from The Sun to his Facebook. It included a photo of Dickinson and Ton-That celebrating bawdily. “My business partners are in the Sun and I feel left out,” Johnson wrote.
Far-right extremist Pax Dickinson celebrates Donald Trump’s election in 2016 with Hoan Ton-That in New York City.]
Johnson was very likely referring to a business that was registered in New York a few months later and followed the same naming convention as WeSearchr: Smartcheckr. The company would eventually rebrand as Clearview, as Ton-That later told the Times.
In January 2017, Johnson indicated on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.” Soon, he was boasting to friends and acquaintances that he was working on a powerful facial recognition tool.
Chuck Johnson dropped hints on Facebook in January 2017 that he was working on a facial recognition project.
A person who used to be close to Johnson and requested anonymity out of concern for their safety told HuffPost that they saw him “with a whole bunch of really important people” at Trump Hotel in spring 2017, “and he was going on and on about this facial recognition software he had hired people to build.” Johnson, they added, was with one of these hires ? “some coding wizard” with long hair in a ponytail. “He kept introducing him as a prodigy who was building the software,” the source recalled. When HuffPost showed the source photos of Ton-That, they confirmed he was the man with Johnson. “If it’s not him, that’s his twin.”
Not long after the election, McHughgot a call from Johnson. “He told me they had a way to identify every illegal alien in the country,” she said. “He brought up facial recognition technology and demanded I call Stephen Miller because he knew Stephen Miller was a true believer.”
It’s unclear if Johnson ever spoke to Miller, the architect of Trump’s brutal immigration policy. But around the same time, Johnson was working behind the scenes with Giesea and Thiel ? a member of the transition executive committee ? to recommend alt-right candidates for science and technology appointments with the incoming administration, according to Forbes. A person close to Trump’s transition confirmed to Politico that Johnson participated in transition-related meetings.
By this point, Johnson had a well-documented track record of bigotry and dirty tricks. In 2015, he’d been permanently ? and noticeably ? suspended from Twitter after requesting funds to “take out” a Black civil rights activist. In 2016, he’d gone on an alt-right podcast called “Fash the Nation” to talk at length about the evolutionary traits of “Jews” and “Blacks.” (“They’re dumber,” Johnson said of African Americans.)
In January 2017, Johnson hosted a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session during which he was asked for his thoughts on “the Holocaust, WW2, and the JQ in general.” (The “JQ,” or “Jewish Question,” is a term anti-Semites, including Hitler, have used for over a century as shorthand for their conspiracy theory that Jews have too much control over society.) “I do not and never have believed the six million figure,” Johnson wrote. “I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic but I confess to having complicated views on the subject. I think the Allied bombings of Germany were a war crime. I agree with [Holocaust revisionist] David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real. Why were their [sic] swimming pools there if it was a death camp?”
Two weeks after Johnson’s Holocaust denial on Reddit, SMARTCHECKR, LLC was registered in New York. The address associated with it belonged to Richard Schwartz, who had been a top aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York City. Schwartz would later admit to being one of the founders of Smartcheckr.
Thiel was one of the company’s earliest investors. “In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” Thiel’s spokesman, Jeremiah Hall, said in a statement. Hall didn’t specify which founder he meant and did not respond to questions for this story.
Emails and messages obtained by HuffPost show that Ton-That and Johnson were in touch about Smartcheckr in 2017. In one email thread, Johnson and his associates at GotNews discussed a dogwhistle post they were putting together about a racially motivated mass shooting in Fresno, California, that had been committed by a Black man who was Muslim. Tyler Bass, a GotNews writer, wondered if there was an easy way to scrape “an entire Facebook page quickly ... the next time another American goes apeshit and before Facebook pulls it down out of shame.” He added Ton-That to the conversation, who replied quickly. “I’m working on this for smartcheckr,” the hacker wrote. “Plan to make these tools available for our guys.”
A Series Of Troubling Hires
Bass was one of Ton-That’s guys. He had become interested in hacker culture as a young man, and he was arrested on a computer harassment charge in Virginia in 2013 that either the alleged victim or the prosecutor declined to pursue.
Bass later morphed into a committed racist. By 2017, he was asking around about a writing job with American Renaissance, a heavyweight white nationalist organization. He already belonged to a white nationalist crew called the “DC Helicopter Pilots,” according to McHugh, who dated him in 2017. The group was a Washington-area chapter of The Right Stuff, an influential pro-Trump organization that attracts neo-Nazis. Members of the DC Helicopter Pilots ? likely a reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing dissidents by throwing them out of helicopters ? met regularly, at least once to eat swastika-shaped cookies. One chapter leader was a State Department official assigned to the Bureau of Energy Resources who advocated for a nuclear-armed white ethnostate.
A few weeks after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 ? which Bass told McHugh that he attended with his 8-year-old son ? he found a job as an “investigator” doing “remote software testing” at Smartcheckr.
HuffPost obtained five of Bass’s résumés spanning from May 2017 to the present. He claimed to have assembled “devastating opposition dossiers on open-borders figures and activists” while working for Johnson and said he created “counternarratives for third-party reporters to mold mass perception.” His résumés also say he helped Johnson vet candidates for the Trump administration transition team. The administration declined to comment.
Another early Smartcheckr hire was Douglass Mackey, an otherwise unremarkable Middlebury graduate who’d washed out of a job in finance and became an alt-right superstar in 2016 under the alias “Ricky Vaughn.” The advocate of “global white supremacy” was so effective at disseminating pro-Trump, anti-Semitic propaganda and Kremlin-originated disinformation that MIT Media Lab named his Twitter account on a list of top influencers on the election, ahead of NBC News and the Drudge Report.
A photo posted by neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell identifying Douglass Mackey, left.]
In 2017, Mackey and an unidentified partner pitched Smartcheckr to the racist Republican candidate Paul Nehlen, who was vying for the Wisconsin seat of retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan. Nehlen, another member of Johnson’s WeSearchr Slack channel, was quickly radicalizing from outlandish bigotry to white nationalist extremism. He’d soon appear on David Duke’s radio show to talk about machine-gunning migrant children.
In a proposal Mackey sent Nehlen, Smartcheckr promised to micro-target potential voters and donors for $2,500 per month. The company would do oppo research by tapping “unconventional databases.” Ton-That’s “proprietary search and facial recognition technology” would allow for analysis of voters’ social media and their views on various issues.
Nehlen said on a podcast that he gave Mackey access to his Facebook through Business Manager, a tool for managing pages and accounts, for three months. “He didn’t post anything,” he said. “He didn’t do anything. He was suggesting that he was going to be able to grow my audience or whatever. He did nothing.”
Ton-That told BuzzFeed that Mackey only worked “for 3 weeks as a consultant to Smartcheckr, which was the initial name of Clearview.” He denied any knowledge of Mackey’s Ricky Vaughn persona — even though Mackey was also a member of the WeSearchr Slack channel, where he used the handle “Richard Vaughn” and the same avatar that he did on Twitter. Ton-That claimed Mackey had been referred to him by a “liberal Democrat.” But Johnson posted a video in October 2016 in which he called Mackey a “friend of mine, a guy that I’ve talked to on the phone, a good guy.” Mackey did not respond to emails from HuffPost.
Ton-That also claimed Mackey sent an “unauthorized proposal” to Nehlen and that “the technology described in the proposal did not even exist.” And yet Johnson had been bragging about the technology for the better part of a year. Bass was already troubleshooting Smartcheckr’s “flagship product,” according to his résumé.
In early 2018, still angry about getting ripped off, Nehlen disclosed that Mackey was Ricky Vaughn — something that was previously known only to high-ranking members of the alt-right. One of them, Christopher Cantwell, posted the Smartcheckr proposal Mackey sent Nehlen on his website. Twitter and other platforms lit up with white nationalist chatter.
“[O]ne of my closest pals just got his life ruined,” Auernheimer said of Mackey in The Daily Stormer forum.
Andrew Auernheimer was upset after Mackey’s identity was revealed.
Smartcheckr employees and associates scrambled to hide their connections to the company and each other after the incident. Schwartz, the former Giuliani aide, sanitized his LinkedIn profile. Smartcheckr used a reputation management service to suppress information about itself and Schwartz by clouding Google search results with fake webpages, according to a source close to the company.
Richard Schwartz listed himself as a Smartcheckr co-founder on LinkedIn until it was revealed that Mackey was a white suprema
Richard Schwartz listed himself as a Smartcheckr co-founder on LinkedIn until it was revealed that Mackey was a white supremacist.
Schwartz did not respond to questions from HuffPost.
Eventually, the commotion subsided. Ton-That and Smartcheckr tightened up operational security. They’d incorporated Clearview AI in Delaware through a third-party registered agent the previous year and would shift to that name for the facial recognition business.
“Thank ... goodness the panicked speculation about Smartcheckr is dying down,” Bass emailed McHugh. “Still, it’s not going to be great. If you have any thoughts on how to tailor things going forward in light of Mackeygate, as you offered, please let me know.”
Clearview Hits The Bigtime
In January 2018, Ton-That surfaced at the “Night for Freedom” party Cernovich organized in New York. Up on stage, Gavin Mcinnes, the Canadian founder of the neo-fascist Proud Boys gang, joked about “faggots” and the genitalia of transgender women. Pizzagate-peddler and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec turned up. So did Canadian cult leader Stefan Molyneux and James O’Keefe, who in 2009 made a Thiel-financed video that mocked people of color.
McHugh was standing in a cluster of people when Ton-That materialized out of the crowd. It had been almost two years since she’d seen him at the far-right dinner in Cleveland. They chatted briefly. “Hoan told me things were going well for him,” McHugh said. “Especially with his company.”
The hacker melted back into the party. McHugh never saw him again.
Things certainly were going well. By the time of Cernovich’s event, Clearview had found more investors, including Ton-That’s former boss at AngelList, Naval Ravikant, and Kirenaga Partners, a small venture capital firm in New York. The firm’s founder, David Scalzo, told the Times that “there’s never going to be privacy” and shrugged about the possibility that technology “might lead to a dystopian future or something.”
Another early investor was Hal Lambert, a Texas money manager and major GOP fundraiser who is close with Ted Cruz and claimed to be on Trump’s inaugural committee. Lambert had also invested early in Anduril, a Thiel-backed defense contractor that is building autonomous surveillance systems to police the southern border. Lambert has railed against the political left and the news media, most recently appearing on Fox Business Network to downplay the danger of coronavirus and accuse journalists of stoking fear.
When reached by phone, Lambert expressed surprise to hear about anti-democratic extremists associated with Clearview. But he admitted to knowing Johnson. He also said he’d known Ton-That prior to Clearview because the coder “worked on some data stuff” for the investor. Lambert declined to provide further details, citing “proprietary” work.
Throughout 2018 and into the following year, Ton-That worked with Schwartz to sign up law enforcement agencies for Clearview. The company claimed to have “mountains” of data in its “proprietary image database.” The Clearview team started aggregating every mugshot taken in the U.S. over the last 15 years, according to emails obtained by OneZero. Schwartz peddled the tech at law enforcement conferences. Ton-That set up bogus LinkedIn profiles to run ads that hyped the technology, according to BuzzFeed.
To help drum up more business, Clearview recruited Jessica Medeiros Garrison, a former executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association and a Daily Caller contributor. The company also retained Paul Clement, the former U.S. solicitor general and perennial right-wing consideration for the Supreme Court, as its attorney.
Clearview brought on high-powered attorney Paul Clement to represent the company.
Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies were signing up for Clearview: the Indiana State Police, the New York State Police, the Chicago Police Department, the Atlanta Police Department, police departments in New Jersey and Florida, and the Department of Homeland Security. So did the Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety, a contract that has not been previously reported. Clement sent a letter to the Atlanta Police Department last summer stating that “over 200 law enforcement agencies around the nation” were using Clearview. That number would triple within months, according to The New York Times.
Clement provided a legal cover for police to sidestep civil rights concerns, writing that Clearview didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment because the mere act of posting anything to social media removed any expectation of privacy.
Clement also anticipated the argument that facial recognition has baked-in racial bias problems. A majority of algorithms tested in 2019 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology falsely identify female and darker-skinned faces at much higher rates than white male faces. Clearview was simply more accurate than existing technology, Clement wrote. (The company appears to have shunned an independent audit of its technology and did not participate in the NIST test.) Moreover, he added, Clearview used “non-race-based algorithms” to minimize bias. Clement offered no evidence in his letter to support either claim.
On his April 2018 résumé, Bass wrote that he was identifying “prostitution and gang connections of subjects on 24-hour deadlines.” Clearview promotional materials state the company “began solving crimes using newly developed facial-recognition technology” in 2018, meaning that Ton-That and his employees may have had the ability to snoop on police searches and criminal investigations and harvest images of suspects for their database for almost two years.
The company also found a big client in Rudin Management Company, a multibillion-dollar real estate firm for which Bass did “background screenings of tenants and hires.” He started hiding his employer on his résumé. He worked, he said, for “Confidential.”
On his résumés, Bass took increasing steps to conceal his connection to Ton-That’s company.
On his current résumé, Bass highlights that he used his “familiarity with the Spanish language” at Rudin Management, an indication that Clearview and the real estate firm may have had a white nationalist vetting Spanish-speaking people for jobs and housing. Bass now claims to work directly for Rudin Management, which Rudin Management says is untrue.
“The individual in question was never employed by Rudin Management,” a spokesperson said. But Rudin did use Ton-That’s company to screen people, according to the spokesperson: “We utilized Smartcheckr’s services for a period of time to conduct routine background checks based on publicly available information.”
Rudin Management refused to provide further details, but the firm previously told BuzzFeed that it also used a surveillance camera system developed by Clearview that works with the facial recognition technology.
Bass declined to speak with HuffPost.
A Radical Liaison To Law Enforcement
As Clearview continued to sign up police departments, the far-right extremists at the company interacted more with law enforcement. In an email from December 2019 obtained by BuzzFeed, Clearview employee Marko Jukic pitched a free trial of the technology to a nationwide police listserv: “We invite you to test the limits for yourself.”
Jukic had for years used an alias derived from his surname to spread racism and anti-democratic ideas, praise Vladimir Putin and even write approvingly about a potential collapse of the United States government. Born in Croatia, Jukic identified as an extremist Catholic traditionalist and had spent most of his childhood bouncing around the world with his Croatian mother and American father, a political officer with the U.S. State Department.
He dropped out of Northwestern University in 2016. Soon enough, he went to work for Johnson and became an active member of the WeSearchr Slack channel. He coordinated with Ton-That on the Gawker-scraping project and tweeted about radical organizing with the former director of the Thiel-funded Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
Marko Jukic and Chuck Johnson in Cleveland during the 2016 Republican National Convention.]
In his early adulthood, Jukic, who just turned 24, published many thousands of extremist words on neoreactionary blogs. He declared that “diversity, equality, tolerance and the rest of the lot of contemporary progressive values are indisputably corrosive to civilization as they are today practiced.” He expressed homophobic, misogynistic and racist views. “[I]f you spend a few hours letting your disenchanted friends and family know that it’s OK to use the word ‘nigger’ [and] point out that democracy is a miserable failure,” he wrote, “you will have accomplished far more concrete good in the world than you would have by spending a few hours doing almost anything else.”
He was opposed to multiculturalism and wrote that Jews did not belong among people of European heritage. “The answer to the Jewish question,” he wrote, “is quite simple: segregation and separation. ... [U]nlike progressives, neoreactionaries do not believe one can abolish the laws of nature and turn diversity into a strength, least of all using the State. Diversity engenders animosity and eventually violence, and is thus a weakness.” Genocide wasn’t a solution, Jukic wrote, “unless you have the biggest bully around on your side.” By that, he meant the power of the state.
“In context that is a quote urging far right extremists to avoid Jewish people and to disavow anti-Semitic violence,” Jukic said.
Jukic was prone to flights of wild-eyed neoreactionary fancy, imagining a future where a king ruled America and would tackle “welfare spending” by sending the military and heavily armed militias to “pacify” the “ghettos” with lethal force. Journalists who set foot in occupied zones would be assassinated. “[V]iolence most definitely is the answer,” he wrote. He supported the “generous use” of racial profiling to curb immigration, as well as a wall along the Mexico border equipped with high-tech cameras and drones.
In much of his writing, he looked to the ethnonationalism of Putin’s Russia for inspiration and speculated about a Russian empire that encompassed Hawaii and extended to San Francisco.
In his vision of a new geopolitical order, the first step, Jukic wrote, was to dismantle and balkanize what he described as the “uniquely evil” United States. To neoreactionaries, that meant replacing democracy with some form of authoritarianism. Two years later, however, he’d decided that balkanization or civil war in America was impossible because “America’s diversity problem is not regional, but national and ubiquitous.”
“This is not unwarranted pessimism but the sober reality that has to be accepted before any real goals can be achieved,” he wrote about a month later. “Just because the United States cannot Balkanize does not mean it cannot collapse into chaos, however.”
Jukic emailed HuffPost a statement in which he claimed his posts were “exercises in theatrical hyperbole and comedic satire.” He was, he said, a young man trying to shock his reader. His talk of balkanization was little more than an off-the-books 4chan-fueled college bull session. He said he no longer believed that “America’s severe societal problems” would lead to governmental collapse, although he still felt the political process remained “fundamentally broken.” And he’d “always disavowed” political violence, he said.
“I wrote a number of purposely inflammatory things as a teenager and young adult to test boundaries,” Jukic said in his statement. “I never meant any harm, but I admit my insouciance and prodigious imagination would not always give that impression. It’s something that I put firmly in the past many years ago already of my own accord, long before being contacted for this article, and I intend to keep it that way. Those quotes do not represent my thinking or views in the present day.”
But many of Jukic’s posts appeared about two years before he says he started working at Clearview. Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal syndicated some of his writing. Other far-right extremists took Jukic seriously and engaged him in long conversations about radical politics.
As far-fetched as Jukic’s vision seemed, he’d thought deeply about his tactics and eschewed the open activism the alt-right had embraced, most notably in Charlottesville. Instead, he endorsed the neoreactionary concept of “passivism”: lie low, create hidden networks, quietly build the “machinery” to subvert the system. “Victory will not be won at the ballot box,” Jukic wrote in 2016. “Donald Trump will need to build his own regime, his own state, and make it so good that the existing regime defects to it in fear and awe of his power. He’ll need his own NYT, his own State Department, his own CIA, his own Harvard.”
Three years later, Jukic was pitching Clearview to law enforcement.
Subverting Democracy
After the Times published its investigation into Clearview in January, New Jersey’s attorney general ordered all police in the state to stop using its tool. Two Democratic senators introduced legislation to put a moratorium on facial recognition use by government officials and contractors until Congress could regulate the technology. Other lawmakers questioned Clearview about the company having licensed its technology to organizations in authoritarian countries such as Saudi Arabia, Singapore and United Arab Emirates.
Social media companies fired off cease-and-desist letters demanding that Clearview stop scraping photos and data. The company was hit with multiple lawsuits by people who alleged that Clearview illegally collected their biometric information, including a class-action suit in New York federal court. Another class-action in Virginia federal court alleged that Clearview had violated the Virginia Computer Crimes Act, the same law Bass was arrested for allegedly violating in 2013 and for which he was never prosecuted. Vermont’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against Clearview last month, alleging that the company had broken state laws by collecting images of Vermonters, including children, without their consent.
Clearview raced to do damage control. A “user code of conduct” materialized on the firm’s website, along with a promise that the technology would have no consumer applications and be available only to law enforcement and “select security professionals.” But that wasn’t true ? Clearview was aggressively courting companies and private clients such as Macy’s, Bank of America and Walmart, according to a list leaked to BuzzFeed.
Clearview also allowed investors and Trump-affiliated elites to play around with its app and unregulated database.The company set up an account for the company of former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller. His company has run almost 20 searches, according to BuzzFeed. John Catsimatidis, the billionaire Trump donor and owner of Gristedes Foods, the largest grocery store chain in Manhattan, tested the facial recognition technology at one of his supermarkets in an effort to catch shoplifters, according to The New York Times. But Catsimatidis, who is friends with Schwartz, also used the app to snoop on a man he spotted on a dinner date with his daughter.
And Johnson appears to still be involved with the company. On a flight to Boston in January, the far-right extremist befriended a passenger and showed off a facial recognition app that could only have been Clearview, according to BuzzFeed.
Ton-That bobbed and weaved through television interviews, letting more details slip while asserting a First Amendment right to access anything posted on social media. A number of banks were using Clearview, he told CNN, but he declined to name them. He admitted to meeting with legislators but didn’t say what they’d discussed. He declined to name them, too. Most of all, he downplayed the dangers of his technology.
“This is not a 24/7 surveillance system,” he said.
Another Clearview attorney, Tor Ekeland, emerged to field media requests. Ekeland was also Auernheimer’s lawyer and had made his name by getting the neo-Nazi out of federal prison. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Another round of damage control ensued after HuffPost reached out to Jukic with questions last week. Ton-That said through a spokesperson on March 27 that Clearview had severed ties with both Bass and Jukic.
“I was shocked by and completely unaware of Marko Jukic’s online writings under a different name,” Ton-That said. “As soon as those writings were brought to my attention, we took steps to separate him from the company.”
But Ton-That almost certainly knew Jukic’s neoreactionary pen name. In Slack channel messages and emails between the two that date back to 2016, Jukic used the same alias as he did on Social Matter, a prominent, now-defunct neoreactionary blog run by a former Daily Caller writer who later took a job at a Thiel-funded think tank.
In a statement to HuffPost, Ton-That professed his love for America ? in large part, he said, because of his adopted country’s diversity. He said he found white supremacist and anti-Semitic views “abhorrent.” He shared an insight into his background that could apply to many intelligent, wayward young men who stumble into hateful online echo chambers.
“I grew up in Australia, but truthfully, I grew up on the Internet,” Ton-That said. “I grew up without television or movies as cultural touchstones. I learned about the world, its inhabitants and ideas online. It’s where I learned my craft to program and code, and how to navigate the vast variety of information, thoughts and views. It had not always been a straight path, and it had not always served me well. There was a period when I explored a range of ideas—not out of belief in any of them, but out of a desire to search for self and place in the world. I have finally found it, and the mission to help make America a safer place. To those who have read my words in the Huffington Post article, I deeply apologize for them.”
When HuffPost contacted Johnson in late March, he pretended to be an undercover U.S. intelligence operative who’d been recruited out of high school. “Would prefer being kept out of whatever you are doing,” he said. “Nearly got me killed by a foreign government last time.” Johnson said his government contract prohibited him from talking to the press. He then spoke at length with HuffPost, and said if this article ran, “you’ll wind up hurting our country as China, Russia, Israel, and Britain all roll out facial recognition products which curtail our liberties.”
The next day, a man using the pseudonym “John Smith” called from a VoIP line with a West Palm Beach number after HuffPost insisted that Johnson have a credible person verify his claims. “Smith” refused to say where he worked but offered vague reassurances that the government had vetted “the DNA” of the Clearview team and found no “red flags.” That team, according to Smith, included Johnson, whom Smith described as “not a significant equity holder” in Clearview. When asked again if Johnson had a stake in Clearview, Smith said, “I believe so. I don’t know for sure.”
Johnson later texted HuffPost. “I’ve done my part,” he wrote. “Marko and Hoan do good work on behalf of our country.” Johnson refused to answer any questions about his involvement in the company or his relationship with Ton-That, who did the same when first contacted by HuffPost but eventually distanced himself from Johnson.
“Charles Johnson is not an executive, employee, consultant, and doesn’t have a board seat at Clearview Ai,” Ton-That told HuffPost a week after his first statement. He refused to disclose whether Johnson had an equity stake in the company.
But the money behind Clearview and the company’s opaque origins are bound to raise more eyebrows, especially during a health crisis in which a hard-right Trump administration could expand domestic surveillance in ways that would be hard to unwind. Clearview’s secretive founders have already shown a callous disregard for the privacy of American citizens. Even more concerning are their connections to a dark strain of political extremism now coursing through Silicon Valley and Washington.
In April 2016, Johnson announced himself as an extremist in a GotNews video. “What is the alt-right?” he said. “I guess I’m sort of on the ground floor here given that I’m friends with Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug.”
To read Yarvin is, in the neoreactionary godfather’s own words, to find “instructions” for a quiet “fascist coup” in America, one that might take 25 years, maybe 50. What Yarvin calls a “reboot” of America would dissolve the government and “terminate democracy.” All in the name of a stable new world order.
If you squint, you can almost see it underway, as techno-authoritarians who openly deride modern America as an obsolete operating system build-out, through their own companies and the complicity of law enforcement, an all-seeing eye unbound by the statutes that constrain the government’s use of personal data. Does the Trump adviser behind many of these efforts — the German-born American billionaire with a third citizenship quietly purchased from New Zealand ? really have the best interests of every American in mind?
More than a decade ago, Thiel committed a statement to print that should adjoin his every mention in the press.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” the Clearview investor wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute.
He meant it.
==
nOVEMBER 4, 2019 11:30PM (UTC)
Former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos published a leaked audio recording that he claims shows white nationalist leader Richard Spencer shouting racist slurs and threats after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
Yiannopoulos, who reportedly worked with white supremacists to mainstream their rhetoric through Breitbart News before he lost his job there, published the audio in a blog post. The audio, which Yiannopoulos claimed was confirmed by a source close to Spencer, appears to capture the prominent white nationalist unleashing a flurry of slurs aimed at Jews and African Americans after the murder of Heather Heyer at the 2017 rally. The audio has not been verified by Salon.
Yiannopoulos wrote that the audio was recorded at an “emergency meeting” following Heyer’s death. Heyer was killed by white nationalist James Fields, who drove his car into a crowd of protesters. After the rally, President Trump was accused of emboldening white nationalists when he claimed there were “very fine people on both sides” of the rally.
“My ancestors f**king enslaved those little pieces of f**king sh*t,” the man identified as Spencer shouts in the audio recording. “They don’t do this to f**king me. We’re going to f**king ritualistically humiliate them.”
“Little f**king kikes,” the audio continues. “They get ruled by people like me. Little f**king octaroons.”
The audio includes a threat to return to Charlottesville repeatedly.
“We are coming back here like a f**king hundred times,” the voice in the recording says. “I am so mad. I am so f**king mad at these people. I am coming back here every f**king weekend if I have to. Like this is never over. I win. They f**king lose. That’s how the world f**king works. I rule the f**king world. Those pieces of sh*t get ruled by people like me.”
“We are going to destroy this f**king town,” he added.
“It is not clear why Spencer was blaming Jews and black people for the death,” Yiannopoulos wrote.
Spencer, who has advocated for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” of nonwhite Americans, rose to prominence after a string of glowing profiles that touted him as a “dapper white nationalist” trying to “make racism cool again.” After the 2016 election, Spencer was recorded giving a speech in which he declared
as members of the audience gave the Nazi salute. He was later recorded being punched in the face at Trump’s inauguration, prompting endless debate over whether it was appropriate to “punch Nazis.” Spencer helped popularize the term “alt-right” to obfuscate the racist ideology behind the movement.
Yiannopoulos has his own ties to Nazism and was banned by Twitter for inciting online mobs. In a leaked message, he recently complained that he could no longer “put food on the table” without access to mainstream social media platforms.
Yiannopoulos told Newsweek that he shared the audio out of a mutual “hate” between the two men.
"I have always publicly hated Spencer, and he has always publicly hated me,” he said. “He thinks I'm a degenerate race-mixing kike and I think he's a knuckle-dragging racist in a cheap suit.”
The audio was first published by the far-right group “Daily Groyper.” The group suggested that the leak was in response to a recent rift among white nationalist groups.
The audio leak prompted a new round of criticism aimed at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who personally intervened to prevent the social network from banning Spencer’s account, according to The Wall Street Journal. A Twitter employee told Motherboard earlier this year that the social network has been reluctant to create an algorithm that would effectively police white supremacist content on the website “because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.”
IGOR DERYSH
Igor Derysh is a New York-based political writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.
MORE FROM IGOR DERYSH
---
---
Related Topics
Aggregation All Salon Alt-right Breitbart Charlottesville Donald Trump Far Right Heather Heyer Jack Dorsey Milo Yiannopoulos Neo-nazis News & Politics Politics Racism Richard Spencer Twitter White Nationalism White Supremacy
===
neo-Nazi Richard Spencer went into a racist rage after the death of Heather Heyer: Leaked audio
In January 2017, Richard Spencer gained fame as a result of a number of articles highlighting him as the new, “dapper” face of white nationalism.
Jen Hayden / Daily Kos November 4, 2019
In January 2017, Richard Spencer gained fame as a result of a number of articles highlighting him as the new, “dapper” face of white nationalism. Then, there was the infamous incident at a Trump inauguration protest in which he was punched in the face during a live television interview.
In August 2017, Richard Spencer was one of the leaders of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville where Heather Heyer was killed, and many others seriously injured, after one of Spencer’s buddies drove into a crowd of anti-Nazi protesters. Spencer was apparently furious about the negative coverage of their violent Nazi rally and now his fellow alt-right pal (or former pal) Milo Yiannopoulos has leaked audio on YouTube, which Yiannopoulos says is Spencer in a racist rage, recorded after the rally. For what it’s worth, YouTube is one of the only social media platforms that hasn’t banned Yiannopoulous. He was permanently banned from Twitter after a racist attack on comedian Leslie Jones..
This is definitely NSFW as it contains explicit and racist language.
BAILEY, THE LIBTARDTARIAN ??
@atheist_cvnt
Milo just uploaded leaked audio of Richard Spencer reacting to the death of Heather Heyer and the negative press it did to his movement.
Just in case there was any question of the so-called "dapper white nationalist" being a raged fuelled hateful monster.
Explicit warning.
Embedded video
When you hear that audio, recall Donald Trump, President of the United States, defending these people, calling them “very fine people.” Sickening.
---
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212658769
[link:https://www.salon.com/2019/11/04/leaked-audio-purportedly-captures-richard-spencers-racist-violent-threats-after-charlottesville/|
Leaked audio purportedly captures Richard Spencer's racist, violent threats after Charlottesville
“We are going to destroy this f**king town,” he is heard saying in the audio. "I rule the f**king world." [i win]
Former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos published a leaked audio recording that he claims shows white nationalist leader Richard Spencer shouting racist slurs and threats after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
“My ancestors f**king enslaved those little pieces of f**king sh*t,” the man identified as Spencer shouts in the audio recording. “They don’t do this to f**king me. We’re going to f**king ritualistically humiliate them.”
“Little f**king kikes,” the audio continues. “They get ruled by people like me. Little f**king octaroons.”
The audio includes a threat to return to Charlottesville repeatedly.
“We are coming back here like a f**king hundred times,” the voice in the recording says. “I am so mad. I am so f**king mad at these people. I am coming back here every f**king weekend if I have to. Like this is never over. I win. They f**king lose. That’s how the world f**king works. I rule the f**king world. Those pieces of sh*t get ruled by people like me.”
“We are going to destroy this f**king town,” he added.
===
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/russia-accusations-a-distraction-from-tulsi-gabbards-actual-troubling-ties
no lnx docs?
Russia accusations a distraction From Tulsi Gabbard’s actual troubling ties
Written by Ari Paul / FAIR October 26, 2019
When 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (Campaign HQ, 10/17/19) accused Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a long-shot Democratic primary candidate, of being a Russian-groomed foil, the media reverberations were sweeping. Coverage of the row prompted more coverage, with some takes defending Gabbard’s moral compass and others prolonging the obsession with the idea that Russia is interfering in American politics.
Lost in the noise is the reality that Gabbard’s most troubling attribute is her documented connection to the far-right Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva, movement known as Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent organization of India’s ruling BJP party.
There is no evidence that Gabbard, who rarely polls above 3%, is any kind of Russian agent, plucked by Moscow to sway the 2020 election toward the reelection of Donald Trump. But those silly accusations eventually mix into the media as they look to explain how an idiosyncratic candidate like Gabbard can gain the support not only of anti-war leftists who see her as a champion of nonintervention, but also of far-right white nationalists like David Duke and Richard Spencer.....
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/neo-nazi-troll-andrew-anglins-celebratory-mood-crushed-by-14-million-judgment-against-him/
david n kos
Over the weekend, Andrew Anglin was in a celebratory mood, thanks to Donald Trump’s racist tweets telling congresswomen of color to go back to their native countries.
Then, on Monday, the hammer fell on the notorious neo-Nazi troll and publisher of The Daily Stormer. A judge in **Montana**, ruling in a lawsuit brought by a Jewish woman from Whitefish and the Southern Poverty Law Center, determined that Anglin owed the woman $14 million in damages for the “troll storm” he unleashed on her in early 2017. Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch found Anglin had acted with “actual malice,” declaring his conduct was “egregious and reprehensible,” and recommended that real estate agent Tanya Gersh be awarded the maximum in punitive damages under Montana law ($10 million) and more than $4 million in compensatory damages. The findings now await final approval from a federal judge.
...
Anglin’s threats initially spurred Whitefish’s police chief to step up patrols, particularly for the people Anglin named in his posts.
For his part, Spencer attempted to tamp down the controversy—but only by heaping blame on his critics while rationalizing Anglin’s behavior and suggesting the whole thing was a “joke” and a “troll” prank.Appearing on white supremacist leader David Duke’s radio program, Spencer claimed he wanted to try to keep his part-time Montana home out of the limelight created by his white nationalist activism. “I don’t host conferences, I don’t hand out fliers here,” he said. “It’s just a place I go to get my work done. I like being out here. I don’t want my daughter growing up in Washington, D.C. – I don’t need to tell you why.”
The problem, he claimed, was caused by local Montana activists who had organized to oppose his efforts several years before, notably local anti-hate group Love Lives Here and the Helena-based Montana Human Rights Network. He claimed they had attempted to strong-arm his mother into denouncing him but had failed.
In a YouTube rant, Spencer called for the controversy to just go away: “I’m just saying this—let’s just end this. Let’s put it to bed. The controversy’s over. Don’t bring it up again. I won’t bring it up again. I’ve said all I need to say.” As for Anglin, Spencer explained, “He’s wild. We have different styles. But this is one thing I will say, and I will say this with confidence. Andrew Anglin is a rational person. Andrew Anglin has specifically stated that this is nonviolent and that no laws are broken. This is—this was a troll. So that’s what it is. People were pushing back.”
The larger Whitefish community’s response to the threats to Jewish community members spoke loudly. “It’s important to know that the businesses that were hit by this were strongly supported in the community,” said Will Randall of Love Lives Here. “Their businesses are booming now. They were hit at the beginning and were frightened, scared. And then the community came in and said, ‘Well, I’m going to buy your product. I’m going to buy your soap, or your services. We’ve got your back.’”
...
==
==
DAF donor advised fund
Theanonymity that donor-advised funds provide is problematic on another level too.It allows givers to obscure their identities. For example, according to The Daily Beast, Project Veritas, the right-wing organization whose mission is to reveal alleged left-wing media bias, received $381,505 from Donors Trust, the right-wing donor-advised fund notoriously supported by the Koch family, and $52,050 between 2011 and 2013 from the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund. The white nationalist Richard Spencer’s nonprofit, the National Policy Institute, also received donor-advised–fund money prior to the IRS’s revocation of its tax-exempt status. “There’s no direct line between a controversial donor and a controversial cause,” Cantor says.
==
...From their point of view … It reveals a culture where white men are acceptable targets of hate who deserve no sympathy and no due process, and where the left-wing mob wields tremendous power through its command of the public sphere.
That view connects to a broader assumption shared by many conservatives: that white Christian men are a persecuted minority in modern America.
To non-conservatives, this sounds absurd. White men are the country’s most powerful and privileged citizens. The party they dominate currently controls two and a half branches of government, and they sit in a disproportionate number of powerful seats in the private sector. But in this argument, conservatives follow a maxim generally attributed to the late provocateur Andrew Breitbart: “Politics is downstream from culture.” By this, Breitbart meant that the balance of power in day-to-day politics is determined, in the long run, by the cultural ideas that shape the way people approach politics.
With liberal elites largely in charge of the country’s entertainment and higher education, in the Breitbart-conservative view, that means they control the commanding heights in our society.
The concept of white men being the persecuted in America largely comes down to being told they’re wrong, or freaking out over nothing when they’re told it’s something by the right-wing outrage machine. And within the “commanding heights,” whether it be scientists, Hollywood, the media, or Democrats, calling stupid ideas stupid has somehow become “elitist” and evidence of bias. It’s one of the most bitter ironies that the people who bitch and moan about political correctness and wear shirts saying “fuck your feelings” are the ones whining about respect whenever a TV show or movie has a story which steps on their toes, or a science article actually advocates … you know, science which goes against one of their beliefs.
It’s as if we are trying to placate children who want people to hold their hands and play along while they wish really hard for unicorns to be real.
From Reeeves Wiedeman at New York Magazine:
After work one day in January 2007, Scott McConnell left his office at the magazine The American Conservative in Arlington, Virginia, and walked to a nearby Thai restaurant that was hosting a panel discussion about the Duke lacrosse scandal… McConnell and his magazine had largely ignored the scandal; identity politics weren’t top of mind for conservative media then, and most outlets weren’t especially interested in defending a group of rich jocks who had hired a stripper. But by January, the case was imploding. The accuser had changed her story more than half a dozen times, one of the players had a well-documented alibi, and DNA tests found no match with any member of the team, a fact the prosecutors initially hid from the defense. McConnell was reminded of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s novel about 1980s New York in which an overzealous prosecutor, the media, and the city’s liberal elite rushed to condemn an innocent white man accused of killing a black man. “There was this palpable yearning among the liberal establishment for guilty white people they could put on trial,” McConnell said, of the lacrosse case.
McConnell and one of his editors, Michael Dougherty, went to the Thai restaurant panel hoping to find someone to write about the case. They knew most of the speakers — an economics professor, an editor at the WashingtonTimes, a men’s-rights blogger — but their talks were so boilerplate that neither McConnell nor Dougherty could recall much about them. The fourth speaker, however, was a Ph.D. candidate in Duke’s history department who delivered a blistering critique of the Duke faculty’s rush to prejudgment. “Scott and I both thought, Here’s a young guy, he presents himself well, and his talk was the most interesting of the night,” Dougherty said recently. “God, I hate to think that we were part of creating this.”
Richard Spencer, the fourth speaker, is now America’s most famous self-identified white nationalist. “In this funny chain of events, the Duke lacrosse case changed the course of my career,” Spencer told me recently. “My life would not have taken the direction it did absent the Duke lacrosse case.” The speech at the Thai restaurant — “Ironic, isn’t it?” he said — pushed him from an academic track toward a more activist one. McConnell commissioned Spencer to write a piece for The American Conservative about the case, and, by the end of the semester, Spencer had dropped out of school to work at the magazine full-time. A year later, he coined the term “alt-right.” … It not only launched Spencer’s career, but that of White House adviser Stephen Miller, too. On the morning of Spencer’s talk at the Thai restaurant, Miller — who was then a senior at Duke — published a column in the student newspaper titled “A Portrait of Radicalism,” just a few days after he appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show to chastise Duke’s faculty. Donald Trump didn’t have much to say about the scandal at the time; he hadn’t yet joined Twitter and was devoting his cable-news appearances to his simmering feud with Rosie O’Donnell. But Miller seemed interested in little else. He had become known to some at Duke as the “Miller Outrage Machine” for his willingness to take controversial stands in his biweekly “Miller Time” column, which he wrote for the campus newspaper as a way, he says, to “defend the idea of America.”
This sort of behavior is also present in conservative women.Recent research and ponderings attempting to identify why white women support Republicans and conservative policies more than their non-white sisterhood have largely explained the difference through gender roles and subservience to their partners. For example, during the recent hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Republican women (who are for the most part white) were the only demographic among which support for Kavanaugh increased as the process went along.
Why is that?
...AN
==
rww no lnx
...The Clark brothers would stand alongside Posobiec again at a rally he led alongside white nationalist Richard Spencer, of whom the brothers and Posobiec were both seeming fans. Alexander Reid Ross, the author of the book “Against the Fascist Creep,” tweeted that the Clark brothers had infiltrated a book talk he gave last year. According to Ross, a Daily Caller reporter was filming the incident. Later that night, Posobiec published the PDF of Ross’ book.
(Alexander Reid Ross)))
@areidross
- Nov 13, 2018
Whoa, these are the guys who tried to bust up my book talk in DC. There was a Daily Caller journo waiting in a cab outside livestreaming in case something went down. Instead, dozens of antifascists came and ensured the security of the space. Fash couldn't even catch a ride home.
(((Alexander Reid Ross)))
@areidross
That evening, Jack Posobiec posted a pirated copy of the PDF of my book online -- total coincidence, i know. Here's an article that was published about the evening's affairs...https://itsgoingdown.org/nazis-fail-attempt-shut-fascist-creep-author-talk-potters-house/ … pic.twitter.com/ww7RrDO09K
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Twitter Ads info and privacy
In a video interview recorded by One People’s Project, Spencer detailed his relationship with Posobiec going back to the Republican National Convention in 2016.
[pix]
“He introduced himself as, ‘Oh, I work for Roger Stone, I’m Roger Stone’s man, kind of thing.’ He definitely introduced himself as really tightly connected with the campaign—the Trump campaign—and he was maybe two degrees of separation from Trump himself, that kind of thing,” Spencer says in the video, adding that Posobiec expressed gratitude to the alt-right for joining a pro-Trump “coalition” in a tone Spencer described as “a smoke-blown-up-ass kind of way.”
Spencer alleged that while Posobiec was at The Rebel, the outlet had edited him out of rally footage while feeding his talking points to Posobiec to reiterate as if they were Posobiec’s opinions.
“It was highly dishonest, to put it mildly,” Spencer said.
Spencer said he had an “ongoing connection” with Posobiec over the years, but that the relationship was “not intimate.” Spencer described Posobiec as being “highly complimentary” to him “in a way that no conservative would be.”
Posobiec has documented ties to the alt-right dating back to his formative years at Rebel Media. In the most public example, he was fired for plagiarizing a video published by the organizer of the “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Posobiec was also spotted sitting with Marcus Epstein, who was once charged with assault after karate-chopping a black woman and calling her a racial slur, during this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. He’s also tweeted anti-Semitic tropes (and since deleted those tweets).
Posobiec’s tie-ins to the alt-right are not entirely severed. In September, Posobiec released a book that Theodore Beale, an “alt-right” writer using the pseudonym “Vox Day,” edited and published. Beale has been openly identified as “alt-right” as recently as August 9, 2018.
==
https://www.alternet.org/trumps-embrace-new-white-supremacist-conspiracy-theory-hits-dangerous-low-his-authoritarian-ranting
marcotte
Wednesday, Donald Trump briefly interrupted his ongoing Twitter tirades denouncing various investigations into his shady behavior with a bizarre tweet about "the large scale killing of farmers" and "land and farm seizures and expropriations" in South Africa. It didn't take long for journalists to figure out what Trump was talking about. He was referencing a racist (and false) conspiracy theory that floats around white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites and had been elevated by Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who has grown increasingly bold about mainstreaming ideas picked up from the white supremacist fringe.
That Trump often expresses racist views is neither new nor surprising information, so while news sites dutifully published pieces debunking this conspiracy theory — which implies that the South Africa government is working with vigilantes to steal land from white farmers through violence — it seems likely that both the media and the public will rapidly move on, especially since there are so many other big stories vying for attention.
But this strange interlude deserves more consideration, even amid the constant drumbeat of Trump-is-a-racist stories. By embracing this particular false narrative, the president of the United States has moved beyond garden-variety racism and is now openly pushing a white nationalist myth that has been used for decades to justify a violent ideology, one that occasionally leads to terrorism.
“'White genocide' is probably the most popular theme in the white supremacist world," Heidi Beirich, head of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Salon. The South African narrative Trump referenced "is a subset of that,” she said.
"White genocide" -- the thesis that there is a grand conspiracy to wipe out as many white people as possible, and/or to destroy their collective power -- is an idea that's been kicking around white nationalist circles for decades now, Beirich explained. Its purpose, she said, is "to strike fear in the hearts of white people in countries that are diversifying."
Racist beliefs or impulses are sadly common, and arguably drive most of the support for Trump. But the concept of "white genocide" takes racism to another level, because it's used to justify a commitment to a white nationalist agenda. By floating this conspiracy theory, which white nationalists use as "evidence" that black and brown people are trying to wipe out white people, Trump and Carlson are attempting to turn ordinary bigots into paranoid white nationalists, people who believe, as Beirich explained, that "we can’t share politics and political spaces with people of other races, because their goal is to exterminate us."
Derek Black, the son of former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Stormfront founder Don Black, told Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow in 2016 how white nationalists have long sought to push movement conservatives past their occasional use of racist stereotypes and into overt paranoia about the supposed danger black and brown people pose to the very survival of whites.
“If we say it a thousand times — ‘White genocide! We are losing control of our country!’ — politicians are going to start saying it, too," said Derek Black, who "rejected the white nationalist cause" several years ago, in his words, and has been speaking out against his father's movement since then.
What white nationalists believe, and with some reason, is that ordinary white conservatives may hold racist beliefs, but don't generally possess a concrete ideology to frame it. They may crack racist jokes or make personal choices — such as where they choose to live or whom they vote for — that reinforce racial inequality. But most of them will draw the line at openly supporting explicitly racist policies, like legal segregation or bans on interracial marriage.
So white nationalists crafted this "white genocide" line, Beirich says, to radicalize those people into supporting the concept of a "white ethno-state" by convincing them that their very survival depends on it.
Obviously, the real-world evidence that white people are in danger of being wiped out by genocide is nonexistent. So white nationalists rely on conspiracy theories, such as the one about South African farmers, to scare people. They also lean heavily on fiction, Beirich notes, especially science fiction, to create this fear that "the white apocalypse is coming."
Last month, playwright Ian Allen an article piece for the New York Times examining the small but robust world of "white genocide" dystopian sci-fi, books that "act as a kind of binding agent, a Bible-like codification of basic principles that underpin the various denominations" of white nationalism.
Allen writes about a number of these books, but the two most important are likely "The Turner Diaries" and "The Camp of the Saints." The former, written by the late white-supremacist leader William Luther Pierce (under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald), tells the story of Earl Turner, a fictional hero who wages an insurgent war against the government -- which is presented as a tool of Jews and black people -- and becomes a martyr in the process of creating a worldwide, all-white fascist regime. Thelatter is a 1973 novel by French author and explorer Jean Raspail,recounting the future history of Europe being overrun by Arabs, Africans and other dark-skinned people, who are characterized as violent, filthy and parasitic.
"The Turner Diaries," in particular, has been implicated in a great deal of violent crime, influencing a number of white supremacist and right-wing terrorists, including Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people. "The Camp of the Saints," a marginally more respectable literary work, is a favorite not just of professed white nationalists and hardcore immigration foes, but also of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
All this paranoia about "white genocide" is perhaps best understood as an extreme form of projection, a way of taking the murderous history of European colonialism and reversing the roles of oppressors and victims. The obsession with South Africa's land policy — which is meant to reverse the damage caused by the widespread white dispossession of African land, and the denial of both economic justice and civil rights under apartheid — illustrates this clearly.
While racism continues to be a major problem in the United States, this notion of "white genocide" has mostly lingered on the fringes of American culture. But by actively championing this South African conspiracy theory and other white nationalist beliefs on his prime-time Fox News show, Carlson is clearly betting that many more conservatives can be radicalized in that direction. By tweeting his support Wednesday, Trump is directly helping to normalize these views.
That's dangerous. If millions of Americans start to believe that white people are literally under threat of genocide, that belief can be used to justify all sorts of atrocious policy and disgraceful or violent behavior. The Trump administration's family separation policy offers a good example of how ugly things can get if frightened people become convinced that brutal human rights violations are necessary for their own survival. In the worst case, that may be just the beginning.
==
==
Trump tweeted on Wednesday night that the South African government was "seizing land" from white farmers, who he claimed to be the subject of large-scale killings.
This claim is false — there is no evidence of large-scale targeted killings of white farmers anywhere in South Africa.
The Anti-Defamation League released a blistering statement about Trump's comments, which he appears to have tweeted after watching a conspiratorial Fox News segment.
"It is extremely disturbing that the President of the United States echoed a longstanding and false white supremacist claim that South Africa’s white farmers are targets of large-scale, racially-motivated killings by South Africa’s black majority," the group said.
The ADL explained how Trump's claims are actually part of a long-standing effort by white supremacists to falsely paint white people as victims of genocide.
White supremacists in the United States have made such claims for years. In early 2012, ADL’s Center on Extremism documented how white supremacists in the United States were gearing up for protests as part of something they termed the “South Africa Project (SAP).” The goal of the organizers, which included representatives from major neo-Nazi, racist skinhead, "traditional white supremacist," Christian Identity groups, as well as racist prison gangs, was to stop the alleged ‘genocide of Whites’ in South Africa. The protests originated in 2011 at the hands of Monica Stone, a long-time member of the Louisiana-based white supremacist Christian Defense League and immigrant from South Africa.
Prominent American white supremacist Richard Spencer has used the South Africa talking point as recently as this March.
The ADL ended with a damning indictment of Trump's racist remarks.
"We would hope that the President would try to understand the facts and realities of the situation in South Africa, rather than repeat disturbing, racially divisive talking points used most frequently by white supremacists," the ADL concluded.
==
===
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.
...
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 Spencertold 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.
==
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/richard-spencer-u-s-military-should-have-enslaved-haitians-after-hurricane-instead-of-providing-relief
==
https://www.alternet.org/time-me-lawyer-alt-right-leader-richard-spencer-begs-money-pay-his-legal-bills
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/alt-right-verge-collapse
no link
March 5, 2018
Michael Edison Hayden
Posted with permission from Newsweek
The white supremacist, alt-right movement that rose during the presidential campaign of President Donald Trump appears to be splintering.
Kyle Bristow, an attorney and key ally to alt-right leader Richard Spencer said this weekend he was dropping out of politics a day before he was slated to host a white nationalism-themed conference in Detroit, Michigan. As this was happening, other key figures in the movement lashed out at one another in a public way, accusing each other in heated terms of sabotaging their efforts to organize.
The chaos, defection and infighting shows a political movement mired in turmoil seven and a half months after appearing united at the deadly Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Bristow, a white nationalist lawyer based in Michigan, defected from the movement on Saturday just before his own organization, Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, was to hold an event in Detroit on Sunday. The event, which was billed as an opportunity to hash out the direction of the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic alt-right movement, was cancelled. Spencer, who had been scheduled to attend Bristow’s event ahead of a speaking engagement on Monday at Michigan State University in East Lansing, was forced to hold a small gathering at a private residence as a substitute, he told Newsweek.
“I support Kyle in whatever path he chooses to take,” Spencer told Newsweek. “We’re in touch.”
Spencer spoke at Michigan State University in front of a sparse crowd of fewer than 50 people on Monday. He didn't address the subject of splintering in his movement, but acknowledged that the alt-right was going through “growing pains.” The meager turnout for Monday’s rally showed a significant decline from rallies the alt-right held as recently as last October, when slightly more than 200 people showed up to a “White Lives Matter” in Tennessee.
Bristow represented Spencer in his attempts to give speeches at several colleges throughout the country, and argued successfully to allow his client a chance to speak Monday at Michigan State University, his own alma mater. He was also an integral and unifying figure in the so-called racist right going back for the better part of a decade. Bristow published in 2010 a novel called White Apocalypse, which detailed violent fantasies directed at Jewish people, people of color and characters that eerily resembled staffers at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He also voiced big plans of creating his own rights group, as a way to defend the alt-right movement on grounds of free speech, and was in the middle of raising money on the crowdsourcing site Patreon toward that goal. Bristow did not respond to a request for comment, but he blamed his exit from the movement on journalists in a statement.
“In light of the recent relentless and unjustifiable vilification of me, as well as the mischaracterizations of who I am as a person, I have unilaterally made the decision to provide this clarification and to withdraw from politics,” Bristow wrote on Saturday in a parting statement to the alt-right, which was published on his wesbite.
Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty law Center told Newsweek Monday that Bristow's unexpected departure was significant for the movement in part because it would force Spencer to find new representation to continue his current efforts at galvanizing press attention, which typically occur when protesters mobilize to shut down his speaking engagements. Bristow has bragged in the past that Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas was the “sword and shield of the Alt-Right.” ?
To be sure, recent turmoil in the alt-right movement has spread beyond Spencer's inner circle. Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that once served as the de facto homepage for young white supremacists, was uncharacteristically silent Monday about Spencer’s speaking appearance at Michigan State University. When Spencer spoke at the University of Florida in October, in contrast, the website promoted that event. The shift may have something to do with Spencer’s recent alignment with the Traditionalist Worker’s Party, a small, neo-Nazi group that has become a regular fixture at alt-right protests throughout the country over the last few years.
Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer’s editor, sniped publically at Matt Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker’s Party, calling him a “good-natured but socially awkward fat kid” on a popular alt-right forum on Saturday, while denouncing his influence as a leader. Anglin, and his colleague, Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, took turns ridiculing the presentation of Traditionalist Worker’s Party rallies, suggesting their uniforms and “communist” rhetoric were discouraging people from aligning with their cause.
“Everyone in the alt-right is a malignant contrarian,” Lenz said about the growing divisions in their movement following the united front the alt-right displayed in Charlottesville. “They come from a culture where insults are the coin of the realm.”
Anglin and Auernheimer were in turn criticized in a public way on the same forum throughout Saturday and Sunday for linking the alt-right to overt neo-Nazism, violence and misogyny. Auernheimer has publically praised Atomwaffen, for example, a neo-Nazi group linked to a string of brutal murders, a move that has caused embarrassment to Traditionalist Worker’s Party and members of the “Southern Nationalist” outfit League of the South, two groups that marched in Charlottesville last August. Anglin has spoken in sadistic terms about white women, going so far as to celebrate the idea of them being raped and physically abused.
Daily Stormer are “hypocrites who are clinging to failed reactionary politics,” Heimbach told Newsweek on Monday about the public collapse into infightin
==
===
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/whitefish-montana-center-far-right
l posner
Something fishy is going on in Whitefish, Montana. The small town of 6,500 is in one of America's most rural regions, but it has occupied a lot of media space this year. Since the beginning of 2017, the town’s name has popped up repeatedly in stories about the far right. Whitefish is the home base for Trump’s potential private spy agency, as well as the tiny company contracted to restore power in Puerto Rico, and early in the year, the town drew media attention as the proposed meeting point for an anti-Semitic rally. On the surface, these may not seem related. But on closer examination, all three are clearly linked to the Trump White House.
Let's begin with Whitefish Energy. After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and left the island without power, a tiny company based in Whitefish, operating for less than two years, was contracted to restore power for a hefty fee of $300 million. The Puerto Rican government opposed the Whitefish Energy deal and it ultimately fell through, terminating November 30. The FBI has since launched an investigation into the contract.
It was through the Puerto Rico story that many first learned of the Trump administration's ties to Whitefish. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke grew up in Whitefish and has personal and business ties to the energy group contracted for the work in Puerto Rico, leading many to suspect that Zinke had ulterior motives for choosing the firm over larger, more experienced competitors. The Washington Post reported that Whitefish CEO Andy Techmanski and Zinke are acquainted, "but only, Zinke’s office said in an email, because Whitefish is a small town where 'everybody knows everybody.'...Zinke’s office said he had no role in Whitefish securing the contract for work in Puerto Rico. Techmanski also said Zinke was not involved."
Special favors among powerful business owners and local politicians, while unethical, aren’t anything new, and once the relationship between Zinke and Whitefish Energy was revealed in full, Puerto Rican officials called for the contract to be voided. Actually, the company continued work through Novemberuntil it claimed it was owed over $80 million in fees by the government. According to Slate, “Under the contract, subcontractors made as much as $462 per hour, racking up high costs for PREPA, which was already billions in debt before the Hurricane struck.”
But that wasn’t the last we would hear of Whitefish, Montana.
Most recently, Buzzfeed reported that Trump was considering launching a new intelligence agency that some are calling a “private CIA." Amyntor Group, the company that submitted the proposal, is a private contractor that provides intelligence and militia manpower to governments and corporations, and is based in Whitefish. Buzzfeed says there’s “no known relationship” between Amyntor and Whitefish Energy, but both groups have connections to the Trump administration. In addition to Zinke’s tie to Whitefish Energy, Amyntor has an advocate close to the president: Erik Prince, brother of Betsy DeVos and a vocal proponent of the American government’s use of private contracted militias (like his own, Blackwater). Prince is one of the key figures pushing the Trump administration to employ private spies, and Trump is allegedly tempted as he’s frequently expressed his disdain for both the CIA and the FBI. Prince is a former Navy SEAL—as is Ryan Zinke.
Simmering beneath these suspicious White House deals is the well-documented tradition of white supremacy and neo-Nazism in the town of Whitefish. The town is home to white supremacist leader Richard Spencer and Chuck Baldwin, a radical-right extremist minister who preaches Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and homophobia among other strains of hate. Buzzfeed News looked into the remarkable growth of white supremacism in this isolated region, and explained the trend of neo-Nazis moving to the area as follows:
“Flathead County, population 96,000, is one of the whitest places in the nation (95.2%). There are other allures for people at odds with mainstream American culture: the large pockets of open space, the ability to live off the grid, the lack of restriction when it comes to gun ownership. The Montana political ethos—some mix of libertarian, conservative, and ‘don’t f**k with me'—is inviting that way. As a local pastor put it, ‘It’s a place where people can feel safe when they say outrageous things.'"
Neo-Nazis in Spencer’s camp planned to march on Whitefish around the same time as the Women’s March earlier this year, in a rally targeted “against Jews, Jewish businesses and everyone who supports either.” The Daily Stormer promised around 200 skinheads would invade the town “carrying high-powered rifles” to defend Spencer’s honor. In response, counterprotesters gathered, local residents handed out matzoh ball soup and the skinheads never showed up.
The Whitefish city government has repeatedly denounced Spencer and his presence in their town. The mayor said in a public statement last year, “The city of Whitefish repudiates the ideas and ideology of the founder of the so-called alt-right as a direct affront to our community’s core values and principles. The city of Whitefish rejects racism and bigotry in all its forms and expressions.”
The wave of right-wing hate in Whitefish is also connected to Trump's cabinet; here again, Interior Sec. Zinke's name emerges. Last year, Raw Story reported on Zinke’s connections to white supremacists in Whitefish and the surrounding area. Zinke endorsed a white nationalist candidate for Montana statehouse in 2016, who ended up losing but later thanked Zinke for helping him appear more mainstream. This year, journalist Wayne Madsen reported that Zinkes' two sons "were friends of former Whitefish resident Richard Spencer,” and that part of the reason Spencer moved his headquarters to Washington, D.C., after Trump’s election was to be closer to the Zinkes, as well as his friend Stephen Miller.
Madsen said via email that he "was told by those who've been to Whitefish that the Zinke boys ran with Spencer and his crowd.”
In case your head is spinning, here's a recap: Whitefish Energy’s CEO knows Zinke; Zinke served in the same elite military branch as Erik Prince, who is now pushing Trump to contract a private militia based in Whitefish, which has emerged as a white nationalist hotbed in recent years and was the setting for a personal relationship between far-right extremists and Zinke’s own family. So much for the excuse that Whitefish is just a small town where "everyone knows everybody." There are too many suspicious ties for Zinke's PR team to get away with that one. Smells fishy to us.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/richard-spencers-former-classmate-confirms-hes-always-been-monster
===
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/british-journalist-masterfully-exposes-richard-spencer-fraud-hes-been-all-along
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/why-media-reluctant-cover-neo-nazi-violence
s been just a little over two months since a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters and killed a woman in Charlottesville, Virginia. It seems as if the mainstream media has already gotten bored with the story of neo-Nazi violence and domestic terrorism. Leading white nationalist Richard Spencer snagged a huge amount of coverage for scheduling a speech at the University of Florida,which provoked stories about how much the school was spending on security, the potential for protests and the fact that the state's Republican governor felt compelled to declare a state of emergency. But when three of Spencer's biggest fans and core followers — their names are Tyler Tenbrink, William Fears and Colton Fears (the latter two are brothers) — were arrested for attempting to murder protesters, coverage of the event was relatively sparse.
Media Matters analyzed the news coverage of the incident, in which one neo-Nazi allegedly fired a gun while the other two egged him on to shoot protesters. The watchdog group found that cable news networks almost completely ignored it. CNN and Fox News didn't mention the alleged attack at all, and MSNBC devoted a two-minute segment to it on one show.
Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, told Salon he didn't believe the incident necessarily deserved "hours of coverage over a few days." But the paltry coverage the alleged attack got, he worries, may contribute to the public's failure to understand how serious the threat of neo-Nazi violence really is.
Vicious attacks on anti-fascist protesters have happened on at least two occasions since the events in Charlottesville. In an early September rally in Vancouver, Washington, there were reports of threatening behavior from motorists, with one man driving into a crowd (fortunately injuring no one), and a group of men in another car throwing things and driving menacingly around the protesters. Then there was this latest shooting associated with the Spencer event in Florida.
Just because no one has gotten hurt doesn't mean this isn't news. It's sheer luck that separates a bullet that hits someone in the head from one that doesn't. More importantly, Americans need to see the pattern of violent behavior coming from the white supremacist subculture, to understand the threat it actually poses.
Incidents like these “really underscore the risk a lot of people talked about when it comes to these rallies, and about what these groups actually bring when they hold these events," Keegan Hankes, a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Salon.
Hankes emphasized that white supremacy is an inherently violent ideology, noting that "you don't have the 'ethno-state,' you don't have this kind of world that they're dreaming up without extreme violence.”
As far-right fringe groups, emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, plan more rallies and public speeches, there's a real risk that the centrality of violence to white supremacist ideology gets lost in the public discourse. Part of the problem is that right-wing pundits have been working to frame the challenge posed by these groups strictly in terms of "free speech" while minimizing the problem of actual or potential violence.
“The security concerns are justified, as we see, because violence follows" where neo-Nazis and white supremacists go, Hankes said. "It's more than just that people don't want to hear their ideas or don't agree with them, and don't think they should be on campus."
Carusone characterized himself as a "free-speech purist," but felt that the public's understanding of the debate over speech on campus is incomplete if they don't understand the enhanced possibility of violence that white supremacists bring.
"Alt-right" groups, he explained, "do these sort of trolling events at campuses, not trying to make a point, but just to elicit a backlash, so that they can have these kinds of skirmishes. The net effect of the skirmishes is to create conditions such that they can not just engage in violence but also bully, intimidate and suppress their opponents.”
That too, he noted, is a free speech issue: The free speech rights of anti-fascists and leftists are endangered if they are being intimidated with violence.
White supremacists and other "alt-right" types have deliberately downplayed their own acts of violence in an effort to confuse the issue, Hankes said. Instead, they focus on a narrative claiming that they "just want a fair hearing for [their] ideas" and that it's "the anti-fascists who are committing violence," permitting them to play the victim and drum up sympathy for their extremist views.
He then began to make excuses, calling Fields a "scapegoat" and saying that Heyer's death was an "ambiguous situation." He also claimed that Fields' "vehicle was attacked," and suggested that ramming a car into a crowd of protesters was Fields "attempting to escape."Spencer himself did this during his speech at the University of Florida. When an audience member asked Spencer about the killing of leftist protester Heather Heyer, for which a white supremacist named James Fields has been charged with second-degree murder, Spencer deflected and downplayed the situation. He claimed he is opposed to all forms of violence and has "explicitly called for peace."
Shortly after Spencer tried to spin his movement as nonviolent, three of his most prominent followers — men who have repeatedly attended Spencer's appearances and events, including the Charlottesville rally — reportedly fired a gun at protesters while shouting "Heil Hitler" and urging each other on.
The media has an important role to play here. It's not just about reporting on events like this, but also putting them into context. The shooting was part of a growing white supremacist movement that is growing ever more ambitious and more violent, and feels emboldened by a sympathetic leader in the White House. This shooting happened during a constant churn of stories about Trump's racially provocative attacks on NFL players, Rep. Frederica Wilson, Myeshia Johnson (the widow of slain soldier La David Johnson) and ESPN sports analyst Jemele Hill. It's no mystery why white supremacists might feel it's a good time to ramp up their activities. This shooting cannot be viewed as a random crime, but as the inescapable result of electing President Donald Trump.
==
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trumps-racist-fans-turn-each-other-over-pathetic-weekend-rally
===
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/professional-racist-richard-spencer-makes-his-money-cotton-farms-and-black-laborAs a professional racist, Richard Spencer’s career and life philosophy rest on a few basic bits of misinformation. The first is the innate supremacy of whiteness: The idea that white people’s superior inventiveness, strength and vision have made them high achievers who earned every bit of their status. The second is that non-white people (around the world, but particularly in the United States) serve only as a burden to white greatness. According to this historically revisionist theory, white people got to the top on their own, while people of color mostly just got in their way.Spencer has repeated this racist lie many times. Speaking at the National Policy Institute, an innocuously named think tank run by Spencer to promote all things white power, he told an audience giddy over Trump’s election, “[White people] don’t exploit other groups. We don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us and not the other way around.”He doubled down on those remarks when African-American pundit Roland Martin suggested centuries of free black labor had built America into an economic superpower, a truth Spencer dismissed out of hand. “White people ultimately don’t need other races in order to succeed, in order to be ourselves,” Spencer retorted. “Absolutely not.”Spencer argued America had become a world leader “through the genius of Europeans...it has nothing to do with slavery....White people could have figured out another way to pick cotton....We do it now, we did it previously.”As Lance Williams, writing at Reveal shows, Spencer’s answer is ridiculous, and not just because American history proves it wrong. Spencer’s own personal history, and that of his family, flies in the face of that illogical conclusion:Spencer, along with his mother and sister, are absentee landlords of 5,200 acres of cotton and corn fields in an impoverished, largely African American region of Louisiana, according to records examined by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR). The farms, controlled by multiple family-owned businesses, are worth millions: A 1,600-acre parcel sold for $4.3 million in 2012.The Spencer family’s farms also are subsidized heavily by the federal government. From 2008 through 2015, the Spencers received $2 million in U.S. farm subsidy payments, according to federal data.The land was originally purchased during the Jim Crow era by Spencer’s maternal grandfather, R.W. Dickenhorst. The northern Louisiana region was a harsh place for black folks to live in the Civil Rights era, with a thriving Ku Klux Klan and a legacy of lynchings and anti-black violence. Dickenhorst, a well-to-do radiologist, grew even richer off his land holdings, thanks to the labor of poor black Louisianans who lived under the constant threat of white terror and were paid almost nothing.Spencer’s mother, Sherry, inherited the lands when her father died in 2002. Those thousands of acres added lots of money to the Spencers’ coffers, as inherited land holdings have for millions of white Americans. The racial wealth gap currently stands at $13 to $1 for black and white households. The key to that difference is property ownership—the "central vehicle Americans use to store wealth” that is handed down within white families, according to Demos senior policy analyst Catherine Ruetschlin.okeefe usda scam all the more heinous]Huffington Post cites a USDA report that states, "of all private U.S. agricultural land, Whites account for 96 percent of the owners, 97 percent of the value, and 98 percent of the acres... Blacks possess 7.8 million acres “of overall rural land” ... For a century after the end of slavery, Black farmers tended to be tenants rather than owners. Since the early 1970s, activists and scholars have warned that the rural Black community was in danger of losing its entire land base. Land ownership by Black farmers peaked in 1910 at 16-19 million acres, according to the Census of Agriculture. However, the 1997 census reports that Black farmers owned only 1.5 million acres 'of farmable land.'"The story of white supremacy Spencer peddles, in which wealthy white people like the Spencers got that way by power and pluck, and not institutionalized black economic exploitation, is a myth. White people got a leg up on everyone else because of a system designed to enforce and maintain white power while ensuring black vulnerability and subjugation. Richard Spencer should know this, because he’s a case in point.The finances of NPI, Spencer’s “up with white people” organization, are unclear because it “hasn’t filed a public report since 2013,” according to reporting by Reveal’s Al Letson. (The organization was stripped of its nonprofit standing by the IRS just this March.) Spencer dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Duke University to run his white power club, and has had no other identifiable paid work before or since. While donations are likely up from racists and Trump supporters around the country, family money has likely been hugely important to keeping Spencer and NPI afloat.When confronted about the land parcel during the Reveal podcast, Spencer refused to answer Letson’s questions about how much of those cotton-fueled profits have been filtered into his white power organizing machine. He also countered that he is “not involved in any direct day-to-day running of the business,” which is a moot point. Spencer later stated he is “proud of [what] my grandfather...built” and—without admitting that the Spencer story invalidates the lie of white American exceptionalism—copped to having gotten a boost from black labor.“We’ve all benefited from white privilege,” Spencer says in the recording. “I want my children to have white privilege.”What Spencer really wants is a future in which his children and other white people don’t have to compete for a country and power he believes they are entitled to by race. White supremacist ideology is precarious and insecure because it’s constructed out of lies. That's why black literacy was illegal for centuries, and why white racists—including Steve Bannon—want Trump to impose laws that stop nonwhite immigrants from taking over Silicon Valley today. White people have always needed to exploit other races to get ahead, and they still do. Ask some of those white California farmers who didn't realize they voted to keep their own Mexican farmworkers out of the country.What Spencer is really offering his followers is a delusion of white superiority and a fable about coming white marginalization. They’ll buy it, because it fits their victim narrative and sense of entitlement, while soothing their insecurity about white extraordinariness. In that way, Spencer and Donald Trump have the same racist hustle.=https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/19/white_nationalists_neo_nazis_right_wingberekeleyhttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/far-right-white-supremacists-berkeley-protests-antifa-trumphttps://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/19/headlines/hundreds_protest_white_nationalist_richard_spencer_at_auburn_universityhttps://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alternative-righthttps://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alternative-right The Alternative Right is a term coined in 2008 by Richard Bertrand Spencer, who heads the white nationalist think tank known as the National Policy Institute, to describe a loose set of far-right ideals centered on “white identity” and the preservation of “Western civilization.” In 2010, Spencer, who had done stints as an editor of The American Conservative and Taki’s Magazine, launched the Alternative Right blog, where he worked to refine the movement’s ideological tenets.Spencer describes the Alt Right as a big-tent ideology that blends the ideas of neo-reactionaries (NRx-ers), who advocate a return to an antiquated, pseudo-libertarian government that supports “traditional western civilization”; “archeofuturists,” those who advocate for a return to “traditional values” without jettisoning the advances of society and technology; human biodiversity adherents (HBDers) and “race realists,” people who generally adhere to “scientific racism”; and other extreme-right ideologies. Alt-Right adherents stridently reject egalitarianism and universalism.At the heart of the Alt-Right is a break with establishment conservatism that favors experimentation with the ideas of the French New Right; libertarian thought as exemplified by former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas); anarcho-capitalism, which advocates individual sovereignty and open markets in place of an organized state; Catholic traditionalism, which seeks a return to Roman Catholicism before the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council; and other ideologies. It is a reaction to the conservative establishment as exemplified by the nomination of Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964. According to Spencer, that solidified several aspects of contemporary conservatism, including an emphasis on liberty, freedom, free markets and capitalism. Spencer considers these ideas to be “anti-ideals” and says the Alt-Right is redefining categories for a new kind of conservative.Spencer describes Alt-Right adherents as younger people, often recent college graduates, who recognize the “uselessness of mainstream conservatism” in what he describes as a “hyper-racialized” world. So it’s no surprise that the movement in 2015 and 2016 concentrated on opposing immigration and the resettlement of Syrian refugees in America. Although such stances align with older forms of white racism, Spencer insists that the Alt-Right is “a liberation from a left-right dialectic.”The Alt-Right is intimately connected American Identitarianism, a version of an ideology popular in Europe that emphasizes cultural and racial homogeneity within different countries. One difference is that while European Identitarians indict the generation known as the “68ers,” a reference to the left of the 1960s, their American counterparts attack baby boomers, who are presumed to comprise the bulk of the current Republican Party’s base. But the movements on both continents are similar in accusing older conservatives for selling out their countries to foreigners.Spencer left his Alternative Right blog on Christmas Day 2013 in order to focus on the Radix Journal, an online journal published by the National Policy Institute that promotes the creation of a white ethno-state. Spencer’s abrupt departure, referred to as the “Christmas Day Purge,” left the blog to two fellow white nationalists, Colin Liddell of the United Kingdom and Andy Nowicki, a former college professor. The blog has struggled since then to stay relevant to the white nationalist movement.Although Spencer has positioned himself as the effective leader of the Alt-Right, other proponents include several well-known names on the far right, including Jared Taylor , editor of the American Renaissance racist journal; Greg Johnson of the publishing house Counter-Currents; Matthew Parrott and Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Youth Network; and Mike Enoch, who runs The Right Stuff blog. But the general population of the Alt-Right is composed, by and large, of anonymous youths who were exposed to the movement’s ideas through online message boards like 4chan and 8chan’s /pol/ and Internet platforms like Reddit and Twitter.The movement is not monolithic. The diversity of far-right ideologies that it includes has resulted in some disagreement with regard to Jews, and whether to blame them for the perceived plight of white culture—a belief that has undergirded many sectors of white nationalism for decades. While some Alt-Right leaders are unquestionably anti-Semitic, others, like Jared Taylor, are not, seeing Jews simply as white people. For his part, Spencer has repeatedly brought in anti-Semites to speak at his events.In March 2016, for instance, Spencer invited former California State University-Long Beach professor Kevin MacDonald, the author of a trilogy purporting to show that Jews seek to undermine the host Christian societies in which they often live, to speak at an event titled “Identity Politics.” After the event, Spencer stopped just short of questioning the Holocaust, telling a Huffington Post reporter that if it “really happened, then of course it wasn’t justified. If it happened differently than what the story we’ve been told [is], then I think that needs to be let out.”Social media have been instrumental to the growth of the Alt-Right. Legions of anonymous Twitter users have used the hashtag #AltRight to proliferate their ideas, sometimes successfully pushing them into the political mainstream....http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/decoding-alt-right-how-fringe-white-nationalism-invaded-mainstream-1594035...However, the election of Donald Trump has brought the alt-right movement to the fore. Duke and other white nationalists such as Jared Taylor, the founder of white supremacist publication American Renaissance, and Richard B Spencer, who coined the alt-right term, have suddenly started appearing in mainstream media outlets.A search on Google News brings up some 588,000 articles on Duke and 131,000 on Spencer. This clamour for information has seen web searches for the alt-right rocketing since September.IBTimes UK research shows that the alt-right page on Wikipedia has reached 1.5 million page views at the time of writing, with a daily average of 78,000 unique visitors. The page has been edited more than 100 times in the last 20 days. The rise in usage of the term was so pronounced that alt-right became contender for the Oxford Dictionary's international word of the year. It was beaten by the term 'post-truth', another Trump-linked word that reflects the dominance of opinions, emotions and 'fake news' over objective facts.Newswire The Associated Press (AP), a global guardian of editorial style, has also entered the fray with their own definition and guidelines for journalists covering the alt-right. It describes the movement as "a mix of racism, white nationalism and populism."...The rise of the alt-right has led to a great deal of soul-searching from commentators and reporters in recent weeks, with some arguing that the blanket coverage of the movement in the run up to and after the election of Donald Trump has turned what was a fringe movement into a mainstream talking point. This is particularly true for Spencer and the think tank he heads up, the National Policy Institute (NPI)."In many ways Spencer is a younger version of Taylor: well-educated, in tune with modern technology, and determined to bridge the gap between conservatives and 'racial realists' (i.e. closet white supremacists)," said Cas Mudde, associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University Georgia, writing for the Huffington Post in August 2016."Both Spencer and the term alt-right were [...] unknown to the US public until the rise of Donald Trump. And it is actually not so much Trump but the mainstream media that has made them into recognisable names. This has rejuvenated these moribund organisations and undoubtedly strengthened their appeal and support, at least [on] social media," said Mudde.But it was Hillary Clinton that first brought the term alt-right into the mainstream. On 24 August she mentioned the movement in a campaign speech in Reno, Nevada. Following her comments, white nationalist groups took to social media to thank the Democratic candidate. The first spike in searches for alt-right directly followed her speech, IBTimesUK research shows. Alt-right analysisThis was disputed by Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in a comment to the New York Times: "I think every public official ought to denounce racism, and that is what Secretary Clinton did. [Alt-right] is a fancy, almost antiseptic term for white supremacy in the digital world." Anti alt-rightIndeed, just because internet users are searching for the term, does not mean that they support the movement. IBTimes UK and ImpactSocial research reveals that opposition to the alt-right on social media platforms is stronger than support. SentimentMelissa Deckman, professor of political science at Washington College, told IBTimes UK that while the traditional conservative 'Tea Party' right in the US, many of which voted for Trump, has strident views on immigration and feels "racial resentment", that does not mean they support the alt-right."[They] are conservative on [immigration]. They are uncomfortable when English isn't being spoken. But does that mean that they're [...] white nationalists? No. I think there's a difference," she said."[Trump support is] a disgust with the political status quo but I don't think that the alt-right is about that, I think that the alt right is just racist."As for the blanket coverage of the movement by the media since Trump's election, Deckman thinks it is healthy: "I think it is important to expose these groups for what they are. In this day and age you can't brush it under the carpet. I think it is better that we have these open conversations about it. That we call a spade a spade and we denounce them."Donald Trump has spoken out against the white nationalist movement since his election, saying that he 'disavowed' them after footage of an event at which supporters of Spencer gave Nazi salutes. But he gave a robust defence of Steve Bannon, founder of alt-right news website Breitbart, who he appointed as his chief strategist."I've known Steve Bannon a long time. If I thought he was a racist or alt-right or any of the things, the terms we could use, I wouldn't even think about hiring him," Trump said.But plenty in the US would like to see Trump go further, distancing himself from both the movement and figures linked to it, but also to those that have stoked the flames, like Breitbart and its former chief. Bannon. Until he does, America's curiosity about the movement will likely continue, and Trump's association with it could lose him support on both sides of the political divide. This article was first published on December 1, 2016https://www.yahoo.com/news/alt-poster-boy-richard-spencer-162634420.htmlWhite nationalist Richard Spencer and members of his family own acres of cotton fields in an impoverished and predominantly African American part of Louisiana, records show.According to records examined by The Center for Investigative Reporting, Spencer along with his mother and sister are absentee landlords of 5,200 acres of cotton and corn fields in the southern state.The land is worth millions, with a parcel selling for for $4.3m (£3.2m) in 2012.Louisiana has a long history of slavery and racial segregation, and was at the centre of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.Spencer emerged during the 2016 presidential campaign as a key voice in the alt-right, a white nationalist movement, and has argued for the creation of an 'ethno-state', and believes immigration is an existential threat to white America.What is the alt-right?The alt-right is a loose collection of people with far-right views that came to prominence during Donald Trump's election campaign. Many members operating online profess views related to white supremacism, nationalism, anti-feminism and Islamophobia, amongst others. There isn't a defined core ideology to the movement, aside from a rejection of America's mainstream conservatism. Alt-right members generally supported Donald Trump and hailed campaign promises to build a wall along the US-Mexico border and ban Muslims from entering the country. With the rise of Stephen 'Steve' Bannon, who was appointed as chief strategist and counselor to the president in Trump's White House team, there are fears that the alt-right now has a voice in the Oval Office. Bannon was previously executive chairman of the Breitbart News website, which he once called "a platform for the alt-right". At a conference in Washington DC in November, Spencer and supporters celebrated the election of Donald Trump as US president, proclaiming 'Hail Trump' as they raised their arms in Nazi salutes.In December, Spencer's mother, Sherry, said she had been forced to sell a property in rural Whitefish, Montana, because of local opposition to her son's views. Several of Spencer's organisations are listed as based in the town.In an open letter sent to their local newspaper in December, Spencer's father Rand said that, while they love their son, "we are not racists. We have never been racists. We do not endorse the idea of white nationalism."The documents shed light on a possible source of Spencer's income.He is currently the director of white nationalist think tank the National Policy Institute, which was recently stripped of its tax-exempt status after failing to submit financial returns for three years.img He has also launched the altright.com website with Swedish mining executive Daniel Friberg as a hub for white nationalist ideology and news.Despite the alt-right positioning itself as critical of 'big government', the documents reveal that Spencer family farms receive substantial federal government funded subsidies. From 2008 through 2015, the Spencers received $2m in US farm subsidy payments, according to federal data.READ: Decoding the alt-right: How fringe white nationalism invaded the mainstreamThe family's farm holdings were passed down by Spencer's grandfather, who reportedly built the businesses during the civil rights era.When asked whether he uses his land holdings and federal subsidies to fund his political activity, Spencer told Mother Jones: "I'm not involved in any direct day-to-day running of the business," adding, "I'm going to navigate the world as it is, and I'm not going to be a pauper."You may be interested in:" data-reactid="61" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">You may be interested in:Tory think-tank invites anti-black Traditional Britain Group to anniversary dinnerMeet Daniel Friberg, the Swedish mining tycoon bankrolling the alt-right's global media empireInside the alt-right: Stockholm conference brings together US and European white nationalistsAlt-right poster boy Richard Spencer owns 5,200 acres of Louisiana cotton fieldshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/02/23/cpac-organizer-denounces-alt-right-as-left-wing-fascist-groupDan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, told attendees at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 23 that members of the alt-right are “anti-Semites, they are racists, they are sexists.” (The Washington Post)Richard Spencer, a founder of the alt-right movement that seeks a whites-only state and that strongly backed Donald Trump for president, was expelled from the Conservative Political Action Conference after being criticized from its main stage, then giving interviews to a growing crowd of reporters. “People want to talk to me,” Spencer told NBC News from outside the Gaylord National Harbor complex. “They don’t want to talk to these boring conservatives. They want to learn about ideas whose time has come, not whose time has passed.” Spencer, who has frequently attended CPAC without incident, became a minor media sensation during and after the 2016 election. One of the first speeches at this year’s conference challenged the media to stop referring to the alt-right as conservative. “There is a sinister organization that is trying to worm its way into our ranks,” said Dan Schneider, the executive director of the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC. “We must not be deceived by [a] hateful, left-wing fascist group.” There was an irony to Spencer’s expulsion on the same day the conference featured White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, the former CEO of Breitbart News, who once called the site “the platform for the alt-right.” In 2013 and 2014, Breitbart News sponsored forums on the outskirts of CPAC called “The Uninvited,” featuring guests who were not welcome on the main stage due to controversial views on Islam and immigration. “I didn’t like ‘the Uninvited,'” said the ACU’s president, Matt Schlapp, introducing Bannon with White House Chief of Staff Reince Preibus. “Everybody’s a part of our conservative family.” But not Spencer, apparently. Over seven tense, perplexing minutes, Schneider argued that the alt-right was philosophically left-wing because it departed from a conservatism in which “the individual” was sovereign. “They hate the Constitution. They hate free markets. They hate pluralism,” Schneider said. “Fascists tend to want big government control.” The argument wasn’t unique to Schneider. In 2009’s “Liberal Fascism,” the National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg drew a zigging line from the fascism of the 1930s to the welfare state liberalism of the Clinton/Obama era. But inside the main ballroom of CPAC, the argument didn’t generate much applause. Some in the audience cheered the denunciation of “left-wing fascism,” while a few listeners walked out....... ==http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”That’s how Richard B. Spencer saluted more than 200 attendees on Saturday, gathered at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”Spencer has popularized the term “alt-right” to describe the movement he leads. Spencer has said his dream is “a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans,” and has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”For most of the day, a parade of speakers discussed their ideology in relatively anodyne terms, putting a presentable face on their agenda. But after dinner, when most journalists had already departed, Spencer rose and delivered a speech to his followers dripping with anti-Semitism, and leaving no doubt as to what he actually seeks. He referred to the mainstream media as “Lügenpresse,” a term he said he was borrowing from “the original German”; the Nazis used the word to attack their critics in the press.“America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Spencer said. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” The audience offered cheers, applause, and enthusiastic Nazi salutes.Here is the video, excerpted from an Atlantic documentary profile of Spencer that will premiere in December 2016.=https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/2/the_de_judification_of_the_holocaust =Prominent white supremacist and Donald Trump supporter Richard Spencer has praised Trump for not mentioning in a statement commemorating International Holocaust Memorial Day the 6 million Jews killed. Trump has faced widespread criticism for the omission, but the administration has repeatedly defended the statement. Sen. Tim Kaine went as far as calling it a form of "Holocaust denial." Spencer, however, praised the statement as the "de-Judification" of the Holocaust. We speak to Andrea Pitzer, author of the forthcoming book, "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps." It looks at mass civilian detention without trial from 1896 to today.https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/2/lizzy_ratner_nobody_wanted_to_take As attorneys and activists continue to fight Donald Trump’s travel ban on refugees and nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries, a new article takes a sweeping look at history to find what it portends. Perhaps more fascinating is that the story involves the family of one of the senior-most members of the Trump administration. In "Nobody Wanted to Take Us In: The Story of Jared Kushner’s Family, and Mine," Nation magazine senior editor Lizzy Ratner looks at the journey of both her family and that of Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump. Both Ratner’s and Kushner’s grandparents came to the United States as Jewish immigrants from Poland, as the German occupation was ramping up and U.S. borders were closing down. We speak to Lizzy and play video clips of Jared’s grandmother, Rae Kushner.== ...When I was researching the 1920s and these 1920 anti-immigrant acts that had such gruesome consequences for people, I was struck by the parallels in language. So, you had Jewish people referred to as "physically deficient," "abnormally twisted," "un-American," "filthy," "a peril to this country," sort of a danger in all sorts of ways. Jews were conceived as both a threat to the economy, but also a threat to national security. The idea was that Jews who came from Eastern Europe, which was sort of a hotbed of Bolshevism and radicalism, would come here, turn our country red from the inside out and destroy it. We hear the same or really parallel rhetoric today being thrown against Muslims, people from Muslim countries, who are being sort of described as a threat to our society, a fifth column, Trojan horse. I mean, Donald Trump used the term "Trojan horse." You could have heard that applied against Jews in the 1920s and the 1940s. And I think we can say, you know, horrible things happened to people. Horrible things were visited on immigrants and desperate refugees who wanted to come here.AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Rae Kushner in this interview she did in the Kean University of New Jersey’s Holocaust Research Center.RAE KUSHNER: Let’s hope it’s not going to happen again. But it can happen, if you don’t watch who comes up. When I came to Washington, the Nazis are going with the swastikas in front of the White House. And they’re going on free. And this scares us. This is very painful.https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/2/lizzy_ratner_nobody_wanted_to_take=http://www.salon.com/2016/12/08/how-the-alt-right-became-racist-a-short-history-of-hate-part-1/ http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/27/misinformer-year-ecosystem-fake-news-and-alt-right/214899An anti-intellectual alliance of misogynists and white nationalists is using cult tactics to harass and abuse Americans. They systematically attempt to discredit reputable sources. They replace logic with paranoia. They horrifically harass perceived political opponents. And this campaign, which has dangerous historical precedents, has been empowered by a fake news ecosystem and a tech industry that profits off the phenomenon.I. Fake NewsWhile reporting real news requires a newsroom and some sort of process that can be critiqued and examined, “fake news” is built to obfuscate and hide sources. Its creators are varied, from a random American making $10,000 a month from his fabricated Facebook posts to a group of teenagers in Macedonia running more than a hundred pro-Trump websites. The business model is simple: identify the news that people want to read, and give it to them, regardless of the truth and with no effort whatsoever put into actual reporting.There is no question that fake news got lots of attention in 2016, in part because the president-elect himself -- and several people close to him -- pushed fabricated information. That’s deeply concerning, because data shows that not only do Americans believe lies they see on Facebook, but also that Americans across party lines say fake news is a real problem.No one is more responsible for the rise of fake news than Facebook. It was Facebook’s platform that allowedfake news to spread far and wide. In fairness, the basic nature of the social media giant ensures that users will share lies to some extent. But the structures that Facebook built also made it easy to game. All content looks the same on Facebook, and the name of the source shows up in a small and almost unreadable font. The pages look nearly identical, regardless of their purpose or who is operating them. Of course, these factors have been in place since Facebook’s inception, but in 2016, other factors changed as well.In its own way, fake news is more sophisticated than real news. Sure, real news actually examines complexities that exist in the real world while fake news just makes stuff up. But fake news can be targeted to appeal to exactly what people want to see. On Facebook in particular, content can be fine-tuned to target exactly what people are likely to click on. Many private companies do this: It is called advertising. Whereas real news outlets generally post a piece once and people either read it or not, fake news can be tweaked again and again until it finally breaks through and becomes viral. And fake news outlets sometimes do have the data to go viral: Breitbart.com and Trump political benefactor the Mercer family has a company, Cambridge Analytica, that conveniently owns a lot of data on private citizens. And sitting on the board of Cambridge Analytica is Trump’s chief adviser, and the former CEO of Breitbart, Stephen Bannon.Facebook’s algorithm has always been extremely prone to confirmation bias, but changes in recent years seem to have allowed fake news to rise much more easily (as the algorithm is proprietary, no one outside Facebook can know for certain). In the past, at the very least, there were human editors who could manually prevent outright lies from making it onto the site’s list of trending topics. But when Facebook fired them after conservatives complained this summer, fake news really took off.As John Herrman explained in The New York Times:This year, political content has become more popular all across the platform: on homegrown Facebook pages, through media companies with a growing Facebook presence and through the sharing habits of users in general. But truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of Facebook’s audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of any allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance, of any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with Facebook purely on its terms. These are professional Facebook users straining to build media companies, in other words, not the other way around.Google is also responsible for this burgeoning fake news empire. Google’s third-party advertising platform, AdSense, is driving mass profitability on many of these websites. When pressure started to rise about fake news, Google said it would be taking action to remove these actors from its advertising network, eliminating their ability to generate revenue. Our review showed that the company still has much work to do.II. The “Alt-Right”While some fake news is created simply for profit (think of the Macedonian teens who just see their sites as an easy way to make money), the misogynist and white nationalist “alt-right” embraces it for a more dangerous purpose: to encourage fake news readers into harassing individuals and discouraging people from taking part in public life. The fake news ecosystem is broader than just lies; many of these lies are purposeful.The “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory proved this link. A fake news story emerged from the depths of the internet claiming that a D.C. pizzeria with ties to certain political figures was running an underground child sex-trafficking ring. It was patently untrue. And yet mainstream reports on the story, even great in-depth reportingfrom truly credible sources, treated the fake news as separate from the harassment that pizzerias across the country endured from believers of the bogus claims as they spread to include other restaurants.Harassment is a deeply entrenched aspect of the “alt-right” community. It came to prominence with Gamergate, and then there was a wretched, bigoted campaign against black actress Leslie Jones. “Alt-right” figure Milo Yiannopoulos has now taken his harassment tactics with him on a college tour. Another example is the recent smear campaign against satirist Vic Berger by “alt-right” figure Mike Cernovich. Cernovich is no stranger to such tactics, having bragged previously about his ability to game Google to get other outlets to pick up on his smears, spreading the lies to more false headlines and more viewers. Comedian and producer Tim Heidecker has also spoken out about abuse he has received, including death-threats, as a result of "alt-right" criticism.The New York Times’ John Herrman took special note of commenters on pro-Trump Facebook pages:Nearly every page operator I spoke to was astonished by the tone their commenters took, comparing them to things like torch-wielding mobs and sharks in a feeding frenzy. No doubt because of the [Make America Great] page’s name, some Trump supporters even mistake [operator Adam] Nicoloff’s page for an official organ of the campaign. Nicoloff says that he receives dozens of messages a day from Trump supporters, expecting or hoping to reach the man himself. Many, he says, are simply asking for money.It is not clear to what extent this vitriol on Facebook overlaps with the “alt-right” proper (to whatever extent there even is an “alt-right” proper). But Facebook crowd-sourced virulence is at least overtly reminiscent of what is seen from the “alt-right.”A particular hub for the “alt-right” is Reddit’s “r/The_Donald” subreddit. As Bryan Menegus explained for Gizmodo:Reddit’s The_Donald subreddit was founded a year ago as the premier online meeting place for Trump supporters. It has since sought to—in CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman’s words—“dominate the conversation” on the site. Its members spread coded hate speech, openly antagonize other Redditors, and break the site’s most basic rules with impunity while moderators feel the brunt of the abuse, and Reddit leadership fail to adequately address the problem.This is abuse, and it is abuse for a particular political purpose. Whether it is under the guise of news or commentary, the fabricated stories bouncing around r/The_Donald, often cloaked in shockingly venomous rhetoric, do not adhere to and cannot be judged by traditional journalistic standards. This type of fake news needs to be understood in tandem with its context and purpose. Some of it is just for profit. But other pieces are intended to serve as weaponized propaganda meant to inspire harassment or even worse.The “alt-right” movement has been equated to white supremacy and neo-Nazis. That is broadly accurate, but the reality is a bit more complicated. More often than not, the gateway drug for this movement is sexism -- "extreme misogyny evolving from male bonding gone haywire,” as Aja Romano put it for Vox. White nationalism and neo-Nazism often come later.This framework also explains why the “alt-right” tilts at so many cultural windmills. Whether with boycotts against Star Wars this year, or boycotts against Star Wars last year, or boycotts against Ghostbusters or Hamilton or other notable events that women and people of color are involved in, the intent of the “alt-right” is not necessarily to be successful in the short run: The protests are intended as a statement of white patriarchy. Anyone talking about the boycott is surreptitiously sharing the message of white, male-centric cultural identity.Jason Wilson perfectly characterized the misogyny and bigotry of the "alt-right" when describing Yiannopoulos and his tactics:Yiannopoulos and the alt right certainly shared a couple of traits. First, there was a willingness to dispense with the American right’s trusty dog whistle and offer frank views on race (all the while disparaging those conservatives who were more attuned to euphemism and conciliation as ‘cucks’). Second, they shared a desire to restore white masculinity to its position as the central, reigning political identity.In Eugene, [OH], Yiannopoulos endorsed Trump’s call to end Muslim immigration on the grounds that fundamentalists ‘want to kill people like me’ – a preview of the full-throated Islamophobic appeal that he and others made to the LGBT community after the Pulse nightclub shooting the next month.But the meat of his address was a repetition of a claim he has made repeatedly in his writings and on social media: that white men, especially the working class, are being oppressed with an elitist doctrine of political correctness.Referring to lesbians as ‘horrendous, quivering masses of horror’ and feminism as ‘cancer’, Yiannopoulos generally castigated the ‘awful, awful, terrible, diseased and damaged people lecturing and hectoring the working class’ – those he sees as the enforcers of ‘the oppressive hegemony of social justice’. The only solution, he said, is a Trump administration.Members of the "alt-right" don't just preach this hatred. They mobilize it. Jesse Singal examined the many similarities the “alt-right”/fake news ecosystem shares with cults, and the role misogyny plays in attracting new members:But it’s the alt-right concept of so-called red-pilling where this subculture appears more similar to “traditional” cults and extremist groups. Adapted from The Matrix, “taking the red pill” or “getting red-pilled” simply means seeing the world as it really is. In the online subcultures that gave rise to the alt-right, its most famous meaning is in reference to feminism: After you take the red pill, the scales fall from your eyes and you can see that feminism is really just an attempt to emasculate and bully men, to allow social-justice warriors to run rampant over masculine (and traditional) values and ideals in favor of a shrill and judgmental far-left radicalism. Recently, the definition has expanded a bit — these days, in an alt-right context “getting red-pilled” probably means something more like “understanding that progressivism is a lie and part of a large-scale effort to hurt you and people like you.” But the basic point is the same: This is the moment at which you start to see things as they really are.This is exactly the sort of transformative experience offered by cults and extremist movements: After this, things won’t ever be the same for you. After this, you will have a role to play in an important battle that will determine the fate of the world. Your life will take on an enhanced meaning.At its core, the “alt-right” is just a bunch of men who feel powerless and resent women because of it. That’s why Gamergate is so crucial to understanding the movement; it truly was a galvanizing political event for a fringe movement that far too many mainstream people had overlooked because they were not the ones being harassed.III. Historical PrecedentThe “alt-right” weaponizes fake news stories that others drum up to harass and abuse opponents. Its members attack women, people of color, and the poor -- and their allies and advocates -- from “Gamergate” to Leslie Jones, to “Pizzagate” and now to Vic Berger (also see Megyn Kelly below). Radio host Alex Jones ties the conspiracy theories together and gives everything a common language. Reddit allows the herd to self-organize and quickly pivot from one harassment campaign to another. The Drudge Report tries to push these things into the mainstream. And tying the whole enterprise together is Breitbart, which was up until recently run by Bannon, now President-elect Donald Trump’s chief strategist. Breitbart is now even admitting that it will take on any Republicans who try to hurt Trump, again neatly echoing oppressive regimes of the past. Meanwhile, Trump is deliberately trying to undermine the reliability of truth itself, in a hope to push as many people as possible toward this ecosystem.http://wwwwww.alternet.org/right-wing/white-nationalists-are-prepared-revolt-if-trump-runs-their-support =failure to supporthttp://wwwwww.alternet.org/human-rights/debunking-latest-breitbart-promoted-right-wing-racist-paranoid-buzzwordThe false claim that there is a genocide against white people is a key rallying cry used by organized white supremacists to justify racist violence targeting people of color, Muslims and Jews. With the rise of Donald Trump, who promptly appointed white nationalist Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, those forces will soon have a direct line to the White House.George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of international politics and decolonization at Philadelphia-based Drexel University, recently found himself at the center of a smear campaign for mocking the concept of white genocide. On December 24, Ciccariello-Maher posted a tweet stating, "all I want for Christmas is white genocide." He explained the tweet in a later statement: “For those who haven't bothered to do their research, ‘white genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I'm glad to have mocked it.”Ciccariello-Maher’s tweet and other social media commentary was soon reported by the white nationalist publication Breitbart, which ran an article by Warner Todd Huston referring to the scholar’s Twitter feed as “hateful” and “obnoxious.” The comments section of the article included at least one death threat against Ciccariello-Maher, as well as hateful messages targeting LGBTQ people and African Americans. The story quickly spread to Reddit and 4chan, and before long George Ciccariello-Maher had become became the target of a coordinated campaign to contact his employer, Drexel University. Ciccariello-Maher said he awoke Christmas morning to death threats targeting him and his family.But Drexel, instead of defending Ciccariello-Maher, appeared to be swayed by the pressure it received and publicly condemned his social media remarks as “utterly reprehensible” and “deeply disturbing.” The university’s statement did not include any mention of the white supremacist origins of the term Ciccariello-Maher was mocking—an omission that extended to numerous press outlets which covered the story.Scholars of fascism and the racist right told AlterNet such omission is dangerous in the era of Trump, with implications far beyond Ciccariello-Maher. “This phrase and its broad dissemination these days is helping shape what Trumpism is politically and also, by its very framing, is something that can authorize any kind of violence against people of color,” Joseph Lowndes, an associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon in Eugene, told AlterNet. “We should mock it, expose it and delegitimize it.”Term with a disgraceful history“Fears of the decline of the so-called white race have been around for a long time, with different iterations,” Lowndes said. “In the American context, it goes back to fears of slave revolts. You can see it in Thomas Jefferson’s notes, when he describes slavery as holding a ‘wolf by the ears.’ He claimed that once you let the wolf go, it will turn on you and devour you.”Such racist concepts were used as salvo against movements to abolish slavery. "In the 19th century, before the Civil War, you can look at how people who were anti-abolition were warning everyone about an impending genocide if slaves were liberated,” said Alexander Reid Ross, who teaches in the geography department at Portland State University and is the author of the forthcoming book, Against the Fascist Creep.In undated remarks published in a book of his writings and speeches, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison expressed his outrage at such baseless fear-mongering:...slate 2014BUDAPEST, Hungary—In the United States, nobody listens to Jared Taylor. Despite his Ivy League education and polite manners, few people working in politics take him seriously. That’s because he is a white supremacist, although he would prefer to be called a “racial realist.” When he tries to organize a meeting for his publication, American Renaissance, it is typically banned from hotels and conference rooms as soon as the proprietors find out about its racist mission. His ideas obviously hold little sway with established political parties or institutions. Which explains why Taylor traveled to Hungary last month to organize an international conference of white supremacists and anti-immigrant nationalists from more than 10 countries with the express purpose of making common cause with Europe’s own burgeoning far-right political movements. The conference was blandly dubbed “The Future of Europe.”Taylor and his fellow organizers, the Montana-based white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute, chose Hungary because of the rise of far-right nationalists in that country; they thought it might offer a hospitable environment for their assembly. In fact, it was the opposite. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a member of the leading conservative party who has been criticized for his increasingly authoritarian politics—banned the conference. While Orbán has support from Hungary’s far-right parties, he likely saw this move as an easy way to help position himself as a moderate conservative in the runup to local elections last month. Orbán even ordered police to arrest anyone trying to organize the event. William Regnery, the founder of the National Policy Institute (and heir to the conservative publishing powerhouse Regnery, home to best-sellers from Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, and Edward Klein, among others) was immediately sent back to the United States when he arrived at Budapest’s airport. Richard Spencer, the director of NPI, was arrested in a Budapest pub when he tried to organize a casual gathering of the conference’s attendees. The conference-goers already had been evicted from the hotel where their meeting was scheduled to take place. Spencer spent the next three days in a Budapest jail, which he didn’t seem to mind. He kept emailing fellow attendees and journalists from his prison cell. When I met Taylor in Budapest, he compared Spencer’s Budapest emails to Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham jail.”...trump huge boost: https://democracynow.org/2016/11/21/headlines/at_white_supremacist_meeting_nazi_salutes_heil_hitler_chants_and_celebrations_of_trumpIn Washington, D.C., hundreds of people protested outside of a white nationalist conference in which white supremacists and other members of the "alt-right" movement gathered to celebrate Donald Trump’s victory. The gathering was held at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. Inside, white supremacist Richard Spencer, a leader of the alt-right movement, recited Nazi propaganda in original German and said, "America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity." Multiple people performed the Nazi salute after his speech and chanted "Heil the people! Heil victory!" When asked by The New York Times about Donald Trump, Spencer said, "I do think we have a psychic connection, or you can say a deeper connection, with Donald Trump in a way that we simply do not have with most Republicans."https://kpfa.org/episode/rising-up-with-sonali-november-16-2016/chip berlethttps://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alternative-rightThe Alternative Right, commonly known as the Alt-Right, is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew “establishment” conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value.--The Alternative Right is a term coined in 2008 by Richard Bertrand Spencer, who heads the white nationalist think tank known as the National Policy Institute, to describe a loose set of far-right ideals centered on “white identity” and the preservation of “Western civilization.” In 2010, Spencer, who had done stints as an editor of The American Conservative and Taki’s Magazine, launched the Alternative Right blog, where he worked to refine the movement’s ideological tenets.Spencer describes the Alt Right as a big-tent ideology that blends the ideas of neo-reactionaries (NRx-ers), who advocate a return to an antiquated, pseudo-libertarian government that supports “traditional western civilization”; “archeofuturists,” those who advocate for a return to “traditional values” without jettisoning the advances of society and technology; human biodiversity adherents (HBDers) and “race realists,” people who generally adhere to “scientific racism”; and other extreme-right ideologies. Alt-Right adherents stridently reject egalitarianism and universalism.At the heart of the Alt-Right is a break with establishment conservatism that favors experimentation with the ideas of the French New Right; libertarian thought as exemplified by former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas); anarcho-capitalism, which advocates individual sovereignty and open markets in place of an organized state; Catholic traditionalism, which seeks a return to Roman Catholicism before the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council; and other ideologies. It is a reaction to the conservative establishment as exemplified by the nomination of Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964. According to Spencer, that solidified several aspects of contemporary conservatism, including an emphasis on liberty, freedom, free markets and capitalism. Spencer considers these ideas to be “anti-ideals” and says the Alt-Right is redefining categories for a new kind of conservative.Spencer describes Alt-Right adherents as younger people, often recent college graduates, who recognize the “uselessness of mainstream conservatism” in what he describes as a “hyper-racialized” world. So it’s no surprise that the movement in 2015 and 2016 concentrated on opposing immigration and the resettlement of Syrian refugees in America. Although such stances align with older forms of white racism, Spencer insists that the Alt-Right is “a liberation from a left-right dialectic.”The Alt-Right is intimately connected American Identitarianism, a version of an ideology popular in Europe that emphasizes cultural and racial homogeneity within different countries. One difference is that while European Identitarians indict the generation known as the “68ers,” a reference to the left of the 1960s, their American counterparts attack baby boomers, who are presumed to comprise the bulk of the current Republican Party’s base. But the movements on both continents are similar in accusing older conservatives for selling out their countries to foreigners.Spencer left his Alternative Right blog on Christmas Day 2013 in order to focus on the Radix Journal, an online journal published by the National Policy Institute that promotes the creation of a white ethno-state. Spencer’s abrupt departure, referred to as the “Christmas Day Purge,” left the blog to two fellow white nationalists, Colin Liddell of the United Kingdom and Andy Nowicki, a former college professor. The blog has struggled since then to stay relevant to the white nationalist movement.Although Spencer has positioned himself as the effective leader of the Alt-Right, other proponents include several well-known names on the far right, including Jared Taylor , editor of the American Renaissance racist journal; Greg Johnson of the publishing house Counter-Currents; Matthew Parrott and Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Youth Network; and Mike Enoch, who runs The Right Stuff blog. But the general population of the Alt-Right is composed, by and large, of anonymous youths who were exposed to the movement’s ideas through online message boards like 4chan and 8chan’s /pol/ and Internet platforms like Reddit and Twitter.The movement is not monolithic. The diversity of far-right ideologies that it includes has resulted in some disagreement with regard to Jews, and whether to blame them for the perceived plight of white culture—a belief that has undergirded many sectors of white nationalism for decades. While some Alt-Right leaders are unquestionably anti-Semitic, others, like Jared Taylor, are not, seeing Jews simply as white people. For his part, Spencer has repeatedly brought in anti-Semites to speak at his events.In March 2016, for instance, Spencer invited former California State University-Long Beach professor Kevin MacDonald, the author of a trilogy purporting to show that Jews seek to undermine the host Christian societies in which they often live, to speak at an event titled “Identity Politics.” After the event, Spencer stopped just short of questioning the Holocaust, telling a Huffington Post reporter that if it “really happened, then of course it wasn’t justified. If it happened differently than what the story we’ve been told [is], then I think that needs to be let out.”Social media have been instrumental to the growth of the Alt-Right. Legions of anonymous Twitter users have used the hashtag #AltRight to proliferate their ideas, sometimes successfully pushing them into the political mainstream.The best example of that is probably the term “cuckservative” — a combination of “cuckold” and “conservative,” coined to castigate Republican politicians who are seen as traitors to their people who are selling out conservatives with their support for globalism and certain liberal ideas. The phrase has a racist undertone, as some of its backers have suggested, implying that establishment conservatives are like white men who allow black men to sleep with their wives. It received widespread media attention, including, to the delight of Spencer and others, in The Washington Post.But the Alt-Right has taken on many more issues than that, including issues of high importance to white nationalists like the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the U.S. and Europe in 2015 and 2016, the Black Lives Matter movement and immigration reform. Propaganda campaigns also have been organized around hashtags such as #WhiteGenocide, a reference to the myth that white people are being subjected to an orchestrated eradication campaign; #ISaluteWhitePeople; #BoycottStarWarsVII, a racist campaign to protest the black actor who was cast in a lead role in the 2015 “Star Wars” reboot; and #NROrevolt, which arose after the National Review, a journal that has historically served as the gatekeeper to mainstream conservatism and has vehemently opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy for president.Trump is a hero to the Alt-Right. Through a series of semi-organized campaigns, Alt-Right activists applied the “cuckservative” slur to every major Republican primary candidate except Trump, who regularly rails against “political correctness,” Muslims, immigrants, Mexicans, Chinese and others. They have also worked hard to affix the Alt Right brand to Trump through the use of hashtags and memes.The movement is not limited to the Internet. At least twice a year, Spencer reserves the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., for a coat-and-tie gathering of his followers. The events are open to reporters but also cloaked in secrecy — attendees regularly use false names or refuse to identify themselves for fear of being labeled as racists. Topics and themes vary. The gathering in March 2015 was titled “Beyond Conservatism” and capitalized on the strength of the “cuckservative” meme. “Identity Politics” in March 2016 focused heavily on the continued success of Trump’s presidential campaign. Each of the speakers featured there addressed a different facet of Trump’s influence of politics and American culture. Kevin MacDonald classified Trump’s rise as part of an implicit white backlash against present-day politics, while Spencer declared that Trump was merely creating a political space, intentionally or not, in which the Alt-Right could grow.The Alt-Right also has a stable of publishing houses. Most notably, both NPI and Counter-Currents have publishing arms — NPI’s is Washington Summit Press — that focus on historical and contemporary extremists. They distribute the works of such well-known white nationalist writers as Alexander Dugin, Corneliu Codreanu, Guillaume Faye and Alain de Benoist, along with more contemporary authors like F. Roger Devlin, Andy Nowicki, Greg Johnson and Richard Spencer.In March 2016, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos wrote an article for the right-wing Breitbart news site that claimed that the Alt-Right was fundamentally about youthful provocation and subversion, rather than simply another “vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set,” a reference to an online forum run by a former Alabama Klan leader. Yiannopoulos, who was instrumental in the online harassment campaign against women in the electronic gaming world known as Gamergate, was not well received. Virtually every mainstream conservative publication, from the National Review to The Federalist, condemned it. And some on the furthest extremes of the Alt-right attacked him as a “Jewish homosexual,” in the words of Andrew Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, which Anglin describes as “The World’s Most Visited Alt-Right Web Site.” Anglin said Yiannopoulos had “a history of engaging in sneaky Jewish tricks” and added that “this is how they get you. Clearly, the man seeks to undermine right-wing movements for Jewish purposes.”That last attack, which came despite the fact that Yiannopoulos has been photographed wearing a necklace with the German Iron Cross symbol, illustrates the diversity of opinion within the Alt-Right world. But, at the end of the day, neo-Nazis like Anglin, coat-and-tie racists like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor, and oddball figures like Yiannopoulos have more in common, in terms of sharing a vision of society as fundamentally determined by race, than they disagree about.In their own words:“Martin Luther King Jr., a fraud and degenerate in his life, has become the symbol and cynosure of White Dispossession and the deconstruction of Occidental civilization. We must overcome!”—National Policy Institute column, January 2014“Immigration is a kind a proxy war—and maybe a last stand—for White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile.”—National Policy Institute column, February 2014“Since we are fighting for nothing less than the biological survival of our race, and since the vast bulk of Jews oppose us, we need to err on the side of caution and have no association with Jews whatsoever. Any genuine Jewish well-wishers will understand, since they know what their people are like better than we ever can. Saving our race is something that we will have to do ourselves alone.”—Greg Johnson, “White Nationalism & Jewish Nationalism,” August 2011“I oppose the Jewish diaspora in the United States and other white societies. I would like to see the white peoples of the world break the power of the Jewish diaspora and send the Jews to Israel, where they will have to learn how to be a normal nation.”—Greg Johnson, “White Nationalism & Jewish Nationalism,” August 2011“At the core of the JI [Jewish Identity] is a malevolent supremacy. This is the manifest in their rejection of outgroups who wish to participate and innovate traditional Jewish cultural activities. Why reject diversity and progress within your community if not a false feeling of ‘betterness’? The root of this problem is, of course, a sexual feeling of inferiority. Mighty psychosexual urges must not be downplayed within group dynamics. As a remedy to this, the JI must be infiltrated with foreign members to procreate with their men and women. That way, the deep psychological psychosis can be treated at the root.”—“A Critical Analysis of the Jewish Identity,” The Right Stuff, January 2016“The new left doctrine of racial struggle in favor of non-Whites only, a product of decolonization and the defeat of nationalists by egalitarians after WWII, must be repudiated and Whites must be allowed to take their own side in their affairs. A value system that says Whites are not allowed to have collective interests while literally every other identity group can do so and ought to do so is unacceptable.”—“The Fight for the Alt-Right: The Rising Tide of Ideological Autism Against Big-Tent Supremacy,” The Right Stuff, January 2016“This is our home and our kith and kin. Borders matter, identity matters, blood matters, libertarians and their capitalism can move to Somalia if they want to live without rules, in the West we must have standards and enforce them. The ‘freedom’ for other races to move freely into white nations is nonexistent. Stay in your own nations, we don’t want you here.”—Matthew Heimbach, “I Hate Freedom,” Traditionalist Youth Network, July 7, 2013“Those who promote miscegenation, usury, or any other forms of racial suicide should be sent to re-education centers, not tolerated.”—Matthew Heimbach, “I Hate Freedom,” Traditionalist Youth Network, July 7, 2013==Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 11, 1978) is an American white nationalist known for promoting white supremacistviews.[1][2][3][4] He is president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think-tank, and Washington Summit Publishers, an independent publishing firm. Spencer has stated that he rejects the description of white supremacist, and describes himself as an identitarian.Contents [hide] 1Early life2Career3Views4Personal life5See also6References7External linksEarly life[edit]Richard Spencer was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Dallas, Texas.[5] His father is an ophtalmologist while his mother erected a building in Whitefish, Montana.[5]Spencer graduated from St. Mark's School of Texas.[5] In 2001, he received a B.A. from the University of Virginia and, in 2003, an M.A. from the University of Chicago.[5]He was later a doctoral student at Duke University,[5] before leaving to pursue a career in journalism.[6]Career[edit]Spencer became an assistant editor at The American Conservative magazine in 2007; subsequently he was the executive editor of Taki's Magazine.[7] In 2010, he founded Alternative Right, a website that he edited until 2012. Spencer has been published at Right Now!, American Renaissance, VDARE, The Occidental Observer, and others.[citation needed]In 2012, Spencer founded Radix Journal[8] as a biannual publication of Washington Summit Publishers. Contributors have included Kevin B. MacDonald, Alex Kurtagic, Samuel T. Francis, and Derek Turner. He also hosts a weekly podcast, Vanguard Radio (a successor to AltRight Radio).[citation needed]Groups and events Spencer has spoken to include the Property and Freedom Society,[9] National Policy Institute,[10] and the HL Mencken Club.[11]Views[edit]According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Spencer advocates for a white homeland for a "dispossessed white race" and calls for "peaceful ethnic cleansing" to halt the "deconstruction" of European culture.[7][12][13]The Anti-Defamation League cited him in 2013 as "a leader in white supremacist circles", and says that since his time at The American Conservative, he has rejected conservatism, because according to Spencer, its adherents "can't or won't represent explicitly white interests".[14] In a 2016 interview for Time, Spencer said that he rejected white supremacy and slavery of nonwhites, preferring to establish a white ethnostate.[15]Greg Johnson, then-editor of The Occidental Quarterly, stressed how Spencer's concept of the "Alternative Right" was to collect a variety of perspectives that are outside the purview of the American Conservative movement:[16][Alternative Right] will attract the brightest 'young' conservatives and libertarians and expose them to far broader intellectual horizons, including race realism, White Nationalism, the European New Right, the Conservative Revolution, Traditionalism, neo-paganism, agrarianism, Third Positionism, anti-feminism, and right-wing anti-capitalists, ecologists, bioregionalists, and small-is-beautiful types.According to a 2010 article by Alex Knepper on FrumForum.com, Spencer is an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche.[17]Personal life[edit]Spencer resides in Whitefish, Montana.[5]See also