irony just kidding
aha-let: outrage requires constant stoking and/or amplification
on 4chan constant one-upmandship weenie wag (all talk until bluff called or someone just gets bored w/ talk and acts?!
NIHILISM?
recall beck and rush fallback when cross line (and imperil their incomes) is to retreat to i'm just a rodeo clown or entertainer, not a journalist; i do not have to abide by your (or prof'l) standards of truth
proud boy vince schtick: to nyr? jrnl, maybe i'll be beat you or, not not, or maybe will, just messing w/ ya (not in that order) bk
kind of no -lose: you clueless lib snowflakes are too dumb/fanatical to get the joke (it's an in-joke) OR: we are serious and will act on threat, see below on overton window aspect
FRANTIFA
https://franifio.substack.com/p/most-brain-rotted-presidency-ever
In this deep dive Francesca explores how Trump’s propaganda derives from the very bowels of the internet that Trump’s victories have pulled from: the gamers, the incels, the 4chan and 8chan white nationalists. These are the online communities with big mass shooter energy who hate women, people of color, and living in a society?
And actual mass shooters exhibit the same kinds of posting behavior as whoever is behind these unhinged DHS and White House posts.
So it’s no accident that Trump’s propaganda pulls from these same places in order to recruit sad dads to work for ICE. In order to do racist violence you should probably be a violent racist. You want armies of Nick Fuentes’.
And it’s extra funny that while being tough online, DHS claims *they* are the ones being targeted. It’s extra rich that FBI director Kash Patel claims he’s ‘going after nihilistic extremists who were radicalized online’. He should start by looking in the mirror.
...
2:37
there are memes. As the official White
2:40
House Twitter account posted in July,
2:42
nowhere in the Constitution does it say
2:44
we can't post banger memes with an image
2:46
of a poster that reads, "OMG did the
2:49
White House really post this." A cringy
2:52
wink and a nod to the liberal outrage
2:54
that MAGA lives on. And let's be fair,
2:57
they have to live on it because they
2:58
can't afford homes or health care food.
3:02
Thankfully, liberal tears are nutritious
3:04
and organic. You're welcome. And before
3:06
we get to the classic memes, we should
3:08
probably look at the vintage imagery
3:10
that this regime has been pumping out in
3:12
order to promote its reign of terror on
3:14
immigrants and try and recruit drunk
3:16
te-ball coaches into ICE. It hearkens
3:18
back to a very particular period of time
3:20
in the United States. Some deep cuts
3:22
when it comes to white nostalgia,
3:25
beginning with DHS sending out this
3:27
famous John Gas painting of a white
3:29
woman drifting west in what's often
3:32
studied as a stand-in for so-called
3:34
manifest destiny. the idea that it was
3:36
the destiny of American settlers to kill
3:38
indigenous people all the way to the
3:41
Pacific so that we could build
3:43
Bakersfield
3:45
in all of its glory. Native Americans
3:47
might have given us my ease, but
3:49
Bakersfield gave them corn. DHS tweeted
3:52
it with the line, "A heritage to be
3:54
proud of, a homeland worth defending."
3:56
Yeah, and guess what? That heritage
3:59
ain't Chuck. That's Applebee's
4:02
whiteness. something that must be
4:03
defended from those who want to build
4:05
white people's homes, raise white
4:07
people's children, and serve white
4:09
people their food. You know, a threat, I
4:12
guess. DHS also tweeted out paintings of
4:16
pioneer life with the line, "We are the
4:18
ones who create." We are the ones who
4:21
create. Where have I heard that before?
4:24
You can build nothing. You can produce
4:26
nothing. You can create nothing. We are
4:31
the ones who build. We are the ones who
4:33
create.
4:34
Oh, that's right. The gerbles
4:35
plagiarist. Look, Stephen. Building a
4:37
blanket spanket fort doesn't count as
4:40
building. This regime is going back.
4:42
Back to the prairie. Back to the hatred
4:44
of Native Americans. Back to the Oregon
4:46
Trail where you die of measles cuz your
4:49
mom believes Instagram posts instead of
4:51
scientists. DHS has also revived old
4:54
American propaganda from World War I of
4:56
Lady Colombia flying on an eagle while
4:58
leading a pack of war plananes with the
5:00
added words, "Join ICE." And a
5:03
bastardized New Deal cartoon with Uncle
5:05
Sam at a crossroads with the line,
5:07
"Which way American man?" Now, that
5:10
phrase might not mean much to you,
5:12
non-white nationalist, but it is a
5:14
reference to a book called Which Way
5:16
Western Man, written by a white
5:18
supremacist author, William Gayy
5:20
Simpson. In the book, Simpson says that
5:22
discrimination on the basis of race is
5:24
essential to any race or nation
5:26
survival. And yet here, our country is
5:29
dying and the only thing that's killing
5:31
it is the race of billionaires. In
5:33
response to the clear racist reference,
5:35
DHS spokesperson Trisha Mclofflin, the
5:37
junior pre- Mara Lago Christy Gnome,
5:40
said in a statement to Slate, "Calling
5:42
everything you dislike Nazi propaganda
5:44
is tiresome." And I kind of agree with
5:47
her. Like, this isn't Nazi propaganda.
5:50
It's American settler propaganda to
5:52
whitewash its genocide of Native
5:53
Americans, which what do you know
5:56
actually inspired Adolf Hitler and his
5:59
policies of expansionism and mass
6:02
murder. That's why Third Reich
6:04
propaganda that celebrates the German
6:05
non-Jewish family sort of looks like
6:08
this propaganda of white families
6:10
settling the West. And oh yeah, that was
6:13
tweeted by DHS with the line, "Remember
6:15
your homeland's heritage." Yes, remember
6:18
dying by snake bite cuz your mom said it
6:21
could be cured with a sound bath. Now
6:23
maybe that set of memes is for an older
6:25
generation, you know, to get excited
6:27
over ICE not having an age cap on
6:29
recruitment or as they put it, taking
6:31
father and son bonding to a whole new
6:34
level. Yeah, deal with your family
6:36
trauma, but traumatizing other families.
6:39
It's beautiful. But to get the youths,
6:42
MAGA has long tapped into pop culture
6:44
and internet memes. Trump's 2015
6:47
campaign was turbocharged by irony pill
6:49
alt-right subcultures of the internet
6:51
that lived on places like 4chan, 8chan,
6:53
and Reddit. Web traffic data from 2016
6:56
showed that 8chan was the ninth largest
6:58
source of referral traffic for Trump's
7:00
website, clocking in at about 2.3% of
7:02
all such traffic. This puts it just
7:05
below breitbart.com.
7:06
The campaign especially mobilized angry
7:09
gamers, which sensient liver spot Steve
7:12
Bannon understood. He called gamers
7:15
ruthless white males that can be
7:16
activated like an army. He said they
7:19
come in through Gamergate and then get
7:21
turned on to politics and then Trump.
7:23
Gamergate, remember, was the
7:24
misogynistic movement in 2014 against
7:26
female gamers. Okay. Memes were
7:28
laundered up from 4chan or 8chan through
7:30
Breitbart via Trump's former digital
7:32
media manager Brad Parcal to give us
7:35
Trump himself tweeting an image of him
7:37
as Pepe the Frog. Fun update. Parcal has
7:41
since taken his digital media skills to
7:43
a much different client, Israel. Oh,
7:46
he's a foreign agent now. But like, how
7:49
will he pivot his white nationalist
7:51
posts into Zionist posts? Let's answer
7:54
that question with a meme. They're the
7:57
same picture. Now, in 2025, the
7:59
administration is trying to convert the
8:00
kids that did the ice bucket challenge
8:02
into adult ICE agents. Adult is, I
...
15:59
Yes, they're doing a lot of talking
16:01
about it allegedly, while we are doing
16:03
the actual violence against people's
16:05
families. And those things are the same
16:08
if you huff enough glue. All because a
16:10
couple agents were doxed and communities
16:12
are defending themselves. Suddenly, ICE
16:14
is now the victim. DHS is now
16:16
objectively tweeting beta things like
16:18
the violence and dehumanization of these
16:20
men and women who are simply enforcing
16:22
the law must stop. To which user One
16:24
World Powerful replied, "We are the
16:26
storm. We are the reckoning. We are also
16:29
small beings, so please no bully." You
16:31
don't get to play Kairens with crocodile
16:33
tears while harming people. But again,
16:35
that is the behavior of fascism,
16:37
claiming victimhood to justify any and
16:40
all actions against an unarmed civilian
16:42
population. The hate memeing of this
16:44
administration's propaganda style is
reminiscent of the white supremacist
Nick Fuentes, someone who answers the
16:50
question, "What if a prepubescent
16:51
mustache started a podcast?" Nick began
16:54
his America First show after attending
16:56
the Unite the Right rally in
16:57
Charlottesville in 2017 and started what
17:00
he calls the Groper Army, a white
17:02
supremacist online cohort named after
17:05
this version of the Pepe meme. He very
17:07
much represents an ethos of [ __ ] posting
17:10
and saying things to get a rise out of
17:11
people, but also because he believes it.
17:14
Fuentes talks about the importance of
things like humor and memes in which to
couch bigotry so that one has plausible
deniability if they're ever called on
it.
17:23
Use irony because
you know when it comes to something like
Holocaust revision.
17:30
I mean this is a subject that you cannot
17:32
deviate from the popular consensus on.
17:35
But you also you also can't like I I
17:38
also think you really can't tell the
17:40
truth if you adhere to that. So, it's
17:43
sort of like getting in the middle. It's
17:44
being provocative. It's being I I can't
17:47
explain this in a very explicit way.
17:48
You're going to have to just sort of uh
17:50
get what I'm saying here. When it comes
17:52
to a lot of these issues, you need a
17:54
little bit of maneuverability that irony
17:57
gives you. Oh, well, you know, what does
18:00
that mean? Well, I was being ironic.
18:01
Well, I was joking. Well, it's whatever.
18:03
Well, you don't understand the tone.
18:04
Well, you don't understand huMOR. So,
18:05
when a viewer writes in with a coded
18:07
analogy to deny the Holocaust, Nick
18:09
jumps in, but then says, "I'm an irony
guy just to cover his ass." Max says,
"If I take 1 hour to cook a batch of
cookies, and Cookie Monster has 15
ovens, working 24 hours a day, every day
18:22
for 5 years, how long does it take
18:25
Cookie Monster to make six million
18:27
batches of cookies?"
18:29
I don't know. That's a good question.
18:32
Certainly. Uh Oh, no. No, it doesn't
18:36
really sound correct to me. Wait a
18:37
second. So, 6 million cookies. Uh-uh. I
18:40
don't buy it. That's all irony. I'm an
18:43
irony bro. That's all irony. I'm an
18:45
irony guy. That is actually how I open
18:47
every standup show when I know I'm about
18:49
to bomb my tits off. It works every
18:51
time. The irony defense. Trump Stooges
18:54
used to use it a lot back in his first
18:56
term. Remember, he's just joking.
18:58
The president was clearly joking with
19:00
his comments. But now that Steven Miller
19:02
is the shadow president, they know and
19:04
we know he is very much not joking cuz
19:08
he doesn't get jokes. That's why the
memes suck. In 2022, Nick famously got a
meeting with President Trump and Kanye
West. You know, the artist who is
19:17
currently putting out songs titled HEil
Hitler. Yeah. Speakers at Nick's America
19:21
First Conference have included
19:23
Representative Marjorie Taylor Green and
19:25
Representative Paul Gosar, who earned
19:27
his 8chan gamer cred when he tweeted a
19:29
video of himself as a Japanese manga
19:32
character killing Representative
19:34
Alexandria Kaziocortez. Gosar then
19:36
bragged that the video was made in house
19:39
and that the creativity of my team is
19:41
off the hook. Off the hook. It's amazing
19:45
that racist sneak in language
19:46
appropriated from people they hate.
19:48
That's fire, yo. and I know a thing or
19:50
two about fire. You should see me burn a
19:52
cross, son. Memes have actually been
19:55
vital to the recruitment of white
19:57
nationalists online. The neo-Nazi
19:59
website, The Daily Stormer, posts an
20:01
endless scroll of anti-Semitic memes
20:03
every Monday, calling it mEmeTic
Mondays. And while a lot of the violence
20:07
is in cartoon form, online hate has
20:09
translated more and more to realworld
20:12
violence. the Christ Church shooter who
20:14
killed 51 people in two mosques in 2019
20:17
and who said Trump was a symbol of
20:19
renewed white identity and common
20:20
purpose called on others to create
20:23
memes, post memes, and spread memes,
20:26
saying that memes have done more for the
20:28
ethnationalist movement than any
20:30
manifesto. The El Paso shooter, who was
20:33
inspired by the Christurch shooter,
20:34
posted the coordinates of his attack on
20:36
8chan before he killed 23 people. And
20:39
according to reporting by Robert Evans,
20:41
there was an obsession to beat the score
20:43
of how many people were killed in Christ
20:45
Church. He writes, "What we see here is
20:47
evidence of the only real innovation
20:49
8chan has brought to global terrorism,
20:51
the gamification of mass violence. We
20:53
see this not just in the references to
20:55
high scores, but in the very way the
20:57
Christurch shooting was carried out.
20:59
Brenton Tarant live streamed his
21:01
massacre from a helmet cam in a way that
21:03
made the shooting look almost exactly
21:05
like a firstp person shooter video game.
21:07
This was a conscious choice, as was his
21:09
decision to pick a soundtrack for the
21:11
spree that would entertain and inspire
21:13
his viewers. Fun. And now to inspire my
21:17
viewers, here is Chunk, a 12,200-lb
21:20
brown bear who just won Alaska's fat
21:22
bear contest. He has a broken jaw, but
21:25
he could still catch enough fish to
21:26
dethrone 128 Graaser, the female fat
21:29
bear title holder, two years in a row.
21:32
Girl, you should have watched the
21:33
throne. And more recently, acts of
21:35
violence don't always have a political
21:37
goal, but seem more like behaviors of
21:40
severely brained people who don't have a
21:42
specific worldview, but are just
21:45
posting, doing harm for harm's sake. The
21:48
Charlie Kirk shooter, who the FBI swears
21:50
is a hardened leftist, even though he is
21:53
a Mormon from a family of Republicans
21:54
and dressed as a Pepe meme for
21:56
Halloween, was described by one of his
21:58
former classmates as a Reddit kid. And
22:01
the best way I could describe him is
22:03
just like a Reddit kid. I don't know. I
22:06
feel like if you were in high school
22:08
around that same time and even probably
22:10
now, like 2018, and then like you know
22:13
those kinds of kids. But that's exactly
22:16
what he was. All I'm going to say is
22:18
this is the kind of [ __ ] that happens
22:20
when you spend way too much time online
22:22
and all of a sudden your beliefs are all
22:23
the way this way or all the way this way
22:25
and you do some dramatic [ __ ] to please
22:27
these people that are not your friends.
22:29
Yeah. The king of gropers who had
22:31
declared war on Charlie Kirk certainly
22:33
doesn't love his followers back. He'll
22:35
even disown them for acting on the
22:37
vitriol towards Kirk. I disavow you. I
22:40
disown you in the strongest possible
22:43
terms. I that is not what we are about.
22:47
Now I'm not saying Tyler Robinson was a
groper necessarily, but it is kind of
wild that Fuentes had to say all that. I
22:54
didn't have to say anything like that to
22:55
my audience. To my audience, I'd say
22:57
something like, "I know you love Greta,
23:00
but I just don't think you can pull off
23:02
the frog bucket hat." Robinson might
23:05
hold a bunch of different political
23:06
beliefs. What researchers call composite
violent extremists, where extremist
ideologies are blurring, and young
people with very salient personal
grievances are increasingly turning to a
salad bar of ideologies to explain their
anger and hopelessness. Okay, that's all
23:21
fine and good, but don't bring salad
bars into this. The cold hard-boiled
eggs aren't their fault, okay? They're
23:28
your nana's. She loves them. It's also
23:31
important to know that the Pepe meme
23:32
that Tyler dressed up as for Halloween
23:34
isn't so much left or right, but mostly
23:37
represents the alienation and
23:38
hopelessness of many terminally online
23:41
men, as Aiden, etc. explained on Tik
23:43
Tok.
23:44
But again, like many Pepe or Graper
23:46
memes, the core of this is is a lonely
23:48
male figure in sort of an emiserated
23:51
landscape looking sad. And that's part
23:53
of the story I wish more people were
23:54
talking about. What's driving our
23:56
political violence isn't just
polarization. It is that feeling which
these Pepe memes represent of you're
always going to be alone. You're never
going to have a future. And you're never
going to have a voice.
You're never going to have a voice
unless you join ICE where your boss is a
24:13
guy in a white suit with an eagle for a
24:15
head. You keep asking him how you're
...
description of being more alienated than
24:26
politically motivated also seems to
24:28
describe the recent ICE detention
24:30
facility shooter in Dallas who killed
24:32
two detained men, neither of whom had
24:34
criminal records and neither of whom
24:36
should have been detained in the first
place. According to his friends who
spoke with journalist Ken Clippenstein,
24:42
the shooter was an online edge lord. He
24:44
was most certainly an edge lord. An
24:46
irony guy, one friend said. Irony guy?
Where? Where have I heard that before?
24:51
I'm an irony bro.
24:52
Oh, right. One friend said he stopped
talking to him when he took his 4chan
irony stuff into daily interactions. He
was becoming unbearable. Once he dropped
out of college, he had no obligation to
25:03
be social and none of us reached out due
to his edge lord behavior. Yeah, usually
25:07
when you start sending noose memes to
25:09
the group chat, your friends probably
25:11
won't hit you up to go bowling. But it's
25:13
this very irony edgelord that this
25:16
regime's campaigns and propaganda
25:17
machine have targeted to come into its
25:19
ranks. They, like white nationalists,
25:22
prey on real feelings of hopelessness,
25:24
disenchantment with the two-party system
25:26
to the point of throwing down with a
25:27
dumbass strong man just to shake things
25:29
up. The very election of Donald Trump
25:32
was arguably the most cynical and
25:34
nihilistic thing our country has ever
25:36
done, next to the cinnamon challenge. Of
25:39
course,
25:46
why all of this makes it so rich that
25:49
Trump's FBI, under a guy who is
25:51
definitely not being honey trapped by
25:53
his girlfriend, claimed that they're
25:54
taking nihilistic violent extremism
25:56
seriously. Look, I'm not saying
25:58
nihilistic violent extremism isn't a
26:00
threat, which again, these ideologically
26:03
scattered joker-like acts of violence
26:04
are, but the fact that Trump's FBI will
26:07
take it seriously is giving big OJ going
26:10
to find the real killer vibes.
26:12
The simple answer, in my opinion, is
26:14
social media is wildly out of control
26:15
and there's too much clickbait in this
26:17
country. And one of the things I
26:18
highlighted at Congress in my testimony
26:20
last week was if we want to protect our
26:21
youth, we got to get more involved in
26:23
social media and online platforms
26:25
because that's where the folks, the
26:26
assassins of this world get radicalized.
26:28
That's where they're the lone afters in
26:30
general. And so we have to get after
26:32
that problem set. And I ask for
26:33
Congress's help in doing so. And because
26:35
this is a video about memes, let's just
26:37
answer that with this one. We're all
26:39
trying to find the guy who radicalized
26:41
young people online. We know the FBI
26:44
doesn't care about nihilistic
26:45
extremists. Instead, they're busy
26:47
hunting activists, trans people, and
26:49
this frog. That frog.
26:53
The cruelty of this administration and
26:55
its sociopathic lack of empathy towards
26:57
the families that ICE is destroying, and
26:59
the glee with which they celebrate any
27:02
outrage is truly reminiscent of the kind
27:04
of brain rot we've seen in mass
27:06
shooters. Their propaganda has mass
27:08
shooter energy. And that makes sense
27:11
since MAGA has capitalized on the very
27:13
dark humored online alienation of
27:15
Americans to get itself into power. We
27:18
don't yet know who the specific people
27:20
are behind DHS or the White House's
27:22
Twitter accounts. But in a way, it
27:24
doesn't matter because it really could
27:26
be any random 17-year-old who's angry at
27:29
the world and doesn't think he's ever
27:30
going to like that frog. And though at
27:33
the moment the AI seems to be
27:35
over-the-top and obviously fake, as the
27:37
technology advances and the regime's
27:39
minimal scruples fall away, we all know
27:42
Trump will only keep using AI in more
27:44
and more deceptive ways. And I don't
27:47
know the way out of all this, but it's
27:49
important to name it. If only we had a
27:52
government that actually took online
27:53
hate seriously instead of stoked it. If
27:56
only we had someone to save us, a a hero
27:59
of sorts, someone like
28:06
Gracias, Superbigote. Thank you so much
28:09
for watching the Bituation Rooms deep
28:11
dives. If you want to support this show
===
Take Trumpist threats to jail journalists seriously
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 09/23/24 mma
Last year, after I criticized the Republican political operative Mike Davis, he publicly declared that he had added me to a list he maintains of Americans he would imprison if he led the Justice Department. I am far from alone: The former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer has issued similar threats to several of my colleagues as well as journalists at other outlets.
When Davis is challenged about his openly fascistic musings, he retreats to claiming that his deranged threats are only trolling. But two disturbing reports last week show that if Davis is just kidding about punishing the press and other presumed Trump critics, portions of the MAGA movement — including Donald Trump himself — are not in on the joke.
Indeed, Davis’ psychotic behavior helped turn him into a MAGA favorite who gets floated for a high-ranking role in a second Trump administration — perhaps even attorney general. The former president’s most zealous supporters, who frequently call for politicized prosecutions against his foes, can’t get enough of Davis’ authoritarian diatribes.
It’s not just trolling: Trump is an authoritarian leading an authoritarian movement, and if he returns to the White House, he will again try to carry out his authoritarian impulses. And journalists, whom the former president often describes as the “enemy of the people,” will not be spared.
*A Mike Davis post from X/Twitter. Davis claims to have “five lists, ready to go,” if he becomes attorney general; List 2 is people he would indict and List 4 is people he would imprison in the “DC gulag” or Guantanamo Bay.
Davis told a Politico reporter he was trolling. Then MAGA thugs cornered the reporter.
In a profile of Davis published Friday, Politico reporter Adam Wren discussed being accosted by Trumpist goons while he was reporting from the Republican National Convention.
Wren’s piece chronicles how Davis’ star has risen within the MAGA movement due to his willingness to defend Trump in the wake of his indictments on state and federal changes. Wren particularly highlights Davis’ incendiary calls for retaliatory prosecutions if Trump is elected in November, such as his August 2023 statement that he would use a “three-week reign of terror” as attorney general to carry out his “five lists” of people to fire, indict, deport, imprison, and pardon.
But in interviews for the piece, Davis maintained to Wren that his statements about sending people like me to a “gulag” shouldn’t be taken literally. From the profile (emphasis in the original):
Davis will admit to being quite serious about much of what he says in the media, including wanting to dismantle the power of the federal government, an idea he has held onto since his Gingrich days. But he told me he is obviously joking about some of the more inflammatory promises — putting kids in cages and detaining journalists in a gulag. He later told me the sound bite was “a self-inflicted wound,” but also said he “didn’t want to back down from it.”
“It’s hilarious that it’s so easy to trigger these people. I’m obviously trolling them,” Davis told me of Democrats.
Davis’ allies are apparently not quite so sure.
Wren writes that when he accompanied Davis to a ninth-floor hotel bar frequented by the Trump family and their hangers-on during the Republican National Convention, he observed Davis being “greeted by Republican revelers like a caesar” — and overheard Donald Trump Jr. telling the GOP operative, “I want you to be my father’s attorney general for all four years.”
Then a woman “demanded” that Wren either delete his notes of that interaction or hand over his phone, “recruited four men to block the elevators” when he refused, and issued a not-terribly-veiled threat. Unable to access the elevators to leave the bar, Wren wrote that he fled down the stairs, pursued by two of the goons.
Wren further described the incident in an interview with The Bulwark:
Davis, Wren explained in his piece, subsequently “confronted the aide near the elevators and dressed her down” and told the reporter what happened was “fucking shocking.”
The Politico profile concludes with an adviser to Donald Trump Jr. telling Wren that the behavior he had experienced was unacceptable — and also that Don Jr.’s comments to Davis about serving as attorney general were merely “trolling.”
Donald Trump spent his White House years demanding — and receiving — probes of his enemies
In a lengthy investigation published over the weekend, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt reviewed the cases of 10 individuals who “faced federal pressure of one kind or another” following Trump’s “public or private demands for them to be targeted by the government” during his presidency.
Schmidt revealed:
- In the spring of 2018, Trump told White House counsel Donald McGahn “that he wanted to order” Attorney General Jeff Sessions “to prosecute” Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey, “and that if Mr. Sessions refused he would take matters into his own hands.”
- Lawyers in the White House counsel’s office subsequently authored a memo to the then-president which “made clear that Mr. Trump did not have the authority ‘to initiate an investigation or prosecution yourself or circumvent the attorney general by directing a different official to pursue a prosecution or investigation,’ as one draft memo put it.”
- Nonetheless, “within a month, Mr. Trump plunged ahead with one of his most successful efforts to have a Democratic critic investigated. He publicly demanded and ultimately got an inquiry by federal prosecutors into” former secretary of state John Kerry.
- “Through the rest of Mr. Trump’s time in office, he never let up on pressuring federal agencies to take action against his perceived enemies even as he was counseled against it by aides like Mr. McGahn and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff from the middle of 2017 until the beginning of 2019.”
- “In a few of the cases where Mr. Trump wanted investigations, there was legitimate basis for action. But in many others, there was little or no legal justification. None resulted in a criminal conviction.”
- “There is no record of the inquiries and other actions coming about as a result of a formal, signed order from Mr. Trump. Instead, he repeatedly signaled what he wanted, publicly and privately, leaving no doubt among subordinates.”
- “At least two other West Wing officials defied Mr. Trump’s repeated instructions not to take notes and wrote down accounts of Mr. Trump’s eruptions about using the federal government to target his perceived enemies. Those notes were taken from the White House as well to ensure there was documentation.”
Schmidt’s list of investigations Trump demanded into his foes is lengthy but by no means exhaustive. It mentions, for example, that “federal prosecutors and a special counsel examined nearly all the issues and conspiracy theories Mr. Trump raised about Mrs. Clinton, her campaign and the Clinton Foundation,” but it omits the ultimately fruitless two-year review of her role as secretary of state in the sale of the company known as Uranium One that he had sought.
Nor does it reference every instance in which Trump sought government retaliation against his critics. Schmidt’s list notes that “the Justice Department obtained phone and email records for reporters for CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times” as part of leak investigations, but it does not detail Trump’s efforts to use federal regulatory powers to punish news outlets.
Nevertheless, it shows quite clearly that Trump’s impulse to prosecute his political foes found few restraints during his presidency — and could be even more dangerous in a second term.
The staffing plans developed under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are intended to empower loyalists while keeping out people like McGahn, who reportedly tried to prevent Trump from exercising his whims. Meanwhile, presidential efforts to pressure Justice Department officials to take action were specifically rendered immune from federal prosecution thanks to the radical doctrine the Supreme Court enshrined over the summer in Trump v. United States.
Trump, for his part, continues to regularly accuse his political opponents of crimes. That has critics worried he would once again urge the Justice Department to initiate investigations if he returned to office. But Trump’s supporters say such claims are overwrought. “His defenders often seek to explain away Mr. Trump’s threats to take legal action against opponents as campaign trail bluster,” Schmidt wrote.
In other words, they’re claiming that Trump is just trolling.
Related
11/10/23 11:39 AM EST
02/29/24 11:08 AM EST
11/30/23
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no lnx
https://apps.publicintegrity.org/united-states-of-petroleum/fueling-dissent/
‘A lot like climate’
In June, two peer-reviewed studies trumpeted a conclusion at odds with years of solid science: fine-particle pollution long linked to premature death and chronic illness isn’t as dangerous as health advocates contend. If true, the findings would call into question health benefits claimed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has set ever-tightening air-quality standards.
There was a catch, however. The articles — which were published within a week of one another — appeared in Critical Reviews in Toxicology and Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, two journals favored by industry consultants alleged to promote pay-for-play science. And both studies were funded by API, a trade group that has spent $40 million since 2013 to lobby Congress on topics ranging from taxes to global warming.[twitter]
“Our study is published...air quality does not kill. $600 million of EPA junk science up in smoke,” climate-change skeptic and Donald Trump acolyte Steve Milloy tweeted in June, linking to the Regulatory Toxicology article. During a congressional luncheon a month later, the former coal executive took credit for conceiving the study before turning it over to friend, S. Stanley Young, and two other statisticians, who authored the final article. No mention of Milloy’s involvement is made in the publication.
Read more about how Big Oil is trying to sow skepticism of science among judges ]
Some of the same data were used in the Critical Reviews article published by Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox Jr., which also disputed the link between fine particles and mortality. Cox, a biostatistician from Colorado, started consulting for API in 1988. Cox disclosed that his paper “benefitted from close proofreading and copy-editing suggestions from API” but denied in an interview that his findings were influenced. In November, he was named the next chair of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, drawing criticism from groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The science on particle pollution, much like the science on global warming, is exhaustive and widely accepted, with thousands of studies pointing to serious health implications. The World Health Organization notes that particulate matter “affects more people than any other pollutant,” with effects observed at even “very low concentrations.” The particles — found in automotive and industrial exhaust and smaller than one-fifth of the width of a strand of hair — form a toxic mix with ozone that lodges deep in the lungs. Unlike Cox, most researchers are no longer fixated on whether this form of pollution is fundamentally dangerous; they worry instead about whether it can cause — not just exacerbate — chronic illness.
Attacking the science is one way of undermining the Clean Air Act, said John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which advocates for more protective air-quality standards. The Clean Air Act is routinely hailed as one of the most cost-effective federal laws, even by business groups. In 2015, the EPA estimated that the law will have saved the U.S. economy $2 trillion by 2020 while costing $65 billion to implement. About 85 percent of the act’s benefits come from reducing fine-particle pollution, which raises the risk of early death. Opponents of the law “deny that air pollution is deadly … or even harmful in order to try to pretend that no benefits are delivered,” Walke said.
Steve Milloy
milloy’s July luncheon at the Rayburn House Office Building — billed as a “congressional staff and media briefing” — was little more than a plug for his latest book, “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA,” which condemns the “echo chamber of deceptive science” on ozone and fine particles. The event was hosted by Myron Ebell, who chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, a climate-skeptics’ group that began as an alliance of free-market think tanks. “It’s a lot like climate,” Milloy told the audience. “This stuff is pulled out of thin air.”
“It’s a lot like climate... This stuff is pulled out of thin air.”
Reached for comment, Milloy said the study is not an attack on the Clean Air Act but part of his 20-year effort to expose the EPA’s “garbage-in, garbage-out” air pollution research. He denied having any formal ties to API. “I am very, very disappointed in the American Petroleum Institute and all the oil companies for not defending their products, for leaving the science to people like me,” he said.
Young, who authored the study, stood behind its findings and disputed the idea that industry funding presents ethical conflicts. His study data are publicly available, he said, but the EPA isn’t as transparent. Ebell agreed, accusing the agency of using “junk science” to justify air-quality and greenhouse-gas regulation.
Despite their misgivings about the EPA, all three men have become tethered to the agency. Earlier this year, Ebell oversaw the EPA transition for Trump, leading a group that included Milloy. Young was named to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board in October.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., co-founder of the Senate Climate Action Task Force, complained that such appointments have become all too common. “These people were fringe fanatics and industry stooges fighting on behalf of the industry a propaganda war against science,” he said.
Milloy and Ebell were listed among the authors of a $2 million plan to amplify uncertainty in climate science — as revealed in a 1998 API memo leaked to The New York Times. Both say the memo grew out of an API brainstorming session that never resulted in concrete action, with Milloy calling it “just a big joke.”
Years before, API had refuted the very concept of global warming under President Charles DiBona, who joined the institute shortly after a stint as energy policy advisor to Richard Nixon in the 1970s. White House communications show that DiBona regularly met with then-API President Frank Ikard, a close friend of Nixon’s, before becoming Ikard’s deputy in 1974....
an 12 21
...Bombarded with criticism for his childish stunt, the 35-year-old Schmeck told the Oregonian, “Now, I am being attacked for utilizing my freedom of speech.”And Obeidallah slams Schmeck for painting himself as a victim.
“Schmeck is now doing the cliché conservative move of saying he's being unfairly criticized because people have slammed his ‘joke’…. Aww, poor ‘victim’ Schmeck,” Obeidallah argues. “Apparently, he thinks he should be able to tell Biden to basically go f**k himself while on a family-friendly holiday call,but no one should be able to take issue with his actions. Sorry, that's not how freedom of speech works.”
Obeidallah continues, “If you want to troll a president to apparently make others on the right happy, you can expect criticism. If you don't want criticism because you are painfully thin-skinned, then don't say ‘Let's go, Brandon’ on a live Christmas Eve special. It's as simple as that.”...
an 11 21
After the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on Friday afternoon, right-wing trolls — many of whom are elected members of Congress — were ecstatic at this prime opportunity to trigger the liberals.Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Madison Cawthorne of North Carolina, and Paul Gosar of Arizona — all Republicans more interested in trolling than governance — made showily public offers of an internship to Rittenhouse. Cawthorne even took it to the next level, instructing his supporters to "be armed and dangerous."
Never one to be out-trolled, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia let loose with some truly unhinged tweets about "radical Marxists" who are trying to start "a race war," proclaiming that "gun rights are the only thing holding back the Communist Revolution the Democrats are waging." And on the Senate side, Ted Cruz of Texas attacked the "corrupt corporate media," skillfully targeting the very people he needs to amplify his message and get that sweet trolling attention.
Right-wing pundits joined in on all the gleeful trolling, as well.
Ann Coulter tweeted a meme equating Rittenhouse with superheroes, and Donald Trump Jr., forever trying and failing at being a Twitter wit, wrote, "The Rittenhouse jury just gave Biden his second colonoscopy of the day." Multiple right-wingers on social media wrote songs to honor Rittenhouse. On Friday, popular and t**rollish YouTuber Steven Crowder**celebrated the verdict by insisting, "it's so wrong that we teach young men that violence is immoral," and encouraged viewers to follow in Rittenhouse's lead by taking up arms against Black Lives Matter protesters. Tucker Carlson, King of the Trolls, will host Rittenhouse on his Fox News show and insisted that he's "not a racist person." This claim is impossible, of course, to square with the photos taken earlier this year in a Wisconsin bar where Rittenhouse partied with Proud Boys and flashed white supremacist signs at the camera.
All of these provocations worked as intended: They got attention and garnered liberal outrage. "Liberal tears" are the most valuable commodity in Republican circles these days, and nothing brings forth tears like senseless violence. For those who subsist on liberal outrage, the dunks were easy and plentiful, because it turns out those silly liberals really do make frowny faces over the celebration of political violence.
The right is reacting to this verdict like they're sports fans whose team just vanquished a rival team in the Superbowl. The excitement on the right was palpable, but also measurable. As an analysis from Raw Story shows, Facebook exploded with conservative celebrations of the verdict, with "18 of the top 20 most engaged page links in the world" originating with conservative American pages. And the pleasure of the moment was explicitly tied to joy over how upset liberals — or at least those perceived as liberals — were. Right-wing figurehead Dan Bongino, who is reliably one of the most popular figures on Facebook, posted a link claiming Chuck Todd "nearly cries" after the verdict. The post garnered over 3,000 shares and 68,000 reactions, the majority of which were the "laughing" emoji.
It's not just that this behavior is tasteless. It also illustrates how violence is the logical endpoint of the right-wing obsession with trolling liberals. If your goal is provoking a reaction, then violence is surely the most efficient way to do it. Unlike mean tweets and "f*ck your feelings" T-shirts, violence simply cannot be ignored. By celebrating this violence, congressional Republicans and right-wing media are openly inviting more of it, because the reward of upsetting people on the left is just so delicious. The distinction between right-wing trolling and violence is collapsing.
To be certain, the escalation of violence-as-trolling has been going on for a while now. As Eric Boehler wrote in his Press Run newsletter, "The flashpoints of Republicans and conservatives promoting political violence have become ceaseless, to the point of frightening normalization," to the point where polling data suggests "that as many as 21 million Americans think that the use of force is justifiedto restore Donald Trump to the presidency."
Much of the month has been dominated by a story about Gosar tweeting out a fan-made video that depicts him murdering President Joe Biden and Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The Democratic-controlled House responded to this unsubtle threat by censuring Gosar and stripping him of his committee assignments, but nearly all Republicans stood by Gosar. The excuse used to defend Gosar's behavior was that he was just trolling liberals for fun. Gosar's digital director even put out a statement saying, "Everyone needs to relax. The left doesn't get meme culture. They have no joy."
However, right-wing "joy" is not mutually exclusive from violence.
Gosar's tweet wasboth trolling to get a reaction from the left and a threat of violence. Trolling is a crucial aspect to both amplifying violent threats and helping conservatives hype each other up for more violence. That's why Gosar doubled down by retweeting the video minutes after being censured for it. The message is clear: If you love outraging the left, then violence is the swiftest way to do it.
Even Rittenhouse's behavior prior to killing two people at a Kenosha, Wisconsin protest last year embodies this troll logic. As Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times observed, Rittenhouse's presence at the protest was clearly a provocation. Rittenhouse carried a showy AR-15 "in part because the rifle "looked cool," and the gun "seemed to invite conflict." Popular right-wing troll Drew Hernandez was at the protest that night, an
that, when some protesters saw Rittenhouse and other men with guns, "they immediately attempted to agitate them, to try and start some conflict with them."
In other words, Rittenhouse's AR-15 functioned both as a troll and as a deadly weapon. The distinction between trying to "trigger the liberals" and actually pulling the trigger on liberals collapsed completely the night Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two. He certainly got what every right-wing troll wants, which is an outraged and dramatic reaction from people he perceived as liberals. The result was two dead bodies — and another opportunity for GOP leaders to troll some more, further reinforcing the idea that, for those who live for triggering the liberals, nothing works better to get a reaction than actual violence.
bizinsider, why back off?
Trump has also expressed the desire to ramp up the fossil-fuel production and re-start the Keystone pipeline process; both decisions that would be detrimental to the environment.
At the first presidential debate last September, Clinton brought up his wild claims about climate change.
This is how the exchange went down:
CLINTON: Some country is going to be the clean- energy superpower of the 21st century. Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it's real.
:{
}:
TRUMP: I did not. I did not. I do not say that.
CLINTON: I think science is real.
TRUMP: I do not say that.
Trump has since backed away from what he said, calling his words a "joke" and has even denied saying these things altogether. However, over the years Trump hasn't shied away from his skepticism about climate change, and he has referred to it as a hoax many times. A lot of these claims are on his Twitter feed.
This tweet is from January 2014.
—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2014
"NBC News just called it the great freeze — coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?"
A few days later.
—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2014
"Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!"
—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2014
"Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air — not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense."
Last January he told Fox & Friends that climate change was merely a very expensive form of tax.
"A lot of people are making a lot of money. I know much about climate change. I'd be — received environmental awards. And I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China," he said. "Obviously, I joke. But this is done for the benefit of China, because China does not do anything to help climate change. They burn everything you could burn; they couldn't care less. They have very — you know, their standards are nothing. But they — in the meantime, they can undercut us on price. So it's very hard on our business."
In a speech on energy policy in North Dakota last May, Trump referred to "draconian climate rules" and attacked "all the job-destroying Obama executive actions, including the Climate Action Plan."
"President Obama entered the United States into the Paris Climate Accords unilaterally and without the permission of Congress," he said. "This agreement gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use right here in America."
The fact that the new president of the US has repeatedly disagreed with the science is concerning, not just for the future of climate science, but for everyone that lives on earth. The USA is the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide, so if Trump makes decisions to make the situation even worse, we could all suffer.
NZ livestream // call of duty?!
http://www.thewaroneveryone.com/
at end sez most surprise was jnx xian ID?
Chapter 1: The Eternal Fascist
There is nothing new under the sun. In this chapter, you’ll learn about “Ur-Fascism”, and how humor and irony have historically been used to enable its rise.
The War on Everyone (52pp)
By Robert Evans
Transcribed by Grateful Members of the Behind the Bastards Community
Chapter 1: The Eternal Fascist
On November 9 and 10, 1938 Nazi stormtroopers and party members took to the streets of cities throughout Germany. They burned synagogues, shattered the windows of Jewish owned buildings, beat and murdered hundreds upon hundreds of Jewish people in the streets. This bloody pogrom is known to history as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. It’s one of those moments in history so shocking and brutal that it’s become stained into our collective consciousness, a single moment of horror forever printed on the human psyche.
Adolph Hitler and the other members of Nazi high command considered Kristallnacht to be failure. Rather than being enthused by the violence, the German people were horrified by this outpouring of brutality. World media harshly condemned Hitler’s regime, and from their plush offices in Berlin, the Fuhrer and his inner circle began to revise their plans for how to sell anti-Semitic brutality to De Volk.
Joseph Goebbels decided that film was the right medium to help crack this nut, his efforts culminated in the 1940 production, The Eternal Jew. The essential through line of this particularly vile piece of propaganda was the idea that Jewish people were an age-old parasitic force, leeching off their host nations and almost habitually working to undermine and destabilize them.
As with most pieces of vile, racist propaganda, The Eternal Jew reveals more about the men who made it than it does about Judaism. There is no eternal Jew. But there might be an eternal fascist.
Umberto Eco was probably the first person to really grasp this idea and try to define it in a scholarly way. His 1995 essay Ur-Fascism is still one of the single finest pieces of writing on the subject. Eco was an Italian novelist, a literary critic and a professor. He was born into fascist Italy. In 1942, at the age of 10, he won an award in the provincial competition for young fascists where he gave an elaborately positive answer to the question “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?”
Eco came to hate fascism slightly later in life, and he came to also love the partisans and rebels who fought back against Benito Mussolini’s regime. As he grew older and began to analyze his world, and the history behind the war that had torn apart his childhood, Eco found himself drawn again and again to the question: What is a fascist?
That’s not an easy question to answer. Most dictionary definitions you will find for the word fascism leave rather a lot to be desired. Here’s Merriam-Webster’s definition: “A political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts the nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” Now, that definition seems decent enough on its surface, but you could apply the bulk of it to the USSR, or Mao’s China, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for that matter. Now, that may not seem like a problem to you. After all, Hitler and Mao and Stalin and Saddam were all pieces of shit dictators who did horrible things to their people. But there is a reason Fascism is more than just a system that brings about dictators. Fascism arises out of, and murders, vibrant democracies. As such, it only comes to power with the enthusiastic consent of the people. Umberto Eco understood the singular nature of fascism. He also understood that when it reappeared in the future it would come in different guises than the ones that had popped up all around Europe in the 1920s and 30s. He wrote: “I think that it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or eternal fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system. Many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
Eco’s concept of eternal fascism started with a cult of tradition.The belief that “Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.” Whether you’re looking at Nazis and their concept of the Aryan civilization or you’re looking at modern American fascism and this idea that there was a point in which America was great and perfect that we need to get back to.
Now, you might translate this to conservatism, which doesn’t mean that conservatives are all fascists, just that fascism gestates within conservative movements.
Next, according to Eco, is a rejection of modernism, particularly a rejection of modern depravity. As traditionally marginalized and oppressed groups stand up for their human rights in modern societies, fascists inevitably seek to reverse these trends. The first books the Nazis burned were Magnus Hirschfield’s library of research on transgender individuals. Hatred of trans men and women is still a central unifying tenant of modern fascists. Then there is the cult of action for action’s sake, expressed as a worship of the soldier, of the man with a gun in his hand, willing to do violence at a moment’s notice. For fascists, according to Eco, thinking is a form of emasculation.
Eco also recognized a rejection of criticism and disagreement as central aspects to fascism. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.” He wrote.
It’s worth noting that 8chan’s /pol/ board, one of the largest gathering places for neo-Nazis on the internet, the community that spawned both the Christchurch massacre and the Poway synagogue shooting was formed as a direct result of Gamer Gate. Gamer Gate was a reactionary movement inspired by rage at female video game reviewers who had started to critique what they saw as artistic shortcomings of popular video games. Before too long, gamer-gaters took to harassing and threatening to murder these video game reviewers, which got them off of 4chan and sent them scurrying to 8chan. Once again, Eco hit the nail on the head.
Racism and hatred of diversity, exploitation of the natural fear of differences, these are the other characteristics of Ur-Fascism. Eco recognized it as derived from social frustration, generally rising out of an “appeal to a frustrated middle class. A class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.” Ur-fascism promises its followers a social identity, in the kind of false equality that comes from belonging to a nation and a people that are set above all the other nations and peoples of this earth.
Fascism of course requires an absolute rejection of pacifism. Life is lived for struggle, war is permanent. We see this translated in our modern fascist movements in an obsession with the tools and aesthetics of war. Black and camo and tactical everything. Earlier on the day I wrote this, I was browsing Twitter and I came across a post of someone’s bug-out bag. He wrote in the Twitter post, “How’s this for a bug-out Boogaloo setup?” if you aren’t aware, Boogaloo is a far right term for the civil war that many in that corner of the populace believe is coming, as in Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo. This guy’s emergency preparedness kit contained no food, no water, no medical supplies. His gas mask had no actual filters, and seemed to be only for aesthetics. But he did have an AR-15 rifle, a 12 gauge shotgun, a Glock sidearm with a 30 round magazine and a .44 magnum revolver, along with a tomahawk, a throwing knife, and stylish green body armor the exact same shade as his tactical backpack.
Seeing this post brought to mind what Eco wrote about the fascist Armageddon complex. “Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a final solution implies a further era of peace, a golden age which contradicts the principle of permanent war.” No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
Umberto Eco goes on to name contempt for the weak, the cult of the hero, machismo and a sense of contempt for women and femininity, as other key aspects of incipient fascism. For a fascist movement to evolve, a number of these things must coalesce together, generally around the personality of a single charismatic man with dreams of power. This man will of course never admit to desiring power. Instead he claims to speak for some broad mass of the population. A claimed majority that stands behind him and his movement. Eco called this “qualitative populism”, and noted that in the modern era, “We no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome, or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or internet populism in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the voice of the people.”
Umberto Eco was not wrong, but he did miss something, and since y’all are listening to my audiobook, I hope you’ll forgive my arrogance in adding one new element of fascism to Eco’s list.
Fascism often wraps itself in irony humor as a way to disguise its true intentions as black comedy and test the waters for its most extreme goals. If you’re someone who’s paid attention to the rise of fascism on the internet, if you’ve followed my work on 8chan or read much about the alt-right, you understand what I’m getting at, but you probably view this as a rather new wrinkle in the history of fascism. The truth is that it goes all the way back to the beginning.
If you want a picture the personality of the Fuhrer, what he was like on a day to day basis with the people he liked and trusted, Hitler’s table talk is about the best resource that exists. Starting in 1941, Martin Boreman, Hitler’s secretary, convinced his boss to allow a series of aides to transcribe his private conversations for posterity.
Some of these were the traditional Hitler ranting monologues you’d expect, others were just, y’know, chats between courses at dinners and the like. There’s a lot of debate as to how truly off the cuff any of these were, but Hitler’s table talk is generally regarded as an incredibly useful resource for understanding the minds of the top Nazis. In his 1998 book, “Explaining Hitler”, journalist and historian Ron Rosenbaum turned to the table talk records several times in his attempt to understand, in essence, how bouncing baby Adolph turned into the genocidal warlord we all know and hate. He focuses on one passage in particular. “The passage in which Hitler, Himmler, and Heidrich are ostentatiously debunking the rumor, that they know to be true, that the Jews are being exterminated. ‘It’s silly that people should say such things, Hitler piously avers, when we’re only parking the Jews in the marshy parts of Russia’. Although he adds that if it were true, it would be no less than the Jews deserved. It seems to me a transparent charade in which the three architects of the Final Solution were becoming the first Holocaust deniers. The first revisionists, so to speak, and doing so in a particularly repulsive winking and nodding way.”
Rosenbaum brought his theory to another scholar, a fellow named Lange, who agreed that this was probably evidence of Hitler company concealing their crimes via humor. Both to keep explicit discussion out of the historical record, and so that those in the know could laughingly revel in their crapulence. Lange said “the inventiveness seems to me in some ways really to come to the heart of the matter, even though its subtler than the brutality. Primo Levy used the phrase Needless Violence, which is not quite what I’m saying. It’s the element of gratuitousness, but it’s more than the gratuitousness, there seems to be this imaginative protraction, elaboration that one finds best exemplified in art forms in which in art we usually take to be indicative of a consciousness, an artistic consciousness of an overall design.”
For Nazis and their modern descendants, shittiness is a form of art. It’s never enough to gain power, or even to hurt or kill your rivals. These people’s ultimate goal is to shift the nature of reality itself to be further in line with their own narcissistic beliefs. Irony is a powerful tool to achieving that. Lange goes on, “Brutality is straightforward. It’s not imaginative. This isn’t just brute strength, it seems to me that there’s a sense of irony constantly. The sign over the entrance gate to Auschwitz you know “Arbeit macht frei”—work will make you free. It’s like a joke, it is a joke. The orchestra playing as these people go out to work.”
Hitler’s sense of humor is not something we talk about much. But perhaps we should. Ironic humor was used regularly by the incipient Fuhrer during his rise to power.In August of 1920 in one of his earlier speeches, Hitler told an audience that he supported “removal of the Jews from our nation, not because we would begrudge them their existence, we congratulate the rest of the world on their company.” This line was met with widespread laughter. “But because the existence of our own nation is a thousand times more important than that of an alien race”. Lucy Davidowitz, the Holocaust scholar who brought that speech to Rosenbaum’s attention believed that the joke and the thing that Hitler’s audience was laughing at was not the line “We congratulate the rest of the whole world on their company,” but the earlier line “We do not begrudge them their existence.” I’m going to quote again from “Explaining Hitler”, “This, Davidowitz suggests, is an inside joke for party members who know the secret meaning. That in fact, they do begrudge, they are dedicated to eradicating the Jews’ existence.” Now reading that quote brings to mind a post I found on 8chan’s /pol/ board, during one of my regular sessions browsing that image board in between the mass shootings carried out by its members. In one thread I found anons discussing the value of comedic memes about mass killing as a way to camouflage their very real efforts to inspire more massacres. One user typed, “The best thing about this is that they will never be able to discern an ironic, tongue-in-cheek frog poster from a man of action like Terrent or Bowers. We have all the plausible deniability in the world and unless they’re going to start locking people up for shitposting, we have nothing to fear.”
In the decades since Adolph Hitler shot himself in his bunker, ironic racist humor has been one of the through lines connecting every Nazi and fascist movement that’s arisen around the world. George Lincoln Rockwell, the founding father of American Nazism, had his minions dress up in racist gorilla costumes to interrupt events and distract attention from civil rights activists. The main weakness of Rockwell’s humor is that it was far too overt and hateful to be viewed as ironic by most Americans. But down through the years, his descendants have become much better at straddling the fine line between dog-whistling to people in the know and maintaining plausible deniability. One good example would be Count Dankula, a failed UK political candidate who first achieved notoriety for a video in which he trained his dog to Sieg Heil. When he was fined for this, he was able to frame himself as a free speech crusader and raise thousands of dollars while claiming to fight back against political correctness. There is tremendous power within humor. It's why satirists and comedians are some of the first people purged by a dictatorial regime. It’s why nothing is more important to fascists than to powerful and serious. Getting hit by a milkshake is worse for a Nazi than getting hit by a brick. Blood looks cool, milkshakes look like milkshakes. But humor also has an incredible ability to act as a sort of ideological Trojan Horse, allowing ideas to sneak into someone’s mind, cloaked as jokes. Actual fascists know this—it’s why the Nazis on 8chan spend so much time crafting memes to spread their ideas. But this process can take place even within the head of an individual fascist.
......
https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/proud-boys/
Right-wing extremists have long fled behind humor and irony to escape consequences for their hateful ideology, and that allowed some of them to hide in plain sight before Donald Trump's supporters tried to violently overturn his election loss.
They've never made any secret of their efforts to use humor and irony as both a weapon and defense, and those tools also allow them to sell what might otherwise be considered toxic to potential converts, reported NPR.
"Irony is so important for giving a lot of cover and plausible deniability for our views," said 22-year-old extremist Nick Fuentes in a video from last year.
Fuentes specifically mentioned Holocaust denial -- or "revision," as he puts it -- as a topic he smuggles into conversations under the cover of irony, and he recently went on an extended violent and misogynistic rant about domestic abuse that he punctuated with a smirk toward the camera.
"Just kidding!" he told viewers, after urging a viewer to violently "punish" his wife. "No, I'm kidding, of course. Just kidding. Just a joke."
Weaponized irony allows extremists like Christian Secor, a Fuentes fan who was charged in the Capitol riot, to skirt past consequences after his UCLA classmates grew increasingly worried about his glorification of guns, racist and anti-Semitic social media posts and other bigoted behavior, which he insisted was just "trolling" whenever he was called to account.
"It's called a joke and the fact that you think that these posts are anything more than that is telling," Secor told one classmate who flagged an offensive tweet.
Fuentes and other right-wing content creators urge their followers to hide behind irony and then try to shame their critics into silence.
"A lot of these content creators will tell the audience explicitly, 'When people say you're racist for liking this or thinking this, just laugh at them. They can't handle it — they're sensitive babies,' " said Jared Holt, a resident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.
UCLA took no action against Secor despite his escalating behavior, likely out of free speech concerns at the public institution, and classmates said they were afraid to report him for the same reason.
"I definitely felt that sense of threat," said student Oona Flood, "and, like, I really hate to say, [because] it sounds so much like, overblown, 'snowflake,' that we're just overreacting, you know?"
The Ku Klux Klan were portrayed as outlandish, rather than dangerous, in its early days, and French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously noted the way Nazis attempted to hide behind absurdist humor to cover their hate -- and give themselves an unfair advantage.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies," Sartre wrote in 1944. "They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
The Proud Boys, the pro-Trump paramilitary group named after a song from Disney's "Aladdin," revel in irony, indulging in ridiculous bonding rituals before engaging in street fights, and at least 25 members of the right-wing group are facing conspiracy and other charges related to the Capitol insurrection.
True to form, group founder Gavin McInnes mocked the media in an email to NPR, which he said "willfully ignores" the group's in-jokes to make them look bad.
The Proud Boys are "funny dudes, not Nazis," McInnes wrote.
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==
the fed bs blog cites on pinko prof
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/26/democratic-professors-outnumber-republicans-10-to-/
no lnx all link 1 to guy who writes for them:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mitchell-langbert/
Bradford Richardson - The Washington Times - Thursday, April 26, 2018
There are more than 10 professors affiliated with the Democratic Party for every faculty member who is a registered Republican, according to a new study.
Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business management at Brooklyn College, reviewed the party affiliations of 8,688 tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors at 51 of the top 60 liberal arts colleges listed in U.S. News and World Report’s 2017 rankings.
Nearly 60 percent of all faculty members were registered as either a Republican or a Democrat, and of that sample, there were 10.4 times as many Democrats as Republicans.
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“The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic,” Mr. Langbert wrote in an article published by the National Association of Scholars. “Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free — having zero Republicans.”
There are several shortcomings associated with political uniformity in higher education, Mr. Langbert continued, including biased research and diminished academic credibility.
Studies show that academic psychologists are more likely to study the attitudes and behaviors of conservatives than liberals. They are also more likely to view conservative beliefs as deviant.
Sociologists prefer not to work with fundamentalists, evangelicals, National Rifle Association members and Republicans, according to another study cited by Mr. Langbert. Another study found that sociological research is not taken seriously unless it presupposes that there are no differences between the sexes.
There are a few colleges that stood out in Mr. Langbert’s sample.
Two military colleges, West Point and the Naval Academy, had relatively balanced Democrat-to-Republican ratios, 1.3 to 1 and 2.3 to 1, respectively. When the military colleges were excluded from the sample, the overall imbalance ballooned to 12.7 Democratic professors for every Republican.
Thomas Aquinas College, a private Roman Catholic college in Santa Paula, California, had no professors who are registered Democrats.
Claremont McKenna College, Kenyon College and St. John’s College in Annapolis also had more intellectually diverse faculties than their peers.
Two schools, Bryn Mawr College and Soka University of America, had no faculty members who are registered Republican.
Wellesley College, Williams College and Swarthmore College had more than 100 professors affiliated with the Democratic Party for every registered Republican.
The most politically balanced field was engineering with 1.6 Democrats for every Republican. Computer science, economics, mathematics and the natural sciences tended to have ratios below 10 to 1.
The disciplines with the least intellectual diversity were communications and anthropology, both of which had no registered Republicans. Fields with Democrat-to-Republican ratios greater than 40 to 1 were art, sociology, English and religion.
When broken down by gender, there were nearly 21 female Democrats for every female Republican and more than 7 male Democrats for every male Republican.
Mr. Langbert limited his search to the 12 states that host at least one top-60 college and make voter registration information public.
Any attempt to reform higher education is a “very tall order,” he wrote, if current levels of political homogeneity are not changed.
“The solution to viewpoint homogeneity may lie in establishing new colleges from the ground up, rather than in reforming existing ones,” Mr. Langbert wrote.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/4/mitchell-langbert-brooklyn-college-professor-under/
chasmer
no lnx
brooklyn College professor under fire for blog post defending Kavanaugh, ripping 'totalitarian' Dems
By Jessica Chasmar - The Washington Times - Thursday, October 4, 2018
An associate professor of business at Brooklyn College is facing calls to resign after he issued a “satirical” essay in defending Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh that argued “sexual assault” is a rite of passage for young males.
Mitchell Langbert wrote a Sept. 27 blog post calling Democrats the “party of tutu-wearing pansies, totalitarian sissies” who use have used “anonymity and defamation” in trying to bring down a conservative judge, who strongly denies all allegations of sexual misconduct.
“If someone did not commit sexual assault in high school, then he is not a member of the male sex,” Mr. Langbert argued. “The Democrats have discovered that 15-year-olds play spin-the-bottle, and they have jumped on a series of supposed spin-the-bottle crimes during Kavanaugh’s minority, which they characterize as rape, although no one complained or reported any crime for 40 years.”
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The blog post has outraged students, prompting a protest to take place Thursday afternoon. Corrinne Greene said her campus group, Young Progressives of America, wants the professor fired.
“To have someone in a position of power espousing sexual assault is not a joke,” Ms. Greene told CNN. “It’s something that needs to be taken seriously.”
Brooklyn College Provost Anne Lopes said officials planned to meet to discuss the issue, but declined to elaborate, saying the school protects free speech.
“[T]he First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects even speech that many experience as offensive, such as the faculty member’s post,” she told CNN.
Mr. Langbert later revealed that the post was satire and apologized to anyone who was offended.
“I was trying to be satirical, but I guess I’m no Jonathan Swift,” he said. “I appreciated that it may have been in bad taste and I have apologized for that and I will again. I’m sorry people got offended. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings or cause them to not feel respected. I honestly didn’t expect them to read it.”
Mr. Langbert also updated his original post to clearly state that it was meant to parody, “in the tradition of Swift’s (1729) ‘Modest Proposal,’” though he continued to defend Judge Kavanaugh.
“Given that it is unclear that Kavanaugh did a thing, the defamation that he has suffered at the hands of the media is a disgrace,” Mr. Langbert wrote in the update. “Intolerance of and defamation of anyone who does not toe the big government line are ongoing threats to freedom. The humiliation that Judge Kavanaugh has suffered is a disgrace. Perhaps more time should be spent on Horace and Swift, and less time on political indoctrination in college.”
Mr. Langbert told CNN that the backlash for the post has resulted in threats of violence, which he turned over to authorities.
==
https://www.thetrace.org/2020/06/boogaloo-gun-ammunition-marketing-facebook-instagram/
in mid March, Fenix Ammunition, an ammunition manufacturer in Michigan, saw its daily online sales rise from :{$4,000 to $40,000:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.
The coronavirus pandemic had :{boosted demand for guns:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: and ammunition around the country, and Fenix was reaping the fruits of the national following it has cultivated since its 2016 launch. In addition to record high civilian demand, Fenix also counted at least three local police departments, a law enforcement training center, and KelTec, one of the :{leading rifle manufacturers:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in America, among its clients.
But Fenix’s March profits were also driven by an aggressive social media campaign led by its owner, Justin Nazaroff.
For months, Nazaroff had been posting memes to his company’s Facebook and Instagram pages referencing the “boogaloo,” slang for the armed uprising that a loose assortment of preppers, Second Amendment activists, and anti-government extremists is getting ready for — and in some cases trying to accelerate.
“I’ll be honest, it drives sales,” Nazaroff said in April of his company’s marketing practices. “People think it’s funny. People click on boogaloo memes. It’s something that gun people enjoy joking about.”
“You can look up any firearms social media influencer and probably find them using the term boogaloo at some point in time,” he added. Nazaroff cut off communication after a police department notified him of our records request seeking information about sales to Fenix and emails referencing boogaloo.
The word itself is a reference to the 1984 movie, “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” but the imagined sequel would be a second civil war. Sometimes re-tooled as “big luau” or “big igloo” (adherents often don floral Hawaiian shirts or insignia bearing cartoon igloos), the concept reportedly originated on 4chan, the anonymous image board that’s long been a meeting place for the alt-right. While some spreaders of boogaloo memes claim to see them as provocative fun, their mushrooming popularity has concerned experts on extremism. They fear that the concept has re-energized the American militia movement and given anti-government extremists a rallying cry.
Boogaloo is not a true movement in the sense that there is little — if any— structure or leadership. Adherents even seem to have :{different visions:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: of what a civil war would accomplish. But to the extent that there is a central idea animating the boogaloo’s largely white, right-wing supporters, it’s that armed combatants will kick off a full-fledged rebellion to topple the federal government. “They don’t have a lot of beliefs other than they really like guns, they really hate cops, and they want some sort of revolution,”said Megan Squire, a computer scientist who researches online extremism at Elon University. “You pretty much have to be weapons-trained and interested in weapons to be a boogaloo adherent.”
In the past month, at least seven people with boogaloo ties have been arrested for attempting or carrying out violence at recent protests. On June 6, Air Force Sergeant Steve Carillo allegedly shot two Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s deputies, killing one. He was arrested after scrawling the word “boog” in blood on the hood of a stolen car alongside phrases from memes that are popular in boogaloo groups. Carillo was also charged with shooting two guards outside an Oakland, California, courthouse during protests a week earlier. One died. That morning, Carillo had posted to Facebook: “Go to the riots and support our own cause. Show them the real targets. Use their anger to fuel our fire. Think outside the box. We have mobs of angry people to use to our advantage.” A boogaloo patch was recovered from the van that he used that day. A suspected accomplice was also arrested after confessing to the FBI.
On the day of the Oakland shooting, three men were arrested in Las Vegas on suspicion of possessing homemade explosives and on charges of conspiracy to commit an act of domestic terrorism near protests. Though they have since pleaded not guilty, the criminal complaint against them noted boogaloo ties. And, in South Carolina, two men with boogaloo connections were separately arrested on charges of looting and attempting to incite a riot.
At least two more boogaloo supporters were arrested for the possession of illegal firearms in Oklahoma and Tennessee. In Colorado, police seized multiple weapons from one boogaloo supporter at a protest, but did not make an arrest.
On June 26, Attorney General William Barr created a task force aimed at fighting extremism, and in a memo he singled out boogaloo supporters, as well as members of the left-leaning antifa.
Even before the protests, several boogaloo supporters had attempted to incite violence. In March, a Missouri man who planned to bomb a hospital in what he called “operation boogaloo” shot and killed himself before he could be arrested by the FBI. In April, a member of several boogaloo Facebook groups was arrested in Texas, live streaming as he searched for police to kill.
“Boogaloo boys,” as they call themselves, have been spotted at protests following the killing of George Floyd, both marching with demonstrators and as counter-protesters. Some have also been :{discussing:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: how to use the protests to encourage violence. The varied response is indicative of supporters’ lack of a unifying ideology.
Their fixation on guns and tactical gear makes boogaloo supporters attractive clients for gun sellers. And hashtagged social media posts are an effective way for weapons dealers to boost their brands. Firearms sellers are not allowed to purchase ads on Facebook, though some have:{found ways around this:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, but they can use their official pages to reach niche audiences.
When COVID-19 lockdowns seemed to validate adherents’ expectations of government overreach, use of the term boogaloo exploded on mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Reddit. In April, the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit that monitors activity on major online platforms, documented 125 boogaloo Facebook groups with over 72,000 members. More than 60 percent had been created since February — the same time that Fenix’s use of boogaloo-related hashtags peaked, according to data from the company’s Instagram page.
Around the same time, a review posted on Fenix’s Facebook page revealed that the company was sending stickers to online customers that featured the “boogaloo flag,” a black and white American flag with a floral Hawaiian stripe and a cartoon igloo instead of stars. When contacted, the reviewer said he had found the company by searching for competition-grade ammunition, and that the sticker helped cement his loyalty to Fenix.
[pix]A Fenix Ammunition Instagram post that blends boogaloo memes and marketing. [Instagram / fenixammo]
A December 19, 2019, post on Fenix’s Instagram page, which has nearly 34,000 followers, shows the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster photoshopped so that he’s holding an AR-15 and wearing night-vision goggles. “B is for Boogaloo” is written over the bright yellow background. “And V is for Virginia,” read Fenix’s caption, which went on to offer “free shipping on ammunition, body armor and medical products” sent to the state. The offer lasted through a January 20 rally to oppose new gun laws, one that sparked a state of emergency order from Governor Ralph Northam as :{armed militias:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: and white nationalist groups implored their members to attend the demonstration.
In the days before the rally, members of a neo-Nazi group called:{ The Base :(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:were arrested after federal agents said two of them discussed opening fire on the rally. An FBI affidavit claimed the group wanted to use the event to start the boogaloo, which some neo-Nazis see as a race war or civilizational collapse. There is no evidence that The Base acquired ammo from Fenix, and on June 25, Fenix posted on Instagram about our reporting, writing: “Our company wants nothing to do with anyone claiming to be a Nazi, or a white supremacist. We’ve banned people from our page for saying such things in the past and we’ll continue to do so in the future. The Boogaloo is for everyone. “
Since October 2019, Fenix has made over 100 posts using hashtags and imagery related to the boogaloo. Many were linked to events like the Virginia rally, national anti-lockdown demonstrations, and recent anti-racism protests. “This is what the politicians and media fear the most” read a June 5 post showing a diverse group of protesters holding a boogaloo flag on a city street.
In another post, Fenix responded to a suggestion that looters target white neighborhoods, like Novi, Michigan, the Detroit suburb where Fenix is located. The response included a picture of four high-powered guns with the comment “send bachelors.”
The Trace has identified 35 more dealers and manufacturers of firearms or tactical supplies across the country that have posted references to the boogaloo on social media. They range from small town stores to multi-million dollar manufacturers of AR-style weapons, like the South Carolina-based Palmetto State Armory.
Instagram search still recommended these #boogaloo-related hashtags on June 24.
We also reviewed the online presence of 548 federally licensed firearms dealers in Michigan, where armed protesters converged on the state Capitol, and identified 48 with active social media profiles. Six of those posted memes or hashtags referencing the boogaloo. Eight promoted insignia from militia groups like the Three Percenters, an armed anti-government group with chapters around the country. Another six promoted coronavirus conspiracy theories or encouraged disobedience against state lockdown measures. Three made suggestive posts about shooting looters during the protests
Instagram no longer allows searches for #boogaloo and some related hashtags on its site. However, as of June 24, if you typed #boogaloo into the search bar, it still autofilled suggestions of related hashtags. After being asked about this by The Trace, a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram and has been criticized for its failure to rein in boogaloo content, said, “The hashtag #boogaloomemes was already blocked and we’ve since further blocked #boogalooboys, #boogaloocrew, and #boogalootime given the amount of content using these hashtags that violated our policy.” The spokesperson added, “we continue to remove content using boogaloo and related terms when accompanied by statements and images depicting armed violence. We are also preventing these pages and groups from being recommended on Facebook.”
Boogaloo marketing isn’t limited to social media. Some companies, like Fenix, sell boogaloo-themed merchandise. For instance, in February, Palmetto State Armory sold a limited run of custom boogaloo-themed AK-47-style guns, finished with Hawaiian patterns, mimicking the shirts boogaloo supporters have adopted as an unofficial uniform. They also advertise boogaloo T-shirts on Facebook. Palmetto State Armory CEO Jamin McCallum did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Hoplite Armor, a body armor manufacturer in Kalispell, Montana, sells a Hawaiian-patterned plate carrier — a kind of bullet-proof vest — as a part of its “Aloha Line” of products. The traditional flowers have been replaced with a blood-stained bauhinia flower, which adorns the Hong Kong flag frequently carried by protesters there.
During an interview, Hoplite’s owner, Lyman Bishop, said he was inspired to make the shirt on a trip to Hawaii, and not because of the boogaloo. Yet a September 27, 2019 Facebook post introducing the plate carrier was tagged with #boogaloo. The company’s page, with more than 142,000 followers, has continued to use the hashtag as well as associated language and imagery. Bishop is currently a long-shot candidate for governor of Montana on the Libertarian Party ticket, running on an apocalyptic platform that suggests violent secession.
In spite of significant anti-police sentiment among boogaloo boys, Fenix’s website lists four Michigan police departments as major clients, as well as the law enforcement training center at Schoolcraft College.
Records from police departments in the small cities of Dowagiac and Berkley showed receipts from Fenix totaling $4,899 and $18,076, respectively, since 2017. The Grosse Ile Police Department confirmed that it had records of purchases, but has yet to release them. The Northville Police Department denied buying ammunition from Fenix, and a records request returned no receipts from the company. The Schoolcraft training center confirmed it had purchased ammo from Fenix, but refused to say how much.
All of the organizations said they had no knowledge of Fenix’s support for boogaloo, and don’t have policies on checking suppliers’ social media accounts. Fenix’s social media posts have been largely pro-police, sprinkled with some criticism of police brutality, including the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.
Interviews with firearms dealers revealed a host of reasons for posting about the boogaloo or selling related merchandise.
Chris David, the owner of Route 6 Guns, a small shop in Torrington, Connecticut, said that he posts about boogaloo for his company’s 650-odd followers because he believes in the movement’s libertarian messaging. “It’s a lot more mainstream than I think people give the movement credit for because of the portrayal that it’s just this group of people that have these violent intentions, which is just not the case,” said David.
David successfully lobbied for a spot on a list of pro-boogaloo companies in one of Facebook’s largest boogaloo groups, which, as of June 8, no longer appears in Facebook searches. It’s unclear whether this is because the group was made secret or if it was taken down by Facebook.
All five firearms and armor dealers that agreed to be interviewed for this story denied that their posts should be interpreted as calls to violence. Nazaroff likened spreading the memes to being an ammunition seller: He said he’s aware of the possibility that his product may be used in violent crimes against innocent people. “That’s the nature of the product,” Nazaroff said. “There’s nothing to be done about that. It doesn’t mean that my company shouldn’t exist.”
“It’s literally an internet joke. It’s like ‘Harambe,’” said Dimitri Karras of Firearms Unknown, which sells “ghost guns,” unserialized but legal firearm parts that can be assembled by customers at home. “I’m a Marine who’s fought in two wars. I have a dark sense of humor. That’s just who I am.”
The use of humor to cover up intentions or shift the boundaries of acceptable discourse has a history in the alt right. In 2017, The Huffington Post published :{excerpts:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: from the style guide for the Daily Stormer, one of the largest white supremacist websites, instructing supporters to employ jokes instead of screeds, noting that the latter may be a “turnoff” to potential converts.“The reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor,” it stated, “and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points.” According to historian Elaine Frantz Parsons, the use of :{humor:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: as a way to destigmatize extremist ideologies dates back at least to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Whether the inflammatory memes that boogaloo supporters share reflect their true beliefs can be hard to pin down — and some experts say that’s by design.
Nazaroff, for instance, said he considers himself a liberal libertarian and boogaloo “prepper.” He believes in the possibility of civil war, but like other arms dealers interviewed for this story, stressed that the memes shouldn’t be taken seriously. But Cassie Miller, a researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said: “They pretend that it’s a joke. In some ways that’s to conceal just how serious and sometimes dangerous the ideas that they’re pushing are."
==
==
triggered [heh] by
The issue of expertise and knowledge caught the attention of another communications expert, Dr. Dannagal Young, author of “Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States” (Salon interview: Part 1/Part 2). “Truth still exists, and there are those working to study it, report on it, and illuminate it,” Young said. “We are still here. And we will be here, regardless of the economics of digital and social media that prioritize and reward spin and partisan mis- and disinformation over tedious truth”:
==
What makes something ironic?
Roger J. Kreuz, University of Memphis
Irony is a slippery concept. Sometimes it's used in speech, other times it's used to describe a situation – oh, and it can also characterize an attitude. Is its versatility its downfall?
==