league of so miller
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SEE DEROSA DILORENZO
UNITE THE RIGHT CHARELOTTESVILLE
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john o
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31 minutes, 30 seconds
Marshall Rosson, who's currently running for Florida State House. He attended the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and marched with the League of the
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31 minutes, 37 seconds
South, a racist and anti-Semitic neoconedfederate group. And while he has since tried to downplay that, saying, quote, "We arrived late on the second
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day after the march." Not only is that in no way exonerating, I'll point out that once he did show up,
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this video shows him getting a pretty warm welcome.
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Marshall's finally here. Hey, good to see y'all. What's up, brother? See you, man. Yes, sir.
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32 minutes, 5 seconds
How you doing, Mrs. Ros?
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32 minutes, 9 seconds
Yeah, they seemed pretty happy to see old Marshall there. And while it went by kind of fast, it is worth noting that that friendly exchange took place right
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32 minutes, 17 seconds
next to a swastika flag. And if you have a conversation right next to a swastika flag that does not begin, hey, the
32:25
32 minutes, 25 seconds
is that swastika flag doing here? I feel like that's already a pretty good tell.
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And it gets even worse because Rosson later stood among the marchers at the rally. That is him right there. And that is the guy who not long after killed a
counter demonstrator with his car. So condemning Rosson should be the lowest possible bar to clear. And yet, when a
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32 minutes, 46 seconds
reporter asked 28 Florida Republicans, many of whom had endorsed Rosson if any of this changed their mind about him, only three even bothered to respond,
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32 minutes, 55 seconds
with one Byron Donald sending back a boilerplate condemnation of racism generally without mentioning Rosson by name, and the other two actually
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33 minutes, 3 seconds
standing by him. The point here is far-right views in the Republican party are by no means irrelevant, and they are way past the point of being ignorable.
Republican Nominee Marched at Violent Neo-Nazi Rally - Yahoo
Sep 14, 2026Florida state House of Representatives nominee Marshall Rawson marched in the 2017 neo-Nazi "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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AN 9 26
An exclusive Talking Points Memo investigation by Christopher Mathias reports that a Republican candidate for House District 10 in Florida was photographed marching with white supremacists at the infamous Charlottesville, Virginia, rally that left one woman dead and 35 injured.
Marshall Rawson attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally alongside members of the League of the South, which is a white nationalist, neo-Confederate organization.
TPM spotted Rawson and his wife arriving at the rally in archived video footage. They're greeted by fellow members of the League. Footage and photographs reviewed by the outlet reportedly place him carrying a League of the South flag and marching with neo-Nazis, including James Alex Fields Jr. He was the man who later killed counterprotester Heather Heyer by driving his car into a crowd of people.
Rawson has never denounced the League of the South, apologized for his participation in the violent rally or spoken out against many of the people he marched with.
The League has a documented history of white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, homophobic and secessionist advocacy, and its leaders have openly promoted the idea of a white ethnostate in the South, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center's database of hate groups.
TPM cited a 2025 Facebook post in which Rowson claimed, “I am happy to talk about my past advocacy and activism on any issue. I am also proud of the advocacy work that I have been involved with for the past 13 years.”
Rawson's ideology is a close match to the League's values, particularly when it comes to LGBTQ people. A 2023 statement from him, cited by TPM, expressed his support for the death penalty for gay people in Uganda.
“This is how you would run the pervs and miscreants out of Florida," he said.
“A one-way ticket to no more sexualizing of children and the LGBTQ+ agenda in Florida!” he added.
The investigation by TPM alleged that "there are indications Rawson may have still felt the need to operate a pseudonymous social media account where he could express even more extreme sentiments. There are several data points linking an X account that posted from 2017 to 2020 under the handle 'RockOfDixie' to Rawson. Some of the posts from this account compiled by researcher ShermanMarching seem to have since been deleted, and the account’s most recent post is from 2020."
The account "features a bodybuilder flexing on stage," which is the same image in an online gallery of photos from the 2016 National Physique Committee’s Galaxy Championships. The researcher found that the bodybuilder in the image was identified at that time as Marshall Rawson. He finished fourth out of six.
One of the policies he advocated for is to bring back lynchings.
“Multiculturalism kills and public lynchings worked," said the "RockOfDixie" account.
Fellow League of the South members have opened their checkbooks in support, TPM found. So far, he's received more than $15,000 from dozens of people the report said are tied to the League of the South, neo-Nazi circles, white nationalist groups or other extremist activism.
One of the donors is a former Klan lawyer, and others also attended the Charlottesville riot. When asked about it, Rawson said he doesn't "screen" his donors or their views before he takes their money.
Rawson won the August Republican primary by just over 2,000 votes and is widely expected to win the November general election in the heavily conservative district. TPM argues that his candidacy illustrates how ideas once associated with fringe white-nationalist groups have gained a greater foothold within Republican politics.
Neither the Florida GOP nor the national Republican Party responded to TPM’s requests for comment.
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Trump divide among American conservative professors - PMC
...
There are interesting contrasts in clusters of affiliations. The Trumpists tend to cluster around a few think tanks. There are 35 think tanks with 2 or more Trumpists, 19 with 4 or more, and 5 with 8 or more. The clustering tends to occur around ideologically oriented right-wing centers, such as the Claremont Institute (16), the Heritage Foundation (9), the Federalist Society (8), the Heartland Institute (8), the Independent institute (12), the League of the South (5), and the Abbeville Institute (4) (see Table 1) .30
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AHan
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/gop-lawmaker-made-videos-for-extremist-group-that-provided-biblical-training-for-christian-fundamentalists-leaked-e-mails/
GOP lawmaker made videos for extremist group that provided ‘biblical training’ for Christian fundamentalists: leaked e-mails
Written by Alex Henderson August 14, 2019
In Washington State’s legislature, Rep. Matt Shea is controversial even among fellow Republicans: he has distributed white supremacist Christian Identity literature and openly advocated violence against Muslims, gays and others he considers enemies of the United States. And according to a report by Jason Wilson for the Guardian, Shea has enthusiastically encouraged an extremist group called Team Rugged.
E-mails obtained by the Guardian show that Shea was in close contact with Team Rugged in 2016. Team Rugged, Wilson reports, offered training in “biblical warfare” to young Christian fundamentalist men — and that training included advice on ways in which guns and knives could be used on enemies. Shea, according to Wilson, made videos on behalf of the group.
The e-mails, Wilson reports, began in July 2016, when Shea corresponded with Team Rugged’s Patrick Caughran. In one of the e-mails,Team Rugged is described as a way “to provide patriotic and biblical training on war for young men.” Caughran said of Team Rugged, “Everything about it is both politically incorrect and what would be considered shocking truth to most modern Christians.”
In the e-mails, Caughran sounds a lot like a member of al-Qaeda, ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria) or Boko Haram — only instead of promoting a violent Islamist jihad, he is promoting armed training and holy war for fundamentalist Christians. And one person who is cited as an inspiration in the e-mails is the Georgia-based Rev. John Weaver, a neo-Confederate extremist who the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described as a “leading proponent” of “training Christians for armed battle.”
Weaver, according to the SPLC, has given weapons training to the League of the South— a neo-Confederate group that marched with neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.
Caughran, in the e-mail communications with Shea, explained that Team Rugged’s training would show young Christian fundamentalist men “how to work better as a team, both in achieving physically demanding tasks and on the battlefield.” Training, Caughran explained, would include “combatives, the use of a knife in defense, close quarters shooting with rifle and pistol and how to work effectively in teams of two, three and four.”
Caughran, according to Wilson’s report, asked Shea to promote its activities on Facebook. And in a 2017 video posted on his Facebook page, Shea interviewed members of Team Rugged and described the group as “returning to basic patriot principles.”
In 2018, Wilson notes, Shea sparked a major controversy in Washington State when he distributed a Christian Identity white supremacist document called “Biblical Basis for War” — which calls for Christian fundamentalist holy war and advocates the killing of all males who support abortion or same-sex marriage.
One of the Washington State Republicans who has been a vehement critic of Shea is Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich. In an interview with the Guardian, Knezovich asserted that the militaristic armed training Shea favors for young Christian fundamentalists “almost sounds like going back to the Hitler Youth concept.”
Knezovich told the Guardian, “There are lines that should never crossed. When you indoctrinate children in radicalized hate, then we wonder why we have the kind of shootings and bombings that we have around the world.”
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Two real winners were arrested for vandalizing a memorial dedicated to African Americans last month at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Fifty-year-old Nancy Rushton McCorkle and 31-year-old Ryan Francis Barnett have been accused of defacing the Unsung Founders Memorial with racist graffiti as well as other acts of vandalism around the campus. The Unsung Founders Memorial was created in honor of “enslaved and free African American workers that helped build the University.”
According to the Winston-Salem Journal, McCorkle is a member in a group called Heirs to the Confederacy. Sort of like being called the Proud Losers of Dumb Terrorist Losers. TheWinston-Salem Journalsays McCorkle was seen at a rally in support of a Confederate statue in Downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, this January.
When the alleged vandals struck, at the end of March, UNC’s Interim Chancellor Guskiewicz wrote that besides the memorial, other racist language was graffitied outside of the school’s Hanes Art Center.
According to CNN, the inscription on the memorial, dedicated in 2002, reads: “The Class of 2002 honors the University’s unsung founders—the people of color bond and free—who helped build the Carolina that we cherish today.”
Their memory will last, but these two clowns will vanish into the night.
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see derosa omg PIC
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AN no lnx
Slow motion civil war: Here's how Donald Trump is the Jefferson Davis of a new red state confederacy
It’s a slow motion civil war, and it’s being fought by Trump’s “very fine people.”
By Lucian K. Truscott IV / Salon November 17, 2018, 12:39 PM GMT
In both cases, they were young, and they were white, and they were male, and the actions they took started civil wars.
In 1861, they were cadets from the Citadel Military Academy in South Carolina. On January 9, of that year, they were manning an artillery battery on Morris Island, an uninhabited island in Charleston Harbor when they fired on the United States steamship Star of the West, which was attempting to resupply the American garrison at Fort Sumter. The shots they fired that day, along with the bombardment of the fort by the Confederate States Army beginning on April 12 of that year, are generally considered by historians to be the first shots fired in what became the American Civil War.
In 2017, they were members of the so-called “alt-right” — white supremacists, neo-nazis, neo-confederates, white nationalists, and neo-fascists who were in Charlottesville for the so-called “Unite the Right” rally. On the night of August 11, 2017, as many as 200 of them marched carrying burning torches through the campus of the University of Virginia chanting white supremacist slogans such as “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” When they reached the statue of Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, they clashed with a group of students who had surrounded the statue. The alt-right demonstrators swung and threw their torches and used pepper spray against the counter-protestors, injuring several.
The next day, the alt-right demonstrators marched through Charlottesville carrying Confederate and Nazi flags chanting “white lives matter,” “Jewish media is going down,” and “make America great again.” Many demonstrators were armed, some with semi-automatic assault-style rifles. They clashed again with counter-protestors, and at 1:45 p.m., a white supremacist demonstrator identified as James Alex Fields Jr. drove his 2010 Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring 19 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
She was not the first to die in the new civil war. Already dead were black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina; a native of India in Olathe, Kansas; an Army lieutenant in College Park, Maryland; and many others.
But the death of Heather Heyer would become a focus of the violence and killing in the new civil war, because President Trump would put it there.
Later the day she died, President Trump went before the cameras at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and said, "We all must be united and condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Let's come together as one!" Responding to a question, he went on to say, "we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides." He was roundly criticized that day and the next for blaming the violence that caused multiple injuries and the death of Heather Heyer on “many sides.”
Responding to the criticism three days later, Trump addressed the media at Trump Tower and repeated his claim that there was “blame on both sides.” Responding to another question, Trump asserted, "Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.” He went on to criticize the movement to take down Confederate statues as “an attempt to change history,” and criticized “the very, very violent alt-left.” He went on to defend the protest by the alt-right in Charlottesville by saying “there were very fine people on both sides.”
In an interview the next day, Steve Bannon, who was then serving in the White House as Trump’s Chief Strategist, called Trump’s press conference the previous day “a defining moment” in Trump’s presidency because Trump had chosen “his people” over “globalists.”
At a rally in Phoenix, Arizona a week later, Trump defended his statements at the Trump Tower press conference and again criticized the movement to take down Confederate statues. “They're trying to take away our culture, they're trying to take away our history,” Trump said. “And our weak leaders, they do it overnight.”
Like a blind squirrel who found an acorn, Steve Bannon was right that Trump’s remarks after Charlottesville were a defining moment in his presidency. Trump had taken the side of “his people” when he told the world there were “very fine people on both sides,” and said “they” were taking away “our” culture and history.
It was crystal clear who “our” refers to, crystal clear why Trump felt compelled to note that “not all” of the demonstrators in Charlottesville were “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists.” He stood with those defending the celebration of the Confederacy with statues of Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. ”Our” people are white people.
The New York Timescreated a stunning portrait of the new civil war on the cover of its Sunday magazine on November 11. Against a photograph of a burning Nazi swastika at a white supremacist rally in Georgia this year, the Times displayed a list of 70 white supremacist demonstrations, shootings, bombings, and planned attacks going back to the killing of nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by white supremacist Dylann Roof on June 17, 2015. The Times used the list to illustrate an article about how federal and state law enforcement agencies have failed to respond to the threat of white supremacist violence in this country. Read another way, it’s a list of battles in the new civil war.
On January 28, 2017, a mosque in Victoria, Texas was burned down by Marq Vincent Perez, who was later convicted of arson in the commission of a hate crime, among other charges.
On February 4, 2017, there was a white supremacist rally by Identity Evropa in New York’s Times Square.
On February 17, 2017, the white supremacist Knights Party held a “Love your Heritage” flag rally in Harrison, Arkansas.
On May 20, 2017, 23-year-old United States Army Second Lieutenant Richard Collins III was stabbed to death in a hate crime by 22 year-old-Sean Urbanski, a member of a white supremacist Facebook group known as “Alt-Reich: Nation.” Second Lieutenant Collins was black. Urbanski is white.
On May 21, 2017, the white supremacist East Coast Knights conducted a ceremonial cross-burning in Quarryville, Pennsylvania.
On January 2, 2018, 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein was killed in a park in Lake Forest, California. Twenty-one year old Samuel Woodward has been charged with the killing as a hate crime. Racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic materials were found in Woodward’s social media accounts. Bernstein was Jewish and out as a gay man. The two had attended the same high school and knew each other.
On January 27, 2018, there was a League of the South rally in Tallahassee, Florida.
On March 17, 2018, there was another League of the South rally in Knoxville, Tennessee.
On April 7, 2018, there was a League of the South roadside demonstration in Wetumpka, Alabama.
On May 19, 2018, there was a League of the South demonstration in Berry, Alabama.
On September 29, 2018, there was a League of the South demonstration in Newport, Tennessee.
The League of the South is a white supremacist, neo-Confederate organization headquartered in Killen, Alabama. Designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, the League of the South has stated its goal is a “free and independent Southern republic” comprised of the former states of the Confederacy, ruled by white men.
On October 13, 2018, there was a “Build the Wall” rally in Greenville, South Carolina.
Also on October 13, 2018, there was a “Law and Order March” by the Patriot Prayer group in Portland, Oregon. Far right groups such as the Proud Boys have allied themselves with Patriot Prayer and attended their rallies.
On October 25, 2018, a white gunman shot and killed two black patrons of a Kroger supermarket in Jeffersontown, Kentucky. Gregory Bush, 51, has been charged with three counts of federal hate crimes and two state counts of murder and ten counts of wanton endangerment. The shooter is a suspected white supremacist who shouted out “whites don’t kill whites” as he gunned down the two Kroger shoppers.
On October 27, 2018, 46-year-old Robert Gregory Bowers walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and shot to death 11 people and wounded six more. The gunman shouted “all Jews must die” during the attack. He is a suspected white supremacist and anti-Semite who has posted pro-Nazi material on internet websites.
Over a period of several days in October of this year, Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc allegedly sent at least 14 mail bombs to a total of 12 prominent Democratic critics of President Trump, including former President Barack Obama, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Joe Biden, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and Senator Kamala Harris. Sayoc had been living in a van covered with pro-Trump and anti-Democrat stickers, including several with photos of prominent Democrats such as Hillary Clinton with the crosshairs of a rifle sight superimposed on them.
That is only a partial list of the killings and other incidents carried out by members of the “alt-right” and white supremacists. It happens day by day, week, by week, month by month, one after another.
It’s a slow motion civil war, and it’s being fought by Trump’s “very fine people.” The warriors in this civil war include a lot of people who are fighting against what might be called a pluralistic United States. Many of them have guns. Some of them have bombs. Some of them have killed the people they are at war with. Others have held repeated rallies and demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction with the United States as it is presently comprised. Many want a separate state of white people, ruled by white people. They want a new Confederate States of America.
Trump is helping to give them one. Beginning on March 10th of this year, Trump held 45 rallies to support Republican candidates in the midterm elections. Reading that list is reading the list of Trump’s America: Southaven, Mississippi. Johnson City, Tennessee. Richmond, Kentucky. Missoula, Montana. Houston, Texas. Columbia, Missouri. Fort Myers, Florida. Elkhart, Indiana. Macon, Georgia. Murphysboro, Illinois. Topeka, Kansas. Wheeling, West Virginia.
Red districts in Trump’s red state confederacy.
This weekend, Trump will travel to California, which is not one of the states in Trump’s confederacy. It’s a state he dismisses for its “sanctuary” cities and for its high taxes and its liberal political leadership and for is “mismanagement” of its forests, which he claims cause the fires that have destroyed the places he will presumably visit. To prepare for the visit by Trump, the citizens of California might consult the citizens of Puerto Rico, another place Trump doesn’t consider part of his confederacy, which he visited after a natural disaster. He might even toss them some paper towels.
Donald Trump has made a decision that he isn’t the president of the United States of America, but president of the red states of America. Trump has embraced a new confederacy, and he is their Jefferson Davis, and a new civil war has been joined.
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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 Southis 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, whosits on the board for Occidental Quarterly. Taylor has been a prominent figure on thewhite supremacist scene for more than 25 years, and frequently appearsat far-right conferences, including those convened by Spencer.
Former Counter–Currents contributor Jason Jorjani wasfilmed last September by theanti-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-NazisAndrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer, failed Senate candidatePatrick 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 unrolledpolicies 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 beendenied access to their platforms.
However, Patreon continues toallow extremist James Allsup, an advocate of white identitarianism, to continue to use Patreon to enrich himself. Allsup this year joined the white extremist group, Identity Evropa, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and in 2017 marched with extremist groups at the Unite the Right convergence in Charlottesville. He also spoke that year at a rally in Washington, D.C., convened by Spencer.
Read: [Richard Spencer Is Begging For Money To Fight Lawsuit Against Him]
For his own part, Richard Spencer told us he’s been unable to reach a human contact at Stripe to talk about the status of his account. He called it “ridiculous” that he has been, as he believes, “singled out as a bad actor” to serve as a public martyr for display to signal that companies like Stripe are combating hate on their platforms.
Spencer says he was cut off from the platform shortly after the Unite the Right converging of far-right groups in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017. The night before the streets of Charlottesville turned deadly, Spencer led a torchlit march to the campus of University of Virginia, steering a column of far-right activists who chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” Some of the marchers attacked a small band of UVA students who mounted a counter-protest.
Spencer told us that he had used Stripe for about five years prior to the ban imposed on him and the National Policy Institute, the innocuously named far-right extremist organization he helms. He said he used the platform to process hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of financial tractions — which he said he conservatively estimates to total at least a $250,000, but speculated it could have been as much a $1 million — for conference registrations, donations and book sales, all without a hitch.
“There are groups that seem quite similar to my operation, and indeed places I’ve written for in my career, that are apparently able to use these payment systems,” Spencer told us, saying he felt it was “unfair” he was “singled out.” He later added, “I have become the poster boy for this,” and compared himself to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been given the boot from many online services. It should be noted that those extremists who still have access to big-tech payment systems could be viewed as Spencer’s competitors.
Kicking white nationalists like Spencer from platforms can have serious implications for their ability to recruit and organize. Spencer said that his operation has experienced large setbacks since he lost access to simple payment processing online.
“I, in a way, have not recovered from the deplatforming since Charlottesville, and everything it entails,” Spencer said. “The payment processing — that is more devastating than the social media. I mean, I would give up my Twitter account if we could maintain something like payment processing that is made so easy through Stripe.”
Spencer told us he had “made some headway in cracking the nut” of payment processing for his group, but when we asked for more details he laughed and said, “I’m not going to tell you.”
This article was co-authored by Luke Barnes, a reporter at the progressive online news site, ThinkProgress. His work focuses on Big Tech, far-right extremism and organized crime.
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AN
...Yoking the Republican Party to the Defense of Confederate Heritage
:{:{Confederate symbols to the cause of fanning the resentments of white southerners was by no means the exclusive work of Republican politicians. The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), neo-Confederates, and avowed white supremacists in the region played a crucial role during the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in 1896, the SCV failed for nearly a century to muster a large membership or to exercise much cultural authority. But during the 1970s and 1980s, its ranks were invigorated by new recruits, including Civil War reenactors and men vigilant against any insults to southern white “heritage.” Included in the membership of the SCV were white supremacists who looked to the Confederacy as inspiration for the creation of a white Euro-American homeland. }::{The League of the South, }::{a neo-Confederate and white supremacist organization}::{founded in 1994, added a patina of intellectual rigor to the Confederate revival.}::
{ Together, the SCV, the League of the South, and their allies warned white southerners that cosmopolitan academics, liberal and irreligious politicians, foreign organizations, and other sinister forces were intent on the destruction of the white South’s values and heritage. Attacks on the symbols of the Confederacy were one manifestation of this nihilism run amok. While liberals applauded the tentative first steps in the creation of a pluralist South that incorporated everyone into civic life, neo-Confederates angrily countered that the South historically had been and should remain an Anglo-Celtic homeland. Equally important, when the white South launched the Confederacy, it purportedly had come closer than any previous or subsequent society to creating the ideal Christian republic. The defense of white southern “heritage” was, literally, the defense of everything that was sacred.}:}:
With gathering energy during the 1990s, the SCV picketed, lobbied, campaigned, and litigated to prevent “heritage violations,” which included “any attack upon our Confederate Heritage, or the flags, monuments, and symbols which represent it.” Particular energy was devoted to bringing suit against countless school districts and municipalities that sought to restrict the public display of the Confederate Battle Flag. Although the SCV usually failed in these efforts, it stoked the fears and resentments of members and allies who were steeped in a white regional memory that dwelled on white southerners’ victimhood at the hands of Union generals, liberal judges, northern legislators, and outside agitators.
This defense of Confederate heritage increasingly contaminated the region’s public life during the 1990s. At the same time that activists within the SCV gained control of the organization, Republicans grasped that Confederate symbols could be used as a wedge issue to loosen the weakening grip of Democratic politicians on the rural South. Georgia provided a vivid illustration of the dangers for Democrats of tangling with Confederate heritage. Throughout the 1990s, state politics were roiled by demands to change the state flag, which segregationist politicians had redesigned to include the Confederate Battle Flag in response to the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown V. Board of Education decision. When the 1996 Olympics brought international scrutiny to Atlanta and the state, Democrats and some business leaders advocated the removal of the divisive Confederate symbol from the state flag.
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https://www.alternet.org/propaganda-working-trump-voters-call-ms-13-serious-threat-us-thats-simply-not-true
When news broke of an active shooting at the Capital Gazette,my local newspaper inAnnapolis, Maryland, Itweetededitor Rick Hutzell to ask if he was safe, and how I could help. When police announced the arrest of 38-year-old Jarrod Ramos as the suspect in the mass shooting, I, like many others, delved into his Twitter accounts.}:
I was shocked when I realized that Ramos – whom a grand jury just indicted on 23 charges, including five counts of first-degree murder – had contacted me two years ago. He taunted me in response to the Capital’s March 2015 report about how I had helped law enforcement thwart a mass shooting threat made on Twitter against grade school kids and Jews in Kalispell, Montana, by a man named David J. Lenio.
What I learned about Ramos, as I followed his Twitter trail, reveals as strange a worldview as one could imagine informing a mass-murder scenario. There are at least two main influences evident in Ramos' tweets. One is a worldview taken from the theocratic wing of the alt-right, and the other comes from a violent anime subculture centered around a popular manga, anime and film series titled “Berserk.” Taken together, they provide a Rosetta Stone that allows us to translate the significance of two religious visions, in relation to each other, as they existed in Ramos' mind. I believe these mutually informing visions allowed Ramos to cast himself as a vigilante hand of God. His theocratic worldview, combined with his immersion in the world of "Berserk," helps to solve the mystery of his cryptic, final tweet and illuminate his possible motive for mass murder.
For all of Ramos’ vividly imagined righteousness, this story begins with a woman-hating, angry man. That there is amisogynist root to Ramos’ rage-filled rampage is no surprise. Numerous male mass murderers have backgrounds of stalking and harassing women, especially online. Ramos’ beef with the Capital goes back to his ill-conceived defamation suit against the paper, its publisher and a columnist for reporting on his guilty plea for the online harassment of a woman he had known slightly in high school. In court documents he objected to the Capital’s report that, after he had not heard from the woman in months, he told her, “Fuck you, leave me alone.” Ramos told the judge that he felt it unfair that the reporter had not allowed him to offer an explanation. He complained to the judge, “That carries a clear implication that something is wrong inside my head, that I’m insane.”
Whether Ramos is sane is a matter for the court to determine. But there is an explanation for these hostile words – which he cribbed from the protagonist in "Berserk" – and it has to do with Ramos’ worldview, which needs to be more clearly understood.
The alt-right half of the Rosetta Stone
I believe Ramos contacted me initially because the Capital had reported on my connection to David Lenio, a white nationalist who had tweeted threats of a possible mass shooting, and also because I was researching and writing about ties between a local politician named Michael Peroutka and a right-wing group called the League of the South.
The League is a theocratic, secessionist organization whose leader, Michael Hill, had called for the formation of death squads targeting journalists, elected officials and other members of “the elite.” In his essay “A Bazooka in Every Pot,” Hill described such an assassination campaign as part of “fourth-generation warfare,” a style of decentralized conflict that blurs the lines between war and politics, combatants and civilians.
Hill wrote: “To oversimplify, the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elitewithout whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.”
That was not Hill’s only overt call to violence. He followed up with another essay calling for young men of “Christendom” to become “citizen-soldiers” to destroy the “galloping tyranny” of our time.
...
As for Peroutka, he is a neo-Confederate theocratwho thinks that the wrong side won the Civil War and that our real national anthem is “Dixie.” He is also a former board member of the League, which had endorsed his successful 2014 campaign for a seat on Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Council, running as a Republican. This is the same League that helped organize the infamous torch-lit Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer.
Over a period of nearly seven years, Peroutka is one of only two politicians whom Ramos tweeted about – the other being Donald Trump, who has repeatedly vilified journalists.
For example, Ramos wrote in his @EricHartleyFrnd Twitter bio (which he named in apparent mockery of a former Capital columnist whom Ramos had sued unsuccessfully for defamation), “Dear reader: I created this page to defend myself. Now I’m suing the shit out of half of AA County and making corpses of corrupt careers and corporate entities.”Jarrod Ramos is not affiliated with any political party, and there is no evidence that he was politically motivated or that he acted on anyone’s orders. On the other hand, as Salon’s Paul Rosenberg has reported, he was influenced by the rhetoric and ideology of the racist alt-right. And like Hill, Ramos showed bold belligerence toward managerial elites whom he viewed as enemies.
Justice and public safety require that we consider the context, including multiple influences and possible triggers, when a suspect faces mass murder charges. Therefore, it is fair and necessary to ask whether President Trump’s demagoguery against journalists could trigger some lone nut to murder them. As researcher Chip Berlet has written, sociologists call such aviolent response to coded rhetoric “scripted violence” – and “heroes know which villains to kill.” Followers thus don’t require specific orders, but gather a sense of validation and righteousness in carrying out a violent campaign of societal purification against people designated as corrupting influences.
This suspect had a simmering feud for seven years with the Capital, its former publisher and Eric Hartley, the former columnist whom he had sued unsuccessfully. Ramos created a website on which he posted documents and communications about his case, describing himself as an agent of “the Inquisition” and “a crusader” who answered to a “Higher Authority” than civil government and who meted out literal “carnage” to his foes.
Ramos wrote of his perceived enemies: "The authority that permits their power also stands poised to punish its abuse. Even kings must answer to God, and a modern day Inquisition is at hand. The potential judgement is no less severe; the carnage differs only in literal terms. As this search for Truth commences, a crusader they could not kill approaches."
His crusade targeted court officials as well as journalists, whom he considered dishonest. For example, Ramos tweeted a quote from German poet Paul Gerhardt: “When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.” Ramos concluded, “Time to slay some murderous shitbag esquires." In another tweet criticizing “inequity in the MD justice system,” he said: "Here's to Higher Authority hearing and #hurting."
To Ramos, defamation is a violation of common law but, more important, a violation of God’s law that is worthy of hellfire.
For example, he once tweeted: “Catholicism still says liars go to hell.”
He also tweeted, without attribution or citation, a quote from a 16th-century church court case: “Again, my unruly tongue, if it were not punished, it would not only set more of you on fire, but it would bolden others to do the like.” This quote is from a confession to defamation in Mitford v. Shaw, an ecclesiastical court case from 1569-70. Church courts in England had jurisdiction over cases of defamation when the plaintiff’s claim was not for money damages but for the correction of a sin. (Common law courts oversaw claims for money damages.) Church courts sentenced violators to do public penance, on pain of excommunication.
In the Mitford case, when the church court found Charles Shaw guilty of slander, he did penance by standing up in church, wearing linen apparel, and reading his confessional statement, which equates slander to murder, worthy of divine retribution.
Shaw stated, “I acknowledge thus to slander my Christian brother is an heinous offence, first towards God, who hath straightly forbidden it in his holy laws, accounting it to be a kind of murdering of my neighbor, and threatening to punish it with hellfire and the loss of the kingdom of heaven.”
Modern-day theocrats, such as Peroutka, would like to see ecclesiastical courts replace the American judicial system. At a 2016 Summer of Justice rally in Wichita, Kansas, which took place the same week as the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Peroutka called on his fellow Christian nationalists to “take dominion over these positions of civil authority” in order to “interpose” against laws that don’t square with their notion of God’s law.
Peroutka
that the only valid laws are ones which adhere to this fundamentalist vision of the Constitution and the Bible. “What if the Congress did pass a law allowing abortion? And then what if a sitting president signed it and a sitting court validated it?” he asked. “Would it be the law? No, of course not.” Then he slung on his guitar and filmed the crowd for a
for his new song, “Courts cannot make law.”
Near the end of the Summer of Justice, the anti-abortion group Operation Save America staged a kangaroo 
” which declared that Supreme Court rulings on abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, marriage equality and the removal of government-sponsored prayer in schools were contrary to God’s law. Eight “judges” took turns reading “charges” against the Supreme Court and then declared their decisions “null and void.”
The judges included the Rev. Matt Trewhella, leader of the Milwaukee-based Missionaries to the Preborn, who had signed a statement in 1993 declaring that the murder of abortion providers was “justifiable homicide.” Convicted murderers Paul Hill and Michael Griffin later unsuccessfully used “justifiable homicide” defenses in their trials for killing abortion providers.
Ramos’ tweets make clear that in his theological view, journalists who had allegedly framed him and court officers who had supposedly lied about him were as guilty as murderers and would ultimately answer to God. He saw himself as an agent of divine retribution. He was not subtle about how he would punish the sin of defamation.
He tweeted: “Awaiting reprisal, death will be their acquisition.” This is a misquoted lyric from a thrash metal song by Slayer, “Raining Blood.” The actual line is: “Awaiting reprisal, death will be their acquittance.” The song ends with a vision of victims’ blood deluging a revenge-driven killer: “Raining blood from a lacerated sky, bleeding its horror, creating my structure. Now I shall reign in blood!”
“Ramos came to see himself as some kind of vigilante for righteousness, casting himself for example as a 'crusader' and gunning down innocent people in a newsroom," Political Research Associates analyst Frederick Clarkson told Salon. This vision was "not unlike the militaristic, millennial vision of Michael Hill,” he continued. “Last year [Hill] rallied what he calls the Southern Defense Force, which he envisions as not just a modern Confederate army but the ‘Army of the True Living God.’”
So it makes sense that Ramos, who has metaphorically casts himself as a Christian holy warrior, would identify with Peroutka, a dyed-in-the-wool theocrat who has argued that civil servants must disobey any laws believed to be contrary to God’s law. Ramos tweeted three times in defense of Peroutka, once to crow to Rema Rahman, a journalist at the Capital, about Peroutka’s 2014 election to the Anne Arundel County Council. He tweeted: “Peroutka won and you lost @remawriter. Get over it. You’re already going to Hell, so why not concern yourself with more relevant matters?”
He tweeted again to tell Rahman to “shut the fuck up” after she wrote a piece reporting that illegal robocalls might have helped put Peroutka’s campaign over the top. He said: “It's not your place, so shut the fuck up @capgaznews. Peroutka's columns don't get the pickled shit sued out of him.”
He also tweeted: “Why are they so obsessed about Peroutka @capgaznews?” He added the hashtag #CapDeathWatch.
Ramos, who nursed grievances against perceived injustices, and who had sued a newspaper for defamation, also identified with Donald Trump. In response to an opinion column in the Capital that questioned Trump’s qualifications for the presidency, he tweeted a warning: “Referring to @realDonaldTrump as ‘unqualified’ @capgaznews could end badly (again).” His tweet linked to a Wall Street Journal article about Trump's lawsuit against Univision, claiming breach of contract and defamation.
The next day, Ramos tweeted: “Fuck you, leave me alone,” and linked to a Maryland appellate court document upholding the dismissal of his defamation case against the Capital. It is reasonable to assume that this angry comment was directed at the journalists and newspaper who had bested him in court, and perhaps also at attorneys and judges.
The embittered suspect with a vendetta against a local newspaper the justice system had been simmering since 2011. What triggered him in 2018? I don’t know. But shortly before the massacre, two things happened that could have been factors.Three days before the shooting, Donald Trump had pointed out members of the news media at a big outdoor rally in South Carolina, demonizing them as “enemies of the people.” This is a phrase that demagogues throughout history, from the French Revolution to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, have understood and used as an incitement to violence.A day later, Peroutka was defeated in his 2018 re-election bid, losing to a female candidate in the Republican primary.
The "Berserk" half of the Rosetta Stone
The other, seemingly unrelated element of Ramos' worldview is drawn from the world of anime, the source of his final, cryptic tweet, approximately three minutes before the shooting began. It was a peculiar expression he had used before: “Fuck you, leave me alone.” This world of manga and anime informed the suspect’s hero-versus-villain worldview and also the way he expressed it through language and religious symbolic imagery. While his tweets referenced mainstream sci-fi touchstones, such as "Star Wars" and "Star Trek," his primary influence was the universe of "Berserk," a blood-and-guts manga, anime and movie series that has also inspired several video games.
Ramos tweeted numerous references to "Berserk" characters, paraphrased quotes from them, and used symbolism drawn from the series. He described himself as playing a role in the world of "Berserk" and hinted that an understanding of its fictional world was key to understanding his “psyche.” Indeed, in a letter he wrote stating his intention of “killing every person present” in the Capital newsroom, he quoted from "Berserk." As mentioned above, he did so again in his final tweet before the shooting began.
Ramos tweeted to ask whether Eric Hartley, the former Capital columnist, was “Ordained to Be Murdered by the God Hand?” In "Berserk," the God Hand is a group of the five most powerful demons. The photo on Ramos' Twitter avatar was the face of Hartley, with a Berserk symbol pasted over it – a brand that marks victims for demonic sacrifice.
He tweeted, “Judge Nick doesn’t believe in the God Hand. I play a well-established part of that system by tweeting of it.” It appears that Ramos identified with the world of "Berserk" and saw himself as playing a part in it.
Ramos also marked former Capital Gazette publisher Thomas Marquardt -- whom he nicknamed "Evil Tom" -- with the demonic brand, in the banner image for the Twitter account @EricHartleyFrnd. To Ramos, the brand signified that it was "Open Season" to hunt and kill. He tweeted, "Another stooge @capgaznews says Evil Tom is going on his own terms? That mark on his head is called Brand of Sacrifice; or now, Open Season." He also tweeted a YouTube link to the song 
” from the "Berserk" soundtrack.
He repeatedly referenced a vampire character from "Berserk," Nosferatu Zodd, and tweeted an image of Zodd. He tweeted: "If you think this man [wants to be] your friend, know this: when his ambition crumbles, death will come for you — a death you cannot escape." This is a paraphrased quote from Zodd, who said, “If you consider this man your true friend, and regard him as a brother, then know this. When this man's ambition crumbles, it is your destiny to face your death. A death you can never escape!”
Ramos also identified with "Berserk" characters on several other occasions. He tweeted, “I told you once. I will have my own kingdom. Nothing has changed.” This is a close paraphrase of a quote from the character Griffith, who said, “I told you once, I will get my own kingdom. Nothing has changed.”
He tweeted, “I'm Femto. I can also do whatever I want. I will have my own kingdom. I will choose the place you die," adding a link to a trailer for "Berserk." Griffith dies and is reborn as Femto, a member of the God Hand, who is undeterred by moral inhibitions. Femto becomes the spearheadof the God Hand’s schemes.
Ramos tweeted the anime cover art from "Berserk – The Golden Age Arc Movie Collection" on DVD, which features the protagonist Guts. He twice quoted Guts, a swordsman motivated by revenge whose left forearm is replaced by a prosthetic which can be fitted with a cannon. Guts kills many enemies, including his primary antagonist, Bishop Mozgus, who is a demon spawn with angelic wings. Before delivering the coup de grâce, Guts tells Mozgus, “If you meet your God, say this for me … Leave me the hell alone!”
The latter is one of the most popular quotes among "Berserk" fans. However, some translate the quote, or paraphrase it differently. For example: “If you meet your God, tell him to leave me the fuck alone!”
Or, as Ramos tweeted, some three minutes before the shooting: “Fuck you, leave me alone.” He then added another of his Twitter handles, @JudgeMoylanFrnd, which features the face of Charles Moylan, the judge who had dismissed his defamation case, marked with the brand of sacrifice.
Guts’ message for Mozgus to take to his god is a familiar trope in action movies, the sort of comment that a protagonist makes before dispatching a villain, such as “I’ll see you in Hell,” “See you on the other side,” or “Hasta la vista, baby.” However, this “Leave me alone” message is not meant for the people whom the protagonist is about to kill; it is for them to carry to their god.
In light of Ramos’ having previously tweeted this same language in anger at both the Capital and Maryland court officials, and that this closely tracks what Guts tells his primary antagonist before delivering the killing blow, Ramos was making clear his intent to kill. In the context of scripted violence, as when a politician uses his office to demonize journalists, individuals who view themselves as holy warriors or heroes motivated by a sense of grievance know which villains to kill.
Ramos, who represented himself in his defamation case against the Capital, insisted that he was sane and that he had not been merely fantasizing online about being a predator. He wrote on his website, "I’ve been learning law for a different kind of game. It’s no publicity stunt, nor clinical insanity, nor predatory Internet fantasy, but very dangerous indeed."
In the same document, he wrote, "Much like a life, what is the price of a name? Are these even two different questions?" Like the 16th-century English penitent who confessed to defamation in Mitford v. Shaw, calling it a kind of murder, Ramos equates the loss of his good name with the loss of a life. This is akin to the reasoning of those who kill abortion providers: If, according to their understanding of God’s law, abortion is murder, then those who provide abortions are subject to death. Likewise, if a theocrat believes defamation to be a kind of murder, then what is the penalty?
After years of build-up, Ramos became a self-righteous, avenging character he had invented for himself, and announced his intent to kill, writing to the newspaper’s former attorney and to Maryland court officials that he was on his way to the Capital newsroom “with the objective of killing every person present.” They received the letters after the massacre. In a letter to Judge Moylan, he wrote, “Welcome, Mr. Moylan, to your unexpected legacy: YOU should have died.” He signed off, “Friends forever, Jarrod W. Ramos.”
Here again, Ramos is quoting from Berserk.
Guts’ adoptive father Gambino blames him for the death of his wife. So he tries to kill Guts, while telling him, “You should have died.” In self-defense, Guts kills Gambino. But he feels guilty and conflicted about this deed. A recurring nightmare of an army of skeletons haunts him, their eyeless orbs glaring as they chant over and over, “You should have died.”
This message is not for the people whom the protagonist has killed, nor for the people he would have liked to kill. It is for Guts himself – a killer who felt justified but also conflicted and guilty even as he killed.
Ramos seems to be suggesting that, like the "Berserk" protagonist he referenced in his final tweet, he felt conflicted about killing. It appears that just prior to the mass murder, Ramos signaled his realization that, like Guts, he would feel guilty about it. This suggests that he knew right from wrong, and therefore supports the argument that, as Ramos himself has insisted, he was sane. While his final tweet indicates a rationale that he must defend himself from perceived oppression and injustice (“Leave me alone”), his letter to the judge indicates that he anticipates feeling haunted by the consciousness of guilt (“You should have died”).
Lessons learned
As our family members, friends and colleagues die in one mass shooting after another, we urge ourselves to understand what we could do differently as a society. Why did this suspect do what he did? Each time, we come away with at least as many questions as answers. I don’t claim to know the right questions, let alone the answers. We all have a lot of work to do. But I have learned a few things from my research into Jarrod Ramos’ world. One of them recalls Maya Angelou’s famous quote, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Ramos showed himself to the world before he acted. He collected a grab bag of grievances out of which he tried to forge a rationale, arguably a theology, that would give his revenge tale a transcendent meaning: It would be the story of his life. He revealed himself often; society chose not to see or was unable to, or at any rate did not take him seriously. He recognized this fact. After the mass murders, his letters reminded us all, “I told you so.”
Ramos' worldview is clearly derived from multiple, esoteric sources – sources he may not have accessed all by himself. This does not mean that he did not act alone; it does mean that he did not come to such sources as 16th-century ecclesiastical court records by himself. Someone pointed him in this direction. Ramos is probably not the only one who has been directed to such material in search of the will of God in the 21st Century and one’s role in God’s plan.
Ramos called himself “an arrogant auto-didact,” with reference to how he learned how to represent himself (however unsuccessfully) in court. There is a rich history on the far right of individuals -- including self-proclaimed “sovereign citizens” and theocrats advocating Higher Law -- who defend themselves by cobbling together supposed legal precedents, divine authority and ill-conceived justifications for illegal and sometimes violent acts.
There are also Christian nationalist think tanks, such as Michael Peroutka’s Institute on the Constitution,that peddle books and courses to self-taught advocates on how to “defend against those in opposition to God’s Word.” However out of the mainstream they may be, such people should be properly understood and taken seriously. They say what they mean; they mean what they say. When someone speaks out about meting out carnage in service to Higher Authority, let’s all pay attention.
Ignoring an injustice collector who views himself as the hand of God doesn’t work. Ignoring the women he harasses doesn’t work. Coddling him in the courts despite his overt law-breaking doesn’t work. Ignoring the multiple cultural influences that shape and validate his viewpoint doesn’t work.
When it comes to Jarrod Ramos in particular, however bizarre and convoluted his "Berserk"-influenced, alt-right worldview may seem, pay attention. There is much more we need to know about the profoundly anti-democratic origins of this man's violent history.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/how-charles-koch-is-helping-neo-confederates-teach-college-students/
no many lnx
How Charles Koch Is Helping Neo-Confederates Teach College Students
The Koch Foundation is often praised for its higher-ed funding, but the money is going to some radical professors
By Alex Kotch MARCH 21, 2018
Billionaire industrialist and conservative political mega-donor Charles Koch first entered the political world through the John Birch Society, a secretive anti-Communist outfit that campaigned against the civil-rights movement. Since then, he and his brother David amassed enormous wealth and put together a powerful conservative political network that rivals either major party in size and funding.
A new report from activist group UnKoch My Campus shows that Charles Koch’s ties to white supremacy have persisted throughout his adult life. The report details an array of instances where Koch has funded neo-Confederate scholars—a largely unnoticed aspect of the Koch Industries CEO’s ambitious project of funding higher education.Most alarming is a collaboration between Florida Atlantic University, the Charles Koch Foundation, and a major private-prison company, which is led by a professor who was a member of the research arm of a white-nationalist hate group.
While raking in corporate profits as the head of the family’s oil-refining business since the mid-1960s, Charles Koch and his top tactician, Richard Fink, developed a “Structure of Social Change,” which they would deploy to pull America as far to the right on taxes and regulations as they could. Koch, a libertarian, had resigned from the John Birch Society after opposing its position on the Vietnam War, and created a regressive sphere of influence. The first step in this strategy was funding higher education, because, as he said at a 1974 gathering of the Institute for Humane Studies, now a George Mason University center that he finances and directs, “educational programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free-market scholars is preferable to mass advertising.”
Koch and his family foundations have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges and universities around the United States. In 2013, the Charles Koch Foundation began donating to Florida Atlantic University, offering $5,000 that year. By 2016, the annual donation had risen to $32,000.
Marshall DeRosa, who runs a prison-education program with financial backing from the Koch Foundation, is a Florida Atlantic University political-science professor who has written extensively on the Confederacy. He also has ties to its modern remnants.
From 2000 until at least 2009, according to archived web pages,DeRosa was a “faculty member” at the League of the South Institute, the “educational arm of the Southern independence movement” where “the South’s finest unreconstructed scholars” taught summer institutes and seminars. The LOS Institute acts as the charitable nonprofit of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers aneo-Confederate hate group, and supports a second Southern secession in order to form a nation ruled by “Anglo-Celtic” people.
The LOS was co-founded in 1994 by an original member of the Center for Libertarian Studies, which was launched in 1976 with seed money from Charles Koch. Michael Tubbs, a white nationalist who once stockpiled military weapons and planned to target businesses owned by African Americans and Jews, is still the current chairman of the Florida LOS chapter, according to Newsweek, and has appeared at the side of LOS president Michael Hill as recently as January 2018. In 1987, Hill and three accomplices called themselves “guardians of the gene pool.”
The League of the South Institute is “the educational branch of the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation,” named after the wife of the late Jack Kershaw, longtime leader within the violent White Citizens Council and founding board member of the League of the South. In 1998, Kershaw erected a statue of Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest and declared, “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”
Recently, LOS was a prominent white-nationalist force at the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hill, a board member of the Kershey Foundation, had told supporters to prepare for violence. Another LOS member was charged in January for brutally beating a 20-year-old black man at the rally.
Regarding his LOS affiliation, DeRosa told The Nation, “That was a long time ago. I disengaged early on. They’d invite me to things and I’d go to talk about my scholarship, especially the Confederate constitution, but I got an inkling as to some of the characters involved…. I didn’t feel comfortable.”
Experts on hate groups have a different view. “The LOS was different when DeRosa was involved, not as militant, but it still had very, very bad racial views,” said Heidi Beirich, an expert on right-wing extremism and director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He can’t scurry away from the fact that for a long time he was a member of a group that had white-supremacist view
DeRosa isn’t the only former LOS Institute academic in the Koch higher-ed network. The founder of the institute, Donald Livingston, who served on the Institute for Humane Studies Academic Review Committee—which grants Koch’s “Humane Studies Fellowships” (originally “Claude R. Lambe Fellowships”)—from 1996 to 1999, has stayed in the network’s orbit. Last spring, he lectured at an Institute for Humane Studies seminar at George Mason University.
Thomas DiLorenzo, an “affiliated scholar” of the LOS Institute as recently as 2008, was an economics professor in George Mason University and worked on policy for the Koch-funded, libertarian Cato Institute. In 2005, several years after the Southern Poverty Law Center classified LOS as a hate group, he defended the organization, writing that it “advocates peace and prosperity in the tradition of a George Washington or a Thomas Jefferson.”
DeRosa and DiLorenzo taught a three-day LOS “summer school” together in 2000 on topics including “Why secession was, and is, constitutional” and “How the ‘Fourteenth Amendment’ was never constitutionally passed by Congress nor ratified by the States.”
Not long after SPLC labeled the LOS a hate group in the early 2000s, Livingston left the LOS Institute and founded its successor, the Abbeville Institute, named after the birthplace of fierce slavery advocate John Calhoun, and is still president. (DiLorenzo is currently affiliated with the Abbeville Institute, as well.) In 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed the Abbeville Institute a place where scholars “nostalgic for the Old South” went to “study the virtues of secession.” The Chronicle reported that Abbeville scholars argued that the Civil War, or “the War of Northern Aggression,” was “not about slavery…and that the antebellum Southern states had every right to secede.”
Beirich said that while Livingston did leave the LOS when it became especially extreme, “he runs his own incredibly neo-Confederate institute…. A question [for the Koch Foundation] is, why are you affiliated with a person like that? His position is not a serious historical position. The South did not just fight for states’ rights—it was about slavery. These are distorted views of history.”
DeRosa remains part of Abbeville as well, and other ex-LOS Institute scholars including DiLorenzo have recently been active with the group.
Several former LOS scholars are also part of the Mises Institute, a think tank formed in 1982 that the Southern Poverty Law Center says has “strong neo-Confederate principles.” Its founder, Lewis Rockwell, argued that the Civil War “transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order.”
At least nine Mises Institutes scholars have worked with LOS, according to the UnKoch report, and Mises employs several Koch-funded academics. Mises scholars collectively received $12.5 million in academic funding from the Charles Koch Foundation between 2005 and 2016.
“Through their support for these faculty, the Koch Foundation is subsidizing and strengthening an already booming wave of violent, alt-right anarcho-capitalists,” said Ralph Wilson, the UnKoch report’s author and the group’s co-founder.
When asked for detailed comment about several aspects of this reporting, the Koch Foundation issued a two-sentence reply to The Nation: “The Charles Koch Foundation’s criminal justice reform work is rooted in the principles of human dignity. We do not tolerate racism in any shape or form.”
THE PRISON-TO-WHITE-SUPREMACY PIPELINE
But Florida Atlantic students aren’t the only minds that DeRosa is being paid to shape. After getting commitments from the Koch Foundation and GEO Group, one of the world’s largest private-prison companies, DeRosa got state certification for a pilot program, the Inmate Civics Education Enhancement Project. He taught the first class at a South Bay, Florida, GEO Group prison in 2015.
“It’s disturbing that people of color might be exposed to neo-Confederate ideas in prison,” said Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If you’re going to find someone to teach in prisons you’d think you could find someone who wasn’t involved with a neo-Confederate hate group.”
Meanwhile, at least four GEO Group executives have served on the Florida Atlantic University board of trustees. GEO Group had an agreement with FAU to donate $6 million to the university in 2013 in exchange for naming rights over the football stadium, but it was withdrawn because it sparked significant controversy. “GEO is very much committed to recidivism. They have a reentry program. They’re amazing,” said DeRosa.
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/white-supremacists-disturbing-outreach-russian-friends-shows-why-trumps-fondness
Many fear that President Donald Trump’s obvious affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin means that the occupant of the Oval Office is being blackmailed by a foreign power. And while there is some evidence to support this theory, another even more troubling explanation has received far less attention.
This theory posits that Trump is not solely obliged to Putin for personal reasons but that he also has an ideological affinity for the authoritarian leader.
The ideological connection is illustrated in the increasingly amicable relationship between American white supremacists and the Russian state, as detailed in a recent ThinkProgress article. Most recently, this connection manifested in a letter fromMichael Hill, the president of the neo-Confederate group League of the South, addressed to “our Russian Friends,” as reported by Right Wing Watch.
In the letter, Hill announces the launch of Russian language section on his group’s website and draws out his shared interests with Russia:
We understand that the Russian people and Southerners are natural allies in blood, culture, and religion. As fellow Whites of northern European extraction, we come from the same general gene pool. As inheritors of the European cultural tradition, we share similar values, customs, and ways of life. And as Christians, we worship the same Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and our common faith binds us as brothers and sisters.
ThinkProgress reports that Hill also held a video conference call with the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia’s 2014 conference in Moscow.
“The invitation for Hill to speak marks one of the earliest instances of interest in Russia in stoking secessionists — and white supremacist — movements across the U.S.,” writes Casey Michel for ThinkProgress. “It would set the tone for things like the opening of a 'California Embassy' in Moscow or the 'Heart of Texas' Facebook page, which advocated Texas secession.”
The apparent alliance between Russian nationalists and American white supremacists suggests a foreign policy agenda that Trump seems to be pursuing. It would involve closer ties to largely white, authoritarian states like Russia while distancing the U.S. from liberal multicultural democraMichel also notes that Matthew Heimbach, a prominent white supremacist member of the “alt-right,” once posed for a photograph holding the League of the South’s flag along with a copy of a book by neo-fascist Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin.
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