mchugh, katie
==
she had defected, apology not enuf, names names
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/hiding-in-plain-sight-the-white-nationalist-who-toiled-inside-a-right-wing-media-powerhouse
mj thompson
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big lawsuit
scary link?
[### United States : GEOINT champion Umbra at centre of ...
Intelligence Online
https://www.intelligenceonline.com › 2023/11/29 › geo...](https://www.intelligenceonline.com/corporate-intelligence/2023/11/29/geoint-champion-umbra-at-centre-of-dispute-between-investors-with-historic-ties-to-far-right,110113116-eve)
Nov 29, 2023 — Charles Johnson, a controversial former political operative, alleges that investment manager Hal Lambert and his firm Point Bridge Capital ...
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sjpl
Hatewatch reviewed a trove of emails, first reported on by Buzzfeed, that detailed the relationship between the NYPD and Clearview AI. Clearview AI founder Ton-That put the NYPD and the non-profit group Thorn in contact after meetings with Ashton Kutcher, Thorn’s cofounder. Kutcher and Ton-That discussed possible investment, according to a former associate of Ton-That who spoke to Hatewatch.
Ton-That sent the email to NYPD Lt. Felix Rivera and a person whose name and email were redacted by the NYPD’s Records Access Office.
Ton-That, March 19, 2019, 6:23 p.m. ET: Hi [redacted], Felix Rivera can tell you more about how he’s used our software to solve cases.
A source close to Thorn confirmed that someone introduced Thorn and Clearview AI in 2019. Demi Moore and Kutcher founded Thorn in 2012. Thorn uses facial recognition technology for its Spotlight program, which is designed to help law enforcement identify victims of child sex trafficking. Thorn claims officers in “all 50 states and Canada” use Spotlight.
The introduction “went nowhere,” the source told Hatewatch in a call. There “were concerns with how that technology was deployed, and there was no interest in working with Clearview AI.” Still, the email further demonstrates Clearview AI’s ambitions to integrate itself in law enforcement operations across the U.S.
It is unclear if Rivera responded to Ton-That’s email. Thorn no longer has emails related to the introduction, according to the source, who declined to elaborate. Hatewatch requested further emails from the NYPD, but a records officer said there were no more emails to release.
Hatewatch emailed an NYPD spokesperson for a comment on the email. The spokesperson referred Hatewatch to its policy on facial recognition technology adopted in March 2020 and said their “previous practices did not authorize the use of services such as Clearview AI nor did they specifically prohibit it.”
Ton-That responded to Hatewatch’s request for comment via email, saying the “questions relate to old assertions regarding myself and my company. There are factual inaccuracies and these questions are irrelevant with regard to the myriad crimes we have assisted law enforcement in solving over the years.”
Ton-That did not respond to a follow-up request asking him to point out the purported factual inaccuracies in Hatewatch’s reporting.
‘Terrifying’ app
Clearview has links to the authoritarian hard right, and Ton-That associates with white supremacists, as HuffPost previously reported. Privacy experts have raised alarm about the company because it amassed a reservoir of over 3 billion images by scraping photos from the web, without the consent of those photographed.
Research shows facial recognition technology is prone to racial bias. One study found it produces “higher rates of false positives for [Asian, Indigenous and Black people] at a factor of “10 to 100 times,” depending on the technology.
Clearview AI began as Smartcheckr in 2017. Extremist Charles “Chuck” Johnson claimed involvement in the company’s facial recognition algorithm that January, HuffPost reported.
Hatewatch and others have documented Johnson’s activism in detail. An associate of reactionary billionaire Peter Thiel, he has repeatedly collaborated with white supremacists and helped amplify a Russian intelligence-backed plot to sway the French elections in May 2017 through his now-defunct website GotNews.
Johnson set up a far-right crowdfunding platform, WeSearchr, in 2017. Former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh shared messages from the WeSearchr Slack channel, a nexus for far-right figures including Ton-That, Johnson, neo-Nazi Andrew Auernheimer and more, with HuffPost and Hatewatch.
Johnson said in the messages he hired Ton-That to create facial recognition software and that the software could be used to “identify every illegal alien in the country.”
Johnson confirmed to Hatewatch that he views himself as a co-founder of Clearview AI. Ton-That has denied this. Johnson, who challenges his designation as an extremist, also told Hatewatch that Ton-That met with Kutcher in early 2019 about a possible investment in the company. Johnson was “against the meetings,” which he claimed led to Ton-That introducing Thorn and the NYPD.
Clearview AI began seeking funding from investors in 2018,The New York Times reported. The company secured an initial seed investment of $1 million in July 2018 from backers including “Thiel, the venture capitalist David Scalzo and Hal Lambert.” Lambert is the creator of MAGA ETF, an investment fund that tracks companies aligned with Republican beliefs.
Investors and Schwartz’s friends had versions of Clearview AI on their phone in 2018, according to The New York Times.
Kutcher referenced a facial recognition “beta app” on his phone during an appearance on YouTube program “Hot Ones” that premiered Sept. 26, 2019. He called the app “terrifying.”
Kutcher is a successful investor, and co-founded Sound Ventures and A-Grade Investments, two venture capital firms.
Hatewatch contacted Kutcher’s publicist and Sound Ventures for comment on the alleged meeting with Ton-That. Neither responded. Sound Ventures denied it invested in Clearview AI to Business Insider in 2020.
Hatewatch attempted and failed to find up-to-date contact information for A-Grade Investment. Thorn did not respond to a follow-up request for comment on Johnson’s claims.
NYPD connection
Clearview AI has ingrained itself in law enforcement culture by offering trials to departments and bureaus from local to federal levels. The FBI agreed to pay Clearview AI $18,000 for a licensing contract on Dec. 31, 2021, according to public records. The Army, Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have also signed contracts with Ton-That’s company.
The contract between ICE and Clearview AI, signed on Sept. 3, 2021, totals $500,000, records show.
The NYPD began speaking to Clearview AI about a trial period for its technology in October 2018. Richard Schwartz, a longtime New York political player and former aide to mayors Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch, began arranging meetings with Deputy Inspector Christopher Flanagan. Schwartz mentioned his ties to former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and former Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple when arranging meetings. Ton-That also attended.
Schwartz, Oct. 17, 2018, 5:55 p.m. ET: “Hi Inspector Flanagan, A pleasure meeting you. My partner, Hoan, and I would very much like to meet with you on our facial-recognition app, as Greg suggested. I am personally highly committed to the success of the NYPD as I served as Mayor Giuliani's Senior Advisor and introduced him to [Bratton] and [Maple]. Please let me if there's a date that's convenient for you.”
Flanagan, Oct. 18, 2018, 10:58 a.m. ET: I would be interested in meeting up. Does Tuesday Oct 23 work?
Schwartz, Oct. 19, 2018, 08:56 a.m. ET: Good Morning Inspector Flanagan. Just wanted to follow up on your kind email from yesterday regarding a meeting on Oct. 23. Hoan and I are free anytime that day between 10:45 am and 4 pm. What works for you? Look forward to getting together.
Flanagan, Oct. 19, 2018, 10:06 a.m. ET : 11:00 is good. Our office is at 300 Gold street [84th Precinct] in Brooklyn or I can stop by your office on my way in. Either is fine with me.
Emails show Ton-That visited NYPD at least three more times before Ton-That signed a contract for an NYPD trial of Clearview AI that ran from December 2018 to March 2019.
Officers continued using Clearview AI long after the trial period ended, the emails show. NYPD Det. Damon Gergar wrote to Clearview AI to get a trial version in Dec. 2019.
Gergar, Dec. 17, 2019, 9:09 a.m. ET: Hi! I’m a detective with the NYPD and on a Homeland Security Investigations task force where I conduct mostly child pornography and pedophile investigations. Other members of my team investigate a wide variety of other crimes. I was wondering what I need to do to get a trial version of clearview? We would love to test it out, if possible. You can reach me at 914-[redacted], also. Thanks so much!
Clearview, Dec. 19, 2019, 10:37 a.m. ET: Hi Damon Gergar, you have been invited to Clearview! To active your account please click the button below”
Gergar and Clearview AI fostered a collaborative relationship that went beyond the NYPD. Gergar referred three ICE employees to Clearview AI, the emails show.
The first ICE referral was sent to Clearview AI on Jan. 6, 2020, at 1:32 p.m. ET. The next was a special agent, whose name is redacted, on Jan. 14, 2020, at 1:34 p.m. ET. Another came on Jan. 21, 2020, at 12:17 p.m. ET.
That same day, Gergar sent Ton-That his resume.
Gergar, Jan. 15, 2020, 10:54 a.m. ET: Hi, Hoan! Let me know if you receive this and what you think. Thanks so much.
NYPD officers continued using and requesting access as late as Jan. 2020, according to an email sent from NYPD and U.S. Homeland Security Det. Lynn McCarthy to Jessica Garrison, Clearview AI’s vice president of government affairs.
McCarthy, Jan. 22, 2020, 2:48 p.m. ET: Hi, I am hoping to obtain access to Clearview, the facial recognition program. The program assisted to identify a subject of a case that we are currently working on. Thank you in advance.
The NYPD spokesperson told Hatewatch, “A facial recognition match is merely a lead; no one has ever been arrested solely on the bases of a computer match alone.”
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at advocacy organization Free Press, responded to Hatewatch’s request for comment on the email and Clearview AI’s relationship with the NYPD by saying it “was troubling from the start.”
Benavidez concluded:
no lnx pix
emails Reveal Identity of Longtime White Nationalist Propagandist as Onetime Conservative Insider
March 04, 2020
Hannah Gais
Months before the “alt-right” became a household name, the nebulous band of white power activists seized upon their digital prowess to popularize a slur that would soon become a mainstay in the Republican infighting that defined the 2016 presidential election.
Frustrated by the GOP’s array of insufficiently racist presidential candidates, far-right wordsmiths from Breitbart News to the Daily Stormer branded their conservative enemies as “cuckservatives” – or “cucks.”
The proliferation of this portmanteau of “cuckold” and “conservative” ought to be remembered as no more than an early manifestation of the conservative infighting that would mark the run-up to President Trump’s election.
At the heart of the media blitz was one white nationalist blogger, Gregory Hood, whose popular manifesto lambasting cuckservatives was cited by Salon, The Guardian and New Republic – not to mention a wealth of white supremacist websites. “Hood’s porny polemic, with its talk about wives being mounted and begging from the corner,” wrote former New Republic staffer Jeet Heer, “is proof of how the term cuckservative is popular because it pushes psycho-sexual hot buttons.”
“Porny” or not, Hood’s diatribe provided – both to the alt-right broadly and to journalists – a thinking man’s summary of a viral phenomenon.
But who was “Gregory Hood”? Despite being occasionally conjured up as a representative of the alt-right in mainstream publications, the prolific white nationalist blogger’s identity has remained a secret for over a decade. Yet a trove of leaked emails from former Daily Caller and Breitbart staffer Katie McHugh exposes “Hood’s” identity as Kevin DeAnna – an early leader and ideological architect of the alt-right. McHugh and DeAnna dated from 2013 to 2016, and again briefly in 2017, during which they often corresponded about DeAnna’s pseudonymous written work by email and Google Chat. These emails also tie DeAnna to another pseudonym, “James Kirkpatrick” – a pen name he used at other alt-right and far-right sites that tended to be more focused on anti-immigrant rhetoric, including, among others, VDARE.
DeAnna and his editors throughout the years – among them, American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah, the National Policy Institute’s Richard Spencer, and Counter-Currents’ Gregory Johnson – did not respond to Hatewatch’s repeated requests for comment via email.
"James Kirkpatrick" Twitter account
A screenshot from the "James Kirkpatrick" Twitter account.
“Hood” and “Kirkpatrick” were prolific in their output. “Hood” published a book and contributed to several others – all while penning nearly 450 articles for various white nationalist sites since 2008. As “Kirkpatrick,” DeAnna has published over 1,130 articles since 2011. In October 2019, he even released his first book. “Hood” sought to hone the anger of young, white men in service of the movement. “Kirkpatrick” spoke to the broader far right’s anxieties about immigration and multiculturalism in more hardcore language that white nationalists could appreciate.
DeAnna frequently turned to McHugh to proofread articles written under both bylines. On a number of occasions, he asked for her assistance in running VDARE’s Twitter account.
Most importantly, DeAnna and McHugh’s emails shed light on the role DeAnna played in helping to lead the budding movement. While operating safely behind pseudonyms, his contributions propelled white nationalism into the realm of cultural palatability. The flexibility his pseudonyms gave him allowed DeAnna to express his beliefs on white nationalism and the need for white ethnic hegemony to an extreme degree.
These emails and DeAnna’s use of two different pseudonyms to represent two particular ideological trends on the far right illuminate the intimate ties between the anti-immigrant far right and the hardline white nationalists – connections some supporters, including in the Trump administration, would prefer be ignored.
From the campus cultural wars to the blogosphere
DeAnna’s career as a pseudonymous blogger took off years before the alt-right became a household name.
On Feb. 17, 2012, DeAnna – the longtime white nationalist head and founder of the ultra-conservative Youth for Western Civilization – announced his intention to step down. A graduate student at American University’s School of International Service at the time, he noted his decision was motivated by “various personal (namely, I’m old) and professional reasons.” Neither DeAnna, nor YWC, were going to disappear, however. “I’ll still be working in the conservative movement . . . but I’ll be doing different things and won’t be associated with . . . YWC.”
DeAnna went on to abandon his perch at the Leadership Institute and become marketing coordinator at the far-right website WorldNetDaily. But his shift away from YWC also caused the once-prominent DeAnna to fade from the public eye.
His decision to abandon YWC and go dark gave him the space – and freedom – to shape the very movement he helped build. Over the course of a decade, DeAnna authored thousands of posts.
Gregory Hood AmRen articles
American Renaissance has published nearly 200 articles bylined by Gregory Hood.
As “Hood” he penned at least 82 articles for Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal, 116 articles for Gregory Johnson’s website and publishing house Counter-Currents and close to 250 articles for Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance.
These three outlets served as ground zero for the formation of the alt-right’s more “intellectual” wing, bridging the thought of the chin-stroking racist paleoconservatives with that of more traditional white nationalism.
Meanwhile, as “Kirkpatrick,” DeAnna authored nearly 1,110 articles for the anti-immigrant, white nationalist site VDARE, alongside more mainstream ultra-conservative figureheads, such as Ann Coulter. In 2018, “Kirkpatrick” picked up a columnist gig with The Social Contract – a journal published by anti-immigrant stalwart John Tanton.
Building a revolutionary alternative right
Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried in 2017. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
More so than Paul Gottfried, a far-right thinker often credited with giving rise to the term “alternative right,” DeAnna as “Hood” set a roadmap for the alt-right to “destroy” the conservative establishment. Whereas Gottfried implored the racist paleoconservatives of the H.L. Mencken Society to “do what is possible rather than what lies beyond our limited material resources” in 2008, DeAnna called for a more aggressive revolutionary approach. Writing for Taki’s Magazine in July 2009 under his own byline, DeAnna argued in favor of a “post-conservative and post-national right” that could “be a voice for a ‘revolution’ that isn’t just rhetoric.” He cited the momentum of the Ron Paul movement as evidence that a new, “alternative” form of conservatism could take root. While distancing the YWC from the budding “alternative right,” DeAnna saw within corners of the conservative movement an openness to breaking with the establishment.
These currents have carried over into DeAnna’s pseudonymous work, where he has repeatedly decried the hegemony of, to use a term all-too-common on VDARE, “Conservatism, Inc.” Emboldened by the GOP’s failure to choose a suitable candidate to represent white nationalist ideals, “Hood” wrote an essay published on Counter-Currents that would quickly become foundational. The piece, “ A White Nationalist Memo to White Male Republicans,” called upon disaffected white Americans to “fight for a country of [their] own.” From 4chan’s /pol/ and Identity Evropa-affiliated Discord servers to sites such as Occidental Observer, “Hood’s” essay was lauded as a classic.
“You need to recognize that America today is a filthy lie, the most vile and despicable fiction ever foisted upon decent people,” DeAnna wrote under the “Hood” pseudonym. Elsewhere in the same piece, he proclaimed: “It’s time to stop being Americans. It’s time to start being White Men again.”
As “Hood,” DeAnna painted a picture of an America that had forsaken the white race – and more specifically, white men. “Everything you loved about what used to be your country came from one group of people. It’s the group you belong to. It’s the white race,” “Hood” wrote in a 2012 article called “Waking Up from the American Dream” from his book of the same title. “And it’s not an accident that the same people who hate your country hate your race more than anything.”
But whites cannot “drop out” of the system; instead, they have to fight against it in defense of the ethnostate, as DeAnna, writing as “Hood,” argued in a Counter-Currents article published in December 2012:
You can’t drop out. You can’t remain silent. You can’t work a job quietly and hope they will leave you alone. . . . They are coming for you, your job, your family, everything you care about. . . . You can give in to their system, accept their oppression, play by their rules, do everything you are supposed to do. It just won’t matter.
Struggle is not a choice. That’s inevitable. The choice is a desperate struggle for a white homeland – or the surrender to eternal darkness.
In other words, there was no political solution from within the system; such a civilizational corrective had to come from outside of it. Whites were, in “Hood’s” account, unable to “drop out” of the system entirely, but only insofar as dropping out meant giving up on the ethnostate.
To that end, DeAnna as “Hood” repeatedly advocated for the destruction of mainstream conservatism, albeit now citing more extreme figures as inspiration.
In a Counter-Currents article from 2013, “Hood” called for a hostile takeover of the GOP. Citing James Mason – the author of the terroristic manifesto "SIEGE," which has inspired the likes of Atomwaffen Division, the Base, and others – “Hood” encouraged “white advocates” to form a movement that united all white people against a common enemy. Doing so effectively meant carving out alternative “cultural spaces,” such as “publishers, website, bands, or spiritual groups.”
Success, “Hood” continued, depended on translating traditional white nationalist talking points so they could be more easily digested by a mainstream audience. While claiming that the GOP constituted the largest and most amicable group of politically active white voters to the white nationalist cause, he argued that racist activists could not simply transform them into a viable base overnight. “A successful movement,” “Hood” observed earlier in the same piece, “has to have waystations that we control all along the political spectrum.”
Finding an admirer in Jared Taylor
“Hood’s” reputation as a major driver of the alt-right’s approach to conservatism in particular was not built overnight. Indeed, DeAnna began cultivating his alter ego long before YWC collapsed.
The pen name “Gregory Hood” appeared for the first time in 2008 on a piece published in American Renaissance. “Hood” is simply described in his author’s bio as someone who “has been active in conservative youth movements in the US.”
“Hood” remained relatively inactive until 2011, when DeAnna began to more frequently write under the pseudonym. That year, he wrote four pieces for Counter-Currents, a white nationalist website and publishing house run by Gregory Johnson.
In May 2011, American Renaissance ran yet another essay from “Hood” – this time on what the neo-Confederate movement can offer “white advocates.” One month prior, American Renaissance head Jared Taylor encouraged the organization’s newsletter subscribers to support YWC and DeAnna.
Taylor’s admiration aside, it wasn’t until 2012 that “Hood’s” byline began to regularly appear in American Renaissance as an online contributor.
By 2015, those driving the alt-right moment into salience had heeded DeAnna’s advice. They recognized Trump, as “Hood” wrote in a 2015 Radix Journal post, as an opportunity to “disrupt the system.”
“Hood’s” profile rose throughout the 2016 election cycle. His July 24, 2015, article for American Renaissance on “cuckservatism” came to be referred to as a manifesto. Meanwhile, his persona garnered numerous mainstream media mentions in Vox, Mother Jones and the L.A. Times, among others. Riding off this momentum, Counter-Currents released DeAnna’s first collection of essays under the pseudonym, titled Waking Up from the American Dream, in 2016. It was warmly received by those within the movement. Taylor contributed a blurb to “Hood’s” book, writing, “In our movement, Gregory Hood is unquestionably the best writer of his generation. Heck, he could be the best writer in the entire movement.”
At other times, DeAnna’s reputation made for ample joke material. In a Feb. 1, 2016, email, longtime friend and former YWC member Marcus Epstein jokingly blamed DeAnna’s “negative energy” for Trump’s poor performance in the Iowa caucuses. “His naysaying became a self fulfilling prophecy,” Epstein wrote, copying Richard Spencer, McHugh, DeAnna and a number of other D.C.-area white nationalists.
“Fox News shilling hard to get voters in NH to abandon Trump,” responded DeAnna.
“Kevin is like the homeless guy in American Psycho,” Epstein countered. “Negative attitude.”
Regardless, “Hood’s” reputation as a content producer and ideologue among the alt-right would pay off. “Hood” was hired in February 2018 at American Renaissance as a full-time staff writer, where he worked with another YWC alum, Devin Saucier. As Joseph Bernstein reported in BuzzFeed in 2017, Saucier has, in addition to working for Taylor as an assistant, written for American Renaissance for years using the pseudonym “Henry Wolff.” According to McHugh, who was not talking frequently with DeAnna at that time, it is unclear whether “Hood’s” new gig at American Renaissance was immediately after, or just before, DeAnna left his job at WorldNetDaily.
American Renaissance used the opportunity to re-introduce “Hood” to their readers through an interview with fellow pseudonymous AmRen, VDARE and Radix contributor “Hubert Collins.” Collins had crossed paths with Hood many times prior, including during a now-deleted 2014 interview on the neoreactionary website Social Matter with DeAnna as “Hood,” former Daily Caller reporter Scott Greer as “Michael McGregor” and former Daily Caller reporter Jonah Bennett as “Hadley Bennett.”
“James Kirkpatrick’s” life in “prudent obscurity”
Since 2011, DeAnna has cycled between his persona as “Hood” and writing under the pseudonym “James Kirkpatrick” for the anti-immigration, white nationalist hate site VDARE. Here, DeAnna acted as one of the site’s main contributors and, later, as a social media manager and editor. He railed against the behemoth that VDARE referred to as “Conservatism, Inc.” – that is, the people behind the party’s “ideological wonkery” – while occasionally bolstering insider efforts to shift the party to a more hardline stance on immigration and demographic change.
What would become DeAnna’s preferred nom de guerre for his more mainstream anti-immigration work appeared first at Richard Spencer’s AlternativeRight.org in early 2011. But by October 2011, “Kirkpatrick” took his talents to VDARE and DeAnna began writing under the “Kirkpatrick” pseudonym for the site. “Kevin DeAnna at Youth for Western Civilization writes that Occupy Wall St. protestors have accurately identified the problem,” “Kirkpatrick” wrote in the first sentence of his Oct. 14, 2011, piece, “namely the inability of ‘ordinary Americans to lead a middle class life.’”
As “Kirkpatrick,” DeAnna frequently aggregated and cited himself and “Hood.” Following Trump’s victory, he repurposed “Hood’s” 2012 essay “A White Nationalist Memo to White Male Republicans.”
Despite “Kirkpatrick’s” prolific output at VDARE, where he has penned over 1,110 blogs, DeAnna’s work for the site was not limited to blogging. As early as December 2013, DeAnna acknowledged to McHugh that he had picked up additional responsibilities at the site after temporarily breaking from his job at WND. In a Jan. 16, 2014 email, he expressed frustration while grappling with some sort of “record keeping” issue at VDARE.
Among some of the writers DeAnna had the responsibility of editing were Donald Collins, a former board member and current advisory board co-chair at the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform and frequent VDARE contributor. DeAnna was, as his emails to McHugh make clear, not a fan.
DeAnna, July 19, 2014, 5:04 pm: “. . . was set to write [an] immigration piece. . . But instead have to edit Collins, [G]ottfried, and write something abour [sic] TN. This is why no one reads vdare.”
DeAnna issued the same complaint a few weeks later in an email about his editorial duties.
DeAnna, July 30, 2014, 6:22 pm: “Fuck, Don Collins roused himself from senility and sent in a steaming plate of horseshit again.”
DeAnna, July 30, 2014, 6:22 pm: “‘Hey folks! Did you know the Whore of Babylon, the Pope, is trying to destroy our precious rule of law to fulfill his sinister Jesuit designs?’ Every Don Collins column.”
About a year later, DeAnna emailed McHugh from his “James Kirkpatrick” Gmail account, prepared to bring his complaints to Brimelow. After asking McHugh if she thought “this is too much,” DeAnna wrote:
“Kirkpatrick,” Nov. 25, 2015, 11:49 am: “I really, really don’t want to be an editor. I hate talking to people, I hate editing people whose work I’m uninterested in. . . . I don’t want to spend the rest of my life editing [Allan] Wall, Federale, etc. . . . If you want me to send in an article or two a week great, but I don’t want to do anything else (including Twitter, which is eating up all of my time.)
Despite his complaints, little about DeAnna’s situation at VDARE seemed to have changed. In an email sent to McHugh prior to the 2016 state of the union address, he complained about covering the event.
DeAnna, Jan. 12, 2016, 1:15 pm: “[The article on the State of the Union] will be a good mix with our cutting edge content about a random guy [that] I’ve never heard of [who] Paul Gottfried doesn’t like, a Stix column about an incident two months ago, and a Federale [column] complaining about a Washington Post article from two months ago. Also, we’re running a Don Collins ‘column’ which is literally just him copying the comments from a Washington Post article. . . . [I]t’s just plagiarism.”
These additional duties did little to stymie DeAnna’s production as a writer, however. In July 2017, he began publishing in The Social Contract. Two years later, in October 2019, DeAnna’s second pseudonymous book – his first as “Kirkpatrick” – was published by Arktos Media.
The book, titled "Conservatism, Inc.: The Battle for the American Right," was praised by reviewers at numerous white nationalist sites, including VDARE itself. “Kirkpatrick,” opined VDARE editor Peter Brimelow upon the book’s release, was one of many young authors compelled to hide from the mainstream media as a result of the “extraordinary unreported personal and professional . . . Holocaust after Trump’s 2016 election.”
“Once a rising figure in the Beltway Right,” Brimelow pontificated in his foreword for the book, “[‘Kirkpatrick’] has for some years now lived in prudent obscurity.” You, the reader, Brimelow continued, could blame the left’s “Reign of Terror” for that.
“The best you can do once you start down this road”
“I’m the best writer in the world for my niche,” DeAnna wrote in an email to McHugh on Aug. 10, 2015. “I’ve been told that directly.”
Yet DeAnna’s life as the “Prince of the Alt Right,” as he crowned himself in a June 1, 2014, email to McHugh, was far from glorious. His influence on the movement as “Hood” and “Kirkpatrick” was no replacement for the security guaranteed by a steady job outside of the extremist movement he had worked so hard to cultivate.
“I’m broke, know there’s no future in it, am terrified every day of being outed, would kill off the name entirely if I didn’t think that would increase the chances of being outed, and am desperate to find a way back to a normal job, having wasted the last 14 years,” DeAnna wrote to McHugh on Aug. 10, 2015, “My situation right now is basically the best you can do once you start on this road.”
Whatever sense of desperation DeAnna felt about his situation back in 2015 has done little to separate himself from the white nationalist movement. Some of the outlets “Hood” and “Kirkpatrick” wrote for have gone dark – most notably, NPI’s Radix Journal. But even as waves of infighting after the 2017 Unite the Right riots in Charlottesville tore apart the loose coalition of extremists who constituted the alt-right, both “Hood” and “Kirkpatrick” have carried on.
==
AN
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-mask-on-the-beltway-medias-embrace-of-white-nationalism-keeps-rearing-its-ugly-head/
One of the important factors in the rise of white nationalism is the way it has been normalized within the national media — treated at best as an afterthought, a purely fringe phenomenon that we really needn’t worry our heads about, with coverage often accompanied by warm fuzzy features remarking on how normal these neo-Nazi types can seem in real life.
People both inside and outside the media business often wind up scratching their heads in wonder that this sort of thing can happen even in an age when there is ample information on the toxicity that white nationalism represents. But the more we learn about the alt-right and its tentacles, the clearer it’s become that there are people situated within the media mainstream who in reality are silently sympathetic to these causes, and they are influencing the decisions over what gets covered and how.
A recent BuzzFeed piece by Rosie Gray does an excellent job of exposing how white nationalism has managed to insinuate itself inside the Beltway media ecosystem, mainly through a coterie of ostensibly mainstream conservatives who, it seems, are extraordinarily tolerant of neo-Nazism. It recounts the saga of Katie McHugh, an alt-right provocateur who moved in the right-wing Washington circles of Breitbart, The Daily Caller, GotNews, and WorldNetDaily, and who now deeply regrets the error of her ways.
It’s not entirely clear from the piece that McHugh has come to terms with the deeper issues around the work she did in helping propagate a vicious brand of white nationalism surreptitiously, under the guise of “conservatism.” It’s certainly not clear that she has yet reckoned with the real damage she did and her obligation now to do what she can to repair it, but time will tell on that front.
On the other hand, she clearly is regretful for her past actions, which is where everyone needs to start on the road to recovery from the grip of hateful ideologies. And she deserves credit for taking that biggest of all steps.
She also has started out by performing what is probably a huge public service in exposing much of the inner workings of the Beltway media white nationalist coterie. Editors and other reporters who operate with supposedly mainstream credentials are shown to be co-players in the white nationalist propaganda they all engaged in, though they all deny doing so.
Appropriately enough, the nexus of this coterie is none other than Tucker Carlson, both his Daily Caller news operation, of which he is co-founder but no longer publisher, as well as his daily Fox News program. As McHugh describes it, the vast majority of the surreptitious white nationalist organizing occurred within the ranks of Daily Caller staffers, heavily flanked by a full complement of Breitbart writers.
Some of the more prominent white nationalist movement figures—such as Kevin DeAnna, McHugh’s former boyfriend, who has long been on the radar of the Southern Poverty Law Center for his youthful organization of campus white nationalists in the 2000s—apparently operated more on the periphery, while their close friends occupied media positions inside the Beltway.
McHugh, you may recall, was fired from Breitbart for an overtly racist tweet about Muslims (“There would be no terror attacks in the UK if Muslims didn’t live there”). Of course, it was not actually the most racist thing she had ever tweeted out, but her timing was indiscreet, and she got caught in a media crossfire and was shown the door after having been a protégé of Steve Bannon’s, all while attending truly weird neopagan events:
McHugh sometimes accompanied DeAnna on weekend trips down to the Wolves’ headquarters for what they called a “moot” — a ceremony in which the assembled Wolves would smear ash on their bodies around a fire and give what McHugh described as “dramatic speeches” about self-sufficiency and relying on the other group members. They would then sit around the fire and drink beers.
The Wolves placed a heavy emphasis on masculinity. The women would prepare food for the gatherings earlier in the day before the moot commenced, according to McHugh. The Wolves were into a “Centurion Method” of physical fitness; a video still on YouTube shows DeAnna and Paul Waggener, one of the founders of the group who used the pseudonym “Grimnir,” taking turns lifting up the trunk of a car filled with cement blocks, scrambling around on a bunch of debris, and squatting while holding logs.
What we also learn is that there is a reason the same fellows grunting around campfires to establish their masculinity are eager viewers of Tucker Carlson: his news operation has provided a home for a number of them. Indeed, Snopes.com last year explored the striking extent to which Daily Caller writers have expressed white-nationalist views. Now it’s also clear why that is.
There is a reason that white nationalists avidly watch Carlson’s nightly Fox program in hopes of gleaning talking points and ideas. There is a reason the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer’s favorite pundit is Carlson (Andrew Anglin calls him “literally our greatest ally”). There is a reason the chat boards and other white nationalist haunts positively hum with chatter over Carlson’s TV broadcasts (“Tucker is a national treasure and will be the catalyst for real social change”; “At best, he’s a gateway for us and they know it”).
Of course, Carlson is not alone in the Beltway media in promoting white nationalist talking points. His cohort at Fox Business, Lou Dobbs—one of Donald Trump’s favorite pundits—mouths an endless stream of white nationalist and authoritarian talking points as well.
However, it’s obvious that Carlson’s sphere extends well beyond just the frame of the Fox network, and into a much darker world altogether. Nor is he alone.
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http://www.alternet.org/media/breitbart-news-dramatic-tailspin-may-be-irreversible
Earlier this year, reporter Lee Stranahan was in the White House press room when another journalist asked him which outlet he worked for.
“Breitbart News,” Stranahan answered, recalling the exchange in a recent phone conversation.
The other journalist laughed, thinking this had to be a joke. Breitbart, after all, was largely known, whether justly or not, as a hothouse where the alt-right tended to its most outlandish, paranoid creations: Clinton conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant fearmongering, garden-variety misogyny. One of its story tags was “black crime.” The tag is no longer used, yet it remains attached to a half-dozen stories on the website, the last published just over a year ago.
Tradition rules journalism as much as it rules golf, and tradition dictated that the White House press room was for upstanding men and women who’d gone to Columbia Journalism School, putting in their time at the Palookaville Weekly Citizen before earning a coveted spot in the newsroom of The Washington Post or The New York Times, or some other publication that deserved to be in the White House because its mission was sober reportage, not click-bait about “lesbian bridezillas” or “trannies.” Breitbart had no business being there because it would eagerly publish—has eagerly published, in fact—articles about “lesbian bridezillas” and “trannies.”
And not just a couple of such articles either: Breitbart’s editorial outlook is not imbued with cultural or political conservatism. Breitbart’s guiding principle is that of the tabloid: If it bleeds, it leads. Especially if the bleeding is caused by an illegal immigrant or some “globalist” Democrat crafting the New World Order on her porch in the Hamptons. This was (and largely remains) a lurid vision of America, terrifying yet enchanting, like one of those 1980s crime blockbusters with weird racial politics and lots of explosions, not to mention at least a couple of scantily clad blondes in search of a musclebound savior, preferably one wearing a sweat-stained American flag bandana.
But there Breitbart was, the outsider suddenly in the inner sanctum of American power, the unpopular kid unexpectedly crowned prom king, sought out by all those who’d once mocked him. Its chief executive, unkempt ultra-nationalist Steve Bannon, is now Trump’s chief strategist. He brought Breitbart staffers with him to the White House, including self-styled terrorism expert Sebastian Gorka and establishment tormentor Julia Hahn, in what *The Hill* called “the Breitbartization of the White House.”
And even as President Trump was supposedly draining the political swamp, his White House granted Bannon a retroactive ethics waiver that allowed him to keep talking Breitbart staffers, in seeming violation of federal rules.
Whatever you think of Breitbart’s unabashed distaste for Democrats and centrist Republicans, or its famously incendiary headlines—“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” “Bill Kristol, Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew”—it is inarguable that the site helped elect Trump, in large part by mercilessly shredding every Republican opposed to his candidacy while touting his immigration plan (i.e., the border wall) and making the darkest possible insinuations about Hillary Clinton and her supposedly corrupt coterie. So there Breitbart News was on November 8, shoulder to shoulder with Trump in the electoral trenches, firing away at the Democratic firewall. It crumbled that night, and the plains of the Midwest lay open for the taking. So did the Oval Office.
And that’s the problem Breitbart faces today, a problem similar to the one plaguing the Trump administration: Being an outsider works only when you’re on the outside. Breitbart’s (potential) troubles have been compounded because it sold Trump to its readers as our guy. Bannon had once wanted that guy to be Alabama’s Senator Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general. Instead, he got an ideology-averse pseudo-mogul, difficult to control but easy to convince. It’s hard to know how much of Breitbart’s support of Trump was a ploy for clicks, but it certainly presented a convincing portrait of an economic nationalist whose business savvy was matched only by his xenophobia.
The sale was made, but as has been frequently the case with Trump, the buyers have started to suspect they may have been played for fools. Breitbart (and, really, the entire right-wing media establishment) is now faced with a bungling chief executive who has embraced NATO and Goldman Sachs, largely ditched his plan for a border wall with Mexico and, during a speech in Saudi Arabia, didn’t utter the words that have been the touchstone of Republican foreign policy: radical Islamic terrorism.
What’s to be done about this? Breitbart doesn’t have a particularly rich tonal register, its voice reverting most frequently to outrage, derision or disgust. It is incapable of hitting the complex notes of regret, or even of measured concern. If you wanted nuance, you’d probably be a Weekly Standard subscriber.
“They are an outlet that has a very, very large stake in the success of President Trump,” explains Ben Shapiro, who left Breitbart during the presidential campaign, after Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski roughly grabbed Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields. After the incident, Breitbart sided with the Trump campaign over its reporter’s easily verifiable claims. Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire and host of a popular right-leaning podcast, says that under Bannon, Breitbart had become “Trump’s personal Pravda.”
For Breitbart, the potential spoils of playing the role of a state propaganda organ are great. The dangers are greater still. In February, Alexa, which ranks the popularity of websites, scored Breitbart as the 29th most visited website in the nation. This was an astonishing achievement for a news organization founded a decade ago in a Los Angeles basement, unknown to most Americans until the Trump candidacy ceased to seem like a political sideshow. Breitbart celebrated the achievement with typical bluster, touting its digital supremacy over both ESPN and PornHub. By the beginning of 2017, Breitbart had more unique visitors than Politico, more total traffic (that is, both visitors and page views combined) than The Washington Post. Breitbart had beaten not just the pornographers but also the journalistic elites who’d scorned it for years.
But much like Trump himself, Breitbart News may have expended too much energy on gloating. Breitbart has fallen to 63rdin Alexa’s rankings (its ranking was actually much lower, in the 270s, but after Vanity Fairpublished that figure, Breitbart complained to Alexa and had its ranking somehow recalibrated). SimilarWeb, a company that uses Google Analytics to analyze web browsing patterns, found that Breitbart had 128 million total visits in November, but that the number has since dropped to 78 million total visits in April. That is still an amazing feat, one that places Breitbart well above most other news organizations. Yet some in the media wonder whether the high watermark of the site’s relevance was the election in November.
Right-wing sites like the nascent Heat Street and Tucker Calrson's more established Daily Caller have shown themselves to be more nimble in their coverage, less tied to the White House and more willing to conduct genuine journalism. Traffic numbers aside, those are the sites I visit when I want to understand what the right is thinking.
Web popularity is fleeting, especially so when tethered to the fortunes of one exceedingly volatile, temperamental head of state. Alex Marlow, 31, the site’s Berkeley-educated editor-in-chief, has said he won’t allow for Stalinist shows of loyalty in his newsroom (the newsroom is mostly digital; writers tend to work from home). “When we feel like the president is not honoring the pledges he made to the public, he’s going to get critical coverage,” he told NBC’s *Today* in March.
Breitbart’s attempts to detach from Trump have been minor. For the most part, the site has either pulled its punches or directed them elsewhere. Much like the president, Breitbart is adept at transferring blame, usually to hapless White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, to whom almost unimaginable powers of ruin have been ascribed; the modestly more competent chief of staff, Reince Priebus; or the team of “globalists” (an epithet that, to some, has anti-Semitic connotations) who’ve pulled Trump toward centrist positions that could yet rescue his presidency but alienate his base.
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Luis Gutierrez Whines: Breitbart News Coverage of Illegal Immigrants, Muslim Refugees Too Harsh -...
Luis Gutierrez Whines: Breitbart News Coverage of Illegal Immigrants, Muslim Refugees Too Harsh
breitbart.com
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“Any attempts to separate themselves from Trump will result in an immediate collapse of their traffic,” warns Shapiro, “and will not result in any additional mainstream credibility.”
That credibility won’t be easy to come by, especially from a Washington press corps predisposed to sneer at Breitbart as an unsophisticated arriviste, one that has consistently put click-getting ahead of truth-telling. In March, the Standing Committee of Correspondents denied Breitbart a congressional press pass. Hadas Gold, a media reporter for Politico, explained at the time that committee members had questions about Breitbart’s monetary ties to right-wing activists Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, which the site has generally downplayed. The committee seemed to also frown on the fact that Breitbart’s newsroom was a Capitol Hill townhouse, known as “the Breitbart Embassy.”
News organizations are funded by all sorts of individuals, some of them perhaps unworthy of the high-minded journalistic enterprises they sponsor. And though I’ve never been to the Breitbart Embassy, I doubt it’s all that different from your average Manhattan newsroom, with its abused coffee machine and even more abused bathrooms. Regardless, the correspondents’ committee felt these to be signs of Breitbart’s pervasive amateurism. “The whole thing suggests to me that they’re just not ready for a credential,” a committee member told Politico.
At the same time, Breitbart’s much-touted plans to expand into Europe, proof of its newfound relevance, seem to have been more talk than anything else. In February, Politico reported that “difficulties in recruiting journalists, questions about which language to use and a desire to make a high impact on launch have all slowed down efforts to establish French and German editions.” In the course of my reporting, I also heard that domestic bureaus weren’t nearly as well staffed as Breitbart wanted readers to believe.
Right around the same time, Breitbart cut ties with its most prominent writer, expert provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos —or “MILO,” as he is called on the site, like a European soccer deity—after it was revealed that he’d made comments supportive of pedophilia.
After the London Bridge attack at the beginning of this month, Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh made Islamophobic comments on Twitter (“There would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn’t live there”). She was promptly fired, in what may have been a sign of how sensitive Breitbart News has become to accusations that it promulgates right-wing extremism. The firing instead exposed it to criticism from those very extremists, some of whom are now calling the site "Cuckbart," using the far right's favorite term (i.e., "cuck," from cuckold) for weak-kneed members of its clan.
The site’s gravest problem may be the wholesale flight of advertisers, who have been pressured by anti-Trump forces to disassociate themselves from any outlet friendly to his administration. "Breitbart ads plummet nearly 90 percent in three months as Trump’s troubles mount," read the headline of a Digiday story by Lucia Moses that detailed the site's deepening financial woes.
The campaign against Breitbart is being led by a group that identifies itself on Twitter as Sleeping Giants. At the time of this writing, its online spreadsheet of advertisers that no longer buy ads on Breitbart includes 2,178 entries, from German flagship airline Lufthansa to Zeus, a beard grooming company. A visit to the Sleeping Giants feed finds a tweet at the founder of tech company Taboola, which apparently advertises with Breitbart: “Do you love money more than tolerance?”
The Perils of Access Journalism
Perhaps no man has a more complex relationship with Breitbart than Lee Stranahan, one of the most polarizing and unusual figures of the alt-right, which brims with unusual and polarizing figures. He has quit the site twice and been fired once, because of clashes with editors. But having been originally hired by Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, Stranahan sees himself as a Breitbart purist, a “reader’s’ advocate” who will rescue the organization from its own trolliest impulses, returning it to its original mission, which was to...well, that’s actually not entirely clear.
“I take that legacy really seriously,” Stranahan tells me while talking about working for Breitbart, whose founder died in 2012, effectively leaving the site in the hands of Bannon, a slovenly, self-styled intellectual with a visceral feel for the kinds of stories that would animate the far right, the stories mainstream conservative publications like the National Review would never publish.
“It’s why I kept going back to Breitbart,” Stranahan says. (None of the several current Breitbart editors contacted for this story responded to a request for comment. Nor did Breitbart Chief Executive Larry Solov or the company’s spokesperson, Chad Wilkinson.)
These days, Stranahan hosts a radio show for the Sputnik news agency, the Kremlin-funded outlet that has been friendly to Trump. He also runs an online journalism school and The Populist, a news outlet. His sensibility remains edgy and outré, tending to be angry and suspicious. Those can be helpful qualities for a reporter, allowing Stranahan to spot big stories the mainstream media may have missed, most notably the Pigford farm loan scandal, which allowed some African-American farmers to collect $50,000 federal compensation payments after falsely claiming discrimination by the federal Farm Service Agency. But those same qualities could be ruinous if you’re trying to cozy up to the White House in hopes of getting first-rate access.
Stranahan is also adept at Periscope, the video-based social media platform owned by Twitter. After his latest departure from Breitbart in March, he posted a 23-minute video in which he called himself Breitbart’s “crying mom” and “stern dad,” saying the site was in need of “tough love.” Congressional Republicans were in the midst of their first, and unsuccessful, attempt to bring the American Health Care Act (AHCA) to a vote, in a push led by House Speaker Paul Ryan but supported by Trump. The bill, which would weaken President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act without abrogating it, was toxically unpopular with the American public, so Breitbart had deemed it Ryancare, thus implicitly absolving Trump of any responsibility.
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Ramadan 2017 has claimed 1,000 lives that we know of. Our tally of attacks so far: :{http://:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important"):}:trib.al/QdHZZbs:{ :(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important"):}:
Ramadan Rage 2017: The Complete List of Jihadist Attacks Around the World - Breitbart
Ramadan Rage 2017: The Complete List of Jihadist Attacks Around the World
breitbart.com
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Stranahan, himself a Trump supporter,would have none of it. “Donald Trump has been actively supporting this bill,” he said in the Periscope video, arguing that the responsibility for the AHCA ended with the president. Breitbart pretending otherwise would only mean disaster for Breitbart.
“You’re making yourself look bad to the outside world. You’re pandering to the worst elements of your readership, who will just go along in complete denial, in complete total denial, that Donald Trump might have actually made a mistake,” Stranahan said, his voice far closer to pain than bitterness.
“It’s a bad move,” he warned. “It’s bad move journalistically. It’s a bad move politically.”
Stranahan tells me what the site lacks most is responsible leadership. “You got people running things, in editorial positions, who are 30 years old,” he says. The reference is clearly to Marlow, the editor-in-chief.
Stranahan’s greater nemesis is Matt Boyle, the 29-year-old White House editor, with whom he reportedly clashed. A Bannon protégé who lacks his mentor’s dark intellectual pretensions, Boyle is reportedly disliked by some on the right, including former colleagues at The Daily Caller who are said to have widely mocked him behind his back. Boyle was recently the subject of a mostly unflattering profile in the *Washingtonian* in which a former editor, Jonathan Strong, happily went on the record to say that Boyle “has two modes: murder and blow job.”
Personal rivalries aside, Stranahan’s greater point is that access journalism is not real journalism, that playing publicist to the president ultimately does the president little good while squandering long-sought journalistic credibility. Nor can it be said that Breitbart News has capitalized on that access in the way it must have intended. In February, it landed a White House interview with Spicer, which was broadcast on Facebook Live. The reactions were brutal, withThe Washington Post, for example, calling it “the most awkward thing ever.”
It was a Trumpian predicament, a classic Rodney Dangerfield moment of respect maddeningly withheld at the moment when it was so plainly deserved.
Alt-Right Theater of the Grotesque
“They’ve had a lot of growing pains,” says Will Sommer, a writer for The Hillwho publishes a newsletter on conservative outlets, Right Richter. “It’s easier, if you’re a site like Breitbart, to be in the opposition," especially if your roster was stocked with iconoclasts like Stranahan and Bannon.
So what now?
Now, you have editor-at-large Joel Pollak explaining that when Trump pushed aside the prime minister of Montenegro during the recent NATO summit, he was merely asserting American supremacy. And you have reporter Daniel Flynn defending Montana politician Greg Gianforte, who’d assaulted a journalist, for “the good politics of body slams” Gianforte practiced in Bozeman.
It’s hard to say whether this is what Breitbart readers want or what Breitbart is most capable of giving its readers.
It may simply be that Breitbart was never equipped to become the sober, Wall Street Journal -like publication Marlow seemed to promise after helping to elect Trump. The site was started by Breitbart as “a streamlined news portal for information junkies seeking access to every single story produced by the major newswires,” as writer Greg Beato described it in a 2009 post for Gawker. Beato pointed to the not-so-secret formula for Breitbart’s success: aggregate wire stories in a way that would earn links from the Drudge Report, the traffic behemoth where Andrew Breitbart had once toiled with the site’s founder, Matt Drudge. Beyond any motivating ideology, the site has been sustained by Drudge-friendly links that consistently drive web traffic. That is as true today as it was eight years ago: SimilarWeb’s analysis shows that 53 percent of all outside referrals to Breitbart come from Drudge. That may seem like a high number, but it actually represents a precipitous drop of 28 percent since March.
After Breitbart’s unexpected death, Bannon sharpened the site, turning it into a high-volume theater of the grotesque, the “platform for the alt-right” that most Americans came to know during the presidential campaign. The hiring of figures like Yiannopoulos signaled a more combative stance on cultural issues; Gorka gave the site its strong anti-Muslim edge, while Hahn, a young University of Chicago graduate, came to so closely mirror her boss’s vituperative attacks on the Republican Party’s centrists that she came to be known as “Bannon’s Bannon.”
“Bannon built a far-right-wing media sledgehammer, an enforcer of orthodoxy that its fans praised for its swagger and that its critics labeled xenophobic or worse.” That was the colorful description offered by *The* *Washington Post* as Bannon moved from the Breitbart Embassy to the big white mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. The audience was—and remains—younger and more sophisticated than that of Fox News yet animated by the same resentments: the Clintons, Mexico, Muslims, Goldman Sachs, Lena Dunham.
Breitbart can’t pivot away from right-wing click-bait to sober, deeply reported news any more than Trump can pivot away from paranoid tweets, self-pitying broadsides against the media and weekends at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, at least, has daughter Ivanka to keep him in check, or so they say. With Bannon gone, it’s hard to see anyone at the Breitbart Embassy overseeing the kind of radical editorial overhaul that would make Breitbart more like the Journaland less like World Net Daily.
At the same time, the president it helped elect has an approval rating below 40 percent, making the daily job of selling his policies even more difficult. Breitbart remains an ally, though. If it has anxieties about Trump, it isn’t quite ready to share them just yet. That’s because while Drudge provides the traffic, Bannon provides the access, the interviews and “exclusives” that are the meat of Breitbart’s reporting. Anger the president, and the gates to the White House might close. That has made it difficult for Breitbart to honestly ascribe Trump’s shortcomings and failures to Trump himself.
“They’re failing to grapple with news of the day,” says The Hill ’s Sommer. “Eventually, your audience starts to get disillusioned.”
This is true not only of Breitbart but of an entire right-wing media ecosystem still largely unwilling to call out Trump on the plainly unrealistic promises he made. Sustained illusion thus becomes the best antidote to creeping disillusion. So in the Breitbart world, the jobs have all come back from China, while “the illegals” have all gone back to Mexico. The administrative state will be deconstructed, just as Bannon promised, until there are so few bureaucrats left in Washington they can share a single Uber out of town. NATO, NAFTA, NEA: They are all dead, or dying, cowering in the last dank dungeons of the “deep state.”
Stranahan isn’t optimistic about the long-term success of this approach for Breitbart. “I would not be surprised if their readership goes down again,” he says of the site he once loved but no longer recognizes."
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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/06/07/breitbart-doomed/216818
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Breitbart was happy to attract traffic from bigots with articles such as “Five Devastating Facts About Black-On-Black Crime” and “Black-On-Black Crime: Blame It On The System And Ignore The Evidence.” But this sort of content is racist on its face, and as Breitbart’s profile rose, being associated with naked bigotry became untenable for the site’s advertisers. Breitbart likely pulled the plug on this sort of content to assuage the advertisers, but at the cost of opening the site up to the critique that it had knelt at the altar of “political correctness.”
Likewise, when media attention settled on Yiannopoulos and McHugh, their histories of bigoted commentary made them radioactive to advertisers. But each had a strong individual fan base and close ties to the “alt-right” network because of that very virulence, which had previously made them valuable assets to Breitbart by building the website’s audience.
As the site has sought to downplay its relationship with the “alt-right” and the fringe, commentators from those movements saw weakness and began attacking Breitbart for turning its back on its fans and supposedly becoming mainstream. In recent months, this far-right alternative media echo chamber has gained an increasingly large audience by presenting its adherents as completely dedicated to President Donald Trump and as savage foes of “political correctness” and “SJWs” -- in other words, by trying to out-Breitbart Breitbart.
This dynamic came to a head on Monday when Breitbart fired McHugh after she responded to the London Bridge terror attack by tweeting that "there would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn't live there” and attacked a critic’s perceived ethnicity. The far-right immediately rallied around McHugh and lashed out at her former employer, with leading fringe figures declaring that the website had given in to “political correctness,” castigating the site for supposedly seeking “to try to pivot to the mainstream,” and declaring that “Breitbart is over.”
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Mike Cernovich :{
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}:@Cernovich](https://twitter.com/Cernovich)
Breitbart fired a journalist to appease fake news media. Here's how to respond! :{https://www.:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important"):}:wesearchr.com/bounties/suppo:{rt-katie-mchugh-fired-from-breitbart-for-telling-the-tr :(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important"):}:…
Support Katie McHugh: Fired From Breitbart For Telling The Truth
Katie needs your help, America.
wesearchr.com
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None of this is to say that Breitbart has suddenly become a beacon of moderation. Yiannopoulos spent years promoting bigotry with the site’s full approval before he apparently crossed the line. McHugh didn’t suddenly start tweeting racist things over the weekend -- she first drew attention for this behavior in September 2015. Asked about her racist tweets in March 2016, current Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow replied, “We’re considering giving Katie a weekly column.”
And while “black crime” reporting seems to have died away, Breitbart still regularly publishes the same type of anti-Muslim commentary that got McHugh fired, and continues to employ white nationalist reporterswith long records of racism who have yet to experience a media flashpoint.
If the site’s leaders were cleaning house, they would clean house. Instead, they’re taking steps to minimize advertiser blowback when public attention is focused on their staffers’ awful behavior. The day after McHugh was fired, Digiday reported that Breitbart had lost nearly 90 percent of its advertisers over the previous three months, along with seeing a steep decline in traffic.
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