Now that the neo-Nazi car attack on a group of anti-racist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, has once again reminded America that hate groups represent a and significant threat to the country (and world, if you look around), it’s probably worth keeping in mind that these groups are in many ways cults. Cults reinforced by far-right media ecosystems that have been steadily radicalizing Americans as American conservatism has veered further and further to the right. A media ecosystem that includes Steve Bannon’s Breitbart along with sites like Daily Stormer and InfoWars and tells its audience that a cabal that includes everyone from liberals to the Muslim Brotherhood are all working together to undermine white Christians and The West in general. It’s the kind of hate landscape that might make a violent lunatic run over a bunch of anti-neo-Nazi protestors. But this is where we are and now a significant contemporary challenge for American is figuring out how to get fellow Americans trapped in such hate cults to recognize they got sucked into something awful and need to leave it and join Team Nice. Sure, that might be fruitless in many cases, but it’s still important to try. And nice. And as we’re going to see as we look at a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center on the Kingston clan, a ~6,000 member strong polygamous incestuous super-racist apocalyptic cult that runs its own business empire, it’s pretty clear that figuring out how to encourage hate cult members to join their fellow humans and just mellow out is a challenge we can’t ignore. Because they might be apocalyptic death cults planning on winning a race war and becoming diving kings. With their own high-end firearms manufacturer. Hate cult recovery services are something society is going to have to get really good at if its going to survive so we should probably work on that.
And adding to the challenge is, of course, President Donald J. Trump. It’s been quite a week for President Trump’s style of diplomacy and leadership. First we have the ongoing escalating bluster talk contest between President Trump and Kim Jong-un that includes Trump’s threats to pre-emptively nuke North Korea if North Korea continues its own threats of nuclear blackmail. And of course Trump suddenly threatening military action in Venezuela. And then there was Trump’s response to the neo-Nazi car attack on a group of protesters at a “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A response that could largely be summarized as “many sides (and not just the neo-Nazis) need to be condemned for their hatred, bigotry, and violence.” It was that kind of week: when he wasn’t talking the US into a pre-emptive nuclear strike, President Trump was running rhetorical cover for the ‘Alt-Right’ neo-Nazis:
The Huffington Post
Donald Trump Blames ‘Many Sides’ For White Supremacist Clashes In Charlottesville
Trump did not specifically criticize the white supremacist groups who had organized Saturday’s rally.By Paige Lavender , Daniel Marans
08/12/2017 01:21 pm ET | Updated 2 hours agoPresident Donald Trump responded to violence that erupted this weekend as white supremacists and a fringe group clashed in Charlottesville, Virginia.
He refused to single out the activity of white supremacists, however, arguing that there was blame to go around on “many sides.”
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides — on many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country, not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, it’s been going on for a long, long time,” Trump said at a ceremony for the signing of a bill to reform the Veterans Affairs health care system.
“It has no place in America,” he added. “What is vital now is a swift restoration of law and order and the protection of innocent lives.”
Trump went on to emphasize that he loves “all the people of our country,” and called for Americans of different races and backgrounds to remember their shared Americanness.
“We wanna get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville and we want to study it,” he said. “We want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.”
Trump’s comments were his third attempt at addressing the unrest in Virginia. First, earlier on Saturday, he condemned “hate” and “violence,” but didn’t mention Charlottesville by name or directly address any of the groups demonstrating there.
We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2017
He then followed up that tweet with another one 41 minutes later, finally mentioning Charlottesville by name but not referencing the white supremacists whose rally triggered the chaos.
Civil rights leaders criticized Trump for failing to squarely denounce the white supremacists who organized the rally.
“The president’s remarks were morally frustrating and disappointing,” former NAACP president Cornell Brooks told CNN. “Because while it is good that he says he wants to be a president for all the people and he wants to make America great for all of the people. Let us know this: Throughout his remarks he refused to” call out white supremacists by name.
Trump condemned “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” This isn’t a many sides issue. This is about white supremacy, plain & simple.
— Civil Rights (@civilrightsorg) August 12, 2017
.@realDonaldTrump never misses an opportunity–to miss an opportunity. Failure 2 honor dead or denounce white supremacists utterly shameful.
— Van Jones (@VanJones68) August 12, 2017
In a statement to the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs, a White House spokesperson defended the president’s reaction as, “condemning hatred, bigotry and violence from all sources and all sides.”
“There was violence between protesters and counter protesters today,” the spokesperson added.
David Duke, a white nationalist and supporter of Trump, criticized the president’s initial statement, arguing that, “it was White Americans who put you in the presidency.”
I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists. https://t.co/Rkfs7O2Ykr
— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) August 12, 2017
Duke said Saturday the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville is in line with Trump’s “promises.”
“We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump,” Duke said. “That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”
Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer thanked Trump for his statement:
@realDonaldTrump, thanks, at long last, for condemning hate in speech and action. Our work here is just beginning. Yours is too.
— Mike Signer (@MikeSigner) August 12, 2017
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) declared a state of emergency Saturday as fist fights broke out in streets, objects were thrown and reporters were covered in raw sewage. The White House said it has been in contact with McAuliffe’s office, and Tom Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser, has had contact with local authorities.
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Trump’s responses to incidents of violence have varied since he took office.
He immediately condemned a June attack in London, calling it “horrific” while criticizing London Mayor Sadiq Khan and calling for implementation of his proposed travel ban against citizens from several majority-Muslim countries. In February, he called anti-Semitic incidents in the United States “horrible” and “painful.”
But his response to other attacks has been delayed or non-existent.
After several days, Trump tweeted from the @POTUS account — an official White House account, not the personal one he most often uses — to recognize victims of a knife attack in Portland for “standing up to hate and intolerance” for standing up to a man yelling slurs and hate speech. Trump never issued a response to an attack on a mosque in Minnesota earlier this month.
The violence in Charlottesville erupted in the middle of Trump’s 17-day “working vacation” at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Trump has remained active on Twitter throughout his vacation, tweeting criticisms at several lawmakers, making comments on the situation with North Korea and retweeting stories from Fox News.
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““We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides — on many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country, not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, it’s been going on for a long, long time,” Trump said at a ceremony for the signing of a bill to reform the Veterans Affairs health care system.”
Yes, shame on those anti-racist protestors for their displays of bigotry for towards open proud bigots. That was a central element of President Trump’s address to the nation following the attack. And that was his third attempt at addressing the violence at the rally:
...
Trump’s comments were his third attempt at addressing the unrest in Virginia. First, earlier on Saturday, he condemned “hate” and “violence,” but didn’t mention Charlottesville by name or directly address any of the groups demonstrating there.We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2017
He then followed up that tweet with another one 41 minutes later, finally mentioning Charlottesville by name but not referencing the white supremacists whose rally triggered the chaos.
...
So that was three attempts, and three failures at any sort of direct condemnation of the white power groups and what they were rallying for. The third time was definitely not a charm.
But there is one line in Trump’s response that it worth taking to heart, albeit probably not in the way Trump intended: what can be learn from studying this situation about how to prevent the growing of such movements so we can move past this and maybe actually heal American society:
...
Trump went on to emphasize that he loves “all the people of our country,” and called for Americans of different races and backgrounds to remember their shared Americanness.“We wanna get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville and we want to study it,” he said. “We want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.”
...
“We wanna get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville and we want to study it...We want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.”
Well, ok, that’s decent advice. What types of insights can we obtain by taking a step back and study the situation? Well, for starters, it seems like having a President that actually openly condemns white nationalist groups would be a good example of “what we’re doing wrong as a country”. Although that’s more Trump’s fault than the entire country’s. But it’s still quite obvious that there’s quite a few Americans that sympathize with the general worldview put on display by the “Unite the Right” marchers.
So in the interest of “studying our situation”, perhaps there’s value in taking a closer look at a report just put out by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s August 2017 Intelligence Report. It’s an article about the kind of group that has a worldview that’s what you might get if you take the neo-Nazi ‘whites are pure and all others are enemies who must be suppressed and eventually extinguished’ totalitarian identitarian worldview and took it to the extreme. So extreme that they don’t simply fetishize their own race but actually their own bloodline, viewing themselves as a divinely ordained line of the ‘purest’ white people in history with a direct line back to Jesus Christ. So extreme that if they think you have one drop of non-white blood in your ancestry you will be excommunicated. So extreme that they practice incest as a way to not just stay pure but achieve some sort of Aryan super-person. So extreme that the rest of the world must be eventually conquered following a giant race war. And yes, they are Mormons. But still not that much more extreme that your standard extremist. That’s the scariest part.
And since this clan of polygamists cultists, the Kingston clan, represent basically a distilled form of the kind of “us vs them” white supremacists mind-virus — a virus that views “others” as a dehumanized existential threat and the end of the word if white supremacy isn’t dominant — perhaps we can learn something about what motivates the kinds of ‘Alt Right’ worldview? Like, is there any sort of message the broader public can send to people trapped in such cults that would facilitate them ‘snapping out it’? Some way of effectively communicating, “hey, it’s not the end of the world if you leave the cult and join a multi-ethnic culture that values diversity + niceness (i.e. celebrating diversity except for the bigotry), and you’ll be welcomed and MUCH happier and fulfilled when you do”. Is there something society at large can do to facilitate that process that is essentially internal discovery and epiphany in the hearts and minds of people trapped in hate cults? If so, that message would probably be quite useful on freeing people trapped by the Alt-Right hate ideologies too.
The Kingston Klan’s Extra-Extreme Extremism Keeps it All in the Family
So in the spirit of President Trump’s advice, let’s briefly study the Kingston clan, one of the have extreme totalitarian identitarian movements you’ll even come across. First, let’s take a look at this article about them from 2004 when the incest and abuse within the the clan started making national news.
It’s a notable article in context of ‘Alt-Right’ white power groups rallying to “preserve our history and culture, etc” because, of course, when you’re trying to preserve a history of white supremacy and culture you’re obviously trying to preserve the freedom to create a society dominated by white supremacists and not simply “preserve history”. As should be clear, when groups like those behind “Unite the Right” cry out about how they’re just fighting for their freedom of speech and expression, or greater tolerance of their views, that’s a preposterous lie. They’re fighting for the hearts and minds of a large enough swath of White America that would allow them to stage what amounts to a white supremacist political revolution that will allow them to impose a far-right neo-Nazi-style regime of subjugation of everyone who isn’t a white supremacist. The ‘Alt-Right’ far-right movements are fighting for the freedom to build up enough support for an eventual white supremacist takeover of society followed by the dehumanization and subjugation of all “others”. That’s part of why it’s so important to understand how such worldviews sustain their appeal and how to make it clear to susceptible audiences that their lives will be much, much better in a world that embraces genuine niceness.
Along those lines, here’s the public face of the Kingston clan. A group with thousands of members and a billion dollar business empire. A super-racist clan so deeply corrupted by a “we’re good, everyone else is evil” mindset that they teach about an apocalyptic end-times race war where blood will run in the streets. And when this group received a bunch of negative press back in 2004, their message was “we want to live our life and let everybody else live their life” (and eventually wipe everyone else out, but let’s not mention that in public):
Newsweek
A FAMILY’S TANGLED TIES
By Andrew Murr
On 2/8/04 at 7:00 PMLu Ann Kingston was 15 when she married her first cousin Jeremy Kingston in a hush-hush 1995 wedding in Bountiful, Utah. As members of a secretive society of “fundamentalist Mormons” whose leaders practiced polygamy, Lu Ann’s family thought nothing of the fact that Jeremy, then 24, was such a close relative–or that he had three other wives. So entwined were the branches of the family tree that Lu Ann’s cousin-husband was also her nephew.
But the Kingstons’ tangled family ties are threatening to unravel, thanks largely to the efforts of Lu Ann and another former Kingston wife, her niece Mary Ann. In 2000, Lu Ann and her two children fled the 1,000-person society that members call The Order, and she later cooperated with state prosecutors cracking down on sexual abuse of teen girls by polygamists. Last week Jeremy Kingston was sentenced to one year in jail after pleading guilty to felony incest. Meanwhile, Mary Ann Kingston, 22, has brought a $110 million civil suit against 242 Order members and 97 companies they operate, claiming that they share collective responsibility for abuse she suffered at the hands of her father and the uncle she married to become his 15th wife. The two men went to prison in 1999 on charges ranging from child abuse to incest.
Mary Ann’s suit argues that Order members are “jointly liable” because her mistreatment grew directly out of the group’s beliefs. (The watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center used a similar strategy of group responsibility to bankrupt the white-supremacist Aryan Nations in 2000 after its security guards assaulted a pair of black motorists.) Mary Ann claims that the Order’s practice of polygamy led her uncle David Kingston, 33, to marry the 16-year-old and sleep with her. When she fled the marriage, her father, John Daniel Kingston, drove her to a family ranch near the Idaho border and whipped her with a leather belt until she passed out. Kingston spokesman Elden Kingston, 65, calls the suit an effort to “extort money” (the Order now controls a financial empire estimated at $100 million). He hints the family’s lawyers would use hardball tactics, claiming Mary Ann experimented with sex and drugs, and that marrying her to her uncle was an attempt to “help that girl.”
In another legal threat to the clan, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff is launching a financial probe of the Kingstons (as well as a second polygamous clan). He hopes to bring an organized-crime-style prosecution against the Kingstons, whose high-ranking members run ranches, shopping centers, a real-estate firm and a coal mine. Elden Kingston denies wrongdoing and dismisses the investigation as “just another example of the state’s long history of persecution” of the Kingstons. But for decades after a disastrous 1953 raid wrenched hundreds of children from their parents, Utah officials virtually ignored the sect and other so-called fundamentalists who practice polygamy in defiance of the law and the Mormon Church’s 1890 ban on plural marriage. The convictions of Mary Ann’s father and uncle ended the laissez-faire period, and public opposition grew last year with the news that polygamy was behind the alleged kidnapping and sexual assault of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart.
Incest is a Kingston tradition. The clan’s leaders have married dozens of first cousins, half sisters and nieces. The Order’s top man, Paul Kingston, counts a half-dozen such relatives among his 20-plus wives, according to ex-members and Attorney General’s investigator Ron Barton. Intermarriage of close relatives dates to Paul’s late father, former leader John Ortell Kingston (who was also Jeremy’s grandfather and Lu Ann’s father). He taught his family that the Kingstons descended from Jesus Christ through a pair of “Jewish princesses,” recalls former member Ron Tucker, 45, another of John Ortell’s sons.
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The ongoing attention is having an effect. Former members say Paul Kingston recently had to calm anxious members who feared that Mary Ann’s suit will take away their businesses and savings. Elden Kingston says the crackdown on underage marriages has “changed a lot of individuals’ feelings about young marriages.” But they insist on living their own way. “We pay millions of dollars in taxes,” Elden Kingston complains. “We want to live our life and let everybody else live their life.” For the Order, the days of live and let live may be gone.
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“A FAMILY’S TANGLED TIES” by Andrew Murr; Newsweek; 02/08/2004.
“The ongoing attention is having an effect. Former members say Paul Kingston recently had to calm anxious members who feared that Mary Ann’s suit will take away their businesses and savings. Elden Kingston says the crackdown on underage marriages has “changed a lot of individuals’ feelings about young marriages.” But they insist on living their own way. “We pay millions of dollars in taxes,” Elden Kingston complains. “We want to live our life and let everybody else live their life.” For the Order, the days of live and let live may be gone.”
That was how a clan that views all non-Whites as divinely corrupted presented itself to the world: we just want to live our own lives. A message that sounds about as disingenuous as the the “Unite the Right” rally of neo-Nazis that claim to merely want to defend their “free speech” and “preserving heritage” (a Robert E. Lee statue) and they are clearly rallying to popularize a movement with the end goal of a white supremacist revolution and subjugation of non-whites.
At the same time, as the abusive isolating nature of the Kingston clans cult lifestyle makes clear, the vast majority of the people involved are largely victims of cult abuse/brainwashing and indoctrination. They’re really sympathetic figures. As are many people in hate groups. Everyone has their own path into a hate cult and a lot of those paths are pretty horrific. That’s important to keep in mind because the fact that the Alt-Right includes a lot of damaged people in need of healing is all the more reason for them to leave and join Team Nice. Because if Team Nice is nice it should be pretty good at giving that healing.
So with all that in mind, if we’re going to “study our situation” as President Trump recommends, behold the Kingston clan, future divine kings if things go horribly awry:
Southern Poverty Law Center
Intelligence ReportBlood Cult
Stephen Lemons
August 08, 2017
2017 Fall IssueUtah’s polygamous Kingston clan mixes incest and white supremacy with old-fashioned capitalism
When it comes to racist Sunday school lessons, the polygamous Kingston clan could teach the Ku Klux Klan a thing or two.
During a recent interview with the Intelligence Report, Jessica Kingston, a former member of the secretive, Salt Lake City-based cult and a star of the A&E reality series “Escaping Polygamy,” remembered, when she was 12, her Sunday school teacher coming into class with a bucket of water and a vial of black food coloring.
The teacher added a drop of dye to the water, and the children watched as the blackness slowly spread.
“The teacher was like, ‘You can never get that out, that is always there now,’” recalled Jessica, now 29. “She talked about how you can’t associate with black people or anybody of a different race.”
This racist display was no one-off. Jessica said she and other children of the Kingston clan — a group also known as The Order, the Davis County Cooperative Society, and the Latter-Day Church of Christ — dropped the N‑bomb all the time, as did their parents.
Black people supposedly suffered from multiple scriptural curses, from the mark of Cain and Noah’s curse on Ham in the Old Testament to the racist tenets of early Mormonism that have since been renounced or abandoned by the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the LDS or Mormon church.
Black blood was “the worst thing you can have,” Jessica said, particularly since the Kingstons consider themselves to be the whitest of the white, descended directly from Jesus Christ and King David, the Middle Eastern origins of both men notwithstanding.
Obsessed with the purity of their bloodline and empowered by a sense of entitlement on par with the divine right of kings, the Kingstons have made incest the cornerstone of a self-serving theology that loathes non whites, fosters homophobia and abhors government authority.
Additionally, ex-Order members tell of a reputed church prophecy of an “End of the World War,” an apocalyptic vision that foresees a bloody race war with the Kingstons as the ultimate victors, chosen by their Heavenly Father to rule the world for a millennium.
But given that the Kingstons command an estimated 6,000 adherents, boast a business empire reportedly worth as much as $1 billion and have outlasted myriad bouts with law enforcement and the press, these dreams of world domination may be less delusional than they first seem.All Along the Watchtower
The Order denies that it encourages racism and homophobia within its ranks.
In a letter to the Intelligence Report responding to allegations made by former members, Kent Johnson, a spokesman for the Davis County Cooperative Society, claimed that The Order’s “foundational principles” include the Golden Rule, and that the church rejects any form of racism or bigotry.
“[W]e directly condemn in action and in words, racist, homophobic or hateful actions against any group or individual,” Johnson wrote.
Johnson maintained that The Order’s vast array of businesses — which includes a grocery store, pawn shops, a garbage disposal business, an insurance company, a politically-influential biofuels plant, and a high-end firearms manufacturer — employs individuals of various racial and ethnic minorities.
The letter asserts that one of the earliest members of the church was a Native American man and that the “Co-op,” as it is sometimes called, has been the victim of prejudice and harassment by Utah’s “majority religion” (i.e., the LDS church) because of the former’s “progressive” ideas.
Indeed, the group was founded during the Great Depression as a communal religious organization where members dedicated their earnings and possessions to building “the Kingdom of God on Earth,” as one church document attests.
Its ominous-sounding moniker, “The Order,” is a reference to the United Order, a quasi-utopian society proposed by LDS-founder Joseph Smith, and practiced in some Mormon communities under the leadership of early church president Brigham Young.
The Order can rightly claim discrimination by mainstream Mormonism, but this is due to its embrace of polygamy, which the LDS church officially abandoned in 1890 in order for Utah to become a state. The renunciation of polygamy is now church doctrine, and the Mormon church has a policy of excommunicating polygamists. Kingston forebears were among those who suffered this fate.
Polygamy is outlawed in Utah, both by the state’s constitution, and in statute, where it is a third-degree felony, with a possible punishment of five years in prison. But for their part, The Order and other fundamentalist sects believe the LDS church exists in a state of apostasy for abandoning what they see as a bedrock principle of their faith.
According to church lore, The Order came into existence when founder Charles “Elden” Kingston saw Jesus in the mountains above the family’s settlement in Bountiful, Utah, inspiring him to create the DCCS in 1935.
The family’s dedication to “the principle” of polygamy already had been established by Kingston’s father, who had three wives. Elden continued the tradition. According to historian Brian Hales’ Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto, Brother Elden, as he was also known, had five wives and 17 children.
Elden also instituted the church law of “one above the other,” requiring members’ blind obedience to the church’s hierarchy of “numbered men,” with Elden being Brother Number One.
Brother Elden died of penile cancer in 1948, despite the best efforts of some family members to burn away the cancer using acid. Elden had predicted that he would be resurrected from the dead, so clan members kept his body on ice for three days, to no avail.
His brother, John “Ortell” Kingston, took over the leadership of The Order — incorporated in the 1970s as the Latter Day Church of Christ. Ortell is credited with expanding The Order’s business empire and making the family immensely wealthy. His seven sons and two daughters by LaDonna Peterson, the second of his 13 wives, are reputed to be the inner circle that runs the cult.
A stern disciplinarian, who in later years looked and dressed like a mortician, Ortell made incest a tenet of the clan’s faith, informed by his work breeding Holstein cows on the Kingstons’ dairy farm.
A 1999 Salt Lake Tribune article mapped the Kingstons’ incestuous family tree, quoting one of Ortell’s 65 kids, ex-Order member Connie Rugg as saying, “My father experimented [with] inbreeding with his cattle and then he turned to his children.”
In order to maintain his family’s “superior bloodlines,” Ortell married and had children with two of his half-sisters and two nieces. He orchestrated all unions within the cult, which was maintained with classic mind control techniques, corporal punishment, fasting and bizarre dietary practices. Ortell died in 1987, but his progeny continued the polygamy, the inbreeding and the marriages to young female teens that he instituted.
Control of The Order then passed to Ortell’s well-educated son Paul Kingston, one of several lawyers in a cult whose members dress normally and try not to draw attention to themselves.
Known variously as “Brother Paul,” “the leader,” and “the man on the watchtower” by Order members, this unremarkable, balding middle-aged man reportedly has 27 wives and over 300 children. Three of his wives are his half-sisters. One is a first cousin. Two are nieces.
John Daniel Kingston seen here in 1999, pleading no contest to beating his 16-year-old daughter after she attempted to flee an arranged marriage with her uncle David, Kingston’s brother.
Similarly, his older brother John Daniel Kingston has had 14 wives, four of them his half-sisters. Another is a first cousin.
Like polygamy, incest is a third-degree felony in Utah, and as with polygamy, convictions are rare. Over the years, state law enforcement and the courts have sporadically addressed the incest in the Kingston ranks.
In 1999, Paul’s younger brother David Ortell Kingston was convicted of taking his 16-year-old niece as wife number 15. The incest came to light after the girl tried to escape the arranged “celestial” marriage — an illegal marriage, sans license.
Her disobedience incurred the wrath of her father Daniel, who took her to a family ranch near the Idaho border and savagely beat her. The girl, who as an adult would unsuccessfully sue the clan, then walked miles to the nearest gas station, where she called the police.
Daniel was arrested and eventually spent 28 weeks in a county jail for felony child abuse. David was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the incest, but served only four before being paroled.
In 2003, another clan member, Jeremy Kingston pleaded guilty to incest for taking 15-year-old Lu Ann Kingston as his fourth wife. Jeremy was nearly 10 years her senior at the time. Due to the Kingstons’ convoluted genealogy, Lu Ann was both his first cousin and his aunt. As part of a plea bargain, Jeremy spent just one year in prison.
The ‘Curse’ of Blackness
In secret videotapes of Order church meetings aired on Escaping Polygamy, Paul’s nephew Nick Young, speaking from a church lectern, identifies himself as a numbered man, number 72, to be precise.
The son of Paul’s sister Rachel — herself a daughter of Ortell and LaDonna Kingston — Young was the only current member of the Kingston clan, out of the many contacted for this story, who consented to a live, on-the-record interview.
Young is the owner of Desert Tech, a Utah gun manufacturer, which produces sniper rifles and so-called “bullpup” rifles, The latter, unlike conventional magazine-fed rifles, have shorter barrels, with the gun’s action located behind the trigger. These specialty firearms can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $8,000 each.
Desert Tech and its rifles have been featured on Fox News, Mythbusters, Daredevil and The Blacklist, among other TV shows. Young told Intelligence Report that his company has sold weapons, with the approval of the U.S. State Department, to governments in Europe and the Middle East, Saudi Arabia being one.
Young also claimed Desert Tech had sold guns to Picatinny Arsenal, the research division of the U.S. military.
“We haven’t gotten any big U.S. contracts,” Young explained. “Obviously, we would love to.”
Spokesmen for both the U.S. State Department and for Picatinny Arsenal could neither verify nor deny Young’s claims.
The company was founded in 2007 with an investment from family members. Young denied that The Order was racist or taught any form of bigotry, and said he had people of all races working for him.
“What we’re taught is to love our neighbor, that all people, all races no matter who they are … deserve to be loved,” he explained.
Still, he conceded that some Order members may have prejudiced beliefs because “in our organization people have freedom of choice.”
So what about polygamy? Is it a requirement to gain the highest levels of heaven?
“Yeah, I believe in it,” he said. “As far as how you end up in heaven, that’s up to God.”
Young declined to comment when asked if he practices polygamy. Intelligence Report then read the names of women believed to be his wives — four in all.
“Okay, I have one legal wife,” he said. “But I do have children with other women.”
Asked if two women named were in fact his first cousins, Young paused, finally replying, “I guess I’m curious as to what you’re trying to get at here.”
Before the call ended, Young insisted that he “didn’t admit to any kind of incest or anything.” When Intelligence Report inquired if Young thought there was anything wrong with first cousins getting married, Young opined that such issues were between the individuals involved and God.
Nevertheless, former members of The Order say that incest and racism are inextricably linked in The Order’s teachings.
During an interview with this reporter, Lu Ann Kingston, whose defiance of the cult led to the conviction of her former “spiritual” husband Jeremy, recalled that Order members saw intermarriage as a way to “keep the bloodline pure.”
And by pure, they meant pure white.
All outsiders are considered to be beneath Order members, she explained. But The Order saves most of its bile for blacks and other non whites. Ethnic jokes and stereotypes were commonly repeated. Chinese people were called “stupid,” and Mexicans were “dirty,” said Lu Ann, adding, “because of their skin.”
Allison, a 17 year-old ex-Kingston member says not much has changed since Lu Ann’s day.
“I didn’t even know the n‑word was bad until I was like 15 or 16,” she told Intelligence Report.
Once free of the cult, Lu Ann, Allison and other ex-Order members have had to unlearn the hatred that was drilled into their heads. The mere rumor of black blood could condemn someone in the eyes of Order members.
That’s what happened with Ron Tucker’s family. Tucker is another of Ortell’s many sons, though not from the favored wife, LaDonna.
Seated on a couch, sipping lemonade in his home in a Salt Lake City suburb, he resembles Paul Kingston quite a bit. The two were playmates when they were boys.
A loyal Order member for years, he lost his faith and ended up leaving the Order over a curse of sorts, leveled at his family by LaDonna. Supposedly, LaDonna had a dream wherein it was revealed that anyone who left The Order would be tainted by black blood.
Somehow LaDonna’s curse was transferred to the Tuckers via Christy, Ron’s wife, because, Christy’s mom left The Order and married an Irishman, before leaving him and returning to the fold.
“I could see that the leaders of The Order really did believe we had black ancestors,” Ron explained, with Christy next to him, and his adult daughters Emily and Julie nearby.
Boys began to show interest in Julie as she matured, but Paul, as the clan’s leader, warned them away, because of Julie’s black blood.
Up to this point, Julie had treated the rumor like a joke. Her younger sister Emily thought it was a joke, too, until one day another Order kid told her, “We can’t play with you because the Tuckers are niggers.”
Julie left the cult at age 19. Her parents and siblings eventually left as well.
Ron says the cult’s justification for its racism goes back to early Mormon teachings about a war in heaven between the forces of Satan and those of Jesus. The battle took place in the spiritual pre-existence that Mormons believe all souls come from. Blacks were “the less valiant people in heaven” who sat on the sidelines while others took sides, according to The Order.
Their punishment? Dark skin, of course.
Another of Ortell’s teachings: Adolf Hitler had the right idea about creating a master race, but didn’t have the Lord’s help, so he failed.
Tucker recounted the clan’s version of the apocalypse, the “End of the World War,” a riff on a prophecy some ascribe to Joseph Smith, called The White Horse Prophecy. In it, black people come close to killing off the white race until they are countered by Native Americans, symbolized by a Red Horse, which gallops to the White Horse’s rescue.
“That will open up for The Order to rise up and take over the world,” Ron said.
The Tuckers think this is all hogwash now, though they were programmed to believe it at the time.
Recordings of church testimony given by various Kingstons serve as further evidence of the cult’s bigoted teachings.
In one, Ortell warns that there is a movement afoot that wants to “homogenize the people” and “make one race,” by mixing all the races up.
In another, Order attorney Carl Kingston warns listeners about marrying up with “Ham’s kids,” a reference to the aforementioned Biblical curse. “If you have as much as one drop of that blood in your veins,” says Carl, “you’re cursed from holding the priesthood.”
The lawyer’s words call to mind another heavenly curse, described in 2 Nephi, Chapter 5 of the Book of Mormon, where God caused a “skin of blackness” to come upon a group called the Lamanites, supposedly ancestors of Native Americans.
Modern interpretations of this passage vary, but The Order apparently takes quite literally this idea of “blackness” being a sign of iniquity.
Soy Makes You Gay
LGBT people fare little better in the Kingston clan.One ex-Order member, who asked to be referred to as “Scott,” instead of his real name for fear of retribution by clan members, said hatred of gays was big in the Kingston clan, with the word “faggot” in frequent use.
For fun he and other Order men would go to a park frequented by gay males, looking for victims.
“We would cause harm,” he confessed. “Bad harm. Hospital harm.”
While part of The Order, Val Snow, a twenty-something gay man with a wry sense of humor, believed being gay was like “spitting in the eye of God.” Snow is the son of Daniel Kingston, whom he paints as “a little man with a lot of power.”
From a young age, Snow worked for Order companies to help feed his siblings, a responsibility some Kingston men are known to shirk.
Snow began dating men when he was 22. When this got around to his dad, his father packed up Snow’s belongings and left them in the room of a hotel owned by The Order. Daniel’s ultimatum: Stay in The Order, date no one, and have no contact with family. Or leave.
Snow left.
He says The Order regards homosexuality as a choice. If gay men stay in the closet, they are allowed to remain in the cult as “worker bees.”
Snow also remembered being taught end-time prophecies, with a “cleansing” wherein the streets of Salt Lake City would run red with blood.
“All of the gay people would definitely be the first to go,” he said.
Another of the cult’s teachings was that soy can make you gay, an anti-government conspiracy theory popular in some right-wing circles.
“I guess I just had too much soy,” Snow smiled.
Ex-order members interviewed by the Intelligence Report generally agreed with the characterization of the Kingston clan as a “hate group.”
Ron Tucker went so far as to call his former brethren “white supremacists,” and “ten times more racist” than your run-of-the-mill skinhead.
As for its anti-government views, allegations of fraud against government entities have long dogged the Kingstons.
In the 1980s, the state of Utah sued John Ortell Kingston over welfare fraud related to his many wives. Rather than submit to DNA tests, which could have revealed the incest in his brood, he coughed up a more than $200,000 settlement.
More recently, the Kingston-owned Washakie Renewable Energy (WRE) agreed to pay a $3 million fine after it was sued by the federal government for raking in tax credits for biofuels it never produced.
WRE’s influence earned special scrutiny in February 2016 after the IRS, the EPA and other government agencies raided owner Jacob Kingston’s house as well as The Order’s bank and other locations, carting away banker’s box after banker’s box of records. Nothing has come of the raids yet, and the IRS refused comment on the matter when contacted by this publication.
But The Order’s critics say that cult members see nothing wrong with bilking the government, a time-honored tradition among FLDS sects, gleefully referred to as “bleeding the beast.”
More troubling, during a contentious 2004 custody case that ensued when Jessica and her sister Andrea fled Daniel Kingston’s household, a judge in the case reportedly was the subject of a death threat, allegedly from Kingston clan members. There was also testimony, during one hearing, that someone in the Kingston clan wanted to blow up the courthouse.
Given such incidents, could Order members be a threat to law enforcement?
Ron Kingston says The Order’s leadership has too much to lose for something like that to happen.
“Paul would rather have the wealth and the money than the isolation and the conflict,” he said.
Matt Browning seems less sure. A retired Arizona law enforcement officer, Browning is the president and founder of the Skinhead Intelligence Network and is in charge of security for the A&E show, where his wife Tawni works as the casting producer.
Browning sees similarities between The Order and the religion-minded racists of the World Church of the Creator and the Christian Identity movement. There is also some overlap with Sovereign citizens, he contends.
“They’re basically the Utah Mafioso of the white power world,” Browning told Intelligence Report.
And they are growing. Former Order members tell of babies being born nearly every week in the church. And during a recent picnic to honor the birthday of patriarch John Ortell Kingston, Order families descended on a Salt Lake Valley park, where hundreds of children of all ages blanketed the park’s green expanse.
Accounts of clan babies being born with congenital defects and other problems abound, including dwarfism, albinism and children born minus fingernails or without genitals.
...
Don’t the infant deaths and tales of horrific deformities belie Ortell’s homespun eugenics?
Scott remembered that Ortell had an answer for that question.
“Something along the lines of, to build a superhuman, if you have four or five defects to get the one good one, it’s worth it,” he recalled.
“Because that one is going to be genius-level purity, and that’s what The Order is looking for.”
———-
“During a recent interview with the Intelligence Report, Jessica Kingston, a former member of the secretive, Salt Lake City-based cult and a star of the A&E reality series “Escaping Polygamy,” remembered, when she was 12, her Sunday school teacher coming into class with a bucket of water and a vial of black food coloring.”
As Jessica Kingston recounts, being non-white was basically seen as “the worst thing you can have” and corruption of the divine whiteness lineage of the Kingstons that went back to directly to Jesus and King David:
...
The teacher added a drop of dye to the water, and the children watched as the blackness slowly spread.“The teacher was like, ‘You can never get that out, that is always there now,’” recalled Jessica, now 29. “She talked about how you can’t associate with black people or anybody of a different race.”
This racist display was no one-off. Jessica said she and other children of the Kingston clan — a group also known as The Order, the Davis County Cooperative Society, and the Latter-Day Church of Christ — dropped the N‑bomb all the time, as did their parents.
Black people supposedly suffered from multiple scriptural curses, from the mark of Cain and Noah’s curse on Ham in the Old Testament to the racist tenets of early Mormonism that have since been renounced or abandoned by the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the LDS or Mormon church.
Black blood was “the worst thing you can have,” Jessica said, particularly since the Kingstons consider themselves to be the whitest of the white, descended directly from Jesus Christ and King David, the Middle Eastern origins of both men notwithstanding.
...
But they aren’t just trying to create a white supremacists cult enclave. The cult’s leaders apparently also view themselves as having a divine right to be kings of the world and practice selective incestuous breeding within the clan to achieve some sort of divine super-whiteness. And this is all part of a prophecy that involves an eventual race war where the streets will run with blood and that will enable them to emerge victorious over all. As they see it, Hitler was right in trying to create a Master Race, but he didn’t have God’s backing and that’s why he failed:
Obsessed with the purity of their bloodline and empowered by a sense of entitlement on par with the divine right of kings, the Kingstons have made incest the cornerstone of a self-serving theology that loathes non whites, fosters homophobia and abhors government authority.
Additionally, ex-Order members tell of a reputed church prophecy of an “End of the World War,” an apocalyptic vision that foresees a bloody race war with the Kingstons as the ultimate victors, chosen by their Heavenly Father to rule the world for a millennium.
...
A 1999 Salt Lake Tribune article mapped the Kingstons’ incestuous family tree, quoting one of Ortell’s 65 kids, ex-Order member Connie Rugg as saying, “My father experimented [with] inbreeding with his cattle and then he turned to his children.”
In order to maintain his family’s “superior bloodlines,” Ortell married and had children with two of his half-sisters and two nieces. He orchestrated all unions within the cult, which was maintained with classic mind control techniques, corporal punishment, fasting and bizarre dietary practices. Ortell died in 1987, but his progeny continued the polygamy, the inbreeding and the marriages to young female teens that he instituted.
...
During an interview with this reporter, Lu Ann Kingston, whose defiance of the cult led to the conviction of her former “spiritual” husband Jeremy, recalled that Order members saw intermarriage as a way to “keep the bloodline pure.”
And by pure, they meant pure white.
All outsiders are considered to be beneath Order members, she explained. But The Order saves most of its bile for blacks and other non whites. Ethnic jokes and stereotypes were commonly repeated. Chinese people were called “stupid,” and Mexicans were “dirty,” said Lu Ann, adding, “because of their skin.”
...
Ron says the cult’s justification for its racism goes back to early Mormon teachings about a war in heaven between the forces of Satan and those of Jesus. The battle took place in the spiritual pre-existence that Mormons believe all souls come from. Blacks were “the less valiant people in heaven” who sat on the sidelines while others took sides, according to The Order.
Their punishment? Dark skin, of course.
Another of Ortell’s teachings: Adolf Hitler had the right idea about creating a master race, but didn’t have the Lord’s help, so he failed.
Tucker recounted the clan’s version of the apocalypse, the “End of the World War,” a riff on a prophecy some ascribe to Joseph Smith, called The White Horse Prophecy. In it, black people come close to killing off the white race until they are countered by Native Americans, symbolized by a Red Horse, which gallops to the White Horse’s rescue.
“That will open up for The Order to rise up and take over the world,” Ron said.
...
And this group owns a billion dollar business empire, including a high-end weapons manufacturer. But don’t worry because, as one of the group leaders proclaims, they’re really all about loving thy neighbor and there’s only a few racists in the group:
...
Young is the owner of Desert Tech, a Utah gun manufacturer, which produces sniper rifles and so-called “bullpup” rifles, The latter, unlike conventional magazine-fed rifles, have shorter barrels, with the gun’s action located behind the trigger. These specialty firearms can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $8,000 each.Desert Tech and its rifles have been featured on Fox News, Mythbusters, Daredevil and The Blacklist, among other TV shows. Young told Intelligence Report that his company has sold weapons, with the approval of the U.S. State Department, to governments in Europe and the Middle East, Saudi Arabia being one.
Young also claimed Desert Tech had sold guns to Picatinny Arsenal, the research division of the U.S. military.
“We haven’t gotten any big U.S. contracts,” Young explained. “Obviously, we would love to.”
Spokesmen for both the U.S. State Department and for Picatinny Arsenal could neither verify nor deny Young’s claims.
The company was founded in 2007 with an investment from family members. Young denied that The Order was racist or taught any form of bigotry, and said he had people of all races working for him.
“What we’re taught is to love our neighbor, that all people, all races no matter who they are … deserve to be loved,” he explained.
Still, he conceded that some Order members may have prejudiced beliefs because “in our organization people have freedom of choice.”
...
“What we’re taught is to love our neighbor, that all people, all races no matter who they are … deserve to be loved,” he explained.
We just want to “love thy neighbor”. That was the message from the guy who founded the race war cult’s high-end weapons manufacturing firm. And it’s worth note that apocalyptic wealthy cults that own their own high-end weapons manufacturer aren’t as uncommon as one might hope.
The Hate Cult in the White House
Now after looking at that profile of the Kingston clan, the question is raised in relation to the larger Alt-Right white supremacist movement that continues to use the Trump White House’s quiet approval to mainstream itself and present its members as some sort of aggrieved segment of American society: So what exactly is the key difference between the Kingstons’ worldview and that or your typical neo-Nazi? Sure, there are undoubtedly some differences in terms of the religious/incest stuff maybe. But in terms of the mindless fetishization of ‘whiteness’ coupled with a need for a rigid authoritarian hierarchical society, is there really all that big a difference between an apocalyptic racist theocratic polygamist cult that views all non-whites as an existential threat and the general ‘Alt-Right’ neo-Nazi worldview that portrays non-whites, women, gays, and anyone who isn’t a far-right white male as an existential threat to far-right white males? If there are substantial fundamental differences, it’s unclear what they are because both groups fundamentally view non-white conservatives as a dehumanized “other” unworthy of “thy neighbors” love or an interesting group of people worth getting to know, but instead an inevitable rival group that represents an existential threat that must be extinguished. And it’s that worldview that President Trump refuses to denounce. Because the ‘Alt-Right’ and its sympathizers are far too important a political constituency (and Trump is kind of of Nazi himself).
But while we might be tempted to presume that it’s purely crass political calculations that have led to the President’s silence on this matter, as the following piece by Josh Marshall points out, that same worldview that sees the everyone who opposes Alt-Right as part of some sort of existential threat to conservative whites is not surprisingly popular in the the upper-echelons of the White House. As the recent reports of an intra-White House battle in the National Security Council tragically demonstrates — where National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster recently fired an NSC staffer with close ties to an ‘Alt-Right’ personality as part of a larger Alt-Right vs non-Alt-Right power struggle in the White House — that ‘Alt-Right’ worldview that portrays all non-Alt-Rights as being part of some grand cabal out to destroy white conservatives (as opposed to making a better world for the conservatives to enjoy living in too, just not exclusively enjoy) has been turned into a message where all non-Alt-Rights are all in a grand cabal to destroy Donald Trump. And only the Alt-Right is on his side. Everyone from progressives, to ‘establishment’ Republicans, the ‘deep state’, and even the the Muslim Brotherhood are all in a ca bal against Trump. That’s the Team Alt-Right message in the White House and Trump is reportedly quite receptive to it:
Talking Points Memo
Editor’s BlogThe Fringe At The Wheel: Inside The Cernovich/McMaster Derp War
By Josh Marshall
Published August 11, 2017 2:59 pmEarlier this month, The Atlantic reported on a memo written by a since-fired NSC staffer named Rich Higgins. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster fired Higgins in July over the memo. But Higgins’ dismissal was part of McMaster’s broader effort to assert control over an NSC which still has or had numerous staffers brought in by Mike Flynn. Yesterday Foreign Policy published the memo in its entirety along with new reporting about the context of the memo, its discovery and Higgins’ dismissal.
The memo itself is fairly described as nuts. But I want to get into more detail about just what it contains because the details are important on several fronts. But before that I want to mention a key element of FP’s reporting, which I at least think is new in its specifics. If you don’t waste your time on Twitter or haven’t closely followed the so-called alt-right, you may not know the name Mike Cernovich. His Wikipedia page describes him as “an American alt-right social media personality, writer, and conspiracy theorist”, which is not a bad description. He was a big promoter of the ‘pizzagate’ conspiracy theory which ended up almost getting people killed in DC last year. Before that he was a ‘men’s empowerment’ activist who took a more clearly political turn in 2016 race. He’s provocative and goofy in as much as a white supremacist and Nazi-sympathizer can be goofy.
In any case, since Trump’s inauguration Cernovich has been carrying on a sort of rearguard action against the Trump White House, notionally supporting ‘Trump’ while waging online battles against the mix of ‘globalists’, sell-outs and ‘deep state’ forces trying to undo the Trump revolution. Through all this Cernovich has claimed he has sources deep and high up in the Trump White House and that he’s sitting on all manner of stories that could change everything. It has always been clear that Cernovich does have some ‘sources’ or at least people leaking him stuff or access to some information ahead of the conventional media because more than once he’s reported things on his website or Twitter which did turn out to be true. But one of my biggest takeaways from the FP piece is that this is apparently far more true than at least I realized. Indeed, H.R. McMaster, in this telling at least, is obsessed with rooting out the NSC staffers who are leaking to Cernovich and it was that leak hunt that led to the discovery of the memo we were discussing above.
...
Here’s a key passage …
The controversy over the memo has its origins in a hunt for staffers believed to be providing information to right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich, who seemed to have uncanny insight into the inner workings of the NSC. Cernovich in the past few months has been conducting a wide-ranging campaign against the national security advisor.
“McMaster was just very, very obsessed with this, with Cernovich,” a senior administration official told FP. “He had become this incredible specter.”
In July, the memo was discovered in Higgins’s email during what two sources described to Foreign Policy as a “routine security” audit of NSC staffers’ communications. Another source, however, characterized it as a McCarthy-type leak investigation targeting staffers suspected of communicating with Cernovich.
Higgins, who had worked on the Trump campaign and transition before coming to the NSC, drafted the memo in late May and then circulated the memo to friends from the transition, a number of whom are now in the White House.
After the memo was discovered, McMaster’s deputy, Ricky Waddell, summoned Higgins, who was told he could resign — or be fired, and risk losing his security clearance, according to two sources.
Higgins, who agreed to resign, was escorted out of the building. He later learned from his colleagues still at the NSC that his association to this now-infamous memo was the reason he was removed.
Needless to say, if McMaster is surveilling his own staff to find out who is talking to Cernovich, then Cernovich is playing a big, big role in the unfolding Trump administration drama. That’s a big deal and a highly disturbing one, which we will come back to.
Now let’s discuss the memo itself. As I said, it’s nuts on many levels. But the details of what it contains are important. I have a series of observations. Let me lay them out seriatim.
1: First, an overview. The gist of Higgins memo is that President Trump is under a sustained, illegitimate and conspiracy driven attack by the forces of “cultural Marxism” which aims to drive him from office. These forces include basically everyone from the far left to establishment Republicans, either as conspirators or dupes and fellow travelers. Key elements of the drama are that the American left is in league with ‘radical Islam’, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, to destroy America from the within. Both sides – the forces of the ‘cultural Marxism’ and the supporters of President Trump – are in what amounts to a final, all-or-nothing battle. Indeed, Higgins argues that the country is now in the midst of a pitched battle for the future existence of America in which the person of President Trump is a proxy for the future of America itself. It is a Manichean, verging on political eschatological vision of contemporary America. This is the concluding paragraph of the memo, emphasis added …
The recent turn of events give rise to the observation that the defense of President Trump is the defense of America. In the same way President Lincoln was surrounded by political opposition both inside and outside of his wire, in both overt and covert forms, so too is President Trump. Had Lincoln failed, so too would have the Republic. The administration has been maneuvered into a constant backpedal by relentless political warfare attacks structured to force him to assume a reactive posture that assures inadequate responses. The president can either drive or be driven by events; it’s time for him to drive them.
2: Trump Era Politics is Really War. It is far down the list of problems with this memo and this situation. But it is to put it mildly highly irregular and problematic for a former Pentagon official who is now an NSC staffer to be circulating memos on domestic ‘political warfare’. But the memo is replete with the imagery, terminology and conceptual framework of war, even down to high-drama, often manic descriptions of the ‘battlespace’ on which President Trump is fighting the forces of ‘cultural Marxism’. The memo views opposition politics in the Trump era as illegitimate and a form of violent resistance against the state.
Again from the memo …
This is not politics as usual but rather political warfare at an unprecedented level that is openly engaged in the direct targeting of a seated president through manipulation of the news cycle. It must be recognized on its own terms so that immediate action can be taken. At its core, these campaigns run on multiple lines of effort, serve as the non-violent line of effort of a wider movement, and execute political warfare agendas that reflect cultural Marxist outcomes. The campaigns operate through narratives. Because the hard left is aligned with lslamist organizations at local (ANTI FA working with Muslim Brotherhood doing business as MSA and CAIR), national (ACLU and BLM working with CAIR and MPAC) and international levels (OIC working with OSCEand the UN), recognition must given to the fact that they seamlessly interoperate at the narrative level as well. In candidate Trump, the opposition saw a threat to the “politically correct” enforcement narratives they’ve meticulously laid in over the past few decades. In President Trump, they see a latent threat to continue that effort to ruinous effect and their retaliatory response reflects this fear.
As you can see, a persistent theme of the memo is that what most of us would recognize as an embattled and unpopular President fighting widespread opposition is actually more like a domestic rebellion and needs to be addressed as such.
Again from the memo …
Culturally conditioned to limit responses to such attacks as yet another round in the on-going drone from diversity and multicultural malcontents, these broadsides are discounted as political correctness run amuck. However, political correctness is a weapon against reason and critical thinking. This weapon functions as the enforcement mechanism of diversity narratives that seek to implement cultural Marxism. Candidate Trump’s rhetoric in the campaign not only cut through the Marxist narrative, he did so in ways that were viscerally comprehensible to a voting bloc that then made candidate Trump the president; making that bloc self-aware in the process. President Trump is either the candidate he ran as, or he is nothing.
Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek his destruction. For this cabal, Trump must be destroyed. Far from politics as usual, this is a political warfare effort that seeks the destruction of a sitting president. Since Trump took office, the situation has intensified to crisis level proportions. For those engaged in the effort, especially those from within the “deep state” or permanent government apparatus, this raises clear Title 18 (legal) concerns.
Consider this passage about the “battlespace”.
Battlespace. These attack narratives are pervasive, full spectrum and institutionalized at all levels. They operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media, and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies and within the foreign policy establishment. They inform the entertainment industry from late night monologues, to situation comedies, to television series memes, to movie themes. The effort required to direct this capacity at President Trump is little more than a programming decision to do so. The cultural Marxist narrative is fully deployed, pervasive, full spectrum and ongoing. Regarding the president, attacks have become a relentless 24/7 effort.
This mix of observations and feelings might be more simply summed up as “Wow, we seem to be super unpopular. And we’re being attacked constantly!”
Many White Houses have had this feeling. It’s a tough job. But Higgins sees it quite differently, as an integrated, conspiratorial effort to drive the President from office and destroy the America he represents. Indeed, Higgins explicitly cites the doctrine’s of Maoist ‘people’s war’ as the conceptual framework and the plan Trump’s enemies are following. I’m not kidding about this. From the memo: “As used here, ‘political warfare’ does not concern activities associated with the American political process but rather exclusively refers to political warfare as understood by the Maoist Insurgency model. Political warfare is one of the five components of a Maoist insurgency. Maoist methodologies employ synchronized violent and non-violent actions that focus on mobilization of individuals and groups to action. This approach envisions the direct use of non-violent operational arts and tactics as elements of combat power.”
Again, my description isn’t semantic or hyperbolic. Higgins views a vast array of disparate domestic political movements, institutions and cultural voices as together executing an organized plan to drive Trump from office and that the instigators of this effort are the far left and Islamic radicals trying to perpetuate ‘cultural Marxism’.
3: The Domestic War is a Meme War: A week ago, the above-mentioned Cernovich tweeted this much-derided message.
As a patriot I offer to go to NSC, teach them how to fight and win memetic wars. McMaster fears me, well let’s fight radical Islam together. https://t.co/nJdcZ4oVHT
— Mike Cernovich ???? (@Cernovich) August 5, 2017
What is “memetic warfare”? It is essentially fighting people on social media with photoshopped images, propagating ‘memes’ – nugget sized images or blocks of text which inject messages and ideas into the conversations of a broader public. It also involves digital vigilantism, organized intimidation campaigns, threats and a lot more. There’s something to this. And Cernovich is demonstrably an able practitioner of it. He’s built up a huge following based on pretty much just that. At the end of the day though, McMaster is a master of war wars. And ‘memetic warfare’ is really just spending the day mouthing off on Twitter. So it’s a bit of a comical boast. But if you read the Higgins memo it is replete with the vocabulary and mental world of ‘memetic warfare’. These two men are in contact with each other and share the same mental and ideational world. Which seems to be why McMaster fired Higgins. To a degree, it’s a slightly higher-brow version of what you can listen to on Hannity every night. That’s not surprising since – unlikely the imagined conspiracies of Higgins memo – Hannity, the Cernovich crew at the NSC, Trump, Don Jr. and the rest do seem to be in regular contact with each other.
4: What is ‘Cultural Marxism’? Higgins is not the only person to use this phrase. But as he uses it ‘cultural Marxism’ is essentially the entirety of social movements, cultural change, growing internationalization of public life in America that distinguishes the American of the early 21st century from the idealized public version of America as presented in media and mainstream TV and cinema in the 1950s. There is arguably such a thing as ‘cultural Marxism’ – radical critiques of American society, and its culture and economic underpinnings, which exist but don’t have a great deal of traction outside the academy and some radical political circles. There is also the range of critiques of American gender and racial norms and power structures that critique ‘patriarchy’ and ‘white supremacy’. These are obviously much more pervasive debates within contemporary American society, ones which are disproportionately (though by no means exclusively) rooted in the ideas of the younger generation of Americans. They are real, deeply contested and genuinely threatening to a large segment of the US population. They’re not ‘cultural Marxism’ in any sense other than as swear words and trash talk in domestic political debates. But even this isn’t really what Higgins is talking about. It is a far more expansive and watered-down definition and set of ideas which are taken more or less as givens in corporate America under the blandified catchwords of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. That’s all ‘cultural Marxism’ for Higgins and all driven by an alliance of ‘the left’ and Islamist radicals.
5: The Trumpite Milieu: Where does this stuff come from? Higgins is a former soldier and later a Pentagon staffer. Some of his writing is simply taking fairly conventional military planning jargon and applying it to domestic politics. But reading Higgins I hear the voices of two other men loud and clear: Frank Gaffney and David Horowitz.
Gaffney was a mid-tier Reagan Pentagon appointee who has been a constant presence in Washington for the last three decades and has in the years since 9/11 become the preeminent author and propagator of various Islamophobic conspiracy theories. To set expectations properly, I’m not talking about counter-terrorism hawks who say the US needs to surveil Muslim immigrant populations or limit immigration by Muslims. Gaffney says the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the US government at all levels with sleeper agents and fellow travelers. There’s crazy and there’s crazy. Gaffney is in the latter category.
As Peter Beinart noted earlier this year, most mainstream Republicans have treated Gaffney like a crank for years. (Indeed, he’s for years fought a nitwit battle to expel Grover Norquist from the conservative movement because Gaffney claims Norquist is a Muslim Brotherhood agent or fellow traveler.) But he’s viewed as a major thinker and adviser in the Trump White House. And Mike Flynn was deeply under his influence. Indeed, in 2016 Flynn co-authored a book with Michael Ledeen, a comparable though somewhat more obscure figure. Ledeen is a different, with his own distinct though no less crazy conspiracy theories largely tied to radical Islamist, terrorist and simply anti-American groups. The upshot is that Flynn was totally down with and in the Frank Gaffney nutbag and he staffed the Trump world with people of the same mindset. A lot of them are still there.
David Horowitz is a one-time member of the New Left who’s made his living for decades as a self-styled Whittaker Chambers of the nutball right. I can tell you from personal experience that he is simply one of the worst people in American public life. Think Roger Stone is terrible? Me too. But I’ve met Roger and he’s kind of a blast to spend a bit of time with if you can bracket out the politics. I’ve met Horowitz too. He’s an awful person. Higgins obsession with ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘political warfare’, Maoist insurgency tactics and all manner of other sub-Marxist claptrap is pure Horowitz. It is both how he thinks and also his schtick within the conservative movement: the guy who knows all the dark truths about ‘the left’ and is sharing them with the embattled right. Horowitz too is tight with the Trump world and the various extremists and conspiracy theorists who cluster around it. I don’t know whether Higgins got this stuff directly from Horowitz or just atmospherically because his influence is so pervasive in today’s right. But the influence is unmistakable.
For our present purposes, the important point is that even though mainstream conservatives – not to mention everyone to their left – have long regarded both men as no more than activist bilge water, they are both highly influential in the Trump White House. Just as importantly, while they’ve generally been regarded as jokes by mainstream political reporters, they’ve actually spent years propagating their ideas among the people we now call the Trump base. So their ideas are as important as they are nonsensical and hyperbolic because they are at the center of power and draw on a mass base of support.
Higgins himself may be out. But the FP piece reports that Don Jr. got hold of his memo during the firestorm of controversy over his June 2016 Trump Tower meeting and loved it. He shared it with his father, President Trump, who loved it too. He got angry when Sean Hannity told him that Higgins had been fired over it. So even though Higgins is out, these ideas are still pervasive in the Trump White House and get an enthusiastic thumbs up from Trump himself. Even though McMaster won the battle, to put it in Higginsian terms, the war continues. And it seems as likely as not, on the FP’s reporting, that McMaster will eventually lose.
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“First, an overview. The gist of Higgins memo is that President Trump is under a sustained, illegitimate and conspiracy driven attack by the forces of “cultural Marxism” which aims to drive him from office. These forces include basically everyone from the far left to establishment Republicans, either as conspirators or dupes and fellow travelers. Key elements of the drama are that the American left is in league with ‘radical Islam’, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, to destroy America from the within. Both sides – the forces of the ‘cultural Marxism’ and the supporters of President Trump – are in what amounts to a final, all-or-nothing battle. Indeed, Higgins argues that the country is now in the midst of a pitched battle for the future existence of America in which the person of President Trump is a proxy for the future of America itself. It is a Manichean, verging on political eschatological vision of contemporary America...”
And as Josh Marshall ends with, while Rich Higgins, the Alt-Right NSC staffer, may have been successfully removed by H.R. McMaster, his overall message of the world being against Trump and the Alt-Right being his only real ally in this is a message that continues to resonate within the White House and Trump himself:
...
Higgins himself may be out. But the FP piece reports that Don Jr. got hold of his memo during the firestorm of controversy over his June 2016 Trump Tower meeting and loved it. He shared it with his father, President Trump, who loved it too. He got angry when Sean Hannity told him that Higgins had been fired over it. So even though Higgins is out, these ideas are still pervasive in the Trump White House and get an enthusiastic thumbs up from Trump himself. Even though McMaster won the battle, to put it in Higginsian terms, the war continues. And it seems as likely as not, on the FP’s reporting, that McMaster will eventually lose.
So as we scratch our heads asking why President Trump refuses to denounce white suprmacists, let’s not forget that this is an embattled White House that appears to view the ‘Alt-Right’ as his only real allies. Might that have something to do with his refusal to denounce them despite the political costs he’s incurring for not doing so? They’re his only friends.
And one quick quibble with Marshall’s characterization of millieu of figures that have been promoting this “liberals and Islamists united in Cultural Marxism” worldview. Specifically this section regarding Frank Gaffney:
...
As Peter Beinart noted earlier this year, most mainstream Republicans have treated Gaffney like a crank for years. (Indeed, he’s for years fought a nitwit battle to expel Grover Norquist from the conservative movement because Gaffney claims Norquist is a Muslim Brotherhood agent or fellow traveler.) But he’s viewed as a major thinker and adviser in the Trump White House. And Mike Flynn was deeply under his influence. Indeed, in 2016 Flynn co-authored a book with Michael Ledeen, a comparable though somewhat more obscure figure. Ledeen is a different, with his own distinct though no less crazy conspiracy theories largely tied to radical Islamist, terrorist and simply anti-American groups. The upshot is that Flynn was totally down with and in the Frank Gaffney nutbag and he staffed the Trump world with people of the same mindset. A lot of them are still there.
...
While it’s true that Frank Gaffney is indeed a crank who focuses almost exclusively on the Muslim Brotherhood to the point where his analysis is nonsense, the work he’s done highlighting conservative anti-tax extremist Grover Norquists ties to the Muslim Brotherhood is probably one of the few useful things Gaffney has ever done. Why? Because the Muslim Brotherhood is effectively the KKK of the Sunni world — an elitist corporatist hyper-sectarian far-right theocratic organization hell-bent on total domination of society and the dehumanization of “others”. And an understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood’s history of coordinating with far-right groups, including extensive history of coordinating with ex-Nazis and fascists, is critical for understanding both the Muslim Brotherhood and the larger global movement of reactionary far-right movements operating throughout the 20th and 21st century. These movements work with each other and the story of the American right-wing’s work relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood is important and Grover Norquist played an important role in that story. Especially if people like Mike Cernovich are going to push memes that progressives are teaming up with the Muslim Brotherhood in some sort of grand. Plus, you can’t fully understand the post‑9/11 investigation into terror financing without understanding that relationship and that specifically includes the role Grover Norquist played in intervening on behalf of Muslim Brotherhood networks to thwart Operation Greenquest. Other than all that, yes, Gaffney is a crank and manages to completely mangle any meaningful understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood. While terror attacks or some other nefarious activity by far-right Islamist militant groups is certainly a concern for America as is the case for all far-right groups, America isn’t being overrun by Islamofascists like Gaffney suggests because it’s already overrun by Christofascists. That ‘space’ is sort of taken up already.
But this is where we are: when we step back and “study the situation”, the situation appears to be one where a worldview best left to a racist cult is guiding the White House. And that White House is, in turn, effectively defending via omission a group of neo-Nazis the day after one of them ran down a crowd of anti-racist protestors. And if we step back further we find that same kind of worldview capturing the imagination of a significant segment of white American conservatives. And Europe too when you look at the rise of white nationalism there. And of course the Muslim world when you look at ongoing domination of hyper-conservative strains of Islam and groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and theocratic monarchies. And don’t forget North Korea. It’s an entire nation run by an insular cult that views the rest of the world as an existential threat. In other worlds, pretty much wherever you look around the globe you’re going to find reactionary totalitarian identitarian groups that view the rest of the world as an existential “others” threat. And if we’re going to find a real existential threat anywhere that’s where it is: groups that can’t live peacefully with others and refuse to humanize others.
But what do we do about this? Virginia governor Terry McCoullough made an important point during his address to the public after the neo-Nazi car attack on a crowd of anti-fascist protestors and hte ‘Unify the Right’ torchlight march. He called for them to “go home”, and said Virginia isn’t a commonwealth that welcomes them. And the United States isn’t doesn’t have space for them. It was an important rebuke made all the more important bye the President’s silence. But it still raises the question: where do they go? And the answer is the same answer to the question of “what do we do with [insert totalitarian identitarian group here]?” And that answer is to be super welcoming when they snap out of it and become non-totalitarian identitarians and otherwise continue to be unwelcoming. They won’t be deported or anything. Just unwelcome when they express hateful views.
But that’s probably not going to be adequate. So how about we counter the systematic dehumanization of “others” by public recognizing that the dehumanization of “others” is an extremely “human” thing to do. Tragically, but that’s how it is. Throughout history it’s been pervasive and enduring. Across time and cultures. Monstrous acts and ideologies are all too human. And those help captive by such views aren’t monsters. They’re human captives of monstrous ideologies. It’s sadly human to get caught up in such ideologies, but also human to experience an epiphany, snap out of it, and move past it. Think of the former members of the Kingston clan. They were die-hard believers who managed to escape. It wasn’t easy, but they did it. And that whole arc of experience, believing in a hate cult and learning to move past it, is a very human experience. On top of that, it’s not just a relief when someone escapes from a hate cult but it’s actually really quite remarkable. Way to go! For real, it’s an amazing and impressive achievement. So how about we celebrate that and make it very clear that we recognize that those trapped in hate cults can be just a handful of personal epiphanies away from becoming great people who will be welcome anywhere. At least anywhere that isn’t a hate cult. Would recognizing the awesomeness of escaping from a hate cult help our overall situation?
Sure, it’s not fair that the side that promotes peace and equality and diversity and trying to empathize and humanize others should be forced to repeatedly ‘turn the other cheek’ when it comes to finding a common path forward with groups dedicated to dehumanization of others and, in many cases, their eventual extermination. But that’s how it is when you’re forced to fight for a more empathetic society and an end to thoughtless heartlessness. It comes with the territory. And it’s important to note that it’s relatively new territory when it comes to trying to create a society that isn’t simply dominated by some group but is instead thoughtfully based on a real ‘Golden rule’ paradigm. We know societies like North Korea or Nazi Germany can exist and have always existed. Humans are clearly capable of that. But this whole tolerance thing, a society that looks past superficialities and truly embraces The Golden Rule and priorities the humanization of “others”, this is new. And largely untested because there’s always been a large swath of society that never agreed with that vision. So how about we create a national project that actually celebrates the humanization of “others” and moving past hating, including hating the haters. Humanizing the haters. Not as models to follow but as real people trapped in hate cults they didn’t create but someone fell into or were born into. A celebration of the act of shedding previously held bigotries, in effect being “born again”. Could a movement of born again ex-haters have any impact?
Similarly, how about developing a a sense of “White Pride” that’s pride in white society overcoming white supremacy. And mysogyny. And homophobia. And all the other unjustified horrible habits that have infested societies throughout history. And add it to “[insert group’s label here] Pride” that celebrates that group’s various obstacles that they’ve overcome to also achieve a real “Golden Rule” culture. The kind of culture one might associate with a super nice pacifist hippie who loves everyone, as long as they’re not mean. And if they are mean the super nice pacifist hippie loves them in a ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ way and humanizes them. Totalitarian identitarian movements like the ‘Alt-Right’ neo-Nazis explicitly don’t have a space for non-whites. They can’t possibly be a viable worldview for the real world unless it involves real world mass genocide. Which is part of their long-term vision. And the rest of the totalitarian identitarian worldviews of the world are the same way. It’s like extra-psycho Highlander scenario played out on a tribal level, where it’s either one totalitarian identitarian movement wins or humanity obliterates itself. In which case the rest of life on Earth wins. And that leaves and global community of tolerant progressive multi-cultural societies where all the participating cultures are nice and generally tolerant and Golden-rule-ish as the only viable vision for a future that doesn’t destroy itself. Being nice isn’t just nice. It’s logistically the only viable modality in a globalized world filled with advanced technology and a capacity for groups to destroy each other.
So if people like Mike Cernovich are going wage meme warfare propagating hate cult ideology, how about a counter meme campaign celebrating the awesome logistical utility of empathy and general niceness and how much stronger it makes any society. And how much nicer it is. Because many people appear to have forgotten or never figured out that life would be much better for everyone if we dropped the hate cult ideas. So a pro-niceness meme campaign is sadly necessary.
And make it very clear to to President Trump that he will be legitimately celebrated if he sheds his ‘Alt-Right’ neo-Nazi sympathies and uses his leadership position to create a real culture of niceness. The best moments in history involve overcoming the worst moments in history and the US is having a pretty bad moment. Trump has a real opportunity here after leading us to this horrible place. He said he loves “all the people of our country,” and called for Americans of different races and backgrounds to remember their shared Americanness in his remarks after the attack. If he actually demonstrated that by jettisoning all the Nazi-sympthizers like Steve Bannon or Sebastian Gorka from the White House and them lead a Presidential commission on Hate or that had an emphasis on white supremacy (since that’s the dominant hate movement in terms of raw numbers), he could end up being a wildly successful president. At least successful on race relations. He still might blow up the world in other ways but at least he would have a ‘healing the racial divide’ feather in his presidential cap. And sure, the odds of this happening are extremely low, but that’s the point: making a formal offer to avowed racists who will probably go to their graves avowed racists that, hey, the grass really is greener on the nice side and you’re more than welcome to come on over. No hard feelings. Hugs? It’ll be a “born again” thing and all will be forgiven basically. Even Bannon and Gorka could join in as long as they denounce their hate cult-ish ways. Wouldn’t it be so much more fun if we all just kind of got along? A “born again” nice Trump could save his presidency and help us all get along by by ditching the neo-Nazis and saving America from polarizing peril. His silence doesn’t bode well but it’s ultimately up to him. But it’s up to the rest of us to let him and the rest of the Nazi sympathizers in high and low places that if they have whatever personal epiphany experience that’s required to snap out of their hate cult worldviews, they will be totally welcome on Team Nice. Healing hugs anyone? Especially for Trump if he joinst Team Nice soon. It would be quite a twist for his presidency.
But as is, it appears that much like how the Elders in the Kingston clan paint a picture of a corrupt world besieging their community, the ‘Alt-Right’ and the rest of the far-right media universe has been busy selling its audience of primarily conservative white Christians prone to anti-government sentiments that liberals/progressives and the Muslim Brotherhood and presumably George Soros and the Illuminati and etc are all teaming up against them. So making it clear that they are trapped in a hate cult dynamic and that everyone will be very understanding when they snap out of it could be a useful path forward. Or perhaps totally useless but at least we tried. And should presumably keep trying as is required of Team Nice. More hugs are clearly in order.
And who knows, if we even found an effective ‘nice culture’ that actually acted as an epiphany catalyst for members of hate cults and encouraged them join in on the welcoming niceness, it might work for all sorts of other hate cults, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Jewish extremists, or any other hate group that’s clearly terrified of the rest of the world. Maybe we’ll finally find a way out of the North Korean mass cult nuclear blackmail situation. Or at least a significant part of a much larger solution.
Given that the purported purpose for the “Unite the Right” rally was to protect ‘White heritage’ by preventing the removal of a statue or Robert E. Lee, it’s worth recall that the kinds of figures that groups like this revere aren’t limited to Civil War figures. For instance, Andrew “the weev” Auernheimer has been calling for a crowdfunding campaign to create a a permanent statue for a grave memorializing Timothy McVeigh.
So will the McVeigh monument become part of the ‘Alt-Right’ neo-Nazis’ white heritage that future ‘Alt-Right’ torchlight mobs rally around and protect from removal? We’ll sadly probably find out:
““Think of it, a gigantic bronze statue of Timothy McVeigh poised triumphantly atop a Ryder truck, arms raised as if to form an Algiz rune from his body, with a plaque that states the honest truth,” Auernheimer wrote. “Nothing would be a greater insult to these pizza-party guarding federal swine than a permanent monument honoring [McVeigh’s] journey to Valhalla or Fólkvangr atop the piles of their corpses.””
That’s right, for the far-right someone like Timothy McVeigh is a heroic figure worthy of a giant bronze statue. Would that statue be considered protected ‘white heritage’ by the “Unite the Right” folks once it gets built? It seems like its just a matter of time before someone builds a statue of the guy Well given the cult-like status McVeigh has on the far-right. So that’s an unpleasant future conflict over American ‘white heritage’ that we’re going to have to deal with. Although not as unpleasant as the other forms for enduring McVeigh worship:
“The complaint alleges that Varnell initially wanted to blow up the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, D.C. with a device that was similar to the one used in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.”
And this planned domestic terror attack in Oklahoma City was supposed to happen at 1 am on Saturday, the evening the “Unite the Right” torchlight marches started. On top of be really horrible, it’s just the latest sign that the far-right really, really, really loves Timothy McVeigh and thinks he was just a great, heroic figure in American history.
When you’re living with a not-very-crypto-fascist President in the White House, there are good days and there are those days. And as is evident from the effusive praise President Trump received today over his ongoing remarks on the car attack at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA, this was one of those days:
“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa”
That was the high praise President Trump received today...from David Duke. And Richard Spencer. And the Daily Stormer. And...
“After Trump read a curt statement Monday denouncing white supremacists and hate groups by name, Spencer insisted he wasn’t being “serious,” and celebrated his reversal on Tuesday.”
Yep, there was a lot of celebrate today...if you happened to be a neo-Nazi. After all, thanks to Trump’s press conference that the white supremacists are all raving about, the President of the United States has now put the neo-Nazis and those who show up to protest them largely on the same moral ground. They’re both ‘bad’ groups, that he condemns. He also fretting about the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue, asking if George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues were next. So, yes Robert E. Lee is apparently on the same history footing as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson according to the President of the United States. It was that kind of day:
“Returning to the point later, Trump made the connection explicit: “This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?””
So that was what got the white supremacists all excited this afternoon. After a neo-Nazi runs down a crown of anti-Nazi protestors, the President of the United States spends the next three days have the condemnations of the neo-Nazis grudgingly dragged out of him while trying to find equivalences between Nazis and the anti-Nazis protestors. You can see what they’re so giddy. Although a lot of that giddiness was probably left over from this morning’s twitter trainwreck when he tweeted an image of a train running over “CNN” and the ‘Alt-Right’ retweet from Monday night:
“President Trump’s war with CNN went off the rails Tuesday morning after he retweeted an image of a Trump train running over a CNN reporter, then quickly deleted it after the meme sparked criticism as inappropriate just days after the Charlottesville violence.”
Classy. And rather reminiscent of the previous “CNN Fakenews” image Trump retweeted a while back that resulted in Andrew Auernheimer at the Daily Stormer plotting a terror against the families of CNN employees. So, yeah, real classy.
And then there was the retweet os an Alt-Right personality about crime in Chicago over the weekend by that was clearly intended to deflect attention from the neo-Nazi rally by directing attention to crime in predominantly African American neighborhoods and suggest a parallel with a neo-Nazi hate rally that resulted in a domestic terror attack:
Oh so classy.
As we can see, today was one of those days. The kind of day that has neo-Nazis tweeting with glee. And yeah, pretty much every day in the Trump era is one of those days, but this one was extra bad simply because it was the day after Trump belated issued the open condemnation of white supremacy and racism that the public was clamoring for following the neo-Nazi attack. So today wasn’t just a sign of a lack of progress. It was Trump regressing. In real time. It was that kind of day. One step forward, two goose-steps back. Sad!
Amidst all the reports about the White House staff being “stunned” by President Trump’s decision to ‘go rogue’ and go on a press conference tirade defending his ‘both sides had good and bad people’ response to the Charlottesville, Virgina neo-Nazi car attack on a group of anti-Nazi protestors, it’s worth noting that those discomforted sentiments don’t apply to Steve Bannon. Or course:
“Many in the White House have communicated to reporters — off the record — that Trump’s statements made them uncomfortable. For Bannon, at least according to unnamed sources familiar with his opinion, the opposite is true.”
Yep, Bannon wasn’t just “thrilled”. He was “proud”:
Presumably that was ‘White pride’ filling Bannon’s heart, although maybe it was some sort of ‘Machiavelli divide-and-conquer campaign strategist pride’. Or maybe a bit of both. We don’t get to know. It’s one of life’s mysteries.
But as Josh Marshall noted after yesterday’s Trump tirade, what is becoming increasingly non-mysterious is the answer to why it is that Donald Trump insists on defending and associating himself with the ‘Alt-Right’ and other far-right racists. And it doesn’t require the application of “Trump’s Razor”. Nope, good ol’ Occam’s razor should suffice in the this instance: He associates himself with and defends the ‘Alt-Right’ neo-Nazi movement because he is a part of it:
“With Trump, he has a revanchist racist politics because he is a revanchist racist. Once you accept that, a lot falls into place. All the heroic and increasingly nonsensical perambulations of misunderstandings, inexperience, missed opportunities, stubbornness and all the rest are not needed. It all falls into place.”
Yep, while it’s entirely possible for a politicians to cater to and fuel racists politics for purely self-serving cynical reasons, when you examine Trump’s long publicly available track record that long-predates his political life we see one indication after another that Trump himself really is racist. And brought up to be that way:
““Mr. Trump prides himself on an unapologetic style he learned from his father, Fred Trump, a New York City housing developer, and Roy Cohn, a combative lawyer who served as an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.” Quite true. One might also add though that both men, from profoundly different backgrounds and life experiences, were dyed-in-the-wool racists.”
It’s also worth noting that if Steven Bannon was “thrilled” by Trump’s tirade that suggests that Bannon not only liked the sentiment behind it but also the politics. Don’t forget, he’s Trump’s chief political strategist. And he was “thrilled” by that display that’s sparked outrage across the country. In other words, Bannon apparently approves of the political game of creating a national political litmus test over the question of whether or not Nazis and anti-Nazis are morally equivalent. That’s what Trump was doing, intentionally or unintentionally, and it appears to be a Bannon-approved tactic.
So that’s where we are: a nation a President who apparently can’t help but wear his heart on his sleave. And that heart is filled with racist thought, conspiracy theories, and grievances. Lovely.
It all raises a rather interesting question: While it’s extremely likely that whatever is in Trump’s heart will be taken to the grave. Sadly. But in the spirit of healing it’s probably worth asking if are there any sort of de-radicalization techniques that could be borrowed from the various groups that work on de-progamming die-hard racists and extremists that could somehow be applied remotely that might have a positive impact? And not just on Trump. There’s no doubt plenty of folks in the White House in need of deprogramming: Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka, etc. With all the money the US government has invested in anti-extremism programs, is there anything with a record of success that might work, even if it’s just a tiny chance of success? If so, they’re probably worth trying. And who knows, if it works, we might be able to convince the Trump administration to give back the money it cut for the only group the federal government funds focused on de-radicalizing neo-Nazis:
“Life After Hate was founded by former white supremacists who have renounced the racist ideology and who now help others transition out of hate groups and re-assimilate into society. Christian Piccolini, a former neo-Nazi and a co-founder of the group, told NPR on Sunday he was not surprised by the devastation in Charlottesville.”
That’s the group that just had its federal funding eliminated: a white supremacist de-programming organization run by ex-white supremacists. And it wasn’t due to eliminating waste or government redundancy since it was the only organization focused exclusively on white supremacists in the entire federal countering violent extremism (CVE) program.
So if there’s any thing we can learn from Life After Hate that might work on persuading the white nationalists in the White House to begin their personal journey of healing we should probably apply those lessons soon. Very soon. Ideally yesterday.
Roger Stone recently predicted a “spasm of violence” and insurrection should Donald Trump be impeached, saying “Both sides are heavily armed, my friend, This is not 1974. People will not stand for impeachment.”. On one level it was just more typically disturbing talk from someone like Roger Stone. But on the other hand, it’s also kind of hard to ignore the fact that much of the right-wing media narrative in the US is basically dedicated to depicting “the Left” as being the perpetrators of a John Birch Society-esque grand secular atheist communist conspiracy to subvert capitalism and all that is decent. This is where we are. So who knows what the response would be to a Trump impeachment for the audience of the right-wing ‘disinfotainment’ complex. It sort of depends on what that disinfotainment complex tells them to do.
But Stone’s comment also highlights something regarding the controversy that enveloped Donald Trump’s comments on the Nazi car attack in Charlottesvilles and Trump’s repeated attempts to promote a narrative that there’s a big “violent Left”, as opposed to a relatively small network of Antifa and Black Bloc groups that focus their violence on fascists and Nazis: given that the ‘Alt-Right’ and neo-Nazis are openly intent on creating a spiral of violence between Left and Right and want push a narrative of a “violent Left” as part of those efforts to recruit people for an actual neo-Nazi white nationalist insurrection, it’s going to be important for the broader Left to figure out how to address far-left networks like Antifa that are willing to embrace militant tactics directed at Nazis and fascists. There’s sort of a Gandhi question at work. How much should you prepare to defend yourself when the far-right is actively out to pick a fight with left-wing protestors as part of a campaign to create a cycle of violence and depict the Left as violent?
And what should the left do about a movement like Antifa that actively shows up to fight the far-right groups out to pick fights? On the one hand, it’s obvious that Antifa’s antics are successfully playing into the “violent Left” meme being pushed by both neo-Nazis and the broader mainstream conservative media. But it’s not like the ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazis haven’t demonstrated a willingness to attack non-Antifa protestors. Or run them over in a car. And it’s very possible the events in Charlottesville would have gone much worse if the Antifa people hadn’t been there if the neo-Nazis simply attacked the rest of the protestors who weren’t prepared for a crowd of armed Nazis. Guardian Reporter Jason Wilson was recently interviewed by Gary Brecher and Mark Ames on the War Nerd Podcast about his experiences in Charlottesville and if you listen starting at to ~5:30 to the preview (the first 20 minutes of the show) you’ll hear Wilson describe a scene in Charlottesville on the first night of the “Unite the Right” rally that took place on the Friday evening before the Saturday march/car attack. The way Wilson depicts it, the “Unite the Right” marchers swarmed and beat the crap out of a much smaller group of counter-protestors surrounding a statue and it wasn’t clear that they were Antifa counter-protestors. Wilson depects “Unite the Right” marchers as extremely aggressive and starting the violence. Additionally, there are already reports documenting the online chats by the “Unite the Right” organizers where people preparing for the march actively talk about getting ready for major brawls and even joked about running over protestors.
So what on earth is the appropriate response to Nazi attempts to start a cycle of violence given the right-wing media landscape where painting “the Left” as violent is emerging as a permanent narrative in the Trump era? The Nazis are not just a group of horribly bigoted people but also a movement that promoted both organized and leaderless insurrectionary tactics for the purpose of installing a neo-Nazi regime that will enslave or exterminate entire peoples. How do you fight a movement where both their means and ends revolve around starting fights and validating violence as a means of conflict resolution without taking an Antifa approach of saying, “Ok, we’ll use violence against Nazis because they are that awful” and what do you do about groups like Antifa that are playing into that cycle of violence strategy?
“In a related but more general sense, it is precisely the aim of fascistic groups to shift the basis of civic dialog, space and politics from law to violence. To put it another way, they are trying to shift the basis of society and power from law, voting, equality to force, violence and the domination of the most powerful. And in this case we mean power as expressed by the superior ability to wield violence. Once we’ve moved from one to the other, fascists have to a significant degree already won. The Nazis and white supremacists are literally trying to create a “both sides” situation. We should not help them.”
Yep, it is precisely the aim of fascistic groups to shift the basis of civic dialog, space and politics from law to violence. The ends and the means are the same. Although the full “ends” include things like slavery and genocide. Don’t forget, we’re dealing with actual Nazis here. This is the real deal. And that points us towards a possible general stance towards groups like Antifa: It’s acceptable if they engage in violence purely as an act of self-defense when law enforcement is unable or unwilling to intervene. But if they’re showing up for the expressed purpose of street fighting with the Nazis that should be fully condemned. Not because Nazis don’t deserve to get punched, but because getting punched furthers their plans. Violence really needs to be seen as a last resort, and if Antifa or similar groups refuse to recognize that they are being used to further the Nazis’ ambitions they should be fully condemned for playing dumb and playing along with those ambitions. Could that work as an approach to Antifa?
But if there’s some sort of drive to send of a message of, “Ok, Antifa, don’t play into this cycle of violence,” there would have to be a simultaneously emphasis on ensuring law enforcement is ready and willing to intervene when violence breaks out at these types of events and making it clear that that is how society is going to deal with violent extremists: with law enforcement and not street brawls:
But in addition to stronger rule of law, what about a campaign to explicitly point out that the ‘Alt Right’ and neo-Nazis behind are actively trying to provoke a violent conflict? Because that’s a pretty good reason for a stronger rule of law...making it specifically stronger for the purpose of addressing a movement planning on weakening rule of law for the purpose of replacing civic dialog with violence as the new normal.
But there’s another key issue that needs to be addressed regarding movements like Antifa, and that’s the fact that people like Jeremy Christian exist. Christian is, of course, the Alt Right lunatic who stabbed two men to death in Portland after they intervened when he began verbally assaulting a Muslim woman on the bus. And who also happened to be a big vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders while simultaneously exhibiting a large number of white supremacist far-right tendencies. Whether or not he was a neo-Nazi infiltrator who consciously decided to give himself a ‘Bernie Bro’ persona for the purpose of furthering a “violent Left” narrative, or if he was a genuinely confused neo-Nazi/‘Bernie Bro’ hybrid, he exists and there’s no reason to believe there aren’t plenty of other Jeremy Christians out there who are infiltrating groups like Antifa for the expressed purpose of smearing the Left as ‘violent’. And as long as such people exist any group that wants to take a “we will only use violence to fight the violent” approach is going to be extremely vulnerable to becoming a dupe group in a larger narrative. And people like Jeremy Christian will always exist. It’s one of the many reasons the “we will only use violence to fight the violent” approach politics is so very problematic:
“In February 2016, Christian wrote, “Just to clarify a few things: ‘I Hereby Solemnly swear to Die trying to Kill Hillary (Herself a filthy Murderess) Clinton and Donald Trump should they be elected to the post of President in my faire country on Vinland. This I swear to Odin, Kali, Bastet and all other Pagan Gods and Goddesses in my Aryan Theosophical Nucleus. This is my duty as a Viking and Patriot. In Jesus name....I Feel The Bern!!!!””
And that right there is why the Antifa approach to things is so dangerous: Some dude with an “Aryan Theosophical Nucleus” when he’s not spouting white supremacist memes might declare his desires for political violence. And then declare his love of Bernie Sanders. And while Jeremy Christian happened to be very anti-Antifa, calling them fascists, there’s nothing stopping someone like him joining one of the Antifa groups. Or an undercover government agent who also has orders to make them look like a massive national security threat. It’s pretty much guaranteed that some percentage of their ranks include infiltrators since these are movements basically anyone can join. And another percent just might include kind of crazy people drawn to extreme politics. That’s just the nature of radical movements that anyone can join. And these extreme risks present by and to Antifa exists in a volatile political environment where an organized white supremacist movement bolstered by a Trump presidency is trying to strategically create a cycle of violence intended to create a divide-and-conquer wedge meme asking people “who do you support, white nationalists defending your heritage or violent Antifa radicals?”. And the broader right-wing media and GOP is more than happy to play along and promote that “violent Left” meme. It’s a bad situation. And that was before Roger Stone started talking about violent insurrection in the face of a Trump impeachment.
So given that President Trump has decided to make the acknowledgement of “bad people” on “all sides” in the Charlottesville tragedy one of his key political talking points, perhaps there would be some value in meeting him half-way, and noting that the inevitable neo-Nazi infiltrators like Jeremy Christian on the side of the counter-protestors were indeed just as bad as the neo-Nazi marchers. And maybe even agree that Antifa groups can sometimes include some bad actors who aren’t crypto-Nazis or COINTELPRO troublemakers but just bad news. But also ask that President Trump agree that Nazis are way, way, way worse in terms of being “bad people” than even the bad Antifa folks. Racial supremacists who plot violent overthrows with dreams of genocide are much, much, much worse than a bunch of quasi-militant extreme left-wingers, right? Can everyone but the Nazis agree with the notion that Nazis are far worse than even bad Antifa people who maybe shouldn’t be so willing to embrace violence? If so, great, because that would mean we may have found some sort of common ground, and if there’s one thing that’s going to be needed in abundance to ultimately defeat today’s Nazis it’s common ground. Lots of common ground and a recognition that destroying common ground is another one of things that’s simultaneously an ends and a means for the far-right:
“The thing with these message boards — which I maintain are a thousand times more toxic than any alt-right spokesperson could ever dream of being — is that those who use them become so deeply enmeshed in their own views that they actually do legitimately believe they are making sense, and that this is a thing they can “trick” the left into being on board with. They are essentially brainwashed.”
And thanks to that essentially brainwashed mentality, the hyper-misogynistic 4Chan folks decided to openly plot a fake campaign intended to smear Antifa as pro-violence against white women as part of some sort of Alt-Right divide and conquer campaign intended to create a rift between white women and the Left. Because white supremacist misogynists still need white women for breeding purposes:
And that’s who we’re dealing with: people who desperately want to create a “violent Left” cultural zeitgeist with American conservatives as part of the white supremacists endless efforts to win over a broader audience. And yes, they failed spectacularly this time. Not only did they get caught, but the people that were arguing that the hoax worked anyway because it reminded people that Antifa backs violence of course forget that smearing Antifa with domestic violence merely reminds people that the Antifa groups focus their violence on what they view as sources of oppression, as opposed to white supremacists who focus their violence on everyone who isn’t a white supremacist. Even the white women who they need for breeding will probably get a lot of violence inflicted on them too since white supremacists tend to be misogynists. That’s what the 4Chan campaign effectively communicated. It wasn’t the best 4Chan campaign.
But that doesn’t mean the far-right won’t succeed in pulling off a “violent Left” divide and conquer psyop on US conservatives some day and it’s going to be a lot easier to succeed with Antifa predictably showing up to brawl and predictably being open to infiltration. Especially with so much of the right-wing media fully on board with pushing the “violent Left” meme. And President Trump.
And the gun manufacturers. That’s right, tragically but not surprisingly, the NRA is fully on board promoting the “violent Left” meme to is membership and broader audience:
“The highlight reel of Trump’s feature-film-length whine demonstrates, yet again, that the president is echoing talking points from the same white supremacist and “alt-right” circles that he struggles to half-heartedly denounce: Monuments to the white supremacist Confederate regime are “our history and heritage,” that white communities need to be “liberated” from violent immigrants, and politicized violence in the streets is being caused not by fascists, but by antifa activists who show up to resist them.”
Yep, when Trump makes Antifa the focus of a cynical political strategy to concoct a “violent Left” threat mythology while simultaneously downplaying his ties to a very real “violent far-Right” threat, Trumnp is basically echoing the same thing Trump’s core base of supporters get from right-wing radio, Breitbart, and Fox News every day. And the gun lobby’s own media empire its built in recent years, which is apparently specializing in mainstreaming fringe far-right conspiracy theory and thought. That’s not a super dangerous situation or anything:
And right-wing talker Dana Loesch is making NRA recruitment videos warning people of liberal violence, echoing the words of NRA president Wayne LaPierre:
So who’s a bigger threat, Wayne LaPierre or Antifa? Obvious LaPierre. He’s literally running an empire that peddles guns and ‘reasons’ to use them against political opponents. Still, we can’t ignore that the violent segments of Antifa are playing into La Pierre’s sick attempt to paint the Left by taking an overt ‘fight the fascists with your fists in the streets’ presenting some sort of violent threat. While Antifa is admittedly quite helpful in the face of far-right militant protestors like the “Unite the Right” marchers who would have attacked all the counter-protesters there’s a significant cost if it means playing into neo-Nazi violence cycle schemes. Now is definitely not the time for casually playing into neo-Nazi violence cycle schemes:
“America’s stability is increasingly an undercurrent in political discourse. Earlier this year, I began a conversation with Keith Mines about America’s turmoil. Mines has spent his career—in the U.S. Army Special Forces, the United Nations, and now the State Department—navigating civil wars in other countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. He returned to Washington after sixteen years to find conditions that he had seen nurture conflict abroad now visible at home. It haunts him. In March, Mines was one of several national-security experts whom Foreign Policy asked to evaluate the risks of a second civil war—with percentages. Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years. Other experts’ predictions ranged from five per cent to ninety-five per cent. The sobering consensus was thirty-five per cent. And that was five months before Charlottesville.”
Talk about Dr. Doom: Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years. But at least he’s an outlier in that prediction among the experts polls and when he spoke of “civil war” it appears he means something very different from the Civil War, where states went to war with each other, and instead a war of vigilante violence political violence that at some point requires the National Guard. Exactly the thing the far-right wants to happen (presumably with Trump calling in the National Guard on their side):
“President Trump “modeled violence as a way to advance politically and validated bullying during and after the campaign,” Mines wrote in Foreign Policy. “Judging from recent events the left is now fully on board with this,” he continued, citing anarchists in anti-globalization riots as one of several flashpoints. “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.””
Yep, President Trump, has indeed “modeled violence as a way to advance politically and validated bullying during and after the campaign”, as Keith Mines, the ex-Special Forces civil war expert in the US State Department, describes it. And that’s one of the reason he sees a 65 percent chance of a conflict of mass violence that requires the National Guard, or ‘civil war’ as he puts it. And thankfully he’s not talking about something as destructive as another state on state civil war. Mines’s civil war scenario is something far less severe. But Mines’s civil war scenario of outright violent conflict between dueling sides of society that requires the National Guard to address still represents a very real existential threat to the US since we’re talking about Nazi movements utilizing mass organized violence as a tool for coming to power at any cost. The battles are part of a broader psyop. One of the goals is the normalization of political violence and that’s also the means. And all this is for the ultimate purpose of racial subjugation and genocide. Again, these are real Nazis we’re talking about.
So given that a bunch of Nazis are actively trying to provoke a civil-war in the United States and given that the willingness to engage in anti-Nazi violence by Antifa is one of the wedge issues the Nazis are creating as part of an “pick your side, us or them” divide and conquer tactic, perhaps it’s worth declaring an explicitly non-violent ‘civil war’ of sorts: a ‘war’ on our inability to talk about differences and conflict. Americans use the term ‘war’ for all sorts of things. A ‘war’ on cancer, poverty, drugs, terror, etc. So how about a ‘war’ on the non-violent resolution of enduring conflicts. Tricky, tough conflicts that have been simmering for so long that we’ve also collectively lost the ability to have a meaningful conversation about them. Let’s declare a ‘war’ on that. And conveniently we already have the perfect organization for facilitating such a ‘war’: Life After Hate, a group that effectively treats the disease of extremist hate by sitting extremists down with members of the groups they fear and despise.
And since we have a Reality TV US President, how about a reality TV show that sits down a group of neo-Nazis and alt-rightists with a bunch of Antifa people and forces them to discuss their differences. And since Nazis obviously embrace the use of lies, disinformation, and general rhetorical trickery there could be various outside experts and Life After Hate members also participating in the group therapy session so someone can step in when the Nazis’ historical revisionism gets too egregious. The show ends when they figure out how to hug it out and we declare a war on violence. Maybe President Trump could sit in on a few sessions. Think of the ratings!
Barring that, could we at least agree to find the following common ground:
1. The violent Antifa members present a real dilemma and potentially a subversive force that could end up playing right into the hands of an organized far-right movement intent on creating a “violent Left” mythology. Antifa members maybe have picked the right target, but the wrong tactic when they engage in preemptive violence. Political violence, even just street brawls where no one dies, is a taboo tactic because it really does threaten society. There are reasons we don’t punch Nazis even if they deserve it. There’s value in that. So if it’s in self-defense that’s one valid use of violence, but playing into Nazi schemes to create escalating cycles of violence is not at all ok.
2. While there are undoubtedly some “bad people” in Antifa, as Donald Trump would put it, and people with really messed up political views (like anarchists who want to see society collapse so they can build an anarcho-whatever utopia) we should all be able to agree that even the bad Antifa members are highly unlikely to be as bad as Nazis. Ok, it’s inevitable there’s few Antifa member who are as bad as a Nazi who aren’t crypto-Nazi infiltrators. That’s going to happen in a big enough group. And then there’s the actual crypto-Nazi infiltrators who really are as bad as the Nazis. But in general can we all agree that even groups with politics and economic paradigms that we may not personally like and who are willing to be militant towards Nazis, and pretty much just towards Nazis or Nazi-like groups, are far better than Nazis who want to subjugate and exterminate entire races?
3. Making the distinction of how much worse Nazism is than whatever particular far-left vision Antifa members might hold is an important distinction to make in this context because even if you’re an uber-capitalist who hates Communists there’s a widely held recognition that race-based supremacy ideologies are horrific and collective doom and rejecting that is a foundation of decent and durable societies and individuals. Getting the economics right is important. Recognizing the evil and terror caused by of racial-supremacy ideologies is more important because it’s even more foundational for building a decent and durable society populated by decent people.
Is that available as common ground? A simple recognition that Antifa’s willingness to engage preemptive violence is bad when it occurs but Nazis are much worse because they want to subjugate entire groups and races? Can we at least agree to all that? Because if the predictions of sleaze bags like Roger Stone or academics like Keith Mines that the Unites States could experience a ‘civil war’-ish scenario in the near future comes to to fruition it seems pretty likely that it will only happen when the ‘Alt-Right’ and neo-Nazis successfully sell themselves as “the lesser of two evils” with the “violent Left” getting framed as the greater evil. And these street brawls are undoubtedly playing a huge role in the successful propagation of that meme.
So perhaps it’s worth making it clear that Antifa undoubtedly has some “bad people”, because all movements have that element, but also that Antifa is stupidly falling for a trap laid by the ‘Alt-Right’ neo-Nazis. A trap intended to create a cycle of violence as part of a larger divide and conquer strategy designed to pose a question to the general public “do you stand with the white nationalists or do you stand with those Antifa commies?” That’s the trap and it’s a really stupid trap to fall into. And you know who else is stupidly falling for that trap? Anyone who thinks the Nazis in Charlottesville were the lesser of two evils or even equally bad as Antifa. Antifa inevitably has to bad or misguided elements. Nazis are unambiguously much, much worse. Can American society arrive at that common ground? Or are we already caught in a stupidity trap? Hopefully we’re not trapped by stupidity yet. We’ll see.
The state of Virginia has a gubernatorial race coming up that’s doesn’t bode well for the future of the US: In late August, the GOP candidate, Ed Gillespie, hired Jack Morgan, the Southwest Virginia field director for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign in an attempt to appeal to rural voters who Gillespie had been struggling with. Morgan predicts a second Civil War and claims the push to remove Confederate statues is a communist insurgency. Gillespie’s campaign then proceeded to focus on protecting Confederate statues, issued one race-baiting/fear mongering ad after another and from the Trump/Bannon/Lee Atwater playbook, immigrants, and fears of Muslims, sanctuary cities (which don’t exist in Virginia), and the race for the governor that was looking like a likely Democratic win a month ago is now a dead heat.
As depressing as this turn of events is for the state of America, it’s also worth noting one potential insight we can take from the Democrats’ inability to appeal to rural voters that ties into the debate over whether or not the Democratic party should be focusing more on “identity politics” and issue important to contemporary Democratic coalition of minorities groups (religious, ethnic, sexual orientation, etc) and labor unions or instead focus on appealing to working class white males and rural voters: If there are two groups that that should be a core elements of the Democratic party from an economic self-interest standpoint it’s white working class voters (rural and urban) and rural voters in general who tend to gain the most from robust government services and investments. But those two groups have been increasingly won over by the far-right ‘populist’ media and rhetoric that portrays the world as a global communist Muslim atheist socialist conspiracy out to get white people. That’s basically meta-message of the Trump/Bannon political playbook and much of right-wing media and it clearly has a deep resonance with a lot of white voters who are either true conservatives or largely uninformed people understandably pissed off about the state of affairs and highly vulnerable to the messaging of the right-wing Big Lie disinfotainment complex.
And since part of the complaints often heard from white voters who left the Democratic party in recent years is the feeling that Democrats are only interested in issues affecting minority groups, it’s worth noting how the damage GOP policies are doing to rural communities present an enormous opportunity for the Democratic party to make a key argument that can break the GOP’s spell over white voters while uniting the Democratic party: The US system can’t function unless everyone wins. Even the system’s ‘losers’ to need win by being in a system that doesn’t abuse the losers or allow them to fall into traps. That’s how everyone wins, and when you make building that kind of a system a key political goal — the real Shining City on a Hill — it’s a goal that inherently includes all sorts of minority groups and white working class voters and small farmers and rural voters and urban voters and every else in between not because the party is interested in pandering to everyone but because a society that doesn’t look out for everyone is a dysfunctional society. We’re all supposed to look out for each other’s interests. If that’s not already part of the social contract it should be.
So you have to wonder if the Democrats could get some of these alienated white voters to give the party a second look by framing the party’s governing philosophy along the following lines:
1. A recognition that, in a democracy, the most effective way to ensure your own self-interests are going to be protected in by being in a broad based coalition of people with a wide variety of interests all united by a common recognition that we’re all in this together and we all need to care about each other’s interests.
2. When we are looking after a diverse group of interests together we tend to create a more just society because we’re forced to search for solutions that work for everyone. It’s a key element of the contemporary social contract and one of the most important principles the US can export to the rest of the world.
3. When developing policy solutions that address “identity politics” issues and issues facing minority groups, unions, the poor, and the environment (traditional Democratic bases) in mind while also keeping economic and business community issues (like small farmer concerns) simultaneously in mind we will develop better better overall policies solutions that work for as many people as possible. Minority groups and white working class folks and farms all looking out for each other’s interests (interests that are heavily overlapping if we stopped to think about it) is the goal. The only losers with that approach are outright bigots, xenophobes, and power mongering billionaires.
4. This is how we implement the Golden Rule through democracy: using government to mutually look out for each other’s self-interests. Everyone looking out for everyone makes us stronger and unites us and quality, well-thought out government programs are a key way of how we do that. The GOP won’t allow this because it governs under a philosophy of exalting self-interest and demonizing government.
5. If the concerns of the white working-class, rural voters and smaller farmers haven’t been addressed that’s largely, though not entirely, the fault of the GOP. See Point 4.
6. When different groups’ interests are in conflicts with each other, the Democratic Party sides with the little guy because it is the party of the little guy and big guys who want a decent society. And since most issues are little guy vs big guy and not rural vs urban in contemporary affairs there’s a huge overlap in interests between most of the GOP base and most of the Democratic base since almost everyone is one of the ‘little guy’. If the various “identity politics” issues (which are typically ‘little guy vs big guy’ issues) and the issues white working class and rural voters and small farmers (which are also typically ‘little guy vs big guy’ issues) and every other group out there aren’t being addressed simultaneously that means government is failing. Because it’s not like government can’t address multiple issues simultaneously. That’s government’s job. Being responsive to the little guy’s interests and big guy’s interest in harmony, regardless of who they are. And that includes all the issues that only affects rural voters. But the GOP won’t let us have that because it hates government.
Somehow rural white America became convinced that the party of the plutocrats is going to look out for their best interest. While that’s a troubling phenomena it’s also heavily a result of the success of the right-wing Big Lie media disinfotainment complex over the decades and that means a lot a of the reasons rural voters hate Democrats has to do with right-wing media brainwashing and that means the GOP base’s dislike of the Democrats is going to be heavily dependent on sea of right-wing media lies. That presents a real opening for Democrats, because the GOP is unambiguously the pro-big guy party at almost every opportunity. Mutually looking out everyone’s interest can and should be a package deal The Democrats offer rural voters. It’s a deal the GOP is incapable of delivering on. All they know is divide and conquer. But in reality the Democratic voters right-wing media teaches its audience to hate and fear really should be seen as partners for that right-wing audience in mutually looking out for each others’ best interests together from a little guy vs big guy perspective (which really should be the ‘American spirit’...the little guy looking out for itself democratically).
Could the Democrats successfully make that sales pitch? Who knows, but even if it’s a long shot it might be worth a try, because whatever the Democrats are doing right now to reach out to rural America clearly isn’t working:
“Critics point to Northam’s stances on sanctuary cities and natural gas pipelines as possible reasons for the struggles. But the predominant issue may be that no Democrat, no matter their rural credentials, appeals to rural voters who have been turning away from the party for years — a big warning sign for Democrats hoping to compete in dozens of rural-rooted Senate, House and gubernatorial elections around the country next year.”
No matter what the Democrats try they can’t find a way to lure white rural voters away from the GOP, a party that wants to eviscerate the federal spending in rural areas while unleashing the pollution floodgates.
And don’t forget that when Gillespie hired Jack Morgan, Trump’s campaign operative specializing in South West Virginia politics, the divisive race-baiting began in earnest. And this was done to target rural Virginia’s voters:
By scaring the crap out of rural voters about all the minorities and liberals the OGP has managed to ‘excite’ the party’s base. To the point where Ed Gillespie might win due largely to his egregious Trumpian race-bating.
And note how the one area where Northam was legitimately acting like a Republican — the issue if the pipeline — it’s an issue that unites rural voters with environmentalists:
The area where Northam is acting like a GOPer is an area that could have united environmentalists and rural land owners. Ouch. That’s an opportunity it hurts to lose. But it’s all the more reason for real reforms that will “drain the swamp” like overturning Citizen’s United and getting the influence of big business out of politics. The kind of corruption voters from both parties hate is the kind of corruption that makes Democrats behave like Republicans. It’s critical GOP voters understand this.
Might such an ‘urban and rural little guys united to help each other’ approach work in a state like Virginia or elsewhere? AT least there won’t be a shortage of examples of how the GOP is totally screwing rural voters (remember Trumpcare?) For instance, anyone involved with the meat packing industry might be receptive to a ‘united little guys’ message:
“The fight was about whether small farmers can sue if they feel they’ve been mistreated by big companies. Poultry farmers, for example, often get their chicks and feed from big meat producers, which in turn pay the farmer for the full-grown product. If a farmer wants to sue a company for retaliating against him because he complained about his contract—say, by sending him sick chicks or bad feed—the farmer needs to show the company’s actions hurt not only him, but the entire industry.”
Small farmers basically can’t sue the meat processing giants they contract with. And this was all changed at the end of the Obama administration. Until the GOP came along and did what it always does in big guy vs little guy situations and sided with the big guy:
Small farmers get screwed by the GOP. Again. Because that’s just what the GOP does. Under the guise of “reducing regulation”:
There’s no good reason urban Democratic voters should want small farmers to get locked out of the ability to sue their behemoth clients just as there’s no valid reason small farmers should actually have a problem with the vast majority of issues important to current Democratic coalition voters. Little guys unite. That should be the Democrats’ outreach of the GOP base. And sure enough, it’s the Democrats opposing this anti-small farmer ruling:
What the right-wing media big Lie machine has long derided as “socialism” is really just democracy in action. Government addressing its citizens’ needs and grievances. That’s ‘Big Government’ in action and it’s what rural voters actually want. Regulating the market so the little guy isn’t screwed. And that’s basically what most of the rest of groups that make of the Democratic coalition want: the ability to use government to protect themselves from some sort of systemic abuse particular to their lives. That’s the reality behind what Gillespie’s strategist Jack Morgan would have called a communist conspiracy. A government that addresses the little guy’s grievances.
So rural voters disappointed with a GOP that doesn’t really do anything to ‘help’ rural communities — other than deregulate things and cut taxes which typically only helps the big guy ‑are more than welcome to join the Democrats and join the joint effort to help everyone solve the various and diverse problems facing everyone’s lives. Perhaps that could be a would way of responding to the chilling success of Ed Gillespie’s Trumpian divide and conquer campaign.
It’s tragically no longer surprising to see Fox News hosts try to scare their audiences into thinking there’s a wave of left-wing violence threatening conservatives because this has been a meme pushed by the right-wing aggressively since Trump won the election. An election that followed a campaign where Trump turned violence at his rallies into a regular feature. But Saturday night’s prime-time show “Justice with Judge Jeanine” include an opening 15 minutes that was truly chilling and should be recognized as a public and civil health hazard: ‘Judge’ Jeanine Pirro started her show with an opening ~7 minute rant that took the one instance of real left-wing violence this year (the shooting of Steve Scalise by a whack job), and took that incident along with some antifa stories and used that to repeatedly tell her audience that the left condones violence against conservatives and anyone else they disagree with. And then, to make matters much worse, she invited on Ann Coulter and they continued talking about how the left supposed represents this massive violent threat.
And what made it so awful was how Pirro and Coulter would repeatedly first mischaracterize some sort of situation involving antifa to portray antifa as some sort of domestic terror group threatening all conservatives for being conservative and then acting like antifa represents ‘the Left’ in general. It was bad even by Fox News standards:
““With conviction and an air of condescension the Left so hates Donald Trump and those who support him that they’ve sanctioned the use of violence against them,”. she explained. “The goal of these haters is to normalize, incite, and mobilize hatred and turn it into violence.””
“With conviction and an air of condescension the Left so hates Donald Trump and those who support him that they’ve sanctioned the use of violence against them.” And that more or less summarizes her 7 minute rant that was dedicated to taking antifa incidents and the shooting of Scalise and convincing her audience that “the Left” is sanctioning violence against conservatives.
And as bad as that opening statement was, it was followed up by a segment with Ann Coulter where they both talked about all the ‘leftist violence’ they’ve been subjected to over the years. Ann Coulter seriously tells the audience that if you look at history every single act of political violence was from a left-winger and that ‘the Left’ is constantly ginning their side up to be violent. Ann Coulter said that. Because of course she did. She’s Ann Coulter and she needs help.
So given the reality that major media outlets like Fox News and right-wing talk radio outlets are allowing people like Pirro to the kind of dangerous fantasy worldviews that one should expect to hear from Stormfront, it’s probably worth making the point that antifa is specifically sanctioning punching fascists only in self defense and only neo-Nazis and fascists and other people that hang around places like Stormfront. Not random Trump supporters. Whether or not you think ‘punching a Nazi’ in ok, Nazis are the only people antifa is interesting in punching. So when Judge Jeanine points to antifa scuffles with neo-Nazis as an example of left-wing violence against Trump supporters she’s basically equating Trump supporters to neo-Nazis and fascists in her opening statement. Her audience should probably be informed of this.
But, of course, it’s also worth making the point that antifa’s willingness to embrace the punching of Nazis in self-defense and meet violent neo-Nazi groups to protest even when they know violence could easily erupt as a result is an incredibly dangerous behavior precisely because of malicious media figures like Jeanine Pirro. The ‘Is it ok to punch a Nazi (or others who embrace political violence)?’ debate is difficult enough in a democracy. But ‘punching a Nazi’ is wildly dangerous now specifically because of the unfortunate reality that the those Nazis have a lot of allies in the media these days. Don’t forget, Pirro equates her audience with Alt Right and neo-Nazi hate group members. She’s not helping her audience or conservatives in general when she does that, but she’s definitely helping the Alt Right neo-Nazis. And that’s why the danger of antifa being used as a far-right foil has grown so significantly. There’s an army of people like Pirro waiting to use it to promote their ‘the Left sanctions violence against conservatives’ meme at every opportunity.
The reality is that, as a consequence of the a political media ecosystem dominated by increasingly right-wing voices on TV and radio, borderline hate-speech against liberals from media figures like Pirro is now the norm across right-wing radio and cable ‘news’. While it might seem like Trump took over the GOP, it’s important to recognize that Ann Coulter’s style of thought and speech took over right-wing punditry a while ago and that probably has a lot to do with the rise of Trump. That’s just where we are in terms of the US’s national discourse which is why antifa is a dream come true for people like Pirro. Or Michael Savage. Or Sean Hannity. Or Ann Coulter. Major figures with massive audiences routinely push the same memes Pirro is pushing: that ‘the Left’ has an active physical threat to people with different political views. That’s seriously the meme Pirro was just pushing in that rant and it wasn’t the first time she’s done it. Whenever there’s a brawl between antifa and some neo-Nazis, Pirro and others use it to feed a Big Lie that tells the audience over and over that there’s a left-wing violent plot against them that they need to prepare for and freak out about.
And if you think about what Pirro is doing — trying to stoke civil conflict using Big Lie methods on a major broadcasting platform like Fox News — it raises a question that might help provide us with an answer to this horrific situation the right-wing Big Lie machine has created: What kind of damage happened to Jeanine that brought her to this point in life where she’s consciously stoking civil violence on TV? Because she presumably didn’t grow up planning on this sort of Goebbels-esque career at this point in her life. At least hopefully she wasn’t always planning on this. So what has to happen to someone to bring them to this point?
It’s a question worth loudly asking, because when you have Pirro and others basically trying to spark violence between liberals and conservatives by repeatedly telling their audience that ‘the Left’ hate them and is condoning violence against conservatives (and this is the messages these hosts really are telling their audiences routinely these days), the response should probably involve making it clear that that left would actually much prefer healing the national divide and are mostly just upset with and pissed off at media figures like Jeanine Pirro who systematically lie to their audience in an attempt to make conservatives hate and fear liberals. Jeanine Pirro’s hate speech campaign isn’t a reason for liberal anger towards ‘conservatives.’ It’s a reason for liberal anger towards Jeanine Pirro and other conservative media figures like her who have decided to divide the country by terrorizing their audiences with far-right fantasies about a left-wing violence.
So what’s a better response to Pirro’s far-right fantasies about left-wing violence designed to provoke violence against liberals than to loudly ask the question, “what happened to Jeanine Pirro to make sink low enough to actively peddle this kind of dangerous tripe and how can we help heal her?” Not harm her. Help her heal. And heal Sean Hannity. And Michael Savage. And of course Ann Coulter who needs en immense amount of healing. What happened to them all? Were they blackmailed? Do they genuinely hate liberals as much as they appear to or is this just cold-hearted shtick they callously use to push their audiences’ buttons? Were they always super cynical and just decided nothing matters or did something break them? Judge Jeanine is clearly not well. What happened and how can we help Jeanine and the other right-wing pundits pushing this same kind of poison?
But this kind of dangerous behavior also represents a potential significant opportunity. Because a key element of what makes this behavior so dangerous is the fact Pirro and her pundit peers systematically deprive their audience of relevant facts. And in this case one of the most relevant facts is the fact that liberals don’t hate and want harm conservatives. That would be horrible and insane. Conservatives are our family members and friends and colleagues and vice versa. The notion that liberals condone violence against people for being conservative is a malicious smear. But that’s exactly what Judge Jeanine and Ann smeared by taking a handful of cases of people involved with antifa groups talking about self-defense against fascists and conflating into the widespread liberal condoning of violence against conservatives. And this was like the opening 15 minutes of the prime time Saturday night Fox News show. Confusion and omission put to dangerous effect.
So the need to call out Pirro and Coulter as dangerous sources of disinformation who are actually endangering America also represents the opportunity to loudly make it clear that the audiences of Fox News and right-wing talk radio have been given a wildly lied to about not just liberals but A LOT of other things for years. Fox News hosts promote a wildly irresponsible lie that liberals condone violence against conservatives. This is how far they have fallen. If ever there was a time where there deserved to be a national Fox News ‘intervention’ of some sort is is that time. Perhaps in the form of national advertising campaign to advertise how grossly Fox News distorts reality or something. Who knows if that could successfully puncture the Fox News bubble but now seems like a good time to try considering that Fox News is increasingly trying to stoke a civil conflict.
Here’s the latest ‘who could have seen this coming (anyone paying attention’ story coming out of the Trump administration: the Trump-appointed head of the FCC, Ajit Pai, just announced his plans to completely eliminate the US’s net neutrality rules for the internet. And he’ll be able to do exactly that on December 14th, when the FCC is expected to put it to a vote and it’s expected to pass. And that will be it, allowing internet service providers (ISPs) the power to slow down or speed up access to websites at their whim. Or block access to sites they don’t like altogether for any reason they see fit as long as the ISPs are transparent about it:
“Federal regulators unveiled a plan Tuesday that would give Internet providers broad powers to determine what websites and online services their customers can see and use, and at what cost”
Broads powers for ISPs to determine what websites and online services their customers can see and use and the costs to use them. And the only apparent requirement is that they are transparent about this. So if, for instance, AT&T merges with Time Warner and then decides to provide extra fast access to Time Warner content online (like HBO) and extra slow access to HBO’s competitors and no access to websites that criticize this practice, that will theoretically be fine:
It’s the kind of move that, perhaps intentionally, makes the AT&T/Time Warner merger look that much worse from an antitrust standpoint because merger media content companies like Time Warner with Internet Service Providers like AT&T is exactly the kind of conflict of interest that net neutrality is supposed to protect against.
Given how unpopular this kind of move is it will be interesting to see what sort of public backlash it elicits. In particular, it’s going to be really interesting to see what sort of backlash this move triggers in one of the most hard core segments of Donald Trump’s support base: online Alt Right neo-Nazi trolls. Don’t forget, if corporations start outright banning access to websites, they’re probably going to start with places like Stormfront or 4Chan. Places that almost everyone agrees provide nothing of value other than hate and vicious trolling campaigns designed to scare and harm people. Places that are protected from government censorship under the 1st Amendment in the US constitution protecting free speech, but are not protected from corporate censorship.
‘Internet freedom’ is a rallying cry for much of the digital libertarian movement so this move by the Trump administration really is a giant slap in the face to one of his loudest groups of supporters. Isn’t Trump’s troll army concerned about their online hubs getting censored away by corporations that will soon have the freedom to censor hateful content? It seems like they should be. And based on this article from January of this year, Trump’s troll army is indeed quite concerned about this:
“And even if you wouldn’t expect the Redditors and channers who make up the Trump Train to support net neutrality by virtue of their heavy internet use, Trump’s most vocal online supporters have a clear interest in maintaining net neutrality — it’s a policy that helps guarantee that sites like Reddit, 4chan, and their even seedier cousins can be accessed by anyone. But standing up for net neutrality would also require them to criticize the god-emperor. There is no evidence that Trump really understands the issue, save for an ill-informed 2014 tweet.”
Yep, net neutrality helps guarantee that sites like Reddit and 4chan are accessible by anyone. But Trump is the Alt Rigth’s god-emperor. So what is the Alt Right to do? Well, some might end up embracing the end of net neutrality under the pretense that corporate control is better that government regulation. But overall all indications are that the Trump’s Troll Army isn’t going to be very happy about this:
“Multiple users fear that ISPs, which own mainstream news outlets (Comcast owns NBC, Time Warner owns CNN), will use a lack of net neutrality to push a liberal agenda onto internet customers.”
Fear of the media oligopoly pushing a liberal agenda. While that’s not something the Alt Right should actually fear — since a liberal agenda would include an anti-corporatist agenda and there’s no way the media oligopoly is going to be pushing an anti-corporatist agenda — it’s not at all unimaginable that ISPs could end up specifically banning the worst, most hateful sites on the web and sell that as a family-friendly feature. And such a move is probably more likely in the age of Trump than previously simply because neo-Nazi trolling is so topical these days. If Comcast and AT&T had the right to ban Stormfront after the neo-Nazi brawls in Charlottesville would that even be surprising at this point?
And that’s all part of why it’s going to be really interesting to see what this core element of Trump’s base does in response to a move that will surely be seen as a massive betrayal. When “NimbleNavigator931” writes that “Privacy and net neutrality is a priority if we’re going to win the meme war in the long game,” on the r/The_Donald Reddit forum, there is a lot of truth to that.
At the same time, if there is ever a wave of corporate-backed censorship hitting places like 4chan that probably just means those users will migrate onto more mainstream sites.
So what’s the Alt Right going to do in response to this? We’ll find out. Soon, because that FCC meeting is next month. But it’s worth noting that we’ve already gotten a hint as to how Alt Right personality Jack Posobiec — who rose to prominence last year by peddling the ‘Pizzagate’ smear — might respond to the net neutrality debate: Back in July of this year Posobiec decided to troll a pro-net-neutrality rally by showing up with flyers claiming net neutrality promotes pornography and other undesirable online content:
“The flyer claims to be written on behalf of the organizers of the Women’s March, open internet nonprofit Fight for the Future, along with the porn sites RedTube and PornHub. All of these organizations and companies supported Wednesday’s Net Neutrality Day of Action, which spawned rallies across the U.S.”
So Posobiec shows up at a rally for net neutrality and hands out flyers trying to promote the idea that net neutrality is about protecting pornography and other appalling material:
Posobiec is not just anti-net neutrality. He appears to be anti-internet porn too, which presumably isn’t going to go down too well with his largely young, male Alt Right audience.
But his point about net neutrality making it harder for ISPs to block “appalling material” like snuff videos is a valid point. It presumably will be a lot easier for that content to be censored out by ISPs if the federal government tells the industry these kinds of decisions are entirely up to them. It’s just rather remarkable that Posobiec doesn’t seem to realize that the Alt Right specializes in appalling material. Maybe not snuff video-levels of appalling typically, but still appalling. That’s their thing. That’s what being a neo-Nazi troll is all about. Putting out appalling neo-Nazi memes in order to normalize hate-based far-right worldviews.
And that’s all part of what’s going to make the Alt Right’s response to this FCC move so fascinating: The Alt Right is clearly driven by an almost compulsive sadistic desire to troll liberals. And yet with net neutrality we find one issue where the Alt Right is largely going to be in agreement with the left and the public at large. So will it be able to resist that troling urge when it comes to this issue? That remains to be seen, but if Posobiec is an indication of what to expect things could get wierd.
It’s also worth recalling that the Alt Right troll army thoroughly freaked out back in March, when the GOP decided to give ISPs the right to sell almost all the information that collect on users to whoever they want and many were acting like this was a massive betrayal. But that was also a move by the GOP Congress, not Trump. So the Alt Right’s loyalty to their god-emperor wasn’t really tested the same way it’s tested by this latest move by the FCC.
One of the defining features of about the nihilistic nature of the Alt Right is how little they hold dear. It’s mostly people who want to laugh while society burns down. Other than white supremacy, misogyny, and self-interest, there aren’t really a lot of other ideals that the Alt Right appears to truly hold dear...except internet open access and internet anonymity with no censorship. It’s basically the only non-hate based ideal they hold dear and their god-emperor is the one threatening to take it away. It’s pretty remarkable.
As the US society experiences the waves of sexual harassment allegations hitting one prominent figure after another, one of the biggest challenges facing this national ‘moment’ is how to ensure it’s not just a moment and instead yields some real lasting positive changes to American culture. It’s a challenge for a myriad of reasons. But perhaps the biggest reason is the reality that human societies have a long track-record of failing at exactly these kinds of challenges. Specifically, the challenge of a group recognizing something that it has been collectively blind to all along. Suddenly ‘seeing the light’ clearly isn’t easy for humans, even when the need to do so is blindingly obvious. Humans aren’t good at this stuff. If we were we wouldn’t be where we are.
Part of what complicates the current moment is the obvious fact that so many of powerful men accused of mistreating women (or worse) are politicians. Most notably President Trump, who arguably catalyzed the current moment by getting elected President despite a lifetime of sexually demeaning women and the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape of him bragging about it. And when a situation involves Trump it’s unavoidable that the situation will get clouded in a mix of hoax and deception really fast. Especially when that situation involves a Trump scandal. And sure enough, that’s exactly what’s happened. We’ve seen....
1. Roger Stone tweeting about Democratic Senator Al Franken getting his “time in the barrel” before the initial accusations by Leeann Tweeden were made public. Thus ensuring that Roger Stone’s history of political dirty tricks becomes associated with resulting fall out.
2. Mike Cernovich, the ‘Alt Right’ uber-misogynist and rape apologist who played a key role in promoting the ‘Pizzagate’ hoax — that’s literally his specialty...writing about hating women, promoting the idea that there’s an epidemic of fake rape and sexual harassment allegations, and promoting far-right hoaxes — is perversely the source for multiple stories of sexual harassment accusations against prominent liberals. He was the source of the story about accusations against Democratic Congressman John Conyers, who as since announced his retirement as a result. And Cernovich was also the driving force behind a successful campaign to get liberal pundit Sam Seder kicked off of MSNBC over a sarcastic rape joke about Roman Polanski from a 2009.
3. James O’Keefe’s “Project Veritas” sending in an undercover operative to the Washington Post with claims that she was raped by Alabama far-right GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore when she was 15 in a clear attempt to discredit the numerous other allegations against Moore who has been facing his own waves of allegations by women claiming he was routinely trying to date high-school girls while he was a 32 year old district attorney.
So we clearly have a GOP operation in place designed to protect both President Trump and Roy Moore from the serious allegations against them by finding accusers against Democrats and liberals in an attempt to create a “both sides do it” zeitgeist to minimize the political fallout. And using overt misogynists like Mike Cernovich or established dirty tricks operatives like Stone and O’Keefe and directly, and conspicuously, associating them with these stories almost seems like an attempt to use the disreputable nature of these individuals to smear this entire national moment.
And this is happening at this same time Democrats are wrestling with whether or not Senator Al Franken should resign in response to the multiple allegations of drive-by groping at the same time the GOP demands Franken resigns while the party simultaneously wages a campaign to discredit all accusers of Roy Moore and Donald Trump. Accusations that include those made by Trump himself in the notorious ‘Hollywood Access’ tape. And that’s all on top of the reports of Donald Trump questioning whether or not the ‘Hollywood Access’ is actually real (it’s real). Alt Right proud misogynists and right-wing dirty tricks operatives weaponizing sexual harassment allegations for the benefit of the GOP. It’s just a sick situation.
So given the fact that the right-wing is clearly trying to create a “both sides do it (so everyone ignore Trump and Moore)” dynamic to this, it’s probably worth making a point that Roy Moore’s associated with hyper-conservative patriarchal religious movements makes very easy to make: whether or not liberals or conservatives are caught sexually harassing women, the unambiguous reality is that sexual harassment is a behavior condoned by traditional conservative worldviews. It’s right-wing behavior. That’s why ‘Alt Right’ figures like Mike Cernovich celebrate it. So when liberals or conservatives are caught sexually harassing women, they are all, in that moment, behaving like a patriarchal right-wing conservative. In other words, the “both sides do it” argument should really be “both side have people who act like far-right patriarchal jerks like Mike Cernovich at times, but only one side openly embraces Mike Cernovich” argument.
Because the underlying issue here isn’t “which side has the sexual harassers and which doesn’t.” Of course you’re going to find sexual harassers in in political movements. The underlying issue is that Mike Cernovich’s far-right misogynistic worldview is accepted by a large number of men with power over women and openly accepted by the contemporary GOP and its embrace of the ‘Alt Right’. Yes, you’ll find liberal men also sexually harassing women because the ‘boys will be boys’ attitude is clearly a tragically difficult cultural habit to break. But when liberal men do they are clearly failing to live up to the values they profess to uphold, whereas for the right-wing this largely fine. Don’t forget, one of the defining traits of contemporary conservatism is a direct rejection of feminism.
In other words, while both liberal and conservative individuals engage in this kind of behavior, it is unambiguously conservative patriarchal behavior at its core and this issue can’t really be confront without confronting that conservative patriarchal attitude that views women as essentially resources to be enjoyed and consumed by men. Because that’s what’s going to perpetuate these misogynistic attitudes for generation after generation: The traditional second-class status of women. A status that made sexual harassment and far worse the norm across history and cultures. It’s is one of the oldest stories of humanity and it is those old attitudes and norms that the ‘Alt Right’ want to hold on to and once again see reigning supreme someday.
So given all this, it’s worth keeping in mind that you almost couldn’t come up with a better poster boy for highlighting the importance of addressing the institutional perpetuation of misogynistic patriarchy than Roy Moore:
“Alabama Republican Senate Candidate Roy Moore co-authored a study course, published in 2011 and recently obtained by ThinkProgress, that instructs students that women should not be permitted to run for elected office. If women do run for office, the course argues, people have a moral obligation not to vote for them. The course is also critical of the women’s suffrage movement, which in 1920 secured some American women the right to vote.”
Yep, the guy the GOP is desperate to protect from accusations that he routinely tried to date high school girls just happens to be a contributor to a religious curriculum that taught “Biblical patriarchy” and argued that women were Biblically unfit for public office and even voting. And it just so happens that the man behind the Vision Forum organization that created this curriculum ended up having to resign after it came out that he had a long-running affair with a woman and this woman claims it started when she was 15 and involved emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse:
“The suit, which was settled and dismissed in 2016, has clear parallels to the many sexual abuse accusations against Moore, which allegedly took place when his accusers were teenagers and he was in his 30s.”
Yes indeed, the parallels are clear. Disturbingly clear.
And the “strict, unequal gender roles for men and women” laid out in the “Biblical patriarchy” worldview Roy Moore subscribes not surprisingly forbids women from holding office and from leadership positions in general:
And, of course, this is all infused with a deep and seething hatred of “feminism” and egalitarianism between the sexes in general:
“She’s not a warrior. She’s not a judge. She’s a woman. Created by God. Glorious in her place and in her conduct and in her role...Nothing is said in scripture that supports the notion that she is qualified or called to be a civil magistrate.”
And that, right there, is a major reason why women continue to be systematically mistreated by men across cultures and times: women have been traditionally seen as sex objects, baby-machines and little more. It’s a massive black mark on human history. And those traditions and attitudes continue to this day are so pervasive that even men who aren’t far-right theocrats might still succumb to a ‘boys will be boys’ attitude towards women. It’s a part of our social fabric and that’s what needs to change. The ‘Mike Cernovich’ worldview that the ‘Alt Right’ is feverishly trying to defend is what needs to go. For some men that might largely come down to realizing women don’t appreciate their sexual advances, but for other men like Cernovich it come down to recognizing that their entire perspective on women is sick and wrong. There’s A LOT of work still to be done, and most of that work needs to be done on the right-wing because that’s where misogyny is actively embraced at an institutional and ideological level.
But another part of what makes the topic of a permissive culture towards sexual harassment so challenging to address is that sexual harassment is both a major topic and challenge in and of itself, but it’s also sort of a proxy issue for perhaps one of the fundamental problems that plague humanity: the human instinctual drive to dehumanize and categorize ‘others’ and do this casually without really thinking about it. For a variety of evolutionary and circumstantial reasons humans are kind of wired to be assholes to each other. Helpful assholes at times, but still assholes. And you probably can’t find a more pervasive example of that human drive to dehumanize other people than the historic dehumanization of women by patriarchies.
Racism is another massive example of this capacity for casual dehumanization, but societies were women are seen as property and/or lesser beings has got to be one of the ‘original sins’. Sure, women a perfectly capable of dehumanizing others too, but its an unavoidable fact of human history that patriarchal societies have that relegated women to ‘lesser being’ have largely been the norm. That may not have been the case for every ancient tribal culture, but as human ‘civilization’ took root it’s hard to ignore the the fact that women have been systematically mistreated by men throughout history written history. A profound lack of empathy appears to be built into the human species. Which is a weird and scary but it’s the historic norm.
And that weird and scary historic norm of humans not empathizing very well isn’t just a defining feature of humanity. It’s also a major existential challenge because if we don’t get better at it we’re probably going to destroy ourselves. Just wait until people who can’t empathize well get their hands on future super-weapons that they can use for super-villain schemes. The the ‘Alt Right’ has almost defined itself as a movement of people who really, really, really hate humanizing other people and deeply resent being asked by other people to do so. And Nazis actively plot wreaking havoc on societies in order to seize control and install an uber-patriarchal rule. What’s going to happen when these movements of uber-misogynists and neo-Nazis get their hands on those future weapons? Not something good, which is why raising future generations of males who don’t have this psychological weakness of thoughtless cruelty isn’t just a utopian dream. It’s going to be a basic necessity as human civilization advances technologically.
And it’s that fundamental relationship between the current national ‘moment’ centered on sexual harassment and that much older and deeper challenge for humanity — the challenge of overcoming that pervasive human capacity for the casual dehumanization of others — that complicates this ‘moment’ because it creates a ‘chicken & egg’ dilemma: Is focusing on the damage to real lives that the sexual objectification and harassment of women by men a useful stepping stone in addressing that deeper existential challenge of humanity’s propensity to casually dehumanize and not think about the lives of other people? Or does that deeper issue of humanity’s capacity for casual cruelty and unempathetic behavior need to really be addressed in order to address a topic as difficult as the historical systematic mistreatment of women? Can changing actions help change the underlying thoughts that lead to those actions or do you need to change the thoughts first? It’s one of those kind of situations. And it will probably remain one of those situations if we don’t get this right.
Given that chicken & egg conundrum it’s not exactly clear what the best path forward is at this point. But what remains unambiguous is that going backwards is not the solution, and yet going backwards is exactly the solution the ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazis and their allies in the GOP would like to see on the general issue of gender equality in the United States. Traditional patriarchal attitudes that encourage men to dehumanize women as mere sex objects — a kind of cultural selective sociopathy — is obviously a major factor that needs to be confronted. But more generally, recognizing that achieving a state of cultural enlightenment that is unprecedented in human history — a society where boys and girls are actually raised to view each other as equals — is the solution. How we get there is unclear, but it clearly shouldn’t involve going backwards, which is exactly where Roy Moore, Mike Cernovich, and their GOP allies would like to drag us.
With the race to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s Alabama Senate seat just a few days, one of the questions that’s been looming over the race is whether or not GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore will be able to squeeze in a few more horrible actions, statements or scandals — past or new — that make his looming election victory even more soul-crushing. It’s part of the US’s national New Normal Nightmare experience of the Trump era. It’s a lot like the GOP’s normal national New Normal Nightmare, but with more overt white nationalism.
And sure enough, Moore didn’t disappoint. It was an oldie that suddenly got noticed. But it’s only a few months old: When Moore was asked during a campaign rally back in September when exactly he thought America was “Great” (in reference to Donald Trump’s “Make American Great Again” slogan), Moore’s answer was the pre-Civil War South. The era of slavery in America was when America was last “Great” according to Moore. And the guy asking the question was an African American. It’s just one of the many profoundly disturbing elements of the likely Moore win, but it’s a doozy:
“This is not a joke or exaggeration. When a black man at a September rally asked what President Donald Trump means by “make America great again,” Moore acknowledged, the Los Angeles Times reported, that the country had a history of racial tensions. Then he answered the question: “I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery. They cared for one another. People were strong in the families. Our families were strong. Our country had a direction.””
Yes, in Roy Moore’s mind, America was “Great” back when it still had slavery. Because the pre-Civil War era of America was apparently a unique time in American history when “families were strong” and “our country had a direction.”
But Moore assures us that his slavery-era choice for American ‘greatness’ wasn’t about the slavery. It was about the unique greatness in American culture at the time:
“The greatness I see was in our culture, not in all our policies.”
Now, it’s important to keep in mind that when the contemporary far-right rails against the “culture” and the loss of ‘strong families’ in America today, that’s generally code for a criticism of rights for women and minorities and the growth of a government safety-net and welfare programs that the right-wing portrays as exclusively used by single black mothers. In other words, “strong families” has become a dog-whistle term for the classic GOP ‘welfare Queen’ smear. So when Roy Moore claims that he wasn’t saying slavery made the slavery-era America great, but instead it was “our culture” and the “strong families”, he’s still making a highly racially charged comment even if you take him at his word about not being a fan of slavery.
And note that when Moore claims that America has “turned the tide on civil rights”, that’s something he openly opposed just last month when he told an audience that all the “new rights” created in 1965 — the year the Voting Rights Act was passed — were causing all sorts of problems today.
It’s also important to recall one of the most egregious omission from Moore’s whimsical remembrances of slavery-era America: the reality that slave families were routinely tortured, torn apart, and marriage between slaves wasn’t legally recognized:
Keeping slaves, tearing their families apart, and torturing them. All highly notable pieces of the culture of slave-era America, and yet Roy Moore assures us that these weren’t the cultural elements that he feels made American ‘great’.
Which, of course, begs the question as to which part of the culture during the slaver-era Moore felt was uniquely ‘great’. Because if he was solely dog-whistling about welfare programs and black single-parent homes he could have just referred back to the pre-Civil Rights 1950’s America as a time when America was last ‘great’, which is the standard ‘when America was great’ period of nostalgia for the contemporary GOP. Perhaps he wanted to include the New Deal, unions, and the post-WWII rise of the middle-class in his list of grievances, but he could have chosen the 1920’s. Instead, he chose the slavery-era.
So what was so uniquely great about the slavery-era according to Roy Moore? It’s an open question:
It’s a mystery. A mystery with a pretty obvious answer even if we take Roy Moore at his word: that Roy Moore would like to see a return to a slavery-era America, perhaps without the actual slavery. Or maybe with the slavery. It’s unclear.
It’s unclear just what Moore meant by those remarks, in part, because of how little Moore has done to clarify those remarks. But let’s not not forget that Roy Moore’s ties to slavery-era America are for more extensive than just his chilling comments. There’s also the fact that Roy Moore’s closest political ally and biggest financial donor has long by Michael Peroutka of the pro-Confederacy/pro-secession League of the South and Peroutka himself has openly called for secession.
And let’s also not forget that, while Michael Peroutka’s political history includes a 2004 run as the presidential candidate for the Constitution Party, he is currently an elected official in the Republican party. Specifically, Peroutka is currently a county commissioner in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. And he’s not just sitting on the county commission council. He’s the current chairman. Yep, the GOP in Anne Arundel County Council — which has a 4–3 GOP majority — chose to make Michael Peroutka the chairman. And it made this decision — on a 4–3 vote — last Monday.
So with all the national controversy swirling around Roy Moore, the Ann Arundel County GOP decided to make Roy Moore’s long-time sugar-daddy its council chairman.
With all that in mind, check out the Republican politician who is currently facing questions over his close ties to an extremist personality: Michael Peroutka, who is currently facing questions in Maryland about why he hasn’t renounced Roy Moore:
“The committee cited Peroutka’s connection to U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, of Alabama. The Republican candidate has been accused of pursuing girls as young as 14, one of which revealed a sexual encounter she had with Moore when she was 14 and he was in his 30s. The encounter did not include intercourse, but the girl said the scenario made her uncomfortable and she avoided Moore’s follow-up call.”
This is the state of the contemporary GOP: Michael Peroutka is an elected GOP official and Roy Moore is about to become an elected official. And Peroutka is apparently held in such high esteem by the Anne Arundel County GOP that they decided to make him council chairman this week.
And this decision to make him council chairman was done in a vacuum with no knowledge of Peroutka’s extremist associations. He’s been asked to step down over this kind of stuff before. Like when he was recently asked by county residents to step down over his League of the South ties and the horrible things the League’s co-founder, Michael Hill, has just said:
So what exactly did League co-found Michael Hill say that led to public calls for Peroutka’s resignation? Oh, merely that Hill pledged to be, “a white supremacist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a xenophobe, an Islamophobe and any other sort of ‘phobe’ that benefits my people.” It’s the kind of comment that simultaneously lays bare exactly the kind of world-view the League of the South represents, which is probably why even Michael Peroutka denounced it. It’s the truth the neo-Confederate dares not speak...in public:
“Peroutka opened the meeting by referring to Hill’s recent pledge “to be a white supremacist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a xenophobe, an Islamophobe and any other sort of ‘phobe’ that benefits my people” as “outrageous” and “inappropriate.””
Outrageous and inappropriate, that’s how Michael Peroutka characterized Michael Hill’s proud white supremacist declaration. And while it’s true that they were outrageous and inappropriate comments, it’s also true that “outrageous” and “inappropriate” is an outrageous understatement considering what Hill said.
And it’s not like Peroutka is new the League of the South or Michael Hill. As the article pointed out, this wasn’t the first time Peroutka disassociated himself with the League of the South. When he did this same song and dance back in 2014, Peroutka also noted that he “didn’t have any problem with the organization.” He just disassociated himself with the group for vague reasons:
And note how, it was only shortly after Peroutka’s 2014 disassociation with the League that Hill’s rhetoric suddenly became much, much more like that of an open neo-Nazi:
That was 2014, when the League started getting openly militant. Flash forward to today, and we have the League make David Duke the keynote speaker at its annual conference and a growing number of alliances with far-right groups across North American and Europe, including Nazis:
So we have League of the South co-founder Michael Hill basically calling for an alliance with an array of groups planning on mass violence and race wars. It’s certainly “outrageous” and “inappropriate”. As Peroutka put it.
And yet, as the following SPLC profile on Hill describes, it’s not like the League of the South just suddenly started calling for militancy and race wars in 2014. It just became more open about it, but Michael Hill and the League have been getting openly militant and talking of race war long before Peroutka’s 2014 disassociation
“In a 2012 essay, he claimed that white people are endowed with a “God-ordained superiority.” Whites of “honor, genius and principle” left us with a “glorious heritage,” while black people “have never created anything approximating a civilization.” Slavery, he wrote, was “successfully defended from a Biblical standpoint” until “the institution’s legitimacy was systematically undermined in the name of ‘equality’ and misappropriated ‘Christian ethics.’” He also waxed nostalgic for the Jim Crow system of racial oppression.”
Yep, in 2012, Michael Hill described slavery as “successfully defended from a Biblical standpoint” until “the institution’s legitimacy was systematically undermined in the name of ‘equality’ and misappropriated ‘Christian ethics.’” And that was just one of the many comments of this nature that Hill has been making for decades.
And note the parallels between Hill’s comments about the Civil War and Roy Moore’s impression that the slavery era was the last time America was “great”: As Hill sees it, the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. It was about the imposition by godless Yankees of a materialistic, capitalist industrial system on a South that embodied the only surviving remnant of “orthodox Christianity”:
That sure sounds like music to Roy Moore’s ears! After all, isn’t a casual dismissal of slavery coupled with a focus on the imposition of godless Yankee materialism as a threat to “orthodox Christianity” kind of Roy Moore’s brand at this point?
So, to summarize, it appears that Roy Moore’s idea of what it would take to “Make America Great Again” has a rather disturbing overlap with that of Michael Hill, the militant neo-Confederate leader of the League of the South. And that’s why Michael Peroutka has become another headache for the GOP.
And yet Peroutka hasn’t actually become that much of headache and his own words and associations should more than enough to make him a much bigger headache. But he’s only appears to have gotten attention in a single county in Maryland. It raises the question of why Moore’s ties to Peroutka hasn’t also been an issue for Moore during this campaign. And the answer to that question is clearly that Roy Moore allegedly stalked and sexually assaulted high-schoolers while he was a district attorney and Moore has responded by saying it’s all lies, which is understandably going to grab a lot of attention, especially in the #metoo national political context.
It’s a reminder that, had Moore not been facing his teen-creeper accusations that morphed into a national nightmare of sorts, his nomination and likely victory would still be a national nightmare. Just a different kind of national nightmare. A national nightmare involving the legitimization of a neo-Confederate theocrat instead of a national nightmare involving the legitimization of a guy who cruises the local mall looking for high-school girls while he was a district attorney.
But, of course, the Roy Moore national nightmare is both a nightmare about a teen creeper and a national nightmare about a neo-Confederate theocrat who pals around with pals of militant white supremacists who want to wage a race war and reimpose slavery and a whole lot of other nightmares. And don’t forget Moore’s campaign is also a national nightmare about a guy who thinks thinks the Biblical role of women bans them from politics and leadership roles in general. It’s a whole bunch of sub-nightmares all woven together into one giant multifaceted nightmare.
It’s a recurring nightmare.
Oh look, another US government shutdown after Congress reaches an impasse over the budget. Given the frequency with which this happens in US politics in recent decades it’s tempting to snarkily remark, ‘Who could have seen that coming?’
But as the following article reminds points out, in this case the impasse really was a bit of surprise. The big sticking points were known well in advance. The issue of DACA — the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” program created by President Obama to address ~800,000 ‘Dreamers’, undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children by their parents, who are suddenly at risk of deportation in early March — was obviously going to be a major issue for these budget negotiations. And sure enough, that’s the sticking point. Sort of. There’s a faction of GOPers who are actually demanding a Steve Bannon-esque immigration overhaul in return for their support in ending the shutdown.
So that’s the shutdown situation. The Democrats drew a single line in the sand with this upcoming budget negotiation: Due to the urgency of resolving the Dreamer issue by the March 5th deadline (at which point they could lose their legal status, lose their jobs, and face deportation to countries they barely know), any budget bill needed to include the DACA fix. Because there is no belief in the Democratic party that Trump and the GOP will be willing to agree to a fix by the deadline. The budget bill really is the last chance for the Dreamers.
And don’t forget that these Dreamers are at risk of losing their jobs and getting deported because Trump rescinded the previous agreement back in September and gave a 6 month window to resolve it. Trump listened to the Steve Bannon/Stephen Miller faction back in September and that’s how this situation was created.
The default thing that happens if the DACA issue isn’t resolved by the deadline is the loss of legal status and jobs for the ‘Dreamers’ and the beginning of deportation of 800,000 people to countries they barely know. Which, of course, a cruel humanitarian disaster. An entirely avoidable cruel humanitarian disaster. Making this a ‘line in the sand’ in the budget negotiations with the threat of the shutdown really is pretty much only realistic option for the Democrats because kicking out all the Dreamers is a very Trumpian thing to do based on his record of words and deeds on immigration. Allowing this DACA negotiation to make it to the March 5th deadline is a guaranteed recipe for no real negotiations. The GOP will obviously make unrealistically outrageous demands to totally overhaul the immigration system in exchange for DACA.
But even if the GOP promises to address DACA soon in exchange for the Democrats’ support on the budget to end the shutdown, the party lacks any credibility in general. This really is basically the last chance for the ‘Dreamers’ to avoid deportation to countries they barely know so it really is a humanitarian issue. And the GOP’s lack of credibility isn’t just based on its long track-record of incredulity. The GOP has already broken its word on these negotiations. Specifically, President Trump has already rejected a bipartisan proposal that included the Democrats making concessions that included funding for Trump’s border wall, limits on the ability of legal U.S. residents to sponsor their adult children for immigration, and a reduction in diversity visas. Democrats just offered that in exchange for saving the Dreams and Trump reportedly took it as an insult.
So what will Trump accept in exchange for saving the Dreamers from deportation? Well, according to Chief of Staff John Kelly, Trump wants a bill that will appease the group of immigration hardline GOP holdouts like Senators Tom Cotton and Sonny Perdue who co-sponsored a bill to cut immigration in half and move away from family-focused immigration. And as we’ll see, these demands are being made by Senator Tom Cotton in order to get his support just to end the shutdown.
As the article below also notes, Trump appears to be under the sway of his most hardline policy advisors (like Stephen Miller). And that’s why this current situation really is the last chance to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe: GOP pledges to address this issue soon in exchange for support on ending the shutdown now can’t be taken seriously because there’s no credibility behind them. Jon Kelly just basically said a massive Bannon-esque immigration overhaul is the only acceptable trade in exchange for saving the Dreamers. So we appear to be in the middle of a multifaceted GOP ‘gotcha’ strategy of trapping the Democrats in a situation where they’re forced to choose between holding out for the Dreamers’ last chance or ending the shutdown while the GOP blames them the whole time for creating this situation:
“The key revelation of the memo obtained by Axios is that Miller is not alone: Apparently, several of the administration’s top immigration policy hands are also committed to sabotaging a Dreamer deal — or, at the very least, to jeopardizing such a deal by pressing maximalist demands.”
Yep, several of the administration’s top immigration policy hands are out to tank any deal protecting the Dreamers. Either by convincing Trump to reject a Dreamer deal outright or by convincing him to make demands that Democrats couldn’t possibly support. And these policy hands have been lobbying Trump on this issue ever since he declared DACA null and void back in September. And keep doing it whenever he waivers. Hence Trump’s rejection of the bipartisan bill proposal filled with Democratic concessions:
“And Trump took their offer as an insult.”
That was Trump’s view on the Democratic offer with massive concessions. Because he wants a bill that will appears the hardcore immigration faction of Senators Cotton, Perdue, and Goodlatte:
That happened. And then this happened shortly after Trump met with that bipartisan Senate delegation: Trump sat down with the hardliners:
And this is the same hardliner group of White House policy advisors since he first announced the end to the DREAM Act back in September. So they’ve had a lot of time to influence him:
“Less than two weeks ago, Trump told a bipartisan group of lawmakers that he would sign any DREAM Act that made it to his desk — and, momentarily, signed on to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s proposal for a “clean” version of the bill that wouldn’t include any border security measures at all.”
So back in September, Trump declares the DREAM Act dead and gives a 6 month window to fix it. His advisors start lobbying him to not fix it at all. Then a couple of weeks ago he says he’ll sign ANY new version Congress presents him. The a bipartisan group of Senators makes an offer with a ton of Democratic concessions including money for ‘The Wall’. Trump rejects it, declares he needs something Tom Cotton will approve of, and then he meets with his hardline advisors. And here we are. Forced by Trump to placate Cotton. Who wants to cut immigration in half:
And there’s no denying that a large chunk of Trump’s base, which is the GOP’s base, is more likely to agree with the Tom Cotton view on these issues, like demanding an end to ‘chain-migration’ — the term for family-focused immigration policies which is a massive change to the US immigration policies — in exchange for supporting an end to the government shutdown:
““I can’t make that commitment at all,” Cotton told NBC’s Chuck Todd after he was asked if he would support whatever the president agreed to in the shutdown negotiations.”
Senator Tom Cotton wants an end to ‘chain-migration’ to support an end to the shutdown. And that’s the view of the Stephen Miller/Steve Bannon faction successfully manipulating Trump right now. It’s why even GOP Senator Lindsey Graham is calling Tom Cotton the ‘Steve King of the Senate’;
“In an interview with MSNBC, Graham, who has advocated for legislative protections for young immigrants, rejected the notion of ending family-based immigration in exchange for enshrining the protections of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program into law.”
So what exactly is Tom Cotton demanding in exchange for ending the government shutdown by demanding an end to ‘chain-migration’ immigration policies, where family members of immigrants are given a large percentage of annual slots (after an average wait period of 15 or so years)? Well, to answer that we have to take a look at the following Vox article about how end ‘chain-migration’ is a policy response to what amounts to an ‘Alt-Right’ Big Lie campaign about how immigration works in the US. Because according to the propaganda put out by far-right anti-immigrant white nationalist-oriented organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), ‘chain-migration’ allow a single immigration to lead to thousands of new immigrants for their families and their families’ families. And their families’ families’ families, etc. And it’s a Big Lie at the heart of deep sense of urgency embedded in the right-wing fear machine about impending ‘demographic-replacement’ and the loss of control for White America. And this gross mischaracterization of how immigration policy works is at the heart of Tom Cotton’s demands that Trump is demanding Democrats support in exchange for ending the shutdown:
“Massey and the other demographers of “chain migration” weren’t presenting it as a negative. But their words were easily adopted by people who did. The Massey essay quoted above ended up being reprinted in an issue of The Social Contract — the journal founded by immigration restrictionist mogul John Tanton, who also founded the three most visible restrictionist organizations in American politics (the think tank the Center for Immigration Studies and the advocacy groups NumbersUSA and FAIR).”
Adventures in unintended citations: Princeton demographer Doug Massey studies the motives behind immigration and recognizes the family element (people like to move to where they have relatives) and this gets twisted into ‘chain-migration’ hysteria by a bunch of white nationalists running anti-immigration ‘think-tanks’:
And now Professor Massey’s work is used to justify blatant propaganda and disinformation embraced by a significant faction of the GOP and the Bannon/Miller wing of the Trump White House:
And it seems like President Trump might actually believe this is how US immigration policy works:
And this propaganda is all in the service of deceiving the public of the reality of how ‘chain migration’ works in the US: you can tug on those chains to bring some relatives. But those chains moving reeeeallly sloooowly:
“When people talk about the “visa backlog,” this is what they mean: In January 2018, for example, the US government will start processing applications for F4 visas (the siblings of US citizens) who first petitioned to let them immigrate on June 22, 2004, or earlier. That is, unless the sibling lives in India (in which case the petition had to be filed by December 2003 to get processed in January 2018), Mexico (November 1997), or the Philippines (September 1994).”
That’s the reality of ‘chain migration’ in America. But Tom Cotton needs immigration cut in half and an end of family-focused policies. And an end to the diversity lottery entirely. In order to support ending the shut down. And President Trump’s chief of staff declared Trump wants a bill that satisfies Tom Cotton’s CIS-oriented faction.
So, since the underlying real obstacle to ending this shutdown is the deep fear of immigrants flooding into America felt deeply by elements of Trump’s base and how the political need to placate those fears is holding up the resolution of the DACA crisis, and since those fears are based heavily on the gross mischaracterization of things like ‘chain migration’ (along with all the other anti-immigrant propaganda), perhaps part of the path forward out of this impasse is an education campaign to let people know that Tom Cotton and President Trump have succumbed to ‘Alt-Right’ garbage propaganda on the state of US immigration policies. ‘Alt-Right’ propaganda shut down the government and knowing that is part of overcoming it. Because while there may not be an epidemic of immigrants flooding the US like barbarian hordes, there is an epidemic of lies about it.
It’s basically the last chance to stop an ‘Alt-Right’ lie from throwing the Dreamers’s lives into chaos. So that immigration-reality education campaign is pretty urgent. And long overdue.
Well that was a fast. You blink and the government shutdown over the fate of the ~800,00 ‘Dreamers’ is over. That’s sort of how the US federal shutdown played out. It starts on midnight Friday night, when most federal employees aren’t working anyway, and on Monday it’s over by noon. The non-essential federal employees went on furlough for the morning.
But the shutdown isn’t over for long. It was more of a tactical retreat for the Democrats. Because the offer the Democrats accepted from Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell merely deferred this same shutdown budget fight over the fate of the ‘Dreamers’ to February 8th.
Plus the Democrats got 6 years of funding for the CHIP children’s health program in the deal (yes, the GOP was holding CHIP hostage too in addition to the Dreamers). So it was a tactical retreat with a sweetener. Sick children are no longer being held hostage in these negotiations.
And that all means there’s going to be a two and a half week period when both parties prepare to have a new shutdown over the DREAM Act that will prevent the ‘Dreamers’ from all losing their jobs and getting subject to deportation to countries they barely know on March 5th.
So what should we expect for the next shutdown? That’s very unclear, in large part because the overall political dynamics of this situation are extremely counterintuitive. How so? Well, for example, consider this: The most powerful leverage the Democrats hold in this situation is their power to save the GOP from itself.
Yep. The Democrats cajoling the GOP into agreeing to a new DREAM Act is quite possibly the best thing that could happen to the GOP at this point. Why? Because if the GOP really goes through with what its base wants the GOP to do, almost all of the Dreamers will be deported and that’s going to be really unpopular. Recent polls on the question of whether or not the Dreamers should be allowed to stay in the US ranged from 70 to 80 percent support for allowing the Dreamers to stay. A poll back in September suggested two thirds of Republican voters wanted to grant the DACA Dreamers citizenship. But for a key white nationalist element of the GOP/Trump base, kicking all the Dreamers out is REALLY popular and the ONLY way the GOP can save the Dreamers is by almost completely shutting down immigration into the US.
All that is why ‘winning’ on DACA (resulting in Dreamer deportations) is potentially a BIG net loss for the GOP. And that big loss could happen right when a crucial mid-term election threatens the GOP’s grip on Congress. In other words, when the GOP holds the Dreamers hostage, its holding itself hostage too and only the Democrats can save them from this self-fulfilling fate. That’s real leverage for the Democrats, but it’s extremely counterintuitive.
And that all ironically makes the greatest threat the Democrats can make in the upcoming shutdown fight is the threat agree to fold on the shutdown without an agreement for the Dreamers. This test of wills is really a game of ‘chicken’ where the winner ends up driving off a cliff.
But here’s the counterintuitive other side of that coin: While the Dreamers might have public support on their side, that support only manifests in real political power when they appear to be at risk of deportation. So in order for the Democrats to wield their leverage in the upcoming fight, the Dreamers have to remain at risk of deportation long enough for the American public to start demanding their situation gets fixed. And that’s why this strategic retreat from the shutdown wasn’t actually a bad move for the Democrats. Their best strategy is predicated on waiting for the GOP to basically ‘drop the mask’ and start harming the lives of the Dreamers because that’s exactly the kind of situation that translates into the kind of real public demand the GOP fears. The Dreamers counterintuitively have to lose to win. Just hopefully not lose too much. It’s that kind of situation. Sad!
Another counterintuitive aspect to this Dreamer shutdown standoff is that the closer the Democrats get to the March 5th deadline, the better off the Dreamers are from a position making it clear to the American public that the GOP really is serious about deporting the Dreamers. Look at how the shutdown played out: When the Democrats entered Friday’s shutdown, their general argument was that Trump couldn’t be trusted to make good on his pledge to help the Dreamers and that’s why they were making the DREAM Act a requirement for passing the budget. But the GOP just said, “we want to work on the Dreamers, but separately from the budget.” And the Democrats didn’t have a clear response to the that. The GOP’s pledges to deal with the Dreamers after the budget is resolved lack credibility but that’s not an easy argument for the Democrats to make in the US media. So the Democrats had the right argument (the GOP and Trump aren’t serious about helping the Dreamers) at the wrong time (a month and a half before the March 5th deadline).
But as time passes it keeps getting increasingly clear that the GOP wants to see some sort of massive immigration overhaul in exchange for helping the Dreamers and that massive overhaul is really just an excuse NOT to reach a deal and not to legalize them at all. Don’t forget that granting a path to citizenship for the Dreamers is an extremely unpopular outcome in the right-wing talk-radio/Fox News domain of conservative thought. And that suggests the GOP is going to keep ratcheting up its demands for a big far-right immigration overhaul the closer we get to March 5th, creating an absurdist dynamic where they demand the Steve Bannon/Stephen Miller immigration dream package on March 4th in exchange for saving the Dreamers. It’s the kind of perilous situation that counterintuitively helps the Dreamers by making their peril very clear. Because, again, the American public does want to help the Dreamers according to polls, they just haven’t realized that the GOP really does want to deport them and will do so if they are allowed.
And that’s all why the Democrats really do have major leverage in this situation: if they can maneuver the GOP into a position where the public realizes the GOP is serious about deporting the Dreamers, it’s possible the Democrats can save the GOP from themselves and save the Dreamers at the same time by creating a public uproar about saving the Dreamers that is so undeniable the GOP can safely explain such a decision to their anti-immigrant base. And that scenario is ironically the best scenario for the Dreamers, Democrats, and elected GOPers who probably want to avoid a much more protracted and larger political headache with the voting public at large that could arise if Dreamer deportation actually starts happening.
That’s two and a half weeks for the Democrats to make the following basic points:
1. Trump and a large faction of the GOP wants to deport the ‘Dreamers’.
2. That would be a horrible thing for the US to do.
3. The only way the GOP is planning on letting the ‘Dreamers’ get amnesty and become US citizens is to get a massive Stephen Miller/Steve Bannon-esque immigration overhaul bill that in no way should be attached to the ‘Dreamers’ issue. Because that’s holding the ‘Dreamers’ hostage.
4. Holding the ‘Dreamers’ hostage is a horrible thing for the GOP to do. There are plenty of other opportunities for the GOP to bargain for its immigration overhaul demands without holding them hostage.
5. With the White House already openly backing Tom Cotton’s radical immigration overhaul bill as standard Trump is looking for, it’s pretty clear Trump will only accept a massive Stephen Miller/Steven Bannon-esque immigration overhaul in exchange for freeing the Dreamer hostages. Which, again, is a horrible thing to do.
6. All the above points are reasons to treat this Dreamer issue as a looming moral and humanitarian crisis and opportunity for the US. Because doing the right thing, and just granting amnesty to the ‘Dreamers’ a path to citizenship without tying it up with a big far-right immigration overhaul, really is the only decent option. Doing the right thing is a possibility here, but only if the public demands it.
But there’s on other significant hurdle that both helps and hurts the upcoming February 8th shutdown showdown in the Senate: While the upcoming February 8th fight is in the Senate, the person most relevant to those discussion is in the other chamber of Congress: House Speaker Paul Ryan, who, like Trump, has a history of promising to save the Dreamers while also promising to appease the people who want them deported:
“The truth is that there is one person who can answer all those questions, one person who has the power both to forestall another shutdown and literally keep hundreds of thousands of young people from having their lives destroyed. That person is House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R‑Wis.), and unfortunately, there isn’t much reason to believe he’ll do the right thing.”
Yep, even if the Senate comes to a bipartisan budget bill that includes a DACA fix, there’s no reason to assuem Paul Ryan will even allow a vote on the issue in the House. And that’s why Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, is ironically the central person in this shutdown situation in the Senate. Ok, President Trump is actually the central person on this issue because he could resolve it all single-handed (he just needs to issue an Executive Order), but since he’s clearly not interested in doing that, the next most important person in this debate because Paul Ryan:
So if Democrats in the Senate are planning on redo of the government shutdown over the DACA issue, and Paul Ryan’s cooperation is required in the House for this issue to be resolved, what’s Paul Ryan’s stance on the issue? Well, as we saw, like most elected GOP officials, Paul Ryan has publicly expressed his sympathy for the Dreamers and has long indicated that he supports a fix for them:
BUT, Ryan has also made pledges to the far-right Freedom Caucus of his party that he won’t allow an immigration bill to have a vote in the House UNLESS this bill as the backing of the “majority of the majority” (a majority of House GOPers). And there’s no real reason to believe a majority of House GOPers have any interest in an immigration bill that grants amnesty to the Dreamers, despite all the happy talk from the party:
And that massive uncertainty swirling around the House Republicans is a big reason why making this DACA issue part of the budget fight is seen as really the only real chance to save the Dreamers from deportation but also simultaneously why it’s very unclear if the threat of shutdown in the Senate even can resolve the issue because the Senate has no control over the House or the White House:
And this situation — where there’s absolutely no compelling reason to believe the GOP has any real interest in helping the Dreamers (other than the fear of looking like monsters after all the horror stories come out following the mass deportations) — is why the new February 8th deadline has a ‘now or never’ feel to it.
But let’s not forget that it’s really more of a ‘now or hopefully later when it’s more obvious the GOP is going to seriously deport these kids’ scenario as opposed to a ‘now or never’ scenario. Because the closer we get to that March 5th DACA deadline, and the more obvious it becomes that the GOP really is seriously about deporting these kids, the likelier that we’ll actually see some sort of public backlash against the GOP. And that public backlash is pretty much the ONLY thing that can realistically compel the GOP to do the right thing. Don’t forget, the vast majority of voters, including a majority of GOP voters, really do want to protect the Dreamers, but that small hardcore anti-immigrant GOP base is intensely opposed to it. The GOP really is in a bind here.
And let’s also not forget about the other scenario that could result in the ‘Dreamers’ being save. It’s a horrible scenario but it might ironically work: the GOP lets DACA expire, the Dreamers start getting deported, and the horror stories about almost a million people who were essentially young Americans having their lives destroyed shocks and sickens the American public to such an extent that the GOP feels compelled to pass a fix just to avoid looking like the party of the heartless. That’s the ‘now or later, perhaps too late for some’ scenario that at least some members of the GOP probably wants to avoid as much as the Dreamers.
So we have this strange ‘chicken and egg’ scenario where the most effective path to persuading the Republicans to change their stance on this issue is to let them have their way and act like a bunch of monsters. The Democrats can insist all they want that the GOP is just lying when it pretends to want an actual solution for the Dreamers, but until the American public truly believes that’s the case and can clearly see that the party really is heartless enough to destroy the lives of almost a million young people there’s limited leverage that the Democrats have in this debate.
But what about all those pledges Paul Ryan has made about finding some solution for the Dreamers? Might there be reason to assume that he’ll make good on that? Well, to answer that question, let’s take a look at the reason statements of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Because as the Majority Whip, Scalise’s job is to basically get an idea of where the GOP caucus stands on issue. So what does Scalise have to say about the idea of the House getting together with the Senate and passing a DACA bill that protects the Dreamers? There will be NO DEAL from the House until the March 5th deadline. And any deal can NOT involve amnesty for the Dreamers. That’s what Scalise had to say on the issue:
“SCALISE told us the House doesn’t feel at all bound by SENATE MAJORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL’S (R‑KY) agreement with Senate Democrats to consider immigration legislation by Feb. 8. “March is really the timeline. … The House wasn’t part of that deal.””
So House Majority Whip Steve Scalise is basically saying that there is NO WAY the House will participate in any deal worked out by Senate Democrats and Republicans UNTIL we’re at the March 5th DACA deadline. That certainly complicates the Senate Democrats’ February 8th shutdown threats. BUT, look at what Scalise has to say about how for the GOP is willing to go with the ultimate March 5th deal: “We’re not going to pass a bill that has amnesty. There are things that would anger our base that I don’t see us passing in the House”:
And if there’s no amnesty for the Dreamers, that means the House GOP is basically planning on kicking them out. And that is exactly the kind of thing that does help the Senate Democrat’s shutdown threats because the whole Democratic strategy in this situation is to make it clear that the GOP really is planning on doing something Americans by and large view as horrible. And the GOP has to know that deporting the Dreamers is not going to be popular at all.
That’s weird dynamic of all this. Steve Scalise’s warning that the House GOP will not to anything about the Dreamers before the March 5th deadline weakens the Democrats’ bargaining power in the upcoming February 8th shutdown fight in the Senate because the House GOP has already made it clear it’s unwilling to negotiate on anything before March 5th. But Scalise’s assurances that “We’re not going to pass a bill that has amnesty. There are things that would anger our base that I don’t see us passing in the House,” only serve to strengthen the Democrats’ case by making it clear that the House GOP really is planning on deporting the Dreamers and that’s the most important case the Democrats can make in this situation since public outrage over Dreamer deportations is the only real strength they have in this situation.
And don’t forget that the bipartisan offer the Senate made to the White House that Trump rejected ‘as an insult’ was an offer that included an enormous number of concessions: funding for Trump’s border wall, limits on the ability of legal U.S. residents to sponsor their adult children for immigration, and a reduction in diversity visas. That was all rejected by the White House when the Democrats made that offer. So it’s pretty clear that the GOP is planning on making a Steve Bannon/Stephen Miller immigration overhaul wish list as its demands for protecting the Dreamers, knowing full well that such demands are unlikely to be met. And that’s why the best strategy for saving the Dreamers probably revolves around making the case to the American public that the GOP leaders like Paul Ryan are lying when they say they want to help the Dreamers and the GOP is planning on making completely unrealistic demands with these negotiations about a complete immigration overhaul in order to create the excuse for deporting them and blaming the Democrats. It’s all a cynical game design to create a giant smokescreen so they can deport the Dreamers and act like they had no choice. That’s obviously the GOP’s plan, and the closer we get to that March 5th deadline the more obvious it becomes.
Will this issue be resolved with the upcoming new February 8th shutdown showdown? It’s possible, but it’s hard to see that happening because the GOP is probably just going to incredulously say, “we want to protect the Dreamers, but just not now. Not until March 5th.” And that means we’re probably looking at a March 5th showdown of some sort. And even then, it’s still unclear a deal will be achieved at that point because so much of the GOP wants nothing to do with amnesty for the Dreamers at all and will keep making more and more extreme demands in exchange for some sort of Dreamer path to citizenship because they are actually searching for a reason to not protect the Dreamers (to placate their hardline base) while blaming the Democrats. It’s like a hostage negotiation with the Joker.
So is there any real hope for the Dreamers? Sure, but only as long as the situation for them appears hopeless thanks to GOP heartlessness. How exactly the Democrats make that heartless hopelessness clear to the American public remains to be seen. Winston Churchill is said to have once quipped that ‘that Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else’. Is that true in this situation or is American going to do the wrong thing after trying everything else? We’ll find out.
There’s no shortage of ominous stories involving the GOP. But there’s nothing quite like stories about the GOP’s youth outreach organizations to maximize the ominousness, because they’re generally stories about college Republicans espousing Nazi-like views. And those are the people who are going to be running the GOP in a few decades. It’s no surprise the nihilistic agenda of the GOP attracts scary youths, but it’s still ominous.
So in the spirit of ominous stories about the GOP’s youth outreach agenda, here’s a pair of articles about Turning Point USA. It’s one of the far-right organizations focused on college campus. In particular, focused on what it perceived to be the persecution of conservative voices on college campuses. In other words, it’s a form of liberal tyranny when there are protests against someone like Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, or Charles Murray coming to spew hate speech on a campus or when far-right ideas are laughed down in classrooms because they’re ungrounded and academically unsound. Making the point that this is tyranny is one of the primary purposes of Turning Point USA.
But as Jane Mayer pointed out in an article back in December, Turning Point USA has quite a few more uses. For instance, it’s being used as a vehicle for the right-wing takeover of almost all the college student governments of major American universities. The idea is to get power, then defund left-wing organization, and repeal bans on hate speech.
Turning Point also runs a McCarthyite “Professor Watch List” that claims to reveal outrageous left-wing professors. And Turning Point USA has millions of dollars in its annual budget.
So who is paying for Turning Point’s activities? Well, that’s a secret. Most of the donors are anonymous, although we know Foster Friess — one of the key billionaires behind Ted Cruz — is heavily involved in the financing. And the petroleum industry too. Other than that it’s a secret.
Turning Point was also revealed to be used as a political arm of some Republican campaigns, which is technically illegal because it’s calls itself a charity. But it turns out that Crystal Clanton, the second in command at the group, was apparently lending some Turning Point staff to the campaign of Ted Cruz. Gini Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice member Clarence Thomas, was the Cruz campaign contact person with Clanton.
And, surprise, it turns out that Turning Point USA had a racially hostile environment. Clanton was revealed to have sent a text message to another Turning Point employee saying, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all ... I hate blacks. End of story.” The few black members found themselves uninvited to evens. And, as we’ll see, the group has a very chummy relationship with a number of ‘Alt Right’ figures.
Oh, and the group can boast the endorsements of Breitbart and the Trump family. Don Jr. and Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, are both openly close to the group.
So we have a secret billionaire-funded far-right organization dedicated to attacking left-wing professors and taking over college student governments run by racists. And it’s acting as a potential pool for youth muscle for GOP campaigns while calling itself a tax-exempt charity so those secret billionaires have extra incentives to flood them with money. This is why the GOP youth outreach stories are so ominous:
“As Turning Point’s profile has risen, so has scrutiny of its funding and tactics. Internal documents that I obtained, as well as interviews with former employees, suggest that the group may have skirted campaign-finance laws that bar charitable organizations from participating in political activity. Former employees say that they were directed to work with prominent conservatives, including the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in aid of Republican Presidential candidates in 2016. Perhaps most troubling for an organization that holds up conservatives as the real victims of discrimination in America, Turning Point USA is also alleged to have fostered an atmosphere that is hostile to minorities. Screenshots provided to me by a source show that Crystal Clanton, who served until last summer as the group’s national field director, sent a text message to another Turning Point employee saying, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all ... I hate blacks. End of story.””
Turning Point USA: the conservative ‘charity’ dedicated to harassing liberal professor and a stealth campaign to take over student governments. And its national field director, who hates black people and was open about this, directed her employees to help Ted Cruz’s campaign. It’s quite a charity. No wonder the Trumps love it. And Turning Point’s founder, Charlie Kirk who now calls Don, Jr. a personal friend, was working for the Trump campaign as a specialist in youth outreach:
Sebastian Gorka and Don, Jr. show up for your surprise birthday party. The joys of being a right-wing hack.
And, as we should expect for a group with a national field director who openly hates black people, the black employees didn’t feel welcome. And the only black field director was fired of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day:
And Turning Point can pay for these staffers with his millions in anonymous donations. Which are tax deductible because it calls itself a charity. Despite lending its staff to Republican campaigns. It’s the kind of thing that’s not going to b e limited to Turning Point but is instead likely an example of how a lot of political ‘charities’ operate to giving secret billionaires more bang for their buck:
Keep in mind that these are a bunch of former employees giving these testimonies. Seems like a pretty crappy place to work.
So how many resources does Turning Point actually have on hand to lend to campaigns like Cruz’s and act as a political operative tax shelter? Well, it appears to have an $8 million annual budget. Raised from the energy industry:
And this energy industry-funded national right-wing campus activism group dedicated to portraying conservatives as a persecuted class on campus is being used as a vehicle for a right-wing takeover of college campuses across America:
“Once in control of student governments, the brochure says, Turning Point expects its allied campus leaders to follow a set political agenda. Among its planks are the defunding of progressive organizations on campus, the implementation of “free speech” policies eliminating barriers to hate speech, and the blocking of all campus “boycott, divestment and sanctions” movements. Turning Point’s agenda also calls for the student leaders it empowers to use student resources to host speakers and forums promoting “American Exceptionalism and Free Market ideals on campus.””
That’s the plan: defund left-wing groups on campus and get rid of campus hate speech laws.
As Andy MacCracken, the executive director of the National Campus Leadership Council, puts it at the end, this is an investment in the thought leaders of the tomorrow. Literally an attempt to hijack student governments and, in the process, create young conservative ‘thought leaders’ who will hopefully be influential decades later. And, no, there doesn’t appear to be a left-wing equivalent of a group like this:
“I can totally imagine they’re thinking that if we can win this on campuses, they will be the thought leaders down the road. This is a way to win it efficiently at the start. The challenge, though, is that so much of this is in the dark.”
An investment in the future of thought by trying to take control of campuses to further the far-right agenda of the energy sector. There’s no shortage of ominousness there.
So what should we expect from Turning Point? Will it succeed in its stealth campus crusade? Well, as the following piece from the Southern Poverty Law Center describes, it appears that Turning Point might have some more problems with disgruntled workers. But it’s a very different problem with the workers campaigning about racism and campaign financier violations:
On February 12th, Kaitlin Bennett, the president of the Kent State University chapter of Turning Point USA, published a letter listing her reasons for resigning. And at the core of her complaints was what she saw as hypocrisy by TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk over his refusal to allow her to invite ‘Alt Right’ celebrity Kyle ‘the Based Stickman’ Chapman to speak at an event because Kirk wants the group to distance itself from the ‘Alt Right’. Bennett pointed out the hypocrisy by noting how Kirk had recently liked a tweet by James Alsupp, a white nationalist icon.
And as the following article lays out, this outburst from Bennett happened just 10 days after Kirk had to publicly denounce members of the Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP) during a speech at the Colorado State University at Fort Collins. The TWP — which is Matt Hembach’s youth-oriented neo-Nazi organization — had been canvassing anti-immigrant fliers on the campus earlier that week, which sounds like piggy-backing on Kirk’s appearance. And then during Kirk’s speech some of the TWP members showed up outside with masks and shields and started chanting “blood and soil!”. So of course Kirk denounces them at that moment. You almost have to wonder if that was the point of the spectacle. To give Kirk a chance to denounce them while getting a bunch of attention.
But that was the context of Bennett’s public resignation: Kirk had denounced the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party people in masks chanting “blood and soil!” 10 days earlier and he wouldn’t let Bennett invite ‘Alt Right’ celebrity Kyle ‘Stickman’ Chapman to come speak. So it seems pretty safe to say that Turning Point USA has an ‘Alt Right’ problem:
“While TPUSA and Charlie Kirk claim to “condemn” the racist alt-right that seem to support the organization, as witnessed by the Traditionalist Worker Party demonstration in Fort Collins in early February, evidence is amassing that the attraction between the entities is largely mutual.”
Yes indeed, the evidence is amassing that Turning Point USA is really, really right-wing. And racist. And basically an ‘Alt Right’ front group for the campuses. Funded by wealthy people from the petroleum sector and Foster Friess. And when Wendy Lynne Lee, a philosophy professor at Bloomsburg University (BU) in rural Pennsylvania, exposed these elements of Turning Point USA, they waged an internet meme campaign against her:
And this ‘Alt Right’ orientation for Turning Point’s agenda that professor Lee was attacked for exposing bubbled over into public again when Kaitlin Bennett, the president of the Kent State University chapter of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), posted her resignation letter that angrily denounced Charlie Kirk’s hypocrisy for not letting her invite Kyle ‘the Based Stickman’ Chapman to speak due to his decision to distance itself from the ‘Alt Right’. And that was 10 days after the Traditionalist Workers Party Members showed up and chanted “blood and soil!” during speech by Kirk at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, Colorado:
Yes, Turning Point USA, clearly has an ‘Alt Right’ problem. According to some former employees, it’s too racist. But according Kaitlin Bennett, it wasn’t racist enough. Or rather, Charlie Kirk wasn’t allowing her to be true to the real ‘Alt Right’ viewpoint that Kirk himself had embraced. So Bennett was mostly pissed they weren’t allowed to be openly ‘Alt Right’. Which she felt was dishonest and warranted the public resignation.
So that’s how the GOP’s campus outreach efforts are ominously going.
Here’s a rather disturbing article about a neo-Nazi student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that directly relates to all of the outcry over the missed opportunities to stop Nikolas Cruz — the neo-Nazi who attacked his high school in Parkland, Florida, after repeatedly making clear his violent fantasies on social media:
Videos of a self-described white nationalist UNL student, Daniel Kleve, chatting with other neo-Nazis on “Google Hangouts” and basically declaring that he was very intent on committing extreme violence in the name of a neo-Nazi revolution, but not committing that violence yet because the movement wasn’t ready, was leaked by Antifa Nebraska and shown to the school administration. And that’s not the only video of Kleve expressing violent desires. Kleve also worked security at the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville last year and is generally quite open about his view. As a result of the videos, some students at UNL are asking he be expelled over concerns that he’s a ticking time-bomb on campus. The UNL administration declined to take any action after reviewing the video and say he hasn’t made any direct threats and so there’s nothing they can do.
It’s a particularly topical case given the numerous missed opportunities to intervene with Nikolas Cruz given all the warning signs and it raises a grim question for society posed by the rise of the neo-Nazi ‘Alt Right’ in general:
How should society response to a movement with a long track record of extreme violence that makes very clear its planning on violence even more violence but has also made it clear that its primary recruiting tactic is to ‘play the victim’ and act like they are ‘fighting for freedom’ against a ‘repressive multicultural state’ that doesn’t give them the freedom to violently subjugate those they view as inferior? A movement of violence-prone trolls who thrive on nursing a victimhood narrative to justify further violence. Because that’s a movement that really is a ‘ticking time-bomb’. It’s such a sad and twisted situation but that’s where we are. How should society address this?:
““Just because I dress like a normie, a presentable person, doesn’t mean that I don’t love violence,” Kleve said in one of the Google Hangout videos leaked by the antifascist activist group Antifa Nebraska. “I want to be violent. Trust me. Really violent. It’s just not the right time. We need to build ourselves up. We need to be disciplined. We need to train ourselves and make ourselves hard ... so that when the time comes, we can do what needs to be done.””
That’s Daniel Kleve, in his own words. Words that sound a lot like what neo-Nazis around the world. And that’s part of what makes it so disturbing: it’s not just the rantings of a lone individual. It’s the expression of a long-held goal of the far-right. Recruit now in preparation for some sort of surprise overwhelming attack on society at some point in the future. In other words, a plan to carry out the Nazi takeover plot in Serpent’s Walk. That’s what Kleve was expressing in that leaked video.
And the video is far from the only evidence that Kleve is a neo-Nazi. There’s the photos of him standing with members of Vanguard America at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And another video where he shares his desire to shoot a “Nigerian dude” who previously asked him about his “Pagan tattoos”:
And Antifa Nebraska has spent months trying to get the UNL administration to take some sort of action, but to no avail. Because Kleve is technically not ‘doing anything wrong’ since there’s no proof that he’s actually going to commit an act of violence:
“If they don’t make direct threats, there’s very little we can do about that.”
That’s the position of the UNL administration. As long as neo-Nazis make general threats about organizing for the purpose of extreme violence it will be protected free-speech. It’s only a problem when it’s a direct threat.
Not surprisingly, a number of students feel very differently, and those feelings are backed up by the fact the white nationalists killed more people than al Qaeda and ISIS in the US last year (and that doesn’t count the 17 people killed by Nikolas Cruz last month):
But, of course, Kleve is complaining about how he’s being framed as some sort of “Hollywood villain” and “domestic terrorist”, and then falls back on the “we’re the real victims here” far-right rally cry:
That’s right, Kleve and the other white supremacists plotting a violent subjugation of society are the real victims here.
So given all that, is there anything that Kleve could do that would constitute ‘crossing the line’? Something that would make it very clear that this guy really is a ticking time-bomb waiting for the right time to engage in organized domestic terrorism? The answer is sadly very unclear, but as the following article notes, Kleve has also posted pictures of himself posing with Atomwaffen members along with Facebook posts where he encourages people to following in the footsteps of ‘the Order’ from The Turner Diaries, and that doesn’t appear to have crossed the line:
“Kleve, who is fond of posting selfies with guns to social media, also said that “now is not the right time” for violence, and he has argued that the edited video took his words out of context—but the language spoke for itself to students who were already concerned about him and his demonstrable connections to neo-Nazi groups. Hundreds of students demanding Kleve’s expulsion gathered on campus grounds to stage a protest on Wednesday of last week, adding a physical presence to what was already a sustained campaign of activism.”
The neo-Nazi who is fond of posting selfies with guns to social media and says things like “now is not the right time” for violence wants to assure everyone that he’s not a threat and this is all being taken out of context. Which apparently means the photos of him posing with Atomwaffen members in front of an Atomwaffen flag are also being taken out of context. As well as his social media posts where he endorsed “The Order” from The Turner Diaries:
“You want to be militant. Be like the Order. Be a nameless group of extremists who act instead of talk. TWP and NF has a lot of good people. But you can’t be militant and be a popular movement. Atleast not in this particular instance in time.”
Those were his words. Posted on Facebook. But if you’re alarmed you’re apparently just taking it out of context.
Oh, and it turns out Kleve actually owns an AR-15. Or at least something that looks a lot like an AR-15, the mass shooter weapon of choice in America most recently used by Nikolas Cruz:
And as the article notes, the question of what to do about a student like Kleve is emblematic of the larger issue of what to do about the sudden surge in open white supremacists who have decided to make a point of going on college campuses to spread their ideas and recruit others:
For instance, there’s Daniel Neuhoff, a 27-year-old graduate student in Virginia Tech’s English department who turns out to be a neo-Nazi. Although he assures us he’s actually just a “paleoconservative monarchist” and not a white supremacist, despite his praise of Hitler. It must be more ‘out of context’ judgement:
There’s also Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker’s Party (TWP), who is trying to start a college speaking tour. His goal? to argue for a “safe space for fascists” in academia:
Yep, according to Heimbach, fascists need “safe spaces” to espouse their fascist views. But as the article notes, they are indeed allowed to espouse those views, just not without criticism and potential ostracization.
So what should colleges do about this surge in fascists and neo-Nazis seeking acceptance on campus? Well, in the case of UNL that question for likely be largely up to conservatives given that it’s an overwhelmingly Republican dominated state. And given the GOP’s championing of Alt-Right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos coming to campuses without getting protested — there are actually GOP-sponsored “Milo bills” in state legislatures across the US — it’s hard to see the GOP getting too concerned about people like Kleve posing a threat.
But there is hope. Sort of. As the self-described conservative UNL student interviewed in the article put it, while he’s not sure Kleve had don enough to be “legally kicked off campus”, he still sees a difference between the campus debates about free speech between conservatives and leftists, and the threat of overt neo-Nazism. It’s better than nothing:
But putting aside the question of whether or not UNL should expel a student like Kleve and returning to the outcry over the missed opportunities to intervene in Nikolas Cruz’s downward violence into neo-Nazi violence, the case of Daniel Kleve poses a rather significant question: how openly does a movement need to talk about its plans for violently overthrowing and subjugating society before its recognized as no longer protected free speech and instead is a significant threat to others where law enforcement gets involved? Posing with an Atomwaffen flag and promoting The Turner Diaries clearly doesn’t cross the line. So what does cross the line? It’s an awful open question for America.
The growing influence ‘Alt Right’ presents a number of challenges for the Republican Party. It’s never easy to simultaneously court and disown a voting bloc. But perhaps the greatest challenge is the generic challenge of how to deal with an infusion of people into the party who are predominantly angry young males with a strong nihilistic streak and a desire to watch society burn. And as the ‘Alt Right’ faction of the GOP grows larger and larger, the need to cater to that nihilistic sadism at the core of the ‘Alt Right’ worldview is only going to grow too.
The GOP has long had a sadistic streak, but openly catering to that urge is risky politics. The party that has long branded itself on the Reaganesque slogan of ‘building a shining city on a hill’ is more and more forced to openly campaign the party of the people that want to burn the shining city down so they can revel in all the ‘snowflake tears’. When Paul Ryan’s primary opponent, Paul Nehlen, hires one of the most prominent anti-Semites in America, Kevin MacDonald, as his campaign spokesman, it’s pretty clear that the GOP’s ‘Southern Strategy’ dog-whistling of the past might not be loud enough for the growing ‘Alt Right’ conservatives. And that’s invariably going to change the public face of the party.
So how is the conservative movement hoping to deal with the tricky politics of simultaneously hugging and shunning all these new, often young, ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazi conservatives who don’t get fired up by tradition ‘shining city on a hill’ Republican rhetoric and prefer a more ‘burn it down and take over’ Steve Bannon/Trump kind approach to politics? Well, as the following article notes, there is one source of ‘hope’ the party appears to be holding onto: Jordan Peterson, the Canadian conservative psychology professor who has quickly become a rising star in right-wing thought. A rising star peddling an ‘Alt-Right’-lite self-help gospel targeting frustrated young men with a message of embracing their masculinity and finding purpose in life by embracing Christianity and battling the forces of “cultural marxism” that are trying to strip men of their rightful male roles in a traditional culture that it their natural right. And since Peterson’s target audience heavily overlaps with the ‘Alt Right’ target audience of frustrated young males, the appears to be hope that Peterson will be able to tame the ‘Alt Right’-leaning young men and turn them into some more closely resembling the tradition ‘God, guns, and gays’ kind of conservatives political foot soldier:
“His name is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, a Canadian professor who’s become the spiritual father of an online tribe of alienated, disaffected and resentful young men. In the past few months, Peterson’s rapidly gone from a little-known clinical psychologist to a veritable megachurch preacher of anti-communism and personal responsibility. His popularity is meteoric, and if progressives want to understand the ideological future of the conservative movement, they may want to pay notice.”
That’s Jordan Peterson, the man behind what appears to be a trendy self-help/men’s rights/anti-left traditionalist culture-warrior fusion message. And at this point it’s unclear how popular he’s going to get because his metoric rise is still underway. Especially with the help of Youtube (of course), where his channel has 700,000 subscribers:
And James Damore, the Alt Right former Google engineer did his first two interviews with Stefan Malyneux, a prominent far-right promoter of eugenics and another interview with Jordan Peterson. Those were the first two interviews for Damore:
It’s an indication of Peterson’s Alt-Right appeal and why there appears to be so much hope that he’ll mold the disaffected Alt Right youth more in his image. And more in the image of lobsters, Peterson’s favorite animal. Apparently because lobsters are very hierarchical. By embracing their inner lobsters, men could embrace their masculinity without being shamed into thinking it’s toxic to do so:
“Jordan Peterson is concerned for the young men of the world. They’ve become weak, resentful and bitter. Peterson worries that young men are scolded into believing their own confidence is a symptom of “toxic masculinity,” and given no words of encouragement. It’s a problem that regularly brings him to tears in talks and interviews.”
And who is responsible for creating an atmosphere where embracing your inner lobster is labeled ‘toxic masculinity’? ‘Cultural Marxists’, that’s who. ‘Cultural Marxists’ who are scheming to sap men of their god given rights to assume their natural roles and embrace their inner hierarchical macho lobsters:
“Peterson not only sees Marxism everywhere, but sees its influence as the most pervasive threat to modern civilization.”
And that is why Peterson is the perfect guy to paper over the differences between the ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazis and more traditional ‘God and small-government’ conservatives: by fixating on ‘cultural marxism’ as an existential threat that these disaffected young men should find meaning in life by opposing, Peterson is basically repacking the Alt Right neo-Nazi worldview — a rehashed update of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where the Jews lead the whole world in a giant conspiring to keep conservative white males down by promoting progressivism — and expressing it in the ‘God and small-government’ traditional GOP language. In other words, he’s ‘taming’ the Alt Right by teaching them how to cloak themselves as traditional conservatives more effectively.
And that focus on a small-government, do-it-yourself message is so extreme in the worldview Peterson is peddling that he explicitly discourages trying to fix the world in general. That’s seen as arrogant and a distraction from fixing yourself. It’s another way Peterson helps channel the nihilism of the young Alt Right conservatives and turns it into a general apathy. A general apathy with the exception of the focus on fighting ‘cultural marxism’. You can see why the right-wing oligarchy that traditionally built and manages the conservative movement loves Peterson. He promises to turn out of control potential neo-Nazi terrorists into people focused on making themselves better culture warriors and little else:
“No, he says. Those who want to fix the world are whiners, uninterested in doing the real work of taking responsibility for themselves.”
If you want to improve the world, you’re a whiner running away from your responsibility to improve yourself. Just focus on opposing the ‘cultural Marxists’ (i.e. people trying to improve the world). That’s the antidote to the inherent nihilism of Nazism Peterson offers the GOP. An antidote that just might transform some of these neo-Nazis into disciplined right-wing foot soldiers by officially rejecting the far-right at the same time he’s espousing their worldview:
“Since Trump’s election, there’s been a simmering fear that the future of the GOP would look less like the party of Reagan and will instead be led by disaffected white racists raised on a media diet of 4chan and provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos. Peterson promises to rescue the Lost Boys. He goes into the corners of the internet to rally the frightened fledgelings of the conservative movement yet to come, and raises them up to be good Republicans.”
And as the final patina of traditional conservatism to counter the anti-billionaire sentiments that sometimes exist on the far-right, Peterson has a very Calvinist message that explicitly rejects the notion that the concentration of wealth is a valid concern:
“Peterson demands that his adherents not challenge the rules their forefathers set out for them, to “set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.””
In other words, don’t rock the boat. Instead, organize to throw all the hippies overboard. It’s like a Koch/Mercer dream message. And that’s why Jordan Peterson is currently being treated like a dream come true by the conservative establishment.
It’s a fascinating development in the unfolding story of the rise of the Alt Right and the overt neo-Nazi takeover of the GOP. Trump is part of that story but it’s a story that is going to have a post-Trump chapter and we might be seeing the contours of that post-Trump story of the Alt Right with the emergence of Peterson as a thought-leader embraced by both the Alt Right and mainstream conservativism.
So Peterson is basically offering the Alt Right and politically disaffected nihilist right-wing young men in general a pitch to ditch their nihilism and instead organize to burn down society together and replace it with one where men are free to embrace their role at the top of a macho lobster hierachy without being shamed for it. And the Alt Right appears to be liking what Peterson is selling. Will he succeed in inviting a bunch of Alt Right trolls into the political realm by morphing them into good little GOP operatives? Or will he fail keep the Alt Right trolls focused on Helter Skelter-style paths to power? Either way, it’s a depressing question.
So if you do find yourself depressed by the rise of the Alt Right and the general success of far-right propaganda in keeping humanity divided and conquered, or depressed for any other reason, keep in mind that the Alt Right appears to be actively recruiting depressed people. Especially over the internet. Using Jordan Peterson videos on Youtube as the gateway.
The way it works is the depressed person watched the ‘mainstream’ Jordan Peterson self-help videos on depression then get served up a more ‘Red-pill’-ish video of Peterson sounding more like an Alt Right guru. And then Youtube’s algorithm serves up videos for people like Stefen Molyneux next. And it goes on from there. Youtube is the slippery slope is the extremist’s recruitment dream tool.
According to “MrHappyDieHappy”, the moniker for someone sounding the alarm over the Alt Right recruitment efforts they experienced as a depressed person on the internet, the “common railroad stages of ‘helpful’ linking to ‘motivational speakers’ goes ‘Jordan Peterson —> Stefan Molyneux —> Millennial Woes”.
In other words, Jordan Peterson isn’t just becoming a gateway for people to move out of the trappings of the Alt Right and into the GOP fold, he’s also being used as a gateway for people to move into the Alt Right. He’s like a one-man GOP crytp-Nazi factory.
So if you find yourself even more depressed after learning all that, you probably want to avoid the Jordan Peterson self-help videos while dealing with your depression:
“Type “depression” or “depressed” into YouTube and it won’t be long until you stumble upon a suit-clad white supremacist giving a lecture on self-empowerment. They’re everywhere. For years, members of the alt-right have taken advantage of the internet’s most vulnerable, turning their fear and self-loathing into vitriolic extremism, and thanks to the movement’s recent galvanization, they’re only growing stronger.”
And there we have it, the worst therapy for depression ever: an endless stream of white-supremacy videos on Youtube. Well, ok, ISIS recruitment videos would tie for worst therapy.
And almost no one is warning depressed people about this:
And that stream self-help Alt-Right gateway videos includes the Jordan Peterson. Then it turns to ‘redpilled’ Jordan Peterson videos:
So what are Peterson and the Alt Right offering the depressed? A community that accepts them, which is exactly what Christian Picciolini, a former neo-nazi who co-founded the peace advocacy organization, Life After Hate, warns is a classic feature of neo-Nazi and extremist recruitment techniques:
And this approach of targeting depressed men was tragically on display when a reddit group for the “involuntarily celibate” to commiserate quickly became an Alt Right stomping ground where women and minorities (‘cultural Marxists’) got all the blame. The worldview shared by Jordan Peterson and the Alt Right became the dominant worldview of that online reddit “involuntarily celibate” community, making that community a new recruitment tool. It really is quite depressing:
So, as we can see, Jordan Peterson is both fueling the growth fo the Alt Right and doing it using a message that creates the rhetorical cover story for those Alt Right believers to go into crypto-Nazi mode and become ‘respectable’ and join the GOP. A one-man far-right foot soldier conveyor belt based on the promotion of following key ideals:
1. Those trying to make the world a better place are just running for the need to improve themselves.
2. You can improve yourself and find meaning in life by focusing on the battle against ‘cultural Marxism’, i.e., the battle against the people trying to make the world a better place for everyone by making it a place with everyone in mind. That’s people are battle and get in the way of your inner lobster.
3. If you’re feeling depressed or nihilistic, defeating ‘cultural Marxism’ is a good form of therapy for those feelings.
And Peterson’s formula appears to be working. At least the part where Peterson funnels people in the Alt Right. We’ll see if he succeeds with pulling them out by turning them into card carrying God fearing Republicans. But with mainstream conservatism embracing him too it seems very possible that Jordan Peterson’s message could be a kind of uniting rallying cry for the GOP and its allied Alt Right troll army.
So, yeah, beware the Jordan Peterson self-realization cult. The next thing you know you’re a Nazi and at the end of it all you’re a Jordan Peterson brand Republican. It’s a surprisingly vast and scary cult. Beware.
Oh great, it looks like the social media giants like Youtube and Facebook that are facing scrutiny over the way they’ve become major propaganda tools for the far right have competition: The Steam gaming app, a major distributor for very popular video games, appears to have a neo-Nazi problem. Specifically, neo-Nazis are using its chat room and voice-over-IP options to promote their ideology. Both the Daily Stormer and Andrew Auernheimer have Steam chat rooms. AtomWaffen too.
And there’s also a problem with Steam chat forums that glorify school shooters. Yep. 173 such groups glorifying school shootings according to one count.
And Steam isn’t the only popular gaming app that this neo-Nazi problem. Discord, another very popular app for gamers, also appears to have a number of chat rooms run by neo-Nazis. The Germanic Reconquista group of German neo-Nazis who were training people how to game Youtube’s algorithms did that training using Discord. And, again, Steam and Discord are both quite popular.
So while school shootings like the shooting in Parkland, Florida, inevitably raise difficult questions over the role violent video games may have played in pushing the shooter towards such an act, it seems like the question over whether or not there’s a problem with video gaming chat apps promoting school shootings is a pretty simple question. Yes, there is indeed a problem. Specifically, the 173+ popular video game chat forums on Steam that glorify school shooters are indeed part of the school shooting problem. A school shooting problem that is part of the much larger problem of psychologically vulnerable people succumbing to violent hateful ideologies in general which is also being promoted over these popular chat apps:
“A leading gaming app that is popular with adherents of the neo-Nazi wing of the alt-right movement has at least 173 groups dedicated to the glorification of school shootings, according to a report published last week by Reveal News. Separately, dozens of neo-Nazi groups have cultivated active communities on the app.”
At least 173 groups dedicated to the glorification of school shootings. And that’s just on Steam. When we’re wondering about cultural influences that might push someone to commit such an act, the various online forums glorifying past school shooters seem like a pretty clear cultural culprit. And each of these forums typically have 30–200 members:
“Some of them allude to “future” school shootings yet to take place and are filled with racist language”
Recall the questions surrounding Nikolas Cruz and whether or not he was in contact with the “Republic of Florida” local neo-Nazi group. Also recall the reports that Republic of Florida leader Jordan Jereb was talking on a neo-Nazi chat forum, Gab, about how to set up “lone wolf” acts. So here’s were seeing posts in these Steam school shooter chat rooms filled with racist language where people talk about future school shootings. Might posting messages like that be part of a neo-Nazi technique for inspiring “lone wolves” that Jereb was talking about? Hopefully somebody is looking into that.
Whether or not these school shooter forums are being set up and seeded by neo-Nazis, it’s pretty clear that the psychologically vulnerable people reading those forums are going to have plenty of other neo-Nazi forums they’re getting directed to within the Steam chatroom ecosystem. And that might even include the chat room set up by Andrew “weev” Auernheimer where they discuss whether or not games portray Hitler in a positive light. Or the chatroom set up by the Daily Stormer:
And even AtomWaffen had a group, until it was removed by Steam earlier this month. So Daily Stormer and Auernhiemer appear to have not crossed whatever line triggers the removal of a chat group:
And Steam’s video gaming chatrooms are merely one of the video gaming chatroom ecosystems with a neo-Nazi presence. There’s also the popular Discord gaming communications app. And fortunately someone decided to leak months of the chat logs from the private Discord forum for Patriot Front, the neo-Nzi group that recent emerged as a splinter from Vanguard America after Vanguard America become associated with Alex Field, the driver who killed Heather Heyer at Charlottesville:
“Discord told Newsweek in a statement that the company is still trying to purge groups like Patriot Front from its app.”
Discord is “still trying to purge groups like Patriot Front from its app.” Which is another way of saying that it hasn’t actually purged the group from its app. And as a particularly disturbing report the Daily Beast recent made clear, one reason Discord might have so much trouble purging Patriot Front from its app is because it has difficulty purging any group from its app including groups that promote rape, the trading of revenge porn, and child pornography. Because people just make new Discord IDs to get around the ban and new forums after they get banned. In other words, all these extremist groups are on Discord because Discord is set up to make it very hard to actually kick them off.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t risks for these groups when they use Discord, and that includes the possibility that their private chat logs might get leaked, like what happened to Patriot Front when its chat logs from May 2017 to September 2017 were leaked to Unicorn Front. And this is actually a pretty big risk of using these forums as recruitment tools because the risk of leaking is always there. When those kinds of private neo-Nazi chat logs get leaked, the world gets reminded once again that Nazis really do plot real-world nightmares.
And as the following Unicorn Riot report on those chat logs point out, in the case of Patriot Front, their real-world nightmare goals include an “ideal society” where “ethnostate rape gangs” are allowed to rape women who aren’t living according to “traditional values.” The only rule is that the rape gang could only rape a woman of the same race (because inter-racial ethnostate rape gangs would be wrong, you see). Given that the ‘Alt Right’ has focused on using the internet to promote a less-Nazi-ish public face for Nazism, it’s always a big set back for the ‘Alt Right’ when the internet is also used to reveal that their ideal society really does involve a nightmare future like ethnostate rape gangs:
“Recorded conversations between members show an obsession with firearms, a non-stop tirade of racist, sexist and otherwise abusive language, and a desire to take action in the real world. Patriot Front members are also told that raping women is acceptable, “as long as you’re raping, like, people in your own race” and describe how in their ideal society, “ethnostate rape gangs” would be allowed to freely target unmarried white women who did not adhere to “traditional values.” Discord users in the server repeatedly share pictures of themselves, wrestling, boxing, sparring, and shooting, which they casually refer to as “violence training.””
Raping women is acceptable, “as long as you’re raping, like, people in your own race”. That’s what people are taught in the private Patriot Front forums. Now we know thanks to the leaked chat logs from May to September 2017. It’s it’s a period that happens to cover Charlottesville and the creation of the the Patriot Front splinter group out of Vanguard America as a consequence of the negative fallout from the fact that Alex Fields, the neo-Nazi driver at Charlottesville who ran over Heather Heyer, was seen marching with Vanguard America members there. The association with Fields was seen as a “PR Nightmare”, which is pretty ironic consider their goals are the create ethnostate rape gangs. But that’s the game the ‘Alt Right’ is playing: put forth a public face that doesn’t talk about things like ethnostate rape gangs in order to recruit people into ideology where ethnostate rape gangs and running over people like Heather Heyer are the logical conclusions of the violent totalitarian worldviews openly shared on these neo-Nazi private chat forums:
And that “PR nightmare” resulted Patriot Front, which boasts of getting more “activism” done with just half of Vanguard America’s size. Which would put Patriot Front at about 125 people:
And Vanguard America is a member of the Nationalist Front coalition that includes the League of the South and the National Socialism Movement while Patriot Front acts as security for Richard Spencer events. It’s a reminder that the Richard Spencer college tour really is a tour to normalize the kind of worldview that would justify ethnostate rape gangs:
And it’s the extreme nature of what these groups are working towards that makes their focus on public image both ironic and understandable. And that also appeared to be part of why the Patriotic Front split from Vanguard America: Vanguard America has an openly national socialistic approach (they are open Nazis) while Patriotic Front prefers to frame things from a more traditional ‘patriot’ sense:
And Patriotic Front just recruit online. It’s apparently quite enthusiastic about leaving flyers on college campuses and elsewhere:
And notice how their outreach also includes a Patriotic Front member learning from Andrew Auernheimer how to hack printers and this person claimed he and Auernheimer remotely hacked 29,000 printers and made them spit out anti-semitic flyers. And that did happen, back in 2016. Auernheimer blogged about it. It’s a reminder that, while Auernheimer is likely one of the most talented neo-Nazi hackers out there, he’s far from the only neo-Nazi hacker. Especially if he’s teaching other neo-Nazis how to be hackers:
And then we discover that one Patriot Front member was the founding member of the College Republicans chapter at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Because of course:
Oh, and we learn that Patriot Front has repeatedly engage in disinformation campaigns in the aftermath of recent mass shootings. In particular, they spread the rumors that Steven Paddock, the Vegas shooter, and Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter, were members of antifa. Given the disinformation about Nikolas Cruz that we saw emanating from the far right, it’s hard to avoid the disturbing conclusion that disinformation from groups like Patriot Front following mass shooting is going to be permanent feature of American society. Which is extra disturbing since it involves mass shootings also being permanent feature of American society. But here we are:
This whole disturbing story about the use of video gaming chat apps to promote extremism and potentially cultivate “lone wolf” school shooters by glorifying school shooters in Nazi-infested chat rooms, and the subsequent leaking of some of the chat logs from some of these private neo-Nazi forums, all highlights how the internet is a double-edged sword for extremist movements, whether they’re neo-Nazis or ISIS.
On the one hand, the internet makes it easier than ever for these kinds of groups spread their messages and ideologies while simultaneously putting forward a ‘nice’ public face when desired. Especially on Youtube. And the internet makes it easier than ever for active neo-Nazi group members to all communicate and coordinate, potentially anonymously.
But on the other hand, the internet makes it easier than ever for everyone else to discover what groups like this are actually plotting. Because extremists are going to have to openly talk about their extremism at some point over the internet and things on the internet get leaked. And in this case those leaks mean the world gets reminder that Nazis want nightmare totalitarianism that involves things like “ethnostate rape gangs”.
The internet giveth and the internet taketh away when it comes to the far right’s information warfare strategies. Although mostly giveth since the internet is still invaluable for recruitment and it’s not like it’s a revelation to learn Nazis a plotting Nazi-like schemes.
It’s also all one big reason why we shouldn’t be surprised when the next school shooter is a Nazi.
House Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement announcement raises a number of questions about the GOP’s prospects for maintaining control of the House of Representatives across the US. The GOP’s prospects in the House were already looking pretty ominous in the upcoming mid-terms. And that’s why it was such an exceptionally ominous sign for Ryan to announce his retirement: things were already looking bad for the GOP so it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Paul Ryan read those awful tea leaves and concluded that he was likely to lose his speakership and decided to retire instead. And now his seat is up for grabs and the Democrats have a much better chance of winning it. In other words, Paul Ryan move to extricate himself out the GOP’s bad situation has made the GOP’s bad situation worse.
And as the following article notes, there’s another way the Ryan retirement makes the GOP’s bad situation worse, although it’s a somewhat different, albeit related, bad situation: the GOP’s bad situation of increasingly being the party of white supremacy and neo-Nazis.
Yep, while there’s undoubtedly going to be a number of elected GOP officials in Wisconsin who are considering jumping into the primary race for Ryan’s seat, it turns out that Ryan already had a pair of primary opponents. And the leading opponents, Paul Nehlen, is quickly becoming one of the most prominant open white supremacist neo-Nazis in American politics and he’s set to only get more prominent thanks to Paul Ryan’s sudden retirement:
“House Speaker Paul Ryan’s decision to retire from office makes, for the moment, an anti-Semitic white nationalist who has embraced the so-called Alt Right the Republican frontrunner in Wisconsin’s first congressional district.”
Yep, Paul Nehlen is, for the moment, the Republican frontrunner for the nomination in Paul Ryan’s district. Granted, that’s probably not going to last long after other people jump into the race. But for now he really is the effective frontrunner. And as the GOP frontrunner in Paul Ryan’s district that makes Paul Nehlen the effective frontrunner in the race to be the most prominent white nationalist in U.S. politics today (not counting Donald Trump, of course):
So how is Nehlen going to exploit this sudden, if temporary, frontrunner status? Well, based on what we know about Nehlen he’s presumably going to attack the Jews:
And then he’ll probably post a bunch of tweets that are so racist that he’ll get kicked off of whatever social media platforms he hasn’t been kicked off of yet:
And then Nehlen will probably use his sudden prominence to promote articles from places like the Daily Stormer to attack the Jews some more:
Finally, Nehlen will probably say or do something so outrageous that even his fellow white nationalists distance themselves from him:
And that’s what we should probably expect from the current frontrunner in the GOP primary for Paul Ryan’s seat. Because that’s what he’s been doing all along.
So how long should we expect Nehlen to retain his frontrunner status in the GOP primary for Paul Ryan’s seat? Presumably until one of the more mainstream candidates enters the race, at which point Nehlen will no longer be the most prominent Republican in this particular primary race.
That, of course, assumes he doesn’t end up winning the nomination. This is Trump’s GOP we’re talking about, after all.
Here’s a pair of articles that provide some important context to the van attack in Toronto by a suicidal man who drove over pedestrians and then shouted at the police to shoot him: the 25 year old van driver, Alek Minassian, posted a tribute on Facebook minutes before the attack to Elliot Rodger, who went on a 2014 shooting rampage in 2014 targeting women, and announced the beginning of the “Incel revolution”. His post also referenced 4chan:“Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger.” Both Rodger, and Minassian, were self-described “incels” (involuntary celibates).
And as we’re going to see, the incel movement is one element of a hyper-misogynistic sub-culture for men that has become a fertile recruiting ground for the ‘Alt Right’ and neo-Nazis. Basically, sexually frustrated come to these online communities looking for sympathy and like-minded friends end up getting turned into neo-Nazis convinced that feminism is part of a grand ‘cultural marxist’ plot to suppress white males.
So, first, let’s take a look at how the ‘incel’ movement is part of this larger hyper-misogynistic “manosphere” sub-culture and how, when you look past the pervasive sexual frustration on the surface of the ‘incel’ movement, you’ll find an ideology that is fundamentally both nihilistic and authoritarian in nature:
“Why have the authorities been so fast to reject the idea of terrorism (taking as read that this may change; the tragedy is very fresh)? Shortly before the attack, a post appeared on the suspect’s Facebook profile, hailing the commencement of the “Incel Rebellion”, including the line “Private (Recruit) … Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161.” (“4chan is the main organising platform for the ‘alt-right’,” explains Mike Wendling, the author of Alt-Right: from 4Chan to the White House.)”
Yep, a shout out to 4Chan and the “Incel Rebellion”. That give us an idea of the motive.
And yet, as we saw, there was a strong hesitancy to call this an act of terrorism:
“There are no numbers on how many adherents this doctrine has, or how extreme they are, “but it’s not one tiny bit of Reddit” says Wendling. “It’s big. It’s substantial. It’s a movement that has tens of thousands of people who visit these boards, these sub-Reddits, that are safe places for them.””
Tens of thousands of “incels”, mutually consoling each other online by jointly hating the modern world.
And while the hesitancy to call this attack an act of terror no doubt has something to do with a general hesitancy to called far right violent acts by non-Muslims terrorism in the West, the general lack of appreciation for how much overlap there is between the “incel” movement and broader ‘Alt Right’ community likely also plays a role. But the “incel” movement is indeed an ideology. Because it’s basically the ‘Alt Right’ worldview, but with a particular focus on demonizing women for not wanting to sleep with these guys:
And that’s overlap with the ‘Alt Right’ is why the Southern Poverty Law Center declared Elliot Rodger to be the first ‘Alt Right’ terrorist back in 2014. A terrorist who was responding to the perception that society was rigged against him and others like him because he could find women who would sleep with him:
And as we should expect, Jordan Peterson, who’s videos are being used by a the far right to recruit depressed people, is popular with this crowd:
So let’s take a closer look at how misogyny has become one of the key recruitment elements for converted sexually frusted young men into Alt Right neo-Nazis who are convinced that they are victims of a “cultural marxist” plot to oppress white males:
“But one foundational aspect of the alt-right’s various belief systems has been significantly downplayed following the election — even though it may be the key to understanding the movement’s racist, white nationalist agenda. While it’s true that the movement is most frequently described in terms of the self-stated, explicit white supremacy that defines many of its corners, for many of its members, the gateway drug that led them to join the alt-right in the first place wasn’t racist rhetoric but rather sexism: extreme misogyny evolving from male bonding gone haywire.”
Misogyny: it’s a potent gateway drug. And a gateway drug that starts off as just men socializing with each other on these kinds of “manosphere” online boards:
“Mohutsiwa’s tweetstorm elucidates an important, generally overlooked point: Most white men who become radicalized into the alt-right start out in search of some like-minded friends.”
And these online communities of sexually frustrated young men veering into misogyny are the perfect recruitment grounds for the ‘Alt Right’, because while many of the sub-cultures on the ‘Alt Right’ are often at odds with each other, they all share some core beliefs and a sense that white males are victimized and oppressed by society is one of those core beliefs:
So of course this core belief in the oppossion of white males includes a core belief that feminism is a fundamentally malevolent force runing society. The “the life-altering “truth” that feminism has ruined modern society for everyone (but especially for men)” is treated as a kind of political religion:
And this fear and loathing of feminism and “social justice warriors” typically gets wrapped into the general term of “cultural marxism”, which is basically the same term Hitler used when describing what he described as the insidious effect Jews on have society:
“In fact, the term “cultural Marxism” is descended from actual Nazi propaganda — a distrust of modernism and the spread of non-Germanic culture that Hitler called “cultural Bolshevism.” In his book A History of Nazi Germany: 1919–1945, historian Joseph W. Bendersky notes that the phrase was code for the cultural purging that preceded the Holocaust. “Hitler referred to ‘cultural Bolshevism’ as a disease that would weaken the Germans and leave them prey to the Jews,” Bendersky writes. “A moral struggle was underway, and the outcome could determine the survival of the race.””
And as a result of this successful infiltration and propagandizing of these online communities of sexually frustrated men, we have a situation where the many men who were drawn to these communities because they wanted to either learn how to pick up women or share their frustrations find end up fighting the Alt Right’s broader culture war:
And that’s all a big reason why the attack in Toronto really was basically a terrorist attack. A neo-Nazi terrorist attack cloaked as a “Incel Rebellion”.
And here we go again: On the heels of nominating open Nazi Arthur Jones in Illinois’s Third Congressional District, it looks like the GOP is at risk of nominating another neo-Nazi. This time it’s for California’s Senate race. For real.
This is thanks, in part, to California’s “Jungle” primary system, where everyone from all parties participate in a single primary and the top two candidates have a runoff. But also thanks to the shockingly high support a Nazi candidate is getting in a race with 10 other GOP candidates. According to a recent poll conducted by local ABC News affiliates along with the polling company Survey USA, Dianne Feinstein is in the lead with 39 percent. And open Nazi Patrick Little is polling at 18 percent, putting him in second place a month away from the June 5th runoff vote:
““I cannot claim to have familiarized myself with the mechanics of that race well enough to say,” Cantwell said. “However, I have my doubts that Holocaust revisionism polls well amongst Californians of any party.””
Christopher Cantwell, an open admirer of Hitler, has his doubts about Patrick Little’s chances to win the GOP primary. And yet, as we just saw, the most recent polls put Little ahead of the rest of the Republican candidates. All ten of them. At 18 percent in the polls, Little is ten points ahead of his next rival:
And Little isn’t your standard Alt Right figure. He’s the kind of the neo-Nazi that think the Daily Stormer is “too Jewish” and calls for make “counter-semitism central to all aims of the state”:
And, of course, Little isn’t alone in being an open Nazi prominently running in a GOP primary this year. In addition to Arthur Jones there’s Paul Nehlen, feted as an anti-establishment hero by Breitbart in 2016, dropping the mask and running as an open neo-Nazi this year. Even Richard Spencer disapproves of the guy, primarily because he’s too open about his views:
“It’s unclear whether or not Little, whose political ambitions have so far received less scrutiny than Nehlen’s, will be similarly disavowed.”
Yep, it’s still unclear whether or not the Little will be similarly disavowed. Because he’s still leading the GOP pack and second place overall making his the current front runner to run against Diane Feinstein. At least according to that poll. This is where we are.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this is that, as University of California political science professor Matt Barreto points out, Little doesn’t appear to have any sort of visible campaign to speak of. He’s winning the GOP race without a visible campaign. That’s where the California GOP is these days:
But as we saw, he is quite active on Gab, the Alt Right social media platform. So he does have a campaign to speak of, it’s just a campaign largely limited to on the Alt Right’s social media platform. Although Gab is reportedly not actually that active and largely a digital ghost town these days, so it seems like Patrick Little’s support from Gab would be fairly limited. And yet he’s getting support somehow with no visible campaign. He’s an open Nazi running a successful stealth campaign. This is also where we are.
There’s no shortage of reasons to assume the the big North Korean denuclearization summit won’t result in anything close to denuclearization. But perhaps the biggest reason to assume it won’t result in any sort of diplomatic breakthrough is Trump. Or rather, Trump being Trump.
At the same time, there’s no shortage of reasons to hope that the summit succeeds. Even if that means Trump gets a big political victory. Yes, if there is a breakthrough it will almost certainly happen despite Trump and be largely due to the efforts of the new South Korean Moon government. But a breakthrough would still be used to validate Trump’s schizo-bullying diplomatic style which would be unfortunate, just not so unfortunate that it doesn’t make a breakthrough worth it. Net, we should overwhelmingly hope for some sort of breakthrough.
So in the hopes there is a real breakthrough and Trump doesn’t somehow screw this up, it’s worth noting that Trump does bring some unusual qualities to this summit that could come in handy for bridging the divide. How so? Well, it’s worth keeping in mind that North Korea’s government facing an existential paradox: the North Korean governments wants to engage the world as an equal platform, but it can’t actually engage the world as equals without exposing it’s people to it and the greatest threat to the North Korean regime is unfiltered information about the rest of the world.
And even if the North Korean government never plans on voluntarily letting their people talk to the rest of the world, they have to be terrified that the civilians will someday get unfiltered internet access somehow. imagine devices with satellite internet services getting dropped into the country. That could happen someday. So you have to imagine that the North Korean government is constantly thinking about how to safely deflate it’s reality-bubble if that ever becomes necessary. Reality is literally an existential threat for Kim’s government.
Conveniently, reality is also a threat to Trump. And one of those realities is that he’s had almost nothing to do with North and South Korea reaching this point and his antics on the topic have been generally unhelpful. It’s just one example of the number of qualities the Trump and Kim have in common that should give us hope that maybe the two really might hit it off. There’s a buddy comedy waiting to happen here. For real.
Beyond that, it’s possibly a great and rare opportunity for Kim to actually open North Korea up to the rest of the world. How so? Well, now that America has sort of debased itself by electing Trump. Plus, far right ideologies is sweeping Europe. And this low point for the West kind of creates a great moment for the North Korean government to finally let their people see the world. It has to happen some day, why not today’s Trumpian dystopia. It’s hard to envision a better time for the Kim regime to compare itself to the rest of the world.
So perhaps Trump and Kim and help each other with their reality bubble issues be striking a deal: Peace and denuclearization and in exchange Trump will say really nice things about Kim to the North Korean people as part of a plan to cushion the psychological blow when the North Koreans get access to information about the outside world and learn that their government has been holding them in an Orwellian trap. Trump, being a walking Orwellian trap himself, is kind of perfect for this. The degrading chaos of Trump is the perfect environment for Kim to make a big fateful move and show his people the world.
But as the following articles make clear, Trump brings a certain critical deal-sweetener. The kind of sweetener that a god king like Kim would drool over: It turns out Trump is a bit of a god king himself. At least for a substantial and growing portion of the American evangelical Christian community. And this is exactly the kind of bandwagon Kim could jump onboard because it turns out Trump has found a theocratic angle where he can be as un-Christian (in the good sense) as possible and it doesn’t matter he’s still God’s vessel. Because Trump is apparently like Cyrus the Great, the Persian King who freed the Jews in Babylon. So, because Cyrus wasn’t Jewish, Trump doesn’t have to act like a Christian. That’s the gig. It’s perfect for Kim.
Plus, South Korea’s conservative evangelical Christian community is both culturally significant and apparently includes a large number of churches that also preach that Trump is God’s man. So how about Trump and his team of evangelical enablers/annointers offered Kim dibs on some Bible prophecy goodness as part of a package deal for opening up North Korea to the world. How can Kim resist? Who knows what kind of new evangelical fans he might get.
Trump may not be good at being president, but that might make him the perfect president for a historic deal with Kim Jong Un, especially if it was deal that led to a significant opening of North Korean society to the world. A thug clown president run the US and most of the West is going fascist. It’s the perfect moment for Kim to let his people meet the world. Kim, the the living god, and Trump, the prophet:
““The Bible says, ‘Do not touch my anointed, but especially my prophets,’” Taylor added. “I believe Trump is a type of prophet, he’s a political prophet, and I said from day one, you had better be careful what you say about this man because you are touching God’s anointed … He’s an anointed spiritual machine.””
“He’s an anointed spiritual machine.” That’s Trump. An annointed spiritual machine. According to far right conspiracy theorist/self-declared prophet Mark Taylor. And his prophecy is about to get a lot more exposure in the Christian evangelical community now that Liberty Univerity, run by Trump booster Jerry Falwell, Jr., is making his Trump prophecy into a movie:
And as the following article points out, the upcoming Liberty University movie about Mark Taylor’s Trump prophecy isn’t simply a documentary. It’s intentionally infused with a strong sense of patriotism. A man who embodies God and country. It’s right up Kim’s ally:
“When Trump was elected president in 2016, Taylor penned a book titled “The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story Of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow… And What He Says Is Coming Next” and quickly made a name for himself as a modem-day prophet and radical conspiracy theorist.”
“The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story Of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow… And What He Says Is Coming Next.” It’s quite a title. Sounds riveting. The movie adaptation will no doubt be riveting too:
““I really want it to be a patriotic, a God and country message that we can understand,” Eldridge said.”
God and country. And Trump. That’s the message.
But it’s not just Mark Taylor making these prophetic proclaimations and it’s not just Liberty University endorsing it. As the following article makes alarmingly clear, the belief that Trump is annointed by God is widespread among American evangelicals:
“Some want to abandon him, he says. Others want to stand with him. But others, he says, are wondering: Does Trump have a “biblical mandate” to become president?”
Does Trump have a “biblical mandate” to become president? That’s the question many evangelical Christians in America are unfortunately asking themselves. Specifically, is Trump a new Cyrus the Great, the historical Persian king who conquered Babylon in the sixth century BC. Cyrus ended the Babylonian captivity and allowed captive Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. Thus, Cyrus the Great is seen as a non-Jewish figure who was acting as an agent of God. Same with Trump increasingly:
“Evangelical thinker Lance Wallnau then gives Mitchell his take: Trump is a “modern-day Cyrus,” an ancient Persian king chosen by God to “navigate in chaos.””
Trump as Chaos Navigator in Chief. Wonderful. And the fact that he creates half the chaos himself is presumably seen as divinely directed too.
But it’s not limited to American evangelicals. Look who is also getting on board the ‘Trump is Cyrus’ meme: Benjamin Netanyahu:
So this Cyrus-Trump comparison, coupled with the fact that Cyrus wasn’t Jewish but still an agent of God, basically allows Trump to behave in a most un-Christ-like manner and still be seen as an of God by a shockingly large number of evangelical Christians in America. That sure sounds like the kind of vibe Kim Jong Un would like to glom onto if his cult is going to join the world community:
And note how Trump himself is encouraging this. That’s also a useful service he can offer Kim: if he denuclearizes Trump can help encourage his status as a Biblical figure born again. Trump can even offer the service of referencing fake quotes. That should be super useful for Kim:
And these researchers of American evangelicalism haven’t seen this same kind of treatment by the American evangelical community of an American president in the past. Trump and his evangelical backers can offer Kim Jong Un a rare opportunity to get in on whatever weird scary reactionary theocratic malleability situation going on in the right-wing Christian evangelical community:
And that creates the perfect dynamic for Kim Jong Un to ‘thread the needle’ as he transitions from unchallenged living god king of an isolated North Korea into a challenged god king of a North Korea that gets introduced to the rest of the world. There’s going to be be quite a few shocks in store for North Korean society once they eventually get to see the rest of the world without the government filter. It has to happen someday and some serious needle threading is going to be required. Having Kim Jong Un get annointed as some sort of born again Biblical figure by Trump and the American evangelicals could be one way to thread that needle. Maybe they could come up with some sort of Biblical parallel to denuclearization that involves a Bliblical pledge not to attack a nation that disarms. It would be a novel, if disturbing and unfortunate, way to create the kind of security guarantee Kim would need for real denuclearization:
Another selling point Trump has in these negotiations is that America is unusually well equipped to broker a deal that confers upon Kim some sort of Biblical significance: American history is infused with narratives of divine intervention in politics. In other words, the pumps for theocratic Christian nationalist creativity have been thoroughly primed in America. There’s got to be some sort of Bible verse that makes Kim look decent in exchange for denuclearization and peace. The US Christian community is good at this stuff:
And Trump’s team and supporters at places like Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network (CBN) appear to be fully on board with quietly promoting this ‘Trump is Cyrus’ meme. It’s a group leadership effort:
“Pay no attention to the man in front of the curtain, they imply. The real work is being done by his evangelical influencers behind the scenes”
Trump as an ungodly agent of God who is giving cover for his evangelical influencers to do God’s work behind the scenes. That appears to be be the messages his army of evangelical leader surrogates are sending. It’s also a great recipe for a theocracy. It’s perfect for Kim’s situation.
Trafficking in prophecy obviously isn’t an ideal way to do major foreign policy, but given that Trump is president this is more of a ‘making lemonade’ kind of thing: If the US has to go through this dark period of Trump getting annointed a Biblical figure by a powerful faction of the American Christian community we might as well try to get something good out of it. Like denuclearization. Plus, Kim will have an incentive to keep doing more and more peaceful things to bolster his prophetic status.
If Trump and Kim can just figure out which Biblical figure Kim vaguely resembles we can get the denuclearization under way. Kim will get a new divine leader status that will be super useful for both domestic and foreign propaganda and Trump will get a major foreign policy victory and bolster his prophetic status. And the world gets denuclearization. Winning all around. If you ignore the existential damage catering to authoritarian cults does to everything and the damage to the done by America being taught stupid lessons about the virtues of Trump’s schizo-bully diplomacy.
So let’s hope for some of breakthrough in the upcoming summit. Maybe Trump, being a wannabe authoritarian eager to please other authoritarians, will have some sort of authoritarian-to-authoritarian buddy thing going on with Kim (finally, someone else who understands them). And if that’s what it takes for a major breakthrough, so be it. It’s well worth it. Maybe this can be Trump’s thing. Everybody finds one way to do good. Hopefully that’s Trump’s good deed thing. Trump the Dictator Whisperer.
Can Kim Jong Un also be a Cyrus-like figure or is only one allowed? That seems like something Pat Robertson should figure out soon. Trump could invite all sorts of dictators into a Cyrus club. They could do a reality show.
Better yet, Moon Jai-In’s peace push will succeed and none of this will be necessary. But if Trump and his network of evangelical leaders can offer some sort of prophetic role for Kim that really could be a deal sweetener. Just was a god king needs as he fights for the world’s acceptance. If Trump Tower Pyongyang ends up being part of the deal that’s also ok. Not ideal, but ok.
Remember how it looked at one point like the California GOP might end up nominating Patrick Little, an open neo-Nazi, as its Senate candidate for California? That didn’t end up happening, but that hasn’t stopped the GOP was nominating a Nazi fellow traveler for Senate: Cory Stewart, a candidate deemed even too extreme from the Trump campaign two years ago, just won the Virginia GOP primary for the Senate. And while the National Senate Republican Committee has yet to endorse Stewart, President Trump is already tweeting out his support.
Stewart is known for palling around with Jason Kessler, one of the lead organizers of Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last year. And he almost won the GOP nomination for governor in last year’s race after heavily focusing his campaign on defending Confederate statues. Following the Unite the Right rally and the condemnations some in the Republican party had for the rally organizers, Stewart called them weak Republicans and blamed “half the violence” on the counter-protesters.
And, of course, Stewart is a big fan of Paul Nehlen, the Alt Right candidate running in the Wisconsin primary for Paul Ryan’s seat. He even called Nehlen his personal hero last year during the Virginia women for Trump Inaugural Ball. Or at least he used to be a big fan of Nehlen’s until a little over a week ago when Stewart claimed to have subsequently disavowed Nehlen when asked about his past support by the Washington Post (presumably over Nehlen ‘dropping the mask’ and coming out as an overt neo-Nazi). So that’s the GOP’s Senate candidate in Virginia:
“Stewart won the Republican nomination for Senate in Virginia on Tuesday. A county board member, Stewart almost won the Republican nomination for Virginia governor last year on a campaign of defending Confederate statues. Since then, he’s risen on the back of the alt-right, attending events with an architect of the violent Charlottesville rally and giving money to an anti-Semitic candidate in Wisconsin.”
Yep, the Alt Right’s candidate of choice just won the Virginia primary. And he’s already got Trump’s open endorsement:
Of course, the Trump team isn’t unfamiliar with Stewart. He used to be part of it when it was the Virginia co-chairman of Trump’s campaign (before getting kicked off for attending a protest at the RNC headquarters):
And Stewart isn’t unfamiliar with state-wide bids: He almost won the GOP nomination for governor last year, having based on campaign on (surprise, surprise) protecting Confederate statues:
And that near-win in last year’s GOP primary, based on a campaign focused on Confederate statues, happened after Stewart had already started hanging out with ‘Alt Right’ personality Jason Kessler, who helped organize the Unite the Right rally:
And then after the violence at Charlottesville last year, Stewart decries the GOP’s condemnation of the far right marchers and tries to assert that the counter-protesters deserve blame for “half the violence”:
And, of course, Stewart couldn’t say enough nice things about Paul Nehlen...until last week when he belated disavowed him:
The guy who only got around to disavowing Paul Nehlen a week ago was just nominated by Virginia’s Republicans for the US Senate. Keep in mind that even Steve Bannon and Breitbart disavowed Nehlen back in December for being too overtly neo-Nazi-ish so Stewart’s disavowal is belated even by Alt Right standards.
And notice how before Nehlen drops the mask he’s Stewart’s personal hero, but after he drops mask even Stewart has to eventually disown him. There’s a clear lesson there for the Alt Right: As long as you don’t drop the mask entirely and make it impossible for your fellow GOPers to pretend you aren’t obviously a Nazi, like Nehlen did, the sky’s the limit for you in the GOP. Who knows, you could be a Senator someday. Maybe more.
One of the questions endlessly looming over the Trump era of the Republican party is whether or not ‘the line’ is ever going to be crossed. Which line? That nebulous line of indecency. The line that, if crossed by the Trump White House, is so ghastly that elected GOPers decided to openly condemn the White House knowing full well that they will probably be driven from office in retaliation but they do so because it’s not worth with the shame of being publicly complicit. That line. The line that, for the vast majority of GOP officials, has yet to be crossed. The personal integrity ‘line’.
But it’s looking like we just might get an answer that question because a pretty outrageous line is current getting crossed and even some House GOPers are trying to back away from it. It’s the line crossed by the new “zero tolerance” illegal immigration policies the Trump administration put into place back in April that has already led to thousands of children being separated from their parents. There are now so many of these children that the Trump administration has exhausted existing facilities and is actually opening an immigrant child ‘tent city’. ‘The line’ is the sudden arbitrary decision to abuse the children who crossed the US border. Does such a line actually exist for GOP officials? We’ll see.
As the US society is rapidly discovering, the implications of a “zero tolerance” policy towards illegal immigration includes criminal prosecution and jailing of all undocumented immigrants which, in turn, includes the the policy of tearing young children away from parents, potentially indefinitely. Thousands of undocumented children torn away from their parents for potentially years as their parents legal cases are processed. That’s the new policy. And this can include babies, including, in one alleged case, a baby torn away from its mother in the middle of breastfeeding. Worse, there appears to be policy of tricking parents into handing over their children by telling them the kids are going to get a bath and then never returning them. It’s like designed to induce trauma on both parent and child.
That’s the new “zero tolerance” policy Attorney General Jeff Sessions introduced in April. Things are clearly getting ghastly, even by GOP standards. Even the White House is clearly too embarrassed to take ownership of this new policy. At least parts of the White House. Trump is laughably blaming the Democrats for this new policy at the same time Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the new policy with a Bible passage (citing the same Bible passage previously used to justify slavery) and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Hielsen denied there was a policy of separating families at the border at all. As Benjy Sarlin aptly tweeted: “One WH faction seems to be lying about the family policy because they’re trolling (Trump), a separate faction is lying because they’re embarrassed by it (Nielsen), and a third faction is telling the truth because they’re proud of the policy (Sessions, Miller). Result: This.”
As we’re going to see, the Trump White House and its allies are simultaneously making several argument for this policy:
1. Parents and children should be separated purely based on the principle of justice (i.e. the parents are criminals and need to be punished. Period. If that traumatizes some kids it’s the parents fault).
2. Parents and children should separated in order to ‘send a message’ (i.e. if a large number of parents and children are cruelly separated that will discourage others from trying).
3. Parents and children should separated because that’s what’s required by law (this isn’t true but that’s what the White House is telling people) and that the only solution is for the Democrats to agree to change the law as part of the larger Steve Bannon/Stephen Miller-inspired far right immigration reform package that the White House and GOP in congress are keen on passing. A Bannon/Miller immigration overhaul package designed to address white anxieties about non-white immigration leading to a ‘browning of America’ (i.e. the Democrats are holding these kinds hostage by not agreeing to the Bannon/Miller immigration overhaul that would Make America White Again)
So we have justifications for the mass separation of parents and children that fall under the category of ‘extreme justice’ (it’s the law), ‘extreme force’ (look what happens), and ‘extreme negotiation tactics’ (Democrats better accept the Bannon/Miller immigration package if they want the separation to end).
And thus far, that kind of extremism is largely fine with the GOP officials which will probably remain the case as long as these policies remain popular with the GOP base. It’s clear that a large swath of the GOP base fundamentally thinks of the US as a country that should be run by white people for white people and is deeply anxious about the ‘browning’ of America. It’s the meta-sentiment behind much of the ‘white nationalism’ that has becoming the defining feature of Trumpian ‘populism’. It’s a sentiment that is expressed in its most extreme (extremely stupid) form as fearmongering about ‘white genocide’. Non-whites are fundamentally unable to assimilate into ‘American society’ and are also out breeding whites and planning on taking over, subjugating whites, and eventually exterminating them. That’s the meta-fear. Colonialism in reverse. It’s also profound projection when it’s neo-Nazis expressing the fear.
And instead of trying focusing these fears on things like overpopulation in general and the need for the whole world to prioritize the elimination of global poverty and the traditional disempowerment of women (two key sources of higher birth rates of largely non-white poor countries that has the white nationalist so freaked out), these white nationalist movements are focused on radically changing US immigration policy back to when it was literally designed to ‘keep America white’. That’s the Bannon/Miller strategy that was behind the move to hold the DACA kids hostage and try to force the Democrats into backing the Bannon/Miller immigration overhaul and that same strategy appears to be in play right now with this new “zero tolerance” policy and the separation of children. Trump’s own words make that clear this child separation is being used as a bargaining chip over an immigration overhaul.
So with US midterms fast approaching it’s going to be interesting to see how many GOPers conclude that this crosses ‘the line’. It’s a risky time for ghastly policies catering to the GOP’s nativist sentiments. Maybe that will fire up the Trump base and help offset anti-Trump sentiments but it seems like the kind of policy that could easily backfire.
And whether or not this GOP policy ends up backfiring probably varies quite a bit across congressional races. Child ‘tent cities’ will be popular in some pro-Trump districts and absolutely toxic in others And that’s all part of why it’s going to be interesting to see whether or not the new “zero tolerance” policy towards undocumented immigration manages to cross that ‘line’. There’s got to be plenty of US House districts where tearing children out of the arms of parents isn’t going to play well. At least let’s hope so.
So we’ll see how much tolerance Trump’s fellow GOPers will have towards this new “zero tolerance” policy towards undocumented families. It will probably depend in large part on how successful Trump himself is at convincing the public that this isn’t actually a Trump White House policy. But as the following article makes clear, while it’s true that the detention of families of undocumented immigrants is US policy that preceded the Trump administration, the recent decision to separate parents from children is very much a Trump administration decision. And the culmination of Stephen Miller’s pet project from the very beginning of the administration:
“Almost immediately after President Trump took office, his administration began weighing what for years had been regarded as the nuclear option in the effort to discourage immigrants from unlawfully entering the United States.”
Yep, the Trump administration is currently in the midst of what had for years been regarded as the “nuclear option”. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly warned this was coming back in March of 2017 when he was still the homeland security secretary. And he explained that it would be done as a deterence:
And note how this appears to be in response to a season spike in illegal immigration levels that always hits in the spring. Trump’s new policy came during that spike. It’s quite a time to trigger the “nuclear option”:
And while Trump himself and others inside the administration are uneasy about going through with this, Stephen Miller remains convinced that mass child separation is both good politics and good policy:
And as Obama’s homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, points out, the Obama administation’s had to deal with mass flows of Central and South American children coming in unaccompanied by parents along with the regular seasonal flows of families seeking asylum too. Especially during these seasonal spikes. And when Obama’s team tried to deter those mass flows of Central and South American asylum seakers — by implementing a harsh policy of detaining families by or unparented children in facilities for potentially long periods of time and making it clear in messaging campaigns in those countries that such policies were in place — the effect was just temporary as Johnson points out. The people Trump is using the “nuclear option” on now is also evidence of the temporary effects. So the policy started in April of separating children is, in part, an attempt at deterence by escalating penalties beyond the already pretty harsh penalties Obama had in place. So when Trump blames Obama and the Democrats for his policies, in way he’s correct in the sense that his policies are an escalation for the Democrats’ already very harsh penalties. Intentionally separating families to be extra mean is the new is the escalated deterrance:
And Obama’s policies of potentially indefinitely detaining families lost a legal challenge for being too harsh. The 1997 Flores settlement limited the time unaccompanied children could be held to 20 days and in 2016 a federal judge ruled that the Flores settlement applied to asylum-seeking families as well. So when Trump laughably tries to blame his new child separation policies on Democrats, it’s worth recalling how the Obama adminstration allowed for the indefinite detainment of families and was only prevented by the courts:
“Before long, the Obama administration would face legal challenges, and be forced to stop detaining families indefinitely.”
That’s a fun fact worth keeping in mind when GOPers claim the Democrats support ‘open borders’. Stephen Miller’s use of the “nuclear option” of child separation is intended to be a punitive escalation from an Obama-era policy of indefinite detainment of families that got struck down by the courts.
It’s also notable how this is one of those instances where the Trump adminstration is legitimately more extreme than the George W. Bush administration. Because on most issues the Trump and Bush adminstrations are largly the same, but on some issues the Trump administration is legitimately more extreme. And this is one of those instances which is made clear by the fact that the Stephen Miller policy is basically the same policy as Bush’s “Operation Streamline” except without the waiver for parents with children. And the Trump administration apparently started talking about “zero tolerance” early on in the administration (recall the reports about Steve Bannon’s immigration ‘gulag’ plans just weeks into the administration). So this April 2018 policy is something they’ve been scheming for a while, and Stephen Miller is one of the chief schemers:
And note the “perverse incentive” Miller wanted to end by implementing a “zero tolerance” policy of detaining everyone and not allowing them out with the expectation that they show up for a court case: Miller didn’t want immigrants claiming “credible fear” of returning home and being released (like with an ankle monitor) while they await their court hearings (i.e. asylum seekers). Miller felt that ‘catching and releasing’ undocumented asylum seekers found by authorities invited abuse of the asylum system and advocated for a policy of releasing no one and housing all undocumented asylum seekers in detention while they await their court hearing. And now children are separated from parents to be extra punitive:
The asylum option for Central And South Americans is a “perverse incentive” and had to be made harshly punitive to ensure it’s not abused. And by limiting access to asylum-seeker status, the Flores ruling that limited detainment to 20 days for families with children is avoided. There’s definitely something perverse about that.
So Miller’s version of “Operation Streamline” relied on on automatically classifying everyone as a federal criminal to ensure they can’t even seek asylum and not allowing any waivers for parents with children, which ensuring that these children would be unaccompanied after their parents are sent to a federal detention center. Asylum is the key ‘loophole’, thanks to the Flores legal decision, that Miller was intent on closing by treating everyone as criminal. “Zero tolerance” means no special treatment for asylum seekers:
And when Trump suddenly ended the DACA program last fall, throwing millions of ‘Dreamers’ into legal limbo, it was Stephen Miller who was recommending that Trump demand legislation that closed what Miller called ‘loopholes encouraging illegal immigrants to come’ (loopholes like asylum) in exchange for legislation that protected the ‘Dreamers’:
So when that legislative hostage taking over the DACA issue was thwarted by the US courts we have a new Miller-inspired plan to use family separation at the new legislative bargaining chip. It’s the same end goal (The Miller/Bannon ‘Make America White Again’ immigration law overhaul) but new hostages. So when you read comments from White House officials about this child separation policy being about “deterrence”, that does indeed appear to be part of the agenda, but don’t forget it’s about legislative hostage taking too. The child separation ends if the Democrats cave on the immigration overhaul demands. That’s the offer the GOP is currently making:
And we have Jeff Sessions citing the Bible to justify this policy. And he cited Romans 13, a Bible passage that was often cited by slave owners to justify slavery. Of course:
So it’s looking like Stephen Miller is chilling providing the direction for this White House’s immigration policy. And that direction centers around redeploying the kids-for-immigration-policy hostage-taking strategy that was deployed with the DACA showdown. The cruel policy will stop only after Democrats agreed to the Bannon/Miller immigration legislation. That’s the overarching strategy at work here, in addition to employing a strategy of overt cruelty towards children as a “deterrence”.
And, again, this is all playing out in the lead up to the US mid-term elections. It’s pretty remarkable. Given the ‘what child separation? Blame the Democrats!’ rhetorical response coming out of the White House it seems like this is recognized by at least some White House strategists as a politically risky move. But Stephen Miller clearly doesn’t see it that way and he’s not the only influential voice pushing this stance. Steve Bannon chimed in over the weekend and, surprise, he’s very supportive of the child separation and completely unapologetic about it. The way Bannon sees it, there’s no need for Trump to “justify” anything. When these parents crossed the border with their kids they broke the law. And breaking the law means they will be prosecuted and the means separation the parents from the children. Period. No justification required. That’s the Bannon view: brain dead, heartless ‘law and order’. And no apologies:
““It’s zero tolerance. I don’t think you have to justify it.””
No apologies. That’s the Bannon stance. And note how Bannon is portraying this policy as what Trump ran on. This is literally keeping a campaign promise:
So from Bannon’s perspective, Trump should be proud of his new child separation policy. That stands in contrast to the messaging coming from top White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, who took a much more conciatory, and deceptive, stance. According to Conway, “Nobody likes” breaking up families, but it’s all the Democrats fault because they haven’t agreed to the GOP ‘Make America White Again’ immigration overhaul package. And then Conway denies that these kids are being held hostage in order to get that overhaul package:
““Nobody likes” breaking up families and “seeing babies ripped from their mothers’ arms,” said Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to the president.”
“Nobody likes” breaking up families and “seeing babies ripped from their mothers’ arms.” And blame the Democrats for it because they haven’t met Trump’s legislative demands. But don’t blame Trump for using the kids as legislative leverage. That’s Kellyanne’s message:
And those denials of using these kids as leverage are happening right in the middle of a GOP immigration overhaul legislative push. But don’t call it hostage-taking:
And note how Steve Bannon is explicitly recommending that the White House NOT find a solution to the DACA issue this year over fears that doing so could alienate Trump’s base because any ‘fix’ for DACA would likely involve a path to citizenship for some of them them (likely in exchange for a ‘Make America White Again’ immigration overhaul if current GOP demands are met). So that gives us a hint of the kind of advice Bannon is giving Trump: holding kids hostage is good politics:
And that all why it’s going to be grimly fascinating to see how this issue plays out. This policy of child separation is clearly morally outrageous, as evidenced by the White House denials of who is at fault or whether or not such a policy even exists. But this policy of child separation is also clearly politically popular with a key segment of Trump’s base, as evidence by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller’s strategy recommendations. It’s a selectively popular moral outrage in the middle of an election year. On some level, selectively popular moral outrages are sort of Trump’s comfort zone. But it’s still a pretty risky comfort zone.
This issue is also a great example of how the far right approach to complex problems leads to wild moral distortions: illegal immigration, like many issues where poverty, crime, and children are all potentially involved, is an issue that should prompt ample amounts of cognitive dissonance. Undocumented immigration is obviously an issue a society is going to want to avoid and somehow address. But it’s also an issue involving the most vulnerable people on the planet: desperately poor migrant parents and their children. So, obviously, whatever policy you come up with to address people breaking immigration law, you don’t want to end up abusing people. Especially desperately vulnerable children.
That’s just morality 101 and yet, as Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway’s spin makes clear, that moral imperative of not abusing these desperate people can be casually swept aside in the face of conflicting moral imperatives like not having entirely unregulated immigration. The meta-moral imperative of coming up with creative solutions that don’t violate the various conflicted moral imperatives of a situation doesn’t appear to be a factor in Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway’s worldview which explains, in part, why far right solutions tend to be so bad. They aren’t real solutions to most problems because they subvert some moral imperatives in the service of other moral imperatives. It’s garbage policy that provides selective solutions by employing selective morality that can be used to justify anything. And, in this case, it’s being used to justify separating young children from parents as both a deterrent and political leverage. It’s a big win for ‘the rule of law’ that comes at the cost of undermining the moral paradigm upon which that law is supposed to be built.
Because that’s what a nation gets when Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are your national moral compass. Instead of creatively coming up with solutions that address all of the various moral imperatives in complex situations (which should be a meta-goal of humanity) we get creative in justifications for grossly immoral actions. Or, a lack of creativity, in some cases. Bannon’s ‘zero tolerance’ for compassion stance wasn’t exactly creative.
Here’s another one of those Trump era stories that is both unprecedented and inevitable given that this is the Trump era: President Trump just call for undocumented immigrants to be expelled from the US without due process. This is despite the fact that the US constitution ensures everyone, citizen or not, is afforded due process.
The ostensible reasoning for dropping due process is that there aren’t enough judges to process all of the cases in a timely manner, exacerbating the detention ongoing crisis. But at the same time we have Trump rejecting calls for more judges to process these cases. So there’s clearly a desire to avoid even processing of these cases. Why is that?
Well, we already have one very big clue as to why the Trump administration would like to skip due process and just deport all of these people: no due process means no asylum.
Don’t forget that Stephen Miller, the white nationalist architect of the child separation policy, has already made it very clear that he views asylum claims as some sort of ‘loophole’ that needs to be close. And he’s already made it clear that the “zero tolerance” policy that treats ALL adult undocumented immigrants as criminals — with the side-effect of forced child separations — was intended to be a deterrent in order to discourage people, especially asylum seekers, from making the trip to the US at all.
From the Stephen Miller (and Steve Bannon) perspective, stopping asylum seekers is a critical goal. And the strategy for achieving it is being accomplished by claiming that they aren’t actually people deserving of asylum (they’re all ‘cheating the system’) while simultaneously trying to preventing them claiming asylum in the first place, with the child separation policy designed as a deterrent to make people too scared even try and the trip to the US (yes, that would be a child abuse policy as a deterrent). And as the following article makes clear, ending due process is going to end a lot of asylum claims:
“President Donald Trump on Sunday proposed violating U.S. and international law by deporting “people [who] invade our Country,” presumably referring to undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers, without affording them their Due Process rights.”
The undocumented immigrants are “invaders” who shouldn’t be afforded due process. That’s how President Trump is now framing this issue. Via tweet, of course:
And this call to end due process is, of course, unconstitutional since every person in the United States is supposed to be given due process regardless of immigration status. Because that’s where we are:
And notice the ongoing focus on stopping people from claiming asylum. Trump literally called immigration lawyers “bad people” because they advise clients what to say during court hearings over their asylum claims:
And while it is the case that there are rules in place for ‘expedited removals’ were undocumented people can be deported without seeing an immigration judge, that doesn’t apply to people claiming asylum. They still need to have a court hearing which, again, is why undermining the ability for people to claim asylum is a stop priority of this administration:
We also have reports that border officials are telling asylum seekers that their asylum claims ‘cannot be processed at this time’ and border officials are reportedly standing directly on the US-Mexican border line for the purpose of preventing people crossing from going through the steps of making an asylum claim. Which, again, is happening at the same time Trump rejected more judges for these cases. Because stopping asylum is the end goal here:
It’s also worth keeping in mind that limiting or ending the asylum system is generically a very important goal for the global far right. Why? Because they are always trying to throw the world into conflict, chaos, and hate-fueled division.
Let’s also not forget that it’s very possible that shutting down the asylum system could have an additional urgency from some sort of Trumpian plan for war in Latin America. For instance, Rex Tillerson talked up a military coup in Venezuela back in February when he was still Secretary of State. What kind of refugee situation might emerge if Venezuela experiences a sudden regime change? And how many crisis situations might Trump’s foreign policy team have in mind for south of the border?
And the far right in the West have to be acutely aware of the reality that the climate change their policies are exacerbating is inevitably going to create millions of climate refugees in coming decades. The destruction and there’s no way the far right is going to want to deal with those refugees compassionately. So sabotaging the asylum system is a long-term imperative if the far right is going to succeed at sabotages efforts to mitigate climate change without dealing with waves of refugees.
So that’s the latest update on the US immigration crisis. It’s a real crisis. It started off as the collection of individual humanitarian crises that drove all the undocumented people to the US in the first place and has now turned into a humanitarian for the US and the symbol of a profound moral crisis facing American society. Given the inherent uncertainty over something like granting asylum, where you often don’t know if someone is truly facing the kinds of dangers they claim to be fleeing, a society has a general decision as to whether or not to err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt and avoid turning away those truly in need (the graceful choice) or erring on the side of assuming people are unscrupulous individuals trying to cheat the US system (definitely not graceful). Or, in President Trump’s case, assuming these people are MS-13 gang members (about as ungraceful as you can get). That’s the kind of choice America has to make about poor people fleeing chaos and it’s going to be a fateful choice whatever America chooses because it’s going to impact a growing number of people in need of asylum in coming decades as the crises of our world continue to fester and grow. It’s that kind of moral crisis.
And now it’s looking like legal due process is in crisis too and constitutional protections for non-citizens are in crisis too. Because it’s that kind of crisis.
It’s hopefully not an exaggeration to conclude that the levels of hate speech and the promotion of violent extremism infesting the internet today is not what most people were expecting when the internet first emerged and people started dreaming of a future where anyone could say anything to anyone. But here we are, with the Donald Trump ascending to the presidency by capitalizing on the broader mainstreaming of ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazi ideals made possible via the inundation of the internet with far right propaganda. And the more prominent that neo-Nazi propaganda gets, the more important it is to investigate how it become so prominent.
While there’s no shortage of different factors that have contributed to the explosion and durability of neo-Nazi and other violent extremists online, not all of those factors are of equal importance. And as the following article points out, if you had to come up with the most important factor enabling sites like the Incel.me site — dedicated to hyper violent misogynists who advocate for the rape and murder of women and children — to successfully remain online, that factor would be a company: Cloudflare.
So what does Cloudflare do that is so important for ensuring sites like Incel.me, or DailyStormer.com, remain online? Well, it provided a critical service for websites that a lot of people are going to want to take down: it acts as a middle-man that can protect your site from denial of service attacks (which you flood a website with so many requests that it effectively can’t operate).
Specifically, Cloudflare offer a service where your website can specify that Cloudflare is the “authoritative Name Server” for your site. What this means is that when someone tries to go to your website (like http://www.spitfirelist.com), your browser will check the Domain Name Server (DNS) system to get the IP address of the server hosting the http://www.spitfirelist.com site. It’s at this point, when users are checking the Domain Name Server system, that Cloudflare acts as a middle-man and checks to see if the person(or bot) making that DNS request is part of a denial or service attack, a hacker, or some other type of entity that should be blocked (the CEO of Cloudflare gives a more in depth explanation here in the answer to this Quora page about how Cloudflare works).
So Cloudflare provides a service that is going to be absolutely critical to websites that a lot of people are going to try to take down with denial of service attacks. And it’s hard to think of sites more loathed (and more deserving of being taken down) than sites like Incel.me and DailyStormer.com.
But there’s another key aspect of Cloudflare’s business model that makes it invaluable for site like Incel.me and DailyStormer.com: Cloudflare makes no judgement at all about the who it provides these services for. As long as a website can find a company to host it, Cloudflare will be happy to provide its protection servers. Even Incels.me and DailyStormer.com and any other website. Cloudflare cites freedom of speech as the basis for this business decision. Keep in mind that, in the US, the 1st Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees freedom of speech is purely in reference to the US government and says nothing about the rights of private entities like Cloudflare.
And Cloudflare itself clearly recognizes that it has the right to refuse service because it did that to the DailyStormer.com on August 16, 2018, in response to the violence and murder at the neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, and Daily Stormer admin Andrew Anglin smearing the murder victim.
Interestingly, though, the specific reason Cloudflare gave for cutting of DailyStormer.com wasn’t that DailyStormer had crossed Cloudflare’s line. As Cloudflare explained in blog post about cutting off DailyStormer.com, the tipping point was that neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernhiemer (who helps administer Daily Stormer) claimed that he had a personal relationship with people at Cloudflare and they assured him the company would work to protect the site, including a refusal to turn information over to European courts which would be a significant move given that Cloudflare has data centers in places like Germany. Cloudflare eventually admitted that, yes, one of its executives chatted with Auernhiemer.
So while it’s not clear how friendly Cloudflare’s leadership is with Andrew Auernheimer, it’s clear they are friends on some level. And it sure looks like Cloudflare would like continue offering services to sites like Daily Stormer, but was forced to retreat during a perfect storm of bad PR. And while it’s a highly contentious, but arguably legally defensible, position to grudgingly offer services to places like the Daily Stormer or Incel.me, it’s far less defensible to ‘go the extra mile’ to try to protect these kinds of groups from European courts, and yet a willingness to go the extra mile for Daily Stormer is what Auernheimer described. With that in mind, it’s worth noting that one of the primary reasons Cloudflare gave for its ‘anything goes’ policy is a belief in due process and the idea that removing sites like DailyStormer.com or Incels.me should be done by legal authorities and not people waging denial of service campaigns.
So Cloudflare appears to have a disturbingly close relationship to one of today’s most prominent neo-Nazis. But don’t assume that Cloudflare specializes in protecting the websites of violent extremists. It’s one of those MASSIVE companies that few people are familiar with even though they interact with its services daily. As the following article notes, Cloudflare acts as a middle-man for nearly 10 percent of all internet requests and has managed to block multiple record-breaking denial of service attacks. If you browse the web you are almost certainly going to browse some sites protected by Cloudflare. And a lot of those sites protected by Cloudflare are the kinds of sites that we should all want protected by Cloudflare. Especially sites that neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers would love to take down with denial of service attacks.
Cloudflare’s offer to protect any website is a double-edged sword and shield for everyone. It’s all even and that’s how free speech works, right? Well, that ignores the reality that the real-world lethality of the ‘sword and shield’ Cloudflare offers to anyone is for more deadly when it’s wielded by violent neo-Nazis or movements like that at Incel.me that advocate both random and strategic violence for the purpose of violently taking over and subjugating society compared to the rhetoric of peace activists and people promoting empathy and understanding. There’s just in inherent rhetorical asymmetry when some people are advocating violent subjugation of everyone else.
It’s analogous to free speech bans against the metaphorical ‘shouting fire in a crowded theater’. That kind of speech that creates immediate harm to the public isn’t generally considered protected speech. But according to Cloudflare, the kind of content found on sites like DailyStormer.com and Incels.me doesn’t present the kind of immediate danger to the public and should be protected speech. And while some of that objectionable content (like neo-Nazis talking about how they hate other races) is going to protected under free speech laws, there’s also no avoiding the fact that these kinds of sites are dedicated to the goal of violently overthrowing and subjugating almost everyone. It may not be ‘shouting fire in a crowded theater’, but it is awful close to advocating someone burn the theater down as part of a terror campaign intended to destabilize society.
And that philosophical position taken by Cloudflare to offer their services under the banner of ‘freedom of speech’ to websites that are the public face for movements that advocate the violent overthrow or society and the subjugation of entire races and groups is at the core of a growing legal and philosophical debate facing societies everywhere now that the internet is proving to be a breeding ground of violent extremism:
“Both websites were created within the past year. And both have thrived in an era in which attention has been trained not just on forums for sadistic misogynists, but also on the enabling infrastructure of the internet that sustains them. So how have they survived while brazenly endorsing violence against women? They use Cloudflare.”
Yep, Incels.me and Incelopocalypse were both created in the last year and openly advocate violence against women — and not just violence by torture and murder — and both sites rely on Cloudflare to remain online and withstand the denial of service attacks they would undoubtedly be experiencing. And for two sites dedicated to promoting violence against women, they’ve already got thousands of members and over a million posts, so it’s not like these are sites made by one or two people and read by one or two people:
One person on Incelpocyalyse even recently tried to commission a “how to rape” guide for $100 that went beyond rape and included instructions on murder and how to dispose of a body:
So does that qualify as ‘shouting fire in crowded theater’ in terms of threats to to public safety? Not according to Cloudflare.
And that ‘anything goes’ stance during a time of growing far right influence campaigns on the internet and growing far right violence in real life is helping to spark a debate about what exactly should the role be of internet companies in regulating online hate speech:
And Cloudflare’s CEO made it very clear that the company recognizes it’s the only thing keeping these sites online. And he’s correct. Cloudflare really is the only thing keep many of these sites online. That’s just the nature of the internet today, where the ability to carry out a denial of service attack is possessed by a large number of people and organizations and any site with enough enemies is going to be taken down without the kind of protection Cloudflare offers. And while Cloudflare isn’t the only company that offers these protective services, it does appear to be the only one offering these services to sites like Incels.me and DailyStormer.com:
Cloudflare continued to offer those services to DailyStormer.com even after Heather Heyer’s death in Charlottesville and after Andrew Anglin published viscious smears about her on DailyStormer.com, essentially reveling in her death and after the other service providers to DailyStormer.com ended their (like GoDaddy, that refused their DNS service). But Cloudflare’s last stand only lasted a few days. And it wasn’t for the same reasons as the rest of service providers that cut off DailyStormer.com. Cloudflare’s decision was driven by the allegations (made by Andrew Auernheimer) that Cloudflare’s executives were actually supporters of the Daily Stormer. That was what crossed the line for Cloudflare:
So it’s worth pointing out that if Cloudflare really did secretly support Daily Stormer, that implies they are supportive of neo-Nazis in general which means cutting off support for Daily Stormer was actually vital for containing this public relations disaster that could have potentially forced Cloudflare to cut off service for all the other neo-Nazi and hate group sites it offers its services to, like stormfront.org. In other words, if Cloudflare’s primary reason for cutting off services to a neo-Nazi site — a site getting dropped by virtually every other major service provider following its role in organizing a massive neo-Nazi hate rally that turns deadly — is the allegations from a neo-Nazi that he was friends with Cloudflare’s executive, cutting off service at that point, and only at that point, isn’t really a very effective rebuttal of the charges of secret neo-Nazi support:
The article goes on to note that these decisions over censorship (cutting off Cloudflare’s services is effectively censorship) are being left up to Cloudflare and other companies because there is no legal requirement in the US to regulate hate speech. It’s optional. And while censoring violent hate speech for the purpose of trying to prevent real life violence might seem like an obvious solution, the article points to civil liberties experts who warn a government mandate could set a dangerous precedent. After all, the laws that could be used to censor neo-Nazis today could potentially be used to censor all sorts of other speech in the future. That’s the warning from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a libertarian-oriented corprate-backed civil liberties organization founded by John Perry Barlow — the former Grateful Dead lyricist and Dick Cheney’s former campaign manager. And as Yasha Levine has pointed out, the use of anti-extremism laws can and do get used to shut down legitimate political opposition since that’s exactly what happened when The eXile — Levine’s the Russia-based satirical news site he co-edited with Mark Ames and Matt Taiibi — was taken down by the Kremlin, it was absurdly based on the Russian law against citing extremism. So it’s not a baseless warning by the EFF, but it’s also important to recognize that organizations like the EFF are the kinds of ‘civil liberties’ organizations that are especially focused on corporate liberties:
Cloudflare itself maintains that it’s taking a “strictly neutral stance” on content, with very few exceptions (one fo those exception apparently being claims of secret support by Cloudflare executives for the vile content):
As the article notes, part of the basis for that strictly neutral stance is the assertion that websites are simply “speech” and “not a bomb”. It was a conclusion they arrived at 2011 when Cloudflare had to decided whether or not maintain services for a Turkish sex trade website. So as we can see, we are squarely in this “is this shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” territory with this debate, except in that Turkish case it didn’t involve sites that explicitly call for acts of violence:
And as the article notes, that 2011 Turkish case preceded the numerous acts of violence inspired by the internet we’ve seen in recent years. The deadly neo-Nazi rally of Charlottesville was only one example:
When online advocacy of violence translates into real world violence, and you have one incident after another, the context of that debate changes. And that’s going to be one of the tricky lines the private sector has to walk in societies that are trying to maintain a free speech ideal: the more free speech leads to violence and mayhem, the more calls there will inevitably be to regulate speech. It’s a human response. And that human response is going to be a lot more likely to become a reality when companies refuse to take action when it’s optional but not legally required even in, for lack of a better term, extreme cases of extremism. If Incels.me and Incelpocalypse — with their commissioned manuals on how to rape and kill women and children — get free speech protections according to the philosophy of companies like Cloudflare, that’s the kind of private sector behavior that invites a public response in the form of hate speech regulations. That’s one of the inherent challenges of maintaining a free society: individual actors have to not be so irresponsible with those freedoms that it incites a public crackdown.
And it’s not obviously how to walk that line in this case because the stakes are so high in both directions: if it turns out the violent incitement of neo-Nazis works, and results in an eventual neo-Nazi terror campaign that destabilizes society, well guess what follows after that? It won’t be more free speech. It will be far right authoritarianism. On the flip side, laws that restrict violent free speech in order to preempt that violence likely will be abused under the wrong situation. Image if President Trump had the discretion to say that calling him a treasonous traitor was an incitment to violence. What would he be doing with those powers today? It’s a very tricky line to walk. Freedom is hard.
And that’s all part of what makes Cloudflare’s absolutism so concerning: if any company in the US is going to shift public attitudes in favor of laws actively
regulating speech, it’s Cloudflare. For instance, one service it provides is hiding the host provider and IP address of a website. So the company actually hosting sites like Incels.me remains anonymous. So web hosting companies can potentially host horrific sites without anyone knowing:
And this is where we are: the internet is this global shared ‘commons’, government by a patchwork of national laws. The United States is where much of the infrastructure of the internet resides and also happens to have some of the most permission free speech laws on the planet. This has enable to the internet to be a surprisingly open platform for the globe. But it’s not going to remain that way if neo-Nazis and other extremists continue to hone their skills at effectively turning the advocacy of violents and terror in real acts of violence and terror. The context of this debate is going to keep changing as hate speech experts get better at their craft.
And that means the private sector entities in the US that provide so much of the service that keeps the internet running are going to have to figure out how to navigate this changing landscape in a way that doesn’t invite a public backlash if overt hate speech regulations are going to be avoided. The 1st Amendment gives private companies the right to ‘draw a line’. Where that line is drawn is up to them, and ideally it should be an extremely permissive ‘line’. But should that ‘line’ be so permissive that Incels.me and neo-Nazi sites advocating the violent overthrow of society and race wars are able to find private service providers who proudly provide those services on the basis of freedome of speech? Where to do that ‘line’ for private actors, even if the 1st Amendment technically allows somethings, is going to be an enduring debate as lone as we have something like the internet that’s acts as an anonymous publishing platform for anyone:
And that debate over where to set ‘the line’ is where Cloudflare standouts out. It’s competitors all of terms of service that prohibit abusive behavior or incitements to violence. Cloudflare doesn’t:
At the same time, we have to acknolwedge Cloudflare’s point about due process — that the take down of objectionable sites like DailyStormer.com should be done by the courts and not vigilantes conducting denial of service attacks — is a valid point. Vigilante justice isn’t justice. But let’s not forget that Cloudflare’s adherence to due process is an invitation for laws regulating hate speech. It’s a paradox.
It all points towards one of the meta-challenges facing humanity at this point: if we want to maintain ‘free’ societies, we have to recognize that the principle of upholding principles needs to mesh with reality and if the reality is that these freedoms are being used for egregious public harm the public is going to eventually restrict them. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what’s going to eventually happen which is a big reason why maintain free speech freedoms in the internet age, and avoiding outright laws regulating hate speech, is going to get tricky. After all, it’s less questionable to take a freedom of speech stance like “I think people should be able to set up large online communities where they fixate on violently raping and killing women and children because that’s how much of a free speech advocate I am” before such a community actually becomes reality and is demonstrably horrific and creating significant harm. One neo-Nazi website, Ironmarch.org, has been tied to over 100 neo-Nazi attacks. The hypothetical website that incites large numbers of people to commit real acts of violence is no longer hypothetical.
Navigating freedom of speech without using that freedom to destroy ourselves is going to require a whole lot of collective decisions to say ‘I’m going to use my freedom to condemn XYZ’ without overreaching with that condemnation. It’s a balance that requires being very judicious in how you exploit that freedom. And we ALL (almost all) need to get really good at that and maintain this indefinitely. That’s how free societies remain durable. This is where culture comes in. We have laws and stuff for those that can’t handle freedom without inflicting egregious harm and organizing that freedom (like traffic laws). But when it comes to issues like freedom of speech on the internet and the moral obligation companies have to refuse customers in extreme circumstances, a free society is going to have to rely on much more than laws. And it seems like a culture where groups like the neo-Nazis advocating violence and a ‘leaderless resistance’ strategy of societal destabilization and Incels advocating murder can’t find companies to wage their violence and terror campaign is a much better culture than a culture where the incels find refuge in free speech absolutisms. Of course, the optimal culture would be one where a handful of neo-Nazis and Incels spout all the hateful and violent rhetoric they want without any influence because no one cares what they say. Sadly, we don’t live in that culture, and it’s unclear at this point if the human species is capable of such culture or is always going to have a sizable percentage of people who are dangerously consumed with hate and violence. It’s one of those known unknowns.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that laws make people of legally responsibility when their words inspire violence and murder — like the case of Mathew Hale, who was successfully defended by Glenn Greenwald over charges after he called for the killing of a judge who was eventually killed — are one potential tool for warding off laws that overtly regulate hate speech.
All in all, it’s clear that the principal of freedom of speech is going to be heavily strained by the growing influence of movements advocating for the freedom to commit acts violence against the people they hate thanks in large part (and ironically) to the internet and the freedom it gave to almost anyone to broadcast to a global audience. It’s a debate that’s only going to get more complicated. Sometimes really complicated.
Some previously unpublished essays by Stephen Hawking were just published in the Sunday Times. As we should expect, they include some pretty thought provoking essays. And one essay in particular raises a fascinating question about the future of white supremacy. Or any racial supremacy ideology: Stephen Hawkin predicted that genetic engineer could create a race of superhumans — people with enhanced memories, intelligence, resistance to diseased, etc. — and that we would see the rise of these genetically engineered superhumans some time over the next century. He also predicted that these genetic enhancements would primarily a tool of the wealthy and the rest of us ‘normals’ simply won’t be able to compete with them, leading to sociopolitical tumult and potentially the replacement of humans with these superhumans. Laws will be be passed that forbid genetic enhancements for people and those laws will simply be ignored and superhumans will emerge anyway. As Hawking saw it, an endless race to become the most ‘enhanced’ human is almost an inevitability. An inevitability that could replace and ultimately destroy humanity.
It’s not exactly a novel prediction. Plenty of people have similar concerns about the potential consequences of genetic engineering. But it’s a Stephen Hawking prediction and that makes it more than just another scary prediction. It’s the kind of scary prediction we can’t simply dismiss.
So if we really do see the emergence of genetically enhanced superhumans, that raises a fascinating question for all the current ‘supremacists’: what will race-based supremacists do when superhumans, who can obviously be any race, become the new undisputed ‘superior’ people? Especially if the ‘best’ kinds of genetic enhancements have to be done to you before you’re born and there’s simply no way living people can ‘catch up’ to those born with these enhancements? Will the white supremacists remain white supremacists? Will they become synthetic supremacists and advocate for the extermination of all non-superhumans? Or will they become some of the vehement opponents of genetic engineering? Who knows, but it’s hard to imagine that the mere possibility of creating genetically engineered superhumans once that technology is feasible isn’t going to have some sort impact on race-based supremacists ideologies.
And as the prevalence of supremacists ideologies across human history make clear, if superhumans really are created, at least some subset of those superhumans are going to end up being supremacists. The superhuman equivalent of the genocidal white supremacists. And those superhuman supremacists are going to view white supremacists as just one more group that needs to be wiped out on the road superhuman supremacy, making the superhuman supremacists the natural foe of the white supremacists. So, again, how are white supremacists going to deal with this? It’s one of the many grimly fascinating questions raised by the prospect of humans genetically engineering themselves:
“In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking’s final thoughts on the universe, the physicist suggested wealthy people would soon be able to choose to edit genetic makeup to create superhumans with enhanced memory, disease resistance, intelligence and longevity.”
Enhanced memory, disease resistance, intelligence and longevity. Those are some of the traits Stephen Hawking predicted humanity would have the technology to modify. Soon. And while laws will probably be passed, laws will also inevitably be ignored in some cases. In other words, while laws might prevent the large scale adoption of genetically engineering people, once the technology exists to do so it’s almost inevitably that some people will be modified:
And that group of superhumans could effectively create a new species that would outcompete and eventually destroy humanity:
Note that this kind of scenario of superhumans self-designing themselves at an ever-increasing rate also means that superhuman supremacists will always be in competition with the next generation of even-more-superhuman supremacists. It would be a never-ending inter-generation battle. A battle that, by definition, can’t be won by a particular group of people (since they can always be ‘improved’ upon) and can only be won in an ideological sense. An ideology of an endless quest for greater superiority. For an individual or group to truly ‘win’ this kind of contest they would have to live forever and somehow prevent a crop of more superior beings from popping up somehow. Complete domination would be required.
But let’s also not forget that in this vision of genetically enhanced superhumans there’s no reason the enhancements need to be limited to genetic modifications. There’s also the whole ‘Singlearity’ movement dedicated to the fusion of humans with cyborg technology and super-AIs, with goals like achieving immortality through such schemes as ‘uploading’ you brain into a computer or becoming a cyborg. So in that kind of world, even those ‘old’ superhumans with outdated genetic enhancements could still compete with the ‘new’ superhumans for ‘supremacy’ via other kinds of technological enhancements. And as the following article makes clear, there are already very wealthy people very interested in developing these kinds of technologies as soon as people. Very wealthy very scary people like Peter Thiel
And as the following article also points out, some of the people involved with Thiel’s drive to develop longevity technology are pretty clearly white supremacists too. For instance, a previous media officer at the Thiel-funded Machine Intelligence Research Institute, actually published a white nationalist manifesto. And in a 2013 interview, Anissimov basically made the case that transhumanism is going to inevitably lead to “people lording it over others in a way that has never been seen before in history”. So that’s at least one example of how white supremacists might respond to the emergence of transhumanism: they’ll be super excited about the possibility of “lording it over others in a way that has never been seen before in history”:
“The hows and whens of transhumanism are matters of debate. Some advocate the “Singularity” – a form of artificial super-intelligence which will encompass all of humanity’s knowledge, that our brains will then be uploaded to. Others believe in anti-ageing methods like cryonics, freezing your body after death until such a time when you can be revived.”
One of the fun things about transhumanism is that there’s always going to be new versions of it emerging as technology advances. Maybe the idea is freezing your body at death to be revived by future super medicine. Maybe the goal is uploading your brain into a super-AI. Or maybe it involves genetic engineering for longevity. There’s no shortage of different version of transhumanism.
But if there’s one common theme that you with transhumanists it’s that one of their first goals is life extension, one of the many areas of research that humanity has left to people like Peter Thiel to develop, thus making it entirely possible that a fascist like Thiel could secretly acquire this technology and then be faced with the “what do I do now?” question. Keep in mind that one of the big issues with longevity technology on an overpopulated planet like Earth is how to deal with an explosion of population if this technology was widely available. Because people would keep being born but stop dying from old age. So when you have a situation where someone like Thiel, a champion of the Dark Enlightenment, just might end up secretly getting their hands on longevity technology it’s like handing a super-villain a BIG new reason to be super-villainous and a much long time-frame to carry out their super-villainy. But that’s how it is. The ‘Alt Right’ Silicon Valley billionaire is a leading longevity research financier. And some transhumanists apparently believe (or claim) that immortality will be achievable by 2045:
“A lot of the most important work in longevity is coming from a handful of the billionaires...around six or seven of them”.
Longevity, brought to you by a handful of billionaires like Thiel. Except it won’t be brought you because there’s no way these billionaires are going to just share that kind of technology.
But some transhumanist technology will no doubt be shared with masses. Specifically, technology that make the masses for useful for our future immortal techno-fascist oligarchs. Like the “neurolace” technology Elon Musk is developing to merge the brain with an AI so humans can monitor future super-AIs and make sure they don’t get out of control. That will be shared with masses. Probably as a job requirement:
If you’re tempted to assume that the development of longevity technology and other transhumanist technologies will inevitably force humanity to develop better and more enlightened paradigms and social models to replace things capitalism and massive global inequality, keep in mind that the billionaires developing this technology don’t share that view:
Since Peter Thiel is also so chummy with white supremacists, we get plenty of real-world examples of how white supremacists might feel about genetic enhancements and other types of technological human enhancements. Specifically, the white nationalist who used to be the media officer at the Thiel-funded Machine Intelligence Research Institute think tank, Michael Anissimov, predicted “people lording it over others in a way that has never been seen before in history”:
Keep in mind that Anissimov is a self-described neoreactionary and supporter of the Dark Enlightenment (like Thiel) who supports the repeal of things like democracy and human rights. So when he predicts transhumanism will result in people lording it over others in a way that has never been seen before in history”, he’s presumably strongly in favor of that outcome. Which is exactly what we should probably expect from a white nationalist like Anissimov. Because at the end of the day when you white supremacists aren’t just white supremacists. They’re also almost always authoritarian minded individuals. It just comes with the territory.
And that’s all why it seems highly likely that today’s white supremacists and other racial supremacists will have little problem adapting to a world of transhumanist super-supremacy. It’s an ideology that potentially allows for an individual to declare themselves the ‘superior’ human, which is like the spirit of white supremacy distilled. Individuals vying to become the most technologically and biologically ‘enhanced’ is almost assuredly going to be a thing. That’s more or less what Stephen Hawking was warning us about and when you look at our world, and people like Peter Thiel, it’s hard to see why we shouldn’t be heeding his warning.
So as you can see, the future is going to be a lot like an X‑Men movie plot in terms of the threat of superhumans trying to wipe out humanity. Except instead of evil super-powered mutants trying to wipe out humanity it’s going to be the transhumanist Nazis of the future. And no X‑Men to save the day at the last moment. So in that sense the future will be nothing like an X‑Men movie.
On the plus side, the genetically engineered transhumanist Nazis of the future will probably be somewhat less racist than today’s Nazis since their ‘superiority’ will be derived from genetic engineering. So there’s that. And the more the Nazis begin to focus on transhumanist superiority, the less differences they’ll perceive between the races. Who knows, maybe the tantalizing allure of transhumanism will give today’s Nazis a jolt of much needed perspective they wouldn’t otherwise experience. That probably won’t happen but it’s a nice thought. We have to take whatever morsel of Nazi-related good news we can find these days.
Another in day America, another far right domestic terror attack. That’s three just this week. First, there was the white supremacist who shot to random black people at a grocery store in Kentucky after trying and failing to gain access to an African American church. There there’s the (half Filipino) white supremacist Trump fanatic who was apprehended for sending out the wave of mail bombs to prominent Democrats. And now we have a neo-Nazi shooting up Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue with an AR-15, killing 11 people (as of now) and injuring 6 others at the synagogue, including 4 police officers. The shooter, Rob Bowers, was shot but survived. It’s the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in US history.
As we should expect, Bowers left an extensive digital trail of his worldview. Much of that trail exists on Gab, the social network that could be described as ‘Twitter for Nazis’.
Interestingly, in contrast to many of far right attackers in recent years, Bowers was not a Trump fan. Why? Because Bowers feels Trump is a secret Jewish agent and not a true ally of the far right. It’s an idea that took hold with some on the far right not long after Trump assumed office. Specifically, those on the far right who were disappointed in Trump because they actually thought he was government like a full fledged open fascist. The kinds of Nazis who don’t do nuance and don’t understand the way ‘the game’ — Nazi disinformation and mass manipulation tactics — is played. In other words, Bowers appears to be a particularly stupid Nazi, which is saying something, but the ‘Trump is a Jewish puppet’ faction of the far right exists and Bowers appears to be part of that faction.
The ‘migrant caravan’ of largely asylum seekers making its way up through Central America looks like the particular excuse/trigger for Bowers’s attack based on his social media posts. Right before the shooting, Bowers wrote on his Gab page, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” HIAS is a Hebrew immigrant aid group.
Given the intense media focus on ‘the caravan’, and the growing dog-whistling on the right about the caravan being financed by George Soros and the Democrats to flood the US with non-whites as part of a globalist plot against America — yes, this is the current mainstream right-wing meme — it’s no surprise that this would be his professed breaking point.
But that cynical embrace of the politics of xenophobic fearmongering in these final campaign weeks does make Bowers’s apparent loathing of Trump much more acutely absurd. Bowers expects to Trump behave like an aggressive open neo-Nazi fascist ruler immediately, which is idiotic. The fact that Trump acts like a far right troll perpetually pushing the envelop of what’s acceptable in a far right direction isn’t enough for Nazis like Bowers. Plus Trump has Jews in his administration and family makes him a tool of ‘the Jews’. It appears that the American right-wing stealth far right revolution that Trump and the right-wing media is taking to new levels with endless trolling, and gas-lighting is too stealthy for the likes of neo-Nazis like Bowers. And he goes and shoots up a synagogue in apparent frustration and impatience with his fellow Nazis. So of all the all the factors that played into bring Bowers to commit such an act, stupidity is clearly a major factor:
“Just minutes before the shooting at a baby naming ceremony, the 46-year-old Pennsylvania man allegedly wrote on his Gab page, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” (CNN says that post was made about 5 minutes before the mass shooting.) Authorities say he did just that, shooting multiple people, including four responding officers, in the nation’s latest horrific mass shooting. HIAS is a Hebrew immigrant aid group. At least 11 people have died in the attack, and six more were wounded.”
Look at that: a neo-Nazi who is generally ranting about a Jewish plot to import non-whites into the US responds to the mainstream right-wing freakout about ‘the caravan’ — a cynical freakout led by Trump and Fox News warning about the mortal danger of ‘the caravan’ and a Democratic/Soros plot behind it — with an attack on a synagogue. And immediately preceding the attack, he rants on Gab about a Hebrew immigrant aid group. It’s hard to imagine this attack wasn’t at least in part in response to that mass right-wing media fearmongering:
And despite Trump’s administration being openly friendly to the far right, Bowers wasn’t a Trump fan. Or a QAnon fan, which, like his dislike of Trump, is an example of Bowers not recognizing the crypto-fascist nature of something. QAnon is a Nazi dream meme machine. He’s correct in recognizing the dangers in QAnon’s promotion of martial law, but he sees it as a plot to get the ‘patriots’ and doesn’t seem to realize that the neo-Nazi branch of the ‘patriot’ movement that he is a part of wants to declare martial law and impose an authoritarian state some day. Because they’re Nazis. They just don’t come out and say it. Bowers is so clueless he’s clueless about his own Nazi brethren:
Bowers even acted like Trump was super hard the Charlottesville Nazis. Trump’s massive propaganda assist to the far right when he equated the Nazis marches to the counter-protesters meant nothing to Bowers:
And like so many Nazis who openly want to exterminate entire people, Bowers frets about the ‘certain extinction’ of white people. Due to a Jewish propaganda war it seems. When people tell you what they think you get get a peek into their heads. Pretty much the worst peek is when Nazis whine about the inevitable extinction of white people at the same time they’re plotting mass extermination. It’s wrong on so many levels. And then we have Bowers, a Nazi who thinks Trump is leading a Jewish propaganda war against Western civilization that’s going to lead to white people’s certain extinction. Exterminating people is a topic clearly on his mind a lot:
As we can see, in the middle of a chilling mainstream far right closing campaign season from the GOP — where Trump, the GOP, and the right-wing media complex went into override pushing a far right immigration fear mongering campaign that alleged George Soros and the Democrats are part of a secret globalist plot to get into the US to spoil the election somehow at the same time major right-wing figurs are pushing the theory that the mail bomber is a left-wing false flag hoax — we have a Nazi who thinks Trump is a secret Jewish globalist stooge commit the deadliest attack on the American Jewish community in US history. It’s kind of fitting that this was done by a particularly clueless Nazi.
But Bowers’s apparent inability to recognize the enormous advanced President Trump, the GOP, and the right-wing media have made for the far right during Trump’s tenure in office, and especially during the final weeks of this campaign season in response to ‘the caravan’, doesn’t excuse them for carrying out those far right advances. And that’s one of the most disturbing aspects of this whole tragedy: the fact that Bower’s central thesis about Trump — that he’s a puppet of ‘the Jews’ — is so patently absurd makes this a much bigger tragedy given the truth. The truth being that the massacre in Pittsburgh happened in the middle of a giant political effort by Trump, the GOP, and the right-wing media complex to stoke exactly the kinds of viscerally hateful and stupid sentiments that Bowers allowed to define his tragic life. Bowers’s malicious cluelessness isn’t just a tragedy, it’s also a tragically topical warning where the road Trump is leading us down leads.
Just as the legend of the lone nut bomber began to fall apart as quickly as it came together the horrible mass murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue
pushed it to page two.
I certainly have many questions regarding accused “maga bomber” Cesar Sayoc. For instance:
(1) What is his real name? Cesar Altieri, Julius Cesar Milan and Cesar Altieri Randazzo are just some of the handles he used on Facebook and Twitter.
(2) What is his true ethnicity? Important because he identified as a Native American from the Seminole Tribe of Florida but his father appears to be
Filipino while his mother’s background is Italian. Former employer Debra Gureghian described him as an ardent white supremacist.
(3) How deep are his connections to Trump supporter Michael the Black Man and the black separatist cult Nation of Yahweh? Michael also has a list
of aliases including Michael Symonette and Maurice Woodside. Do Sayoc or Symonette have any connections to US intelligence?
Which leads to another question:
(4)WHO PUT THIS GUY TOGETHER??? And that’s a question that has been asked over the years about Oswald, Ray and Sirhan not to mention
Bremer and McVeigh.
While I’m not ready to assert that Sayoc is a patsy we are led to believe the case was cracked when a single fingerprint left on a package sent to
Maxine Waters was quickly analyzed at the FBI lab in Quantico. Some of us are old enough to remember evidence tampering at FBI forensic labs dates
back to COINTELPRO as well as the OJ Simpson trial.
The same FBI that helped thwart Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the same FBI that conducted a lazy lacklustre investigation into allegations
against right wing operative (and now Supreme Court judge) Bret Kavanaugh.
The sophistication of the mailing operation alone suggests a guy living out of a van would need some help.
And the level of research and graphics work that went into creating memes, photos, diagrams and maps of the homes and polling stations for Maxine
Waters, Joe Biden, Eric Holder appears beyond the assiduity and industriousness of Trump rally MAGA dolts.
Steve King just gave his fellow Republican a new reason not to want to talk about Steven King. He also gave the rest of us a new reason to demand the Republican Party explain their quiet embrace of King: In response to questions about his recent interviews with an Austrian neo-fa cist, King defended his friendly relations with such groups and parties like the FPO by explaining that they aren’t actually Nazis, they are merely far right. As if that’s a valid defense. Or even accurate (recall that the FPO was started by a former SS officers).
Then King went to point out that if these European far right parties were in America they would be Republicans. So King first made that argument that these parties were Nazi parties, they were merely far right parties. Then he pointed out that they would be considered Republicans in America. So King basically call the GOP far right as a defense of his extensive network with the European far right. Which isn’t an inaccurate comparison these days, thanks to GOPers like Steve King. But it should be considered controversial, especially by his fellow GOPers. And yet the Republican Party clearly has no problem at all with who Steve King hangs out with. Even when he equates his European fascist friends with his own party.
Oh, and guess when King gave this interview: Hours after the Nazi slaughter of a Pittsburgh synagogue that was precipitated by the far right hysterics over ‘the caravan’.
So hours after the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the US, Steve King gives an interview were he equates Europe’s ascendant far right movements with the Republican Party. That’s how casual King is about his far right fellow travelers. Instead of hiding it he shouts it from the rooftop. And the GOP says nothing:
“He said the groups he’s associated with that are criticized as having neo-Nazi views were more accurately “far right” groups. He specifically cited Austria’s Freedom Party, which was founded by a former Nazi SS officer and is led by Heinz-Christian Strache, who was active in neo-Nazi circles as a youth. The group has emphasized a hard-line anti-immigration stance even as it seeks to distance itself from the Nazi connections.”
They aren’t neo-Nazis. They’re merely far right. Nothing to worry about! In fact, they’re basically Republicans. That was Steve King’s defense for palling around with Europe’s neo-fascists:
As the article made clear, that ability to just dismiss the fact that these far right parties and organizations have worldviews aligned with the Nazis appears to be possessed by Steve King’s constituents, who have little trouble explaining away to themselves why Steven King isn’t actually a white nationalist. It’s an infectious form of denialism.
And one of the key methods used by King’s constituents to explain/justify King’s views is the wholehearted embrace of one of the most pernicious and pervasive myths in white America today: that there’s a secret lavish welfare state only for non-whites along with other special legal privileges and white people are now a persecuted class in America. It’s an idea that’s been at the core of the Republican Party’s political messaging for decades, exemplified by Reagan’s slanderous ‘welfare queen’ rhetoric. A myth that Trump appears to actually believe according to reports. When the ‘minority welfare queen’ myth becomes widely believed, Steve King’s white nationalism can become seen as an unfortunate means to a justifiable end. At least that’s how King’s supporters in his district are spinning it:
And those constituents who have bought into the ‘Steve King is fighting the secret minority extra welfare system and other perks’ mythology include the poor whites who are frustrated by a lack of government assistance for their own poverty or labor protections. It’s an example of how wildly useful the ‘minority welfare queen’ meme is for both the GOP: the suffering by poor whites due to the party’s endless assault on the safety-net can be blamed on a mythological lavish secret welfare state for minority that’s allegedly consuming all of the government resources. It’s been a truism in right-wing media for decades and that hoax truism is now wildly believed by white America, to the enormous benefit of the GOP and the billionaire oligarchs who are actually being the inadequate public assistance:
These are clearly people with real grievances. And also real areas of profound confusion. Confusion largely due to the pervasive right-wing mythology about minorities having it easy in the US and white people being persecuted against. It’s an absurd idea, but it’s also an idea that’s been perpetuated for decades across right-wing media. And when absurd ideas get repeated over and over for decades they become believed absurd ideas. Propaganda actually works.
So as America is once again forced to ask itself how it can move forward during a time when the president and one of the major parties has embraced the ethno-nationalist politics of the past, it’s worth noting the useful opportunity contained in the GOP’s refusal to address its Steve King ‘situation’: Given that one of the biggest tools of the GOP and far right in general is disinformation and confusion, and given that this disinformation and confusion is maintained by a stubborn refusal to seriously intellectually engage in topic or even answer question and instead keep the audience trapped in a hall of mirrors right-wing disinfo-tainment complex (Fox News, right-wing talk radio, Breitbart, etc) so myths like the ‘welfare queen’ can be perpetuated year after year, the refusal of the GOP to even acknowledge the problem Steve King represents for the party is actually a great symbol of the GOP’s reliance on the tactic of simply not answering dark questions about the party’s ugly tactics and lies in the service of an extremist agenda. And forcing the GOP to answer these kinds of dark questions about ugly tactics and ideologies is how we ‘move forward’ as a nation. Or at least a start.
One of the frequent consoling words we hear from right-wing politicians following one of America’s seemingly endless violent far right massacres is how America is a democracy and we settle out differences with words, not violence. So given that one of the biggest problems in America today is the takeover of the GOP by a far right movement that embraces violence, talking about actually very appropriate. A big public dialogue about what the far right is, what they believe — the full scope of their ugly beliefs — and all the lies they’ve been systematically spreading for years, and how they’ve managed to infiltrate the Republican Party. A truth and reconciliation process to deal with a mountain of far right lies. Asking long overdue questions that the Republican party and the far right refuse to honestly answer. It’s the perfect civic medicine for this moment and we couldn’t ask for a better symbol of our collective need to take this medicine than the GOP’s increasingly loud silence on Steve King.
@Dennis: Yeah, Sayoc the kind of perpetrator who exhibits such over-the-top mental health issues that you have to wonder who he may have been working with because someone that overtly messed up is going to attract the kind of people looking for a useful idiot.
And, yeah, it seems hard to believe that he would have constructed all of those bombs in his van, so the question of who he may have been working with looms large at this point. And yet, as we’ll see below, authorities appear to be arriving at the conclusion that he did, in fact, make these bombs in his van. But even if he did construct and send all these bombs on his own, that doesn’t dismiss the question of who may have been influencing/directing the guy. And as you point out with Sayoc’s association with Maurice Symonette, that’s the kind of association that should raise a lot of questions.
Here’s a couple points regarding whether or not Sayoc actually did the bombings or is a patsy of some sort: according to the following report, the evidence they used to hone in on him was a combination of a finger-print left on a package plus cell-phone geolocation data. Presumably the geolocation data came in handy after it was determined five of the packages were sent from a Opa-Locka processing and distribution center outside Miami. Also, Sayoc has retained a lawyer and is not talking to investigators. But he was initially cooperative and told investigators that the bombs wouldn’t have hurt anyone and that he didn’t want to hurt anyone. So it appears that Sayoc at least initially confessed to sending them:
“Sayoc was initially somewhat cooperative, one official said. He told investigators that the pipe bombs wouldn’t have hurt anyone and that he didn’t want to hurt anyone. But he has since retained a lawyer so questioning has ceased. He is scheduled to appear in federal court on Monday in Florida.”
So it certainly looks like Sayoc did indeed send these bombs. But that still leaves the question of whether or not they really were intended to be harmless like he claims. Along with questions of where he made them and who else he may have been working with.
And all of those questions are intertwined with questions about Sayoc’s apparent mental health and identity issues, exemplified by both his insane van and his fixation on claiming to be a member of the Seminole tribe. Was he actually a member of that tribe? Well, based on the following article, it turns out Sayoc has a record in ancestry.com. And according to that ancestry.com record, Sayoc was born in Brooklyn in 1962 and is the son of a Filipino immigrant. Plus, all of his family deny the Seminole claims. So that’s also looking like another example of a mental health issue.
Interestingly, one of his twitter handles is @hardrock2016, which appears to be a reference to the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino near Hollywood, Florida. Sayoc lived in Hollywood, Florida. So you have to wonder if 2016 (after he was already a big Trump enthusiast) is the same year he started self-identifying as a Seminole:
““We can find no evidence that Cesar Altieri, Caesar Altieri, Caesar Altieri Sayoc, Ceasar Altieri Randazzo (Facebook) or Julus Cesar Milan (Twitter) is or was a member or employee of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, or is or was an employee of Seminole Gaming or Hard Rock International,” Bitner said in an email. “At this time, we cannot verify if he is or was an employee of a vendor company.””
So the Seminole tribe is denying he’s a member. Along with people who know him and the family:
He’s also got an ancestry.com entry that lists him as the son of a Filipino immigrant:
But one of his twitter handles is @hardrock2016, which sure sounds like a twitter profile created in 2016 that’s a reference to the Seminole tribe’s Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino near Hollywood, Florida where Sayoc lived:
So if he just suddenly started claiming to be Seminole in recent years that’s a pretty strong indication that Sayoc’s fraying internal world when combined with his obsession with Trump.
Next, here’s more in depth interview with Ron Lowy, Sayoc’s old lawyer from his 2002 bomb threat case. According to Lowy, who is a long-time family friend of the Sayoc’s mom and Sayoc’s mom’s lawyer, Sayoc was kicked out of his mom’s home in 2015 after years of being unable to hold down a job due to what the family saw as mental illness. She wanted him to get help, he refused, and he was kicked out. That was apparently the last time she saw him. Recall that Sayoc only reportedly became very political after Trump launched his Presidential campaign (which would have been mid-2015). So it’s possible Sayoc’s Trump obsession and Seminole tribe personal myth are all part of some sort of extended psychological episode that’s taken over the guy’s life after getting kicked out and living in his van.
Lowy also notes that when he first met Sayoc, which would have been 2002 or earlier, Sayoc’s car with covered in Native American memorabilia. So while we don’t know when exactly Sayoc first started claiming to be a member of the Seminole tribe, it sounds like self-identifying as a Native American is something he’s done for years.
At the same time, Lowy claims to have never heard any sort of racist sentiments for Sayoc during those years of knowing him and his family, so that part of his personality might actually be a relatively recent phenomena.
Interestingly, the article also notes that law enforcement believe he was actually making the bombs in the van, which seems logistically extremely difficult to do but possible. So if it turns out his van really was the bomb making location that makes it easier to believe the guy was acting alone. Although as Lowy points out, even if Sayoc acted alone, it wasn’t really lone act if he he was responding to president and right-wing media endlessly singing a siren’s song of retribution against Trump’s political enemies:
“When Giardiello saw Sayoc’s face on the news, her lawyer Ronald Lowy told The Daily Beast, it was her first real glimpse of her son in three and a half years. Back in 2015, after years of fighting over his inability to hold down a job or seek help for what they saw as mental illness, Giardiello had kicked Sayoc out of her house, where he occasionally stayed.”
In 2015 Sayoc gets kicked out of his mom’s home due a refusal to get help for what they saw has mental illness, something he has long struggled with according to Lowy. And it was shortly after this when Sayoc because a Trump super-fan:
Lowy, who was once a Democratic delegate and sat on the rules committee for the Democratic Party, also describes Sayoc’s mother as an upstanding person in her wealthy community. So it doesn’t sound like Sayoc came from an underprivileged background or a far right upbringing:
Lowy also describes Sayoc’s car being covered in Native American memorabilia when Lowy first met him years ago. So the Seminole identity issue isn’t completely unprecedented and may have started years ago:
Amazingly, authorities appear to believe Sayoc actually made all of these bombs in his van:
So we’ll see if any accomplices are found, but as Lowy notes, there’s a pretty obvious accomplice in all of this: President Trump, who has been employing exactly the kind of demonizing rhetoric that would incite a mentally ill person to do what Sayoc did:
Still, even if the bombs really were made by Sayoc alone in the van, that doesn’t preclude him having an accomplice, or at least someone who was pushing him to do this. And when you think about this guy’s background — his mom is an ardent Democrat and civic leader in a wealthy community — and the fact that he was spouting white supremacist ideas in recent years according to his former boss, it’s hard to imagine that all the white supremacists he undoubtedly met at these various Trump rallies wouldn’t have found him to be an extremely tempting individual for recruitment. Especially if he was exhibiting some sort of ‘crazy’ vibe.
And the reports that he was associating with Maurice Symonette, aka “Michael the Black Man”, are indeed quite intriguing. Sayoc had dozens of videos and photos on his twitter feed of him holding signs with Symonette at Trump rallies. Symonette, like Sayoc, is a regular at Florida’s Trump rallies so Symonette seems like more than just a casual acquaintance. And as the following article reminds us, the Trump campaign is also very friendly with Symonette and frequently placed him in view of the television cameras. So, through Symonette, Sayoc had a potentially significant tie in to not just the Trump campaign but likely all sorts of other far right figures attending those rallies who would have been networking with Symonette too:
“Trump quickly returned to his Stalinist, enemies-of-the-people label for journalists and then lied about his meeting with Sulzburger to insist that truthful reporting is “fake news.” Those insults have a real effect, and that fact was never frighteningly clearer than at Trump’s rally last night in Tampa, where an unhinged-looking mob screamed insults and waved middle fingers at journalists, particularly CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta.”
That’s right, the Trump rally back in July that got so hostile towards the press that it literally made the news was a rally in Florida. And Maurice Symonette, a mainstay at Trump’s Florida rallies, was right in the middle of the mob:
Was Sayoc also at this particular rally? It seems highly likely.
So we know that Sayoc is a highly impressionable individual who appeared to be looking for group or identity. And we know he regularly attended Trump rallies and met with Symonette. We also know the Trump team was/is very friendly with Symonette. Finally, we know that Symonette as a violent and rather insane background in a murderous cult.
Given all that, it seems like Symonette has to be considered a person of interest in all of this.
And that all makes questions about Symonette’s background that much more interesting. Not that those weren’t interesting questions before. The fact that the Trump team openly embraced someone like Symonette was already interesting enough.
@Pterrafracty: You’ve done a fabulous job assembling this material on the legend of Cesar Sayoc. Attorney Ron Lowy is certainly an interesting character.
The Oct. 26 Naples Daily News carried a piece by Will Greenlee. “You talk to him and he speaks like a 15-year old, like a child,” Lowy said. “This seems
like such a sophisticated crime. I have trouble believing he had the mental capacity to create operating bombs.” That, Lowy said, “leads me to wonder
of course was he used by anybody else or are these bombs really poorly constructed.”
Well maybe both things are true. Florida for decades has been a murky swampy breeding ground for nazi politics and terror. The right wing racist
Minuteman Joseph Milteer predicted the Kennedy assassination thirteen days prior while talking in Miami to a police informant named Willie Somersett.
The CIA, anti-Castro Cubans and organized crime conspired and blended freely throughout the Sunshine State, not to mention Gore/Bush voter fraud.
In 1987 Gary Hart’s presidential ambitions were deep-sixed aboard the Monkey Business 50 miles from Miami in Bimini. (as an aside Dave and Pterra
have you read the November Atlantic magazine essay “Was Gary Hart Set Up” by James Fallows? Contains vitally important material!!)
Huffman Aviation, the flight training centre in Venice, was practically a command post for the Mohammed Atta 911 cell, while the nazi inspired
Atomwaffen Division is headquartered in Florida.
The fascist 5th column which has penetrated US law enforcement/ intelligence from sheriffs departments to homeland security might have had a person
like Sayoc on their radar after he made a bomb threat against Florida Power & Light years ago. Did FBI or ATF keep tabs on him following that case?
It doesn’t appear as though he ever did any jail time for grand larceny, fraud, battery etc. which I find curious.
Michael (the Black Man) Symonette could seemingly make a good liaison officer between Sayoc, law enforcement and the Trump team.
Then there is the Six Degrees of Separation angle! The house Sayoc bought in Fort Lauderdale was foreclosed on in 2009.
“Cesar Sayocs’s Home Was Foreclosed On By Steve Mnuchin’s Bank”, a very informative probe by David Dayens from the Intercept Oct. 26. In short
form IndyMac became the mortgage holder and filed for foreclosure on Sayoc’s home.
“Mnuchin co-owned and chaired the bank that eventually foreclosed on Sayoc. (George) Soros an investor in the bank, received one of the mail bombs.
Kamala Harris, another mail bomb recipient, had an opportunity to prosecute OneWest Bank over similar foreclosure-related abuses in California when
she was state attorney general, but declined to do so. Eric Holder, yet another recipient did next to nothing to sanction banks over foreclosure crimes.”
And these events have tributaries running to Trump/Kushner/Anthony Kennedy’s son AND ‑da da- Deutsche Bank, which was fined billions by the Obama justice department for its role in the sub-prime mortgage meltdown and the international financial crisis which followed.
Yet we’re led to believe Cesar Sayoc found a “father figure” (furhrer figure) in Trump.
YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP!!!
Or can you?
@Dennis: It seems like Sayoc had to be on law enforcement’s radar at least during 2018 simply because he was driving that insane van around Hollywood, Florida. A van with pictures of people with crosshairs over their faces. There’s no way that wasn’t brought to someone’s attention in law enforcement. So it’s hard to imagine someone wasn’t keeping tabs on him. At the same time, just imagine the reactions he must have received pulling up in that thing to a Trump rally. Every single far right nut job at those rallies would have wanted to meet the guy who owns that van. It wouldn’t be surprising if Sayoc was getting encouraged to take his enthusiasm to ‘the next [violent] level’ from multiple separate sources over the past couple of years. If it turns out Sayoc really did construct these bombs in his van that’s actually thematically appropriate given how his van just screamed “I’m a ticking time-bomb!”
Here’s another question regarding Maurice Symonette that relates to questions of what influence Symonette may have had on Sayoc: Who is paying Symonette’s bills? Was “Blacks for Trump” bringing in enough money to finance his travels. Because as the following article notes, Symonette managed to travel all around Florida this year and even traveled to Arizona as part of his Trump-boosting activities, and yet he filed for bankruptcy in May. He listed no income and had $0 in the bank. At the same time, four different banks had claims on $2.9 million in property around Dade County. So in addition to the question of who is paying his bills now, there’s also the question of how did Symonette acquire $2.9 million in property in the first place:
“All that national exposure raises an obvious question: Who is paying the bills for Symonette, a former member of Miami’s murderous Yahweh ben Yahweh cult, to represent “Blacks for Trump” at Trump rallies? Since Blacks for Trump isn’t a registered political organization with the Florida Division of Elections or the Federal Election Commission, there are no public records of any donations funding the group’s operations.”
Who is paying for Symonette’s bizarre services? It’s a big obvious question that only got bigger after Symonette filed for bankruptcy in May and listed no income and no savings in the filings. But perhaps a bigger question is how did Symonette manage to acquire four houses, worth $2.9 million, that he’s trying to protect with this bankruptcy claim:
Symonette claims his live-in girlfriend gives him $2,000/month, but he refused to discuss with reporters whether or not this was enough month to cover his living expenses and travel:
Symonette also makes references in his legal motions to renting vans and buses as part of his Blacks for Trump political activities. Which raises the question of whether or not Blacks for Trump is the current primary source of Symonette’s income:
That report was from back in August. Then, in late September, Symonette was banned from filing for bankruptcy for the next five years after a judge found he was abusing the bankruptcy system. Specifically, he was abusing the system to obtain temporary protection from the banks seizing his properties, but then never actually followed the court’s orders. In fact, Symonette has filed for bankruptcy eight times since 1995, and three times since 2015. He was also listed as an owner or tenant in property involved in two other recent bankruptcy filings. So Symonette appears to be some sort of serial bankruptcy filer in relation to properties he owns, which still doesn’t explain how he got these properties in the first place:
“In an order issued Monday, Chief United States Bankruptcy Judge Laurel M. Isicoff dismissed Symonette’s latest bankruptcy case and ordered him not to file anything else with the court for the next five years. Isicoff found that Symonette had repeatedly filed bankruptcies simply to obtain temporary protection from foreclosures — but then never bothered to follow the court’s orders in any of the cases.”
So he repeatedly filed for bankruptcy to temporary protection from foreclosures, and repeatedly ignored the court order that went along with the bankruptcy. This appears to have happened eight times since 1995, including three times since 2015. And then there’s another two recent bankruptcy filings where he’s listed as an owner or tenant:
So Symonette somehow managed to acquire $2.9 million in properties with no apparent source of income nad he’s apparently managed to hold onto that property by repeatedly filing for bankruptcy. Although it’s unclear if the properties he’s protection from foreclosure now are the same properties he’s been protecting from foreclosure in the past with bankruptcy filings.
And note the additional oddity referenced in the article that tangentially related to Sayoc’s strange fraudulent claims of Seminole tribe membership: Symonette is the proponent of a conspiracy theory that accuses Cherokees of secretly running American’s banking system:
Yep, Symonette is out to expose the Cherokee conspiracy and reveal that black and white people in actually in the Americas before the Native Americans and the Cherokees were the real KKK slave masters:
“His alternative history holds that black and white people were in the Americas before the Native Americans and must unite against the Cherokee Indians. A display of the Confederate battle flag is captioned “Cherokee Democrat Flag.””
So we have Symonette, who asserts that the Cherokees run everything, palling around with Cesar Sayoc, a white supremacist who appears to have completely fabricated his membership in the Seminole tribe. If it does turn out that Symonette played a role in Sayoc’s mail bombing campaign that might be the least odd thing about the guy.
@pterrafractyl: At the very least Symonette and Trump have bankruptcy in common with the president filing four time
times in twenty-five years, all tied to hotels and casinos that racked up over $5 billion in debt.
Seriously though, financial support from an unidentified “girlfriend” sounds like a promising avenue of inquiry when it
comes to figuring how Symonette could afford so many homes plus travelling expenses.
His history recalls Donald DeFreeze of the SLA, who began as a petty criminal with schizoid tendencies (and an attraction to firearms and bombs according to early probation reports), graduating to police informant before
undergoing “behaviour modification” (ie mind control) at the CIA-connected Vacaville medical facility in California.
DeFreeze came under the influence of Colston Westbrook’s Black Cultural Association, a prison practice that
introduced white liberal students to black prisoners. Prior to BCA, Westbrook was part of the CIA Phoenix program in Viet Nam.
Dave and Mae Brussell examined DeFreeze, Patty Hearst and the SLA provocation saga extensively.
Yahweh ben Yahweh (or Nation of Yahweh) with thousands of black followers in Florida (and like the Jim Jones
Peoples Temple of California and Guyana) has all the earmarks of a psy-op.
Symonette and Sayoc, with their bizarre and erratic lifestyles, would certainly appeal to mind control operations run
by intelligence or law enforcement specialists seeking to promote violence and division with a law and order crack-
down to follow, though admittedly this is strictly conjecture on my part.
@Dennis: Here’s a long story in the Miami New Times from 2011 that might explain how Maurice Symonette and the people around him acquired almost $3 million in properties without any clear significant sources of income: mortgage fraud. The story also hints at Maurice essentially reconstituted the Yahweh ben Yahweh cult as its new leader. Or at least a very similar cult.
The following article was prompted by the prosecution of the people believed to be behind the 2009 shooting of Sam Ferguson, a rising star in Miami’s hip hop community at that time. Ferguson was also apparently long-time friends with Maurice. Ferguson’s shooter, according to prosecutors, was Adolphus Symonette, the nephew of Maurice.
Adolphus, like Maurice, was previously a member of the Yahweh ben Yahweh cult. Adolphus grew up in the cult after his parents joined. The cult dissolved in the early 90′ following the conviction of its leader over the gruesome murders when Adolphus was just 8 years old. Adolphus assumed a relatively normal life for the rest of his childhood, until high school. After getting caught with some pot, Adolphus has a work requirement as part of his probation. Maurice made Adolphus an offer: If Adolphus came to Maurice’s office a few times a week he would sign off on his probation-related work papers. Adolphus took him up on his offer and remained in Maurice’s circle until around 2008. o
2008 was also the year when Maurice and his group of followers made national news after unfurling a “KKK” banner at a Barack Obama event and shouted about Obama being in the Klan. They were escorted out of the audience and, in turn, because right-wing heroes. But that stunt appeared to turn off Adolphus, who left Maurice’s group. According to prosecutors, less than a year after leaving Maurice’s circle, Adolphus contracted three men to kidnap Maurice’s 25 year old son, Yachin Parhan, and beat him bloody as a warning to Maurice. Eight months later, in December of 2009, Adolphus shot a man, Samuel Haward, and was arrested.
Following his arrest, Adolphus was charged by the feds with a fraudulent mortgage scheme. According to the indictment, Adolphus directed three men to recruit straw buyers who would buy homes, fake mortgage documents, flip the houses, and pocket the loan money. Prosecutors also charge that the beating of Maurice’s son was an attempt to intimidate anyone threatening their crime spree.
Later, in February of 2011, Adolphus was charged with the killing of Sam Ferguson. Adolphus insists this was all a set up by Maurice.
And Adolphus isn’t the only person with close ties to Maurice apparently involved in mortgage fraud. A man Maurice calls “a close friend” and business partner, Alfred Davis, was also charged in 2011 with felony grand theft. In 2004, he was found guilty of federal bank fraud and served 33 months in prison. Several firms listing Maurice as a registered agent include Davis as a co-owner. In court records, Davis lists Michael’s North Miami headquarters as his home address. In the 2011 case against Davis, prosecutors charge him with recruiting a straw buyer and transferring a Deerfield Beach home to her via a forged mortgage document and a quitclaim deed. Then Davis took out a new $240,000 loan and pocketed the cash. He planned to flip the house to a new straw buyer while the straw buyer filed for bankruptcy to stall foreclosure.
So in 2011, a man who appears to be Maurice’s business partner was involved a mortgage fraud scam that included the strategic use of bankruptcy filings. Keep in mind that Maurice was banned by a court in September from filing for bankruptcy for five years after he was found to be abusing the system in order to avoid foreclosures on four of his properties. Might mortgaged fraud have been involved with any of those bankruptcy filings?
Interestingly, Maurice has an extensive record of criminal allegations against him, and yet none of the cases were prosecuted. These allegations include:
• In 1997, he was charged with grand theft auto, but the case wasn’t prosecuted.
• In 2006, he was booked for allegedly trying to board an Atlanta-bound Delta flight with a loaded .32-caliber firearm in his carry-on bag. Prosecutors eventually dropped the case.
• The same year, he was charged with threatening a police officer. “I wish you would arrest me... I’ll cost you your job,” he told a Miami Beach cop who searched him and found a fake ID. The case was later dropped.
• In September 2009, Bal Harbour cops caught him driving a purportedly stolen car with a Taurus Millennium handgun on the front seat. The case was dropped.
• In July 2010, police initially told reporters that Michael and his 23-year-old son, Jeremiah, fired AK-47s into the water behind their North Miami Beach home in an attempt to intimidate two swimmers who had climbed onto their boat. But only Jeremiah was accused of aggravated assault.
So Maurice Symonette appears to have the ability to escape one prosecution after another. Who knows why exactly that is, but this ability to escape prosecution must be extremely useful for someone who appears to be leading a life of flagrant crime:
“The rambling, hourlong speech, uploaded to his personal site — michaeldefeatssatan.com — last October, is a snapshot of the strange theology Maurice has been preaching since Yahweh’s empire crumbled and he avoided prosecution for two of the Messiah’s murders. In the 20 years since, the devoted follower has become a leader himself, a Tea Party-courting racial apocalyptic named Michael the Black Man who has earned infamy for a spate of increasingly bizarre stunts.”
Yep, in the decades following Maurice “Michael” Symonettes’s acquittal over the cult killings, Maurice appears to have managed to cobble together a cult of his own. And that was after getting what appeared to be some sort of pity acquittal over his role in the cult murders:
Maurice, on the other hand, insists that there were never any murders at all it it was all revenge by the Democrats after the cult started supporting Republicans:
Remarkably, in the years following the conviction of his former cult leader, Symonette managed to rebrand himself as “Michael the Black Man” and set up a Miami headquarters for his new group. A group that would throw weekly parties for the neighborhood kids (yikes!):
But it was in 2008, when Maurice’s group managed to make the national news by pulling a ‘KKK’ stunt at an Obama rally. This appears to be the event that made the group into a Fox News/Tea Party darling:
And in the years leading up to that 2008 stung, Maurice had managed to create a cult of his own, according to Adolphus. But Maurice denies all of this and insists that he isn’t their leader and the alleged cult members are actually just fellow worshipers:
Following Adolphus’s arrest in 2009 over a drive by shooting, federal prosecutors charge him with leading a mortgage fraud scheme. And, eventually, charged him with the killing of Sam Ferguson. Adolphus insists he was set up by his uncle:
Intriguingly, while Maurice has been charged with a number of crimes over the years, none of them are ever prosecuted:
But the people close to Maurice do get prosecuted. That includes Alfred Davis, a man who appears to be Maurice’s business partner. And one of the charges filed against Davis also involved mortgage fraud and the use of bankruptcy claims to carry out that fraud:
So is that what Maurice and his group were up to in the latest round of bankruptcy claims against $2.9 million in properties that prompted the judge to ban Symonette from any more bankruptcy claims for the next five years? And was this how they acquired those properties in the first place? That’s unclear. What is clear is that if mortgage fraud was indeed with Maurice and his group have been up to, he’s probably not going to get prosecuted for it. For unclear reasons.
With all of the focus President Trump and the GOP is placing on the ‘mortal danger’ posed to the United States by a few thousand Central American asylum seekers (mostly women and children) thousands of miles away as the core argument of the GOP’s final pitch to voters in the 2018 mid-terms, it’s easy to gloss over the other group that Trump has explicitly argued is a violent threat to Americans: the media. Specifically, on Monday, just a couple days after the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue by a neo-Nazi voicing Trump’s fears of ‘the caravan’ and the arrest of a pro-Trump pipe-bomber who targeted CNN, Trump blamed the ‘growing anger’ in the US on the ‘fake news’ media, and CNN in particular:
“Again referring to the “Fake News Media” as the “true Enemy of the People,” Trump said journalists “must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame.””
The open and obvious hostility of the ‘fake news’ media towards Trump is what sparked ‘the flame’ of violence. That was Trump’s response Monday morning, days after a neo-Nazi shooting up a synagogue and Trump super-fan who is obsessed with combating the ‘fake news’ — and CNN in particular — creating a mass bomb scare. It was also his message Sunday night, a day after the synagogue shooting:
And Trump was very specific about CNN being the kind of ‘fake news’ outlet that is fanning ‘the flame’ of violence:
Trump then went out of his way to make it clear that he wasn’t labeling all of the media ‘fake news enemies of the people’, clearly leaving out Fox News and the right-wing media complex that shower him with fawning praise day after day:
“The people of our Great Country are angry and disillusioned at receiving so much Fake News.” That sure sounds like Trump saying he understands why Cesar Sayoc sent CNN a pipe bomb!
And this theme of the media ‘creating the violence’ remained one of Trump’s parallel themes — along side fearmongering over ‘the caravan’ — for the entire week, with Trump accusing reporters just yesterday of ‘creating violence by your questions’:
“No, no, you know what, you’re creating violence by your questions...You are creating, you. And also a lot of the reporters are creating violence by not writing the truth. The fake news is creating violence.”
All of these questions being asked of Trump are angering Trump’s supporters (like Cesar Sayoc) so much that they’re being driven to violence. The violence is an understandable response to all the ‘fake news’. That’s clearly the message Trump is sending, and just to make it absolutely unambiguous, Trump tells a reporter that the power is in their hands to reduce the violence by giving Trump friendlier coverage:
That’s one of the core closing arguments by Trump and the GOP, on top of the malicious fearmonger over ‘the caravan’. Fearmongering that’s included calling the military to the border with Mexico and telling the military they can shoot any migrants that throw rocks.
So is Trump’s ‘enemies of the media’ closing argument actually resonating with voters and benefiting the president and his party? Well, according to a recent poll, yes, Trump’s ‘enemies of the people’ message is resonating. At least, it’s resonating with the vast majority of Republicans and a majority of independents. And this poll was conducted from October 25 to October 30, in the middle of the news coverage of the pipe bombs and the Pittsburgh shooting and a window that include Trump’s multiple ‘enemies of the people’ comments following the synagogue shooting. So it’s not like Trump’s decision to frame the media is merely Trump being unable to contain the bile that resides in his heart. He’s executing a political strategy of divide and conquer and it’s working. At least, it’s working at dividing:
“A new Morning Consult/Politico poll published Thursday found that 64 percent of Americans — 80 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of independents — believe the national media has done more to divide than unite the country since Trump took office. Just over half, 56 percent (including 88 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of independents), said the same of Trump.”
64 percent of Americans believe the national media has done more to divide than unite the US since Trump took office, compared to just 56 of Americans saying the same about Trump. It’s a result that’s largely due to Republicans overwhelming agreeing with that sentiment about the media, along with almost two thirds of independents.
And while it’s unclear to what extent these poll results reflect public agreement with Trump’s ‘enemies of the people’ slogan, it’s a sure bet that a large number of those Republican respondees do agree with the full ‘enemies of the people’ sentiments simply because right-wing media has been framing all non-right-wing media as subversive for years. Trump’s attacks are unusually because he’s the president, not because attacks of this nature are unusual.
Keep in mind that this poll was conducted during the period when Trump’s ‘enemy of the people’ rhetoric was in full swing following the Pittsburgh attack and the arrest of Cesar Sayoc and Trump’s ‘enemies of the people’ rhetoric has been going on for years. And that means a number of those polled where likely familiar with Trump’s ‘enemies of the people’ sloganeering when they answered these poll questions even if they weren’t aware of Trump’s recent use of that rhetoric:
Also keep in mind that a poll back in August found 44 percent of Republicans think Trump should have the power to close media organizations for “bad behavior”. So we have a constellation of data points indicating a substantial portion of Republican voters are completely in agreement with Trump’s ‘enemies of the people’ rhetoric and have been in agreement for quite some time. Which was kind of Trump’s point when he argued that ‘fake news’ was the source of ‘all this violence’.
And as the following article note, in one ironic sense Trump was correct. ‘Fake news’ really is a significant factor in this kind of political violence. The deeply felt conviction held by the increasingly radicalized audience of right-wing media — that ‘the media’ is all part of some sort of ‘fake news’ left-wing plot to undermine America which has been a mantra of American right-wing media for decades — has no doubt played a significant role in the wave of far right violence that’s hit America since Trump has been in office (like Jarrod Ramos’s attack on The Capital Gazette in Maryland days after Trump again declared the media the “enemy of the people”). And as the article reminds us, that vast right-wing media complex that’s been telling audiences for years that ‘the media’ is all lying to them and they can only trust sources like Fox News and Breitbart is the definition of ‘fake news’ and clearly stoking violence:
“What you don’t see discussed very often is the possibility that, at least about the “fake news” part, Trump is right.”
“There has been plenty of untrue stories about the bomb plots — early talk of a “false flag” operation to drum up support for liberal candidates.”
Recall that the right-wing meme that the pipe bombs were all part of a left-wing false flag plot was being aggressively pushed by a large number of prominent right-wing personalities. It was a mainstream meme in right-wing media.
But when Trump rails against ‘fake news’, he of course isn’t talking about the avalanche of lies by that right-wing media complex. He’s talking about all of the news that isn’t part of that right-wing media complex:
And, again, Trump’s rantings and ravings about ‘fake news’ is the same argument the right-wing media complex itself has been making for years at the same time the right-wing media has become increasingly invested in promoting a Big Lie version of reality. As the following article describes, it’s a Big Lie version of reality where the idea of objective journalism is dead and all facts are overtly portrayed as inherently partisan. Sure, true objectivity is challenging or impossible for a lot of topics and it’s important for the media and audiences to be honest with themselves about distinguishing between facts and opinions. But as the the following piece, which includes a number of interviews with right-wing media personalities themselves, makes clear, the goal is a media environment where the very concept of objective facts is dead. As Breitbart editor Matt Boyle put it, “Journalistic integrity is dead...There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information”:
““Journalistic integrity is dead,” he declared. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.” Standing behind a mahogany podium in a baggy dark suit, Boyle preached with the confidence of a true believer. In a stuttering staccato, he condemned the nation’s preeminent news outlets as “corrupted institutions,” “built on a lie,” and a criminal “syndicate that needs to be dismantled.” Boyle and his compatriots were laboring to usher in an imminent—and glorious—journalistic apocalypse. “We envision a day when CNN is no longer in business. We envision a day when The New York Times closes its doors. I think that day is possible.””
The weaponization of information. That’s the Breitbart vision, in the words of their own Washington news editor. A vision that includes “The full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media.”:
And as the article notes, it’s a vision that is coming shockingly close to fruition, with the conservative media complex now bigger, stronger, and more influential today than it’s ever been:
It’s been an ascendance decades in the making. Slamming the ‘mainstream media’ (non-right-wing partisan media) has been a right-wing past-time for decades. But in the era of Trump, we’re seeing this long-standing criticism of ‘the mainstream media’ fuse with the ascendance of right-wing conspiracy theory narratives mainstreamed by sites like Breitbart and InfoWars. Sites pushing narratives and worldviews typically drawn from the neo-Nazi far right which views all non-far right thought as part of a diabolical plot against white conservatives. And it’s in that far right conspiratorial context that Trump has been declaring the media ‘the enemy of the people’ and toying with the idea of shutting outlets down or loosening libel laws to go after critics. It was no longer about ‘reforming’ the mainstream media. It’s now about destroying it, as Breitbart editor Matt Boyle previously put it:
And as the article reminds us, if you have a world where the pretense of objective media is officially killed, and all media and information is framed as inherently partisan, that’s a world where the rich and powerful can become, well, even more powerful than they are today. And let’s not kids ourselves, we already live in a world where the rich and powerful can buy immense influence. Jeff Bezos presumably didn’t buy the Washington Post out of the goodness of his heart. He’s getting something out of it. But imagine how much more influence the wealthy and powerful can wield in a world where the public is convinced that every last fact should be viewed in a partisan light and can be casually embraced or discarded if it fits ‘your team’s’ agenda. It’s quite literally the mainstreaming of the kind of anti-Enlightenment nihilism at the core of so many far right movements and that’s the perfect Orwellian environment for powerful interests who want to fundamentally reshape society for their own agendas. A world with the grand ‘truth’ embraced by the public is that there is no truth and we shouldn’t even bother to try to find it:
So when right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro talks about returning to a time when all the media was viewed from a partisan framework, keep in mind that he’s not simply arguing against the idea that there should even be journalistic outlets that strive to maintain an ‘objective’ stance. He’s arguing for a future where the public is convinced that there’s no point in even trying to discern object reality and everyone should just go with whatever their ‘team’s’ media outlets tell them:
Shapiro then goes on to cite James O’Keefe, one of the most amoral and deceptive figures in the far right media complex, as someone who’s work should be viewed as journalistic. James O’Keefe, who has made a career of finding wealthy donor who will pay him to product deceptive undercover videos, is the right-wing vision of journalism. The kind of Big Lie ‘journalism’ that Trump doesn’t consider to be the ‘enemy of the people’:
And that embrace of open liars like James O’Keefe is what distinguishes the advocates of this vision of the media from critics like Jay Rosen who argue that news outlets shouldn’t actually portray themselves as non-partisan and should just be clear about their partisan leanings. One could make a reasonable case that all media outlets invariably have a partisan spin, even when they’re ‘just reporting the facts’. But that’s very different from what the right-wing media complex is up to with figures like James O’Keefe, where outright lies and deception in order to further are partisan agenda is the norm. It’s a sentiment expressed by Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Mathew Continetti, when he argues that even basic facts can’t be a common denominator in the public’s discourse. The ugly fact of the matter is that the right-wing media complex is trying to create a world where even basic facts are partisan playthings and the spreading of outright lies is considered ‘fair game’:
And that gleeful embrace of just fabricating reality is part of why the election of Donald Trump brought such glee to the right-wing media: Trump’s closest allies in the media have long been the most deceptive (Breitbart, Info Wars, Fox News, etc). And when Trump won it really was a genuine victory of that Big Lie machine. But it wasn’t a complete victory. Because, at the end of the day, the right-wing media complex doesn’t actually want a future where the media is split between an overtly partisan right-wing media complex and an overtly partisan left-wing media complex. They want a world where there is ONLY a right-wing media complex and everything else is considered somehow illegal or unallowed because the right-wing media complex is promoting a fundamentally far right authoritarian future. It’s the culmination of the ‘Serpent’s Walk’ scenario, where the authoritarian far right takes over the opinion forming media and dominates society. That’s part of why the declaration of the non-right-wing media as ‘the enemy of the people’ is such an important slogan if this assault on reality is going to fully succeed. Their vision requires doesn’t allow for completing partisan outlets. It requires a unified Big Lie machine:
Recall that Gateway Pundit is one of the sites involved with pushing the hoax rape allegations against Robert Mueller a few days ago. And that’s the true right-wing vision of the future of media. Fabricated reality.
Now, again, we shouldn’t pretend like there aren’t plenty of legitimate and serious critiques of the ‘mainstream (non-right-wing) media’. The coverage of the events in Ukraine, for instance, has been abhorrent. Same with the war in Yemen. There’s plenty of room for criticism.
But this ‘enemy of the people’ campaign does not represent a real legitimate criticism of journalism. It represents a campaign to make the worst aspects of journalism (like kowtowing to the agendas of powerful private interests) far, far worse and an attempt to get the public to just give up on the idea of even trying to discern the object reality of situation. A vision where the public just treats everything as a partisan plaything. It literally represents an assault on the Enlightenment, and if you had to encapsulate the real ideology of the far right it would be to role back the Enlightenment and return to a world where the powerful define reality for the masses. That’s what “The Dark Enlightenment”, promoted by the likes of far right billionaire Peter Thiel, is all about. The ideal of a society guided by science and reason for the masses gets replaced by an ideal world where reality is defined by and for the powerful. And if you had to put a label on what the right-wing envisions for the future, “a Dark Enlightenment” is probably about as apt a label as you can find.
So given overarching necessity of installing the right-wing Big Lie media complex as the arbiter of truth in order to achieve that Dark Enlightment, we should probably expect these attacks on the media to not just continue but accelerate. It’s not just in Trump’s short-term political interests. Destroying or taming all none far-right media is vital for the far right’s long-term interests. Seen in that context, Trump’s endless attacks on the media as ‘enemies of the people’ aren’t just unprecedented coming from a president. They were inevitable if the far right is to succeed and the Dark Enlightenment is to be achieved. Trump is both an aberration and a preview. A politician truly ahead of his times in the most ominous way.
Of course, the inevitability of these kinds of attacks doesn’t mean it was a politically savvy idea to make this one of his central closing arguments in the last week of the mid-terms. We’ll see. That may have simply been Trump being Trump. A politician who is simultaneously an out of control lunatic and a calculating Machiavellian template for our fascist Dark Enlightenment future.
You know that incredibly inflammatory race-baiting ad produced by the Trump administration that portrays Latino immigrants as dangerous criminals and is widely seen as even more racist than the infamous ‘Willie Horton’ ad of 1988? Well, it turns out it’s so racist that CNN refused to air the ad outright. NBC and Fox News did accept the ad. Initially. But after the airing of this ad on NBC during a Sunday night football game, the public backlash was so severe that NBC has now pulled the ad.
Facebook also decided to pull the ad, saying the ad, “violates Facebook’s advertising policy against sensational content so we are rejecting it.” The ad can still be posted on Facebook by Facebook users, but paid distribution has been stopped.
But here’s the amazing part of this story: Fox News also agreed to pull the ad shortly after NBC’s decision. Fox News. That’s how racist this ad is. Although Fox News didn’t give a precise explanation for why they pull the ad, and given all of the factual inaccuracies in the ad, it’s possible Fox technically rejected the ad due to those inaccuracies and was totally fine with the racism. And when you consider that Fox News largely exists to promote race-baiting and barely concealed white nationalist narratives, the ‘inaccuracies’ excuse seems like the more likely one for Fox News. Although the ultimate likeliest reason is Fox News simply knew the racism and deception in this ad could turn into a bigger story right before the mid-terms if Fox News didn’t also ban the ad after NBC did it. In other words, they were probably just trying to help Trump. Still, that’s how bad this ad is. Too racist for CNN and NBC and too deceptive or embarrassing for Fox News.
So how has the White House responded to the revelation that its ad won’t even be shown on Fox News? When asked about the ad by a reporter, Trump replied, “Well, a lot of things are offensive. Your questions are offensive a lot of the times”:
“NBC was first to announce the change, doing so after a backlash over its decision to show the 30-second spot during “Sunday Night Football,” one of the highest-rated programs on television.”
The most racist ad in modern times gets shown on one of the highest-rated programs on television two days before the mid-terms. What could possibly go wrong?
The public responds with revulsion and NBC pulls the ad, citing its “insensitive nature”, which isn’t particularly unexpected. And then Fox News does the same, which is unexpected given the fact that Fox News routinely peddles exactly the kind of content found in that ad. Fearmongering with white nationalist memes is almost the purpose for the network’s existence at this point. So it’s important to note that the ad wasn’t just really racist. It was also filled with factual inaccuracies. So that may have been the particular justification Fox News used. But for whatever reason they decided they had to pull the ad after NBC did it:
Even Facebook pulled the ad, although they just pulled it from paid distribution. Facebook users can still promote the ads themselves on Facebook:
And the Trump campaign responded to all this with cries of censorship and Trump himself equating the offensiveness of the ad with the media asking him questions he finds offensive:
“Well, a lot of things are offensive. Your questions are offensive a lot of the times.”
It begs the question: So is the question Trump was just answering about the offensive nature of the ad one of the questions from the media Trump himself finds so offensive?
The whole situation also begs another question: Is running an ad so racist that even Fox News eventually pulls it (after first playing it) seen as a winning media strategy by the Trump team? In other words, is getting this ad pulled seen as a setback or an accomplishment? After all, running an ad that’s so racist that the news media has to cover it is a pretty effective way at getting free advertising. Sure, the free advertising comes in the form of reports about how racist and dishonest the ad is, but isn’t that the core of Trump’s political strategy? A strategy built around being so racist and dishonest that Trump get extra media coverage in the form of reports about how racist and dishonest he is? Isn’t that a synopsis of the 2016 campaign? When viewed in the larger context of the Trump phenomena, it’s almost shocking that we haven’t seen them get an ad pulled for being too racist before now. For all we know, this ad is going to go viral on Facebook after this and maybe that was plan all along.
So while it seems likely that the Trump team ‘learned its lesson’ from all this, it’s probably not the lesson you want them to learn. And that’s all why this ad is about as Trumpian a closing argument the Trump team could have come up with in the final stretch of the campaign.
Although, as the following article notes, this super racist ad isn’t technically the Trump team’s closing argument ad. Trump’s team came out with an optimistic sounding ad that had nothing to do with immigration or fearmongering and instead touting the economy. And Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, put out a $6 million ad buy for this optimistic ad.
Does this mean that the Trump team is actually responding to the same kinds of concerns that prompted got the race-baiting ad pulled? Well, some on Trump’s team clearly want to go in that direction and move away from the over-the-top racism. But Trump himself isn’t one of those Trump team members. Instead, he’s reportedly upset about this final ad and felt that they should stay focused on the race-baiting and immigrant bashing:
“President Donald Trump was not pleased by the marquee closing TV ad his campaign unveiled last week featuring upbeat themes about the economy.”
Trump is down on the upbeat ad. As one Republican official put, “he hated it.” Instead, Trump has apparently insisted to aides that doubling down on anti-immigrant fear needs to be the closing argument. And this report isn’t solely based on anonymous White House sources. Trump himself has made this clear by promoting the race-baiting ad on his twitter feed while ignoring the upbeat economics ad:
And he’s apparently argue about the need for remaining focus on the anti-immigrant message in the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre and the arrest of the pro-Trump pipe bomber, two stories that exemplified the dangers of Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric:
So as we can see, being super extra racist even when it’s clear that doing so will create a public backlash is Trump’s intended strategy for the final stretch of the mid-terms. In that sense, the real closing argument isn’t that racist ad because the real ad isn’t a commercial. The real ad is the act of proudly running an ad that’s so racist that it gets pull from Fox News. That’s the actual closing argument. A closing argument that presumably doubles as his 2020 opening argument.
It’s been an unusually eventful couple of weeks for American political outcries over blackface. First we had Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Ertel resign following the discovery of 2005 Halloween photos of Ertel dressed in black face as a Hurricane Katrina victim. And now Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, is facing widespread calls for resignation over the revelation of a photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook page with a man in black face posing with another man in a Ku Klux Klan outfit. We also learned that Northham had the nickname of “Coonman” at the school. It was all so over the top that the calls for Northham’s resignation from within the Democratic party started almost immediately and continue to grow.
And those calls for Northam resignation only grew louder after the absurd twist of Northam’s admission that quickly turned into a bizarre denial. First Northam admitting he was in the picture but not being sure if he was wearing the black face or Klan outfit, but the next day Northam announced he had determined he wasn’t in that photo after all upon closer examination of the photo and implied it was some sort of mistake that it got onto his yearbook page at all. He also admitted to having dressed in black face as part of a Michael Jackson outfit for a dance contest that year and suggested that some sort of confusion over the Jackson black face outfit led to the picture with the Klan outfit showing up on his yearbook page. It was the kind of flip-floppy explanation that was so bad on so many levels that it would have made Northham’s resignation inevitable if it hadn’t already been inevitable after the initial publication of that photo.
So given that both the Democrats and Republicans have been dealing with black face controversy of late, it seems like a good time to point out the obvious: that the Republican Party aggressively embraced the ‘Southern Strategy’ of racist dog-whistling for political gain ever since the Civil Rights gains of the 60’s and never looked back and the Democratic Party is where you’re going to find the real civil rights movement for African Americans and that’s why the pressure Northam is feeling to resign is wildly different the pressure Ertel felt to resign as Florida’s Republican Secretary of State.
In Ertel’s case, his black face picture went way beyond dog-whistling and that’s a big no-no for Republican politicians. He dropped the mask too much. For Northham, his black face picture violated the principles the Democratic Party is supposed to be fighting for because, for better or worse, pretty much any civil rights movement for African Americans (or any group) in the US is going to find itself better represented by the Democrats. It’s just one of the basic asymmetries of American politics. In other words, Northam’s 1984 photo reminds us of the Democratic Party’s past while Ertel’s 2005 photo is a chilling reminder of the Republican Party’s present and likely future. So the party’s responses to their respective black face scandals are coming from two very different motives.
So we’ll see how long it take before Northham resigns. But it’s a good time to remind ourselves that the openly racist Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King is still serving in Congress after his own party leaders in House and Senate asked him to resign. Like with Ertel, King’s comments in support of white supremacy and white nationalism dropped the mask way too much for the party not to rebuke him. And yet King is still there and refuses to resign. With links on his congressional website to a VDare.com report by a white nationalist anti-immigration ‘journalist’ that he’s had up for months on a section of his site dedicated to cherry-picked articles intended to make Latinos look prone to crime:
“Weeks after claiming to denounce racism and bigotry, Rep. Steve King (R‑Iowa) is still using his official government website to direct his constituents to a white nationalist blog that regularly publishes the work of vile racists, anti-Semites, and Nazi sympathizers, HuffPost has found.”
VDare is getting readership directed to it from Steve King’s official congressional website. It can be found on a section of King’s website that he’s devoted to cherry-picked articles portraying Latinos as prone to committing crimes. hat’s quite an endorsement for one of the America’s most prominent white nationalist outlets:
And this link to Brenda Walker’s article has apparently been on King’s page since at least June of 2018 when this was first reported. King really, really, really likes Walker’s article:
And this like to a VDare article on his website is just one instance of a long career of going beyond dog-whistling and openly flirting with white nationalism that has come to define Steve King’s political legacy. That’s part of why it’s so notable that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy both asked King to resign following his comments in support of the terms “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” and King has yet to resign:
So given Steve King’s refusal to resign in the face of his recent comments in support of white supremacy it’s going to be extra interesting to see if the racist ghosts of Ralph Northham’s past end up bringing public attention to openly racist congressman currently haunting the GOP by dropping the mask too much and refusing to resign.
Oh look, on the same day President Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, had to spend his appearances on the Sunday morning news shows denying charges that Trump is a white supremacist, Trump decided to spend his Sunday going on a twitter rampage today retweeting both a notorious ‘Alt Right’ personality and an account with a cartoon “Q” wearing a MAGA hat on its icon making it clear it’s a big support of the far right ‘QAnon’ hoax. A hoax that tells people that Trump is actually secretly working with Robert Mueller and the US military to arrest a giant elite pedophile ring that is running America. That’s what Trump was promoting with this retweet. The ‘Alt Right’ personality Trump retweeted was Jack Posobiec, who is perhaps best known for his aggressive promotion of ‘Pizzagate’ in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.
This is, of course, days after Trump once again gave the rhetorical kid glove treatment to white nationalists and neo-Nazis. In this case, it was the outcry over Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the growing threat of white nationalism while he seemingly cast doubt on whether or not the shooter was actually a far right militant following the massacre in New Zealand by a neo-Nazi who appears to have designed the attack for precisely the kind of propaganda campaign that most benefits from *wink and nod* responses by figures like Trump. During that same press conference Trump decried the ‘invasion’ of illegal immigrants into the US. This was just hours after the release of New Zealand shooter Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto that described non-white immigrants as invaders.
So in case anyone somehow got the impression that Trump is no longer a far right sympathizer following Mick Mulvaney’s Sunday morning denials, Trump made sure to put those doubts to rest by spending his afternoon boosting far right twitter personalities who specialize in pedophilia conspiracies. It’s quite a way for a president to spend a Sunday:
“Vox journalist Aaron Rupar reported, via Twitter, that Trump shared content from multiple accounts known for peddling QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories. One of the individuals who had their tweets promoted by President Trump appears to be a bigoted conspiracy theorist who believes that former President Barack Obama is a pedophile. The person frequently posts bigoted, Islamophobic tweets.”
Retweeting ‘Alt Right’ personalities and QAnon accounts: it’s the presidential bully pit at work in the age of Trump. And, again, it’s not like the QAnon account hid the fact that it’s a QAnon account. There’s a big cartoon Q with a MAGA hat as the account’s icon that’s very clearly visible on each of its tweets. And then he retweets Jack Posobiec too, one of the most well known promoters of ‘Pizzagate’
And this is unfortunately merely the latest instance of the Trump White House promoting QAnon:
Don’t forget that Michael Flynn’s son, Mike Flynn, Jr., was aggressively promoting Pizzagate over twitter days before the 2016 election. He went on to become a member of the Trump transition team but was kicked out after he continued promoting Pizzagate after a man shot up the Comet PingPong pizza parlour in December of 2016. None of this is new at all for the Trump team. In other words, nothing has changed. That’s the take home lesson Trump taught us today. He’s still going to openly coddle and promote white nationalists and he’s still going to use far right garbage conspiracy theories to do it and keep his most ardent followers enthralled.
Also in the ‘nothing has changed’ news department, Steve King posted out a joke on Facebook about the US having a civil war on Saturday. The post had a caption “Wonder who would win….” and a smirking emoji and a picture of a red figure whose body is made up of ‘red’ states like Texas, Alabama and Georgia punching a blue figure made up a ‘blue’ states like California. The meme has the text “Folks keep talking about another civil war, One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use”. Recall how Steve King lost his committee assignments in January after he openly questioned why terms like “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” are considered negative now. And recall how Steve King continued to link to far right anti-immigrant sites like VDare.com on his official House website. So it was already clear that nothing had changed for Steve King before he posted on social media out about civil war. But he apparently decided to issue a public reminder that nothing has changed and he is an unrepentant white nationalist over the weekend. One day after the New Zealand massacre:
“Captioned “Wonder who would win….” along with a smirking emoji, the meme shows a red figure whose body is made up of traditionally conservative states like Texas, Alabama and Georgia punching a blue figure whose torso is California and whose head is Oregon.”
Right on time, Steve King swoops in with the civil war post a day after a neo-Nazi terror attack that included a manifesto hoping for civil war. And this is less than a year after saying he felt the US was heading toward a second civil war. The fact that King repeated a neo-Confederate meme wasn’t remarkable, but the timing sure was. One day after the New Zealand attack:
So to summarize the white nationalist signaling stories, on Friday we had Trump rhetorically coddle the far right in the wake of the New Zealand attack, then on Saturday Rep. Steve King decided to signal that he’s kind of on the same team as the New Zealand neo-Nazi shooter with a second civil war Facebook post. At least that’s what the timing would suggest. Then on Sunday President Trump apparently decided it was appropriate to make a big twitter shout out to #Pizzagate and #QAnon figures with a bunch of retweets.
It’s all a reminder that when President Trump answered the question Friday about the rising threat of white nationalism around the globe, part of what made his answer dismissing the threat so wrong is the fact that the correct answer would have been something like “yes, white nationalism is clearly a rising threat and I am helping to fuel that threat with my social media use and trollish downplaying of the threat. But politicians stoking this threat isn’t new, as Steve King has long made clear.” That would have been appropriate answer by Trump. Instead we got a weekend of white nationalist dog-whistles.
So just take that in: the weekend started off with a neo-Nazi terror attack and the white nationalist US president created a controversy by downplaying the threat of white nationalism. Then he spent Sunday retweeting ‘Alt Right’ twitter accounts. And Steve King posted on Facebook a civil war threat. Oh, and don’t forget that it was just Thursday, the day before the neo-Nazi attack, that Breitbart published an interview with Trump Trump where he openly alluded to his supporters in law enforcement, the military, and biker groups protecting him with force.
So as we can see, beyond the neo-Nazi terror attack, last week was filled with lots of other examples of the rising global threat of white nationalism. A rising threat that includes the growing mainstreaming by right-wing politicians of the use of neo-Nazi memes and trollish rhetorical games.
And we have another neo-Nazi domestic terror attack in modern America. This time it’s a shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California. The shooter, John T. Earnest, posted a manifesto on 8Chan that espoused a standard neo-Nazi ideology — claims of ‘white genocide’ being perpetrated by Jews — and e made clear he was following in the footsteps of the mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the synagogue attack in Pittsburgh. Notably, in addition to the shooting taking place on the last day of Passover, it’s also six months to the day following the massacre of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
But another highly notable and disturbing aspect of this terror attack is the fact that this happened one day after President Trump doubled down on the “very fine people on both sides” rhetoric he infamously used in the wake of the violence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in response to the launch of Joe Biden’s presidential bid with a video that focused on Trump’s Charlottesville comments and framed Biden’s bid as a battle for the soul of America and against the white nationalism at the heart of Trump’s political agenda. Trump now characterizes his comments following Charlottesville as “perfect” in what appears to be an embrace of a new revisionist interpretation of Trump’s Charlottesville comments that’s been recently promoted on the right. According to this new spin, when Trump referred to the “very fine people” on both sides, he was never intending to suggest that some of the neo-Nazis were very fine people. Instead, he was solely referring to the people who simply attended the Unite the Right rally for the purpose protesting the removal of Confederate statues.
Of course, this isn’t exactly new spin because Trump did indeed make that exact same claim during his post-Charlottesville comments in 2017 and that was part of what all the controversy was about. It was controversial because, yes, there were indeed people who attended the rally in part to oppose the removal of Confederate statues, which was one of the stated purposes of the rally, after all. But there doesn’t appear to be an indication that there were people who weren’t neo-Nazis who showed up at the rally because it was an overtly advertised neo-Nazi rally that made it absolutely clear that the larger purpose of the rally was opposition to Jews and mainstreaming the far right. So when Trump claims he was merely referring to the non-neo-Nazis protesting the removal of the statues, he’s essentially claiming that some of the attendees of the neo-Nazi rally weren’t actually neo-Nazis which is one of the classic far right trolling techniques for the mainstream of the far right. And this was the rhetorical trolling Trump doubled down on one day before the latest copycat neo-Nazi terror attack by someone espousing exactly the same ideology as the people who attended the Unite the Right rally two years ago:
“Asked by a reporter Friday about his remarks in the immediate aftermath of the Charlottesville clashes that there were “very fine people on both sides” at the “Unite the Right” rally, Trump said was referring to those on the right who simply wanted to protest the removal of Confederate statutes.”
It was just talking about the non-neo-Nazis at the neo-Nazi rally. Those were the “very fine people” he was talking about. Who exactly were these fine non-neo-Nazi people who showed up at the rally that Trump is talking about? That remains extremely mysterious because Unite the Right was explicitly advertised as a far right rally and the organizer, Jason Kessler, is an open white nationalist. But according to Trump, “not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch”:
And note how Trump appeared to take issue with the idea of characterizing the ‘Alt Right’ as neo-Nazis (which is a completely accurate characterization). So presumably Trump was referring to the rally attendees who self-identify as Alt Right and don’t call themselves neo-Nazis, which is, of course, playing into the entire purpose the neo-Nazis coined the term ‘Alt Right’ in the first place as a means of mainstreaming neo-Nazi ideologies with a more ‘respectable’ and neutral label:
So as we can see, contrary to countering the criticisms leveled against him by claiming that he was merely talking about the non-neo-Nazis at the rally, Trump instead made the exact same claim that brought him the criticism in the first place. It was like a 360 degree spin where nothing actually changed.
And in case it’s not obvious how obvious it was that this was a neo-Nazi rally at the time Unite the Right was organizing, here’s a piece in Vox that makes it clear that the nature of this rally was obvious to everyone. For instance, before the rally, Jason Kessler was on the radio promoting it saying, “the number one thing is I want to destigmatize Pro-White advocacy. … I want a huge, huge crowd, and that’s what we’re going to have, to come out and support not just the Lee monument but also white people in general, because it is our race which is under attack.”
And as the article also notes, when you look closely as Trump’s comments at the time explaining why he was confident that there were people there who weren’t actually neo-Nazis but were just peaceful protestors, he appeared to be referring to the torch-light march that Unite the Right had the night before the day of violence. And that, of course, was the torchlight march where they chanted slogans like “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and Soil”:
“Unite the Right was explicitly organized and branded as a far-right, racist, and white supremacist event by far-right racist white supremacists. This was clear for months before the march actually occurred. So by casting the rally instead as a sort of spontaneous outpouring from Confederate statue enthusiasts, Trump is rewriting history.”
It was no mystery. Unite the Right was a bunch of neo-Nazis. It was unambiguous and preceded by two other overt neo-Nazi rallies months earlier. It was only mysterious to those playing dumb:
Also unambiguously clear was the fact that the neo-Nazi ‘Alt Right’ organizers saw the rally as a vehicle for destigmatizing and mainstreaming white supremacy. Jason Kessler was open about that and Andrew Anglin characterized it as a battle cry for a rising Alt Right agenda:
Juxtapose Andrew Anglin’s embrace of the ‘Alt Right’ brand when he wrote, “It is now an historic rally, which will serve as a rallying point and battle cry for the rising Alt-Right movement,” Trump playing dumb about the meaning of the Alt Right at his press conference. Its highlights how Trump wasn’t simply arguing that some of participants of the Unite the Right rally weren’t neo-Nazis but instead “very fine people.” He was also implicitly making that same argument about the Alt Right. That some members of the Alt Right are actually very fine people. And when he today tries to make the specious spin that he was talking about the monument protestors who weren’t neo-Nazis, he is again implicitly arguing that some members of the Alt Right aren’t really neo-Nazis but in fact very fine people and those were the people who were just there protesting monument. The very fine Alt Right.
But based on Trump’s own words, he actually appeared to describe the entire Friday night torchlight march as an example of very fine people because there was no violence Friday night. YEs, they marched with torches in a militantly chanted “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil”, but they weren’t engaging in violence and were examples of very fine people. Trump is pretty clear that’s how he saw it because he says: “I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call ’em. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know, I don’t know if you know, but they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit.” The following day they had some bad one. But not Friday night. Those were the peaceful people who were just concerned about monuments. Those were Trump’s words about the peaceful monument protestors. The ‘Jews will not replace us’ marchers who had a few bad apple show up the next day:
And that’s why the latest spin by Trump that he was just talking about monument protestors is so cynical.
But let’s not forget that Trump was just repeating what’s been bubbling in the right wing media for weeks now. And as the following article notes, this new spin bubbled up at Fox News in a rather humorous way that demonstrates the hall of mirrors nature of the contemporary right-wing media:
After Joe Biden issues his campaign launch video featuring Trump’s ‘very fine people’ Charlottesville commentary, Fox New’s general assignment reporter Doug McKelway sent an email to dozens of Fox News employees with the line “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” and then a bunch of quotes cherry-picked from Trump’s post-Charlottesville commentary that are selectively chosen to make it seems like he was referring to non-white nationalist in the march as very fine people. They were the same quotes that have been pushed recently by places like Breitbart with the spin that Trump was referring to the statue protestors as very fine people. The same spin Trump is now pushing.
Almost immediately, News digital senior editor Cody Derespina replied-all, agreeing with McKelway, and attached a Fox News interview with Jarrod Kuhn, a Charlottesville marcher who claimed he was not a white supremacist, but simply there to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. So we had a Fox News digital senior editor have right on hand that footage supporting McKelway ready to reply-all. Welcome to working at Fox News.
And then Fox News was saved by Fox News Radio’s White House correspondent Jon Decker calling them out by noting that if Kuhn was in that march he was chanting things like “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil”.
McKelway replies an hour later, humbled and providing a link to a report showing that a different marcher who McKelway had interviewed and who also just claimed to be a non-white nationalist marcher only interested in statues was also later found out to be a neo-Nazi who was arrested for flash white power signs. So now you know: Fox News employees are so dedicated to far right propaganda they propagandize themselves and create their own fake news targeting themselves:
“In fact, Decker continued, “Based upon the slew of emails that I’ve received today, both of you should send an apology to your Fox News colleagues—many of whom are hurt and infuriated by your respective posts. Your posts read like something you’d read on a White Supremacist chat room.””
If Jon Decker hadn’t interjected himself into this Fox News employee email thread at that point who knows where it would have gone. It was already sounding like a white supremacist chat room. McKelway’s email parroting the deceptive revisionist spin being pumped out by right-wing outlets lately was replied to just moments later by the digital news senior editor with the Fox News footage of Jarrod Kuhn pretending to just be a statue supporter (an associate of Kuhn confirmed he was a self-professed white supremacist). Good job by Decker. That was a close Fox News Fake News call:
So it appears that the right-wing has currently settled on a parallel universe version of what Trump said after Charlottesville. As we should have expected. And now Trump is joining in on this collective lie about what he said and what he meant. Fittingly.
So America continued its descent into a detached Trumpian bizarro universe with Joe Biden launching his campaign calling Trump’s rhetorical coddling of Nazis an example of how Trump represents a dire threat the soul of America and Trumps responds with a deceptive right-wing that argues there were indeed very fine people in the torghlight march and that’s who Trump was talking about. Trump’s fallback explanation for why his commentary was “perfect” is the very fine non-neo-Nazi Alt Right the ongoing right-wing revisionist campaign is fantasizing about to defend Trump.
In other news, Twitter reportedly can’t implement auto-algorithms to filter neo-Nazi account because it might auto-ban some Republican politicians...
Here’s another story in the ‘Walkin’ the Snake’ theme of the mainstreaming of Nazis. This time Fox News is the culprit. Typically:
Laura Ingraham’s prime time show on Thursday night had a typical segment that was dedicated to stoking the right-wing victimhood complex about social media censorship. The segment was based on a recent Associated Press report about Facebook banning a number of prominent extremist voices. The article listed Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loom, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Paul Nehlen as examples people Facebook recently banned.
Ingraham invited Candace Owens to interview for this segment. Owens is the communications director for Turning Point USA, the ‘Alt Right’-friendly campus outreach group financed by Illinois billionaire GOP mega-donors. Owens is an ‘Alt Right’ right-wing media rising star. Young, attractive, black, and telegenic and willing to enthusiastically spew out all sorts of pop far right nonsense, Owens is basically the ideal vehicle for mainstreaming ‘Alt Right’ worldviews. And like all ‘Alt Right’ rising stars, Owens dutifully keeps getting in trouble for crossing ‘the line’. The far right line. That’s how the line moves. With repeated crossing until it’s expected and tolerated. Owens is quite adept at crossing that line.
For example, during a closed-door event for Turning Point back in December, Owens gave a speech where she complained about the word “nationalism” being conflated with Hitler and the Nazis. She went on to say that “If Hitler Just Wanted To Make Germany Great And Have Things Run Well, OK, Fine...The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalise...”. Hitler would have been ok if he had kept it to Germany. That was her speech to a Turning Point USA closed door event. And she was the communications director at the time.
Note that the elected president of TPUSA-UNLV, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas chapter of Turning Point USA had to resign last month after video surfaced of him and his girlfriend making white power chants. Stories about Turning Points USA and Nazis just keep popping up.
Note that the Republicans in Congress invited Owens to testify back in April during a hearing on the rise of hate crimes and white nationalism which is basically trolling. Trolling is also how you push ‘the line’ which is what the Republicans in Congress were doing. It’s a team effort. Owens was reportedly very upset that a Democratic congressman brought up her Hitler comments during the congressional hearing. Gaslighting is also how you push ‘the line’.
Owens was herself temporarily banned from Facebook a couple of weeks ago after she made a post saying “Black America must wake up to the great liberal hoax. White supremacy is not a threat. Liberal supremacy is,” which is an extremely ‘Alt Right’ meme. It was just a seven day suspension but Facebook quickly announced that the suspension was a mistake because the post didn’t violate the company’s policies and restored her account. That was part of the reason she was on the segment with Laura Ingraham. To play the role of victim of the supposed big crackdown on conservatives because they’re being persecuted and not because they keep violating the rules or crossing the decency lines set up for the platform.
The segment on Laura Ingraham is focused on pushing the idea that there’s massive censorship of “prominent” conservative voices on social media. This is a common meme in right-wing media and part of a long-standing ‘working the refs’ strategy. It’s also a meme heavily promoted by the constellation of far right ideologies around the world that peddle to their audiences the idea that there really is this giant liberal establishment through Wall Street and Hollywood that runs everything and is scheming to destroy white Christian America. And the only people white America can trust are the white nationalists who are actually just patriots. That’s the meta-message. The meta-message that you can only listen to us because you can only trust us because everyone else is against you. That’s a meme routinely pushed on Fox News and also a central meme to most far right movements. And cults.
So Ingraham and Owens do this segment based on the AP article about Facebook banning prominent voices and during the segment there’s a graphic of people who have been kicked off of social media. This is where the segment started ‘Walkin’ the Snake’ in a major way. The graphic (see here) featured the names and photos of eight people. Most of them were from the AP article although some additional names were added that weren’t in the article including Owens herself. Not surprisingly, Louis Farrakhan got left out of the graphic. The eight people were Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, Candace Owens, Michelle Malkin, Dan Scavino, James Woods, and Paul Nehlen. The graphic lists their names so the audience could see Nehlen’s names. Nehlen the open neo-Nazi.
The segment basically treats them all as persecuted conservative voices who just care about border security and national security and are being silenced because Big Social Media is targeting them because they are conservative voices and not because they kept breaking the rules of the social media platforms.
Putting aside Nehlen, Jones, Yiannopolous, and Loomer are already a pretty awful group to mainstream in terms of people for Ingraham to portray as persecuted conservatives who just care about national security and borders. All three have built their careers peddling lies, misinformation, and a general propaganda stream that will somehow fit into a warmed over ‘Protocols’ pop conspiracy version of reality. An ‘Alt’ version of reality where the owners of vast wealth are largely liberals who want to impose a socialist dystopia. Big Liberal Media and ‘globalists’ (the Jews) run the military industrial complex and the world and diabolically plot the destruction of white Christians. Immigration is part of the diabolical plot. That’s the gist of the worldview Jones, Yiannopoulous, and Loomer have all built their careers promoting. It’s the right-wing conspiracy-tainment industry worldview that crafts a narrative about a global conspiracy where the global far right are the good guys. That alternate reality is what these three construct: an alternate reality. Ingraham and Owens spent the segment treating that entire panel of eight figures on one big group of persecuted regular conservative voices who care about border security and national sovereignty and are being silenced by ‘the establishment’ (and not because they keep breaking the rules and decency standards of the social media platform).
And yes, the right-wing billionaires generally endorse and often finance the right-wing conspiracy alternative reality industry. Like the Kochs and the John Birch Society. They should love it. A conspiracy theory that largely leaves out the right-wing billionaires and fascists and Nazi underground and authoritarians around the world and instead focuses on Jews, ‘the Illuminati’, teachers unions, and the rest of the cast of characters that make up the alternative reality version of the world manufactured by individuals like Jones, Yiannopoulos, and Loomer. Hollywood and the unions and Wall Street (which is apparently left-wing) are running the world and conspiring against white conservative Christians. That’s a core meta-message of the right-wing conspiracy world all three inhabit.
Also don’t forget that that Yiannopoulos joined Info Wars in 2018 after he lost his job at Breitbart. So he doesn’t merely flirt with Jones’s far right conspiracy-tainment industry. He’s a partner.
And then there’s Paul Nehlen, the open white nationalist. During the entire segment Ingraham and Owens in no way hinted at the fact that Paul Nehlen is an open white nationalist. For example, Nehlen appeared on a podcast back in April where he admitted to wearing a shirt featuring Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh synagogue neo-Nazi shooter. When asked why he chose that shirt Nehlen responded, “Because, I want to make a point that it will ultimately take — it might not take a million Robert Bowers — but it’s going to take a lot of people all pushing in the same direction to do what needs to be done, and that is to rid white lands of Jews.” More Robert Bowers to rid America of Jews. That was Paul Nehlen like two months ago on a podcast. While wearing a Bowers shirt.
Recall that Nehlen was a rising right-wing start in GOP politics just a few years ago. Steve Bannon and Breitbart strongly back Nehlen in a primary challenge against then-House Speaker Paul Ryan in 2016. Donald Trump was openly backing him over Ryan.
Nehlen ran again for the seat in the 2018 mid-terms and was the front-runner in the primary as of April of 2018, highlighting how there is a disturbingly high portion of the GOP base who will vote for an open white nationalist. One of Nehlen’s main policy issues in the 2018 primary race was online censorship of people like him with a call for the extension of the First Amendment to social media platforms. For that race he didn’t get the conservative media backing because he dropped the mask and openly embraced a white nationalist platform. Bannon and Breitbart disowned him by this point. You can’t drop the mask that much.
And that’s part of what makes Ingraham’s sympathetic coverage of Paul Nehlen so interesting in the context of Fox News overall mission of mainstreaming far right thought. Nehlen was a rising right-wing star. Then he became too toxic to touch. Is ‘I’m not Nazi but Nehlen has a point’ going to be the new ‘line’ on the right-wing? Is Fox News going to use Nehlen as a *wink and nod* oops joke to push ‘the line’ one step further. We’ll see, but the right-wing media’s center of gravity is already so far to the right that Alex Jones is almost a mainstream conservative views these days and that includes Fox News:
“For years, right-wing commentators have levied bad-faith claims of anti-conservative bias against social media companies in an effort to work the refs. In the latest such salvo, Ingraham devoted a segment on Thursday’s show to what she termed progressives’ efforts to “silence conservative voices ahead of the 2020 election,” featuring conservative commentator Candace Owens, who made headlines earlier this year by suggesting that Adolf Hitler’s nationalism would have been “OK” if it had been confined to Germany.”
Yep, the purpose of the segment was to show what Ingraham termed a progressive effort to “silence conservative voices ahead of the 2020 election.” And in the graphic of eight conservative voices we find Paul Nehlen. Ingraham characterized the group as simply “people who believe in border enforcement, people who believe in national sovereignty.” Recall how Robert Bowers claimed the trigger for his attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue was the caravan of Central American asylum seekers which he saw as being part of a Jewish conspiracy. So when Ingraham tries to give cover to neo-Nazis like Nehlen as being misunderstood and simply someone who believes in border security that’s a meme the neo-Nazi terrorists are already heavily pushing too:
So how does Fox News respond to the outcry over the mainstreaming of an open Nazi like Nehlen? By issuing a statement that declared that any insinuation the Laura Ingraham was defending Nehlen is despicable and then suggesting that the names that showed up in that graphic were merely grabbed from the AP report. This ignores the fact that the graphic only included a subset of the names in the article (Louis Farrakhan wasn’t included) and other names not in the article were added to the graphic. It was unambiguously curated by Fox. It also ignores the fact that Ingraham and Owens were clearly both depicting the ‘censored voices’ as people with just typical conservative views. A defense that implicitly included Nehlen for the audience watching at home:
Ingraham then defends herself by suggesting that it’s the critics of her show who are the ones giving Nehlen all this attention that he no doubt enjoys:
Also keep in mind that this is not at all unprecedented for Ingraham. Just in the last year she’s already lost numerous advertisers. That’s part of the reason Fox News even bothered to issue a farcical defense of Ingraham: to placate the remaining advertisers. But it also highlights how dedicated the Fox News is to the mainstreaming of white nationalism. Ingraham gets to keep crossing lines that drive advertisers away. Fox News will apparently just eat the cost:
And note that if Fox News really wanted to make it 100 percent clear that Laura Ingraham wasn’t intentionally promoting a neo-Nazi, they could have simply had her spend 5 minutes on a future episode where they revisit the topic and have Ingraham acknowledge the ‘mistake’ and give a forceful condemnation of Nehlen and his views. It’s a ‘mea culpa’ template that Fox News could easily use whenever these kinds of incidents happen and yet, for some strange reason, it never happens. Although having one mea culpa video after another would eventually become its own PR headache for the channel. Mainstreaming extremism is basically the purpose of the channel, after all. That’s why it’s not at all a surprise that Fox News gives a gaslighting response to this incident. That’s part of its business model and reason for being. gaslighting radicalizes.
It’s also worth noting that another motive Ingraham might have for the mainstreaming of Nazis on her show is that she herself holds Nazi-like views, which is exactly what her estranged older brother has been publicly claiming. According to Curtis Ingraham, they grew up with an alcoholic Nazi-sympathizing father and Laura absorbed a great deal of that growing up. He also called her emotionally dead inside. So in Fox New’s defense, maybe the primary driving force behind this was Laura Ingraham personal desire to mainstream Nazis like Nehlen. It’s not a great defense, especially given the network’s vast history of promoting violent white nationalism.
Also keep in mind that if Nehlen hadn’t been on that graphic during the segment it’s still obscene that it included Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, or Laura Loomer too as basically just average conservatives. Tragically, that’s largely true by the standards of contemporary right-wing media but it’s still obscene. It’s also pretty obscene the Candace “Hitler would have been fine if he kept it at home” Owens was portrayed as an average everyday conservative.
But here we are. The mainstreaming of Nehlen crosses ‘the line’ for what is acceptable. For now. It’s an ever moving line that gets moved by people repeatedly crossing it to the point where it’s just expected. And thanks to years of seeing ‘the line’ shift further and further to the right it’s now more or less understood that Alex Jones and Laura Loomer and Milo Yiannopoulos are average conservatives. Three people who aggressively peddle junk far right pop conspiracy trash as a vehicle for radicalizing the audience are just regular conservatives these days. All the past craziness of Fox News has paid off. It’s normal now. And that’s what this Nehlen incident is about. Making him normal. Just and average conservative concerned about borders who feels there needs to be a violent Nazi takeover.
In this new normal pushed by Fox News, all of these personalities in that graphic weren’t banned (often temporarily) from these platforms for repeatedly violating their various rules and decency standards. No, they were thrown off because conservatives are being persecuted against by the the all powerful liberal establishment. That was the fundamental message in that segment with Owen and a meta-message repeated routinely throughout the day on the network. It’s a sign of how Fox News is fundamentally mainstreaming the far right neo-Nazi pop culture of the social media giants like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. A neo-Nazi pop culture selling a warmed over ‘Protocols’ far right worldview. The far right worldview that there’s this all powerful left-wing establishment (the Jews/Illuminati) that rules the world and is orchestrating a plan to destroy good Christian white people. That’s a ‘line’ that’s pretty much one step away from Paul Nehlen’s line of violent Nazi overthrow. And that’s how far Fox News has pushed ‘the line’. Nehlen is up to the line because moving the line is what right-wing media does. In the wrong direction.
It’s become an American tradition: a white nationalist-inspired mass shooting takes place followed by shock, horror, and then a seething outrage over the fact that absolutely nothing meaningful will be done about it.
But following the two mass shootings over the weekend — one which was described by the neo-Nazi shooter himself as being inspired by the Christchurch terror attack — it’s worth noting that something potentially significant did actually change compared to the response to all the previous attacks. Something that might actually meaningfully contribute to addressing the underlying causes of these attacks: Cloudflare, the company that offers protection against denial of service attacks for websites, just declared that it’s no longer going to be offering its services to the 8chan message board. In other words, 8chan is about to go away.
The shooter’s manifesto was posted on 8chan minutes before the attack. And as the following article makes clear, 8chan is now a central hub for promoting and organizing lone wolf far right terror attacks. This appears to be the basis for Cloudflare cutting off 8chan’s service. Recall how Cloudflare has long taken the stance in the wake of previous internet-inspired far right mass shooting attacks that it will provide its services to virtually any website on the basis of protecting free speech. Cloudflare even continued to defend The Daily Stormer from denial of service attacks following the Charlottesville violence. It was only after Andrew Auernheimer (Daily Stormer’s SysAdmin) suggested that Cloudflare’s executives were sympathetic to their cause that Daily Stormer found its Cloudflare services cut off. Cloudflare made clear Auernheimer’s allegations were the reason. So Cloudflare would offer their services to pretty much any site where neo-Nazis could openly advocate for terror attacks unless that site publicly accuses Cloudflare of supporting them. That was Cloudflare’s stance before.
It’s unclear why this attack cross a line that didn’t appear to exist before with Cloudflare. But it could but a ‘final straw’ kind of situation. As the following article describes, 8chan has become one of the internet’s leading sites where violent extremists congregate and mass shooters death counts are celebrated as “high scores”. It’s become the last refuge of the worst extremists on the internet after they get kicked out of other sites. Even the founder of 8chan wants it shut down but he doesn’t run the site anymore. In other words, Cloudflare will tolerate sites that promote neo-Nazi domestic terror campaigns until the site demonstrates a successful track record of inspiring/facilitating terror attacks. A successful track record now possessed by 8chan. It appears that’s the new ‘line’ for Cloudflare.
So 8chan, one of the internet’s hubs for celebrating violent far right extremism, is about to lose one of its key service providers with the loss of Cloudflare and its unclear the site will be able to find a replacement. It might. And if 8chan can’t find a replacement it’s only a matter of time before it’s effectively taken off line through denial of service attacks. Will the take down of 8chan make neo-Nazi terror attacks less likely by eliminating a key hub for radicalizing, recruiting, and celebrating ‘lone wolf’ neo-Nazi terrorists? Hopefully. At least for a while. Until a replacement site pops up. But 8chan won’t necessarily be that easy for the far right terror groups to replace. That why the loss of 8chan could be a real blow to the forces behind this wave of terror attacks. At least for a while.
So at least something potentially significant was done following a mass shooting attack that might seriously disrupt one of the fundamental causes of all these mass shootings. The neo-Nazi ‘lone wolf’ recruitment efforts experienced a real blow. And it was Cloudflare, the company that stood by The Daily Stormer until the Stormer suggested they were friends, that did it by establishing that websites that demonstrate a successful track record of supporting terror won’t get Cloudflare’s protection. It was a baby step that’s still significant because it’s also the only step:
“In recent months, 8chan has become a go-to resource for violent extremists. At least three mass shootings this year — including the mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif. — have been announced in advance on the site, often accompanied by racist writings that seem engineered to go viral on the internet.”
The go-to resource for violent extremists. That’s what 8chan has become and that’s why taking down 8chan is potentially a significant development in terms of addressing the underlying factors driving all of these neo-Nazi attacks. 8chan really is playing an important element in the online ecosystem of propaganda in part because it’s a mainstream-ish site where mass shootings are openly glorified and the shooters are portrayed as heroic martyrs. There aren’t that many popular sites where that kind of culture dominated and 8chan was arguably the biggest its kind making it fabulously useful for everything for promoting far right memes including ‘lone wolf’ terror memes:
But Cloudflare has finally decided 8chan crossed a line. A line that didn’t really exist before with Cloudflare. That’s also what makes this so significant:
Cloudflare has a line now that can’t be crossed and sites that celebrate and promote neo-Nazi mass killings and demonstrably play an active role in facilitating real harm and real damage cross that line. This is new for Cloudflare and a huge departure from its previous stance.
And if this really does represent a change in Cloudflare’s policies, that suggests any future replacements for 8chan in this neo-Nazi propaganda ecosystem might also end up losing Cloudflare’s services too. We’ll see, but Cloudflare is used by a lot of far right/incel sites. Hopefully the threat of the loss of Cloudflare’s services to sites found to have played a role in promoting these ‘lone wolf’ terror attacks will make the propaganda pumped out by these the neo-Nazi internet ecosystem promoting that ‘lone wolf’ terror a little less potent. The far right’s strategy of using ‘copycat’ terror campaigns of ‘lone wolves’ whose actions can’t be attributed to a particular group relies on potent internet propaganda. And the far right has clearly honed its ‘lone wolf’ propaganda techniques because there’s a new neo-Nazi/incel ‘lone wolf’ violent far right terror attack every few days on average at this point. It’s clearly very potent, as Americans are reminded of with each new attack.
So the question of whether or not this was a one-time move by Cloudflare to avoid bad publicity associated with the El Paso neo-Nazi attack, or a real policy change that will apply to other sites that promote extremist violence and terror attacks, remains a significant yet-to-be answered question. The US First Amendment that prevents government censorship makes questions of whether or not a website is too dangerous to be allowed online largely a private sector question and a major force in the private sector may have just made a significant decision.
Or not. We don’t really know yet because Cloudflare’s announcement was somewhat ambiguous. We’ll unfortunately just have to wait and see how the company responds to the inevitable future controversies over websites connected to future neo-Nazi ‘lone wolf’ terror attacks to get an idea of whether or not this decision against 8chan will apply to the larger neo-Nazi internet ecosystem using Cloudflare’s services. We’ll probably get an idea after the next ten or so neo-Nazi ‘lone wolf’ terror attacks because at least a few of those would be highly likely to be connected to a website using Cloudflare’s services. It should take a few weeks.
Now that President Trump appears to have single-handedly put the US on course towards open war with Iran following the drone assassination strike on Qasem Soleimani, it’s worth noting that a review of Farah Mansoor’s groundbreaking research into the ‘October Surprise’ as covered in FTR#899. Because if Mansoor is correct, and there really was a CIA plot in the late 70’s to foment the Islamic revolution in Iranian as an anti-Communist bulwark following the CIA’s secret discovery of the Shah’s cancer diagnosis and a CIA steering of the hostage crisis to assist in the election of Ronald Reagan, that seems like a chapter of history that is especially important to understand right about now.
And not just for American voters heading into the 2020 election but also the Iranian public as they are inundated with their own theocratic nationalist propaganda. After all, while a conflict between the US and Iran would undoubtedly be portrayed as a kind of ‘clash of civilizations’, the fact of the matter is that the far right elements in the West have long viewed Islamic jihadists as allies in a broader ‘clash of civilization’ campaign to crush left-wing governments of all stripes under the banner of ‘fighting Communism’. That was unambiguously the case when it came to the West’s sponsorship of the Sunni Mujahedeen fighting in Afghanistan in the 80’s that morphed into movements like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and, today, ISIS. And if it turns out the Islamic Revolution in Iran was also seen as an anti-Communist tool by the CIA back in the 1970’s, that seems like the kind of thing the Iranian public should really know about, especially since a popular revolution in Iran that leads to a secular democracy really is the only viable path forward for Iran that won’t end in future sorrow. If the US viewed the current theocrats as more acceptable than, say, Iranian democratic socialists, that’s something that’s going to be very important for the Iranian street that actually wants to have a modern secular democracy to keep in mind.
This history of Western sponsorship of both Sunni and Shia Islamic fundamentalist theocratic movements also highlights one of the more perverse aspects of this whole situation: any war between the US and Iran is invariably part of this broader civil war within Islam between far right theocratic Sunni movements and far right theocratic Shia movements. It’s the kind of intra-religious civil war that’s so appallingly common it’s easy to forget how fundamentally stupid it all is.
Even worse is the fact that we have a US president with unusually close ties to both Sunni theocratic monarchies that are some of the biggest advocates of a war with Iran as part of this religious civil war, as well as the Israel far right. And all of those elements appear to have attempted to assist Trump’s election in 2016 via the still unresolved Psy Group story. The US is literally picking a side in a nonsensical religious civil war.
And then there’s the fact that this conflict is being made inevitable by a serial liar president who is twice divorced playboy who cheated on the current First Lady with multiple porn stars and yet is somehow the political God King of the most apocalyptic branches of conservative Christianity who view a major war in the Middle East as a necessary to fulfilling End Times prophecy. Even the stories in the Bible don’t usually get this absurd.
Oh, and let’s not forget that Trump’s political rise was also deeply tied to his ability to politically speak to and activate the growing neo-Nazi ‘Alt Right’ movement. It was something Trump himself painfully reminded us of when he made his notorious ‘fine people on both sides’ comment in response to the deadly neo-Nazi violence at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017.
That’s who is leading the US into a war with Iran. The political patron saint of American neo-Nazis who also happens to be the patron saint of the apocalyptic Christian Right and best buddies with the theocratic Sunni and far right Jewish leaders who are some of the biggest long-standing cheerleaders of a war with Iran. And Trump also happens to be the modern culmination of a political right-wing revolution that started with the election of Ronald Reagan 40 years ago, an election that was greatly assisted by an Iranian hostage crisis that the CIA helped bring about due to fears of an Iranian secular socialist left coming to power. There’s never really a good context for outright war, but the insane stupidity of this whole situation has got to make this one of the worst war contexts in history.
The Trump administration’s deep ties to the ‘Alt Right’ were grimly highlighted in a now-deleted tweet by Eric Trump when on December 31, days before the assassination drone strike, when he tweeted “Bout to open up a big ol’ can of whoop ass” in response to a tweet about the breaking news that US marines arrived at the US embassy in Baghdad. There’s been much speculation about the tweet and whether or not Eric had foreknowledge of his father’s drone strike plans (which is a pretty deal since the US Congress wasn’t notified). And while there’s no proof that Eric Trump was specifically hinting at the drone strike, the tweet is still highly noteworthy in terms of who made the initial tweet about the marines that Eric was responding to: Jack Posobiec, one of the leading ‘Alt Right’ internet personalities and a major online Trump booster. Yes, in the lead up to Trump’s historic decision to put the US on a course for war with Iran, his son was swapping tweets with the ‘Alt Right’, as usual. An ‘Alt Right’ movement that openly wants to see a massive war between ‘the West’ and everyone else on the planet.
So with that stupid awful historical context in mind, here’s a fun fact to add to the pile of stupid awfulness: It turns out one of the ideological figures of the modern day ‘Alt Right’ is a Satanist who was just arrested in Florida for kidnapping his wife at gunpoint. He goes by the name Augustus Sol Invictus and has a history of ritually sacrificing goats. According to Richard Spencer, the guy penned the first draft of the so-called “Charlottesville Statement” outlining an “alt-right” ideology. He also spoke at the “Unite the Right” rally and later started a legal defense fund for the members of the “Rise Above Movement” (RAM) following their prosecutions over violent attacks at multiple California rallies. Recall how the RAM movement is one of the American neo-Nazi groups that’s been networking with the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which is another reminder of how the US neo-Nazi movements are really just part of a broader global network of far right movements with a long history of fight with each other (identitarian extremists are like that) but also working together in their shared goal of opposing left-wing concepts like universal rights, equality, and an embrace of the Enlightenment which is unfortunately something the Iranian people and the American people and everyone else is going to have to keep in mind as the world stumbles into another massively stupid episode of mass violence:
“White nationalist leader Richard Spencer credited Invictus with penning the first draft of the so-called “Charlottesville Statement” outlining an “alt-right” ideology, the Miami Herald noted.”
It’s a sign of where the moral compass of the ‘Alt Right’ is pointing when Richard Spencer, the kind widely credited as the founder of the movement, goes on to credit a Satanist like Invictus with penning the first draft of the “Charlottesville Statement” outlining an “alt-right” ideology. An ideology intended to be an umbrella movement of groups opposed to concepts like universal rights, equality, and the Enlightenment. The president who was brought to power by channeling the ‘Alt Right’ is the guy who appears to be intent on getting the US into a war with Iran. A war that’s part of an intra-religious civil war between far right Islamic theocratic movements and backed by far right Jewish and Christian theocratic movements. And the one thing united them all is a deep opposition to ideals of the Enlightenment. This march to war is like a dark Satanic dream situation.
So as the world stumbles into a new war over regime change in Iran, it’s going to be worth keeping in mind that Iran isn’t the only country in this conflict in desperate need of charting a new path based on a revolution in thought translated into politics. Because the current path is same the long-standing anti-Enlightenment path to global conflict that the Satanist who kidnaps his wife and sacrifices goats would strongly approve of and the current president and his fellow world leader buddies appear intent on keep us on.
With season of political dirty tricks coming into full swing, here’s a story to keep in mind in the face of what is almost certainly going to be one of the dirtiest GOP campaigns in history, especially if scandals erupt for the Democrats from low-level volunteers saying outrageous things and getting caught by Project Veritas or something extra shady like that. It’s also a story that’s much more topical in light of the extensive coordination between neo-Nazis, militias, and other far right actors and the Tea Party Billionaire-financed anti-covid-lockdown protests that suddenly popped up in cities across the US:
The AZ Mirror just published a report about the leaked 2018 encrypted chat contents of a far right message board, Red Storm, that describes the kind of political activism that was being coordinated on the message board. Organized political activism by neo-Nazis and fellow travelers. Like QAnon followers according to the report. The board was set up for a joint neo-Nazi + fellow traveler political influence campaign for the 2018 election to get Republicans elected. It’s described as being run by neo-Nazis and QAnon conspiracy theorists so it sounds like a place for different far right activist networks that normally don’t communicate get together for dirty tricks schemes.
The Red Storm message board has an introductory post describing it as being set up “for the purpose of discussion, organization, and influential action for the 2018 Midterms, in the interests of undermining the Left and elevating the Right.” And a “big tent right wing Discord. That means ethnonationalists (sic) will have to get along with civic nationalists, that means libertarians have to get along with national socialists, that means mainstream conservatives will have to be ok with race discussions and questioning Israel.” So it’s a far right encrypted message board that’s talking about elevating the general “Right” and get Republicans elected. A big tent of people fighting for a much, much smaller tent. They can’t agree on which particular tiny tent they should be fighting for but they are united in their underlying tinier tent goal by electing Republicans. That’s the political coalition that this Discord encrypted chat message board was coordinating for ‘political influence campaigns’ in 2018, run by neo-Nazis an QAnon followers.
So what political influence campaigns did the AZ Mirror find? Well, they just looked at a small fractions of the 10 million chat logs but basically found discussion of tactics about how to get Republicans elected. Many were standard tactics like calling voters to persuade them. There were threads about calling up old people and convincing them that Democrats were extremists.
And, of course, there was discussion about going undercover to infiltrate the Democratic Party. It’s the kind of tactic that would obviously yield a lot of opportunities for painting the Democrats as extremists. It’s not really a revelation that we would find discussions of this kind of tactic since it’s entirely to be expected. But it is kind of remarkable that it appears to have been set up to be an explicitly pan-far right forum for inter-ideological political influence campaign coordination. It’s in the forum intro post. That’s also not really unexpected given the GOP’s decades of coordination with the far right but it’s still a disturbing story because it’s basically the ‘Unite the Right’ vision manifesting as an anonymous underground pan-far right dirty tricks brain-storming forum.
Also keep in mind that these 2018 discussions about sending in undercover operatives in the Democratic Party would be far more potentially devastating if any of those operatives spent the last two years climbing the ranks of the Democratic activist base. They were only talking about the idea in 2018 so if they did send those undercover people into the Democratic Party it’s possible they won’t be causing trouble until 2020. So if there’s some ‘incident’ in the 2020 campaign where a low-level Democratic operative says or does something that almost seems designed to make Democrats look like extremists it’s going to be worth recalling that a whole spectrum of far right extremists were secretly talking in 2018 about sending undercover agents into the Democrats to make them look like extremists:
“The online chat logs analyzed by the Arizona Mirror are only a small fraction of nearly 10 million internal messages from over 100 servers on the Discord chat app run by Neo-Nazis and QAnon conspiracy theorists that were made available to a group of journalists at Distributed Denial of Secrets.”
Neo-Nazis and QAnon conspiracy theorists. Behold the Red Storm big tent, an encrypted digital ‘Unite the Right’ strategy session. Everyone on the Right is invited. Especially the Nazis who are explicitly welcome:
And part of this campaign to sway voters involved infiltrating the Democratic Party. Now, there’s a lot of ways an undercover operative could assist in an influence campaign beyond publicly playing the role of a Democratic extremist. They could steal documents and computer files and leak them to the press or record the undrecover audio and video. But in terms of influence operations designed to make Democrats look like extremists sending in someone to be a volunteer who says outrageous extremist stuff to undercover right-wing ‘journalists’ seems like an obvious tempting option. And based on the content on the Red Storm forum it’s an option we should be on the lookout for in 2020:
We’ll see what types of Democratic ‘incidents’ or pseudo-scandals bubble up from the muck this year but we know it’s going to happen and all signs point towards this being a banner year for far right dirty tricks. The GOP is the party of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon now. This is an era of open coordinating with neo-Nazis for the GOP. The 2020 GOP is an ‘Alt Right’ party and that means secret chat forums for joint neo-Nazi/QAnon/traditional-conservative dirty tricks coordination. Dirty tricks campaign that is literally the ‘Unite the Right’ ethos put in action. To elect Republicans.
Here’s a pair of stories to keep in mind in light of both the ongoing moves by President Trump and Republicans to turn the George Floyd protests into a military conflict against ‘the left’ and the recent discovery of the “Red Storm” encrypted chatroom set up in 2018 to facilitate the coordination of QAnon with neo-Nazis and mainstream conservatives for the purpose of electing Republicans that included schemes to the infiltration of Democratic Party:
Now that the Republican Party has formally nominated a QAnon proponent, Jo Rae Perkins, to be the party’s nominee for the 2020 Oregon Senate race, one of the more disturbing questions we have to ask of Perkins at this point is what her views are on President Trump’s push to call in the military to police US cities in response to the protests over George Floyd and associated looting. How might the proponent of a conspiracy theory that centers around the fantasy that Trump, Robert Mueller, and the US military are secretly working on mass arresting the networks of globalist Satanic pedophiles behind the ‘Deep State’ respond to Trump’s calls to send in the military to combat some sort of fantasy ‘antifa’ army of insurrectionists? Well, in the case of Jo Rae Perkins she’s all for it. Surprise! But Perkins doesn’t want to limit the military to large cities. She wants to see military forces sent in to rural too. At least the rural areas of Oregon. Why? To stop the busloads of “pure evil” antifa insurrectionists who are planning on descending on rural Oregon according to Perkins:
“At the zenith of the rant, she demanded that martial law be imposed via the National Guard: “This is insurrection. And the governors need to call in the National Guard,” she said. “We need martial law to squash this ASAP.””
We need martial law to squash this ASAP. It’s more or less what we probably should have expected from a QAnon candidate and sure enough that’s what we hear. Predictably awful.
And it’s not just George Soros paying all of these antifa “thugs”, according to Perkins. Barack Obama is also behind the antifa army about to descend on rural Oregon. That’s what Perkin says she just read about. Obama’s secret army he put together a few years ago:
“Wasn’t there an army that he put together a few years ago? I just read about it.”
Those were the comments of the Republican Party’s senate nominee. A party in the thrall of not just far right conspiracy theories designed to justify a bloody suppression of political opponents but in the thrall of the lowest quality far right conspiracy theories one can find. QAnon is the kind of garbage that should have ‘jumped the shark’ even with Trump’s base a while ago (wasn’t Robert Mueller supposed to be hauling Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama off to Gitmo by now?) and yet somehow its has only solidified itself as the prevailing mythos of Trump’s true believer base. Especially with those who view Trump as a God-sent divine actor. That’s part of what makes the QAnon phenomena so disturbing: it’s a reflection of a truly religious fervor at the base of Trump’s support that’s coupled with a truly religious fervor that ‘the left’ is actually some sort of inhuman Satanic force that’s out to out to mass murder conservative Christians. It’s like a parody of what one would imagine a neo-Nazi messaging campaign would look like and yet that’s literally mainstream Republican thought. How mainstream? Well, for example...:
““Every American better wake up. If we loose (sic) this country you will loose (sic) your life. If you’re a Republican, Conservative, Democrat Trump supporter, etc. — you will be murdered. You will be dragged from your burning home and be beat to death. This is a fact. This what they stand for,” Waurishuk wrote about protesters.”
It’s a fact that the left is going to drag Trump voters from their burning homes and beat them to death in the streets if Republicans lose in November. That was message Hillsborough County GOP chairman Jim Waurishuk decided to share with everyone on Facebook.
Also, Obama admitted he was behind the coordinated mayhem. That’s what Waurishuk also decided to share. He presumably read about this admission from the same source Jo Rae Perkins. Or maybe not the same source because there’s a lot of right-wing sources that would be making those kinds of claims these days. Because that’s also the contemporary Trump-era Republican zeitgiest: just make shit up with abandon because the bar is so low no one cares what’s real. It’s about the feelings. The dark scary feelings that are being generated by this content and then channeled into convincing conservative whites that they are facing some sort of existential threat if Trump and the Republicans lose power:
There is no doubt that Barack Obama and George Soros are fielding armies of antifa terrorists who will kill Republican voters if Trump loses. That’s the public message from Hillsborough County GOP Chairman Jim Waurishuk and the extent of the pushback from his party so far is a few calls for a resignation. Will he ultimately resign? We’ll see. We’ll also see if Trump decides to retweet Waurishuk. After all, this is right up his ally. Don’t forget it was just like a week ago that Trump retweeted the video of a local New Mexico county commissioner, Couy Griffin, giving a speech about how “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” And Waurishuk, like Griffin, has been calling for the hangings of political opponents and anyone they associate with the ‘Deep State’. So retweeting Waurishuk has got to be something Trump is seriously tempted by at this point because he’s playing Trump’s tune:
Will Jim Waurishuk resign after telling Republican voters they’ll be killed by left-wing death squads if Democrats win in November or will he keep his office and continuing posting on social media about left wing death squads? And that’s all part of what makes the store of Jo Rae Perkins’s Republican senate nomination so remarkable: an open QAnon advocate as a Senate nominee isn’t really all that remarkable. It’s pretty remarkable. Most of the party is following some variation of the same underlying far right worldview that QAnon follows where ‘the left’ is plotting some sort of diabolical scheme to wipe out Christian conservatives. Far right End Times politics. That’s today’s GOP. Jo Rae Perkins is pretty standard for Republicans these days. She basically sounds like Jim Waurishuk. Or Couy Griffin. Or Trump. The question isn’t whether or Jim Waurishuk or Jo Rae Perkins will resign after fomenting dangerously inflammatory far right conspiracy mongering. The real question is how soon Trump will retweet them like he retweeted Couy Griffin. Stay tuned...
The 2020 presidential general election season is sort of kicking off Saturday with Trump’s packed political rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. True to Trumpian form, the rally was chosen at a time and place that basically makes it a toast to white supremacy. Scheduling the opening Trump rally on ‘Juneteenth’ (June 19) — the anniversary of June 19th, 1865, the day the last slaves were freed by Union soldiers — was bad enough. That would be a slap in the face to the African American community under normal Trumpian circumstances. But this is in the middle of the national police brutality protests that represent one of the largest sustained civil rights public movement in a generation. Starting off on ‘Juneteenth’ was just trolling. Trolling that involved Trump playing dumb about the significance of the date before moving it back a day to Saturday. Steven Miller must have been guffawing over that one
But Trump didn’t just choose Juneteenth as the date to start off his COVID-riffic rallies. He’s chose Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 that have come to symbolize the white supremacist domestic terroristic threat at the core of the Jim Crow post-Civil War subjugation of black America. If you step out of your subjugated status you will be mass murdered by white vigilante militias and the government will stand by. That was the implicit death threat directed at America’s African American community that the slaughter of at Tulsa represents. Trump chose that symbolic location. On Juneteenth. And then played dumb. It’s a wink-and-nod trollish clap back to that white supremacist vigilante domestic terror death threat of 1921 from the president in 2020 intended to jump start his reelection campaign. It’s kind of a nightmare scenario for 99-year anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. We’ll see what the 100-year anniversary has in store.
But one big change between the white supremacist death threats of 1921 and today is that today we have a far right media ecosystem that’s spent years describing everyone who isn’t a Trump supporter as a ‘cultural Marxist’ socialist revolutionary who represents a threat to all that is good and decent. And with the protest and associated chaos we have a renewed fixation on ‘antifa’ as some sort of left-wing domestic terror boogey-man that’s become central to Trump’s reelection messaging. Democrats represent violent antifa terrorists who will destroy you and your family if Trump loses. That really is the prevailing messaging coming from the right-wing media infrastructure these days. Extreme fear-mongering about the consequences of Trump losing with antifa running through conservative communities just ransacking the place and killing people. That’s the kind of political dark magic they are playing with to get Trump reelected.
And then there’s the ‘boogaloo’ movement that is basically the manifestation of every sane person’s fears of rampant online white supremacist culture that’s been increasingly mainstream on the right as social media has become the dominant cultural media. An online movement to turn Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter strategy into a fun online meme movement intended to inspire a ‘lone wolf’ domestic terrorist destabilization campaign. We’ve already seen the case of Steven Carrillo and Robert Justus hooking up over Facebook and going on a false flag killing spree that was intended to be blamed on the protesters in the hopes of fomenting chaos and civil war.
So this modern day civil rights movement for African Americans currently centering on police brutality is coinciding with the culmination of decades of increasingly extreme rhetoric from the political right where we now have a president and right-wing base that has kind of decided to lump almost every American who isn’t a Trump supporter into some sort of vague ‘antifa/blm/sjw cultural Marxist’ existential threat to their futures. Right-wing talk radio has been basically pushing that line for years and now we have a right-wing terrified of Trump losing and indulging in the scariest kind of self-fear-mongering about the dire consequences of Trump losing as a motivational tool to get out the vote and coinciding with the rise of an anarcho-far right white nationalist online terror ‘boogaloo’ culture, where the violently oppressive spirit of the Tulsa massacre lives on in the form of jokey death threat memes.
It’s a convergence of political dynamics that bodes well for the prospects of black civil rights in the US at least in terms of winning over greater public sympathy and awareness but it only bodes well if the US doesn’t succumb to kind of far right power grab that Trump and the right-wing media complex are constantly stoking. A large portion of white America is getting a slight taste of the kind of implicit death threat that black America has been brutally living under for centuries now that we have a president basically toying with civil war memes for his reelection campaign and indulging in the dark politics of selling fantasies of violently finishing off the left. Just a tiny taste but an instructive taste. Trump’s political brand is rooted in a white supremacist id but there are plenty of white Americans that fall under the right-wing umbrella of ‘antifa’ domestic enemies. In other words, Trump’s brand of fueling his supporter’s fears of the ‘other’ might actually help all the ‘others’ to find greater common cause.
But there’s another reason Trump’s rally in Oklahoma might actually play a valuable service that helps society: it’s going to be a ‘boogaloo’ fanatic magnet. So if any law enforcement agencies are actually working to build intelligence on the very real domestic terror threat posed by the ‘boogaloo bois’ and affiliated ‘accelerationist’ neo-Nazis one couldn’t hope for a better place to collect that intelligence than Trump’s Juneteenth Tulsa rally. That kind of dog-whistling doesn’t go unheard. Every nut job in the US with a functioning vehicle is going be in Tulsa making it the kind of ‘boogaloo’ networking platform that would make Facebook blush. Is there any possibility that law enforcement will be collecting intelligence on the ‘boogaloo’ domestic terror networks that will obviously be enthusiastically supporting this event? Who knows, but according to a leaked DHS report obtained by Greg Sargent, the top threat seen by DHS to law enforcement is the threat posed by far right anti-government anarchists, which is basically a description of the boogaloo bois. Antifa doesn’t appear to be seen as any sort of threat according to the document. It’s distinctly a far right threat. That’s what law enforcement should fear most these days and the Tulsa rally, with its white supremacist vigilante race war dog-whistling symbolism, is going to be an absolute magnet for exactly that threat:
“Meanwhile, Trump and his top officials have continued to blame unrest and violence at protests on antifa, to cast the violence more broadly as primarily left-wing in orientation.”
The violent left must be stopped at all cost or it’s all over. That’s Trump’s reelection meme, with antifa cast as some sort of underground militant threat on the cusp of taking over and burning down cities everywhere. And yet based on this DHS document they aren’t even worried about antifa when it comes to threats to law enforcement. It’s the boogaloo bois and other far right extremist that has DHS worried:
And note how Trump even had a Facebook ad pulled this week that used a Nazi-like inverted triangle in a “Stop Antifa!” ad. That’s how dark this kind of stoking/trolling is getting. Trump is using concentration camp imagery against his political opponents:
But when it comes to the ‘boogaloo bois’, Trump has remained completely silent. Because of course he has. The boogaloo bois represent the manifestation of the distillation of Trumpian politics: the trollish mainstreaming of race war politics:
And it’s that fundamental dehumanization of political opponents as the kind of threats that should be thrown in concentration camps coupled with Trump’s complete silence about the threat posed by ‘boogaloo’ that’s ensuring the ‘boogaloo’ movement feels as emboldened as possible. Trump’s silence is playing the same role for the boogaloo movement that the US government played with its lack of criminal action against the white vigilantes of Tulsa a century ago: the hyper-emboldening the white supremacist vigilante domestic terrorists who feel like they’re getting government approval. It’s all a reminder if the law enforcement is going to be using the Juneteenth Tulsa rally as an opportunity to collect intelligence on the growing threat of the ‘boogaloo’ movement, the biggest factor driving the growth of that movement is going to be giving a long-winded hate speech at the rally.
Amidst all the turmoil over the last week created by President Trump’s open attack on the Postal System as part of a broader attack on the legitimacy of the upcoming November 2020 vote, it’s worth noting another story that was largely eclipsed by Trump’s direct assault on democracy: Marjorie Taylor Greene, an open QAnon, adherent just won the GOP primary for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District and is almost certainly going to be the winner in the general election.
As we’ve seen, Greene is just one of the growing number of people running for office in 2020 as a Republican, and with the ongoing US Justice Department investigation into Jeffrey Epstein elevated by the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell the prospects of QAnon themes of Satanic elite Democrats playing a major role in the Trump reelection campaign are only growing too. So her primary victory was part of a broader QAnon-esque zeitgiest that’s captured the Republican base. But it’s important to keep in mind that this mainstreaming of the QAnon within the GOP is happening in the context of Trump’s ongoing preemptive delegitimization of the upcoming election and that’s the kind of stunt that could potentially benefit from a conspiracy movement that’s convinced most of the Democratic party should be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay and charged with crimes against humanity. In other words, the Trump reelection campaign has a lot more QAnon synergy now that it embraced mass mail-in voter fraud conspiracies. And that’s why Trump’s most recent embrace of the QAnon community during a press conference on Friday is extra disturbing:
“Well, she did very well in the election...She won by a lot. She was very popular. She comes from a great state, and she had a tremendous victory. So absolutely I did congratulate her.”
That was Trump’s response to a direct question about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s victory and her support of QAnon: A non-answer that simply pointed out she was popular. And then he ignored a direct followup question which is exactly the kind of non-answer that the QAnon adherents are expecting and listening for from Trump. Because don’t forget that QAnon is based on the idea that Trump was secretly working with Robert Mueller to expose and round up all of the Satanic pedophile elites and ship them off to Guantanamo Bay. QAnon doesn’t expect Trump to endorse QAnon. He just has to do exactly what he did during that exchange to endorse them:
So as America descends into the 2020 Trumpian ‘voter-fraud’ election delegitimization nightmare scenario it’s going to be worth keep in mind that America is simultaneously also descending into a different nightmare scenario where a conspiracy theory that posits that the Democratic party is run by Satanic elite pedophiles who should be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. Which is why we should probably expect voter mail-in fraud to be included in the upcoming Gitmo trials of liberals. Because the Democratic Satanic pedophile elites are obviously going to be involved in the massive mail-in voter fraud too. It only makes sense.
It’s no easy task mentally digesting what exactly transpired on Wednesday, January 6, during the DC insurrection, in part because it’s so unprecedented. And a major part of what complicates that assessment is the simple fact that it’s still not entirely clear what role the Trump administration may have played in fomenting and facilitating the raid. It’s unambiguous that Trump verbally fueled the mob, but we still don’t know what behind-the-scenes actions may have been taken to ensure the mob gained access to the Capitol while the National Guard remained at bay. Nor do we know if the Trump White House had foreknowledge of the possible plot to kidnap members of Congress.
But as the following FiveThirtyEight piece reminds us, one thing we can confidently state about the events that unfolding that day is that they represented a stunning success of the goal laid out in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Because, while that 2017 rally was essentially a gathering of neo-Nazi, the Trump rally on January 6 was a far more inclusive affair: the neo-Nazis were there, but along side thousands of regular Trump supporters who aren’t members of overt white supremacist organizations. In other words, the ‘Right’ — from mainstream Republicans to neo-Nazis — really was united when they stormed the Capitol.
And as the following piece also notes, the mainstreaming of far right ideas isn’t just evident by the fact that that mainstream Republicans have spent four years now rallying side-by-side with neo-Nazis at one Trump rally after another. The mainstreaming of far right ideas is fully evident in current polls. Including the most recent polls about the Jan 6 raid on the Capitol. According to those polls, nearly half of registered Republican voters support the raid. According to a recent YouGov poll, 45 percent of GOP voters supported the siege, while 43 percent opposed it. So while the Republican party may be somewhat split on the topic of whether or not the Capitol should be sieged, the American far right, which appears to now include at least half of Republicans, is more united than ever:
“This was undoubtedly a historic and disturbing moment. But it’s important to remember that it did not happen in a vacuum, which we can see from polling on topics related to Wednesday’s breach — faith in the election, support for the president, trust in institutions — as well as a comparison with the most analogous event in recent U.S. history: the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Taken together, these suggest that the attack on the Capitol shows how right-wing extremist views have become palatable to more members of an increasingly isolated and angry Trump base, even as they shock the rest of the country.”
The people behind the Unite the Right of August 2017 had a vision. A vision where neo-Nazis and mainstream Republicans could stand shoulder to shoulder under a shared cause. And that vision was realized just three and a half years later, with Donald Trump playing the role of the shared cause. The far right has united under the cause of Donald Trump’s ‘stolen election’. It united at the Jan 6 rally and then followed Trump’s words and stormed the Capitol, with the apparent backing of a plurality of Republican voters:
It’s Trump’s parting gift to America: The far right is finally united. United under the banner cause of Trump’s ‘stolen election’. A cause that is already causing a precipitous drop in the Republican electorate’s general faith in the legitimacy of elections and democracy in general. The Republican Party has long been anti-Democratic and has long pushed with anti-democratic policies in its decades-long quest to win elections through any means necessary. But with this new united far right under the cause of a stolen election, we’re finally seeing the formation of an overt 21st century anti-democracy right-wing movement in America that has convinced itself that elections are for suckers. Voting is for suckers. It’s all rigged and basically EVERYONE is conspiring against conservatives. It points to perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the unification of the American right: it’s primarily taken place by mass division. A deepening division created by selling Republican voters on the idea that it’s ‘the Right’ vs EVERYONE ELSE, and their only allies are Donald Trump and a bunch of neo-Nazis.