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So You’ve Got a Hate Cult Problem: Living With the Kingston Klan and its ‘Alt-Right’ Cousins

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 ago

Pres­i­dent 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.

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.

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.”

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:

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.

...

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.

———-

“Don­ald Trump Blames ‘Many Sides’ For White Suprema­cist Clash­es In Char­lottesville” by Paige Laven­der, Daniel Marans; The Huff­in­g­ton Post; 08/12/2017

““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.

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 PM

Lu 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.

...

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.

———-

“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 Report

Blood Cult

Stephen Lemons

August 08, 2017
2017 Fall Issue

Utah’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.”

———-

“Blood Cult” by Stephen Lemons; South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter Intel­li­gence Report; August 08, 2017

“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 Blog

The Fringe At The Wheel: Inside The Cernovich/McMaster Derp War

By Josh Mar­shall
Pub­lished August 11, 2017 2:59 pm

Ear­li­er 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.

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.

———-

“The Fringe At The Wheel: Inside The Cernovich/McMaster Derp War” by Josh Mar­shall; Talk­ing Points Memo; 08/11/2017

“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.

Discussion

45 comments for “So You’ve Got a Hate Cult Problem: Living With the Kingston Klan and its ‘Alt-Right’ Cousins”

  1. 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:

    The South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter
    Hate­watch

    McVeigh Wor­ship: The New Extrem­ist Trend

    June 27, 2017
    Bill Mor­lin

    In extrem­ist cir­cles, there appears to be a bump of inter­est in Tim­o­thy James McVeigh.

    Yes, that Tim­o­thy McVeigh. The guy who used a Ryder truck to bomb the Alfred P. Mur­rah Fed­er­al Build­ing in Okla­homa City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 inno­cent chil­dren and adults and wound­ing more than 600 oth­ers.

    His act 22 years ago, for those who may have for­got­ten, was the dead­liest ter­ror­ist attack in the Unit­ed States before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

    McVeigh was con­vict­ed of ter­ror­ism and exe­cut­ed just three months before those attacks.

    His name and heinous crime are not for­got­ten, nor should they be, while there seems to be a grow­ing admi­ra­tion for McVeigh in some extrem­ist cir­cles. One mili­tia hon­cho even likened McVeigh to Jesus Christ.

    Check out these recent men­tions of McVeigh:

    In mid-May, police in Tam­pa, Flori­da, respond­ed to the scene of a dou­ble-mur­der involv­ing young, self-described neo-Nazis.

    Bran­don Rus­sell, who shared the apart­ment with the mur­der sus­pect, was charged with pos­ses­sion of bomb-mak­ing mate­ri­als and chem­i­cals, includ­ing ammo­ni­um nitrate – the same kind of mate­r­i­al used by McVeigh.

    In Russell’s bed­room at the apart­ment he shared with the mur­der sus­pect and the two slain neo-Nazis, police found a framed pho­to­graph of Tim­o­thy McVeigh. Rus­sell, who’s in cus­tody, hasn’t pub­licly explained that fas­ci­na­tion.

    ...

    Then on May 26, Jere­my Chris­t­ian, who held extrem­ist views, went on a ram­page in Port­land, Ore­gon, slash­ing the throats and killing two men who attempt­ed to come to the aid of two women Chris­t­ian was harass­ing.

    Just a month ear­li­er, on the anniver­sary­of McVeigh’s dead­ly act of ter­ror­ism, Chris­t­ian praised the Okla­homa City bomber in a Face­book post. “May all the Gods Bless Tim­o­thy McVeigh — a TRUE PATRIOT!!!” Chris­t­ian wrote.

    More recent­ly, neo-Nazi Andrew ‘Weev’ Auern­heimer, who writes for the racist web site “Dai­ly Stormer,” said he was seri­ous in propos­ing a crowd-fund­ing account to raise mon­ey to build a “per­ma­nent mon­u­ment” in a memo­r­i­al grove hon­or­ing McVeigh.

    “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.”

    “I am not jok­ing,” Auern­heimer wrote. “This should be done. Imag­ine how angry it would make peo­ple.”

    Last year, dur­ing the ille­gal occu­pa­tion of a fed­er­al wildlife refuge in Ore­gon by antigov­ern­ment fig­ure­head Ammon Bundy and his mili­tia fol­low­ers, Norm Olson, anoth­er long-time mili­tia activist and leader, made omi­nous pub­lic com­ments about McVeigh.

    “The bat­tle for the rights of the peo­ple rages on and it should be assumed that lone wolf patri­ots may be plan­ning anoth­er response to the cen­tral gov­ern­men­t’s abus­es,” Olson wrote. He claimed fed­er­al agents “mur­dered” Bundy asso­ciate LaVoy Finicum, incit­ing Patri­ots, dur­ing the 2016 refuge occu­pa­tion.

    “Once the fuse is lit, it will be hard to extin­guish,” Olson said. “There’s a place that we all should think about: Okla­homa City.”

    Two days lat­er, Olson, who has been active in mili­tia groups in Michi­gan and Alas­ka, said he was ready to tell mem­bers of Con­gress that “Tim­o­thy McVeigh DIED FOR YOUR SINS!!!!!!!!!”

    It’s worth remem­ber­ing that Olson had a unique glimpse of McVeigh. He and Okla­homa bomb­ing co-con­spir­a­tor, Ter­ry Nichols, attend­ed a meet­ing of the Michi­gan Mili­tia, which Olson found­ed in 1994, a year before the Okla­homa City bomb­ing.

    “Anger and frus­tra­tion cre­ate a per­son­al vendet­ta,” Olson wrote last year, claim­ing that the U.S. government’s “case against Tim McVeigh was based on his motive.”

    “His motive was VENDETTA, retal­i­a­tion, ret­ri­bu­tion, eye-for-eye ..f. call it what you want, but there will be blood ... maybe not right away, but soon,” Olson’s said in his omi­nous pub­lic warn­ing.

    Appar­ent­ly refer­ring to McVeigh, Olson said there are oth­er “Patri­ots out there who “want to be remem­bered” and are com­ing to the real­iza­tion that THERE IS NO JUSTICE ... IT IS JUST US!

    Of course, McVeigh may nev­er be as pop­u­lar as oth­er extrem­ist and far-right heroes and memes — - the swasti­ka, the burn­ing cross, Adolf Hitler, Pepe the Frog, George Lin­coln Rock­well, the num­bers 88 and 14 words, the KKK blood-drop cross, William Pierce.

    But the ques­tion remains, why would any­one roman­ti­cize a mod­ern-day, extrem­ist ser­i­al killer and ter­ror­ist?

    Tom Pyszczyn­s­ki, a pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado who has writ­ten about the psy­cho­log­i­cal make­up of extrem­ists, said he believes only a “rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of peo­ple” are enthralled with McVeigh.

    “The psy­cho­log­i­cal, social, eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal forces that lead some Amer­i­cans to idol­ize McVeigh are the same as those that lead dis­en­fran­chised or dis­il­lu­sioned young peo­ple in oth­er parts of the world to idol­ize Osama bin Laden or ISIS,” Pyszczyn­s­ki told Hate­watch.

    “They see them [McVeigh, et al] as heroes who stand up for peo­ple like them,” said Pyszczyn­s­ki, who co-devel­oped and test­ed a “ter­ror man­age­ment the­o­ry,” deal­ing with the role of death in life and the role that mean­ing and self-esteem play in man­ag­ing the fear of death.

    “Of course, the specifics of the issues and lives of the peo­ple who fol­low ISIS and those who idol­ize McVeigh are dif­fer­ent, but beneath the sur­face it usu­al­ly boils down to a feel­ing that one’s peo­ple are dis­re­spect­ed and mis­treat­ed, that one’s way of life is under siege from pow­er­ful forces, and that the world as they know it has got­ten out of con­trol,” the uni­ver­si­ty psy­chol­o­gist said.

    “All peo­ple crave mean­ing in life and a sense of per­son­al or group hero­ism to pro­tect them from their deep­est fears,” he said, explain­ing that ulti­mate­ly boils down to the “facts of life, involv­ing death and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty.”

    But some peo­ple, he said, aren’t able to find this in their worlds. So they look else­where, to rad­i­cal fringe groups, like ISIS for some, or white nation­al­ist groups for oth­ers.

    “These groups typ­i­cal­ly have heroes who are idol­ized as stand­ing up to pow­er­ful forces and if they die in that fight, they are con­sid­ered mar­tyrs,” Pyszczyn­s­ki said.

    Clark McCauley, a research pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at Bryn Mawr Col­lege in Penn­syl­va­nia, offered sim­i­lar brief views about those indi­vid­u­als enchant­ed with McVeigh.

    “McVeigh is ... a sym­bol of resis­tance and a hero for those who hate and fear the U.S. Gov­ern­ment,” McCauley told Hate­watch. “This includes a wide range of peo­ple, some who see them­selves as neo-Nazis and some who do not.”

    McVeigh’s bomb­ing plan gen­er­al­ly fol­lowed a fic­tion­al account of a race war depict­ed in the “Turn­er Diaries,” a nov­el writ­ten by William Pierce, a one-time col­lege pro­fes­sor who went on to lead the Nation­al Alliance, a neo-Nazi hate group.

    McCauley said he doesn’t per­son­al­ly believe McVeigh was a neo-Nazi, so “he can there­fore be a hero for many dif­fer­ent anti-gov­ern­ment groups.”

    Pyszczyn­s­ki, who teach­es at the Col­orado Springs uni­ver­si­ty, said peo­ple “who feel their way of life is under siege” iden­ti­fy with “heroes” like McVeigh.

    “So rad­i­cal ide­olo­gies, whether they be Islamist or white nation­al­ist, are appeal­ing to peo­ple who strug­gle to find mean­ing and a sense of per­son­al val­ue in their own lives and view anoth­er group as the repos­i­to­ry of evil against which they must fight to reclaim that mean­ing and val­ue,” he said.

    ———-

    “McVeigh Wor­ship: The New Extrem­ist Trend” by Bill Mor­lin; The South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter Hate­watch; 06/27/2017

    ““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:

    KFOR.com

    Man arrest­ed by FBI agents after alleged­ly plan­ning to bomb build­ing in down­town Okla­homa City

    KFOR-TV & K. Quer­ry
    08/14/2017

    OKLAHOMA CITY – Fed­er­al offi­cials say that a 23-year-old Okla­homa man has been arrest­ed after alleged­ly plan­ning to blow up a bomb in down­town Okla­homa City.

    Accord­ing to a crim­i­nal com­plaint, the FBI arrest­ed 23-year-old Jer­ry Drake Var­nell at 1 a.m. on Aug. 12 after he alleged­ly attempt­ed to det­o­nate what he believed to be an explo­sives-laden van he had parked in an alley next to Banc­First in down­town Okla­homa City.

    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.

    Court doc­u­ments claim that Var­nell was upset with the gov­ern­ment, and his plans got the atten­tion of law enforce­ment.

    An under­cov­er FBI agent posed as a per­son who could help him with the bomb­ing.

    Accord­ing to the com­plaint, Var­nell iden­ti­fied Banc­First as the tar­get, helped assem­ble the device, loaded it into a van and drove it to the alley by the bank.

    In fact, offi­cials say that Var­nell even dialed a num­ber on a cell phone that he believed would trig­ger the explo­sion. Author­i­ties say they also found a state­ment that he planned to post to social media after the explo­sion.

    How­ev­er, offi­cials say that the device was actu­al­ly inert and the pub­lic was not in any dan­ger.

    “There was nev­er a con­cern that our community’s safe­ty or secu­ri­ty was at risk dur­ing this inves­ti­ga­tion,” said Kathryn Peter­son, Spe­cial Agent in Charge of the FBI in Okla­homa. “I can assure the pub­lic, with­out hes­i­ta­tion, that we had Varnell’s actions mon­i­tored every step of the way.”

    Var­nell is charged with attempt­ing to use explo­sives to destroy a build­ing in inter­state com­merce.

    “I com­mend the devot­ed work of the FBI and our state law enforce­ment part­ners in ensur­ing that vio­lent plots of this kind nev­er suc­ceed,” said Mark A. Yancey, Unit­ed States Attor­ney for the West­ern Dis­trict of Okla­homa.

    If con­vict­ed, he would face a max­i­mum sen­tence of 20 years in prison and a manda­to­ry min­i­mum sen­tence of five years in prison.

    ...

    ———-

    “Man arrest­ed by FBI agents after alleged­ly plan­ning to bomb build­ing in down­town Okla­homa City” by KFOR-TV & K. Quer­ry; KFOR.com; 08/14/2017

    “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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 14, 2017, 8:11 pm
  2. 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:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Livewire

    David Duke Prais­es Trump For Remarks Defend­ing Pro-Con­fed­er­ate Pro­test­ers

    By Matt Shuham Pub­lished August 15, 2017 5:13 pm

    For­mer top Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke praised Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump on Tues­day for his lat­est remarks regard­ing the white suprema­cist ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia over the week­end, which was orga­nized osten­si­bly as a protest of the removal of a stat­ue of Con­fed­er­ate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

    Thank you Pres­i­dent Trump for your hon­esty & courage to tell the truth about #Char­lottesville & con­demn the left­ist ter­ror­ists in BLM/Antifa https://t.co/tTESdV4LP0— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) August 15, 2017

    Duke, in his praise of Trump, re-post­ed a video of the Pres­i­dent won­der­ing aloud if the removal of mon­u­ments to Con­fed­er­ate fig­ures would end up with the removal of mon­u­ments ded­i­cat­ed to ear­ly Amer­i­can slave­hold­ers, includ­ing Pres­i­dents George Wash­ing­ton and Thomas Jef­fer­son.

    The video also includ­ed Trump say­ing not every­one at the ral­ly on the side of white suprema­cists was a neo-Nazi or a white nation­al­ist.

    Pres­i­dent Trump: “George Wash­ing­ton was a slave own­er... Are we gonna take down stat­ues to George Wash­ing­ton? How about Thomas Jef­fer­son?” pic.twitter.com/bUJnbaniwL— NBC News (@NBCNews) August 15, 2017

    “You had peo­ple — and I’m not talk­ing about the neo-Nazis and the white nation­al­ists, because they should be con­demned, total­ly — but you had many peo­ple in that group oth­er than neo-Nazis and white nation­al­ists, okay?” Trump said in the video re-post­ed by Duke. “And the press has treat­ed them absolute­ly unfair­ly.”

    “Now, in the oth­er group also, you had some fine peo­ple, but you also had trou­ble-mak­ers, and you see them come with the black out­fits, and with the hel­mets, and with the base­ball bats,” Trump added. “You had a lot of bad peo­ple in the oth­er group, too.”

    ———-

    “David Duke Prais­es Trump For Remarks Defend­ing Pro-Con­fed­er­ate Pro­test­ers” by Matt Shuham; Talk­ing Points Memo; 08/15/2017

    “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...

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Livewire

    White Suprema­cists Praise Trump’s Return To Rhetoric Blam­ing ‘Both Sides’

    By Esme Cribb
    Pub­lished August 15, 2017 6:58 pm

    White suprema­cists on Tues­day praised Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump for his return to equiv­o­cal rhetoric blam­ing “both sides” for vio­lence that erupt­ed over the week­end at a white nation­al­ist ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia.

    White suprema­cist leader Richard Spencer praised Trump’s state­ment, made dur­ing an off-the-rails press con­fer­ence at Trump Tow­er in Man­hat­tan, as “fair and down to earth.”

    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.

    “Trump cares about the truth,” he tweet­ed.

    Trump cares about the truth. https://t.co/Dv0gGmysPc— Richard ???Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) August 15, 2017

    Trump’s state­ment was fair and down to earth. #Char­lottesville could have been peace­ful, if police did its job. https://t.co/3FUgmWoiWi— Richard ???Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) August 15, 2017

    Bradley Dean Grif­fin, a white nation­al­ist who blogs under the pen name “Hunter Wal­lace” at Occi­den­tal Dis­sent, said Trump’s amend­ed rhetoric was “bet­ter.”

    “The facts about must be fil­ter­ing out now,” he tweet­ed. “He is all over the place but this is much bet­ter.”
    ...

    Neo-Nazi web­site The Dai­ly Stormer was not avail­able on Tues­day after it was boot­ed off sev­er­al web host­ing ser­vices and moved to the so-called Dark Web, part of the inter­net that is not indexed by search engines.

    Accord­ing to the Chica­go Tri­bune, it nev­er­the­less weighed in with an arti­cle titled, “Trump Defends Char­lottesville Nazis Against Jew Media Lies, Con­demns Antifa Ter­ror­ists.”

    ———-

    “White Suprema­cists Praise Trump’s Return To Rhetoric Blam­ing ‘Both Sides’” by Esme Cribb; Talk­ing Points Memo; 08/15/2017

    “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:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Livewire

    ‘What About The Alt-Left?’ Trump Lash­es Out In Impromp­tu Press Con­fer­ence

    By Matt Shuham
    Pub­lished August 15, 2017 6:21 pm

    Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump on Tues­day erased any ground he had gained in denounc­ing white suprema­cist groups by revert­ing to his old habits: False equiv­a­len­cies and equiv­o­ca­tion that left white suprema­cists cheer­ing.

    In an angry press con­fer­ence at Trump Tow­er, the Pres­i­dent said that not every­one who ral­lied on the side of white suprema­cists was wor­thy of con­dem­na­tion, and said that he need­ed the two full days before denounc­ing­white white suprema­cist groups in order to “get the facts.”

    These were Trump’s main claims dur­ing the impromp­tu press con­fer­ence:

    Not every­one at the ral­ly was a white suprema­cist

    Though the ral­ly was orga­nized by white suprema­cist groups and osten­si­bly meant to protest the removal of Con­fed­er­ate Gen. Robert E. Lee, Trump claimed some pro­test­ers on the side of the white suprema­cists were inno­cent­ly and jus­ti­fi­ably exer­cis­ing their rights.

    “I have con­demned many dif­fer­ent groups,” he said. “But not all of those peo­ple were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those peo­ple were white suprema­cists, by any stretch. Those peo­ple were also there because they want­ed to protest the tak­ing down of a stat­ue, Robert E. Lee.”

    “I’m not talk­ing about the neo-Nazis and the white nation­al­ists, because they should be con­demned, total­ly,” he added. “But you had many peo­ple in that group oth­er than neo-Nazis and white nation­al­ists, OK? And the press has treat­ed them absolute­ly unfair­ly.”

    Trump said some pro-Con­fed­er­ate pro­test­ers were “protest­ing, very qui­et­ly, the tak­ing down of the stat­ue of Robert E. Lee” on Fri­day night. “You had a lot of peo­ple in that group who were there to inno­cent­ly protest — and very legal­ly protest. I don’t know if you know, they had a per­mit, the oth­er group didn’t have a per­mit. So I only tell you this, there are two sides to a sto­ry.”

    Trump also crit­i­cized what he called the “alt-left.”

    “What about the alt-left that came charg­ing at them?” he asked sep­a­rate­ly. “What about the alt-left that came charg­ing at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any sem­blance of guilt? What about this? What about the fact that they came charg­ing – they came charg­ing with clubs in their hands swing­ing clubs? Do they have any prob­lem? I think they do.”

    He added: “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the oth­er side that was also very vio­lent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now.”

    I was wait­ing to ‘get the facts’ before con­demn­ing white suprema­cist groups

    On Sat­ur­day, Trump con­demned “many sides” for stir­ring the vio­lence that had left one counter-pro­test­er dead at the time of his state­ment. A man who had ear­li­er been pho­tographed with white suprema­cists had alleged­ly rammed his car into a crowd.

    “I didn’t wait long, I didn’t wait long, I didn’t wait long,” Trump said Tues­day, refer­ring to his spe­cif­ic con­dem­na­tion a day ear­li­er of white suprema­cist groups. “I want­ed to make sure, unlike most politi­cians, that what I said was cor­rect, not make a quick state­ment. The state­ment I made on Sat­ur­day, the first state­ment, was a fine state­ment, but you don’t make state­ments that direct unless you know the fact.”

    “It takes a lit­tle while to get the facts,” he con­tin­ued. “You still don’t know the facts. And it’s a very, very impor­tant process to me. And it’s a very impor­tant state­ment. So I don’t want to go quick­ly and just make a state­ment for the sake of mak­ing a polit­i­cal state­ment. I want to know the facts.”

    The moth­er of the car attack vic­tim praised my state­ment

    Though the moth­er of Heather Hey­er, the woman who died in the car attack, only praised Trump after his Mon­day state­ment explic­it­ly con­demn­ing white suprema­cists, the Pres­i­dent appeared Tues­day to use it to bol­ster his argu­ment for wait­ing two full days to make that con­dem­na­tion.

    “In fact, the young woman who I hear is a fan­tas­tic young woman … her moth­er wrote me and said, through, I guess, Twit­ter, social media, the nicest things,” Trump said. “And I very much appre­ci­at­ed that. I hear she was a fine, real­ly, actu­al­ly, an incred­i­ble young woman. But her moth­er, on Twit­ter, thanked me for what I said. And hon­est­ly, if the press were not fake and if it was hon­est, the press would have said what I said was very nice. But unlike you and unlike the media, before I make a state­ment, I like to know the facts.”

    Tak­ing down Con­fed­er­ate stat­ues is a slip­pery slope

    Cop­ping a com­mon talk­ing point from the far-right, Trump argued that tear­ing down mon­u­ments to Con­fed­er­ate lead­ers could lead to the removal of stat­ues of America’s Found­ing Fathers.

    “George Wash­ing­ton was a slave own­er,” Trump said. “Was George Wash­ing­ton a slave own­er? So will George Wash­ing­ton now lose his sta­tus? Are we going to take down — excuse me. Are we going to take down stat­ues to George Wash­ing­ton? How about Thomas Jef­fer­son?”

    He added: “It’s fine. You’re chang­ing his­to­ry, you’re chang­ing cul­ture.”

    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?”

    ...

    ———-

    “‘What About The Alt-Left?’ Trump Lash­es Out In Impromp­tu Press Con­fer­ence” by Matt Shuham; Talk­ing Points Memo; 08/15/2017

    “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:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    After Char­lottesville, Trump retweets — then deletes — image of train run­ning over CNN reporter

    By David Naka­mu­ra and Aaron C. Davis
    August 15, 2017 at 8:33 AM

    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.

    Trump was in the mid­dle of his usu­al morn­ing tweet­storm when he sent the car­toon image — post­ed by a sup­port­er who added, “Noth­ing can stop the #TrumpTrain!!” — to his near­ly 36 mil­lion fol­low­ers.

    Trump RT’d this pic show­ing a CNN jour­nal­ist hit by a train days after a white nation­al­ist ran his car into activists, killed Heather Hey­er. pic.twitter.com/tWjdoE70AS— Kyle Grif­fin (@kylegriffin1) August 15, 2017

    The pres­i­dent quick­ly delet­ed his hand­i­work but not before the orig­i­nal tweet had been retweet­ed hun­dreds of times and was cap­tured on screen shots by jour­nal­ists and activists.

    Trump’s pro­mo­tion of the image came three days after a white suprema­cist ral­ly in Char­lottesville turned into a vio­lent clash between the suprema­cists and coun­ter­pro­test­ers. Heather Hey­er, 32, was killed and 19 oth­ers injured when a dri­ver slammed his car into a crowd of coun­ter­pro­test­ers. A 20-year old man, who has report­ed­ly espoused neo-Nazi views, has been charged with sec­ond-degree mur­der in the case. Two police offi­cers also died when their heli­copter crashed.

    Trump did not imme­di­ate­ly con­demn the hate groups behind the “Unite the Right” ral­ly, draw­ing crit­i­cism from Democ­rats and some Repub­li­cans. On Mon­day, the pres­i­dent attempt­ed to make amends and denounced the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis by name, while call­ing white suprema­cists “repug­nant to all that we hold dear as Amer­i­cans.”

    But even as he attempt­ed to clar­i­fy his views, Trump seemed eager to blame the back­lash on reporters, in par­tic­u­lar CNN. As the pres­i­dent was wrap­ping up a pho­to op relat­ed to inter­na­tion­al trade Mon­day, CNN cor­re­spon­dent Jim Acos­ta asked him why he had wait­ed so long to con­demn the hate groups by name and why he had not answered ques­tions from reporters.

    “I like real news, not fake news,” Trump said. Point­ing a fin­ger toward Acos­ta, Trump added: “You are fake news.”

    If the pres­i­dent awoke Tues­day think­ing his Twit­ter account would help him regain con­trol of his polit­i­cal nar­ra­tive, he was mis­tak­en, how­ev­er, as he also mis­fired in retweet­ing a man call­ing him a “fas­cist.”

    A user named Mike Hold­en was reply­ing to a Fox News sto­ry that said Trump had told the net­work in an inter­view that he was con­sid­er­ing issu­ing a a pres­i­den­tial par­don for for­mer Ari­zona sher­iff Joe Arpaio, who was found guilty of defy­ing a judge’s order to halt traf­fic patrols on sus­pect­ed undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants. “He’s a fas­cist, so not unusu­al,” Hold­en wrote, only to find him­self retweet­ed by the 45th pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States.

    I’m announc­ing my retire­ment from Twit­ter. I’ll nev­er top this RT. pic.twitter.com/HuGHkiPoyR— Mike Hold­en (@MikeHolden42) August 15, 2017

    Hold­en has post­ed a rapid-fire series of tweets and retweets over the past days on British pol­i­tics and the fall­out from the vio­lence in Char­lottesville, includ­ing a retweet of a car­toon in the Guardian news­pa­per depict­ing the White House topped by a KKK-style point­ed hood. His Twit­ter page also has var­i­ous trib­utes to Bernard Ken­ney, a British man who attempt­ed to sub­due a far-right gun­man who fatal­ly shot British par­lia­ment mem­ber Jo Cox last year. Ken­ney, who was stabbed by the attack­er Thomas Mair, died Mon­day.

    ...

    Hold­en called the Char­lottesville ral­ly a “fas­cist march.”

    “For a pres­i­dent to still be at Bed­min­ster play­ing golf and not come out and say more? From a large cat­a­logue of things he’s done, it seemed among the worst,” he said.

    Hold­en quick­ly set a screen shot of Trump’s retweet as his Twit­ter back­ground image and boast­ed about the endorse­ment — kind of — in his bio on the social media site.

    “Offi­cial­ly Endorsed by the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States,” he wrote. “I wish that were a good thing.”

    Late Mon­day, Trump also retweet­ed a post from the Twit­ter account linked to right-wing provo­ca­teur Jack Poso­biec, a Trump sup­port­er known for fan­ning con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, includ­ing the infa­mous “Piz­za­gate” rumors of child traf­fick­ing. Posobiec’s tweet — retweet­ed by Trump and not tak­en down — linked to a sto­ry from an ABC affil­i­ate and read: “Mean­while: 39 shoot­ings in Chica­go this week­end, 9 deaths. No nation­al media out­rage. Why is that?”

    Poso­biec, a for­mer Navy Reserve intel­li­gence offi­cer, had worked for right-wing web­site the Rebel. Poso­biec gained nation­al atten­tion dur­ing “Piz­za­gate,” a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that claimed Hillary Clin­ton and her cam­paign chief har­bored a child sex ring in a piz­za restau­rant in Wash­ing­ton. The Inter­net-fueled false­hood led a gun­man in Decem­ber to fire an assault-style rifle as he searched the pizze­ria, Comet Ping Pong.

    ———-

    “After Char­lottesville, Trump retweets — then deletes — image of train run­ning over CNN reporter” by David Naka­mu­ra and Aaron C. Davis; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 08/15/2017

    “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:

    ...
    Late Mon­day, Trump also retweet­ed a post from the Twit­ter account linked to right-wing provo­ca­teur Jack Poso­biec, a Trump sup­port­er known for fan­ning con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, includ­ing the infa­mous “Piz­za­gate” rumors of child traf­fick­ing. Posobiec’s tweet — retweet­ed by Trump and not tak­en down — linked to a sto­ry from an ABC affil­i­ate and read: “Mean­while: 39 shoot­ings in Chica­go this week­end, 9 deaths. No nation­al media out­rage. Why is that?”

    Poso­biec, a for­mer Navy Reserve intel­li­gence offi­cer, had worked for right-wing web­site the Rebel. Poso­biec gained nation­al atten­tion dur­ing “Piz­za­gate,” a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that claimed Hillary Clin­ton and her cam­paign chief har­bored a child sex ring in a piz­za restau­rant in Wash­ing­ton. The Inter­net-fueled false­hood led a gun­man in Decem­ber to fire an assault-style rifle as he searched the pizze­ria, Comet Ping Pong.

    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!

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 15, 2017, 8:18 pm
  3. 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:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Livewire

    Reports: Ban­non Was ‘Thrilled,’ ‘Proud’ After Trump’s Char­lottesville Press­er

    By Matt Shuham Pub­lished
    August 16, 2017 2:47 pm

    White House chief strate­gist Steve Ban­non was report­ed­ly “thrilled” and “proud” after Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s com­ments Tues­day that not every­one who attend­ed a white suprema­cist ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia over the week­end was wor­thy of con­dem­na­tion.

    Dur­ing an impromp­tu press con­fer­ence in the lob­by of Trump Tow­er Tues­day, Trump said “I think there’s blame on both sides” — both the white suprema­cists’ and counter-pro­test­ers’ — for the weekend’s tur­moil, and that not every­one who protest­ed the statue’s removal deserved crit­i­cism.

    “You had peo­ple — and I’m not talk­ing about the neo-Nazis and the white nation­al­ists, because they should be con­demned, total­ly — but you had many peo­ple in that group oth­er than neo-Nazis and white nation­al­ists, OK?” he said. “And the press has treat­ed them absolute­ly unfair­ly.”

    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.

    An unnamed “friend” of Bannon’s told Politi­co the advis­er was “thrilled” with the remarks.

    And an unnamed source “close” to Ban­non told Bloomberg he was “proud” of Trump’s per­for­mance.

    Ban­non has a his­to­ry with many of the groups and ide­olo­gies present at Saturday’s ral­ly, which descend­ed into may­hem and vio­lence and result­ed in the death of one counter-pro­test­er after a man who had ear­li­er been pho­tographed with white suprema­cists alleged­ly rammed his car into a crowd.

    “We’re the plat­form for the alt-right,” Ban­non boast­ed to Moth­er Jones in July 2016, refer­ring to Bre­it­bart News, the con­ser­v­a­tive plat­form he used to run before join­ing Trump’s cam­paign for Pres­i­dent, and even­tu­al­ly, Trump’s White House.

    ...

    ———-

    “Reports: Ban­non Was ‘Thrilled,’ ‘Proud’ After Trump’s Char­lottesville Press­er” by Matt Shuham; Talk­ing Points Memo; 08/16/2017

    “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”:

    ...
    An unnamed “friend” of Bannon’s told Politi­co the advis­er was “thrilled” with the remarks.

    And an unnamed source “close” to Ban­non told Bloomberg he was “proud” of Trump’s per­for­mance.
    ...

    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:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Edi­tor’s Blog

    The House Is On Fire – Accept­ing the Truth of the Trump Rev­o­lu­tion

    By Josh Mar­shall
    Pub­lished August 16, 2017 12:15 am

    For those who’ve rec­og­nized what should real­ly be obvi­ous, this is quite a para­graph in the Times’ account of today’s Trump press con­fer­ence

    No word in the Trump lex­i­con is as tread-worn as “unprece­dent­ed.” But mem­bers of the president’s staff, stunned and dis­heart­ened, said they nev­er expect­ed to hear such a vol­u­ble artic­u­la­tion of opin­ions that the pres­i­dent had long expressed in pri­vate. Nation­al Eco­nom­ic Coun­cil Chair­man Gary Cohn and Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Steven T. Mnuchin, who are Jew­ish, stood by uncom­fort­ably as the pres­i­dent exac­er­bat­ed a con­tro­ver­sy that has once again engulfed a White House in dis­ar­ray.

    There you have it. This is Trump, a man whose deep­est polit­i­cal impuls­es are tied to racial griev­ance and a desire for revenge, a desire to place the deserv­ing and white back at the top of the racial hier­ar­chy. Peo­ple get caught up on whether or not peo­ple are will­ing to call Trump a ‘racist’. Of course, he’s a racist. But that doesn’t tell us enough. Lots of peo­ple dis­like blacks or Jews, don’t want to live near them, etc. But many, like­ly most with racist atti­tudes, do not embrace a pol­i­tics dri­ven by racial griev­ance. Trump’s pol­i­tics are about racial griev­ance. It’s not latent or periph­er­al but rather cen­tral. That’s dif­fer­ent and it’s worse. It is one of the few con­sis­tent themes in his pol­i­tics going back many, many years.

    It is worth not­ing this oth­er pas­sage in the piece: “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.

    The ear­li­er pas­sage from the Times tells us explic­it­ly what should be clear from watch­ing the con­sis­ten­cy of Trump’s pub­lic actions. What we saw today is the real Trump. Most of White House ‘comms’ appears to be a mat­ter of keep­ing this real Trump in check or at least served up in palat­able morsels rather than all at once.

    “A vol­u­ble artic­u­la­tion of opin­ions that the pres­i­dent had long expressed in pri­vate.”

    We can infer what stands behind a person’s pub­lic state­ments if we’ve seen them enough, under dif­fer­ent pres­sures and in dif­fer­ent con­texts. Trump’s repeat­ed expres­sions of sym­pa­thy for racist activists, refusals to denounce racist activists, cod­dling and appoint­ments of racist activists can only real­ly mean one thing: that he instinc­tive­ly sym­pa­thizes with them and indeed is one. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 80 mil­lion times, I need to seri­ous­ly con­sid­er what the fuck is wrong with me.

    Again, there’s no rea­son­able, alter­na­tive expla­na­tion.

    I’m remind­ed of Ptolemy’s ancient, geo­cen­tric mod­el of the solar sys­tem, which was only super­seded by the Coper­ni­can, helio­cen­tric mod­el in the 16th cen­tu­ry. If we knew noth­ing more than what we see when we looked in the sky, it makes per­fect sense to think the sun revolves around the Earth. We see it hap­pen every day! But when you begin to make detailed obser­va­tions of the motions of the plan­ets, the sun and the stars, you are forced to posit a series of increas­ing­ly intri­cate and hero­ic assump­tions to make every­thing fit togeth­er: there are orbits with­in orbits, lit­tle side wan­der­ings and detours to make every­thing fit togeth­er.

    Once you put the sun at the cen­ter of the solar sys­tem, every­thing gets much, much sim­pler. The data all falls into place with­out any big hero­ic or far-fetched assump­tions.

    The sim­pler expla­na­tion that accounts for all the avail­able facts is not always right. But as Occam not­ed, it is always to be pre­ferred. What we need is a Coper­ni­can rev­o­lu­tion in our under­stand­ing of Trump­ism, or at least some of us need it. The break­through for Coper­ni­cus was in posit­ing the unimag­in­able, indeed the ter­ri­fy­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty that the Earth is not the cen­ter of the uni­verse but rather a periph­er­al, sec­ondary celes­tial body. Once you accept that, a lot falls into place.

    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.

    ...

    I con­fess I had a small degree of sur­prise that the events of the week­end – as hor­ri­fy­ing and trag­ic as they are – have had quite the effect on peo­ple they seem to have had. This is not to dimin­ish them. It is only to say that I do not think they should be so sur­pris­ing. I don’t think they should amount to a rev­e­la­tion that shifts our basic under­stand­ing of things. We have if not a grow­ing white suprema­cist move­ment in the US at least an increas­ing­ly vocal and embold­ened one. They both made Trump pos­si­ble and have in turn been ener­gized and embold­ened by his suc­cess. He reacts this way because he is one of them. He is dri­ven by the same view of the world, the same ani­mus and griev­ances. What we’ve seen over the last five days is sick­en­ing and awful. The house is on fire. But it was on fire a week ago. It’s been on fire since Novem­ber. The truth is indeed unimag­in­able and ter­ri­fy­ing. But we need to accept the full truth of it if we are going to be able to save our coun­try.

    ———-

    “The House Is On Fire – Accept­ing the Truth of the Trump Rev­o­lu­tion” by Josh Mar­shall; Talk­ing Points Memo; 08/16/2017

    “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:

    ...
    There you have it. This is Trump, a man whose deep­est polit­i­cal impuls­es are tied to racial griev­ance and a desire for revenge, a desire to place the deserv­ing and white back at the top of the racial hier­ar­chy. Peo­ple get caught up on whether or not peo­ple are will­ing to call Trump a ‘racist’. Of course, he’s a racist. But that doesn’t tell us enough. Lots of peo­ple dis­like blacks or Jews, don’t want to live near them, etc. But many, like­ly most with racist atti­tudes, do not embrace a pol­i­tics dri­ven by racial griev­ance. Trump’s pol­i­tics are about racial griev­ance. It’s not latent or periph­er­al but rather cen­tral. That’s dif­fer­ent and it’s worse. It is one of the few con­sis­tent themes in his pol­i­tics going back many, many years.

    It is worth not­ing this oth­er pas­sage in the piece: “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.
    ...

    ““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:

    The Huff­in­g­ton Post

    Con­tro­ver­sial Trump Aide Katharine Gor­ka Helped End Fund­ing For Group That Fights White Suprema­cy
    Life After Hate works to de-rad­i­cal­ize neo-Nazis. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion decid­ed it wasn’t a pri­or­i­ty.

    By Jes­si­ca Schul­berg
    08/15/2017 08:34 am ET Updat­ed

    WASHINGTON — Weeks before a vio­lent white suprema­cist ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, led to three deaths and 19 injuries, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion revoked a grant to Life After Hate, a group that works to de-rad­i­cal­ize neo-Nazis.

    The Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty had award­ed the group $400,000 as part of its Coun­ter­ing Vio­lent Extrem­ism pro­gram pro­gram in Jan­u­ary, just days before for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma left office. It was the only group select­ed for a grant that focused exclu­sive­ly on fight­ing white suprema­cy. But the grant mon­ey was not imme­di­ate­ly dis­bursed.

    Trump aides, includ­ing Katharine Gor­ka, a con­tro­ver­sial nation­al secu­ri­ty ana­lyst known for her anti-Mus­lim rhetoric, were already work­ing toward elim­i­nat­ing Life After Hate’s grant and to direct all fund­ing toward fight­ing what the pres­i­dent has described as “rad­i­cal Islam­ic ter­ror­ism.”

    In Decem­ber, Gor­ka, then a mem­ber of Trump’s tran­si­tion team, met with George Selim, the DHS offi­cial who head­ed the Coun­ter­ing Vio­lent Extrem­ism pro­gram until he resigned last month, and his then-deputy, David Ger­sten.

    Gor­ka told Selim and Ger­sten she didn’t agree with the Oba­ma administration’s approach to coun­ter­ing vio­lent extrem­ism — par­tic­u­lar­ly the way the admin­is­tra­tion had described the threat of extrem­ism, accord­ing to Nate Sny­der, an Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion DHS coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cial who was an advis­er on Coun­ter­ing Vio­lent Extrem­ism efforts and was giv­en a read­out of the meet­ing. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has repeat­ed­ly crit­i­cized the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion for avoid­ing terms like “rad­i­cal Islam” out of con­cern that it could alien­ate Mus­lims in the U.S. and abroad.

    “That was sort of fore­shad­ow­ing what was going to come,” Sny­der said of the Decem­ber meet­ing.

    ...

    Gor­ka and her hus­band, Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka, also a Trump White House offi­cial, have col­lab­o­rat­ed on numer­ous writ­ings about the threat of rad­i­cal Islam. Though they have a large fol­low­ing with­in far-right cir­cles — they both have bylines at Bre­it­bart News — main­stream nation­al secu­ri­ty experts are either unfa­mil­iar with or crit­i­cal of their work.

    The day after Trump won the elec­tion, Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka said, “I pre­dict with absolute cer­ti­tude, the jet­ti­son­ing of con­cepts such as CVE.”

    Once Trump entered the White House in Jan­u­ary, the office of then-DHS Sec­re­tary John Kel­ly ordered a full review of the Coun­ter­ing Vio­lent Extrem­ism pro­gram. Kelly’s office want­ed to re-vet the groups receiv­ing a por­tion of the $10 mil­lion Con­gress had appro­pri­at­ed for the pro­gram — even though DHS had already pub­licly announced the grant recip­i­ents.

    While that review was under­way, DHS and the FBI warned in an inter­nal intel­li­gence bul­letin of the threat posed by white suprema­cy. White suprema­cists “were respon­si­ble for 49 homi­cides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 … more than any oth­er domes­tic extrem­ist move­ment,” the two agen­cies wrote in a May 10 doc­u­ment obtained by For­eign Pol­i­cy. Mem­bers of the white suprema­cist move­ment “like­ly will con­tin­ue to pose a threat of lethal vio­lence over the next year,” they con­clud­ed.

    Staffers in the Coun­ter­ing Vio­lent Extrem­ism pro­gram have long pushed for it to address threats from domes­tic ter­ror­ists, includ­ing white suprema­cists.

    But when DHS pub­lished a new list of award recip­i­ents on June 23, there was no men­tion of Life After Hate.

    DHS also revoked fund­ing from the Mus­lim Pub­lic Affairs Coun­cil, an Amer­i­can Mus­lim advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion that was told in Jan­u­ary it would receive a $393,800 grant to cre­ate com­mu­ni­ty resource cen­ters through­out the coun­try.

    After pub­lish­ing its new list of grantees, DHS told Mus­lim Pub­lic Affairs Coun­cil that it was now pri­or­i­tiz­ing orga­ni­za­tions that worked with law enforce­ment. The mon­ey that was ini­tial­ly set aside for com­mu­ni­ty-based groups like Mus­lim Pub­lic Affairs Coun­cil and Life After Hate will now go to sev­er­al law enforce­ment agen­cies.

    “Is this real­ly just a front for tar­get­ing the Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty?” asked Omar Noureldin, Mus­lim Pub­lic Affairs Council’s vice pres­i­dent. Noureldin is now look­ing into whether the Trump administration’s use of the Coun­ter­ing Vio­lent Extrem­ism program’s funds vio­lates con­gres­sion­al appro­pri­a­tion intent.

    Less than two months after DHS announced it was pulling fund­ing from Life After Hate, Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year old Ohioan, trav­eled to Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, to join white suprema­cists armed with long guns, wav­ing Nazi and Con­fed­er­ate flags and protest­ing the removal of a stat­ue of Con­fed­er­ate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a local park.

    Fields is now accused of ram­ming a Dodge Chal­lenger into a crowd of pedes­tri­ans on Sat­ur­day, and has since been charged with sec­ond-degree mur­der for the death of 32-year-old coun­ter­pro­test­er Heather Hey­er. Dozens of oth­ers were injured, and two Vir­ginia state troop­ers died in a heli­copter crash while mon­i­tor­ing the vio­lent demon­stra­tion.

    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.

    The white suprema­cy move­ment “has been grow­ing, but it’s also been shape-shift­ing,” Pic­col­i­ni said. “It’s gone from what we would have con­sid­ered very open neo-Nazis and skin­heads and KKK march­ing, to now peo­ple that look like our neigh­bors, our doc­tors, our teach­ers, our mechan­ics.”

    “And it’s cer­tain­ly start­ing to embold­en them, because a lot of the rhetoric that’s com­ing out of the White House today is so sim­i­lar to what we preached ... but in a slight­ly more palat­able way,” he added.

    As the vio­lence in Char­lottesville unfold­ed on Sat­ur­day, Trump con­demned “this egre­gious dis­play of hatred, big­otry and vio­lence, on many sides,” adding that the prob­lem exist­ed dur­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion. The pres­i­dent ignored sev­er­al calls to specif­i­cal­ly denounce white suprema­cists and neo-Nazis who said they were work­ing to ful­fill Trump’s cam­paign promis­es.

    It wasn’t until Mon­day, two days after the vio­lent ral­ly, that Trump specif­i­cal­ly denounced “the [Ku Klux Klan], neo-Nazis, white suprema­cists and oth­er hate groups.”

    Trump’s hes­i­tan­cy to dis­avow white suprema­cists echoes his prac­tice of repeat­ed­ly dodg­ing ques­tions about David Duke, a for­mer KKK grand wiz­ard who sup­port­ed Trump, dur­ing the 2016 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. Fac­ing pub­lic pres­sure, Trump even­tu­al­ly dis­tanced him­self from the infa­mous white suprema­cist.

    Now in the White House, Trump has sur­round­ed him­self with an array of peo­ple tied to white suprema­cist, anti-Semit­ic, anti-Mus­lim and anti-immi­grant groups.

    Katharine Gor­ka, now an advis­er in the Depart­ment of Home­land Security’s pol­i­cy office, has pushed con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood infil­trat­ing the gov­ern­ment and media. Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka is a deputy assis­tant to the pres­i­dent and has described Islam as an inher­ent­ly vio­lent reli­gion. He argued days before the Char­lottesville attack that white suprema­cy is not “the prob­lem” fac­ing the coun­try.

    Stephen Miller, Trump’s speech­writer and pol­i­cy advis­er, has blamed the Sept. 11, 2001, ter­ror attacks on poor immi­gra­tion enforce­ment, and accused black stu­dents of racial “para­noia.” Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil spokesman Michael Anton wrote under a pseu­do­nym that Islam is “incom­pat­i­ble with the mod­ern West,” and that diver­si­ty is “a source of weak­ness, ten­sion, and dis­union.”

    And Trump him­self cam­paigned for pres­i­dent on the plat­form of ban­ning Mus­lims from trav­el­ing to the U.S. and build­ing a wall to keep Mex­i­cans out — pro­pos­als that won him enthu­si­as­tic sup­port from white suprema­cists.

    DHS did not direct­ly respond to a ques­tions about why it cut fund­ing for de-rad­i­cal­iz­ing neo-Nazis, and whether it views white suprema­cy as an extrem­ist threat.

    Six­teen of the 26 groups that received DHS fund­ing “have applic­a­bil­i­ty to all forms of vio­lent extrem­ism and as such will address the threat of domes­tic ter­ror­ism,” Anna Franko, a DHS spokes­woman, wrote in an email.

    ———-

    “Con­tro­ver­sial Trump Aide Katharine Gor­ka Helped End Fund­ing For Group That Fights White Suprema­cy” by Jes­si­ca Schul­berg; The Huff­in­g­ton Post; 08/15/2017

    “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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 16, 2017, 2:22 pm
  4. 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?

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Edi­tor’s Blog

    Should We Be Punch­ing Nazis?

    By Josh Mar­shall
    Pub­lished August 28, 2017 1:09 pm

    As we’ve seen the alt-right and var­i­ous white suprema­cist and fascis­tic groups grow in promi­nence if not nec­es­sar­i­ly num­bers in recent years and now be grant­ed renewed promi­nence and val­i­da­tion from the Pres­i­dent, we see a renewed debate about the role of vio­lence in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Specif­i­cal­ly, what is the best way and the appro­pri­ate way to react to and com­bat the always men­ac­ing and often vio­lent actions of the kind of peo­ple we saw protest­ing in Char­lottesville?

    A lot of this debate has gone under the rubric of “nazi-punch­ing” after alt-right leader Richard Spencer was cold-cocked at a demon­stra­tion on the fringes of the President’s inau­gu­ra­tion. It’s also got­ten renewed atten­tion because of the grow­ing promi­nence of small but high-pro­file groups going under the name of “antifa”. There are a lot of details here. But I want to focus nar­row­ly on what we should think of groups that not only protest racist groups or come pre­pared to defend them­selves against vio­lence from racist groups but see it as their goal to con­front these groups on equal terms in street con­fronta­tions. In oth­er words, groups that go look­ing for con­fronta­tions and want to get into street brawls.

    Before pro­ceed­ing fur­ther, I want to address what I think are some impor­tant caveats. As we saw in the days after Char­lottesville, Pres­i­dent Trump went to great lengths to equate the two groups which met in Char­lottesville – his var­i­ous ref­er­ences to “many sides” and so forth. The most impor­tant point to keep in mind here is that the vast major­i­ty of the peo­ple protest­ing the white suprema­cists and Nazis were not vio­lent – either in phi­los­o­phy or prac­tice. They were there protest­ing defi­ant­ly but peace­ful­ly against marchers whose very mes­sage was one of men­ace and threat­ened vio­lence. Oth­ers were pre­pared for con­fronta­tions if the oth­er side became vio­lent but weren’t look­ing to ini­ti­ate vio­lence.

    On a basic philo­soph­i­cal lev­el, embrac­ing vio­lence to com­bat polit­i­cal and moral evils like racism and fas­cism is sim­ply not equiv­a­lent to embrac­ing vio­lence to advance these evils. Any lib­er­al­ism or con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism that is so blood­less that it can’t make these dis­tinc­tions is too ornate and the­o­ret­i­cal to exist in the wild. So the entire­ty of Trump’s equiv­a­lence is false. But again, what should our atti­tude be towards even small groups who embrace phys­i­cal con­fronta­tions and vio­lence as the way to con­front these groups?

    I believe that if you look both his­tor­i­cal­ly and in prac­tice, when you have wide­spread street brawl­ing between “good” groups and “bad” groups it almost always ends up being a vic­to­ry for the fas­cist groups. This is for a num­ber of rea­sons. First is that these groups have his­tor­i­cal­ly used the pres­ence of civ­il vio­lence to jus­ti­fy “law and order” crack­downs which usu­al­ly empow­er and prop­a­gate author­i­tar­i­an pol­i­tics. You can already see this, ten­den­tious­ly, in those hideous NRA video hate screeds. Again, his­to­ry tells us this and I think it’s close to intu­itive: break­downs of civ­il peace lead to author­i­tar­i­an crack­downs, which almost always have a right-wing and often racist valence.

    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.

    Now, a fre­quent counter this is the argu­ment about the Nazis and how non-vio­lent resis­tance didn’t save Ger­many or even­tu­al­ly the Jews or even­tu­al­ly much of the globe which was engulfed in wars trig­gered by the Nazi par­ty. This argu­ment is both bet­ter and worse than it may seem on the sur­face. Let’s dis­cuss it for a moment.

    There’s a volu­mi­nous lit­er­a­ture, not sur­pris­ing­ly, about what is called the Nazi ‘seizure of pow­er’. A key sec­tion of that debate cen­ters on the fact that there was, by and large, no resis­tance when the Nazis took the for­mal pow­ers they had gained through the machin­ery of the Weimar state and used it to cre­ate a dic­ta­tor­ship. This wasn’t a drawn out or vague process. It occurred over a mat­ter of months in 1933. It hap­pened fast.

    One of the key cri­tiques of what we might call the oppo­si­tion to Hitler has to do with the Ger­man Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, the main par­ty of the non-Com­mu­nist left. By and large the SPD, still a mass par­ty in Ger­many, did not resort to extra-con­sti­tu­tion­al or vio­lent means to resist Hitler’s coup from above. Indeed, there’s at least an argu­ment that the par­ties of the left and cen­ter still con­sti­tut­ed the major­i­ty. The argu­ment has always been that the SPD, though nom­i­nal­ly a Marx­ist par­ty, was so wed­ded to con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism and democ­ra­cy that it was either unable or unwill­ing to resist the destruc­tion of the Weimar state by extra-con­sti­tu­tion­al or vio­lent means.

    This very sim­ple review leaves out a world of com­plex­i­ty. Again, there’s a vast lit­er­a­ture on the Nazi seizure of pow­er, which you can read. I put it out there to note that there is a time when vio­lence and extra-con­sti­tu­tion­al action is like­ly the only way to pre­vent fas­cism and dic­ta­tor­ship. But, para­dox­i­cal­ly, the resort to street vio­lence, polit­i­cal para­mil­i­taries and empow­ered vio­lence over law is also the surest route to the destruc­tion of democ­ra­cy and dic­ta­tor­ship. Quite sim­ply, as dire a sit­u­a­tion as I think the country’s in, we are not remote­ly in a posi­tion com­pa­ra­ble to the Spring of 1933 in Ger­many. Sug­gest­ing oth­er­wise amounts to a grandiose and self-flat­ter­ing con­ceit.

    Now, hear­ing this argu­ment you might think I’m argu­ing for a blood­less “I may dis­agree with what you say but I’ll fight for your right to say it” argu­ment. It’s not. I actu­al­ly like see­ing Nazis get punched. Nor do I think all views deserve a right of equal hear­ing in a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety. Philoso­phies that seek to destroy democ­ra­cy and the rule of law don’t mer­it equal val­i­da­tion by a democ­ra­cy. We grant them cer­tain rights because doing so is con­sis­tent with a larg­er sys­tem of laws and rights that guar­an­tees a civ­il soci­ety that is the antithe­sis of what they believe in. Put anoth­er way, Nazis deserve to get punched. A few suck­er punch­es here and there prob­a­bly send a salu­tary mes­sage. But it’s not always wise to give peo­ple what they deserve.

    I also think that in cas­es where the police either refuse to pro­tect or are unable to pro­tect the vic­tims of fas­cist intim­i­da­tion and vio­lence that there should be defense groups that do so. That is defen­sive vio­lence in spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tions. And more gen­er­al­ly that only pre­sup­pos­es the break­down of the state and its basic respon­si­bil­i­ties which it should be our main goal to avoid.

    The entire­ty of this seems still a large­ly mar­gin­al issue – a few street brawls in dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try in which Nazis come out to march and intim­i­date and left-wing groups go out to meet them also look­ing for a fight. This is a tiny, tiny per­cent­age of those counter-protest­ing these peo­ple. And I don’t include here peo­ple who sim­ply defend them­selves when attacked. But it’s still worth think­ing this ques­tion through – even at a dis­tance – since we live in trou­bled times.

    Push­ing civ­il soci­ety from talk and vot­ing to vio­lence and para­mil­i­taries is what the fas­cists are try­ing to accom­plish – mov­ing from the rule of law to the rule of force. By every his­tor­i­cal stan­dard and also by almost every philo­soph­i­cal one, this is a vic­to­ry for, if not fas­cism, then cer­tain­ly author­i­tar­i­an­ism. The answer to Nazis and white suprema­cists isn’t flow­ery talk or left-wing para­mil­i­taries. It’s a stronger rule of law and an empow­ered state behind it. We have our work cut out for us.

    ———-

    “Should We Be Punch­ing Nazis?” by Josh Mar­shall; Talk­ing Points Memo; 08/28/2017

    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:

    ...
    I also think that in cas­es where the police either refuse to pro­tect or are unable to pro­tect the vic­tims of fas­cist intim­i­da­tion and vio­lence that there should be defense groups that do so. That is defen­sive vio­lence in spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tions. And more gen­er­al­ly that only pre­sup­pos­es the break­down of the state and its basic respon­si­bil­i­ties which it should be our main goal to avoid.

    ...

    Push­ing civ­il soci­ety from talk and vot­ing to vio­lence and para­mil­i­taries is what the fas­cists are try­ing to accom­plish – mov­ing from the rule of law to the rule of force. By every his­tor­i­cal stan­dard and also by almost every philo­soph­i­cal one, this is a vic­to­ry for, if not fas­cism, then cer­tain­ly author­i­tar­i­an­ism. The answer to Nazis and white suprema­cists isn’t flow­ery talk or left-wing para­mil­i­taries. It’s a stronger rule of law and an empow­ered state behind it. We have our work cut out for us.”

    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:

    The Oregonian/OregonLive

    Who is Jere­my Chris­t­ian? Face­book shows a man with neb­u­lous polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions who hat­ed cir­cum­ci­sion and Hillary Clin­ton

    By Lizzy Ack­er
    Updat­ed on June 2, 2017 at 6:44 PM Post­ed on May 30, 2017 at 4:33 PM

    A deep look at the Face­book page of the man who alleged­ly killed two at the Hol­ly­wood MAX stop on Fri­day reveals shift­ing polit­i­cal views that often con­tra­dict­ed them­selves, though they main­tained cer­tain themes through­out, like hat­ing cir­cum­ci­sion and Hillary Clin­ton.

    Accord­ing to Shane Bur­ley, Port­land author of the upcom­ing book “Fas­cism Today,” that fuzzi­ness is a hall­mark of extrem­ism.

    “Defined ide­o­log­i­cal con­tra­dic­tions are pret­ty nor­mal with white nation­al­ists,” Bur­ley said over the phone Tues­day.

    On Tues­day after­noon, Jere­my Joseph Chris­t­ian, 35, was arraigned on charges of aggra­vat­ed mur­der and attempt­ed mur­der. He is accused of killing Ricky John Best, 53, of Hap­py Val­ley, and Tal­iesin Myrd­din Namkai-Meche, 23, of South­east Port­land..

    Both men were stabbed in the throat on a MAX train while they attempt­ed to defend two young women from Chris­tian’s racist rant. A third man, Mic­ah Fletch­er, 21, was also stabbed in the neck but sur­vived the attack.

    Fed­er­al author­i­ties are still work­ing with Port­land police and the Dis­trict Attor­ney’s Office to decide whether to pur­sue fed­er­al hate crime or civ­il rights charges against Chris­t­ian.

    Bur­ley believes that Chris­tian’s jour­ney as played out on Face­book — from Bernie Sanders and Stand­ing Rock to Don­ald Trump and white nation­al­ism and ulti­mate­ly vio­lence — is not uncom­mon.

    “I think the most impor­tant thing is when it comes to extrem­ist right-wing pol­i­tics is that they are murky,” Bur­ley said.

    In April, Chris­t­ian was filmed and pho­tographed doing a Nazi salute while shout­ing: “Die Mus­lims!” at an alt-right “free speech” ral­ly.

    In response to the attack, Port­land May­or Ted Wheel­er said the city would­n’t issue per­mits for two planned events he char­ac­ter­ized as “alt-right,” in June and asked the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to revoke an exist­ing per­mit for one of the events, anger­ing alt-right sup­port­ers and bring­ing the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union into the dis­cus­sion of free speech in Port­land.

    On Twit­ter and oth­er social media, how­ev­er, peo­ple who iden­ti­fy as alt-right are dis­tanc­ing them­selves from Chris­t­ian, call­ing him a Bernie Sanders sup­port­er. Lib­er­als also refuse to claim him, point­ing out that he was also a Don­ald Trump sup­port­er.

    His Face­book page shows a com­pli­cat­ed pic­ture. His posts reveal a com­ic book col­lec­tor with neb­u­lous polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions who above all else seemed to hate cir­cum­ci­sion and Hillary Clin­ton.

    In his milder posts, Chris­t­ian wrote about buy­ing and sell­ing com­ic books. But many of his oth­er posts had angry and vio­lent themes.

    “I want a job in Nor­way cut­ting off the heads of peo­ple that Cir­cum­cize Babies....Like if you agree!!!” Chris­t­ian post­ed on May 9. That post got 14 shares, and 34 reac­tions, some of which were laugh­ing and “wow.”

    “If you sup­port the cut­ting of babies gen­i­tals in sick trib­al rit­u­als in Amer­i­ca get off my page,” he wrote in anoth­er post. “I don’t care if you are friend of fam­i­ly.”

    He went on to sug­gest that a law ban­ning cir­cum­ci­sion would “stop True Patri­ots from hav­ing to kill oth­er­wise good doc­tors inside hos­pi­tals.”

    “F– You if you say my body my choice but sup­port cir­cum­ci­sion,” reads anoth­er post.

    “Stop the WAR on babies’ Fore­skins!!!” says anoth­er.

    The ques­tion of whether Chris­t­ian was a Trump sup­port­er or a Sanders sup­port­er, does­n’t have an either/or answer, except: he def­i­nite­ly was not a Clin­ton sup­port­er.

    “Bernie Sanders was the Pres­i­dent I want­ed,” wrote Chris­t­ian in Decem­ber. “He voiced my heart and mind. The one who spoke about the way Amer­i­ca should gone. Away from the Mil­i­tary and Prison Indus­tri­al Com­plex­es. The Trump is who Amer­i­ca needs now that Bernie got ripped off.”

    But on Nov. 11, he post­ed that he was unable to bring him­self to vote for Trump.

    “I’ve had it!!! I gonna kill every­body who vot­ed for Trump or Hillary!!!” he said in anoth­er post in ear­ly Jan­u­ary. “It’s all your fault!!! You’re what’s wrong with this coun­try!!! Reveal your­selves imme­di­ate­ly and face your DOOM!!!”

    Bur­ley said that he believes Chris­t­ian could have sup­port­ed Sanders because he was against glob­al­iza­tion and then, when Sanders lost, he “could have sup­port­ed the kind of Amer­i­ca first pro­tec­tion espoused by Trump.”

    “What it looks like with him is a per­son going through an ide­o­log­i­cal process,” Bur­ley said.

    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!!!!”

    Bur­ley said that “Vin­land” is far right lin­go that alludes to the part of east­ern Cana­da sup­pos­ed­ly set­tled by Leif Erik­son in the 11th cen­tu­ry. Bur­ley said white nation­al­ists use “Vineland” to assert them­selves as “dis­tinct peo­ple with a spir­i­tu­al lin­eage.”

    In late Jan­u­ary, how­ev­er, Chris­t­ian wrote, “If Don­ald Trump is the Next Hitler then I am join­ing his SS to put an end to Monothe­ist Ques­tion. All Zion­ist Jews, All Chris­tians who do not fol­low Christ’s teach­ing of Love, Char­i­ty, and For­give­ness And All Jiha­di Mus­lims are going to Mada­gas­car or the Ovens/FEMA Camps!!! Does this make me a fas­cist!!!”

    Then a few days lat­er he post­ed, “Sanders/Stein 2017!!! Let’s stop these pipelines and reign in the Prison/Military Indus­tri­al Com­plex­es!!!”

    More than any­thing, he seemed to hate Hillary Clin­ton sup­port­ers.

    “The only form of abor­tion I sup­port is the old fash­ioned method that does­n’t cost the tax­pay­ers mon­ey: Dad­dy Kicks Mom­my In The Stom­ach!!!” he wrote in Jan­u­ary. “Also, lead poi­son­ing via a 9MM injec­tion for Hillary Sup­port­ers....”

    “Death to Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton and all her sup­port­ers!!!” he post­ed, also in Jan­u­ary. “To be car­ried out by Bernie Sup­port­ers who did­n’t turn trai­tor and vote Hillary....”

    Besides his hate for Clin­ton and cir­cum­ci­sion, most of his oth­er posi­tions seem dif­fi­cult to pin down.

    On Face­book, Chris­t­ian cer­tain­ly espoused far-right beliefs. One meme he post­ed reads, “If we’re remov­ing stat­ues because of the Civ­il War, we should be remov­ing mosques because of 9/11.”

    In one post, Chris­t­ian called Tim­o­thy McVeigh, the Okla­homa City bomber who killed 168 peo­ple, includ­ing 19 chil­dren in 1995, “a TRUE PATRIOT!!!”

    He also sup­port­ed Stand­ing Rock and fre­quent­ly railed against the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex.

    He post­ed con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry memes from the right-wing Alex Jones Chan­nel along­side pro-legal cannabis sto­ries about Bill Maher, who is decid­ed­ly left wing.

    He wrote about and ref­er­enced a “white home­land” in both pos­i­tive and neu­tral or neg­a­tive terms.

    “So, its like this. If you sup­port Israel for Zion­ist home­land for Jews then you should also sup­port Cas­ca­dia as a White home­land for whites only racists, Alaba­ma and Mis­sis­sip­pi for Nation of Islam and racist Black Pow­er groups and give back at least so cal to Mex­i­cans for all the ille­gal Lati­nos and any Brown racist peeps,” he wrote. “Their can be a cen­tral area ran by feds were all the nor­mal peo­ple who don’t real­ly care about race and gay mar­riage is legal. Prob­lem solved.”

    But he also shared a pic­ture of a black San­ta Claus in Decem­ber that said, “Share this pic­ture of black San­ta because it will piss off a racist a–hole.”

    He fre­quent­ly referred to him­self as a nihilist and appeared to dis­like monothe­is­tic reli­gions uni­ver­sal­ly, shar­ing memes with sen­ti­ments like “Damn girl, are you a reli­gious scrip­ture? Because I want to con­stant­ly mis­in­ter­pret you for my own ben­e­fit.”

    “Ear­ly fas­cists talk about nihilism,” Bur­ley told us. “Hat­ing human­i­ty on the one hand and then hat­ing par­tic­u­lar parts of human­i­ty espe­cial­ly.”

    But, while some­times he called him­self a fas­cist, accord­ing to var­i­ous posts, he con­sid­ered the Antifa, which he hat­ed, to be a fas­cist orga­ni­za­tion.

    On April 28, the day before the alt-right protest where he was filmed, Chris­t­ian wrote: “A note too [sic] all my Port­land Peeps. You should all attend the Free Speech Ral­ly at Mon­tavil­la if you val­ue your rights. ALL RIGHTS.”

    “I will attend in Lizard King Regalia as a Polit­i­cal Nihilist to Pro­voke both Sides and attempt to engage any­one in a true Phi­los­o­phy and Polit­i­cal Dis­cus­sion,” he con­tin­ued.

    “I take the Role of Inter­na­tion­al Patri­ot and Rev­o­lu­tion­ary VERY SERIOUS BUT YOU ALL KNOW I AM THE MOST LAID BACK DUDE IN THE WORLD- Until you cross that line then noth­ing will stop our COME TO JESUS TALK FRIEND OR FOE.”

    He ends the post by say­ing, “FREE SPEECH OR DIE!!! THIS IS MY LAND!!! VINLAND RIP CITY!!!”

    Main­ly though, Chris­t­ian appeared to be angry. In August of 2016, he wrote on Face­book, “Sur­vival Tip #1: Kill Every Oth­er Per­son.”

    When asked about how they deal with posts call­ing for the death of groups of peo­ple or indi­vid­u­als, a Face­book spokesper­son direct­ed us to their Com­mu­ni­ty Stan­dards, which says, “We care­ful­ly review reports of threat­en­ing lan­guage to iden­ti­fy seri­ous threats of harm to pub­lic and per­son­al safe­ty. We remove cred­i­ble threats of phys­i­cal harm to indi­vid­u­als. We may con­sid­er things like a per­son­’s phys­i­cal loca­tion or pub­lic vis­i­bil­i­ty in deter­min­ing whether a threat is cred­i­ble.”

    As far as Chris­t­ian, the spokesper­son said they don’t have a spe­cif­ic com­ment on his posts.

    In the era of social media, it’s easy for mes­sages like those that Chris­t­ian read and those that he shared, to be passed around with not much inter­ven­tion.

    Dur­ing a press con­fer­ence on Sat­ur­day after the attack, Port­land Police Sgt. Pete Simp­son said police do not mon­i­tor social media unless there is “a crim­i­nal nexus.”

    “There’s not a wide­spread mon­i­tor­ing because some­thing is unpop­u­lar or scary,” Simp­son said. “You have to have that crime there.”

    Loren Can­non, the spe­cial agent in charge of the Port­land Divi­sion of the FBI, echoed Simp­son, adding that he could­n’t com­ment on the specifics of Chris­tian’s posts with­out see­ing them.

    Bur­ley believes that Chris­tian’s “lone wolf” act of vio­lence, and the appar­ent con­tra­dic­tions in his belief sys­tem bely a deep­er prob­lem.

    “These are polit­i­cal acts of vio­lence that are the respon­si­bil­i­ty of white nation­al­ists,” he told us.

    Bur­ley said that his­tor­i­cal­ly, it has been the case that high­er lev­el peo­ple in far-right extrem­ist move­ments rile up peo­ple down the line and it is those peo­ple, who are often mar­gin­al­ized, that com­mit the vio­lence.

    ...

    ———-

    “Who is Jere­my Chris­t­ian? Face­book shows a man with neb­u­lous polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions who hat­ed cir­cum­ci­sion and Hillary Clin­ton” by Lizzy Ack­er; The Oregonian/OregonLive; 05/30/2017

    “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:

    Won­kette

    Antifa Loves Beat­ing Women! Say Idiot 4Chan Nazis Who Made It All Up

    By Robyn Pen­nac­chia -
    August 24, 2017 — 3:30pm

    As you may be aware (SIGH), idiots on 4chan have tak­en to mak­ing up fake Twit­ter pro­files for Antifa and Antifa “mem­bers.” This is some­thing they do with stun­ning reg­u­lar­i­ty in order to push their own far Right posi­tions. Often it’s women reject­ing fem­i­nism, black peo­ple reject­ing anti-racism, or peo­ple embrac­ing those things in the most absurd way they can imag­ine, in hopes of get­ting rea­son­able peo­ple to think that they sup­port absurd things.

    On Wednes­day, trolls on 4chan’s /pol/ board attempt­ed to launch a new #PunchANazi/#PunchNazis cam­paign on social media in which their fake Antifa pro­files would sup­port domes­tic vio­lence, in hopes of con­vinc­ing peo­ple that the Left LOVES domes­tic vio­lence and thinks it is super great.

    The goal, as usu­al, was to get actu­al Antifa and sup­port­ers to retweet the memes, which of course did not actu­al­ly hap­pen.

    [see exam­ple of hoax #Pun­chANazi meme]
    [see sec­ond exam­ple of hoax #Pun­chANazi meme]

    The memes includ­ed clever jar­gon like “She said she was right-wing, so I gave her a left hook,” and “It’s all right, she’s alt-right,” next to pic­tures of women with black eyes. There were also sev­er­al with pic­tures of abused chil­dren with text sug­gest­ing they be mur­dered because they might be the next Hitler.

    How­ev­er, giv­en that they post­ed their nefar­i­ous plans on a pub­lic mes­sage board, and that this cam­paign was both incred­i­bly obvi­ous and stu­pid, said plans were quick­ly dis­cov­ered by sev­er­al peo­ple online, includ­ing David Futrelle of We Hunt­ed The Mam­moth, and British cit­i­zen jour­nal­ist Elliot Hig­gins, best known for iden­ti­fy­ing the weapons seen in uploaded videos from the Syr­i­an Civ­il War. It was then report­ed on by the BBC.

    [see tweet out­ing 4Chan as source of hoax #Pun­chANazi meme]

    AND NOW THEY ARE SAD!

    [see post from 4Chan express­ing dis­may over the hoax cam­paign get­ting exposed]

    [see anoth­er post from 4Chan express­ing dis­may over the hoax cam­paign get­ting exposed]

    Because who would have thought that plan­ning some­thing this ridicu­lous on a pub­lic mes­sage board could have gone awry! Weird!

    Of course, some were pret­ty sure that it def­i­nite­ly still worked, because even if they got found out, they total­ly point­ed out… some­thing.

    [See 4Chan post sup­port­ing the hoax cam­paign because they say it points to a larg­er truth]

    [See sec­ond 4Chan post sup­porint the hoax cam­paign]

    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.

    Part of their agen­da as of late has been to try to dri­ve a wedge between white women and peo­ple of col­or. Not because they par­tic­u­lar­ly like women — they don’t, and many appear to be very upset about the 19th Amend­ment — but because feel that this is the eas­i­est way to split the Left, and because they have recent­ly decid­ed that in order to achieve their aims, they need white women to join them, for breed­ing pur­pos­es only.

    ...

    Over on anoth­er thread, sev­er­al /pol/ denizens were also whin­ing about how they have been infil­trat­ed by out­siders and “normies” post­ing threads and “mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for /pol/ users who could poten­tial­ly ben­e­fit from know­ing cer­tain infor­ma­tion, and poten­tial­ly coher­ent­ly gath­er and dis­cuss cer­tain things, from doing so.”

    [see image of 4Chan post whin­ing about “normie” posts clog­ging up the place]

    Which I think means they def­i­nite­ly want us to go over there and start post­ing con­stant­ly about flower arrang­ing, right?

    [We Hunt­ed The Mam­moth]

    ———-

    “Antifa Loves Beat­ing Women! Say Idiot 4Chan Nazis Who Made It All Up” by Robyn Pen­nac­chia; Won­kette; 08/24/2017

    “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:

    ...
    Part of their agen­da as of late has been to try to dri­ve a wedge between white women and peo­ple of col­or. Not because they par­tic­u­lar­ly like women — they don’t, and many appear to be very upset about the 19th Amend­ment — but because feel that this is the eas­i­est way to split the Left, and because they have recent­ly decid­ed that in order to achieve their aims, they need white women to join them, for breed­ing pur­pos­es only.
    ...

    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:

    Salon

    NRA seeks to main­stream — and mon­e­tize — the “alt-right’s” para­noid, racist talk­ing points
    The “alt-right” wants Amer­i­ca to believe vio­lent rad­i­cals are on the attack; the NRA knows para­noia can sell guns

    Aman­da Mar­cotte
    Thurs­day, Aug 24, 2017 03:59 AM CST

    When­ev­er Don­ald Trump feels like he’s on the ropes, he throws him­self a ral­ly in a red state that would make Mus­soli­ni feel envi­ous. So it was on Tues­day night in Phoenix, when Trump — furi­ous that the media took issue with his claim that a torch-wield­ing mob of white suprema­cists was replete with “fine peo­ple” — unleashed a 75-minute rant about his own vic­tim­iza­tion to a crowd who, despite their immense love for the Big­ot-in-Chief, start­ed get­ting bored and drift­ed away.

    (To be fair, Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter had the same prob­lem in the ear­ly ’60s: Crowds would show up, pumped about ral­ly­ing with their fel­low racists and then lose inter­est dur­ing his actu­al speech­es.)

    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.

    Trump’s con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ences are dis­turbing­ly com­fort­able with these talk­ing points, and that’s due to a larg­er right-wing media infra­struc­ture that has been push­ing these notions into more main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive spaces. Ear­li­er this week, I report­ed on the role that Tuck­er Carl­son and the Dai­ly Caller are play­ing in inject­ing more rad­i­cal rhetoric into con­ser­v­a­tive dis­course. But the NRA — a gun lob­by that in recent years has built its own lit­tle media empire through blogs and NRATV — has also played a major role in pro­mot­ing ideas that used to dwell on the fringes.

    “For years, the gun lob­by qui­et­ly dog-whis­tled to white suprema­cists,” said Shan­non Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense In Amer­i­ca, which is part of Every­town for Gun Safe­ty. “But as gun sales plum­met under this admin­is­tra­tion, they are now open­ly traf­fick­ing in para­noia and fear, and incit­ing vio­lence in order to advance an increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal ‘more guns for any­one, any­where’ agen­da to sell more guns.”

    Ear­li­er this sum­mer, an NRA recruit­ment video made by spokes­woman Dana Loesch attract­ed con­sid­er­able media atten­tion. Loesch argued, over a back­drop of dra­mat­ic music and images of street vio­lence, that the sup­pos­ed­ly lib­er­al media was whip­ping up mobs that “smash win­dows, burn cars, shut down inter­states and air­ports, bul­ly and ter­ror­ize the law-abid­ing? — ?until the only option left is for police to do their jobs and stop the mad­ness.”

    She went on to rec­om­mend that well-armed NRA mem­bers meet this sup­posed upsurge of rad­i­cal vio­lence with “the clenched fist of truth.”

    Loesch’s video echoed the argu­ments of NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, who gave a speech in Feb­ru­ary at the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence warn­ing about the rise of the “vio­lent left.”

    “Right now, we face a gath­er­ing of forces that are will­ing to use vio­lence against us,” LaPierre said. “If the vio­lent left brings their ter­ror to our com­mu­ni­ties, our neigh­bor­hoods or into our homes, they will be met with the resolve and the strength and the full force of Amer­i­can free­dom in the hands of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Among them and behind them are some of the most rad­i­cal polit­i­cal ele­ments there are. Anar­chists, Marx­ists, com­mu­nists and the whole rest of the left-wing social­ist brigade.”

    ...

    These claims that there’s some surge of left-wing vio­lence that needs to be shut down by the armed vig­i­lance of the right should be famil­iar to any­one who has fol­lowed the rise of the “alt-right” and the youth-ori­ent­ed white suprema­cist move­ment. For months now, “alt-right” fig­ures like Kyle “Based Stick­man” Chap­man have argued that vio­lent left­ists present a phys­i­cal threat to “free speech” and must be met with vio­lence. “Alt-right” social media feeds are replete with young men brag­ging about how they can’t wait to assault left-wing pro­test­ers — or run them down with cars — all in the thin­ly veiled dis­guise of “self-defense.”

    This was the excuse that the neo-Nazis and oth­er assort­ed racists used to jus­ti­fy show­ing up in Char­lottesville with guns, shields and hel­mets, even though it was obvi­ous to most of the pub­lic that they weren’t act­ing in self-defense so much as delib­er­ate­ly try­ing to pro­voke street fights. It’s true that these goons are some­times met by antifa demon­stra­tors who are ready to rum­ble, but as counter-protests in both Boston and Char­lottesville demon­strat­ed, vio­lent left­ists are a tiny major­i­ty and not actu­al­ly a threat that can serve to jus­ti­fy right-wing vio­lence.

    On Mon­day night the pres­i­dent echoed these claims, call­ing out “antifa” by name and say­ing they “show up in the hel­mets and the black masks and they have clubs and every­thing.” Again, this con­tains a grain of truth — a small num­ber of armed, masked left­ists some­times show up at counter-protests — but the larg­er truth is that most pro­gres­sive pro­test­ers are armed with noth­ing but card­board signs. It’s real­ly the white suprema­cists and fas­cists that are show­ing up in large num­bers with weapons, guns, shields and hel­mets. As the failed “alt-right” ral­ly in Boston showed, if the far right isn’t allowed to arm itself, its forces fre­quent­ly won’t both­er to show up at all.

    As Watts argued, it’s not sur­pris­ing to see the NRA tap into white-suprema­cist talk­ing points, and not just because LaPierre and oth­er NRA spokes­peo­ple have a long his­to­ry of push­ing racist fan­tasies in order to scare heart­land white folks into buy­ing guns. The truth of the mat­ter is that Trump’s pres­i­den­cy, while ide­o­log­i­cal­ly con­ge­nial for the gun lob­by, is bad for busi­ness. In the spring, a “Trump slump” in gun sales was wide­ly report­ed. The firearms industry’s mar­ket­ing is large­ly based around appeal­ing to con­ser­v­a­tive inse­cu­ri­ties. When Democ­rats are in office — espe­cial­ly, say, a black pres­i­dent — anx­ious con­ser­v­a­tives buy more guns to feel pow­er­ful. If a Repub­li­can is in charge, con­ser­v­a­tives feel less need to shore up their self-esteem with high-pow­ered weapon­ry.

    In recent months, though, gun sales start­ed to rise again, and it’s not hard to see why: Con­ser­v­a­tives are respond­ing to a steady drum­beat of warn­ings — from Trump, from right-wing media, from the NRA — that the coun­try is under assault from crim­i­nal gangs and vio­lent left­ists, and they need to be ready.

    The results of this were all too chill­ing­ly on dis­play in Char­lottesville as hun­dreds of white suprema­cists descend­ed on the city, many of them laden down with expen­sive weapons. Images like this also pro­vide effec­tive adver­tis­ing for the gun indus­try, as the images of gun-wield­ing wannabe-fas­cists con­vince oth­er embit­tered right-wingers that there’s an excit­ing move­ment to join, and all they need to do is lay down a cred­it card at the near­est gun shop.

    ———-

    “NRA seeks to main­stream — and mon­e­tize — the “alt-right’s” para­noid, racist talk­ing points” Aman­da Mar­cotte; Salon; 08/24/2017

    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:

    ...
    Trump’s con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ences are dis­turbing­ly com­fort­able with these talk­ing points, and that’s due to a larg­er right-wing media infra­struc­ture that has been push­ing these notions into more main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive spaces. Ear­li­er this week, I report­ed on the role that Tuck­er Carl­son and the Dai­ly Caller are play­ing in inject­ing more rad­i­cal rhetoric into con­ser­v­a­tive dis­course. But the NRA — a gun lob­by that in recent years has built its own lit­tle media empire through blogs and NRATV — has also played a major role in pro­mot­ing ideas that used to dwell on the fringes.

    “For years, the gun lob­by qui­et­ly dog-whis­tled to white suprema­cists,” said Shan­non Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense In Amer­i­ca, which is part of Every­town for Gun Safe­ty. “But as gun sales plum­met under this admin­is­tra­tion, they are now open­ly traf­fick­ing in para­noia and fear, and incit­ing vio­lence in order to advance an increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal ‘more guns for any­one, any­where’ agen­da to sell more guns.”
    ...

    And right-wing talk­er Dana Loesch is mak­ing NRA recruit­ment videos warn­ing peo­ple of lib­er­al vio­lence, echo­ing the words of NRA pres­i­dent Wayne LaPierre:

    ...
    Ear­li­er this sum­mer, an NRA recruit­ment video made by spokes­woman Dana Loesch attract­ed con­sid­er­able media atten­tion. Loesch argued, over a back­drop of dra­mat­ic music and images of street vio­lence, that the sup­pos­ed­ly lib­er­al media was whip­ping up mobs that “smash win­dows, burn cars, shut down inter­states and air­ports, bul­ly and ter­ror­ize the law-abid­ing? — ?until the only option left is for police to do their jobs and stop the mad­ness.”

    She went on to rec­om­mend that well-armed NRA mem­bers meet this sup­posed upsurge of rad­i­cal vio­lence with “the clenched fist of truth.”

    Loesch’s video echoed the argu­ments of NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, who gave a speech in Feb­ru­ary at the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence warn­ing about the rise of the “vio­lent left.”

    “Right now, we face a gath­er­ing of forces that are will­ing to use vio­lence against us,” LaPierre said. “If the vio­lent left brings their ter­ror to our com­mu­ni­ties, our neigh­bor­hoods or into our homes, they will be met with the resolve and the strength and the full force of Amer­i­can free­dom in the hands of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Among them and behind them are some of the most rad­i­cal polit­i­cal ele­ments there are. Anar­chists, Marx­ists, com­mu­nists and the whole rest of the left-wing social­ist brigade.”
    ...

    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:

    The New York­er

    Is Amer­i­ca Head­ed for a New Kind of Civ­il War?

    By Robin Wright

    August 14, 2017

    A day after the brawl­ing and racist bru­tal­i­ty and deaths in Vir­ginia, Gov­er­nor Ter­ry McAu­li­ffe asked, “How did we get to this place?” The more rel­e­vant ques­tion after Charlottesville—and oth­er dead­ly episodes in Fer­gu­son, Charleston, Dal­las, St. Paul, Bal­ti­more, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria—is where the Unit­ed States is head­ed. How frag­ile is the Union, our repub­lic, and a coun­try that has long been con­sid­ered the world’s most sta­ble democ­ra­cy? The dan­gers are now big­ger than the col­lec­tive episodes of vio­lence. “The rad­i­cal right was more suc­cess­ful in enter­ing the polit­i­cal main­stream last year than in half a cen­tu­ry,” the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter report­ed in Feb­ru­ary. The orga­ni­za­tion doc­u­ments more than nine hun­dred active (and grow­ing) hate groups in the Unit­ed States.

    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.

    “We keep say­ing, ‘It can’t hap­pen here,’ but then, holy smokes, it can,” Mines told me after we talked, on Sun­day, about Char­lottesville. The pat­tern of civ­il strife has evolved world­wide over the past six­ty years. Today, few civ­il wars involve pitched bat­tles from trench­es along neat geo­graph­ic front lines. Many are low-inten­si­ty con­flicts with episod­ic vio­lence in con­stant­ly mov­ing locales. Mines’s def­i­n­i­tion of a civ­il war is large-scale vio­lence that includes a rejec­tion of tra­di­tion­al polit­i­cal author­i­ty and requires the Nation­al Guard to deal with it. On Sat­ur­day, McAu­li­ffe put the Nation­al Guard on alert and declared a state of emer­gency.

    Based on his expe­ri­ence in civ­il wars on three con­ti­nents, Mines cit­ed five con­di­tions that sup­port his pre­dic­tion: entrenched nation­al polar­iza­tion, with no obvi­ous meet­ing place for res­o­lu­tion; increas­ing­ly divi­sive press cov­er­age and infor­ma­tion flows; weak­ened insti­tu­tions, notably Con­gress and the judi­cia­ry; a sell­out or aban­don­ment of respon­si­bil­i­ty by polit­i­cal lead­er­ship; and the legit­imiza­tion of vio­lence as the “in” way to either con­duct dis­course or solve dis­putes.

    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.”

    To test Mines’s con­jec­ture, I reached out to five promi­nent Civ­il War his­to­ri­ans this week­end. “When you look at the map of red and blue states and over­lap on top of it the map of the Civ­il War—and who was allied with who in the Civ­il War—not much has changed,” Judith Gies­berg, the edi­tor of the Jour­nal of the Civ­il War Era and a his­to­ri­an at Vil­lano­va Uni­ver­si­ty, told me. “We nev­er agreed on the out­come of the Civ­il War and the direc­tion the coun­try should go in. The post­war amend­ments were high­ly contentious—especially the Four­teenth Amend­ment, which pro­vides equal pro­tec­tion under the law—and they still are today. What does it mean to deliv­er vot­ing rights to peo­ple of col­or? We still don’t know.”

    She added, “Does that make us vul­ner­a­ble to a repeat of the past? I don’t see a repeat of those spe­cif­ic cir­cum­stances. But that doesn’t mean we are not enter­ing some­thing sim­i­lar in the way of a cul­ture war. We are vul­ner­a­ble to racism, trib­al­ism, and con­flict­ing visions of the way for­ward for our nation.”

    Anx­i­ety over deep­en­ing schisms and new con­flict has an out­let in pop­u­lar cul­ture: in April, Ama­zon select­ed the dystopi­an nov­el Amer­i­can War—which cen­ters on a sec­ond U.S. civ­il war—as one of its best books of the month. In a review in the Wash­ing­ton Post, Ron Charles wrote, “Across these scarred pages rages the clash that many of us are anx­ious­ly spec­u­lat­ing about in the Trump era: a nation riv­en by irrec­on­cil­able ide­olo­gies, alien­at­ed by entrenched sus­pi­cions . . . both poignant and hor­ri­fy­ing.” The Times book review­er not­ed, “It’s a work of fic­tion. For the time being, any­way.” The book’s author, Omar El Akkad, was born in Egypt and cov­ered the war in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the Fer­gu­son protest as a jour­nal­ist for Canada’s Globe and Mail.

    Before Char­lottesville, David Blight, a Yale his­to­ri­an, was already plan­ning a con­fer­ence in Novem­ber on “Amer­i­can Dis­union, Then and Now.” “Par­al­lels and analo­gies are always risky, but we do have weak­ened insti­tu­tions and not just polar­ized par­ties but par­ties that are risk­ing dis­in­te­gra­tion, which is what hap­pened in the eigh­teen-fifties,” he told me. “Slav­ery tore apart, over fif­teen years, both major polit­i­cal par­ties. It destroyed the Whig Par­ty, which was replaced by the Repub­li­can Par­ty, and divid­ed the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty into north­ern and south­ern parts.”

    “So,” he said, “watch the par­ties” as an indi­ca­tor of America’s health.

    In the eigh­teen-fifties, Blight told me, Amer­i­cans were not good at fore­see­ing or absorb­ing the “shock of events,” includ­ing the Fugi­tive Slave Act, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott deci­sion, the John Brown raid, and even the Mex­i­can-Amer­i­can War. “No one pre­dict­ed them. They forced peo­ple to repo­si­tion them­selves,” Blight said. “We’re going through one of those repo­si­tion­ings now. Trump’s elec­tion is one of them, and we’re still try­ing to fig­ure it out. But it’s not new. It dates to Obama’s elec­tion. We thought that would lead cul­ture in the oth­er direc­tion, but it didn’t,” he said. “There was a tremen­dous resis­tance from the right, then these episodes of police vio­lence, and all these things [from the past] explod­ed again. It’s not only a racial polar­iza­tion but a seizure about iden­ti­ty.”

    Gen­er­al­ly, Blight added, “We know we are at risk of civ­il war, or some­thing like it, when an elec­tion, an enact­ment, an event, an action by gov­ern­ment or peo­ple in high places, becomes utter­ly unac­cept­able to a par­ty, a large group, a sig­nif­i­cant con­stituen­cy.” The nation wit­nessed tec­ton­ic shifts on the eve of the Civ­il War, and dur­ing the civ­il-rights era, the unrest of the late nine­teen-six­ties and the Viet­nam War, he said. “It did not hap­pen with Bush v. Gore, in 2000, but per­haps we were close. It is not incon­ceiv­able that it could hap­pen now.”

    In a rever­sal of pub­lic opin­ion from the nine­teen-six­ties, Blight said, the weak­en­ing of polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions today has led Amer­i­cans to shift their views on which insti­tu­tions are cred­i­ble. “Who do we put our faith in today? Maybe, iron­i­cal­ly, the F.B.I.,” he said. “With all these mil­i­tary men in the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion, that’s where we’re putting our hope for the use of rea­son. It’s not the Pres­i­dent. It’s not Con­gress, which is utter­ly dys­func­tion­al and run by men who spent decades divid­ing us in order to keep con­trol, and not even the Supreme Court, because it’s been so politi­cized.”

    In the wake of Char­lottesville, the cho­rus of con­dem­na­tion from politi­cians across the polit­i­cal spec­trum has been encour­ag­ing, but it is not nec­es­sar­i­ly reas­sur­ing or an indi­ca­tor about the future, Gre­go­ry Downs, a his­to­ri­an at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Davis, told me. Dur­ing the Civ­il War, even South­ern politi­cians who denounced or were wary of seces­sion for years—including Jef­fer­son Davis—ended up as lead­ers of the Con­fed­er­a­cy. “If the source of con­flict is deeply embed­ded in cul­tur­al or social forces, then politi­cians are not inher­ent­ly able to restrain them with calls for rea­son,” Downs said. He called the nox­ious white suprema­cists and neo-Nazis the “mes­sen­gers,” rather than the “archi­tects,” of the Republic’s poten­tial col­lapse. But, he warned, “We take our sta­bil­i­ty for grant­ed.”

    ...

    Eric Fon­er, the Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty his­to­ri­an, won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2011, for his book “The Fiery Tri­al: Abra­ham Lin­coln and Amer­i­can Slav­ery.” Like the oth­er schol­ars I spoke to, Fon­er is skep­ti­cal that any future con­flict will resem­ble America’s last civ­il war. “Obvi­ous­ly, we have some pret­ty deep divi­sions along mul­ti­ple lines—racial, ide­o­log­i­cal, rur­al ver­sus urban,” he told me. “Whether they will lead to civ­il war, I doubt. We have strong grav­i­ta­tion­al forces that coun­ter­act what we’re see­ing today.” He point­ed out that “the spark in Charlottesville—taking down a stat­ue of Robert E. Lee—doesn’t have to do with civ­il war. Peo­ple are not debat­ing the Civ­il War. They’re debat­ing Amer­i­can soci­ety and race today.”

    Char­lottesville was not the first protest by the so-called alt-right, nor will it be the last. Nine more ral­lies are planned for next week­end and oth­ers in Sep­tem­ber.

    ———-

    “Is Amer­i­ca Head­ed for a New Kind of Civ­il War?” by Robin Wright; The New York­er; 08/14/2017

    “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):

    ...
    “We keep say­ing, ‘It can’t hap­pen here,’ but then, holy smokes, it can,” Mines told me after we talked, on Sun­day, about Char­lottesville. The pat­tern of civ­il strife has evolved world­wide over the past six­ty years. Today, few civ­il wars involve pitched bat­tles from trench­es along neat geo­graph­ic front lines. Many are low-inten­si­ty con­flicts with episod­ic vio­lence in con­stant­ly mov­ing locales. Mines’s def­i­n­i­tion of a civ­il war is large-scale vio­lence that includes a rejec­tion of tra­di­tion­al polit­i­cal author­i­ty and requires the Nation­al Guard to deal with it. On Sat­ur­day, McAu­li­ffe put the Nation­al Guard on alert and declared a state of emer­gency.

    Based on his expe­ri­ence in civ­il wars on three con­ti­nents, Mines cit­ed five con­di­tions that sup­port his pre­dic­tion: entrenched nation­al polar­iza­tion, with no obvi­ous meet­ing place for res­o­lu­tion; increas­ing­ly divi­sive press cov­er­age and infor­ma­tion flows; weak­ened insti­tu­tions, notably Con­gress and the judi­cia­ry; a sell­out or aban­don­ment of respon­si­bil­i­ty by polit­i­cal lead­er­ship; and the legit­imiza­tion of vio­lence as the “in” way to either con­duct dis­course or solve dis­putes.

    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.”
    ...

    “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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 29, 2017, 7:42 pm
  5. 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:

    Politi­co

    Democ­rats still tox­ic in rur­al Amer­i­ca

    The party’s can­di­date for Vir­ginia gov­er­nor grew up in the rur­al reach­es and boasts a mil­i­tary back­ground. But he’s doing no bet­ter than Clin­ton.

    By KEVIN ROBILLARD

    11/03/2017 03:11 PM EDT
    Updat­ed 11/03/2017 02:59 PM EDT

    BLACKSBURG, Va. — Vir­ginia guber­na­to­r­i­al hope­ful Ralph Northam looked like the per­fect can­di­date to help Democ­rats regain trac­tion with rur­al vot­ers after a dis­as­trous 2016, with his South­ern drawl, upbring­ing in the state’s rur­al East­ern Shore and mil­i­tary back­ground.

    But despite sub­stan­tial efforts in the far reach­es of the com­mon­wealth increas­ing­ly ignored by Democ­rats, Northam appears to be com­ing up short of a big improve­ment, accord­ing to his own inter­nal polling.

    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.

    It’s one rea­son why Repub­li­cans still believe that they can pull an upset in the Nov. 7 Vir­ginia elec­tion, despite Northam lead­ing in most pub­lic polling. Northam’s cam­paign believes he is doing well enough in the state’s rur­al cor­ners to win, giv­en Democ­rats’ strength in fast-grow­ing North­ern Vir­ginia. Northam’s own inter­nal polling in Octo­ber showed Repub­li­can Ed Gille­spie get­ting 49 per­cent to Northam’s 36 per­cent in the rur­al Bris­tol, Roanoke and Har­rison­burg tele­vi­sion mar­kets — which Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump won 62 per­cent to 34 per­cent in 2016 (while los­ing Vir­ginia to Hillary Clin­ton).

    While Gille­spie wasn’t hit­ting Trump’s heights, a poten­tial warn­ing sign of his own, Northam’s rur­al polling was lit­tle bet­ter than Clin­ton’s final result in last year’s pres­i­den­tial race — and below the lev­els Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma, John Ker­ry and Al Gore reached in the pre­vi­ous four pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, when they lost the region but still squeezed more votes out of it. The trend has left Democ­rats more reliant on high urban and sub­ur­ban turnout, and not every state has the same boom­ing sub­urbs to coun­ter­bal­ance Democ­rats’ rur­al loss­es. Rur­al Democ­rats wor­ry the par­ty still sees them as an unnec­es­sary after­thought.

    “We’re plain Jane,” said Jay Clarke, a retired his­to­ry pro­fes­sor who briefly resigned from his post as Rock­bridge Coun­ty Demo­c­ra­t­ic Chair­man ear­li­er this fall in order to protest what he saw as the state par­ty’s neglect of rur­al areas. “And the temptress is North­ern Vir­ginia down to Rich­mond and Tide­wa­ter. And politi­cians are eas­i­ly seduced.”

    Matt Mor­ri­son, the co-exec­u­tive direc­tor of the AFL-CIO-backed group Work­ing Amer­i­ca, has helped lead Demo­c­ra­t­ic turnout efforts in Virginia’s south­west, tar­get­ing about 100,000 vot­ers — includ­ing white mod­er­ates as well as siz­able black and Lati­no pop­u­la­tions in cities like Danville and Mar­tinsville.

    Mor­ri­son said can­vassers in the region haven’t detect­ed enthu­si­asm for Gille­spie or Northam, who both lost rur­al areas to their pri­ma­ry oppo­nents in June.

    “Enthu­si­asm on both sides is low,” he said.

    Democ­rats say that’s not for lack of try­ing on Northam’s part. For­mer Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep. Rick Bouch­er, who held a dis­trict in South­west Vir­ginia for 28 years before los­ing in the 2010 wave, said Northam is “doing a lot of what I rec­om­mend­ed” in an essay in the jour­nal “Democ­ra­cy” out­lin­ing how his par­ty could do bet­ter in rur­al areas. Boucher’s key lessons: Allow some flex­i­bil­i­ty on gun pol­i­cy, focus on the econ­o­my and show up.

    “ ‘Show­ing up’ means return­ing repeat­ed­ly and lis­ten­ing more than talk­ing,” he writes.

    Northam and his chief of staff pushed for the recre­ation of the par­ty’s rur­al cau­cus, and he held over 100 events in rur­al parts of the state as lieu­tenant gov­er­nor. He asked for rur­al Wise as the loca­tion of the third debate of the gov­er­nor’s race.

    “He’s sin­cere. He’s not slick,” said Toni Radler, chair of the Hanover Coun­ty Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, which includes sub­ur­ban and rur­al areas out­side of Rich­mond. “And we kin­da like that.”

    The Northam cam­paign released a tele­vi­sion ad ear­li­er this month designed to appeal to rur­al vot­ers, fea­tur­ing Northam work­ing to restore a 1953 Oldsmo­bile and explain­ing that clas­sic car restora­tion has been a hob­by of his since high school.

    “I’m from rur­al Vir­ginia, and when I’m gov­er­nor, you won’t be for­got­ten,” Northam says in the 30-sec­ond spot.

    Last month at a Blacks­burg fundrais­er for Chris Hurst, a local tele­vi­sion anchor-turned-House of Del­e­gates can­di­date, Northam attacked the “clown show in Wash­ing­ton” and said Gille­spie need­ed to do more to con­demn Trump’s flir­ta­tion with white nation­al­ists in Char­lottesville before he laid out his plans for the state’s rur­al areas. He wants to expand a Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia branch in rur­al Wise Coun­ty, make com­mu­ni­ty col­lege free for stu­dents in high-demand fields who com­mit to a year of pub­lic ser­vice and con­tin­u­ing increas­ing voca­tion­al train­ing in high schools.

    But there was one hot-but­ton issue here Northam did­n’t men­tion: the con­struc­tion of two nat­ur­al gas pipelines, oppo­si­tion to which has unit­ed envi­ron­men­tal­ists and rur­al landown­ers.

    In the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry, for­mer Rep. Tom Per­riel­lo cam­paigned heav­i­ly against the pipelines, while Northam said a gov­er­nor would have lit­tle pow­er to stop their con­struc­tion and avoid­ed tak­ing a firm stance for or against.

    Asked whether Northam had missed an oppor­tu­ni­ty by not com­ing out against the pipelines, Clarke had a sim­ple response: “Yes.” He said vol­un­teers in Rock­bridge Coun­ty had asked for guid­ance from the Northam cam­paign on what to say if asked about the pipelines and had­n’t received a response. “That’s polit­i­cal malfea­sance,” Clarke said.

    Vee Frye, chair of the state par­ty’s rur­al cau­cus, down­played the pipeline issue.

    “Ralph did what he thought was right,” she said, not­ing Gillespie’s sup­port for both pipelines and Northam’s strong envi­ron­men­tal record. “I think it’s a non-issue, I real­ly do.”

    Northam’s cam­paign cau­tions that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, which has lost rur­al vot­ers over the course of decades, can’t expect to win them back in a sin­gle elec­tion cycle. They also expect Gille­spie to under­per­form in rur­al areas, many of which he lost in the GOP pri­ma­ry, and think attacks on the Repub­li­can’s record as a lob­by­ist will not inspire high turnout there.

    But Repub­li­cans, who hope Gille­spie’s empha­sis on bar­ring sanc­tu­ary cities and pro­tect­ing Con­fed­er­ate mon­u­ments can excite Repub­li­can vot­ers in rur­al areas where he strug­gled dur­ing the pri­ma­ry, slammed Northam for ignor­ing the less-pop­u­lat­ed parts of the state.

    “Ralph Northam has yet to offer any sub­stan­tive vision to address the chal­lenges fac­ing rur­al Vir­ginia,” Gille­spie spokesman David Abrams said, not­ing Northam missed meet­ings of a rur­al eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment pan­el. “Northam’s inat­ten­tion and bad poli­cies will make things worse in some of the most eco­nom­i­cal­ly chal­lenged areas of the com­mon­wealth.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Democ­rats still tox­ic in rur­al Amer­i­ca” By KEVIN ROBILLARD; Politi­co; 11/03/2017

    “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:

    ...
    But Repub­li­cans, who hope Gille­spie’s empha­sis on bar­ring sanc­tu­ary cities and pro­tect­ing Con­fed­er­ate mon­u­ments can excite Repub­li­can vot­ers in rur­al areas where he strug­gled dur­ing the pri­ma­ry, slammed Northam for ignor­ing the less-pop­u­lat­ed parts of the state.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Last month at a Blacks­burg fundrais­er for Chris Hurst, a local tele­vi­sion anchor-turned-House of Del­e­gates can­di­date, Northam attacked the “clown show in Wash­ing­ton” and said Gille­spie need­ed to do more to con­demn Trump’s flir­ta­tion with white nation­al­ists in Char­lottesville before he laid out his plans for the state’s rur­al areas. He wants to expand a Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia branch in rur­al Wise Coun­ty, make com­mu­ni­ty col­lege free for stu­dents in high-demand fields who com­mit to a year of pub­lic ser­vice and con­tin­u­ing increas­ing voca­tion­al train­ing in high schools.

    But there was one hot-but­ton issue here Northam did­n’t men­tion: the con­struc­tion of two nat­ur­al gas pipelines, oppo­si­tion to which has unit­ed envi­ron­men­tal­ists and rur­al landown­ers.

    In the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry, for­mer Rep. Tom Per­riel­lo cam­paigned heav­i­ly against the pipelines, while Northam said a gov­er­nor would have lit­tle pow­er to stop their con­struc­tion and avoid­ed tak­ing a firm stance for or against.

    Asked whether Northam had missed an oppor­tu­ni­ty by not com­ing out against the pipelines, Clarke had a sim­ple response: “Yes.” He said vol­un­teers in Rock­bridge Coun­ty had asked for guid­ance from the Northam cam­paign on what to say if asked about the pipelines and had­n’t received a response. “That’s polit­i­cal malfea­sance,” Clarke said.
    ...

    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:

    Bloomberg

    Trump Choos­es Big Meat Over Lit­tle Farm­ers
    Rur­al Amer­i­cans vot­ed for him, but he didn’t return the favor when it came to an Oba­ma rule meant to lev­el the play­ing field.

    By Deena Shanker
    Octo­ber 25, 2017, 3:00 AM CDT Octo­ber 25, 2017, 3:29 PM CDT

    After years of fight­ing for an Oba­ma-era rule that would help farm­ers sue the mam­moth com­pa­nies they work for, advo­ca­cy groups for America’s small poul­try, pork and beef grow­ers may have been dealt a final blow by the U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture.

    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.

    Under Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, that high bar would have been low­ered. Under the inter­im final rule, a show­ing of harm to only one farmer would suf­fice to sup­port a claim. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion last week threw out the Oba­ma-era rule in a move hailed by lob­by­ists for the big agri­cul­ture com­pa­nies.

    “I can’t tell you how dis­ap­point­ed I am,” said Mike Weaver, a West Vir­ginia poul­try farmer and pres­i­dent of the Orga­ni­za­tion for Com­pet­i­tive Mar­kets, who vot­ed for Don­ald Trump. “Rur­al Amer­i­ca came out and sup­port­ed the pres­i­dent, and if it weren’t for us, he wouldn’t be where he is now. What they did was wrong, and it shouldn’t have hap­pened that way.”

    Farmer groups—including the Nation­al Farm­ers Union, Rur­al Advance­ment Foun­da­tion Inter­na­tion­al-USA, Farm Aid, R‑CALF USA, the U.S. Cattlemen’s Asso­ci­a­tion, and the Orga­ni­za­tion for Com­pet­i­tive Markets—supported the Oba­ma-era rule. Many farm­ers and ranch­ers thought Trump would allow it to take effect, cit­ing his sup­port for small busi­ness and rur­al Amer­i­cans. Indus­try lob­by­ists, such as the Nation­al Cattlemen’s Beef Asso­ci­a­tion, the Nation­al Pork Pro­duc­ers Coun­cil and the North Amer­i­can Meat Insti­tute, hoped the Repub­li­can pres­i­dent would undo the rule, cit­ing fears over increased lit­i­ga­tion from farm­ers. They also thought they’d found a cham­pi­on for their cause in Trump, who had vowed to cut fed­er­al reg­u­la­tion.

    “When Trump was com­ing in with the mantra of reduced reg­u­la­tion,” said Jere­my Scott, a pro­tein research ana­lyst at Mizuho Secu­ri­ties USA LLC, “there was relief.” In the end it was indus­try, not farm­ers, that guessed cor­rect­ly. Nation­al Chick­en Coun­cil Pres­i­dent Mike Brown pub­licly praised the USDA deci­sion.

    Mean­while, farm­ers and ranch­ers are left with few options to chal­lenge huge com­pa­nies over alleged­ly anti-com­pet­i­tive behav­ior. “This gives the meat­pack­ing indus­try the abil­i­ty to do what­ev­er they wish, in terms of retal­i­a­tion against an indi­vid­ual,” said Jay Platt, a cow-calf ranch­er in Ari­zona, who also vot­ed for Trump. “It leaves the cat­tle pro­duc­er absolute­ly punch-less.”

    “These guide­lines would pro­tect farm­ers and ranch­ers against bad faith, retal­i­a­tion, denial of due process and fraud,” said J. Dud­ley But­ler, for­mer admin­is­tra­tor of the Grain Inspec­tion, Pack­ers and Stock­yards Admin­is­tra­tion under Oba­ma. “Farm­ers and ranch­ers are the back­bone of Amer­i­ca, and they paved the way for Trump to be pres­i­dent. They thought he was their pres­i­dent, but he and his min­ions have now sold these very farm­ers and ranch­ers down the riv­er.”

    In addi­tion to Democ­rats on Capi­tol Hill, at least one mem­ber of Trump’s own par­ty sees it that way, too. “They’re just pan­der­ing to big cor­po­ra­tions. They don’t care about fam­i­ly farms,” Sen­a­tor Chuck Grass­ley, an Iowa Repub­li­can, told reporters upon hear­ing the news of the USDA deci­sion. “This is an exam­ple of a swamp being refilled.”

    The Nation­al Pork Pro­duc­ers Coun­cil dis­agreed, say­ing in an emailed state­ment Wednes­day that the pro­posed rule would have “sti­fled com­pe­ti­tion and inno­va­tion and, ulti­mate­ly, raised meat and poul­try prices for con­sumers.” While the NPPC says farm­ers could still sue in state courts, alle­ga­tions gen­er­al­ly raised in such cas­es, includ­ing antitrust, are large­ly fed­er­al in nature.

    Although the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has faced lit­i­ga­tion oppos­ing oth­er attempts to undo Oba­ma-era reg­u­la­tions, law­suits are unlike­ly to suc­ceed in upend­ing this lat­est deci­sion. That’s because the USDA took pub­lic com­ment on the pos­si­bil­i­ty of with­draw­ing the rule, which itself was based on an inter­pre­ta­tion of exist­ing fed­er­al law, before doing so.

    ...

    For now, farmer groups are look­ing at oth­er avenues. Weaver has sent a let­ter ask­ing Trump to issue an exec­u­tive order revers­ing the USDA’s deci­sion. He still lays part of the blame, how­ev­er, with the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, whose rur­al agen­da was large­ly stymied by Con­gress.

    “Oba­ma had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do the right thing, and he didn’t,” said Weaver. “He made a lot of promis­es to the farm­ers about the things he was gonna do and nev­er fol­lowed through on them.”

    ———-

    “Trump Choos­es Big Meat Over Lit­tle Farm­ers” by Deena Shanker; Bloomberg; 10/25/2017

    “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:

    ...
    Under Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, that high bar would have been low­ered. Under the inter­im final rule, a show­ing of harm to only one farmer would suf­fice to sup­port a claim. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion last week threw out the Oba­ma-era rule in a move hailed by lob­by­ists for the big agri­cul­ture com­pa­nies.

    “I can’t tell you how dis­ap­point­ed I am,” said Mike Weaver, a West Vir­ginia poul­try farmer and pres­i­dent of the Orga­ni­za­tion for Com­pet­i­tive Mar­kets, who vot­ed for Don­ald Trump. “Rur­al Amer­i­ca came out and sup­port­ed the pres­i­dent, and if it weren’t for us, he wouldn’t be where he is now. What they did was wrong, and it shouldn’t have hap­pened that way.”
    ...

    Small farm­ers get screwed by the GOP. Again. Because that’s just what the GOP does. Under the guise of “reduc­ing reg­u­la­tion”:

    ...
    “When Trump was com­ing in with the mantra of reduced reg­u­la­tion,” said Jere­my Scott, a pro­tein research ana­lyst at Mizuho Secu­ri­ties USA LLC, “there was relief.” In the end it was indus­try, not farm­ers, that guessed cor­rect­ly. Nation­al Chick­en Coun­cil Pres­i­dent Mike Brown pub­licly praised the USDA deci­sion.

    Mean­while, farm­ers and ranch­ers are left with few options to chal­lenge huge com­pa­nies over alleged­ly anti-com­pet­i­tive behav­ior. “This gives the meat­pack­ing indus­try the abil­i­ty to do what­ev­er they wish, in terms of retal­i­a­tion against an indi­vid­ual,” said Jay Platt, a cow-calf ranch­er in Ari­zona, who also vot­ed for Trump. “It leaves the cat­tle pro­duc­er absolute­ly punch-less.”

    “These guide­lines would pro­tect farm­ers and ranch­ers against bad faith, retal­i­a­tion, denial of due process and fraud,” said J. Dud­ley But­ler, for­mer admin­is­tra­tor of the Grain Inspec­tion, Pack­ers and Stock­yards Admin­is­tra­tion under Oba­ma. “Farm­ers and ranch­ers are the back­bone of Amer­i­ca, and they paved the way for Trump to be pres­i­dent. They thought he was their pres­i­dent, but he and his min­ions have now sold these very farm­ers and ranch­ers down the riv­er.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    In addi­tion to Democ­rats on Capi­tol Hill, at least one mem­ber of Trump’s own par­ty sees it that way, too. “They’re just pan­der­ing to big cor­po­ra­tions. They don’t care about fam­i­ly farms,” Sen­a­tor Chuck Grass­ley, an Iowa Repub­li­can, told reporters upon hear­ing the news of the USDA deci­sion. “This is an exam­ple of a swamp being refilled.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 6, 2017, 12:12 am
  6. 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:

    Fox News Insid­er

    Judge Jea­nine: Antifa’s Vio­lence Is ‘Out­right Attempt at Anar­chy’

    As seen on Jus­tice With Judge Jea­nine
    Nov12,2017 9:13 am

    Judge Jea­nine Pir­ro said it is not only con­tro­ver­sial to be a Trump sup­port­er but can also be dan­ger­ous.

    Anti-Trump pro­test­ers across the coun­try have nor­mal­ized vio­lence against the right in an “out­right attempt at anar­chy,” the judge said on Sat­ur­day.

    “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.”

    Judge Jea­nine dis­agreed with those who said the shoot­er who shot up Repub­li­cans at a con­gres­sion­al base­ball prac­tice was just a crazy per­son. The gun­man was “focused, lucid, and clear” in his attempt to com­mit vio­lence against the right, the judge opined, point­ing out that he asked a con­gress­man before­hand whether it was Democ­rats or Repub­li­cans play­ing.

    Antifa is try­ing to “recast our legal sys­tem” with­out author­i­ty so that vio­lence is accept­able against those they dis­agree with polit­i­cal­ly, Pir­ro con­tin­ued.

    ...

    ———-

    “Judge Jea­nine: Antifa’s Vio­lence Is ‘Out­right Attempt at Anar­chy’ ” As seen on Jus­tice With Judge Jea­nine; Fox News Insid­er; 11/12/2017

    “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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 12, 2017, 11:36 pm
  7. 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:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    FCC plan would give Inter­net providers pow­er to choose the sites cus­tomers see and use

    By Bri­an Fung
    Novem­ber 21 at 12:32 PM

    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.

    The move sets the stage for a cru­cial vote next month at the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion that could reshape the entire dig­i­tal ecosys­tem. The FCC’s Repub­li­can chair­man, Ajit Pai, has made undo­ing the gov­ern­men­t’s net neu­tral­i­ty rules one of his top pri­or­i­ties, and Tues­day’s move hands a win to broad­band com­pa­nies such as AT&T, Ver­i­zon and Com­cast.

    Pai is tak­ing aim at reg­u­la­tions that were approved two years ago under a Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­cy and that sought to make sure all Inter­net con­tent, whether from big or small com­pa­nies, would be treat­ed equal­ly by Inter­net providers.

    The deci­sion will be put to a vote at the agen­cy’s Dec. 14 meet­ing in Wash­ing­ton. It is expect­ed to pass, with Repub­li­cans con­trol­ling three of the com­mis­sion’s five seats.

    In a release, Pai said his pro­pos­al would pre­vent the gov­ern­ment from “micro­manag­ing the Inter­net.” Under the new rules, he said, the FCC would “sim­ply require Inter­net ser­vice providers to be trans­par­ent about their prac­tices.”

    Today is a great day for con­sumers, inno­va­tion, & Inter­net free­dom. I look for­ward to cast­ing my vote in favor of restor­ing the 20-year, bipar­ti­san approach under which the free & open Inter­net flour­ished. My state­ment –>https://t.co/uAk8ltGB2u pic.twitter.com/KYXFD9LCga— Bren­dan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) Novem­ber 21, 2017

    The pro­pos­al would also shift some enforce­ment respon­si­bil­i­ty to the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion, which can sue com­pa­nies for vio­lat­ing the com­mit­ments or state­ments they have made to the pub­lic.

    Rely­ing more heav­i­ly on Inter­net providers’ own promis­es on net neu­tral­i­ty is a depar­ture from the cur­rent rules, which lay out clear, fed­er­al bans against selec­tive­ly block­ing or slow­ing web­sites, as well as speed­ing up web­sites that agree to pay the providers a fee.

    Inter­net providers wel­comed the FCC announce­ment. “We’re very encour­aged by Chair­man Pai’s announce­ment today that the FCC will move for­ward next month to restore the suc­cess­ful light-touch reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work for Inter­net ser­vices,” Ver­i­zon said in a state­ment.

    But the FCC pro­pos­al is large­ly opposed by Inter­net com­pa­nies such as Google, which said Tues­day that the rules help pro­tect an open Inter­net.

    ...

    For­mer Demo­c­ra­t­ic FCC chair­man Tom Wheel­er, who draft­ed the 2015 net neu­tral­i­ty rules and rammed them through in spite of Repub­li­can oppo­si­tion, called Tues­day’s move “trag­ic.”

    “The job of the FCC is to rep­re­sent the con­sumer,” he said in an inter­view. “Trag­i­cal­ly, this deci­sion is only for the ben­e­fit of the large­ly monop­oly ser­vices that deliv­er the Inter­net to the con­sumer.”

    ———-

    “FCC plan would give Inter­net providers pow­er to choose the sites cus­tomers see and use” by Bri­an Fung; The Washin­gont Post; 11/21/2017

    “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:

    ...
    In a release, Pai said his pro­pos­al would pre­vent the gov­ern­ment from “micro­manag­ing the Inter­net.” Under the new rules, he said, the FCC would “sim­ply require Inter­net ser­vice providers to be trans­par­ent about their prac­tices.”

    Today is a great day for con­sumers, inno­va­tion, & Inter­net free­dom. I look for­ward to cast­ing my vote in favor of restor­ing the 20-year, bipar­ti­san approach under which the free & open Inter­net flour­ished. My state­ment –>https://t.co/uAk8ltGB2u pic.twitter.com/KYXFD9LCga— Bren­dan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) Novem­ber 21, 2017

    The pro­pos­al would also shift some enforce­ment respon­si­bil­i­ty to the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion, which can sue com­pa­nies for vio­lat­ing the com­mit­ments or state­ments they have made to the pub­lic.

    Rely­ing more heav­i­ly on Inter­net providers’ own promis­es on net neu­tral­i­ty is a depar­ture from the cur­rent rules, which lay out clear, fed­er­al bans against selec­tive­ly block­ing or slow­ing web­sites, as well as speed­ing up web­sites that agree to pay the providers a fee.
    ...

    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:

    New York Mag­a­zine

    Will Trump’s Trolls Allow His FCC Pick to End the Open Inter­net?

    By Bri­an Feld­man
    Jan­u­ary 27, 2017 1:12 pm

    It seems unlike­ly that Pres­i­dent Trump’s inter­net base — the trolls and activists from 4chan, Red­dit, Twit­ter, and else­where, whose “meme mag­ic” (most­ly car­toon frogs in red hats) helped the pres­i­dent dom­i­nate social media dur­ing the elec­tion — would be able to find much com­mon ground with oppo­nents of the new admin­is­tra­tion. The online “Trump Train” has a vitu­per­a­tive hatred for the snowflakes and SJWs of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, and there are no issues on which the meme magi­cians wouldn’t fall into lock­step behind the man they call “god-emper­or.” Except, maybe, on one par­tic­u­lar issue that falls close to home — the inter­net itself.

    Last week, Don­ald Trump named the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions lawyer Ajit Pai to run the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion, the reg­u­la­to­ry body that over­sees tele­com com­pa­nies and com­mon car­ri­ers. Pai was the rank­ing Repub­li­can com­mis­sion­er under Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, so his rise is not par­tic­u­lar­ly shock­ing — but Pai has stat­ed many times over the years that he does not believe in the prin­ci­ple of net neu­tral­i­ty: the idea, essen­tial­ly, that all traf­fic on the inter­net must be treat­ed equal­ly. If net neu­tral­i­ty isn’t man­dat­ed, inter­net-ser­vice providers could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly deter­mine their cus­tomers’ abil­i­ty to access cer­tain web­sites or ser­vices — either by direct­ly pre­vent­ing access, or, more like­ly, by severe­ly lim­it­ing or throt­tling speeds.

    Net neu­tral­i­ty is baked into the free, open cul­ture of the inter­net, and it’s long been pop­u­lar a ral­ly­ing point both for the tech com­pa­nies, like Net­flix and Red­dit, that would have the most to lose with­out it, and for the many users that believe strong­ly in the prin­ci­ple of an open inter­net. Over the years, at moments when net neu­tral­i­ty has been threat­ened, hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple have been mobi­lized to pro­tect it, by lob­by­ing the FCC and elect­ed offi­cials. It’s the rare issue that heavy inter­net users on the left and right can agree on.

    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.

    Obama’s attack on the inter­net is anoth­er top down pow­er grab. Net neu­tral­i­ty is the Fair­ness Doc­trine. Will tar­get con­ser­v­a­tive media.— Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Novem­ber 12, 2014

    To find out more about how inter­net advo­cates on the right feel about Pai, I spoke to Utsav San­du­ja, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions offi­cer at Gab.ai, a Twitter/Reddit hybrid pre­ferred by mem­bers of the alt-right fol­low­ing Twitter’s post­elec­tion crack­down. San­du­ja was quick to assert that Gab’s 140,000 users fall across the polit­i­cal spec­trum, but he did tell me that “we have a very pro-free­dom stance” when it comes to indi­vid­ual inter­net users.

    Gab users are unit­ed behind “four crit­i­cal inter­net free­doms,” San­du­ja told me. “The free­dom to to access law­ful con­tent, the free­dom to use appli­ca­tions, the free­dom to attach per­son­al devices to the net­work, and the free­dom to obtain ser­vice-plan infor­ma­tion.” These are, word for word, the four so-called “inter­net free­doms” that for­mer FCC chair Michael Pow­ell out­lined in 2004, dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. (For what it’s worth, Pow­ell has char­ac­ter­ized the FCC’s 2015 net-neu­tral­i­ty mea­sures as too expan­sive.)

    ...

    Ear­li­er this month, Gab’s iOS app was reject­ed from the app store, after sit­ting in review for rough­ly a month. The future of the inter­net that net neu­tral­i­ty seeks to avoid is Apple’s walled gar­den on a larg­er scale: ISPs restrict­ing con­tent from users. If Trump-sup­port­ing Gab users believe that Apple is over­step­ping its bounds by mod­er­at­ing its app store too heav­i­ly, it’s not much of a leap to assume that they feel sim­i­lar­ly about inter­net-ser­vice providers. Both are large, monop­o­lis­tic plat­form hold­ers that could poten­tial­ly wield out­size pow­er regard­ing what trav­els over their net­work. If Trump’s sup­port­ers val­ue their per­son­al lib­er­ties, then it would ben­e­fit them to be in favor of net neu­tral­i­ty, and to oppose Ajit Pai — even if they are hes­i­tant to come out and actu­al­ly admit as much.

    Voat, the anti-polit­i­cal-cor­rect­ness Red­dit clone that popped up after Red­dit start­ed clean­ing house, has numer­ous threads about Pai’s appoint­ment. Most of them lie dor­mant, though occa­sion­al­ly users with names like Ghetto_Shitlord will show up to act as a voice of rea­son. A pro-Pai arti­cle sub­mit­ted to Voat yes­ter­day has two com­ments, one of which reads, “Uncon­vinc­ing BS. This guy uses legalese to coverup his sup­port for ISPs doing what­ev­er they want.”

    The clear silence sur­round­ing Pai on Voat con­trasts stark­ly with posts on net neu­tral­i­ty from a year and a half ago, when users were con­cerned about Con­gress and lob­by­ists launch­ing a sneak attack.

    Maybe the most sophis­ti­cat­ed and dis­sent­ing opin­ions on net neu­tral­i­ty can be found on r/The_Donald, the main sub­red­dit for dis­cus­sion of Don­ald Trump and his poli­cies, and where much of the “meme mag­ic” was gen­er­at­ed. For the most part, where an r/The_Donald mem­ber seems to fall on net neu­tral­i­ty has a lot to do with how well they under­stand the issue. To some, net neu­tral­i­ty rep­re­sents gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of the pri­vate sec­tor. That’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly incor­rect, but even under­stood as reg­u­la­tion, net neu­tral­i­ty has clear ben­e­fits for the end user. This can be dif­fi­cult to sort out and rec­on­cile.

    One r/The_Donald poster, DRRid­er, summed it up thus­ly:

    If we do not allow “net neu­tral­i­ty”, we give con­trol of the inter­net to the gate­keep­ing cor­po­ra­tions such as Time Warn­er, AT&T and Com­cast.

    If we allow “net neu­tral­i­ty”, we hand over con­trol of the inter­net to the gov­ern­ment.

    “Pick your poi­son,” they wrote. “Per­son­al­ly, I’d pre­fer the for­mer since it’s more decen­tral­ized.” Except that, in this case, “decen­tral­ized” ISPs are still high­ly cen­tral­ized geo­graph­i­cal­ly, and tend to hold near-monop­o­lies in the areas they serve. Expect­ing uncon­test­ed ISPs to start inno­vat­ing and improv­ing their prod­ucts, rather than hold­ing users hostage, would be to ignore the entire his­to­ry of com­mer­cial ISPs.

    But for the most part, r/The_Donald users do seem to have a decent grasp on the ques­tion of net neu­tral­i­ty, and do rec­og­nize its impor­tance. The hypo­thet­i­cal exam­ples are like a mir­ror image of the lib­er­al side of the inter­net. 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. And while unlike­ly, there is a nonze­ro pos­si­bil­i­ty of this hap­pen­ing if net neu­tral­i­ty is rolled back. That’s why pre­emp­tive net-neu­tral­i­ty reg­u­la­tions are impor­tant.

    Or, in the words of NimbleNavigator931, “Pri­va­cy and net neu­tral­i­ty is a pri­or­i­ty if we’re going to win the meme war in the long game.”

    ———-

    “Will Trump’s Trolls Allow His FCC Pick to End the Open Inter­net?” by Bri­an Feld­man; New York Mag­a­zine; 01/27/2017

    “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:

    ...
    Maybe the most sophis­ti­cat­ed and dis­sent­ing opin­ions on net neu­tral­i­ty can be found on r/The_Donald, the main sub­red­dit for dis­cus­sion of Don­ald Trump and his poli­cies, and where much of the “meme mag­ic” was gen­er­at­ed. For the most part, where an r/The_Donald mem­ber seems to fall on net neu­tral­i­ty has a lot to do with how well they under­stand the issue. To some, net neu­tral­i­ty rep­re­sents gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of the pri­vate sec­tor. That’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly incor­rect, but even under­stood as reg­u­la­tion, net neu­tral­i­ty has clear ben­e­fits for the end user. This can be dif­fi­cult to sort out and rec­on­cile.

    One r/The_Donald poster, DRRid­er, summed it up thus­ly:

    If we do not allow “net neu­tral­i­ty”, we give con­trol of the inter­net to the gate­keep­ing cor­po­ra­tions such as Time Warn­er, AT&T and Com­cast.

    If we allow “net neu­tral­i­ty”, we hand over con­trol of the inter­net to the gov­ern­ment.

    “Pick your poi­son,” they wrote. “Per­son­al­ly, I’d pre­fer the for­mer since it’s more decen­tral­ized.” Except that, in this case, “decen­tral­ized” ISPs are still high­ly cen­tral­ized geo­graph­i­cal­ly, and tend to hold near-monop­o­lies in the areas they serve. Expect­ing uncon­test­ed ISPs to start inno­vat­ing and improv­ing their prod­ucts, rather than hold­ing users hostage, would be to ignore the entire his­to­ry of com­mer­cial ISPs.

    But for the most part, r/The_Donald users do seem to have a decent grasp on the ques­tion of net neu­tral­i­ty, and do rec­og­nize its impor­tance. The hypo­thet­i­cal exam­ples are like a mir­ror image of the lib­er­al side of the inter­net. 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. And while unlike­ly, there is a nonze­ro pos­si­bil­i­ty of this hap­pen­ing if net neu­tral­i­ty is rolled back. That’s why pre­emp­tive net-neu­tral­i­ty reg­u­la­tions are impor­tant.

    Or, in the words of NimbleNavigator931, “Pri­va­cy and net neu­tral­i­ty is a pri­or­i­ty if we’re going to win the meme war in the long game.”

    “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 Dai­ly Beast

    Alt-Right Claims Net Neu­tral­i­ty Pro­motes ‘Satan­ic Porn’ in Plant­ed Fly­ers
    Jack Poso­biec has made a name for him­self by plant­i­ng a “Rape Mela­nia” sign at an anti-Trump protest and inter­rupt­ing a per­for­mance of Julius Cae­sar in Cen­tral Park last month.

    Ben Collins
    07.12.17 3:00 PM ET

    An alt-right troll and Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist was caught Wednes­day hand­ing out fly­ers thank­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors for “pro­tect­ing our qual­i­ty vio­lent porn con­tent,” includ­ing “rit­u­al Satan­ic porn videos.”

    Jack Poso­biec, who made nation­al head­lines last month for inter­rupt­ing a per­for­mance of Julius Cae­sar in Cen­tral Park because he believed the 418-year-old play had anti-Trump under­tones, dis­trib­uted the fly­ers at a Net Neu­tral­i­ty Day of Action demon­stra­tion out­side the U.S. Sen­ate, accord­ing to atten­dees.

    This isn’t the first time Poso­biec has been caught hand­ing out fake fliers: he plant­ed a sign read­ing “Rape Mela­nia” to frame anti-Trump pro­test­ers in Novem­ber. His involve­ment with the sign wasn’t revealed until Jan­u­ary.

    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.

    “We can con­firm that nei­ther this fly­er nor this cam­paign has any asso­ci­a­tion what­so­ev­er with the Women’s March,” said a spokesper­son for the Women’s March

    Trump admin­is­tra­tion-appoint­ed FCC Com­mis­sion­er Ajit Pai has recent­ly tak­en steps to roll back net neu­tral­i­ty pro­tec­tions, which would allow inter­net ser­vice providers like Ver­i­zon and Com­cast to arti­fi­cial­ly slow access to some web­sites in favor of their own.

    Bri­an Tash­man, a researcher at the ACLU who was work­ing at the ral­ly, first tracked down Poso­biec under a tree after see­ing sev­er­al pro­test­ers dis­card­ing his fly­ers imme­di­ate­ly after hand­ing them out.

    Haha @JackPosobiec blocked me after I exposed him for giv­ing out fly­ers to smear #Net­Neu­tral­i­ty sup­port­ers. pic.twitter.com/PPh5DElxIn— Bri­an Tash­man (@briantashman) July 12, 2017

    The same @JackPosobiec who plant­ed the “Rape Mela­nia” sign and dis­rupt­ed Julius Cae­sar today tried to smear #Net­Neu­tral­i­ty sup­port­ers. pic.twitter.com/um7mTPrzP1— Bri­an Tash­man (@briantashman) July 12, 2017

    “Some­one, a tall guy with sun­glass­es and jack­et, was pass­ing out fly­ers,” Tash­man told The Dai­ly Beast. “Then I saw him there under a tree and I took a pho­to of him. I thought, ‘This looks just like Jack Poso­biec.’”

    After Tash­man con­firmed with oth­ers that the per­son in his pho­to was the same man pass­ing out fly­ers, he saw Poso­biec trail­ing sen­a­tors as they left the Sen­ate.

    “He was fol­low­ing Sen­a­tors and ask­ing them, ‘Why do you sup­port this ral­ly of Satan­ic porn?’” he said. Poso­biec took a video of the encoun­ters for his Twit­ter page.

    Tash­man then tweet­ed the pic­ture of Poso­biec, along with the sen­tence “The same @JackPosobiec who plant­ed the ‘Rape Mela­nia’ sign and dis­rupt­ed Julius Cae­sar today tried to smear #Net­Neu­tral­i­ty sup­port­ers.” He was quick­ly blocked by Poso­biec.

    Poso­biec denied that he was try­ing to rep­re­sent Net Neu­tral­i­ty sup­port­ers to The Dai­ly Beast, say­ing “I nev­er once claimed any­one else made the fly­ers.”

    “No dirty tricks here,” said Poso­biec. “I in no way attempt­ed to say that these fly­ers were made by any­one but myself.”

    When asked what the head­ers from the activist groups and inter­net porn com­pa­nies were intend­ed to com­mu­ni­cate, Poso­biec said it was “tongue-in-cheek” and that he want­ed to “let the gath­ered media aware of the fact that Fight For The Future is stand­ing with Porn­Hub and Red Tube today.”

    “I also intend­ed to raise aware­ness about the exis­tence of this appalling mate­r­i­al on these web­sites, such as videos of US Bor­der Agents rap­ing ille­gal Mex­i­can immi­grant women. As well as Satan­ic porn and snuff videos,” he said.

    My only intent was to show peo­ple who Fight For the Future was stand­ing with — not attempt to say I was rep­re­sent­ing them

    Poso­biec came to promi­nence in part by ped­dling the Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, which false­ly claimed a child sex ring run by Hillary Clin­ton and her cam­paign man­ag­er was oper­at­ing in the base­ment of a piz­za shop that has no base­ment. Poso­biec and a friend video­taped them­selves inside the pizze­ria, where he video­taped a birth­day par­ty and was asked to leave.

    In May, Poso­biec received a one-day White House press cre­den­tial for The Rebel Media, a Cana­di­an far-right and pro-Trump out­let.

    ...

    ———-

    “Alt-Right Claims Net Neu­tral­i­ty Pro­motes ‘Satan­ic Porn’ in Plant­ed Fly­ers” by Ben Collins; The Dai­ly Beast; 07/12/2017

    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 denied that he was try­ing to rep­re­sent Net Neu­tral­i­ty sup­port­ers to The Dai­ly Beast, say­ing “I nev­er once claimed any­one else made the fly­ers.”

    “No dirty tricks here,” said Poso­biec. “I in no way attempt­ed to say that these fly­ers were made by any­one but myself.”

    When asked what the head­ers from the activist groups and inter­net porn com­pa­nies were intend­ed to com­mu­ni­cate, Poso­biec said it was “tongue-in-cheek” and that he want­ed to “let the gath­ered media aware of the fact that Fight For The Future is stand­ing with Porn­Hub and Red Tube today.”

    “I also intend­ed to raise aware­ness about the exis­tence of this appalling mate­r­i­al on these web­sites, such as videos of US Bor­der Agents rap­ing ille­gal Mex­i­can immi­grant women. As well as Satan­ic porn and snuff videos,” he said.

    My only intent was to show peo­ple who Fight For the Future was stand­ing with — not attempt to say I was rep­re­sent­ing them.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 21, 2017, 3:35 pm
  8. 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:

    Think Progress

    Text­book co-authored by Roy Moore in 2011 says women shouldn’t run for office
    The course is also crit­i­cal of the wom­en’s suf­frage move­ment.

    Addy Baird, Zack Ford, Jack Jenk­ins, Judd Legum
    Nov 29, 2017, 6:02 pm

    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.

    The course, called “Law and Gov­ern­ment: An Intro­duc­to­ry Study Course,” includes 28 hours of audio and visu­al lec­tures giv­en by Moore and oth­ers, as well as a study guide. The course is avail­able for pur­chase on Ama­zon, where “Chief Jus­tice Roy Moore” is list­ed as a co-author along­side Doug Phillips, Dr. Joseph C. More­craft, and Dr. Paul Jehle.

    On the back of the pack­ag­ing con­tain­ing all the study course mate­ri­als, Moore’s name and pho­to are list­ed under the words “Fea­tured Speak­ers.”

    The study guide also rec­om­mends Moore’s 2009 book “So Help Me God: The Ten Com­mand­ments, Judi­cial Tyran­ny, and the Bat­tle for Reli­gious Free­dom.”

    The cur­ricu­lum was a prod­uct of Vision Forum, a now-defunct Texas-based evan­gel­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion head­ed by Doug Phillips, which taught “Bib­li­cal patri­archy”, a the­ol­o­gy that pre­scribes strict, unequal gen­der roles for men and women. Accord­ing a state­ment on the Vision Forum’s web­site, “Egal­i­tar­i­an fem­i­nism is a false ide­ol­o­gy that has bred false doc­trine in the church and seduced many believ­ers.”

    For at least a decade, dat­ing back to 1999, Moore served on the “fac­ul­ty” of Vision Forum’s so-called “With­er­spoon School of Law and Pub­lic Pol­i­cy.” Not a school at all, With­er­spoon was instead a series of four-day crash cours­es that taught men — and only men — that the Bible is the source of “law and lib­er­ty and the only sure foun­da­tion for address­ing the chal­leng­ing eth­i­cal ques­tions of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry.”

    Prais­ing a “best of” album of the school’s lec­tures, Moore said, “I came to share what I have learned and instead received a bless­ing. All who attend the With­er­spoon School of Law and Pub­lic Pol­i­cy have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to share in the restora­tion of our Nation — One Nation Under God.”

    Moore’s lec­ture, which is includ­ed in the “Law and Gov­ern­ment” cur­ricu­lum, was record­ed in 2008 at one such “school”, and host­ed and facil­i­tat­ed by Phillips him­self. In the speech, Moore recounts his fight over the Ten Com­mand­ments mon­u­ment and bemoans the arrival of mar­riage equal­i­ty, which the Cal­i­for­nia Supreme Court had approved two weeks pri­or.

    He also open­ly prais­es both Phillips and Vision Forum, say­ing, “As I think about what’s going on here at Vision Forum and what Doug’s doing and has done, I’m a lit­tle envi­ous because I admire Doug and the fact he can round up these young men that are going to make a dif­fer­ence in our nation.”

    Vision Forum closed in 2013 after Phillips resigned, hav­ing admit­ted to a “lengthy” and “inap­pro­pri­ate­ly roman­tic and affec­tion­ate” rela­tion­ship with a woman who was not his wife. Short­ly there­after, that woman, Lour­des Tor­res-Man­teufel, sued Phillips and Vision Forum, detail­ing an emo­tion­al­ly, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly, and sex­u­al­ly abu­sive rela­tion­ship that start­ed when she was just 15 years old.

    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. (Moore has claimed that the alle­ga­tions against him are “absolute­ly false.”) Moore’s attor­ney has stat­ed that, “whether they were 25, 35, or whether he doesn’t know their age”, Moore would always make sure to ask a girl’s par­ents for per­mis­sion to date them before begin­ning any courtship.

    That tra­di­tion is con­sis­tent with the “Bib­li­cal patri­archy” tenets out­lined by Vision Forum.

    “Since daugh­ters are ‘giv­en in mar­riage’ by their fathers, an obe­di­ent daugh­ter will desire her father to guide the process of find­ing a hus­band, although the final approval of a hus­band belongs to her,” the tenets state.

    One lec­ture in the Vision Forum study course on which Moore worked is giv­en by William O. Ein­wechter, a teach­ing elder at Immanuel Free Reformed Church. The lec­ture is titled “What the Bible Says About Female Mag­is­trates.” The les­son argues that the Bible for­bids women from hold­ing elect­ed office.

    An uniden­ti­fied man intro­duces Einwechter’s les­son and crit­i­cizes the women’s suf­frage move­ment.

    “By and large, the issue of the female mag­is­trate rul­ing in author­i­ty in Amer­i­ca would not have been any­where near as con­tro­ver­sial,” the man says. “The con­tro­ver­sy was begin­ning to brew with the women’s suf­frage move­ment.”

    The man ref­er­ences the Bib­li­cal pas­sage Isa­iah 3 as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for this claim. How­ev­er, his argu­ment — that it equates to a blan­ket pro­hi­bi­tion of women in lead­er­ship posi­tions — is not wide­ly held among Chris­tians.

    Many, includ­ing acclaimed 17th cen­tu­ry Bible com­men­tar­i­an Matthew Hen­ry, instead inter­pret the pas­sage as metaphor­i­cal. Oth­ers note ear­li­er trans­la­tions of the pas­sage (in the Greek Sep­tu­agint) do not even include the word “women,” but instead “cred­i­tors” — a word with iden­ti­cal con­so­nants in Hebrew, but dif­fer­ent vow­el points — which also fits with the over­all con­text of the pas­sage.

    To this day, some trans­la­tions of the Bible, such as the Com­mon Eng­lish Bible, New Eng­lish Trans­la­tion, and the Good News Trans­la­tion, still use “swindlers” or “cred­i­tors” instead of “women.”

    Regard­less, when Ein­wechter begins his lec­ture, he asks, “Why even con­sid­er a ques­tion like this?” The answer, he says, is because of the “heresy of fem­i­nism.”

    “One of the most destruc­tive ide­olo­gies of the last 50, hun­dred years have been the doc­trines of fem­i­nism, which have trans­formed our cul­ture and have paved the way for abor­tion on demand, the homo­sex­u­al agen­da, under­mined our church, and sub­vert­ed the doc­trines of the bib­li­cal fam­i­ly,” Ein­wechter says.

    He goes on to call fem­i­nism a “rad­i­cal agen­da” and says “noth­ing enrages fem­i­nists more than the Bib­li­cal doc­trine of male head­ship.”

    “Fem­i­nism and those who have been influ­enced by it advo­cate instead for what we’re going to call an egal­i­tar­i­an approach,” Ein­wechter says, “where men and women are tout­ed as being equal in all respects, except maybe the most obvi­ous phys­i­cal dif­fer­ences, and that they’re equal­ly fit to serve in any occu­pa­tion or serve in any office or posi­tion of lead­er­ship in any sphere of life.”

    The les­son uses what Ein­wechter argues are Bib­li­cal truths about the roles and design of men and women, argu­ing that hus­band, chil­dren, and home “sum­ma­rize God’s def­i­n­i­tion of the woman.”

    “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,” Ein­wechter says. “Noth­ing is said in scrip­ture that sup­ports the notion that she is qual­i­fied or called to be a civ­il mag­is­trate.”

    This, Ein­wechter says, is proof that women should not work out­side the home, run for office, or take on any role that gives women “dom­i­nance” over men, call­ing women “the weak­er ves­sel.” Women, the les­son teach­es, are only fit to be home­mak­ers and should ded­i­cate their lives to their hus­bands and chil­dren, nev­er to work or out­side pur­suits.

    “Some­times we may have a hard time dis­cern­ing the faith, the char­ac­ter, and the views of a par­tic­u­lar can­di­date. But we can usu­al­ly dis­cern if the can­di­date is a man or a woman. And so there is no excuse on that one,” Ein­wechter says as he con­cludes the lec­ture. “In con­clu­sion, we’ve argued that scrip­ture teach­es us that it is not God’s revealed will for a woman to serve as a civ­il mag­is­trate and thus to rule over men in the civ­il sphere.”

    Ein­wechter says this is proof that, if Chris­tians aim to fol­low the teach­ings of the Bible, they must nev­er vote for women run­ning for office, no mat­ter their pol­i­tics.

    His lec­ture, Ein­wechter says, is an “objec­tive study.” In clos­ing, he quotes pas­tor J. H. Vin­cent, say­ing, “The world is in such press­ing need for moth­ers — moth­er­ly women — that none can be spared for pub­lic life.”

    The teach­ing stands in stark con­trast to var­i­ous Chris­t­ian groups that hold sharply diver­gent views. Entire denom­i­na­tions, such as the Unit­ed Methodist Church, Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church in Amer­i­ca, Pres­by­ter­ian Church U.S.A., and the Epis­co­pal Church, ordain women and do not object to female polit­i­cal lead­er­ship, as do oth­ers. Many evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians hold sim­i­lar views: the Repub­li­can Par­ty includes pas­sion­ate female evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers such as Michele Bach­mann and Sarah Palin, and one of Don­ald Trump’s clos­est spir­i­tu­al advis­ers is Paula White, a female pros­per­i­ty gospel preach­er.

    ThinkProgress could not find any record of Moore endors­ing any women for office. The only can­di­date Moore appears to have effec­tive­ly endorsed is Michael Per­out­ka, the Con­sti­tu­tion par­ty can­di­date for pres­i­dent in 2004, accord­ing a Mont­gomery Adver­tis­er arti­cle from July 2004. Notably, the Con­sti­tu­tion par­ty was found­ed by Howard Phillips, Vision Forum head Doug Phillips’ father.

    ...

    ———-

    “Text­book co-authored by Roy Moore in 2011 says women shouldn’t run for office” by Addy Baird, Zack Ford, Jack Jenk­ins, Judd Legum; Think Progress; 11/29/2017

    “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 cur­ricu­lum was a prod­uct of Vision Forum, a now-defunct Texas-based evan­gel­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion head­ed by Doug Phillips, which taught “Bib­li­cal patri­archy”, a the­ol­o­gy that pre­scribes strict, unequal gen­der roles for men and women. Accord­ing a state­ment on the Vision Forum’s web­site, “Egal­i­tar­i­an fem­i­nism is a false ide­ol­o­gy that has bred false doc­trine in the church and seduced many believ­ers.”

    ...

    Vision Forum closed in 2013 after Phillips resigned, hav­ing admit­ted to a “lengthy” and “inap­pro­pri­ate­ly roman­tic and affec­tion­ate” rela­tion­ship with a woman who was not his wife. Short­ly there­after, that woman, Lour­des Tor­res-Man­teufel, sued Phillips and Vision Forum, detail­ing an emo­tion­al­ly, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly, and sex­u­al­ly abu­sive rela­tion­ship that start­ed when she was just 15 years old.

    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. (Moore has claimed that the alle­ga­tions against him are “absolute­ly false.”) Moore’s attor­ney has stat­ed that, “whether they were 25, 35, or whether he doesn’t know their age”, Moore would always make sure to ask a girl’s par­ents for per­mis­sion to date them before begin­ning any courtship.

    That tra­di­tion is con­sis­tent with the “Bib­li­cal patri­archy” tenets out­lined by Vision Forum.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    One lec­ture in the Vision Forum study course on which Moore worked is giv­en by William O. Ein­wechter, a teach­ing elder at Immanuel Free Reformed Church. The lec­ture is titled “What the Bible Says About Female Mag­is­trates.” The les­son argues that the Bible for­bids women from hold­ing elect­ed office.

    An uniden­ti­fied man intro­duces Einwechter’s les­son and crit­i­cizes the women’s suf­frage move­ment.

    “By and large, the issue of the female mag­is­trate rul­ing in author­i­ty in Amer­i­ca would not have been any­where near as con­tro­ver­sial,” the man says. “The con­tro­ver­sy was begin­ning to brew with the women’s suf­frage move­ment.”

    The man ref­er­ences the Bib­li­cal pas­sage Isa­iah 3 as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for this claim. How­ev­er, his argu­ment — that it equates to a blan­ket pro­hi­bi­tion of women in lead­er­ship posi­tions — is not wide­ly held among Chris­tians.
    ...

    And, of course, this is all infused with a deep and seething hatred of “fem­i­nism” and egal­i­tar­i­an­ism between the sex­es in gen­er­al:

    ...
    “One of the most destruc­tive ide­olo­gies of the last 50, hun­dred years have been the doc­trines of fem­i­nism, which have trans­formed our cul­ture and have paved the way for abor­tion on demand, the homo­sex­u­al agen­da, under­mined our church, and sub­vert­ed the doc­trines of the bib­li­cal fam­i­ly,” Ein­wechter says.

    He goes on to call fem­i­nism a “rad­i­cal agen­da” and says “noth­ing enrages fem­i­nists more than the Bib­li­cal doc­trine of male head­ship.”

    “Fem­i­nism and those who have been influ­enced by it advo­cate instead for what we’re going to call an egal­i­tar­i­an approach,” Ein­wechter says, “where men and women are tout­ed as being equal in all respects, except maybe the most obvi­ous phys­i­cal dif­fer­ences, and that they’re equal­ly fit to serve in any occu­pa­tion or serve in any office or posi­tion of lead­er­ship in any sphere of life.”

    The les­son uses what Ein­wechter argues are Bib­li­cal truths about the roles and design of men and women, argu­ing that hus­band, chil­dren, and home “sum­ma­rize God’s def­i­n­i­tion of the woman.”

    “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,” Ein­wechter says. “Noth­ing is said in scrip­ture that sup­ports the notion that she is qual­i­fied or called to be a civ­il mag­is­trate.”
    ...

    “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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 6, 2017, 3:28 pm
  9. 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:

    Vox

    Roy Moore: Amer­i­ca “was great at the time when fam­i­lies were unit­ed — even though we had slav­ery”
    He real­ly said this.
    By Ger­man Lopez
    Updat­ed at Dec 8, 2017, 8:35pm ES

    Alabama’s Repub­li­can can­di­date for Sen­ate, Roy Moore, says Amer­i­ca needs to be a bit more like it was when it had slaves.

    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.”

    Moore lat­er added, “The great­ness I see was in our cul­ture, not in all our poli­cies. There were prob­lems. We had slav­ery; we’ve over­come slav­ery. We’ve had prej­u­dice; we still have prej­u­dice. But we’ve turned the tide on civ­il rights. And we’ve done a lot of things to bring this coun­try around, and I think we can still make it bet­ter.”

    The first part of the quote comes from a Los Ange­les Times report pub­lished in Sep­tem­ber, but it was recent­ly resur­faced by a viral tweet from for­mer Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial Eric Colum­bus. The Times lat­er pub­lished the full audio.

    There are so many prob­lems with this remark that it’s hard to know where to start.

    For one, which fam­i­lies, exact­ly, were “unit­ed” and “strong,” as Moore claims? Black fam­i­lies were reg­u­lar­ly torn apart — and tor­tured — by slave mas­ters at the time. Slaves often couldn’t even mar­ry, because their mar­riages were legal­ly con­sid­ered void.

    Moore’s com­ments also lay bare what “make Amer­i­ca great again” real­ly means. Pro­gres­sives have long asked when, exact­ly, Amer­i­ca was so much bet­ter than it is today.

    When black peo­ple were slaves? When the coun­try com­mit­ted geno­cide and eth­nic cleans­ing against Native Amer­i­cans? Was it when the coun­try looked the oth­er way as white suprema­cists lynched thou­sands of black peo­ple? When women and black peo­ple were denied the right to vote? When black peo­ple were legal­ly barred from white-only schools and restau­rants?

    Was it when women were thwart­ed from hav­ing mean­ing­ful careers? When same-sex cou­ples couldn’t get mar­ried, or even go out into pub­lic hold­ing hands with­out fear­ing for their safe­ty?

    The list could real­ly go on. (And some of these still apply today.)

    These were all hor­ri­ble peri­ods for many Amer­i­cans. The rhetoric of “make Amer­i­ca great again” sug­gests that those Amer­i­cans — black, Native Amer­i­can, LGBTQ, women, and so on — just don’t mat­ter, or at least that their plights could be over­looked for what­ev­er ben­e­fits the coun­try was sup­pos­ed­ly pro­duc­ing — for white men — back then.

    Moore essen­tial­ly said that it’s pos­si­ble to over­look America’s orig­i­nal sin. The time of slav­ery was the time of, in his view, great things — at least in America’s cul­ture, even though that cul­ture includ­ed slav­ery — and that’s appar­ent­ly what the coun­try should aspire to.

    I asked Han­nah Ford, deputy cam­paign man­ag­er for Moore, if he real­ly thinks that the last time Amer­i­ca was great was when it still had slav­ery. She respond­ed, “To sug­gest such is reck­less­ly mali­cious. Judge Moore clear­ly made his point: Amer­i­ca is great when our fam­i­lies are unit­ed, as in the hus­band and wife com­mit­ted to each oth­er and rais­ing their chil­dren to be good cit­i­zens.” She did not respond to a fol­low-up ques­tion about why, then, Moore brought up slav­ery at all.

    ...

    ———-

    “Roy Moore: Amer­i­ca “was great at the time when fam­i­lies were unit­ed — even though we had slav­ery”” by Ger­man Lopez; Vox; 12/08/2017

    “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:

    ...
    Moore lat­er added, “The great­ness I see was in our cul­ture, not in all our poli­cies. There were prob­lems. We had slav­ery; we’ve over­come slav­ery. We’ve had prej­u­dice; we still have prej­u­dice. But we’ve turned the tide on civ­il rights. And we’ve done a lot of things to bring this coun­try around, and I think we can still make it bet­ter.”
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    There are so many prob­lems with this remark that it’s hard to know where to start.

    For one, which fam­i­lies, exact­ly, were “unit­ed” and “strong,” as Moore claims? Black fam­i­lies were reg­u­lar­ly torn apart — and tor­tured — by slave mas­ters at the time. Slaves often couldn’t even mar­ry, because their mar­riages were legal­ly con­sid­ered void.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Moore’s com­ments also lay bare what “make Amer­i­ca great again” real­ly means. Pro­gres­sives have long asked when, exact­ly, Amer­i­ca was so much bet­ter than it is today.

    When black peo­ple were slaves? When the coun­try com­mit­ted geno­cide and eth­nic cleans­ing against Native Amer­i­cans? Was it when the coun­try looked the oth­er way as white suprema­cists lynched thou­sands of black peo­ple? When women and black peo­ple were denied the right to vote? When black peo­ple were legal­ly barred from white-only schools and restau­rants?

    Was it when women were thwart­ed from hav­ing mean­ing­ful careers? When same-sex cou­ples couldn’t get mar­ried, or even go out into pub­lic hold­ing hands with­out fear­ing for their safe­ty?

    The list could real­ly go on. (And some of these still apply today.)
    ...

    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 Los Ange­les Times

    Anne Arun­del Democ­rats call on Michael Per­out­ka to resign

    By Chase Cook

    Decem­ber 8, 2017, 12:30 PM

    The Anne Arun­del Coun­ty Demo­c­ra­t­ic Cen­tral Com­mit­tee is call­ing on Coun­ty Coun­cil Chair­man Michael Per­out­ka to resign.

    In a state­ment sent Fri­day to The Cap­i­tal, com­mit­tee Chair­woman Chris­tine Dav­en­port called on the Millersville Repub­li­can to relin­quish his posi­tion as coun­cil chair­man and resign from the coun­cil. The com­mit­tee, which serves as the par­ty orga­ni­za­tion in the coun­ty, also called on Repub­li­can mem­bers of the coun­cil to hold a new vote on the chair­man­ship.

    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.

    Per­out­ka has been a long­time friend and sup­port­er of Moore since his days as a judge.

    Moore has called the alle­ga­tions “fake news” and a smear cam­paign. The Wash­ing­ton Post ini­tial­ly report­ed the sto­ry.

    “Per­out­ka has donat­ed thou­sands to Moore’s cam­paign, has trav­eled to Alaba­ma to cam­paign on his behalf, and even stood on stage with Moore to cel­e­brate his pri­ma­ry elec­tion vic­to­ry, last month,” Dav­en­port wrote in her state­ment. “In our view, this con­duct is a dis­grace and a stain upon our coun­ty.”

    ...

    But the first-term coun­cil­man has bro­ken his silence on the WNAV pro­gram “Your Coun­ty Mat­ters.” Each Mon­day and Thurs­day Per­out­ka pro­vides brief — about a minute and a half — record­ed thoughts about coun­ty issues.

    Per­out­ka said in his 15 years of friend­ship with Moore, he hasn’t heard him or seen him do any­thing “con­sis­tent with the accu­sa­tions that have been report­ed.”

    The coun­cil chair­man cau­tioned coun­ty res­i­dents not to relin­quish due process when exam­in­ing the accu­sa­tions against Moore.

    “This is my wit­ness, and it gives me no rea­son to with­draw my sup­port or my friend­ship from him,” Per­out­ka said in the radio show.

    Per­out­ka was elect­ed as the coun­cil chair­man at Monday’s meet­ing. The deci­sion was made along par­ty lines in a 4–3 vote.

    This isn’t the first time Per­out­ka has been asked to resign. Most recent­ly coun­ty res­i­dents asked him to step down because of his League of the South ties and racist com­ments made by the league’s pres­i­dent and co-founder, Michael Hill. Per­out­ka said he wouldn’t resign and has denounced Hill’s com­ments.

    The com­mit­tee didn’t save its ire just for Per­out­ka.

    They also called on Coun­ty Exec­u­tive Steve Schuh and oth­er Repub­li­can offi­cials to denounce Per­out­ka and call for his res­ig­na­tion as well.

    Schuh sup­port­ed Moore with a $1,000 dona­tion after attend­ing a Sep­tem­ber fundrais­er in Sev­er­na Park. Schuh asked for that mon­ey back Mon­day, the same day a pro­gres­sive media out­let wrote about the dona­tion.

    The coun­ty exec­u­tive said the sto­ry about the dona­tion was not linked to his refund request. He called Moore a “creep­er” and said the dona­tion was made before know­ing about the alle­ga­tions. He called the alle­ga­tions cred­i­ble.

    Schuh, who has endorsed Peroutka’s 2018 re-elec­tion cam­paign, could not be reached for com­ment.

    ———-

    “Anne Arun­del Democ­rats call on Michael Per­out­ka to resign” by Chase Cook; The Los Ange­les Times; 12/08/2017.

    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.

    ...
    Per­out­ka was elect­ed as the coun­cil chair­man at Monday’s meet­ing. The deci­sion was made along par­ty lines in a 4–3 vote.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    This isn’t the first time Per­out­ka has been asked to resign. Most recent­ly coun­ty res­i­dents asked him to step down because of his League of the South ties and racist com­ments made by the league’s pres­i­dent and co-founder, Michael Hill. Per­out­ka said he wouldn’t resign and has denounced Hill’s com­ments.
    ...

    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:

    South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter
    Hate­watch

    For­mer LOS Mem­ber Per­out­ka Denounces Pres­i­dent Michael Hill

    by Hate­watch Staff
    June 21, 2017

    Speak­ing at a recent ses­sion of Maryland’s Anne Arun­del Coun­ty Coun­cil, for­mer League of the South (LOS) mem­ber Coun­cil­man Michael Per­out­ka denounced state­ments made by the pres­i­dent of the Neo-Con­fed­er­ate LOS, Michael Hill.

    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.”

    While Hate­watch and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions long warned of the dan­ger­ous impli­ca­tions of Hill’s rhetoric and the League’s bent toward mil­i­tan­cy, in 2014 Per­out­ka respond­ed to alarm over his affil­i­a­tion with the League by stat­ing that “he had dropped his asso­ci­a­tion with the League of the South over the sum­mer, although he was vague about his rea­sons and said he ‘didn’t have any prob­lem with the orga­ni­za­tion.’”

    Whether or not Peroutka’s denun­ci­a­tion was sin­cere, his tim­ing in seek­ing office was, to say the least, prov­i­den­tial. Short­ly after Per­out­ka dis­tanced him­self from LOS while cam­paign­ing for office, Hill’s writ­ing and speech­es took an alarm­ing turn toward unprece­dent­ed mil­i­tan­cy, racism and anti-Semi­tism.

    Peroutka’s rebuff comes just as the League is prepar­ing for its annu­al con­fer­ence this week­end in Wetump­ka, Alaba­ma. The con­fer­ence, which Per­out­ka sang “Dix­ie” at in 2012, gen­er­al­ly con­sists of mem­bers sit­ting through hours of speech­es from LOS high­er-ups before lin­ing the inter­sec­tion of US High­ways 231 and 14 for a protest. This year, the pub­lished sched­ule indi­cates the con­fer­ence will be titled “Redeem­ing the Time: Prepar­ing for the Inevitable Con­flict” and con­tains no men­tion of a protest, but rather indi­cates that Hill has final­ly giv­en up on hid­ing his rabid desire for a vio­lent race war.

    David Duke, the noto­ri­ous ex-Klans­men whose asso­ci­a­tion was long seen as the kiss of death for far right groups seek­ing main­stream cred­i­bil­i­ty, is slat­ed as keynote speak­er. Duke’s atten­dance comes along with speech­es from long time LOS affil­i­ates such as John Weaver, who will speak on “Gun Safe­ty and Self Defense.” Weaver has offered gun train­ing to the League and oth­er far-right groups and has preached on slav­ery as a bib­li­cal­ly ordained insti­tu­tion.

    Duke’s appear­ance comes on the back of League involve­ment in a series of high-pub­lic­i­ty events with oth­er far-right groups in Pikeville, Ken­tucky, New Orleans, Lou­siana Auburn, Alaba­ma, Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, and Gainesville, Flori­da.

    Hill has boast­ed that the League has attend­ed these events under the guise of its “South­ern Defense Force,” a para­mil­i­tary wing of the LOS estab­lished this year to put com­bat the ‘left­ist men­ace to our his­toric Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion.

    Hill recent­ly signed the League onto a far-right alliance known as the “Nation­al­ist Front,” com­posed of var­i­ous Amer­i­can and Euro­pean far-right groups such as the Swedish Sveriges Nationel­la För­bund, Nation­al Social­ist Move­ment (NSM), Texas Rebel Knights, Racial Nation­al­ist Par­ty of Amer­i­ca, SS Action Group, Pacif­ic Coast Knights of the KKK, Scot­tish Nation­al Social­ist Par­ty, White Nation­al­ist Front (Cana­da), the Tra­di­tion­al­ist Work­ers Par­ty (TWP), White Lives Mat­ter, Blood & Hon­our Social Club, and Amer­i­can Van­guard.

    While the League for­mer­ly eschewed any rela­tion­ship with Klans­men such as Duke, his pres­ence at the League’s con­fer­ence, the League’s entry into the NF, as well as rumors that Hill is now admit­ting Klans­men into LOS as dual-mem­bers, show that Hill’s past state­ments were either disin­gen­u­ous, hyp­o­crit­i­cal, or down­right lies.

    ...

    ———-

    “For­mer LOS Mem­ber Per­out­ka Denounces Pres­i­dent Michael Hill” by Hate­watch Staff; South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter Hate­watch; 06/27/2017

    “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:

    ...
    While Hate­watch and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions long warned of the dan­ger­ous impli­ca­tions of Hill’s rhetoric and the League’s bent toward mil­i­tan­cy, in 2014 Per­out­ka respond­ed to alarm over his affil­i­a­tion with the League by stat­ing that “he had dropped his asso­ci­a­tion with the League of the South over the sum­mer, although he was vague about his rea­sons and said he ‘didn’t have any prob­lem with the orga­ni­za­tion.’”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Whether or not Peroutka’s denun­ci­a­tion was sin­cere, his tim­ing in seek­ing office was, to say the least, prov­i­den­tial. Short­ly after Per­out­ka dis­tanced him­self from LOS while cam­paign­ing for office, Hill’s writ­ing and speech­es took an alarm­ing turn toward unprece­dent­ed mil­i­tan­cy, racism and anti-Semi­tism.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Peroutka’s rebuff comes just as the League is prepar­ing for its annu­al con­fer­ence this week­end in Wetump­ka, Alaba­ma. The con­fer­ence, which Per­out­ka sang “Dix­ie” at in 2012, gen­er­al­ly con­sists of mem­bers sit­ting through hours of speech­es from LOS high­er-ups before lin­ing the inter­sec­tion of US High­ways 231 and 14 for a protest. This year, the pub­lished sched­ule indi­cates the con­fer­ence will be titled “Redeem­ing the Time: Prepar­ing for the Inevitable Con­flict” and con­tains no men­tion of a protest, but rather indi­cates that Hill has final­ly giv­en up on hid­ing his rabid desire for a vio­lent race war.

    David Duke, the noto­ri­ous ex-Klans­men whose asso­ci­a­tion was long seen as the kiss of death for far right groups seek­ing main­stream cred­i­bil­i­ty, is slat­ed as keynote speak­er. Duke’s atten­dance comes along with speech­es from long time LOS affil­i­ates such as John Weaver, who will speak on “Gun Safe­ty and Self Defense.” Weaver has offered gun train­ing to the League and oth­er far-right groups and has preached on slav­ery as a bib­li­cal­ly ordained insti­tu­tion.

    Duke’s appear­ance comes on the back of League involve­ment in a series of high-pub­lic­i­ty events with oth­er far-right groups in Pikeville, Ken­tucky, New Orleans, Lou­siana Auburn, Alaba­ma, Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, and Gainesville, Flori­da.

    Hill has boast­ed that the League has attend­ed these events under the guise of its “South­ern Defense Force,” a para­mil­i­tary wing of the LOS estab­lished this year to put com­bat the ‘left­ist men­ace to our his­toric Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion.

    Hill recent­ly signed the League onto a far-right alliance known as the “Nation­al­ist Front,” com­posed of var­i­ous Amer­i­can and Euro­pean far-right groups such as the Swedish Sveriges Nationel­la För­bund, Nation­al Social­ist Move­ment (NSM), Texas Rebel Knights, Racial Nation­al­ist Par­ty of Amer­i­ca, SS Action Group, Pacif­ic Coast Knights of the KKK, Scot­tish Nation­al Social­ist Par­ty, White Nation­al­ist Front (Cana­da), the Tra­di­tion­al­ist Work­ers Par­ty (TWP), White Lives Mat­ter, Blood & Hon­our Social Club, and Amer­i­can Van­guard.
    ...

    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

    South Pover­ty Law Cen­ter
    Extrem­ist Files

    Michael Hill

    Michael Hill rep­re­sents the intel­lec­tu­al but racist fac­tion of the neo-Con­fed­er­ate move­ment and is its most impor­tant pro­po­nent.

    Extrem­ist Info
    Born: 1951
    Group: League of the South
    Loca­tion: Killen, AL
    Ide­ol­o­gy: Neo-Con­fed­er­ate

    About Michael Hill

    Iron­i­cal­ly, Hill was a pro­fes­sor for years at a his­tor­i­cal­ly black col­lege before estab­lish­ing the League of the South in 1994 as an insti­tu­tion devot­ed to reviv­ing South­ern her­itage and, even­tu­al­ly, push­ing for seces­sion. As Hill spurred the group to become increas­ing­ly racist and mil­i­tant in the late 1990s, most of the oth­er aca­d­e­mics who joined in 1994 fled as racial extrem­ists took their place in a much-dimin­ished insti­tu­tion. Dur­ing the first decade of the 21stcentury, the group grew increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal, talk­ing about a com­ing “race war,” form­ing a para­mil­i­tary unit, and talk­ing increas­ing­ly of weapons.

    In His Own Words

    “The destruc­tion of states rights in the South was the first neces­si­ty lead­ing to forced poli­cies under­min­ing the cul­tur­al dom­i­nance of the Anglo-Celtic peo­ple and its insti­tu­tions. [Arch-seg­re­ga­tion­ist Alaba­ma Gov. George] Wal­lace right­ly iden­ti­fied the ene­my and fought it until the attempt on his life in 1972.
    South­ern Patri­ot, 1998.

    “[T]he evil genie of uni­ver­sal ‘human rights,’ once loosed from its bot­tle, can nev­er be restrained because rights for women, racial and eth­nic minori­ties, homo­sex­u­als, pedophiles, etc., can be man­u­fac­tured eas­i­ly.”
    Essay post­ed to Dixienet.org, 1999

    “In part, [the Sept. 11, 2001, ter­ror­ist attacks] spring from an ‘open bor­ders’ pol­i­cy that has for the past four decades encour­aged mas­sive Third World immi­gra­tion and thus cul­tur­al desta­bi­liza­tion. Hence, these acts of vio­lence were also the nat­ur­al fruits of a regime com­mit­ted to mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and diver­si­ty, hall­marks of empire rather than of nation. … [T]his is Amer­i­ca’s wake-up call to for­sake its idol­a­try and to return to its true Chris­t­ian and Con­sti­tu­tion­al foun­da­tions.”
    Essay post­ed to Dixienet.org, 2001

    “If the sce­nario of the South (and the rest of Amer­i­ca) being over­run by hordes of non-white immi­grants does not appeal to you, then how is this dis­as­ter to be avert­ed? By the peo­ple who oppose it ris­ing up against their trai­tor­ous elite mas­ters and their mis­an­throp­ic rule. But to do this we must first rid our­selves of the fear of being called ‘racists’ and the oth­er mean­ing­less epi­thets they use against us. What is real­ly meant by the [mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism] advo­cates when they peg us as ‘racists’ is that we adhere to eth­no­cen­trism, which is a nat­ur­al affec­tion for one’s own kind. This is both healthy and Bib­li­cal. I am not ashamed to say that I pre­fer my own kind and my own cul­ture. Oth­ers can have theirs; I have mine. No group can sur­vive for long if its mem­bers do not pre­fer their own over oth­ers.”
    Essay post­ed to Conservativetimes.org, 2007

    “Yes, the South has a ‘black’ prob­lem. It also has a ‘yan­kee’ prob­lem. But our biggest problem—and one even Chris­t­ian mem­bers with­in our own ranks refuse (or fear) to acknowledge—is the ‘Jew­ry’ prob­lem. Indeed, orga­nized Jew­ry has been at the root of most of the South’s trou­bles for the past 100 years.”
    On an inter­nal League of the South Face­book group

    “We South­ern nation­al­ists do not want a race war (or any sort of war). But if one is forced on us, we’ll par­tic­i­pate. … South­ern whites are geared up and armed to the teeth. … So if negroes think a ‘race war’ in mod­ern Amer­i­ca would be to their advan­tage, they had bet­ter pre­pare them­selves for a very rude awak­en­ing. White peo­ple may be patient, but our patience does have a lim­it. You do not want to test that lim­it.”
    “A few notes on an Amer­i­can race war,” May 6, 2015

    “Nev­er under­es­ti­mate the per­fidy of the orga­nized Jew. He is craft enough to manip­u­late both sides in a con­flict for his own advan­tage. From my expe­ri­ence and stud­ies, I have come to the con­clu­sion that his main ene­my is Euro­pean man—the inher­i­tors of Christendom—and his main weapons against us are the var­i­ous Third World peo­ples (includ­ing Mus­lims) he employs as his street-lev­el foot sol­diers, debt, pro­pa­gan­da, and our own guilt. If we are to sur­vive, we must com­bat these weapons, and soon.” — On an inter­nal League of the South Face­book group, Decem­ber 8, 2015

    Back­ground

    Sport­ing a white beard intend­ed to give him the look of a Con­fed­er­ate Army offi­cer, native Alabami­an J. Michael Hill has done more than any­one to cre­ate a new, racial­ly tinged South­ern seces­sion move­ment. Iron­i­cal­ly, Hill taught British his­to­ry for decades as he devel­oped his think­ing about the nature and reli­gion of the South at his­tor­i­cal­ly black Still­man Col­lege in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

    Hill was always an odd­i­ty at the school, roam­ing the cam­pus wear­ing a Con­fed­er­ate flag pin and wax­ing nos­tal­gic to his most­ly black stu­dents about the “War Between the States.” In 1996, Hill told colum­nist Diane Roberts that his black stu­dents adored him; what he did­n’t say was that he appar­ent­ly did not share their warmth. In a 2000 post­ing to the invi­ta­tion-only AlaReb E‑mail list, Hill mocked his for­mer stu­dents and co-work­ers. “A quote,” he wrote, “from a recent affir­ma­tive action hire: ‘Yesta-day I could not spell ‘sec­re­tary.’ Today I is one.’ ” He con­tin­ued: “One of few ben­e­fits I got on a reg­u­lar basis from hav­ing taught for 18 years at Still­man Col­lege was read­ing the class rolls on the first day of class.” He went on to list sev­er­al “humor­ous” names of his black stu­dents, end­ing with, “Where do these peo­ple get such names?” Hill resigned from Still­man in 1998. Although school offi­cials nev­er said so pub­licly, The Jour­nal of Blacks in High­er Edu­ca­tion report­ed that Hill had become “an embar­rass­ment” to the admin­is­tra­tion.

    Hill began to devel­op his ideas about a new Con­fed­er­a­cy in the 1970s, while study­ing under Grady McWhiney and For­rest McDon­ald, two extreme­ly con­ser­v­a­tive his­to­ry pro­fes­sors at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alaba­ma. His men­tors wrote Crack­er Cul­ture, a book that argued that the South was set­tled pri­mar­i­ly by “Anglo-Celts,” while in the North it was British Protes­tants who pre­dom­i­nat­ed.

    Expand­ing on his old pro­fes­sors’ con­tro­ver­sial claim that the South was dif­fer­ent from the North because its pop­u­la­tion was “Celtic,” Hill pub­lished two books on Celtic his­to­ry in the ear­ly 1990s. In 1994, he became an activist and put his ideas into prac­tice, cre­at­ing the South­ern League, which was lat­er renamed the League of the South (the orig­i­nal name was a take­off on the sep­a­ratist and anti-immi­grant North­ern League of Italy, but had to be changed after a base­ball league of the same name threat­ened to sue), or LOS. The LOS envi­sioned a seced­ed South that would be run, basi­cal­ly, as a theo­crat­ic state marked by medieval legal dis­tinc­tions between dif­fer­ent types of cit­i­zens, with white males at the top of the hier­ar­chy.

    Start­ed with 40 peo­ple, the LOS ini­tial­ly includ­ed four men with Ph.D.s on its board, along with Jack Ker­shaw, who was once active in the seg­re­ga­tion­ist White Cit­i­zens Coun­cil in Nashville and who remained on the board as late as 2009.

    Hill’s LOS start­ed out com­plain­ing about the media treat­ment of white South­ern­ers but quick­ly devel­oped into a racist group call­ing for a sec­ond seces­sion, attack­ing egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, describ­ing ante­bel­lum slav­ery as “God-ordained,” oppos­ing racial inter­mar­riage, and defend­ing seg­re­ga­tion as a pol­i­cy designed to pro­tect the “integri­ty” of both the black and the white races.

    An ear­ly sign of the League’s under­ly­ing racism came in 1995, when Hill set up a stu­dent chap­ter at his alma mater, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alaba­ma. With­in months, its mem­bers began to ver­bal­ly attack gays, and chap­ter pres­i­dent Thomas Sted­man wrote to the stu­dent news­pa­per to claim that “blacks did not invent ... any­thing of note any­where in the world.” Hill also praised extrem­ists like the Holo­caust-deny­ing and immi­grant-bash­ing Jean-Marie Le Pen of France, call­ing for “oth­ers like Le Pen to arise.” The “rav­ages of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and so-called diver­si­ty,” Hill said, are anath­e­ma to him. Hill described the Pledge of Alle­giance as “nation­al­ist pro­pa­gan­da [meant] to indoc­tri­nate” chil­dren with social­ist ideas about gov­ern­ment.

    In 2003, Hill led an attempt to resus­ci­tate the South­ern Par­ty, anoth­er neo-Con­fed­er­ate orga­ni­za­tion. And he attacked the Supreme Court after its rul­ing in July of that year strik­ing down anti-gay sodomy laws, say­ing the court was help­ing to advance what he called the “sodomite and civ­il rights agen­das.”

    In 1998, just after he left Still­man, Hill claimed that the LOS had some 15,000 mem­bers. In 2000, the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter added the orga­ni­za­tion to its list of hate groups based on its white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy. Four years lat­er, Hill’s for­mer men­tor, For­rest McDon­ald, who had attend­ed the first meet­ing of the LOS in 1994, denounced him, telling the Intel­li­gence Report that Hill’s racism had destroyed the group. By 2009, the League of the South could only draw a hand­ful of par­tic­i­pants to its events, and its pub­li­ca­tions were pro­duced spo­rad­i­cal­ly.

    But as Hill saw his aca­d­e­m­ic sup­port flee and his organization’s mem­ber­ship dwin­dle, his rhetoric grew more extreme, his racism more explic­it. The Civ­il War, he says, wasn’t about slav­ery. It was the impo­si­tion by god­less Yan­kees of a mate­ri­al­is­tic, cap­i­tal­ist indus­tri­al sys­tem on a South that embod­ied the only sur­viv­ing rem­nant of “ortho­dox Chris­tian­i­ty.” He decried the “evil genie of uni­ver­sal ‘human rights,’” and called egal­i­tar­i­an­ism a nox­ious “Jacobin” doc­trine. America’s trai­tor­ous “elite mas­ters,” he com­plained, had allowed it to be “over­run by hordes of non-white immi­grants.”

    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.

    Par­tic­u­lar­ly alarm­ing was Hill’s grow­ing pen­chant for incit­ing his remain­ing fol­low­ers to vio­lence. At a March 2011 LOS meet­ing in Geor­gia, he urged mem­bers to stock up on AK-47s, hol­low-point bul­lets and tools to derail trains. That sum­mer, at the League’s annu­al con­fer­ence, the leader asked, “What would it take to get you to fight? The mantra [that] vio­lence, or the seri­ous threat there­of, nev­er set­tles any­thing is patent­ly false. His­to­ry shows that it indeed does set­tle many things.”

    This increas­ing­ly vocal mil­i­tan­cy brought the LOS’ ide­ol­o­gy and goals clos­er and clos­er to those of the antigov­ern­ment “Patri­ot” move­ment. In a Jan­u­ary 2012 email, Hill declared the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment an “orga­nized crim­i­nal enter­prise” led by “domes­tic ter­ror­ists,” and told his fol­low­ers to pre­pare for a fight.

    Hill even took ideas straight from the play­book of the Posse Comi­ta­tus, a racist, anti-Semit­ic group that raged through the Mid­west in the late 1970s and 1980s. Adher­ents of the Posse, which was the pre­cur­sor to the con­tem­po­rary “sov­er­eign cit­i­zens” move­ment, believed that sher­iffs were the high­est legit­i­mate law enforce­ment offi­cials in the coun­try. In addi­tion to self-defense, Hill advised his fol­low­ers to use their coun­ty sher­iffs “as bul­warks against the crim­i­nal class. … He can law­ful­ly tell the feds to ‘Go to Hell’ and stay out of his ter­ri­to­ry.”

    The year 2013 saw anoth­er major shift in strat­e­gy for Hill and the LOS as it adopt­ed new rhetoric against “South­ern demo­graph­ic dis­place­ment.” The LOS deem­pha­sized its long­stand­ing objec­tives of a sec­ond south­ern seces­sion and soci­ety dom­i­nat­ed by “Euro­pean Amer­i­cans” dur­ing pub­lic events in order to por­tray a more mod­er­ate, con­ser­v­a­tive image. Under this new strat­e­gy, protests began focus­ing on more tra­di­tion­al­ly con­ser­v­a­tive themes such as oppo­si­tion to immi­gra­tion and same-sex mar­riage. Atten­dees were also required to fol­low a dress code at LOS demon­stra­tions. Most remark­ably, the group banned the usage of the Con­fed­er­ate bat­tle flag at its events, much to the anger and cha­grin of many of its mem­bers, in favor of a new “south­ern nation­al­ist” flag.

    This shift in the LOS’ pol­i­cy also led to Hill’s expul­sion of Matthew Heim­bach, one of the orga­ni­za­tions most vis­i­ble young mem­bers, after pho­tos sur­faced of Heim­bach per­form­ing a Nazi salute at events with the neo-Nazi Nation­al Social­ist Move­ment and the Impe­r­i­al Klans of Amer­i­ca. “Matthew Heim­bach, a for­mer mem­ber of The League of the South, has appar­ent­ly decid­ed to cast his lot with Nazis and oth­ers who do not rep­re­sent the tra­di­tion­al South, the South­ern Nation­al­ist move­ment, and The League of the South,” Hill wrote on the Face­book page for an upcom­ing League event in Ten­nessee. “Nei­ther he nor his friends will be wel­come at our demon­stra­tions.”

    But Hill appar­ent­ly under­went a change of heart less than a year lat­er, read­mit­ting Heim­bach and pro­mot­ing him to a lead­er­ship posi­tion as LOS train­ing direc­tor.

    The LOS’ more rad­i­cal ele­ments returned to the fore­front short­ly there­after with the for­ma­tion of an armed, para­mil­i­tary unit dubbed “the Indomita­bles” by Hill and the LOS’ lead­er­ship at the group’s 2014 nation­al con­fer­ence. The unit was tasked with advanc­ing a sec­ond south­ern seces­sion by any means nec­es­sary and embod­ied the increas­ing­ly extreme rhetoric of the group. “The pri­ma­ry tar­gets will not be ene­my sol­diers; instead, they will be polit­i­cal lead­ers, mem­bers of the hos­tile media, cul­tur­al icons, bureau­crats, and oth­er of the man­age­r­i­al elite with­out whom the engines of tyran­ny don’t run,” wrote Hill on the League’s web­site. He con­clud­ed the essay by quot­ing Psalms: “Blessed be the Lord my strength who teach­es my hands to war and my fin­gers to fight.”

    In May 2015, Hill pub­lished what was prob­a­bly his most provoca­tive essay yet, pon­tif­i­cat­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an Amer­i­can “race war” and warn­ing black Amer­i­cans of “a very rude awak­en­ing” if such a war devel­oped.

    Per­haps even more sur­pris­ing was the appear­ance of an essay by Hill in The Barnes Review, one of the most well known his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ist and Holo­caust denial pub­li­ca­tions. Hill’s essay titled, “The Pol­i­tics of Provo­ca­tion: Spi­ral­ing Out of Con­trol,” capped more than a year of increas­ing­ly anti-Semit­ic post­ings in inter­nal LOS Face­book groups.

    In the months lead­ing up to the pub­li­ca­tion of Hill’s arti­cle, he reg­u­lar­ly post­ed remarks such as, “Orga­nized Jew­ry does its rep­u­ta­tion among decent peo­ple no good by being neck-deep in pornog­ra­phy, the sex traf­fick­ing trade, and the homo­sex­u­al agen­da,” for LOS mem­bers to fawn over.

    In Decem­ber of 2015, when respond­ing to a ques­tion about non-reli­gious indi­vid­u­als join­ing the LOS, Hill told an inquir­ing LOS mem­ber that, “The League is not the church. Though most of us are Chris­tians, one does not have to be to join our ranks. We do not allow Mus­lims or Jews, how­ev­er. Both have proven them­selves, as orga­nized groups, to be against our her­itage and inter­ests. We will take no chances with them. Your friend is wel­come if he is nei­ther a Mus­lim nor Jew.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Extrem­ist Files: Michael Hill”; South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter; Accessed 12/09/2017

    “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”:

    ...
    But as Hill saw his aca­d­e­m­ic sup­port flee and his organization’s mem­ber­ship dwin­dle, his rhetoric grew more extreme, his racism more explic­it. The Civ­il War, he says, wasn’t about slav­ery. It was the impo­si­tion by god­less Yan­kees of a mate­ri­al­is­tic, cap­i­tal­ist indus­tri­al sys­tem on a South that embod­ied the only sur­viv­ing rem­nant of “ortho­dox Chris­tian­i­ty.” He decried the “evil genie of uni­ver­sal ‘human rights,’” and called egal­i­tar­i­an­ism a nox­ious “Jacobin” doc­trine. America’s trai­tor­ous “elite mas­ters,” he com­plained, had allowed it to be “over­run by hordes of non-white immi­grants.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 9, 2017, 8:48 pm
  10. 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:

    New York Mag­a­zine

    Leaked Memo Shows White House Doesn’t Real­ly Want a Dream­er Deal

    By Eric Levitz
    Jan­u­ary 19, 2018 10:50 am

    Don­ald Trump has repeat­ed­ly sug­gest­ed that he believes undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants who were brought to this coun­try as chil­dren — and who went on to obey all (non-immi­gra­tion) laws, and grad­u­ate from col­lege or secure gain­ful employ­ment — should be allowed to stay in the Unit­ed States. On the day the pres­i­dent end­ed Deferred Action for Child­hood Arrivals (DACA), which had pro­vid­ed such immi­grants with work per­mits and pro­tec­tion from depor­ta­tion, he called on Con­gress to pass a leg­isla­tive replace­ment for the Exec­u­tive branch pro­gram. The pres­i­dent went on to say that if Con­gress failed to pro­tect the program’s for­mer ben­e­fi­cia­ries, he would “revis­it the issue,” and, osten­si­bly, pro­tect them him­self.

    But that shouldn’t be nec­es­sary. Last week, a bipar­ti­san group of sen­a­tors announced that they’d reached con­sen­sus on a DACA replace­ment bill: Even though the pres­i­dent and GOP lead­er­ship had claimed to sup­port legal sta­tus for Dream­ers as an end in itself (and thus should have been pre­pared to sup­port leg­is­la­tion that does noth­ing but that), Democ­rats nonethe­less agreed to back a DREAM Act 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 — pro­vi­sions cham­pi­oned by Repub­li­cans and loathed by the pro­gres­sive base.

    And Trump took their offer as an insult.

    Lat­er, White House chief of staff John Kel­ly informed the sen­a­tors that the admin­is­tra­tion did not mere­ly want a Dream­er bill that could pass Con­gress with bipar­ti­san sup­port but one that could earn the approval of “con­ser­v­a­tives like Sens. Tom Cot­ton (R‑Ark.) and David Per­due (R‑Ga.) and Rep. Bob Good­lat­te (R‑Va.).”

    Tom Cot­ton doesn’t like the term “Dream­ers” — he prefers “ille­gal aliens.” The sen­a­tor is the lead spon­sor on a bill to cut legal immi­gra­tion in half. Demand­ing a bipar­ti­san immi­gra­tion bill that Cot­ton can sup­port is like demand­ing a bipar­ti­san agree­ment to cut Social Secu­ri­ty that Bernie Sanders will glad­ly co-spon­sor. If Barack Oba­ma had made the lat­ter request dur­ing “Grand Bar­gain” nego­ti­a­tions in 2011, every­one involved would have under­stood that he did not actu­al­ly want to pass a Grand Bar­gain.

    But Trump’s grasp of polit­i­cal real­i­ty is so loose, it’s gen­uine­ly unclear if he under­stands that he is ask­ing for the impos­si­ble. And an inter­nal White House memo, leaked to Axios on Fri­day, sug­gests that the pres­i­dent like­ly doesn’t com­pre­hend the absur­di­ty of his posi­tion — and that his clos­est advis­ers on immi­gra­tion want to keep it that way.

    Short­ly after Trump’s meet­ing with the sen­a­tors behind the bipar­ti­san DACA bill, staffers from the Jus­tice Depart­ment and DHS pre­pared an inter­nal memo assess­ing the mer­its of the leg­is­la­tion. In a doc­u­ment titled, “Flake-Gra­ham-Durbin Pro­pos­al Would Crip­ple Bor­der Secu­ri­ty and Expand Chain Migra­tion,” the staffers lament­ed that the bill:

    1.Fails to Secure the Bor­der: “pro­vides less than 10 per­cent of the nec­es­sary funds to con­struct the bor­der wall.”

    2. Increas­es Ille­gal Immi­gra­tion and Guar­an­tees Future Amnesties: “pro­vides immi­gra­tion ben­e­fits to cer­tain ille­gal aliens who came to the Unit­ed States as juve­niles.”

    3. Pro­pos­al Not Only Grants Cit­i­zen­ship To Up to 3 Mil­lion “DREAM­ers,” But Also Grants Legal Sta­tus to Their Par­ents: “grants a path to cit­i­zen­ship to an ille­gal pop­u­la­tion that is near­ly five times larg­er than the pop­u­la­tion of DACA recip­i­ents.”

    4. Increas­es Chain Migra­tion: “keeps chain migra­tion in place while increas­ing the num­ber of indi­vid­u­als eli­gi­ble to bring in their for­eign rel­a­tives through chain migra­tion.”

    5. Fails To End the Visa Lot­tery.

    It’s worth remem­ber­ing that Trump wasn’t inclined to can­cel DACA in the first place. It took a law­suit from sev­er­al Repub­li­can state Attor­neys Gen­er­al — and an ulti­ma­tum from Attor­ney Gen­er­al Jeff Ses­sions — to get the pres­i­dent to cut the Dream­ers loose. Even then, Trump had Ses­sions announce the ter­mi­na­tion of the pro­gram for him, and expressed open­ness to reviv­ing DACA over Twit­ter on the very same day.

    In Sep­tem­ber, a sin­gle con­ver­sa­tion with Chuck Schumer and Nan­cy Pelosi con­vinced Trump to back a DACA bill that includ­ed no fund­ing for his wall what­so­ev­er. 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.

    After all of these inci­dents, immi­gra­tion hard-lin­ers in Con­gress — and far-right White House advis­er Stephen Miller — guid­ed Trump back toward recal­ci­trance. Miller has long been the most con­spic­u­ous obsta­cle to a deal.. The Ses­sions acolyte and Bre­it­bart dar­ling has no inter­est in see­ing Dream­ers gain legal sta­tus. And as the administration’s res­i­dent immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy wonk, he has repeat­ed­ly sent Con­gress the same long list of impos­si­ble demands, includ­ing pro­pos­als that lack the sup­port of a major­i­ty of con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans, like a halv­ing of legal immi­gra­tion and $18 bil­lion for a bor­der wall.

    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.

    This explains the inco­her­ence of the White House’s posi­tion. Trump is per­son­al­ly inclined, at least some of the time, to notch a bipar­ti­san vic­to­ry, claim cred­it for achiev­ing some­thing that Oba­ma failed to do, and cel­e­brate his suc­cess in con­vinc­ing Con­gress to make a down pay­ment on his wall. But he is also high­ly impres­sion­able and deeply racist, and sur­round­ed by far-right ide­o­logues who are eager to exploit both those traits to their own ends.

    At this point, the most viable path to a DREAM Act may be for Con­gress to sim­ply ignore the White House, pass some­thing rough­ly sim­i­lar to the exist­ing bipar­ti­san pro­pos­al, and trust that, once the bill is in front of him, Trump will find the lure of a sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny more com­pelling than the com­plaints of the West Wing’s con­niv­ing nativists.

    ———-

    “Leaked Memo Shows White House Doesn’t Real­ly Want a Dream­er Deal” by Eric Levitz; New York Mag­a­zine; 01/19/2018

    “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:

    ...
    But that shouldn’t be nec­es­sary. Last week, a bipar­ti­san group of sen­a­tors announced that they’d reached con­sen­sus on a DACA replace­ment bill: Even though the pres­i­dent and GOP lead­er­ship had claimed to sup­port legal sta­tus for Dream­ers as an end in itself (and thus should have been pre­pared to sup­port leg­is­la­tion that does noth­ing but that), Democ­rats nonethe­less agreed to back a DREAM Act 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 — pro­vi­sions cham­pi­oned by Repub­li­cans and loathed by the pro­gres­sive base.

    And Trump took their offer as an insult.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    Lat­er, White House chief of staff John Kel­ly informed the sen­a­tors that the admin­is­tra­tion did not mere­ly want a Dream­er bill that could pass Con­gress with bipar­ti­san sup­port but one that could earn the approval of “con­ser­v­a­tives like Sens. Tom Cot­ton (R‑Ark.) and David Per­due (R‑Ga.) and Rep. Bob Good­lat­te (R‑Va.).”
    ...

    That hap­pened. And then this hap­pened short­ly after Trump met with that bipar­ti­san Sen­ate del­e­ga­tion: Trump sat down with the hard­lin­ers:

    ...
    Short­ly after Trump’s meet­ing with the sen­a­tors behind the bipar­ti­san DACA bill, staffers from the Jus­tice Depart­ment and DHS pre­pared an inter­nal memo assess­ing the mer­its of the leg­is­la­tion. In a doc­u­ment titled, “Flake-Gra­ham-Durbin Pro­pos­al Would Crip­ple Bor­der Secu­ri­ty and Expand Chain Migra­tion,” the staffers lament­ed that the bill:

    1.Fails to Secure the Bor­der: “pro­vides less than 10 per­cent of the nec­es­sary funds to con­struct the bor­der wall.”

    2. Increas­es Ille­gal Immi­gra­tion and Guar­an­tees Future Amnesties: “pro­vides immi­gra­tion ben­e­fits to cer­tain ille­gal aliens who came to the Unit­ed States as juve­niles.”

    3. Pro­pos­al Not Only Grants Cit­i­zen­ship To Up to 3 Mil­lion “DREAM­ers,” But Also Grants Legal Sta­tus to Their Par­ents: “grants a path to cit­i­zen­ship to an ille­gal pop­u­la­tion that is near­ly five times larg­er than the pop­u­la­tion of DACA recip­i­ents.”

    4. Increas­es Chain Migra­tion: “keeps chain migra­tion in place while increas­ing the num­ber of indi­vid­u­als eli­gi­ble to bring in their for­eign rel­a­tives through chain migra­tion.”

    5. Fails To End the Visa Lot­tery.

    ...

    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:

    ...
    In Sep­tem­ber, a sin­gle con­ver­sa­tion with Chuck Schumer and Nan­cy Pelosi con­vinced Trump to back a DACA bill that includ­ed no fund­ing for his wall what­so­ev­er. 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.

    After all of these inci­dents, immi­gra­tion hard-lin­ers in Con­gress — and far-right White House advis­er Stephen Miller — guid­ed Trump back toward recal­ci­trance. Miller has long been the most con­spic­u­ous obsta­cle to a deal.. The Ses­sions acolyte and Bre­it­bart dar­ling has no inter­est in see­ing Dream­ers gain legal sta­tus. And as the administration’s res­i­dent immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy wonk, he has repeat­ed­ly sent Con­gress the same long list of impos­si­ble demands, includ­ing pro­pos­als that lack the sup­port of a major­i­ty of con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans, like a halv­ing of legal immi­gra­tion and $18 bil­lion for a bor­der wall.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Tom Cot­ton doesn’t like the term “Dream­ers” — he prefers “ille­gal aliens.” The sen­a­tor is the lead spon­sor on a bill to cut legal immi­gra­tion in half. Demand­ing a bipar­ti­san immi­gra­tion bill that Cot­ton can sup­port is like demand­ing a bipar­ti­san agree­ment to cut Social Secu­ri­ty that Bernie Sanders will glad­ly co-spon­sor. If Barack Oba­ma had made the lat­ter request dur­ing “Grand Bar­gain” nego­ti­a­tions in 2011, every­one involved would have under­stood that he did not actu­al­ly want to pass a Grand Bar­gain.
    ...

    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:

    The Hill

    Cot­ton: I won’t com­mit to an immi­gra­tion deal just because Trump sup­ports it

    By Julia Man­ches­ter — 01/21/18 11:13 AM EST

    Sen. Tom Cot­ton (R‑Ark.) said on Sun­day he would not vote for an immi­gra­tion deal just because Pres­i­dent Trump sup­port­ed it.

    “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.

    “I will eval­u­ate any deal on its mer­its and what’s best for the peo­ple of Arkansas and best for our coun­try,” Cot­ton said on “Meet the Press.”

    Sen­ate Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats failed to meet a mid­night dead­line on Sat­ur­day to reach a deal to fund the gov­ern­ment.

    Democ­rats reject­ed fund­ing leg­is­la­tion because it did not con­tain a fix for the recip­i­ents of the Deferred Action for Child­hood Arrivals pro­gram, while Repub­li­cans say Democ­rats are hold­ing the gov­ern­ment hostage. Trump in Sep­tem­ber said he would end the Oba­ma-era pro­gram, which pro­tects young immi­grants brought to the U.S. ille­gal­ly as chil­dren, but gave Con­gress time to come up with a leg­isla­tive solu­tion.

    Cot­ton has proven to be one of the most vocal immi­gra­tion hard-lin­ers in the Sen­ate.

    The Arkansas sen­a­tor and Sen. David Per­due (R‑Ga.) have pro­posed a mea­sure that seeks to end so-called chain migra­tion, which allows U.S. cit­i­zens and per­ma­nent res­i­dents to spon­sor fam­i­ly mem­bers abroad to come to the U.S.

    ...

    ———-

    “Cot­ton: I won’t com­mit to an immi­gra­tion deal just because Trump sup­ports it” by Julia Man­ches­ter; The Hill; 01/21/2018

    ““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’;

    The Hill

    Gra­ham calls Tom Cot­ton ‘the Steve King of the Sen­ate’

    By Max Green­wood — 01/19/18 01:30 PM EST

    Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham (R‑S.C.) said Fri­day that Sen. Tom Cot­ton (R‑Ark.) has become “sort of the Steve King of the Sen­ate,” a ref­er­ence to one of the House­’s most ardent immi­gra­tion hard-lin­ers.

    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.

    A pro­pos­al by Cot­ton and Sen. David Per­due (R‑Ga.) seeks to end so-called chain migra­tion, which allows U.S. cit­i­zens and per­ma­nent res­i­dents to spon­sor fam­i­ly mem­bers abroad to come to the U.S.

    “All I can say is we’re not going to end fam­i­ly immi­gra­tion for DACA,” Gra­ham said. “The Tom Cot­ton approach has no via­bil­i­ty here. You know, he’s become sort of the Steve King of the Sen­ate.”

    “I like Tom, but on immi­gra­tion, he’s putting some­thing on the table that there’s just no mar­ket for in Phase 1,” he added.

    King, an Iowa Repub­li­can, has been a vocal advo­cate for curb­ing immi­gra­tion and end­ing DACA, an Oba­ma-era pro­gram rescind­ed by Trump last fall.

    ...

    Democ­rats have insist­ed that any spend­ing mea­sure must include pro­tec­tions for DACA recip­i­ents, while some Repub­li­cans have called to address legal pro­tec­tions for the young immi­grants, known as Dream­ers, at a lat­er date.

    ———-

    “Gra­ham calls Tom Cot­ton ‘the Steve King of the Sen­ate’
    ” by Max Green­wood; The Hill; 01/19/2018

    “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:

    Vox

    What “chain migra­tion” real­ly means — and why Don­ald Trump hates it so much
    “Fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion” doesn’t sound as scary — or get at the fear of los­ing con­trol.

    By Dara Lind­dara
    Updat­ed Dec 29, 2017, 1:20pm EST

    Over the course of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s first year in office, his administration’s top immi­gra­tion pri­or­i­ty has shift­ed sub­tly. He’s talk­ing less about deport­ing “bad hom­bres” and talk­ing more — a lot more — about how “chain migra­tion” is bad for the Unit­ed States.

    “We have to get rid of chain­like immi­gra­tion, we have to get rid of the chain,” Trump told the New York Times’s Mike Schmidt in an impromp­tu inter­view at his West Palm Beach golf club in Decem­ber. He fol­lowed it up, as he does, with a tweet:

    The Democ­rats have been told, and ful­ly under­stand, that there can be no DACA with­out the des­per­ate­ly need­ed WALL at the South­ern Bor­der and an END to the hor­ri­ble Chain Migra­tion & ridicu­lous Lot­tery Sys­tem of Immi­gra­tion etc. We must pro­tect our Coun­try at all cost!— Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Decem­ber 29, 2017

    “Chain migra­tion” — which is loose­ly used as a syn­onym for all immi­gra­tion to the Unit­ed States that hap­pens based on fam­i­ly ties (when a US cit­i­zen or, in some cas­es, a green card hold­er peti­tions for a rel­a­tive to join them) — has become a con­ser­v­a­tive boogey­man, and an excuse to cut down on legal immi­gra­tion. It’s long been a tar­get of immi­gra­tion restric­tion­ists whose con­cerns about immi­gra­tion are less about peo­ple “respect­ing the law” than about the gov­ern­ment exer­cis­ing stricter con­trol over who enters the coun­try.

    Under the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, those restric­tion­ists have more polit­i­cal pow­er than they’ve had in a gen­er­a­tion — and they’re using it to pros­e­cute an aggres­sive case against the fam­i­ly-based sys­tem as it stands.

    The Trump administration’s attacks on “chain migra­tion” have helped shift the terms of the debate over immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy. “Chain migra­tion” is being invoked, among oth­er things, to frame two total­ly dif­fer­ent demands Repub­li­cans have made in the debate over legal­iz­ing immi­grants tem­porar­i­ly cov­ered by the Deferred Action for Child­hood Arrivals pro­gram: pre­vent­ing cur­rent DACA recip­i­ents from spon­sor­ing their par­ents after becom­ing cit­i­zens, and cut­ting or elim­i­nat­ing some cat­e­gories of fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion for all immi­grants in exchange for legal­iz­ing DACA enrollees.

    It’s time to end Chain Migra­tion: https://t.co/kad5A8Slw7 pic.twitter.com/735JzAZIUa— The White House (@WhiteHouse) Decem­ber 18, 2017

    But it’s not just dur­ing the DACA debate. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion blamed the failed New York sub­way bomb­ing in Decem­ber on “chain migra­tion” because the would-be bomber came as the child of a US citizen’s sib­ling in 2010. Its Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Strat­e­gy, issued Mon­day, called chain migra­tion a secu­ri­ty threat.

    In oth­er words, the Trump administration’s attack on “chain migra­tion” isn’t just a set­up for a par­tic­u­lar pol­i­cy fight. It’s about who is allowed to be a part of Amer­i­ca — and whether changes to the country’s make­up are healthy demo­graph­ic devel­op­ment or a sign of uncon­trolled inva­sion.

    “Chain migra­tion” is the tech­ni­cal name for a com­mon­sense idea: Peo­ple are more like­ly to move where their rel­a­tives are

    The dynam­ic under­ly­ing “chain migra­tion” is so sim­ple that it sounds like com­mon sense: Peo­ple are more like­ly to move to where peo­ple they know live, and each new immi­grant makes peo­ple they know more like­ly to move there in turn.

    But as obvi­ous as the real­i­ty is on the ground, it wasn’t always incor­po­rat­ed into the­o­ret­i­cal mod­els of migra­tion (par­tic­u­lar­ly eco­nom­ic mod­els). Econ­o­mists tend­ed to think about the deci­sion to migrate as a sim­ple cal­cu­lus of how much mon­ey some­one was mak­ing at home ver­sus how much he could be mak­ing abroad, rather than under­stand­ing that the deci­sion was more com­pli­cat­ed — and that fam­i­ly and social rela­tion­ships played a role.

    Prince­ton demog­ra­ph­er Doug Massey, one of the lead­ing schol­ars on immi­gra­tion to the US at the end of the 20th cen­tu­ry (and the begin­ning of the 21st), was one of the schol­ars who tried to cor­rect this over­sim­pli­fied view. As he put it in an essay for the Inter-Amer­i­can Par­lia­men­tary Group on Pop­u­la­tion and Devel­op­ment in the ear­ly 1990s:

    The first migrants who leave for a new des­ti­na­tion have no social ties to draw upon, and for them migra­tion is cost­ly, par­tic­u­lar­ly if it involves enter­ing anoth­er coun­try with­out doc­u­ments. After the first migrants have left, how­ev­er, the costs of migra­tion are sub­stan­tial­ly low­er for their friends and rel­a­tives liv­ing in the com­mu­ni­ty of ori­gin. Because of the nature of kin­ship and friend­ship struc­tures, each new migrant cre­ates a set of peo­ple with social ties to the des­ti­na­tion area.

    These immi­grants would also end up behav­ing dif­fer­ent­ly once they arrived in their new coun­tries. If they were just there for eco­nom­ic rea­sons, they’d have an incen­tive to move back once they’d made enough mon­ey, or cir­cu­late back and forth. But immi­grants who move for social rea­sons are mov­ing to a new com­mu­ni­ty — a new place they’ll stay. That’s an upside if you think it’s impor­tant for immi­grants to become Amer­i­can — and a down­side if you think the US should be much pick­i­er about who gets to move here for good than it is about who gets to work here.

    One upshot of chain migra­tion: Any poli­cies that made it eas­i­er for immi­grants to bring their rel­a­tives would allow migra­tion chains to form, thus expand­ing immi­gra­tion into the coun­try. “Fam­i­ly reuni­fi­ca­tion sys­tems,” Massey wrote, “work at crosspur­pos­es with the lim­i­ta­tion of immi­gra­tion.”

    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).

    The Social Con­tract was a forum for con­cerns about the threat of mass immi­gra­tion (par­tic­u­lar­ly mass non­white immi­gra­tion) to the Unit­ed States. (The South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter, which con­sid­ers all Tan­ton-affil­i­at­ed insti­tu­tions to be “hate groups,” run­down of some of the journal’s more incen­di­ary con­tent.) Massey, on the oth­er hand is a long­time sup­port­er of reforms that would make it eas­i­er for immi­grants to come to Amer­i­ca.

    An arti­cle by a sup­port­er of expan­sive immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy could be reprint­ed, with few appar­ent edits, in a jour­nal for his intel­lec­tu­al oppo­nents only because the debate over chain migra­tion is fun­da­men­tal­ly not about whether it hap­pens, but whether it’s okay. Defend­ers of chain migra­tion tend to argue that it’s impor­tant for immi­grants to put down roots in the US, and that hav­ing a fam­i­ly here is part of what that means.

    Oppo­nents, on the oth­er hand, see fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion as the gov­ern­ment ced­ing some con­trol for who gets to come here, so that it’s not select­ing indi­vid­u­als in a vac­u­um — which leads rapid­ly to fears of the US gov­ern­ment los­ing con­trol of the immi­gra­tion sys­tem entire­ly.

    The actu­al pol­i­cy behind “chain migra­tion”

    It’s not clear whether Pres­i­dent Trump under­stands how fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion actu­al­ly works — and when it can lead to “chains” of rel­a­tives. Trump has claimed that the man who ran over sev­er­al pedes­tri­ans in New York in Novem­ber brought 23 (some­times he says 24) rel­a­tives to the US in the sev­en years he’d lived here — a claim that chain migra­tion oppo­nent Mark Kriko­ri­an of the Cen­ter for Immi­gra­tion stud­ies said was impos­si­ble. And the White House’s “chain migra­tion” dia­gram makes it looks like each gen­er­a­tion of adults brings in chil­dren, which brings their chil­dren — which isn’t how chain migra­tion works.

    To bet­ter under­stand what poli­cies, exact­ly, oppo­nents of “chain migra­tion” are wor­ried about, check out this chart from the restric­tion­ist advo­ca­cy group Num­ber­sUSA — which is a more detailed rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the same fear of over­whelm­ing, uncon­trol­lable waves of migra­tion.

    [see Num­ber­sUSA graph­ic show­ing a sin­gle immi­grant lead­ing to thou­sands of new immi­grants and chil­dren]

    Let’s walk through the sce­nario in that chart. It depicts an immi­grant who’s come to the US on an employ­ment-based green card (in black) and is able to bring over his spouse and chil­dren imme­di­ate­ly. He can also — after he becomes a cit­i­zen (some­thing the Num­ber­sUSA chart doesn’t clar­i­fy) — peti­tion for his par­ents and sib­lings to come to the US on green cards (all in gray).

    The sib­lings all bring over their spous­es and chil­dren imme­di­ate­ly, and the spous­es (in orange, maroon, navy, and teal) can (upon nat­u­ral­iza­tion) peti­tion to bring over their own par­ents and sib­lings. The orig­i­nal immigrant’s par­ents (even­tu­al­ly) peti­tion for their own sib­lings to come to the US, and the sib­lings then peti­tion to bring over their mar­ried adult chil­dren — whose spous­es can then (eventually)petition for their own par­ents and sib­lings, etc., etc.

    Mean­while, the orig­i­nal immigrant’s spouse, once she becomes a cit­i­zen, can peti­tion for her par­ents (in pink) and her sib­lings (in blue, pur­ple, red, and green). Those sib­lings bring over their spous­es, who sub­se­quent­ly peti­tion for their own par­ents and sib­lings, etc., etc.

    There are a ton of assump­tions in this mod­el about the way immi­grants behave — why is every­one in fam­i­lies of four or five? Does no one real­ly want to stay in her home coun­try? Is there no such thing as a bach­e­lor in any of these fam­i­lies? — but the visa cat­e­gories under US law make it a hypo­thet­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty. But the thing is, US pol­i­cy­mak­ers know that it’s a hypo­thet­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty. And there are safe­guards built into the sys­tem that restrict fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion far more than the dia­gram would have you believe.

    In prac­tice, bring­ing over a fam­i­ly mem­ber takes years — which makes it very hard to build a chain

    No one is auto­mat­i­cal­ly allowed to immi­grate to the US. Any­one apply­ing for res­i­den­cy in the coun­try has to go through a stan­dard vet­ting process — includ­ing a crim­i­nal and ter­ror­ism back­ground check, and an eval­u­a­tion of whether they’re like­ly to become a “pub­lic charge” in the US (i.e., be unable to sup­port them­selves for income and rely on social pro­grams).

    Trump’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Strat­e­gy claims that “chain migra­tion” is a prob­lem for nation­al secu­ri­ty, but there’s noth­ing inher­ent to the way some­one is allowed to immi­grate to the US that makes it hard­er for the US to catch would-be ter­ror­ists — that is, if any­thing, a fail­ure of the screen­ing process.

    The big­ger obsta­cle, though, isn’t qual­i­fy­ing to immi­grate — it’s that the num­ber of hypo­thet­i­cal­ly qual­i­fied fam­i­ly-based immi­grants great­ly exceeds the num­ber of slots avail­able for immi­grants each year. The US doesn’t set caps on the num­ber of spous­es, minor chil­dren, or par­ents of US cit­i­zens who can come to the US each year — but, again, those cat­e­gories in them­selves don’t cre­ate chains.

    The cat­e­gories that do cre­ate chains are strict­ly capped: 23,400 mar­ried chil­dren of US cit­i­zens (plus their own spous­es and minor chil­dren) are allowed to immi­grate each year, and 67,500 adult sib­lings of US cit­i­zens (plus spous­es and minor chil­dren). Fur­ther­more, because the total num­ber of immi­grants com­ing from a par­tic­u­lar coun­try each year is capped, would-be immi­grants from Mex­i­co, Chi­na, India, and the Philip­pines end up fac­ing even longer wait times.

    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).

    Under­stand­ing that an F4 visa is a 13- to 23-year process throws that Num­ber­sUSA dia­gram into a dif­fer­ent light. How implau­si­ble it is depends on your assump­tions about how close togeth­er gen­er­a­tions are, and how young the immi­grants are when they come to the Unit­ed States. But if you start by under­stand­ing that the first mem­bers of the orange, maroon, navy, teal, blue, pur­ple, red, and green chains don’t enter the US until 18 years after the orig­i­nal immi­grant (sig­ni­fied by black) does — and that the first immi­grants in the yel­low sec­tion of the chart don’t enter the coun­try until 23 years lat­er — it should give you a sense of how long it will take in to fill in the rest of the chain.

    In prac­tice, this ulti­mate­ly looks like a lot of peo­ple com­ing to the US in late mid­dle age. That’s backed up by the data: A study from Jes­si­ca Vaugh­an of the Cen­ter for Immi­gra­tion Stud­ies — which is crit­i­cal of “chain migra­tion” — found that the aver­age age of immi­grants to the US has risen over the past few decades, and that fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion was a sub­stan­tial cause.

    But even then, the Num­ber­sUSA sce­nario assumes that all the immi­grants can afford to spon­sor a fam­i­ly mem­ber to immi­grate to the US. A US cit­i­zen (or green card hold­er seek­ing to bring an unmar­ried child or par­ent) has to prove to the gov­ern­ment that they can pro­vide finan­cial sup­port if their rel­a­tive needs it, rather than rely­ing on the gov­ern­ment for aid.

    In prac­tice, this means that every immi­grant needs to have some­one vouch­ing for them whose house­hold income is 125 per­cent of the pover­ty line — and the “house­hold” includes the rel­a­tive who’s try­ing to come to the US. In oth­er words, a sin­gle adult could spon­sor his par­ent to immi­grate if he made at least $20,300 — 125 per­cent of the fed­er­al pover­ty line for a two-per­son house­hold — but if he had a spouse and two chil­dren, he’d have to be mak­ing 125 per­cent of the pover­ty line for a five-per­son house­hold. And that includes any oth­er immi­grants who the house­hold is spon­sor­ing at the same time.

    So an immi­grant with a wife and two chil­dren who want­ed to spon­sor his par­ents and four sib­lings to immi­grate as soon as he became a cit­i­zen would have to be mak­ing $56,875 — around the medi­an income in the US. And if his spouse were try­ing to do the same thing with her par­ents and four sib­lings, as in the Num­ber­sUSA chart, they’d have to be mak­ing $83,000 — which would place them in the 66th per­centile of US house­hold income.

    That’s not impos­si­ble. But it cer­tain­ly calls into ques­tion the stereo­type of fam­i­ly-based migra­tion as a way for “low-skilled,” low-earn­ing immi­grants to bring their low-skilled, low-earn­ing rel­a­tives into the US.

    There are ways for cit­i­zens to get oth­er peo­ple to agree to help sup­port a poten­tial immi­grant rel­a­tive. But at the same time, the US gov­ern­ment has dis­cre­tion to reject an appli­ca­tion, even if the cit­i­zen meets the income thresh­old, if they sus­pect that in prac­tice the immi­grant won’t be sup­port­ed in the US. (Anoth­er fac­tor in deter­min­ing “pub­lic charge” is age — which is inter­est­ing, giv­en the data about fam­i­ly-based immi­grants being old­er.)

    Add all of these fac­tors togeth­er, and it becomes clear that an immi­grant won’t be able to bring that many rel­a­tives to the US over the course of his or her life­time. Vaughan’s study found that as of 2015, immi­grants who came to the US from 1981 to 2000 had spon­sored an aver­age of 1.77 rel­a­tives to come join them. The most recent immi­grants in the study — those who came to the US in the late 1990s — had spon­sored the most rel­a­tives: 3.46. But both of those num­bers include the minor chil­dren they brought with them at the time: In oth­er words, they were hard­ly start­ing 3.46 new “chains.”

    If any­thing, in fact, the fam­i­ly-based sys­tem is so over­loaded that it ends up cre­at­ing unre­al­is­tic hopes in peo­ple that they’ll be able to immi­grate to the US. If your sib­ling moves to the US on a work visa, for exam­ple, you might start to hope that he’ll even­tu­al­ly be able to bring you along — but if you try to plan your life around that, you’ll end up wait­ing for two decades.

    There are hints all this pan­ic over “chain migra­tion” is real­ly about fear of cul­tur­al change

    ...

    But the most stal­wart oppo­nents of “chain migra­tion,” the ones who use it to refer to all fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion, peri­od, are talk­ing not just about the mechan­ics of the chain but about a big­ger nor­ma­tive ques­tion: whether allow­ing immi­grants to come as fam­i­ly units, or allow­ing peo­ple to immi­grate based on fam­i­ly rela­tion­ships, gives the US too lit­tle con­trol over who gets to come.

    The ulti­mate impres­sion of both the White House and Num­ber­sUSA “chain migra­tion” dia­grams is to make it seem that admit­ting a sin­gle immi­grant unleash­es an uncon­trol­lable tide of infi­nite future fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion — that each immi­grant is a one-per­son Tro­jan horse for hun­dreds more.

    [see pro-Brex­it cam­paign poster]

    “As more and more immi­grants are admit­ted to the Unit­ed States, the pop­u­la­tion eli­gi­ble to spon­sor their rel­a­tives for green cards increas­es expo­nen­tial­ly,” the restric­tion­ist group FAIR says on its web­site. “This means that every time one immi­grant is admit­ted, the door is opened to many more.”

    This potent visu­al is why “chain migra­tion” has been a long­time tar­get of immi­gra­tion restric­tion­ists, even when the Repub­li­can Par­ty as a whole was attempt­ing to wel­come legal immi­grants. For peo­ple whose biggest fear regard­ing immi­gra­tion is that immi­grants will change the face of Amer­i­ca — that they’ll tram­ple the country’s “tra­di­tion­al­ly” white, Chris­t­ian major­i­ty — there’s lit­tle more potent than the idea of immi­grants bring­ing over huge fam­i­lies, replant­i­ng their com­mu­ni­ties whole in Amer­i­can soil.

    This fear goes hand in hand with a fear that immi­grants won’t assim­i­late. When immi­gra­tion restric­tion­ists cite the sec­ond quar­ter of the 20th cen­tu­ry as a great time for the Unit­ed States, they’re not (at least explic­it­ly) prais­ing the racist coun­try quo­tas that gov­erned immi­gra­tion at the time. They’re (explic­it­ly) prais­ing the fact that, with over­all immi­gra­tion lev­els low, immi­grants were forced to inter­act with and even­tu­al­ly inte­grate among US cit­i­zens. The more immi­grants that come over — and espe­cial­ly the more that immi­grants bring their fam­i­lies over — the less, in the­o­ry, that they and their descen­dants will have to inter­act with peo­ple from out­side of their com­mu­ni­ty. In turn, this gets into fears that parts of Amer­i­ca could become alien to Amer­i­cans — cul­tur­al, or lit­er­al, “no-go zones.”

    The use of “chain migra­tion” in the cur­rent debate over DACA, to refer to DACA recip­i­ents allow­ing their par­ents to become legal immi­grants, com­pli­cates the mat­ter even fur­ther. Because the par­ents of DACA recip­i­ents have, by def­i­n­i­tion, lived in the US as unau­tho­rized immi­grants, this isn’t real­ly about bring­ing new peo­ple into the US — it’s about legal­iz­ing peo­ple who are already here (or bring­ing peo­ple back who have been deport­ed, some­thing US pol­i­cy already makes pret­ty hard).

    ...

    Because these memes, and the fears that they pro­voke, are all so tight­ly con­nect­ed, “chain migra­tion” is both an ide­o­log­i­cal con­cern about Amer­i­ca select­ing immi­grants based on their mer­it, and a racist smoke­screen for fears of demo­graph­ic change. It can be hard to sep­a­rate the two. And it’s cer­tain­ly not in the inter­ests of the oppo­nents of “chain migra­tion” to try.

    There’s a rea­son that fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion has last­ed as long as it has

    It’s a lot eas­i­er to get peo­ple to agree, in the­o­ry, that the US should be accept­ing immi­grants on the basis of “mer­it” — i.e., with­out con­cern for whether they have rel­a­tives liv­ing here — than it is to get them to agree on exact­ly what should be done to reduce the impor­tance of fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion to the cur­rent sys­tem.

    For one thing, many pol­i­cy­mak­ers, includ­ing many Repub­li­cans, see allow­ing some fam­i­ly mem­bers to immi­grate as an impor­tant fac­tor in encour­ag­ing inte­gra­tion. Allow­ing immi­grants to bring along their spous­es and minor chil­dren, for exam­ple, makes it less like­ly that they’ll decide to return to their home coun­tries — and it means their chil­dren will grow up Amer­i­can, in more ways than one.

    There are also pol­i­cy­mak­ers who see fam­i­ly uni­ty as a val­ue worth pro­tect­ing for its own sake (an argu­ment you’ll often hear among reli­gious advo­cates). And there’s, of course, an eth­nic com­po­nent. Asian Amer­i­cans, in par­tic­u­lar, feel that they are still try­ing to make up ground after decades of racist exclu­sion from the immi­gra­tion sys­tem — and fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion has been the best way for them to make that ground up. Mex­i­can Amer­i­cans, too, feel that the cur­rent sys­tem has unfair­ly forced Mex­i­can immi­grant fam­i­lies to be sep­a­rat­ed while oth­er fam­i­lies get to reunite with ease.

    All of these objec­tions have com­bined, so far, to make Democ­rats firm­ly opposed to any pro­pos­al that would restrict future fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion. But as “chain migra­tion” begins to eclipse oth­er issues (like immi­gra­tion enforce­ment in the inte­ri­or of the US) as a top Repub­li­can pri­or­i­ty, it’s not clear whether Democ­rats’ com­mit­ment to hypo­thet­i­cal legal immi­grants of the future is going to win out over their com­mit­ment to legal­iz­ing unau­tho­rized immi­grants who are cur­rent­ly here.

    ———-

    “What “chain migra­tion” real­ly means — and why Don­ald Trump hates it so much” by Dara Lind­dara; Vox; 12/29/2017

    “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’:

    ...
    The Social Con­tract was a forum for con­cerns about the threat of mass immi­gra­tion (par­tic­u­lar­ly mass non­white immi­gra­tion) to the Unit­ed States. (The South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter, which con­sid­ers all Tan­ton-affil­i­at­ed insti­tu­tions to be “hate groups,” run­down of some of the journal’s more incen­di­ary con­tent.) Massey, on the oth­er hand is a long­time sup­port­er of reforms that would make it eas­i­er for immi­grants to come to Amer­i­ca.

    An arti­cle by a sup­port­er of expan­sive immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy could be reprint­ed, with few appar­ent edits, in a jour­nal for his intel­lec­tu­al oppo­nents only because the debate over chain migra­tion is fun­da­men­tal­ly not about whether it hap­pens, but whether it’s okay. Defend­ers of chain migra­tion tend to argue that it’s impor­tant for immi­grants to put down roots in the US, and that hav­ing a fam­i­ly here is part of what that means.

    Oppo­nents, on the oth­er hand, see fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion as the gov­ern­ment ced­ing some con­trol for who gets to come here, so that it’s not select­ing indi­vid­u­als in a vac­u­um — which leads rapid­ly to fears of the US gov­ern­ment los­ing con­trol of the immi­gra­tion sys­tem entire­ly.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The ulti­mate impres­sion of both the White House and Num­ber­sUSA “chain migra­tion” dia­grams is to make it seem that admit­ting a sin­gle immi­grant unleash­es an uncon­trol­lable tide of infi­nite future fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion — that each immi­grant is a one-per­son Tro­jan horse for hun­dreds more.

    [see pro-Brex­it cam­paign poster]

    “As more and more immi­grants are admit­ted to the Unit­ed States, the pop­u­la­tion eli­gi­ble to spon­sor their rel­a­tives for green cards increas­es expo­nen­tial­ly,” the restric­tion­ist group FAIR says on its web­site. “This means that every time one immi­grant is admit­ted, the door is opened to many more.”

    This potent visu­al is why “chain migra­tion” has been a long­time tar­get of immi­gra­tion restric­tion­ists, even when the Repub­li­can Par­ty as a whole was attempt­ing to wel­come legal immi­grants. For peo­ple whose biggest fear regard­ing immi­gra­tion is that immi­grants will change the face of Amer­i­ca — that they’ll tram­ple the country’s “tra­di­tion­al­ly” white, Chris­t­ian major­i­ty — there’s lit­tle more potent than the idea of immi­grants bring­ing over huge fam­i­lies, replant­i­ng their com­mu­ni­ties whole in Amer­i­can soil.
    ...

    And it seems like Pres­i­dent Trump might actu­al­ly believe this is how US immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy works:

    ...
    The actu­al pol­i­cy behind “chain migra­tion”

    It’s not clear whether Pres­i­dent Trump under­stands how fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion actu­al­ly works — and when it can lead to “chains” of rel­a­tives. Trump has claimed that the man who ran over sev­er­al pedes­tri­ans in New York in Novem­ber brought 23 (some­times he says 24) rel­a­tives to the US in the sev­en years he’d lived here — a claim that chain migra­tion oppo­nent Mark Kriko­ri­an of the Cen­ter for Immi­gra­tion stud­ies said was impos­si­ble. And the White House’s “chain migra­tion” dia­gram makes it looks like each gen­er­a­tion of adults brings in chil­dren, which brings their chil­dren — which isn’t how chain migra­tion works.

    To bet­ter under­stand what poli­cies, exact­ly, oppo­nents of “chain migra­tion” are wor­ried about, check out this chart from the restric­tion­ist advo­ca­cy group Num­ber­sUSA — which is a more detailed rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the same fear of over­whelm­ing, uncon­trol­lable waves of migra­tion.

    [see absurd Num­ber­sUSA graph­ic show­ing a sin­gle immi­grant lead­ing to thou­sands of new immi­grants and chil­dren]

    Let’s walk through the sce­nario in that chart. It depicts an immi­grant who’s come to the US on an employ­ment-based green card (in black) and is able to bring over his spouse and chil­dren imme­di­ate­ly. He can also — after he becomes a cit­i­zen (some­thing the Num­ber­sUSA chart doesn’t clar­i­fy) — peti­tion for his par­ents and sib­lings to come to the US on green cards (all in gray).

    The sib­lings all bring over their spous­es and chil­dren imme­di­ate­ly, and the spous­es (in orange, maroon, navy, and teal) can (upon nat­u­ral­iza­tion) peti­tion to bring over their own par­ents and sib­lings. The orig­i­nal immigrant’s par­ents (even­tu­al­ly) peti­tion for their own sib­lings to come to the US, and the sib­lings then peti­tion to bring over their mar­ried adult chil­dren — whose spous­es can then (eventually)petition for their own par­ents and sib­lings, etc., etc.

    Mean­while, the orig­i­nal immigrant’s spouse, once she becomes a cit­i­zen, can peti­tion for her par­ents (in pink) and her sib­lings (in blue, pur­ple, red, and green). Those sib­lings bring over their spous­es, who sub­se­quent­ly peti­tion for their own par­ents and sib­lings, etc., etc.

    There are a ton of assump­tions in this mod­el about the way immi­grants behave — why is every­one in fam­i­lies of four or five? Does no one real­ly want to stay in her home coun­try? Is there no such thing as a bach­e­lor in any of these fam­i­lies? — but the visa cat­e­gories under US law make it a hypo­thet­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty. But the thing is, US pol­i­cy­mak­ers know that it’s a hypo­thet­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty. And there are safe­guards built into the sys­tem that restrict fam­i­ly-based immi­gra­tion far more than the dia­gram would have you believe.

    ...

    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:

    ...
    In prac­tice, bring­ing over a fam­i­ly mem­ber takes years — which makes it very hard to build a chain

    No one is auto­mat­i­cal­ly allowed to immi­grate to the US. Any­one apply­ing for res­i­den­cy in the coun­try has to go through a stan­dard vet­ting process — includ­ing a crim­i­nal and ter­ror­ism back­ground check, and an eval­u­a­tion of whether they’re like­ly to become a “pub­lic charge” in the US (i.e., be unable to sup­port them­selves for income and rely on social pro­grams).

    ...

    The cat­e­gories that do cre­ate chains are strict­ly capped: 23,400 mar­ried chil­dren of US cit­i­zens (plus their own spous­es and minor chil­dren) are allowed to immi­grate each year, and 67,500 adult sib­lings of US cit­i­zens (plus spous­es and minor chil­dren). Fur­ther­more, because the total num­ber of immi­grants com­ing from a par­tic­u­lar coun­try each year is capped, would-be immi­grants from Mex­i­co, Chi­na, India, and the Philip­pines end up fac­ing even longer wait times.

    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).
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 22, 2018, 1:13 am
  11. 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 Wash­ing­ton Post

    The fate of the ‘dream­ers’ lies in Paul Ryan’s hands

    By Paul Wald­man
    Jan­u­ary 23, 2018 at 1:42 PM

    Amid all the talk of who “won” the gov­ern­ment shut­down, there’s an extreme­ly impor­tant ques­tion that needs to be asked, one that con­cerns real people’s lives: What hap­pens now to the “dream­ers”?

    Almost every­one in both par­ties pro­fess­es to care about the young peo­ple who were brought to Amer­i­ca as chil­dren and grew up here, whom Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma pro­tect­ed by installing the Deferred Action for Child­hood Arrivals (DACA) pro­gram, which Pres­i­dent Trump can­celed last fall. Can they actu­al­ly hope to be pro­tect­ed? Will the deal Democ­rats made with Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Mitch McConnell (R‑Ky.) result in a per­ma­nent exten­sion of DACA and a path to cit­i­zen­ship for them? Will Trump betray them at the urg­ing of his hard-line anti-immi­grant advis­ers?

    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.

    The agree­ment Sen­ate Democ­rats struck with McConnell was the fol­low­ing: they would sup­port reopen­ing the gov­ern­ment until Feb. 8, and between now and then, McConnell would allow a vote on an immi­gra­tion bill that would pro­vide pro­tec­tions for the dream­ers. There are a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent pro­pos­als float­ing around, but the bill will prob­a­bly include some mon­ey for a bor­der wall and oth­er restric­tions that Repub­li­cans want, such as end­ing the diver­si­ty visa lot­tery.

    But what­ev­er the Sen­ate pass­es would then have to pass the House. The trou­ble there isn’t get­ting the votes, because a bill that was accept­able to the Sen­ate would like­ly be able to pass the House with­out much of a prob­lem. Pre­sum­ing all or near­ly all House Democ­rats vote for it, it would only need two dozen of the 238 Repub­li­can mem­bers to join in. The ques­tion is whether Ryan would allow a vote on a bill. If he does not, the dream­ers would lose their work per­mits and like­ly be dri­ven under­ground. Some could be deport­ed — ripped away from their fam­i­lies and the coun­try they grew up in, to be sent back to places they bare­ly know. It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say their lives are in Ryan’s hands.

    And what do we know about what he’ll do? Like most Repub­li­cans, when ques­tioned about dream­ers, Ryan says the right things. Last Jan­u­ary, Ryan had a pow­er­ful exchange with a dream­er mom, dur­ing which he hailed her con­tri­bu­tion to her com­mu­ni­ty and said he and Trump want to act to allow peo­ple like her to “get right with the law.” More recent­ly, in Sep­tem­ber, he said that dream­ers should “rest easy,” because the Repub­li­can-con­trolled Con­gress would make sure they get to stay. In Decem­ber, he again said he want­ed to “make sure that we don’t pull the rug out from under peo­ple.”

    But if Ryan is going to be true to those sen­ti­ments, he might have to break anoth­er promise — one he made to the hard-right Free­dom Cau­cus.

    In 2015, when Ryan was vying for House speak­er, Free­dom Cau­cus mem­ber Rep. Mo Brooks (R‑Ala.) demand­ed and received a promise from Ryan that, even after Oba­ma was gone, Ryan would allow no immi­gra­tion bill to be vot­ed on unless it had the sup­port of “a major­i­ty of the major­i­ty.”

    So let’s say the Sen­ate pass­es a bill to pro­tect dream­ers. That bill might or might not be able to get a major­i­ty of House Repub­li­cans. Either way, Ryan may refuse to allow the bill to come to a vote — in effect veto­ing any com­pro­mise. Then we could be fac­ing anoth­er gov­ern­ment shut­down.

    Minus the shut­down, that’s what hap­pened in 2013. A bipar­ti­san “Gang of Eight” spent months craft­ing a com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform bill, which passed the Sen­ate 68–32. When it was sent to the House, Speak­er John A. Boehn­er killed it in def­er­ence to his party’s hard-right wing. Then as now, the bill would have passed if Boehn­er had allowed it to be vot­ed on.

    But what about Trump, you might ask? His own feel­ings are flu­id on this issue, depend­ing on what he saw any giv­en morn­ing on “Fox & Friends,” or whether his lat­est dou­ble cheese­burg­er is sit­ting right. He says admir­ing things about the dream­ers, but he’s also an obvi­ous big­ot who wants to make Amer­i­ca more white. We’ve seen many times how he can be pulled back from con­cil­ia­to­ry posi­tions by the hard-lin­ers on his staff, includ­ing John F. Kel­ly and Stephen Miller.

    ...

    That leaves it up to Ryan. He’s already under pres­sure from his right, and this morn­ing Politi­co reports that House Major­i­ty Whip Steve Scalise (R‑La.) “told us the House doesn’t feel at all bound by [McConnell’s] agree­ment with Sen­ate Democ­rats to con­sid­er immi­gra­tion leg­is­la­tion by Feb. 8.”

    What it ulti­mate­ly comes down to is these ques­tions: How deep is Ryan’s cru­el­ty? Will he con­demn hun­dreds of thou­sands of dream­ers to pos­si­ble depor­ta­tion because he’s afraid of the ultra-right mem­bers of his cau­cus? Or will he do what he him­self says is the right thing?

    We all know that once the threat of the gov­ern­ment shut­down has passed, there won’t be any immi­gra­tion com­pro­mise. The con­flicts with­in the Repub­li­can Par­ty are just too deep. So it’s now or nev­er, and the fact that dream­ers are going to have to rely on Paul Ryan’s human­i­ty makes it hard to be opti­mistic.

    ———-

    “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:

    ...
    The agree­ment Sen­ate Democ­rats struck with McConnell was the fol­low­ing: they would sup­port reopen­ing the gov­ern­ment until Feb. 8, and between now and then, McConnell would allow a vote on an immi­gra­tion bill that would pro­vide pro­tec­tions for the dream­ers. There are a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent pro­pos­als float­ing around, but the bill will prob­a­bly include some mon­ey for a bor­der wall and oth­er restric­tions that Repub­li­cans want, such as end­ing the diver­si­ty visa lot­tery.

    But what­ev­er the Sen­ate pass­es would then have to pass the House. The trou­ble there isn’t get­ting the votes, because a bill that was accept­able to the Sen­ate would like­ly be able to pass the House with­out much of a prob­lem. Pre­sum­ing all or near­ly all House Democ­rats vote for it, it would only need two dozen of the 238 Repub­li­can mem­bers to join in. The ques­tion is whether Ryan would allow a vote on a bill. If he does not, the dream­ers would lose their work per­mits and like­ly be dri­ven under­ground. Some could be deport­ed — ripped away from their fam­i­lies and the coun­try they grew up in, to be sent back to places they bare­ly know. It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say their lives are in Ryan’s hands.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Almost every­one in both par­ties pro­fess­es to care about the young peo­ple who were brought to Amer­i­ca as chil­dren and grew up here, whom Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma pro­tect­ed by installing the Deferred Action for Child­hood Arrivals (DACA) pro­gram, which Pres­i­dent Trump can­celed last fall. Can they actu­al­ly hope to be pro­tect­ed? Will the deal Democ­rats made with Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Mitch McConnell (R‑Ky.) result in a per­ma­nent exten­sion of DACA and a path to cit­i­zen­ship for them? Will Trump betray them at the urg­ing of his hard-line anti-immi­grant advis­ers?

    ...

    And what do we know about what he’ll do? Like most Repub­li­cans, when ques­tioned about dream­ers, Ryan says the right things. Last Jan­u­ary, Ryan had a pow­er­ful exchange with a dream­er mom, dur­ing which he hailed her con­tri­bu­tion to her com­mu­ni­ty and said he and Trump want to act to allow peo­ple like her to “get right with the law.” More recent­ly, in Sep­tem­ber, he said that dream­ers should “rest easy,” because the Repub­li­can-con­trolled Con­gress would make sure they get to stay. In Decem­ber, he again said he want­ed to “make sure that we don’t pull the rug out from under peo­ple.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    But if Ryan is going to be true to those sen­ti­ments, he might have to break anoth­er promise — one he made to the hard-right Free­dom Cau­cus.

    In 2015, when Ryan was vying for House speak­er, Free­dom Cau­cus mem­ber Rep. Mo Brooks (R‑Ala.) demand­ed and received a promise from Ryan that, even after Oba­ma was gone, Ryan would allow no immi­gra­tion bill to be vot­ed on unless it had the sup­port of “a major­i­ty of the major­i­ty.”

    So let’s say the Sen­ate pass­es a bill to pro­tect dream­ers. That bill might or might not be able to get a major­i­ty of House Repub­li­cans. Either way, Ryan may refuse to allow the bill to come to a vote — in effect veto­ing any com­pro­mise. Then we could be fac­ing anoth­er gov­ern­ment shut­down.

    Minus the shut­down, that’s what hap­pened in 2013. A bipar­ti­san “Gang of Eight” spent months craft­ing a com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform bill, which passed the Sen­ate 68–32. When it was sent to the House, Speak­er John A. Boehn­er killed it in def­er­ence to his party’s hard-right wing. Then as now, the bill would have passed if Boehn­er had allowed it to be vot­ed on.
    ...

    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:

    ...

    We all know that once the threat of the gov­ern­ment shut­down has passed, there won’t be any immi­gra­tion com­pro­mise. The con­flicts with­in the Repub­li­can Par­ty are just too deep. So it’s now or nev­er, and the fact that dream­ers are going to have to rely on Paul Ryan’s human­i­ty makes it hard to be opti­mistic.

    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:

    Politi­co

    Scalise says House not bound by McConnel­l’s deal with Sen­ate Democ­rats

    01/23/2018 06:18 AM EST

    As the Sen­ate was vot­ing yes­ter­day, we head­ed up to the third floor of the capi­tol to sit down with HOUSE MAJORITY WHIP STEVE SCALISE (R‑LA.). Scalise was recent­ly dis­charged from the hos­pi­tal, where he had anoth­er post-shoot­ing surgery. Mon­day was his first day back in the Capi­tol.

    SCALISE was in good spir­its. He was sharp — espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing he had surgery less than two weeks ago. He had a few thoughts about the immi­gra­tion debate… Keep this in mind: Scalise — and Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHen­ry of North Car­oli­na — inter­act with every sin­gle House Repub­li­can. They know the mood of the con­fer­ence as well as any­one.

    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.”

    We asked SCALISE if Gra­ham-Durbin — the bipar­ti­san immi­gra­tion deal du jour — stands a chance, and he said “not in the House.” “It’s good for every­body to put their ideas on paper but ulti­mate­ly there are things that can and can­not pass in the House. And we have to work through those details and we’re work­ing through them.”

    SCALISE said he thought it would “excite our base” if they get a big immi­gra­tion deal. But he said blunt­ly: “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.”

    ...

    – EXPECTATION SETTING: The Sen­ate seems quite ready to tack­le a big, bipar­ti­san immi­gra­tion deal. The only big leg­is­la­tion the House has passed in the last year is a tax bill, which was done with Repub­li­cans only. As we kick off this immi­gra­tion debate, set your expec­ta­tions to the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor. Yes, it’s true that if put on truth serum, a major­i­ty of the House would prob­a­bly sup­port the DREAM Act. But in the real world, the lead­er­ship will be wor­ried about their own preser­va­tion, and con­ser­v­a­tives will ensure the debate tacks to the right.

    … OF COURSE, there’s a case to be made that the House will feel such intense polit­i­cal pres­sure that they’ll have to put some­thing on the floor that a huge chunk of the con­fer­ence hates. Time will only tell. But we think that’s unlike­ly.

    ———-

    “Scalise says House not bound by McConnel­l’s deal with Sen­ate Democ­rats”; Politi­co; 01/23/2018

    “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”:

    ...
    We asked SCALISE if Gra­ham-Durbin — the bipar­ti­san immi­gra­tion deal du jour — stands a chance, and he said “not in the House.” “It’s good for every­body to put their ideas on paper but ulti­mate­ly there are things that can and can­not pass in the House. And we have to work through those details and we’re work­ing through them.”

    SCALISE said he thought it would “excite our base” if they get a big immi­gra­tion deal. But he said blunt­ly: “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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 24, 2018, 5:26 pm
  12. 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:

    The New York­er

    A Con­ser­v­a­tive Non­prof­it That Seeks to Trans­form Col­lege Cam­pus­es Faces Alle­ga­tions of Racial Bias and Ille­gal Cam­paign Activ­i­ty

    By Jane May­er

    Decem­ber 21, 2017

    On Tues­day, in a con­ven­tion cen­ter in West Palm Beach, Flori­da, amid chants of “USA!” and “The wall is going to be built!,” Don­ald Trump, Jr., kicked off a three-day annu­al sum­mit for Turn­ing Point USA, a con­ser­v­a­tive non­prof­it. Based out­side of Chica­go, Turn­ing Point’s aim is to foment a polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion on America’s col­lege cam­pus­es, in part by fun­nelling mon­ey into stu­dent gov­ern­ment elec­tions across the coun­try to elect right-lean­ing can­di­dates. But it is secre­tive about its fund­ing and its donors, rais­ing the prospect that “dark mon­ey” may now be shap­ing not just state and fed­er­al races but ones on cam­pus..

    Turn­ing Point touts its close rela­tion­ship with the President’s fam­i­ly. The group’s Web site pro­mot­ed Don, Jr.,’s appear­ance for weeks, fea­tur­ing a pho­to of him rais­ing a clenched fist. Its pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als include a quote from the younger Trump prais­ing Turn­ing Point: “What you guys have done” is “just amaz­ing.” Lara Trump, the wife of Don, Jr.,’s broth­er Eric, is also involved with the group. In West Palm Beach on Wednes­day, she host­ed a lun­cheon pro­mot­ing Turn­ing Point’s com­ing Young Women’s Lead­er­ship Sum­mit. The group’s twen­ty-four-year-old exec­u­tive direc­tor and founder, Char­lie Kirk, told me that he counts Don, Jr., as “a per­son­al friend.”

    Turn­ing Point casts itself as a grass­roots response to what it per­ceives as lib­er­al intol­er­ance on col­lege cam­pus­es. Kirk has called col­lege cam­pus­es “islands of total­i­tar­i­an­ism”; he and his sup­port­ers con­tend that con­ser­v­a­tives are the true vic­tims of dis­crim­i­na­tion in Amer­i­ca, and he has vowed to fight back on behalf of what he has called his “Team Right.” Kirk is a fre­quent guest on Fox News, and last sum­mer he was invit­ed to give a speech at the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion. That was where he met Don­ald Trump, Jr., and “hit it off” with him, Kirk said. After the con­ven­tion, Kirk divid­ed his time between Turn­ing Point activ­i­ties and work­ing for the Trump cam­paign as a spe­cial­ist in youth out­reach. “I helped coör­di­nate some rather suc­cess­ful events with him,” Kirk told me, refer­ring to Don, Jr., “and I also car­ried his bags.” When friends threw Kirk a sur­prise birth­day par­ty ear­li­er this year, Don, Jr., attend­ed, as did Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka, the for­mer Trump White House advis­er.

    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.”

    Clan­ton, who resigned after serv­ing as the group’s sec­ond-high­est offi­cial for five years, at first declined to com­ment. “I’m no longer with Turn­ing Point and wish not to be a part of the sto­ry,” Clan­ton told me over e‑mail. Lat­er, in a sec­ond e‑mail, she said, “I have no rec­ol­lec­tion of these mes­sages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a teenag­er.”

    John Ryan O’Rourke, the for­mer Turn­ing Point employ­ee who received the text mes­sages from Clan­ton, request­ed that the mes­sages “not be used in any arti­cle or back­ground infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing Turn­ing Point” and declined to com­ment on them. Kirk said in an e‑mail that “Turn­ing Point assessed the sit­u­a­tion and took deci­sive action with­in 72 hours of being made aware of the issue.” Soon after, Clan­ton left the orga­ni­za­tion.

    While Kirk served as the pub­lic face of Turn­ing Point, Clan­ton, its for­mer field direc­tor, act­ed as its hands-on boss, accord­ing to for­mer employ­ees. In a 2016 book that Kirk co-authored with Brent Hamachek, “Time for a Turn­ing Point: Set­ting a Course Toward Free Mar­kets and Lim­it­ed Gov­ern­ment for Future Gen­er­a­tions,” he described Clan­ton as “the best hire we ever could have made.” He called her “inte­gral to the suc­cess of Turn­ing Point while effec­tive­ly serv­ing as its chief oper­at­ing offi­cer.” He added, “Turn­ing Point needs more Crys­tals; so does Amer­i­ca.”

    For­mer Turn­ing Point employ­ees say that the orga­ni­za­tion was a dif­fi­cult work­place and rife with ten­sion, some of it racial. Gabrielle Fequiere, a for­mer Turn­ing Point employ­ee, told me that she was the only African-Amer­i­can hired as a field direc­tor when she worked with the group, three years ago. “In look­ing back, I think it was racist,” she said. “At the time, I was blam­ing myself, and I thought I did some­thing wrong.” Fequiere, who now works as a mod­el, recalled that the young black recruits that she brought into the orga­ni­za­tion sud­den­ly found them­selves dis­in­vit­ed from the group’s annu­al stu­dent sum­mit, and that when she her­self attend­ed, she watched speak­ers there who “spoke bad­ly about black women hav­ing all these babies out of wed­lock. It was real­ly offen­sive.” (Kirk, through a spokesman, denied that any such inci­dents occurred, and said, “These accu­sa­tions are absolute­ly base­less and even absurd.”)

    Fequiere said that Clan­ton fired her on Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., Day, on the grounds that she was not per­form­ing her job well. “I was the only black Amer­i­can employ­ee they had, and they fired me on M.L.K. Day—it was so rude!” Fequiere told me. She added, “I felt very uncom­fort­able work­ing there because I was black,” but she said she had seen white employ­ees mis­treat­ed, as well. “My Demo­c­ra­t­ic friends had told me that some Repub­li­cans didn’t care about the poor and minori­ties, and I thought it wasn’t true, but then I found the peo­ple they were talk­ing about!”

    Speak­ers at Turn­ing Point events on var­i­ous col­lege cam­pus­es have been accused of going out of their way to thumb their noses at eth­nic and cul­tur­al sen­si­tiv­i­ties. The con­ser­v­a­tive provo­ca­teur Milo Yiannopou­los, for instance, whose appear­ance Turn­ing Point co-host­ed with the Col­lege Repub­li­cans at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado, in Boul­der, said that despite being gay, he hat­ed “fag­gots,” les­bians, and fem­i­nists, who, he said, “fuck­ing hate men.”

    In an effort to mock cam­pus oppo­si­tion to hate speech, mem­bers of the Turn­ing Point chap­ter at Kent State Uni­ver­si­ty staged a protest last fall in which they appeared on cam­pus wear­ing adult dia­pers and suck­ing on paci­fiers while pro­claim­ing “Safe Spaces are for Chil­dren.” The protest stirred wide­spread ridicule, and Kirk’s spokesman said that he dis­ap­proved of the dis­play and lat­er issued guide­lines against oth­er chap­ters repeat­ing it.

    Kirk grew up in Wheel­ing, Illi­nois, and was an Eagle Scout; in a 2015 speech to the Con­ser­v­a­tive Forum of Sil­i­con Val­ley, he said that his “No. 1 dream in life” was to attend West Point, but the slot he con­sid­ered his went to “a far less-qual­i­fied can­di­date of a dif­fer­ent gen­der and a dif­fer­ent per­sua­sion” whose test scores he claimed he knew. (Kirk said he was being sar­cas­tic when he made the com­ment.) An old­er acquain­tance encour­aged him to for­go col­lege and launch a con­ser­v­a­tive ana­logue to the pro­gres­sive advo­ca­cy group MoveOn.org. Kirk acknowl­edged in an inter­view that it is some­thing of an irony that he heads an orga­ni­za­tion devot­ed to wag­ing polit­i­cal war­fare on cam­pus­es when he nev­er actu­al­ly attend­ed col­lege him­self. “I joke that I wasn’t smart enough to go to a four-year school,” Kirk told me, although he not­ed that he con­tin­ued his stud­ies at a com­mu­ni­ty col­lege.

    MoveOn, how­ev­er, has one part set up as a super PAC, and anoth­er as a 501©4 “social-wel­fare group,” both of which are legal­ly allowed to engage in polit­i­cal elec­tions. It also has a pol­i­cy of dis­clos­ing the names of any­one con­tribut­ing five thou­sand dol­lars or more. In con­trast, Turn­ing Point is a 501©3 char­i­ty. This means that, unlike MoveOn donors, Turn­ing Point donors can take tax deduc­tions for their con­tri­bu­tions and remain anony­mous. In exchange for these ben­e­fits, how­ev­er, the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice strict­ly pro­hibits char­i­ties such as Turn­ing Point from engag­ing either direct­ly or indi­rect­ly in polit­i­cal elec­tions.

    Sev­er­al for­mer Turn­ing Point employ­ees told me in inter­views that they felt they were asked to par­tic­i­pate in activ­i­ties that crossed lines drawn by cam­paign-finance laws for groups like theirs. Pay­den Hall, who worked for Turn­ing Point dur­ing the 2016 Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, told me that Clan­ton, who was her boss, e‑mailed her at her Turn­ing Point address to make arrange­ments for her to coör­di­nate with Gin­ni Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, to help Ted Cruz’s Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. “That’s where the ambi­gu­i­ty began,” Hall recalled. Soon after, she said, Gin­ni Thomas, who was sup­port­ing Cruz’s can­di­da­cy and is on Turn­ing Point’s advi­so­ry coun­cil, left a voice mes­sage for Hall and her sis­ter, who also worked for Turn­ing Point, say­ing that she was send­ing two hun­dred Cruz plac­ards to them to dis­trib­ute in the com­ing Wis­con­sin Pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry.

    “Crys­tal gave Gin­ni Thomas my pri­vate mail­ing address with­out my per­mis­sion,” Hall recalled. “They gave out employ­ees’ per­son­al infor­ma­tion to the wife of a Supreme Court Jus­tice.” The next thing she knew, she said, hun­dreds of Cruz plac­ards arrived at her home. “We threw them out,” Hall said. She was a Cruz sup­port­er, but, she says, “We want­ed to vol­un­teer on our own terms, not to give in to pres­sure from a boss. I felt that if it wasn’t cross­ing a legal line, it was cross­ing a pro­fes­sion­al one.”

    Trevor Pot­ter, a for­mer Repub­li­can com­mis­sion­er on the Fed­er­al Elec­tions Com­mis­sion who is the founder and pres­i­dent of the Cam­paign Legal Cen­ter, a non­par­ti­san cam­paign-finance-law watch­dog group, said that Turn­ing Point is barred from aid­ing polit­i­cal cam­paigns. “Under the law, a 501©3 can’t engage in polit­i­cal action or give any­thing of val­ue to a cam­paign, includ­ing stu­dents, or the names of stu­dents,” he said. “If what Turn­ing Point USA was doing was help­ing Repub­li­cans on cam­pus and feed­ing them to cam­paigns, that’s a polit­i­cal oper­a­tion, and it sounds as if it cross­es the line.”

    Reached by phone, Gin­ni Thomas declined to com­ment. Clanton’s lawyer, Robert Graber­mann, said that if she e‑mailed Hall “at her TPUSA email address, it was an hon­est over­sight and sin­cere mis­take on Ms. Clanton’s part. Ms. Clan­ton cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly denies using TPUSA resources to aid any polit­i­cal cam­paign activ­i­ties. She ful­ly under­stands the 501 ©(3) guide­lines, and has on many occa­sions con­sult­ed with legal coun­sel to ensure that all per­son­al cam­paign involve­ment was com­pli­ant with 501 ©(3) rules.”

    Susan Walk­er, who worked for Turn­ing Point USA in Flori­da, in 2016, told me that the group did aid Repub­li­can polit­i­cal cam­paigns. Walk­er said that a list she cre­at­ed while work­ing for Turn­ing Point, with the names of hun­dreds of stu­dent sup­port­ers, was giv­en with­out her knowl­edge to some­one work­ing for Mar­co Rubio’s Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. “That list had, like, sev­en hun­dred kids, and I worked my ass off to get it,” she said. “I had added notes on every stu­dent I talked to, and they were all on it still.” The Rubio oper­a­tive, she added, “shouldn’t have had that list. We were a char­i­ty, and he was on a polit­i­cal cam­paign.”

    E‑mails and inter­views from oth­er for­mer Turn­ing Point employ­ees in South Car­oli­na and Ohio showed crossover between Pres­i­den­tial-cam­paign work and work for the char­i­ty, as well. In South Car­oli­na, a chain of e‑mails shows, Kirk asked a Turn­ing Point USA employ­ee to round up stu­dents to sup­port Cruz at the behest of two offi­cials with a pro-Cruz super PAC. In a Jan­u­ary 25, 2016, e‑mail, Drew Ryun, a Turn­ing Point advi­so­ry-coun­cil mem­ber who was help­ing run one of the pro-Cruz super PACs, asked Kirk to get anoth­er Turn­ing Point employ­ee to “send” the super PAC “as many kids as pos­si­ble.” Ryun, a for­mer deputy direc­tor of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, explained that he need­ed “as many kids as you can gen­er­ate for a WSJ piece on efforts in” South Car­oli­na. After Kirk agreed to help, the e‑mail thread shows, Kirk coör­di­nat­ed with Dan Tripp, Ryun’s asso­ciate at the pro-Cruz super PAC, who head­ed its oper­a­tions in South Car­oli­na and is the founder and pres­i­dent of Ground Game Strate­gies.

    “Yes!” Kirk answered Tripp when asked for help from Turn­ing Point. “What part of SC?”

    “Greenville, Sparten­burg or Ander­son Coun­ties,” Tripp replied.

    “Time of day and how long?” Kirk asked.

    “I’m think­ing 2 hours late Sun­day after­noon. Can­vass­ing, train­ing and piz­za,” Tripp respond­ed.

    “You got it, will recon short­ly,” Kirk e‑mailed back. Kirk explained that a Turn­ing Point employ­ee in South Car­oli­na named Anna Scott Marsh would be the point per­son, and added that “Anna will be help­ing. Let’s rock this!”

    Soon after, e‑mails show, Marsh, the Turn­ing Point employ­ee, promised to round up the request­ed recruits. “Send­ing some­thing out tonight, and will send you a list hope­ful­ly tomor­row ... I’m sure we can find some sol­id stu­dents here.” Marsh declined to com­ment about her e‑mails.

    Asked about these prac­tices, Kirk referred me to a state­ment from his lawyer, Sal­ly Wagen­mak­er: “Turn­ing Point USA works dili­gent­ly to com­ply entire­ly with all rel­e­vant laws and reg­u­la­tions gov­ern­ing not-for-prof­it orga­ni­za­tions. Turn­ing Point USA focus­es on fis­cal con­ser­vatism, free mar­ket eco­nom­ics, and relat­ed stu­dent edu­ca­tion and advo­ca­cy, all com­plete­ly with­in applic­a­ble Sec­tion 501(c)(3) legal con­straints.”

    Ryun con­firmed that the exchanges occurred, but said that Kirk e‑mailed him “via his per­son­al e‑mail and on his per­son­al time!” Tripp, too, con­firmed the e‑mails, but said, “We wel­comed many vol­un­teers to our efforts and were grate­ful for their sup­port. It would be quite trou­bling if cam­paign finance rules were inter­pret­ed to pre­vent con­ser­v­a­tive vol­un­teers from exer­cis­ing their right to be involved in the polit­i­cal process.”

    In a phone inter­view, Kirk declined to iden­ti­fy the donors who have sup­plied his group’s eight-mil­lion-dol­lar-plus annu­al bud­get, not­ing that many pre­fer to remain anony­mous. But Kirk has spo­ken and fund-raised at var­i­ous closed-door ener­gy-indus­try gath­er­ings, includ­ing those of the 2017 board meet­ing of the Nation­al Min­ing Asso­ci­a­tion and the 2016 annu­al meet­ing of the Inde­pen­dent Petro­le­um Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca. In our inter­view, Kirk acknowl­edged that some of his donors “are in the fos­sil-fuel space.”

    Kirk’s ties to fos­sil-fuel mag­nates are con­tro­ver­sial because Turn­ing Point has helped orga­nize oppo­si­tion on cam­pus­es to stu­dents call­ing for schools to divest from fos­sil-fuel com­pa­nies. Turn­ing Point dis­trib­uted a guide for col­lege stu­dents with a fore­word by Kirk, titled “10 Ways Fos­sil Fuels Improve Our Dai­ly Lives.” In it, he argues, “Across the nation, col­lege stu­dents are clam­or­ing for their cam­pus­es to divest from fos­sil fuel ... stu­dents are indoc­tri­nat­ed to believe the myth that fos­sil fuels are dirty and renew­able ener­gy is a plau­si­ble alter­na­tive ... ” Turn­ing Point, which also runs an online “Pro­fes­sor Watch List” that tar­gets pro­fes­sors it believes are lib­er­al, blamed “left­ist pro­fes­sors” in its book­let for hav­ing “per­pet­u­at­ed” these “myths.” In the inter­view, Kirk told me that “We think tar­get­ing fos­sil fuels is rather unfair, and it is not real­ly in the best inter­ests of the uni­ver­si­ties to favor one type of polit­i­cal agen­da over anoth­er.” It’s a mes­sage that “went great,” he said, when he deliv­ered it at ener­gy-indus­try meet­ings.

    Last May, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion pub­lished an inves­tiga­tive report on what it called Turn­ing Point’s “stealth plan for polit­i­cal influ­ence.” The sto­ry recount­ed accu­sa­tions on mul­ti­ple cam­pus­es that the group had fun­nelled mon­ey into stu­dent elec­tions in vio­la­tion of the spend­ing caps and trans­paren­cy require­ments set by those schools. It detailed how stu­dent can­di­dates backed by Turn­ing Point had been forced to drop out of cam­pus elec­tions at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land and Ohio State “after they were caught vio­lat­ing spend­ing rules and attempt­ing to hide the help they received from Turn­ing Point.” It also quot­ed Kirk say­ing in an appear­ance before a con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal group in 2015 that his group was “invest­ing a lot of time and mon­ey and ener­gy” in stu­dent-gov­ern­ment elec­tions. (In the sto­ry, Kirk denied any wrong­do­ing and said it was “com­plete­ly ludi­crous and ridicu­lous that there’s some sort of secret plan.”)

    A copy of a Turn­ing Point brochure pre­pared for poten­tial donors that I obtained pro­vides a glimpse into the group’s tac­tics. (A for­mer Turn­ing Point employ­ee said the brochure was close­ly held, and not post­ed online so that it couldn’t leak.) Its “Cam­pus Vic­to­ry Project” is described as a detailed, mul­ti-phase plan to “com­man­deer the top office of Stu­dent Body Pres­i­dent at each of the most rec­og­niz­able and influ­en­tial Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ties.”

    Phase 1 calls for vic­to­ry in the “Pow­er 5” con­fer­ence schools, includ­ing the Atlantic Coast Con­fer­ence, the Big Ten Con­fer­ence, the Pacif­ic 12 Con­fer­ence, the Big 12 Con­fer­ence, and the South­east­ern Con­fer­ence. Phase 2 calls for win­ning the top stu­dent-gov­ern­ment slots in every Divi­sion 1 N.C.A.A. school, of which it says there are more than three hun­dred. In the first three years of the plan, the brochure says, the group aims to cap­ture the “out­right major­i­ty” of stu­dent-gov­ern­ment posi­tions in eighty per cent of these schools.

    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.”

    Today, Turn­ing Point claims to have a pres­ence on more than a thou­sand col­lege cam­pus­es nation­wide, and to have “a stronger, more orga­nized pres­ence than all the left-wing cam­pus groups com­bined.” Kirk told me his group had start­ed three hun­dred new chap­ters in the past year. The Cam­pus Vic­to­ry Project brochure names more than fifty four-year col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties where it claims the group helped effec­tu­ate stu­dent gov­ern­ment vic­to­ries in the 2016–17 year, includ­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, Syra­cuse, Pur­due, Michi­gan State, Wake For­est, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, and it names a hun­dred and twen­ty-two more schools whose gov­ern­ments the group hopes to “com­man­deer” in Phase 2. The brochure notes that com­plet­ing the task will take mon­ey: specif­i­cal­ly, $2.2 mil­lion.

    ...

    The prospect of “dark money”—contributions from anony­mous donors to nation­al ide­o­log­i­cal groups—flowing into cam­pus elec­tions has alarmed some stu­dents. “Stu­dents were out­raged that our elec­tions were being influ­enced from out­side,” Danielle Di Scala, who last year was vice-pres­i­dent of the stu­dent gov­ern­ment at Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, said. “I’d nev­er seen that before, but it’s start­ing to be a trend. The prob­lem,” she told me, “is it can price some stu­dent can­di­dates out of the mar­ket when oth­ers are get­ting mon­ey from groups with unlim­it­ed funds.”

    Andy Mac­Crack­en, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Nation­al Cam­pus Lead­er­ship Coun­cil, said he wor­ries that cam­pus elec­tions are “par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble” to out­side mon­ey, “because there aren’t real­ly any stan­dard rules.” Mac­Crack­en says it’s been “shock­ing to see how much of an oper­a­tion there is from Turn­ing Point,” adding that “there’s real­ly noth­ing com­pa­ra­ble that I’m aware of from left-wing groups.”. The push, he sug­gest­ed, reflects a recog­ni­tion on the part of con­ser­v­a­tives about the future val­ue of stu­dent lead­ers. “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,” he says, “is that so much of this is in the dark.”

    ———–

    “A Con­ser­v­a­tive Non­prof­it That Seeks to Trans­form Col­lege Cam­pus­es Faces Alle­ga­tions of Racial Bias and Ille­gal Cam­paign Activ­i­ty” by Jane May­er; The New York­er; 12/21/2017

    “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:

    ...
    Turn­ing Point touts its close rela­tion­ship with the President’s fam­i­ly. The group’s Web site pro­mot­ed Don, Jr.,’s appear­ance for weeks, fea­tur­ing a pho­to of him rais­ing a clenched fist. Its pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als include a quote from the younger Trump prais­ing Turn­ing Point: “What you guys have done” is “just amaz­ing.” Lara Trump, the wife of Don, Jr.,’s broth­er Eric, is also involved with the group. In West Palm Beach on Wednes­day, she host­ed a lun­cheon pro­mot­ing Turn­ing Point’s com­ing Young Women’s Lead­er­ship Sum­mit. The group’s twen­ty-four-year-old exec­u­tive direc­tor and founder, Char­lie Kirk, told me that he counts Don, Jr., as “a per­son­al friend.”

    Turn­ing Point casts itself as a grass­roots response to what it per­ceives as lib­er­al intol­er­ance on col­lege cam­pus­es. Kirk has called col­lege cam­pus­es “islands of total­i­tar­i­an­ism”; he and his sup­port­ers con­tend that con­ser­v­a­tives are the true vic­tims of dis­crim­i­na­tion in Amer­i­ca, and he has vowed to fight back on behalf of what he has called his “Team Right.” Kirk is a fre­quent guest on Fox News, and last sum­mer he was invit­ed to give a speech at the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion. That was where he met Don­ald Trump, Jr., and “hit it off” with him, Kirk said. After the con­ven­tion, Kirk divid­ed his time between Turn­ing Point activ­i­ties and work­ing for the Trump cam­paign as a spe­cial­ist in youth out­reach. “I helped coör­di­nate some rather suc­cess­ful events with him,” Kirk told me, refer­ring to Don, Jr., “and I also car­ried his bags.” When friends threw Kirk a sur­prise birth­day par­ty ear­li­er this year, Don, Jr., attend­ed, as did Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka, the for­mer Trump White House advis­er.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    For­mer Turn­ing Point employ­ees say that the orga­ni­za­tion was a dif­fi­cult work­place and rife with ten­sion, some of it racial. Gabrielle Fequiere, a for­mer Turn­ing Point employ­ee, told me that she was the only African-Amer­i­can hired as a field direc­tor when she worked with the group, three years ago. “In look­ing back, I think it was racist,” she said. “At the time, I was blam­ing myself, and I thought I did some­thing wrong.” Fequiere, who now works as a mod­el, recalled that the young black recruits that she brought into the orga­ni­za­tion sud­den­ly found them­selves dis­in­vit­ed from the group’s annu­al stu­dent sum­mit, and that when she her­self attend­ed, she watched speak­ers there who “spoke bad­ly about black women hav­ing all these babies out of wed­lock. It was real­ly offen­sive.” (Kirk, through a spokesman, denied that any such inci­dents occurred, and said, “These accu­sa­tions are absolute­ly base­less and even absurd.”)

    Fequiere said that Clan­ton fired her on Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., Day, on the grounds that she was not per­form­ing her job well. “I was the only black Amer­i­can employ­ee they had, and they fired me on M.L.K. Day—it was so rude!” Fequiere told me. She added, “I felt very uncom­fort­able work­ing there because I was black,” but she said she had seen white employ­ees mis­treat­ed, as well. “My Demo­c­ra­t­ic friends had told me that some Repub­li­cans didn’t care about the poor and minori­ties, and I thought it wasn’t true, but then I found the peo­ple they were talk­ing about!”

    Speak­ers at Turn­ing Point events on var­i­ous col­lege cam­pus­es have been accused of going out of their way to thumb their noses at eth­nic and cul­tur­al sen­si­tiv­i­ties. The con­ser­v­a­tive provo­ca­teur Milo Yiannopou­los, for instance, whose appear­ance Turn­ing Point co-host­ed with the Col­lege Repub­li­cans at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado, in Boul­der, said that despite being gay, he hat­ed “fag­gots,” les­bians, and fem­i­nists, who, he said, “fuck­ing hate men.”

    In an effort to mock cam­pus oppo­si­tion to hate speech, mem­bers of the Turn­ing Point chap­ter at Kent State Uni­ver­si­ty staged a protest last fall in which they appeared on cam­pus wear­ing adult dia­pers and suck­ing on paci­fiers while pro­claim­ing “Safe Spaces are for Chil­dren.” The protest stirred wide­spread ridicule, and Kirk’s spokesman said that he dis­ap­proved of the dis­play and lat­er issued guide­lines against oth­er chap­ters repeat­ing it
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Kirk grew up in Wheel­ing, Illi­nois, and was an Eagle Scout; in a 2015 speech to the Con­ser­v­a­tive Forum of Sil­i­con Val­ley, he said that his “No. 1 dream in life” was to attend West Point, but the slot he con­sid­ered his went to “a far less-qual­i­fied can­di­date of a dif­fer­ent gen­der and a dif­fer­ent per­sua­sion” whose test scores he claimed he knew. (Kirk said he was being sar­cas­tic when he made the com­ment.) An old­er acquain­tance encour­aged him to for­go col­lege and launch a con­ser­v­a­tive ana­logue to the pro­gres­sive advo­ca­cy group MoveOn.org. Kirk acknowl­edged in an inter­view that it is some­thing of an irony that he heads an orga­ni­za­tion devot­ed to wag­ing polit­i­cal war­fare on cam­pus­es when he nev­er actu­al­ly attend­ed col­lege him­self. “I joke that I wasn’t smart enough to go to a four-year school,” Kirk told me, although he not­ed that he con­tin­ued his stud­ies at a com­mu­ni­ty col­lege.

    MoveOn, how­ev­er, has one part set up as a super PAC, and anoth­er as a 501©4 “social-wel­fare group,” both of which are legal­ly allowed to engage in polit­i­cal elec­tions. It also has a pol­i­cy of dis­clos­ing the names of any­one con­tribut­ing five thou­sand dol­lars or more. In con­trast, Turn­ing Point is a 501©3 char­i­ty. This means that, unlike MoveOn donors, Turn­ing Point donors can take tax deduc­tions for their con­tri­bu­tions and remain anony­mous. In exchange for these ben­e­fits, how­ev­er, the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice strict­ly pro­hibits char­i­ties such as Turn­ing Point from engag­ing either direct­ly or indi­rect­ly in polit­i­cal elec­tions.

    Sev­er­al for­mer Turn­ing Point employ­ees told me in inter­views that they felt they were asked to par­tic­i­pate in activ­i­ties that crossed lines drawn by cam­paign-finance laws for groups like theirs. Pay­den Hall, who worked for Turn­ing Point dur­ing the 2016 Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, told me that Clan­ton, who was her boss, e‑mailed her at her Turn­ing Point address to make arrange­ments for her to coör­di­nate with Gin­ni Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, to help Ted Cruz’s Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. “That’s where the ambi­gu­i­ty began,” Hall recalled. Soon after, she said, Gin­ni Thomas, who was sup­port­ing Cruz’s can­di­da­cy and is on Turn­ing Point’s advi­so­ry coun­cil, left a voice mes­sage for Hall and her sis­ter, who also worked for Turn­ing Point, say­ing that she was send­ing two hun­dred Cruz plac­ards to them to dis­trib­ute in the com­ing Wis­con­sin Pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry.

    “Crys­tal gave Gin­ni Thomas my pri­vate mail­ing address with­out my per­mis­sion,” Hall recalled. “They gave out employ­ees’ per­son­al infor­ma­tion to the wife of a Supreme Court Jus­tice.” The next thing she knew, she said, hun­dreds of Cruz plac­ards arrived at her home. “We threw them out,” Hall said. She was a Cruz sup­port­er, but, she says, “We want­ed to vol­un­teer on our own terms, not to give in to pres­sure from a boss. I felt that if it wasn’t cross­ing a legal line, it was cross­ing a pro­fes­sion­al one.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    In a phone inter­view, Kirk declined to iden­ti­fy the donors who have sup­plied his group’s eight-mil­lion-dol­lar-plus annu­al bud­get, not­ing that many pre­fer to remain anony­mous. But Kirk has spo­ken and fund-raised at var­i­ous closed-door ener­gy-indus­try gath­er­ings, includ­ing those of the 2017 board meet­ing of the Nation­al Min­ing Asso­ci­a­tion and the 2016 annu­al meet­ing of the Inde­pen­dent Petro­le­um Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca. In our inter­view, Kirk acknowl­edged that some of his donors “are in the fos­sil-fuel space.”

    Kirk’s ties to fos­sil-fuel mag­nates are con­tro­ver­sial because Turn­ing Point has helped orga­nize oppo­si­tion on cam­pus­es to stu­dents call­ing for schools to divest from fos­sil-fuel com­pa­nies. Turn­ing Point dis­trib­uted a guide for col­lege stu­dents with a fore­word by Kirk, titled “10 Ways Fos­sil Fuels Improve Our Dai­ly Lives.” In it, he argues, “Across the nation, col­lege stu­dents are clam­or­ing for their cam­pus­es to divest from fos­sil fuel ... stu­dents are indoc­tri­nat­ed to believe the myth that fos­sil fuels are dirty and renew­able ener­gy is a plau­si­ble alter­na­tive ... ” Turn­ing Point, which also runs an online “Pro­fes­sor Watch List” that tar­gets pro­fes­sors it believes are lib­er­al, blamed “left­ist pro­fes­sors” in its book­let for hav­ing “per­pet­u­at­ed” these “myths.” In the inter­view, Kirk told me that “We think tar­get­ing fos­sil fuels is rather unfair, and it is not real­ly in the best inter­ests of the uni­ver­si­ties to favor one type of polit­i­cal agen­da over anoth­er.” It’s a mes­sage that “went great,” he said, when he deliv­ered it at ener­gy-indus­try meet­ings.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Last May, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion pub­lished an inves­tiga­tive report on what it called Turn­ing Point’s “stealth plan for polit­i­cal influ­ence.” The sto­ry recount­ed accu­sa­tions on mul­ti­ple cam­pus­es that the group had fun­nelled mon­ey into stu­dent elec­tions in vio­la­tion of the spend­ing caps and trans­paren­cy require­ments set by those schools. It detailed how stu­dent can­di­dates backed by Turn­ing Point had been forced to drop out of cam­pus elec­tions at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land and Ohio State “after they were caught vio­lat­ing spend­ing rules and attempt­ing to hide the help they received from Turn­ing Point.” It also quot­ed Kirk say­ing in an appear­ance before a con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal group in 2015 that his group was “invest­ing a lot of time and mon­ey and ener­gy” in stu­dent-gov­ern­ment elec­tions. (In the sto­ry, Kirk denied any wrong­do­ing and said it was “com­plete­ly ludi­crous and ridicu­lous that there’s some sort of secret plan.”)

    A copy of a Turn­ing Point brochure pre­pared for poten­tial donors that I obtained pro­vides a glimpse into the group’s tac­tics. (A for­mer Turn­ing Point employ­ee said the brochure was close­ly held, and not post­ed online so that it couldn’t leak.) Its “Cam­pus Vic­to­ry Project” is described as a detailed, mul­ti-phase plan to “com­man­deer the top office of Stu­dent Body Pres­i­dent at each of the most rec­og­niz­able and influ­en­tial Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ties.”

    Phase 1 calls for vic­to­ry in the “Pow­er 5” con­fer­ence schools, includ­ing the Atlantic Coast Con­fer­ence, the Big Ten Con­fer­ence, the Pacif­ic 12 Con­fer­ence, the Big 12 Con­fer­ence, and the South­east­ern Con­fer­ence. Phase 2 calls for win­ning the top stu­dent-gov­ern­ment slots in every Divi­sion 1 N.C.A.A. school, of which it says there are more than three hun­dred. In the first three years of the plan, the brochure says, the group aims to cap­ture the “out­right major­i­ty” of stu­dent-gov­ern­ment posi­tions in eighty per cent of these schools.

    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.”

    Today, Turn­ing Point claims to have a pres­ence on more than a thou­sand col­lege cam­pus­es nation­wide, and to have “a stronger, more orga­nized pres­ence than all the left-wing cam­pus groups com­bined.” Kirk told me his group had start­ed three hun­dred new chap­ters in the past year. The Cam­pus Vic­to­ry Project brochure names more than fifty four-year col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties where it claims the group helped effec­tu­ate stu­dent gov­ern­ment vic­to­ries in the 2016–17 year, includ­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, Syra­cuse, Pur­due, Michi­gan State, Wake For­est, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, and it names a hun­dred and twen­ty-two more schools whose gov­ern­ments the group hopes to “com­man­deer” in Phase 2. The brochure notes that com­plet­ing the task will take mon­ey: specif­i­cal­ly, $2.2 mil­lion.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Andy Mac­Crack­en, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Nation­al Cam­pus Lead­er­ship Coun­cil, said he wor­ries that cam­pus elec­tions are “par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble” to out­side mon­ey, “because there aren’t real­ly any stan­dard rules.” Mac­Crack­en says it’s been “shock­ing to see how much of an oper­a­tion there is from Turn­ing Point,” adding that “there’s real­ly noth­ing com­pa­ra­ble that I’m aware of from left-wing groups.”. The push, he sug­gest­ed, reflects a recog­ni­tion on the part of con­ser­v­a­tives about the future val­ue of stu­dent lead­ers. “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,” he says, “is that so much of this is in the dark.”
    ...

    “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:

    South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter

    Turn­ing Point USA’s bloom­ing romance with the alt-right

    Bren­dan Joel Kel­ley
    Feb­ru­ary 16, 2018

    On Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 12, Kaitlin Ben­nett, pres­i­dent of the Kent State Uni­ver­si­ty chap­ter of Turn­ing Point USA (TPUSA), a self-pro­claimed “stu­dent move­ment for free mar­kets and lim­it­ed gov­ern­ment,” post­ed a scathing res­ig­na­tion let­ter online titled “I’m Turn­ing Point USA’s Top Activist in the Coun­try, & I Quit this Shit­ty Orga­ni­za­tion.”

    Addressed to a field direc­tor and a region­al man­ag­er for TPUSA, Frankie O’Laughlin and Alana Mas­trange­lo, respec­tive­ly, the let­ter detailed Bennett’s per­ceived lack of sup­port from the nation­al orga­ni­za­tion, but made some point­ed claims relat­ed to the racist “alt-right.”

    Ben­nett assert­ed that O’Laughlin “told us we were not allowed to bring Kyle Chap­man (the Based Stick­man) to our cam­pus since Turn­ing Point wants to dis­tance itself from the alt-right.” Chap­man is the founder of the Proud Boys-affil­i­at­ed Fra­ter­nal Order of Alt Knights, which he called the “tac­ti­cal defen­sive arm” of the “west­ern chau­vin­ist” Proud Boys.

    Ben­nett went on to point out the hypocrisy of O’Laughlin reject­ing Chap­man as a guest, since O’Laughlin him­self was “lik­ing tweets from noto­ri­ous Char­lottesville attendee and white nation­al­ist icon, James All­supp,” and post­ed a screen­grab of an All­sup tweet O’Laughlin liked. All­sup is an alt-right YouTube per­son­al­i­ty and speaks at white nation­al­ist ral­lies.

    The same day Bennett’s res­ig­na­tion let­ter was post­ed online, the Kent State chap­ter of TPUSA dis­band­ed itself. Ben­nett did not respond to a request for com­ment from Hate­watch.

    Just 10 days ear­li­er, on Feb­ru­ary 2, a speak­ing engage­ment at Col­orado State Uni­ver­si­ty (CSU) in Fort Collins, Col­orado, by TPUSA founder and direc­tor Char­lie Kirk attract­ed a con­tin­gent of white nation­al­ists from the Tra­di­tion­al­ist Work­er Par­ty (TWP). In the runup to the event, anti-immi­grant fliers attrib­uted to TWP had been post­ed on the CSU cam­pus, caus­ing both CSU’s pres­i­dent and its local TPUSA chap­ter to respond.

    “The TWP goes by var­i­ous names online, but let me keep this sim­ple: a Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi. And the mem­bers of the Tra­di­tion­al­ist Work­er Par­ty are unapolo­getic Nazis who advo­cate mur­der­ing all those who don’t align with their world­view,” CSU pres­i­dent Tony Frank wrote in a pub­lic state­ment.

    Regard­ing Kirk’s speak­ing engage­ment, titled “Smash­ing Social­ism,” Frank wrote, “the recent appear­ance of white nation­al­ist rhetoric on cam­pus has been con­flat­ed with this speak­er and caused con­cerns about the safe­ty and secu­ri­ty of reli­gious groups, peo­ple of col­or, and oth­er tar­get­ed pop­u­la­tions rel­a­tive to pro­tes­tors and counter-pro­tes­tors that may show up on cam­pus Fri­day evening.”

    CSU’s TPUSA chap­ter respond­ed with a state­ment say­ing, “TPUSA at CSU and UNC [Uni­ver­si­ty of North­ern Col­orado] con­demns white nation­al­ism and embraces stu­dents from all back­grounds.”

    While TPUSA founder Kirk was giv­ing his speech, a group of alleged TWP mem­bers showed up on cam­pus wear­ing masks and car­ry­ing shields, chant­i­ng the Nazi ral­ly­ing cry “blood and soil!” The neo-Nazis briefly clashed with anti-racist pro­test­ers, and Kirk lat­er crowed about the con­fronta­tion on Twit­ter:

    Got heat­ed today after my speech today at Col­orado State Uni­ver­si­ty
    Had ANTIFA, dis­gust­ing white-nation­al­ists, and hun­dreds of pro­tes­tors out­side event
    Why free speech is awe­some: these hand­ful of rad­i­cals screamed at each oth­er while hun­dreds of stu­dents filled our event!

    Dur­ing his speech, Kirk acknowl­edged the white nation­al­ists out­side, but dis­tanced him­self and TPUSA from the neo-Nazis. “That BS they’re try­ing to say out there, it’s not who we are, it’s not what we believe, it’s not what Turn­ing Point believes,” he said.

    “It’s very fun­ny, they say, ‘Oh Char­lie, you must be an eth­no-nation­al­ist because these four peo­ple with no lives show up out­side your event. First of all, that’s a bunch of non­sense. Sec­ond of all, I don’t remem­ber any­one say­ing that when all the com­mu­nists show up to the Demo­c­rat events.”

    Still, in his appear­ance Kirk decried the con­cept of white priv­i­lege, call­ing the idea racist because the idea is based on skin col­or. “They’re try­ing to dis­cred­it good ideas and good argu­ments, just because you’re white, and that’s ridicu­lous,” he said.

    So what exact­ly is Turn­ing Point USA, and why is the orga­ni­za­tion so attrac­tive to neo-Nazis and the alt-right?

    TPUSA claims chap­ters on over 1,000 col­lege and high school cam­pus­es across the coun­try. It mar­kets itself say­ing it pro­motes free­dom, free mar­kets and lim­it­ed gov­ern­ment — a brand of con­ser­vatism square­ly aimed at mil­len­ni­als. Don­ald Trump, Jr., and his sis­ter-in-law Lara Trump have pro­mot­ed TPUSA, and accord­ing to a New York­er expose on the group, “[a]mong 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.”

    TPUSA has also been accused of vio­lat­ing spend­ing cap and trans­paren­cy rules at dif­fer­ent col­lege cam­pus­es by fun­nel­ing “dark mon­ey” into stu­dent gov­ern­ment elec­tions, accord­ing to the New York­er arti­cle. The piece also sug­gest­ed TPUSA may have bro­ken cam­paign finance laws by work­ing to aid Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates in 2016.

    Then there’s TPUSA’s “Pro­fes­sor Watch­list,” a McCarthy-ist web­site fea­tur­ing pro­fes­sors at uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try who TPUSA says “dis­crim­i­nate against con­ser­v­a­tive stu­dents and advance left­ist pro­pa­gan­da in the class­room.”

    Wendy Lynne Lee, a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Blooms­burg Uni­ver­si­ty (BU) in rur­al Penn­syl­va­nia for more than a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry (who’s not yet on the Pro­fes­sor Watch­list), began track­ing TPUSA’s activ­i­ties in 2016. “Here was an orga­ni­za­tion that had a mis­sion state­ment that said one thing: lib­er­tar­i­an, free mar­ket, con­ser­v­a­tive… fine, but whose activ­i­ties, affil­i­a­tions, sources of fund­ing, whose Twit­ter feed did not cohere, did not line up with its mis­sion state­ment,” she says.

    Lee began col­lect­ing a “bib­li­og­ra­phy” doc­u­ment­ing con­nec­tions between TPUSA, its fun­ders, advi­sors and guest speak­ers and online expres­sions of anti­semitism, anti-Mus­lim sen­ti­ment, racism, misog­y­ny and anti-LGBT bias, as well as con­nec­tions to promi­nent alt-right per­son­al­i­ties.

    When Lee dis­cov­ered there was a TPUSA chap­ter on her cam­pus at BU, she went to the group’s cam­pus advi­sor with her con­cerns and her bib­li­og­ra­phy. “These kids have free speech rights,” she explains, “but my issue was with for­mal uni­ver­si­ty recog­ni­tion that gets them access to all kinds of uni­ver­si­ty-fund­ed things and the use of the uni­ver­si­ty logo. My objec­tion to them wasn’t that they had a right to be here on cam­pus.”

    Lee failed in her attempt to get TPUSA’s offi­cial cam­pus recog­ni­tion rescind­ed, and as a protest, put a hand-scrawled poster in her office win­dow read­ing “BU-Turn­ing Point USA = Alt-Right = White Suprema­cism.” When a local news report said some stu­dents were con­cerned the sign endorsed white suprema­cy, she changed it to read, “Reject white suprema­cism. Reject BU-Turn­ing Point USA.”

    The back­lash was swift. Days lat­er posters appeared on Lee’s cam­pus read­ing, “WARNING COMMUNIST PROFESSORS TEACH ON THIS CAMPUS.” An online meme with a pho­to of an ani­mat­ed Lee yelling behind a podi­um at an anti-frack­ing protest read, “THIS EXTREMIST PROFESSOR CLAIMS THAT FREEDOM IS THE NEW ‘WHITE SUPREMACY’ — WAIT… THAT WOMAN IS ALLOWED TO TEACH?!” It was shared near­ly 3,000 times on Face­book..

    One con­nec­tion Lee had high­light­ed in her bib­li­og­ra­phy was with alt-right misog­y­nist Ivan Throne, a pre­pos­ter­ous fig­ure who spoke at TPUSA’s Moun­tain West Region­al Con­fer­ence in Den­ver in March 2017. Throne, who pos­es as a mys­te­ri­ous war­rior per­sona he calls “Dark Tri­ad Man,” and whose book has been endorsed by promi­nent white nation­al­ist Greg John­son on his Counter-Cur­rents web­site, struck back on his own web­site in an arti­cle titled “The Incred­i­ble Howl­ing Damp Vira­go of Blooms­burg Uni­ver­si­ty,” imply­ing Lee was involved in the ecoter­ror­ism move­ment.

    ...

    Kirk him­self, besides advo­cat­ing for the elim­i­na­tion of so-called safe spaces for minor­i­ty stu­dents on cam­pus and claim­ing that the con­cept of white priv­i­lege is itself racist, recent­ly tweet­ed “Fact: A police offi­cer is 18.5 times more like­ly to be killed by a black male, than an unarmed black man is to be killed by a police offi­cer” (a flawed sta­tis­tic pro­mul­gat­ed by neo­con­ser­v­a­tive con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist Den­nis Prager). Kirk has also post­ed anti-immi­grant and anti-Mus­lim tweets.

    A mem­ber of TPUSA’s advi­so­ry coun­cil, mul­ti­mil­lion­aire Fos­ter Friess, has fund­ed anti-Mus­lim orga­ni­za­tions and urged stu­dents to “be more intol­er­ant” in a com­mence­ment speech.

    Anti-Mus­lim sen­ti­ment seems all too com­mon in TPUSA. The pres­i­dent of TPUSA’s chap­ter at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at Greens­boro, Col­by Weath­er­spoon, has tweet­ed the anti-Mus­lim hash­tag #Islam­Con­trol­Now and claims mem­ber­ship in the misog­y­nis­tic “west­ern chau­vin­ist” Proud Boys in his Twit­ter bio.

    Dur­ing Islam Aware­ness Week at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi last March, a TPUSA mem­ber, Driena Six­to, co-host­ed a “counter info ses­sion” called “The Truth of Being a Woman of Islam” which its orga­niz­er summed up as “being a woman of Islam often comes with many dan­gers.”

    And TPUSA was blast­ed for anti­semitism after a writer named Adam Wein­stein crit­i­cized the group on Twit­ter by respond­ing on its offi­cial TPUSA account, “The best ‘grift’ this morn­ing is hav­ing a guy named Wein­stein crit­i­cize young peo­ple for want­i­ng few­er hands in their pock­ets. Too good.” TPUSA lat­er delet­ed the tweet and apol­o­gized, say­ing it was a ref­er­ence to Har­vey Wein­stein rather than an insult regard­ing Jew­ish stereo­types.

    TPUSA has also fea­tured for­mer con­gress­man Joe Walsh as a speak­er at events. Walsh has been crit­i­cized as racist and anti-Mus­lim for his con­tro­ver­sial state­ments and tweets, and was fired from a talk radio host gig in 2014 for using racial slurs — which didn’t seem to deter him, since he sub­se­quent­ly tweet­ed, “Found out if I said Red­skins or Crack­er or Red­neck Bible Thumper, I could stay on. But if I said Nig­ger or Spick, they cut me off.”

    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.

    ———-

    “Turn­ing Point USA’s bloom­ing romance with the alt-right” by Bren­dan Joel Kel­ley; South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter; 02/16/2018

    “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:

    ...
    Wendy Lynne Lee, a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Blooms­burg Uni­ver­si­ty (BU) in rur­al Penn­syl­va­nia for more than a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry (who’s not yet on the Pro­fes­sor Watch­list), began track­ing TPUSA’s activ­i­ties in 2016. “Here was an orga­ni­za­tion that had a mis­sion state­ment that said one thing: lib­er­tar­i­an, free mar­ket, con­ser­v­a­tive… fine, but whose activ­i­ties, affil­i­a­tions, sources of fund­ing, whose Twit­ter feed did not cohere, did not line up with its mis­sion state­ment,” she says.

    Lee began col­lect­ing a “bib­li­og­ra­phy” doc­u­ment­ing con­nec­tions between TPUSA, its fun­ders, advi­sors and guest speak­ers and online expres­sions of anti­semitism, anti-Mus­lim sen­ti­ment, racism, misog­y­ny and anti-LGBT bias, as well as con­nec­tions to promi­nent alt-right per­son­al­i­ties.

    When Lee dis­cov­ered there was a TPUSA chap­ter on her cam­pus at BU, she went to the group’s cam­pus advi­sor with her con­cerns and her bib­li­og­ra­phy. “These kids have free speech rights,” she explains, “but my issue was with for­mal uni­ver­si­ty recog­ni­tion that gets them access to all kinds of uni­ver­si­ty-fund­ed things and the use of the uni­ver­si­ty logo. My objec­tion to them wasn’t that they had a right to be here on cam­pus.”

    Lee failed in her attempt to get TPUSA’s offi­cial cam­pus recog­ni­tion rescind­ed, and as a protest, put a hand-scrawled poster in her office win­dow read­ing “BU-Turn­ing Point USA = Alt-Right = White Suprema­cism.” When a local news report said some stu­dents were con­cerned the sign endorsed white suprema­cy, she changed it to read, “Reject white suprema­cism. Reject BU-Turn­ing Point USA.”

    The back­lash was swift. Days lat­er posters appeared on Lee’s cam­pus read­ing, “WARNING COMMUNIST PROFESSORS TEACH ON THIS CAMPUS.” An online meme with a pho­to of an ani­mat­ed Lee yelling behind a podi­um at an anti-frack­ing protest read, “THIS EXTREMIST PROFESSOR CLAIMS THAT FREEDOM IS THE NEW ‘WHITE SUPREMACY’ — WAIT… THAT WOMAN IS ALLOWED TO TEACH?!” It was shared near­ly 3,000 times on Face­book..

    One con­nec­tion Lee had high­light­ed in her bib­li­og­ra­phy was with alt-right misog­y­nist Ivan Throne, a pre­pos­ter­ous fig­ure who spoke at TPUSA’s Moun­tain West Region­al Con­fer­ence in Den­ver in March 2017. Throne, who pos­es as a mys­te­ri­ous war­rior per­sona he calls “Dark Tri­ad Man,” and whose book has been endorsed by promi­nent white nation­al­ist Greg John­son on his Counter-Cur­rents web­site, struck back on his own web­site in an arti­cle titled “The Incred­i­ble Howl­ing Damp Vira­go of Blooms­burg Uni­ver­si­ty,” imply­ing Lee was involved in the ecoter­ror­ism move­ment.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    On Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 12, Kaitlin Ben­nett, pres­i­dent of the Kent State Uni­ver­si­ty chap­ter of Turn­ing Point USA (TPUSA), a self-pro­claimed “stu­dent move­ment for free mar­kets and lim­it­ed gov­ern­ment,” post­ed a scathing res­ig­na­tion let­ter online titled “I’m Turn­ing Point USA’s Top Activist in the Coun­try, & I Quit this Shit­ty Orga­ni­za­tion.”

    Addressed to a field direc­tor and a region­al man­ag­er for TPUSA, Frankie O’Laughlin and Alana Mas­trange­lo, respec­tive­ly, the let­ter detailed Bennett’s per­ceived lack of sup­port from the nation­al orga­ni­za­tion, but made some point­ed claims relat­ed to the racist “alt-right.”

    Ben­nett assert­ed that O’Laughlin “told us we were not allowed to bring Kyle Chap­man (the Based Stick­man) to our cam­pus since Turn­ing Point wants to dis­tance itself from the alt-right.” Chap­man is the founder of the Proud Boys-affil­i­at­ed Fra­ter­nal Order of Alt Knights, which he called the “tac­ti­cal defen­sive arm” of the “west­ern chau­vin­ist” Proud Boys.

    Ben­nett went on to point out the hypocrisy of O’Laughlin reject­ing Chap­man as a guest, since O’Laughlin him­self was “lik­ing tweets from noto­ri­ous Char­lottesville attendee and white nation­al­ist icon, James All­supp,” and post­ed a screen­grab of an All­sup tweet O’Laughlin liked. All­sup is an alt-right YouTube per­son­al­i­ty and speaks at white nation­al­ist ral­lies.

    The same day Bennett’s res­ig­na­tion let­ter was post­ed online, the Kent State chap­ter of TPUSA dis­band­ed itself. Ben­nett did not respond to a request for com­ment from Hate­watch.

    Just 10 days ear­li­er, on Feb­ru­ary 2, a speak­ing engage­ment at Col­orado State Uni­ver­si­ty (CSU) in Fort Collins, Col­orado, by TPUSA founder and direc­tor Char­lie Kirk attract­ed a con­tin­gent of white nation­al­ists from the Tra­di­tion­al­ist Work­er Par­ty (TWP). In the runup to the event, anti-immi­grant fliers attrib­uted to TWP had been post­ed on the CSU cam­pus, caus­ing both CSU’s pres­i­dent and its local TPUSA chap­ter to respond.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 4, 2018, 10:45 pm
  13. 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?:

    Mic

    Uni­ver­si­ty of Nebras­ka-Lin­coln stu­dents fear alt-right activist on cam­pus is a tick­ing time bomb

    By Chauncey Alcorn
    | Feb. 14, 2018

    Uni­ver­si­ty of Nebraska-Lincoln’s stu­dent gov­ern­ment is host­ing a “Hate Will Nev­er Win” ral­ly Wednes­day to send a mes­sage of defi­ance to their fel­low Corn­husker, a self-described white nation­al­ist named Daniel Kleve.

    The action is just the lat­est in a string of events over the last nine days that start­ed when a video of Kleve talk­ing about his racist views and lust for vio­lence went viral Feb. 5. On Sat­ur­day, the UNL men’s bas­ket­ball team wore match­ing “Hate Will Nev­er Win” T‑shirts in response to the con­tro­ver­sy. Oth­er UNL stu­dents host­ed their own town-hall-style meet­ing Tues­day to dis­cuss ways to address the sit­u­a­tion on cam­pus.

    “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.”

    [see video of Kleve express­ing his desire for extreme vio­lence “when the time comes”]

    Since Feb. 5, pic­tures have resur­faced show­ing Kleve stand­ing with white suprema­cist mem­bers of Van­guard Amer­i­ca as they beat a man Aug. 12 dur­ing the infa­mous “Unite the Right” ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia. James Alex Fields, the sus­pect in the car attack that killed 32-year-old Heather Hey­er the same day, was also pho­tographed car­ry­ing a Van­guard-pro­vid­ed shield.

    Anoth­er video shows Kleve talk­ing about want­i­ng to shoot a “Niger­ian dude” who pre­vi­ous­ly asked him about his “Pagan tat­toos.”

    An Antifa Nebras­ka activist named Nestor said in an inter­view that his orga­ni­za­tion has been mon­i­tor­ing Kleve’s activ­i­ties for about a year and had sent leaked pic­tures and screen­shots from Kleve’s now-pri­vate social media accounts to UNL admin­is­tra­tors six months ago. Nestor, who is also a stu­dent at the school, said his group went pub­lic with the videos because the school refused to do any­thing about Kleve. Some of the leaked images show Kleve post­ing threat­en­ing mes­sages to Jew­ish peo­ple, using racial slurs and stereo­typ­i­cal memes.

    “We’ve been try­ing to bring this issue up for six months now. UNL didn’t take any action,” Nestor said Tues­day. “They’re walk­ing this real­ly fine line where they’re say­ing, ‘He’s not doing any­thing wrong. We can’t prove this. We can’t prove that.’”

    Accord­ing to Nestor, one of Kleve’s posts read “Hap­py James Earl Ray Day,” cel­e­brat­ing the man who assas­si­nat­ed Dr. Mar­tin Luther King Jr. In anoth­er post-Char­lottesville post, Kleve announced his plans to “cre­ate the biggest far-right pres­ence in Nebras­ka since the days of the [Ku Klux] Klan.”

    UNL admin­is­tra­tors have host­ed mul­ti­ple town hall meet­ings in recent days allow­ing stu­dents to express their con­cerns about Kleve. The school has refused to expel, how­ev­er, even though oth­er uni­ver­si­ties have expelled stu­dents for espous­ing sim­i­lar racist rhetoric.

    It’s a free speech debate col­leges seem to be fac­ing in greater num­bers since Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s elec­tion. Far-right per­son­al­i­ties like Milo Yiannopou­los, Richard Spencer and oth­ers have been barred from speak­ing on col­lege cam­pus­es by pro­gres­sive activists and anti-fas­cist demon­stra­tors. Accu­sa­tions of sup­press­ing free speech have com­pelled uni­ver­si­ties to bal­ance pro­tect­ing con­ser­v­a­tive speech and keep­ing stu­dents safe from far-right extrem­ists.

    “Every school has their own code of con­duct that they deal with,” UNL’s inter­im direc­tor of the Jack­ie Gaugh­an Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Cen­ter Char­lie Fos­ter said in a phone inter­view. “If they don’t make direct threats, there’s very lit­tle we can do about that. I go to sleep at night and wake up think­ing about the safe­ty of our stu­dents ... But First Amend­ment rights have to be tak­en seri­ous­ly.”

    Kleve’s rhetoric and pres­ence on cam­pus have many stu­dents say­ing they fear he’s a tick­ing time bomb. Nestor and oth­er UNL stu­dents believe Kleve’s remarks about vio­lence meet the thresh­old for being con­sid­ered threat­en­ing. Mul­ti­ple stu­dents have called out the school’s reac­tion on social media.

    “They aren’t tak­ing our safe­ty seri­ous­ly, in my opin­ion,” UNL stu­dent Kyi­ia Rol­lag said in an inter­view. “I am wor­ried, though, that if [Kleve] does get expelled, then he might retal­i­ate. It’s scary because he looks like the major­i­ty [of stu­dents] at my school so I wouldn’t be able to rec­og­nize him. Plus, it is not cer­tain how many fol­low­ers he has recruit­ed already.”

    ...

    Accord­ing to the Anti-Defama­tion League, Kleve and oth­er white nation­al­ist orga­niz­ers have ampli­fied their activ­i­ties at col­leges across the coun­try since Sep­tem­ber 2016, the final few months of Trump’s suc­cess­ful White House bid. Since then, there have been 346 con­firmed reports of “white suprema­cist pro­pa­gan­da” being found on uni­ver­si­ty grounds.

    White nation­al­ists like Kleve killed 18 Amer­i­cans in 2017, more than any oth­er extrem­ist group, includ­ing the Islam­ic state and Al Qae­da. Their vic­tims includ­ed black men like U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Richard Collins III and Tim­o­thy Caugh­man, who were fatal­ly stabbed at ran­dom by white men with self-avowed or alleged alt-right ties.

    In recent days, Kleve has post­ed mul­ti­ple videos on his YouTube chan­nel claim­ing the viral video released by Antifa Nebras­ka was edit­ed to make him seem like a “Hol­ly­wood vil­lain” and “domes­tic ter­ror­ist,” adding that he and oth­er white nation­al­ists are the ones being vic­tim­ized.

    “I’ve received over­whelm­ing sup­port from many Nebraskans, which I appre­ci­ate so much,” Kleve said. “We’re not going to be intim­i­dat­ed. We’re not going to be ashamed. We’re going to be proud to be white.”

    ———-

    “Uni­ver­si­ty of Nebras­ka-Lin­coln stu­dents fear alt-right activist on cam­pus is a tick­ing time bomb” by Chauncey Alcorn; Mic; 02/14/2018

    ““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”:

    ...
    Since Feb. 5, pic­tures have resur­faced show­ing Kleve stand­ing with white suprema­cist mem­bers of Van­guard Amer­i­ca as they beat a man Aug. 12 dur­ing the infa­mous “Unite the Right” ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia. James Alex Fields, the sus­pect in the car attack that killed 32-year-old Heather Hey­er the same day, was also pho­tographed car­ry­ing a Van­guard-pro­vid­ed shield.

    Anoth­er video shows Kleve talk­ing about want­i­ng 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:

    ...
    An Antifa Nebras­ka activist named Nestor said in an inter­view that his orga­ni­za­tion has been mon­i­tor­ing Kleve’s activ­i­ties for about a year and had sent leaked pic­tures and screen­shots from Kleve’s now-pri­vate social media accounts to UNL admin­is­tra­tors six months ago. Nestor, who is also a stu­dent at the school, said his group went pub­lic with the videos because the school refused to do any­thing about Kleve. Some of the leaked images show Kleve post­ing threat­en­ing mes­sages to Jew­ish peo­ple, using racial slurs and stereo­typ­i­cal memes.

    “We’ve been try­ing to bring this issue up for six months now. UNL didn’t take any action,” Nestor said Tues­day. “They’re walk­ing this real­ly fine line where they’re say­ing, ‘He’s not doing any­thing wrong. We can’t prove this. We can’t prove that.’”

    Accord­ing to Nestor, one of Kleve’s posts read “Hap­py James Earl Ray Day,” cel­e­brat­ing the man who assas­si­nat­ed Dr. Mar­tin Luther King Jr. In anoth­er post-Char­lottesville post, Kleve announced his plans to “cre­ate the biggest far-right pres­ence in Nebras­ka since the days of the [Ku Klux] Klan.”

    UNL admin­is­tra­tors have host­ed mul­ti­ple town hall meet­ings in recent days allow­ing stu­dents to express their con­cerns about Kleve. The school has refused to expel, how­ev­er, even though oth­er uni­ver­si­ties have expelled stu­dents for espous­ing sim­i­lar racist rhetoric.

    It’s a free speech debate col­leges seem to be fac­ing in greater num­bers since Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s elec­tion. Far-right per­son­al­i­ties like Milo Yiannopou­los, Richard Spencer and oth­ers have been barred from speak­ing on col­lege cam­pus­es by pro­gres­sive activists and anti-fas­cist demon­stra­tors. Accu­sa­tions of sup­press­ing free speech have com­pelled uni­ver­si­ties to bal­ance pro­tect­ing con­ser­v­a­tive speech and keep­ing stu­dents safe from far-right extrem­ists.

    “Every school has their own code of con­duct that they deal with,” UNL’s inter­im direc­tor of the Jack­ie Gaugh­an Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Cen­ter Char­lie Fos­ter said in a phone inter­view. “If they don’t make direct threats, there’s very lit­tle we can do about that. I go to sleep at night and wake up think­ing about the safe­ty of our stu­dents ... But First Amend­ment rights have to be tak­en seri­ous­ly.”
    ...

    “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):

    ...
    Kleve’s rhetoric and pres­ence on cam­pus have many stu­dents say­ing they fear he’s a tick­ing time bomb. Nestor and oth­er UNL stu­dents believe Kleve’s remarks about vio­lence meet the thresh­old for being con­sid­ered threat­en­ing. Mul­ti­ple stu­dents have called out the school’s reac­tion on social media.

    “They aren’t tak­ing our safe­ty seri­ous­ly, in my opin­ion,” UNL stu­dent Kyi­ia Rol­lag said in an inter­view. “I am wor­ried, though, that if [Kleve] does get expelled, then he might retal­i­ate. It’s scary because he looks like the major­i­ty [of stu­dents] at my school so I wouldn’t be able to rec­og­nize him. Plus, it is not cer­tain how many fol­low­ers he has recruit­ed already.”

    ...

    White nation­al­ists like Kleve killed 18 Amer­i­cans in 2017, more than any oth­er extrem­ist group, includ­ing the Islam­ic state and Al Qae­da. Their vic­tims includ­ed black men like U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Richard Collins III and Tim­o­thy Caugh­man, who were fatal­ly stabbed at ran­dom by white men with self-avowed or alleged alt-right ties.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    In recent days, Kleve has post­ed mul­ti­ple videos on his YouTube chan­nel claim­ing the viral video released by Antifa Nebras­ka was edit­ed to make him seem like a “Hol­ly­wood vil­lain” and “domes­tic ter­ror­ist,” adding that he and oth­er white nation­al­ists are the ones being vic­tim­ized.

    “I’ve received over­whelm­ing sup­port from many Nebraskans, which I appre­ci­ate so much,” Kleve said. “We’re not going to be intim­i­dat­ed. We’re not going to be ashamed. We’re going to be proud to be white.”

    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:

    Newsweek

    Nebras­ka White Suprema­cist Who Prais­es Vio­lence Pos­es Unique Chal­lenges to Cam­pus Free Speech

    By Michael Edi­son Hay­den
    On 2/13/18 at 12:16 PM

    The Uni­ver­si­ty of Nebras­ka-Lin­coln (UNL) receives mes­sages and phones calls about Daniel Kleve all the time these days. The 23-year-old under­grad­u­ate bio­chem­istry major is a white suprema­cist who is overt­ly racist and dan­ger­ous, his class­mates say. They don’t want to share class­es with him, they don’t want to bump into him in a din­ing hall—they don’t want to see the tawny-haired man on cam­pus ever again.

    Antifas­cist Action Nebras­ka, a local group that has devel­oped a nation­al rep­u­ta­tion among activists for the relent­less­ness with which it tracks the move­ments of white suprema­cists, pub­lished a video of Kleve speak­ing with oth­er extrem­ists on Google Hang­out, and it went viral last week, fur­ther inflam­ing the sense of out­rage about him.

    [see Face­book pic of Kleve stand­ing with mem­bers of Atom­waf­fen]

    “Just because I dress like a normie—a reg­u­lar person—doesn’t mean I don’t love vio­lence,” Kleve said to a group of peers regard­ing his ambi­tions as a white suprema­cist. “Trust me. I want to be vio­lent. Trust me. Real­ly vio­lent.”

    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 ques­tion about what to do with the increas­ing­ly iso­lat­ed Kleve is emblem­at­ic of a larg­er issue fac­ing col­leges across the coun­try. Even though the era of so-called alt-right pol­i­tics that arose dur­ing the pop­ulist cam­paign of Don­ald Trump has shown signs of frac­tur­ing, it has embold­ened a small but not insignif­i­cant num­ber of young, white men to come for­ward with white suprema­cist or neo-Nazi beliefs. As this is hap­pen­ing, women, minori­ties and oth­er com­mu­ni­ties that are threat­ened by the polit­i­cal goals of such men are becom­ing more sen­si­tive to their pres­ence, and demand­ing that schools take action to pro­tect them. Young white suprema­cists were tied to a num­ber of mur­ders last year, fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing the issue. The sit­u­a­tion is a com­plex one, and it pos­es chal­lenges to both admin­is­tra­tors and to advo­cates of free speech.

    ...

    “Actu­al harass­ment is not pro­tect­ed speech”

    Saman­tha Har­ris, a researcher with Foun­da­tion for Indi­vid­ual Rights in Edu­ca­tion (FIRE), told Newsweek that the ques­tion of whether to expel an extrem­ist like Kleve is typ­i­cal­ly drawn along one line: All polit­i­cal beliefs should be tol­er­at­ed in acad­e­mia, but “actu­al harass­ment is not pro­tect­ed speech.” By “actu­al harass­ment,” Har­ris said she meant any­thing that pro­hibits some­one from receiv­ing a nor­mal edu­ca­tion.

    In the case of Kleve, the uni­ver­si­ty told Newsweek it was not clear he had made any threats against a spe­cif­ic stu­dent or stu­dents. But his class­mates have told Newsweek that Kleve made them feel uneasy because they believed him to be capa­ble of unleash­ing vio­lence at any time. Addi­tion­al­ly, Calvin Scott, 19, Kleve’s for­mer room­mate at an off-cam­pus hous­ing facil­i­ty, and Scott’s friend, Jack­ie Schnei­der, 20, told Newsweek that Kleve made vio­lent threats against peo­ple of color—generally and also about spe­cif­ic indi­vid­u­als. Both Scott and Schnei­der are peo­ple of col­or them­selves, but nei­ther of them are UNL stu­dents. Kleve has denied mak­ing such threats. UNL cam­pus police told Newsweek that Kleve cur­rent­ly rep­re­sent­ed an active inves­ti­ga­tion, but declined to elab­o­rate any fur­ther about what it entailed.

    [See Face­book pho­to of Kleve giv­ing Nazi salute with mem­bers of Van­guard Amer­i­can before leav­ing for Char­lottesville]

    The issue is tricky for UNL to nav­i­gate for rea­sons beyond the obvi­ous. Politi­cians in the Repub­li­can-dom­i­nat­ed state have been fierce­ly crit­i­cal of the school for what they per­ceive to be its mis­treat­ment of con­ser­v­a­tives. The state is cur­rent­ly review­ing a bill sur­round­ing cam­pus free speech, for exam­ple, one of sev­er­al sim­i­lar mea­sures being exam­ined through­out the coun­try. The Nebras­ka mea­sure, Leg­isla­tive Bill 718, intro­duced by state Sen­a­tor Steve Hal­lo­ran of Hast­ings, would force schools like UNL to cre­ate a “Com­mit­tee on Free Expres­sion” to pro­vide an annu­al inci­dent report to state res­i­dents about free speech mat­ters. Crit­ics say the bill, which was issued in response to a grad­u­ate stu­dent and lec­tur­er who gave the fin­ger to a stu­dent who was recruit­ing for a con­ser­v­a­tive group, is intend­ed to ampli­fy only voic­es of Repub­li­can stu­dents on cam­pus. In response to the inci­dent, UNL will not renew a con­tract to teach issued to the grad­u­ate stu­dent who made the ges­ture.

    In addi­tion to this, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Nebras­ka Board of Regents has adopt­ed its own poli­cies to delin­eate areas where cer­tain kinds of speech are per­mis­si­ble on cam­pus. “When peo­ple want to cen­sor view­points that peo­ple don’t like, uni­ver­si­ties have to step in and pro­tect free speech,” Har­ris of FIRE argued to Newsweek, refer­ring to both right- and left-lean­ing view­points. FIRE has defend­ed not only con­ser­v­a­tive view­points on cam­pus, but wrote a let­ter crit­i­ciz­ing UNL for the way it treat­ed the grad­u­ate stu­dent and lec­tur­er caught up in the scan­dal.

    ...

    “Trust me. Real­ly vio­lent.”

    The stu­dents who claim Kleve is a dan­ger to oth­ers argue that the school should be look­ing at his his­to­ry to under­stand their con­cerns. He appeared in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia on August 12 in a con­tin­gent with Van­guard Amer­i­ca, the white suprema­cist group whose fol­low­ers includ­ed James Fields, the man charged with mur­der­ing antiracist activist Heather Hey­er in a bru­tal car-ram­ming inci­dent. He also post­ed pho­tos of him­self next to an Atom­waf­fen flag in 2017. Atom­waf­fen is a neo-Nazi group that has gar­nered head­lines for being linked to a num­ber of mur­ders. Kleve told me he has “pub­licly dis­avowed” Atom­waf­fen, and no longer belongs to any white suprema­cist groups, but as recent­ly as this year, he was post­ing white suprema­cist slo­gans on Face­book, and endors­ing “the Order,” a fic­tion­al col­lec­tive depict­ed in the neo-Nazi pro­pa­gan­da book The Turn­er Diaries.

    In the book, “the Order” slaugh­tered Jews, non-whites and oth­er minori­ties in part of a make-believe race war. The book was admired by ter­ror­ists like Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh and David Copeland, a British man who mur­dered three peo­ple in a bomb­ing cam­paign that was tar­get­ed at minori­ties in 1999. Kee­gan Han­kes, an intel­li­gence ana­lyst with South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter, told Newsweek that peo­ple “should be con­cerned” about vio­lence when deal­ing with those who asso­ciate with Van­guard Amer­i­ca and Atom­waf­fen, even periph­er­al­ly.

    [See Face­book post where Kleve shows off a hand­gun which he labels “Future Con­ser­v­a­tive starter pack”]

    “Every­one has to remem­ber that this ide­ol­o­gy is found­ed on build­ing a white eth­nos­tate,” Han­kes said. “They believe that they are fight­ing for the sur­vival of the white race.”

    Scott, who lived with Kleve from mid-Octo­ber to the start of Decem­ber 2017, told Newsweek that Kleve had an AR-15 assault rifle that he kept in a com­mon area of their apart­ment. Schnei­der, Scott’s friend, said she saw the weapon as well but thought it was a shot­gun. (She admit­ted to not know­ing much about firearms, while Scott claimed to have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of them.) Scott also told Newsweek that Kleve kept a pis­tol “on him.” Nebras­ka is an open-car­ry state, and Lin­coln Police con­firmed to Newsweek that Kleve would be legal­ly allowed to car­ry a weapon out­side of cam­pus. Kleve told Newsweek that his guns were pur­chased legal­ly but would not elab­o­rate on how many he owns, or their makes and mod­els. He denied own­ing an AR-15, but declined to answer whether he owned any sim­i­lar weapons that could be mis­tak­en for one.

    Scott said he didn’t report to the police about threats Kleve made because he didn’t trust them to do their job, but he report­ed his room­mate to the hous­ing com­plex, ask­ing for a sep­a­ra­tion. A report issued by the admin­is­tra­tion of their hous­ing com­plex and giv­en to Newsweek con­firmed that Scott had expressed “con­cerns” about his room­mate at the time he lived with Kleve. Their rela­tion­ship end­ed when Kleve moved out. Kleve claimed Scott was mak­ing up sto­ries about him.

    [see screen­shot of Kleve’s Face­book post where he states: “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.”]

    “Noth­ing has changed,” Leslie Reed, a spokesper­son for the school, told Newsweek while stu­dents were protest­ing Kleve’s pres­ence, regard­ing their hes­i­tan­cy to remove him from UNL.

    The Uni­ver­si­ty of Nebras­ka can’t “dis­crim­i­nate against some­one for hav­ing unpop­u­lar polit­i­cal beliefs,” she said pre­vi­ous­ly.

    “I can’t wait to grad­u­ate so that I can get out of every­one’s hair”

    Stu­dents who spoke to Newsweek about Kleve, who fre­quent­ly boasts about what he believes to be his tal­ents as a pro­pa­gan­dist, sug­gest­ed that his tac­tics are hav­ing the oppo­site of their intend­ed impact. Kleve is not only fail­ing to make recruit­ing in-roads for his cause, the stu­dents claimed, but his views have made him into a pari­ah on cam­pus. On Sat­ur­day, for exam­ple, the Nebraska’s men’s bas­ket­ball team waged a protest against his pres­ence before their game with Rut­gers. The men wore T‑shirts that read, “Hate Will Nev­er Win.” Stu­dent ath­letes across cam­pus, in fact, have used their influ­ence to con­demn Kleve, and a search for his name on Twit­ter will turn up what looks like a del­uge of dis­gust from fel­low class­mates.

    ...

    Har­ris of FIRE argued to Newsweek that con­dem­na­tion and debate is the best way to deal with a stu­dent like Kleve, so long as he was not harass­ing or endan­ger­ing spe­cif­ic stu­dents. “The best way to com­bat [white suprema­cist advo­ca­cy] is with more speech and bet­ter ideas.” But because of Kleve’s appar­ent racist fix­a­tion with vio­lence, he poten­tial­ly rep­re­sents a dif­fer­ent case than oth­er “alt-right” fig­ures who have stirred protest on cam­pus­es.

    One sim­i­lar case to Kleve’s is that of Mark Daniel Neuhoff, a 27-year-old grad­u­ate stu­dent in Vir­ginia Tech’s Eng­lish depart­ment. Neuhoff’s pres­ence on cam­pus sparked a mas­sive out­cry in the fall semes­ter of 2017. Posts from Neuhoff’s Face­book account that appeared to endorse white suprema­cy, Hitler and the Nazi appli­ca­tion of “Jew­ish stars” dur­ing World War II were leaked by a local antifas­cist group. Stu­dents were out­raged when they saw them, and their feel­ings were com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that Neuhoff taught under­grad­u­ates in his capac­i­ty as a teacher’s assis­tant.

    Vir­ginia Tech told Newsweek that fol­low­ing relent­less protests and phone calls, the admin­is­tra­tion and Neuhoff came to a qui­et agree­ment that he would no longer teach there. Since that time, Neuhoff has become an out­cast. He said he was grate­ful for the way the admin­is­tra­tion han­dled his case, but expressed feel­ings of despair and lone­li­ness in describ­ing his time in school there. He sug­gest­ed that col­leagues had ostra­cized him and sev­ered all ties.

    [See Face­book post by David Neuhoff say­ing “If Hitler Had Won World War II We’d Have A Bet­ter, More Just World Today”]

    He told Newsweek that he was actu­al­ly a “pale­o­con­ser­v­a­tive monar­chist” and not a white suprema­cist, despite his posts appear­ing to praise Hitler, and claimed that his views were tak­en out of con­text. He also com­plained that the posts that appeared to many stu­dents to be deeply anti-Semit­ic were made on a locked feed, and that antifas­cist activists had infil­trat­ed his account.

    “It’s made me feel extreme­ly unwel­come and I can’t wait to grad­u­ate so that I can get out of every­one’s hair and they can get out of mine,” he told Newsweek about the atmos­phere of his edu­ca­tion.

    While Neuhoff longs to make an exit from acad­e­mia, oth­ers on the far-right are eager to make inroads there, but so far with extreme­ly lim­it­ed suc­cess. Matthew Heim­bach of Tra­di­tion­al­ist Worker’s Par­ty (TWP), a small but active neo-Nazi group, is attempt­ing to start a col­lege speak­ing tour called “Nation­al Social­ism or Death” at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ten­nessee in Knoxville lat­er this month. He told Newsweek that the point of the exer­cise is to find com­mon ground with “con­ser­v­a­tives and social­ists.” As with ral­lies staged by white suprema­cist Richard Spencer, though, pro­test­ers of the event are expect­ed to out­num­ber his sup­port­ers. Heim­bach argued that he was doing it to argue for a “safe space for fas­cists” in acad­e­mia, but it is also unclear that fas­cist beliefs are real­ly treat­ed with any intol­er­ance by admin­is­tra­tors. Stu­dents like Neuhoff and Kleve are iso­lat­ed, but they are also enrolled.

    ...

    The far right is a busy but ulti­mate­ly small online com­mu­ni­ty, at least when it comes to peo­ple who don’t oper­ate anony­mous­ly. Neuhoff is Face­book friends with Kleve and inter­acts with him from time to time. He said that while Kleve is more involved with “what peo­ple call white nation­al­ism, nation­al social­ism, and the pro-white cause in gen­er­al,” he iden­ti­fies with Kleve because of the degree to which they’ve been alien­at­ed from their peers in a left-lean­ing envi­ron­ment.

    “Our cas­es are the same,” Neuhoff argued to Newsweek about Kleve. “We have views oth­er peo­ple don’t like and they’re tak­ing things out of con­text or using any pos­si­ble tac­tic to cause us harm while try­ing to con­vince peo­ple we are vio­lent.”

    But two sub­stan­tial dif­fer­ences exist between the com­plaints about Kleve and Neuhoff. Neuhoff told Newsweek that he nev­er belonged to a white suprema­cist or neo-Nazi group. Dur­ing the vio­lence at the Unite the Right ral­ly in Char­lottesville that Sat­ur­day after­noon in August, for exam­ple, he said that he was in church. (Neuhoff is in the process of con­vert­ing to Chris­t­ian Ortho­dox after hav­ing grown up in a non-reli­gious house­hold.) Also, he said he doesn’t own any guns.

    ...

    “The student’s view­point — how­ev­er hate­ful and intol­er­ant it is — is also pro­tect­ed by the First Amend­ment.”

    Justin Myers, 18, a fresh­man busi­ness stu­dent at UNL and a self-described con­ser­v­a­tive, told Newsweek that while he wasn’t sure if Kleve had done enough to be “legal­ly kicked off cam­pus” in terms of his praise of vio­lence, he would feel uncom­fort­able being any­where near him in class.

    Myers also argued that there was a dif­fer­ence between the cam­pus debates about free speech between con­ser­v­a­tives and left­ists, and the threat of overt neo-Nazism. “These guys hate our sys­tem of gov­ern­ment and the free­doms we have,” Myers said.

    ...

    ———-

    “Nebras­ka White Suprema­cist Who Prais­es Vio­lence Pos­es Unique Chal­lenges to Cam­pus Free Speech” by Michael Edi­son Hay­den; Newsweek; 02/13/2018

    “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:

    ...
    [see Face­book pic of Kleve stand­ing with mem­bers of Atom­waf­fen]

    ...

    The stu­dents who claim Kleve is a dan­ger to oth­ers argue that the school should be look­ing at his his­to­ry to under­stand their con­cerns. He appeared in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia on August 12 in a con­tin­gent with Van­guard Amer­i­ca, the white suprema­cist group whose fol­low­ers includ­ed James Fields, the man charged with mur­der­ing antiracist activist Heather Hey­er in a bru­tal car-ram­ming inci­dent. He also post­ed pho­tos of him­self next to an Atom­waf­fen flag in 2017. Atom­waf­fen is a neo-Nazi group that has gar­nered head­lines for being linked to a num­ber of mur­ders. Kleve told me he has “pub­licly dis­avowed” Atom­waf­fen, and no longer belongs to any white suprema­cist groups, but as recent­ly as this year, he was post­ing white suprema­cist slo­gans on Face­book, and endors­ing “the Order,” a fic­tion­al col­lec­tive depict­ed in the neo-Nazi pro­pa­gan­da book The Turn­er Diaries.

    In the book, “the Order” slaugh­tered Jews, non-whites and oth­er minori­ties in part of a make-believe race war. The book was admired by ter­ror­ists like Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh and David Copeland, a British man who mur­dered three peo­ple in a bomb­ing cam­paign that was tar­get­ed at minori­ties in 1999. Kee­gan Han­kes, an intel­li­gence ana­lyst with South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter, told Newsweek that peo­ple “should be con­cerned” about vio­lence when deal­ing with those who asso­ciate with Van­guard Amer­i­ca and Atom­waf­fen, even periph­er­al­ly.

    [See Face­book post where Kleve shows off a hand­gun which he labels “Future Con­ser­v­a­tive starter pack”]

    “Every­one has to remem­ber that this ide­ol­o­gy is found­ed on build­ing a white eth­nos­tate,” Han­kes said. “They believe that they are fight­ing for the sur­vival of the white race.”

    ...

    [see screen­shot of Kleve’s Face­book post where he states: “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.”]
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    Scott, who lived with Kleve from mid-Octo­ber to the start of Decem­ber 2017, told Newsweek that Kleve had an AR-15 assault rifle that he kept in a com­mon area of their apart­ment. Schnei­der, Scott’s friend, said she saw the weapon as well but thought it was a shot­gun. (She admit­ted to not know­ing much about firearms, while Scott claimed to have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of them.) Scott also told Newsweek that Kleve kept a pis­tol “on him.” Nebras­ka is an open-car­ry state, and Lin­coln Police con­firmed to Newsweek that Kleve would be legal­ly allowed to car­ry a weapon out­side of cam­pus. Kleve told Newsweek that his guns were pur­chased legal­ly but would not elab­o­rate on how many he owns, or their makes and mod­els. He denied own­ing an AR-15, but declined to answer whether he owned any sim­i­lar weapons that could be mis­tak­en for one.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The ques­tion about what to do with the increas­ing­ly iso­lat­ed Kleve is emblem­at­ic of a larg­er issue fac­ing col­leges across the coun­try. Even though the era of so-called alt-right pol­i­tics that arose dur­ing the pop­ulist cam­paign of Don­ald Trump has shown signs of frac­tur­ing, it has embold­ened a small but not insignif­i­cant num­ber of young, white men to come for­ward with white suprema­cist or neo-Nazi beliefs. As this is hap­pen­ing, women, minori­ties and oth­er com­mu­ni­ties that are threat­ened by the polit­i­cal goals of such men are becom­ing more sen­si­tive to their pres­ence, and demand­ing that schools take action to pro­tect them. Young white suprema­cists were tied to a num­ber of mur­ders last year, fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing the issue. The sit­u­a­tion is a com­plex one, and it pos­es chal­lenges to both admin­is­tra­tors and to advo­cates of free speech.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    One sim­i­lar case to Kleve’s is that of Mark Daniel Neuhoff, a 27-year-old grad­u­ate stu­dent in Vir­ginia Tech’s Eng­lish depart­ment. Neuhoff’s pres­ence on cam­pus sparked a mas­sive out­cry in the fall semes­ter of 2017. Posts from Neuhoff’s Face­book account that appeared to endorse white suprema­cy, Hitler and the Nazi appli­ca­tion of “Jew­ish stars” dur­ing World War II were leaked by a local antifas­cist group. Stu­dents were out­raged when they saw them, and their feel­ings were com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that Neuhoff taught under­grad­u­ates in his capac­i­ty as a teacher’s assis­tant.

    ...

    He told Newsweek that he was actu­al­ly a “pale­o­con­ser­v­a­tive monar­chist” and not a white suprema­cist, despite his posts appear­ing to praise Hitler, and claimed that his views were tak­en out of con­text. He also com­plained that the posts that appeared to many stu­dents to be deeply anti-Semit­ic were made on a locked feed, and that antifas­cist activists had infil­trat­ed his account.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    While Neuhoff longs to make an exit from acad­e­mia, oth­ers on the far-right are eager to make inroads there, but so far with extreme­ly lim­it­ed suc­cess. Matthew Heim­bach of Tra­di­tion­al­ist Worker’s Par­ty (TWP), a small but active neo-Nazi group, is attempt­ing to start a col­lege speak­ing tour called “Nation­al Social­ism or Death” at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ten­nessee in Knoxville lat­er this month. He told Newsweek that the point of the exer­cise is to find com­mon ground with “con­ser­v­a­tives and social­ists.” As with ral­lies staged by white suprema­cist Richard Spencer, though, pro­test­ers of the event are expect­ed to out­num­ber his sup­port­ers. Heim­bach argued that he was doing it to argue for a “safe space for fas­cists” in acad­e­mia, but it is also unclear that fas­cist beliefs are real­ly treat­ed with any intol­er­ance by admin­is­tra­tors. Stu­dents like Neuhoff and Kleve are iso­lat­ed, but they are also enrolled.
    ...

    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 USit’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:

    ...
    Justin Myers, 18, a fresh­man busi­ness stu­dent at UNL and a self-described con­ser­v­a­tive, told Newsweek that while he wasn’t sure if Kleve had done enough to be “legal­ly kicked off cam­pus” in terms of his praise of vio­lence, he would feel uncom­fort­able being any­where near him in class.

    Myers also argued that there was a dif­fer­ence between the cam­pus debates about free speech between con­ser­v­a­tives and left­ists, and the threat of overt neo-Nazism. “These guys hate our sys­tem of gov­ern­ment and the free­doms we have,” Myers said.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 8, 2018, 11:41 pm
  14. 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:

    Mic

    Jor­dan Peter­son is the ris­ing self-help guru of young con­ser­v­a­tives. Here’s what he’s telling them.

    By Jack Smith IV
    Feb. 3, 2018

    There’s a new self-help guru at the heart of mod­ern con­ser­vatism. He’s a rous­ing speak­er, encour­ag­ing his lis­ten­ers to take con­trol of their own des­tinies, like a wiry Tony Rob­bins who sounds like a Mup­pet and believes there are only two gen­ders.

    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.

    Peterson’s been described as “the stu­pid man’s smart per­son,” which is a good enough euphemism for say­ing “effec­tive pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al.” Peterson’s YouTube chan­nel has more than 700,000 sub­scribers, and he has a pod­cast in which he gives long address­es on clas­si­cal phi­los­o­phy. At his well-attend­ed col­lege talks, his ador­ing, large­ly male fan­base reg­u­lar­ly approach him after­ward to say that his advice has giv­en them mean­ing and pur­pose.

    Peter­son first earned inter­na­tion­al noto­ri­ety in Novem­ber 2017 as the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to pro­fes­sor who refused to use gen­der-neu­tral pro­nouns after the intro­duc­tion of a Cana­di­an bill that would pro­hib­it dis­crim­i­na­tion on the basis of gen­der iden­ti­ty. Peter­son railed against the bill as a total­i­tar­i­an crack­down on free speech. He threat­ened a hunger strike if he were jailed for not using someone’s pre­ferred pro­nouns, although a let­ter from the Cana­di­an Bar Asso­ci­a­tion found that inter­pret­ing the law as Peter­son did is “a mis­un­der­stand­ing of human rights and hate crimes leg­is­la­tion.”

    When for­mer Google engi­neer James Damore was fired after writ­ing his now-infa­mous inter­nal memo about gen­der in the work­place, he did two inter­views on YouTube before speak­ing with any­one in the main­stream press. One inter­view was with far-right talk­ing head Ste­fan Molyneux. The oth­er was with Peter­son.

    But no sin­gle event did more to launch Peter­son than his mid-Jan­u­ary appear­ance on the British Chan­nel 4 News, where he was con­front­ed about his gen­der essen­tial­ism by vet­er­an news­cast­er Cathy New­man.

    The inter­view was a dis­as­ter for New­man. For a half-hour, New­man pep­pered Peter­son with asser­tions about his beliefs, mis­quot­ing Peter­son back to him­self. In a dis­cus­sion about the gen­der pay gap, she con­tin­u­al­ly tried to catch him in his sex­ism, employ­ing the phrase “so what you’re real­ly say­ing is...” fol­lowed by bold mis­char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of his com­ments as he lucid­ly recit­ed sta­tis­tics and anec­dotes from his work as a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist.

    The inter­view went viral with right wingers, who held it up as exem­plary of one of their favorite tropes: the man of sci­ence employ­ing log­ic against a rad­i­cal fem­i­nist in media hell-bent on call­ing him a sex­ist.

    In the days that fol­lowed, con­ser­v­a­tive colum­nists rushed to his defense in the Guardian, the Atlantic and the Wall Street Jour­nal. The New York Times announced that the “Jor­dan Peter­son Moment” had arrived. Soon after, Peterson’s lat­est book, 12 Rules for Life, shot to the top of the Ama­zon best­seller list. In the Atlantic, res­i­dent con­ser­v­a­tive Conor Frieder­s­dorf asked, “Why can’t peo­ple hear what Jor­dan Peter­son is say­ing?”

    ...

    Con­sid­er the lob­ster

    Jor­dan Peter­son is obsessed with lob­sters. Sev­er­al ear­ly pages in 12 Rules for Life are ded­i­cat­ed to lob­sters and their behav­ior, how they fight, how they mate, their dom­i­nance hier­ar­chies and their sero­tonin lev­els.

    “Look for your inspi­ra­tion to the vic­to­ri­ous lob­ster, with its 350 mil­lion years of prac­ti­cal wis­dom,” Peter­son wrote. “Stand up straight, with your shoul­ders back.”

    This is the first piece of advice he dis­pens­es in his book and his lec­tures, aimed large­ly at the alien­at­ed and pur­pose­less young men. Peterson’s work mix­es psy­chol­o­gy with basic self-help pablum, Joseph Campbell’s idea of the “Hero’s Jour­ney,” moti­va­tion­al speak­ing, evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, Dis­ney movies like Pinoc­chio and Chris­tian­i­ty. His advice is sim­ple: Stand up straight. Make your bed. Only use speech that makes you feel strong. Pick up the heav­i­est bur­den you can find, and make your­self stronger by bear­ing it. Slay the drag­on. Defend the West.

    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.

    When Peter­son speaks, he looks out into the crowd and sees the eyes of his most­ly male audi­ence light up at the men­tion of per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty. But it nev­er takes long before Peter­son sim­mers over from lucid, effec­tive advice and into tirades against fem­i­nists and social jus­tice war­riors. Even the lob­sters are evi­dence that biol­o­gy is biol­o­gy, and that gen­der hier­ar­chy must not be inter­rupt­ed.

    “Do male crus­taceans oppress female crus­taceans?” Peter­son asks in 12 Rules for Life. “Should their hier­ar­chies be upend­ed?”

    So what is this force Peter­son says is bear­ing down on young men, blud­geon­ing their self-esteem with unfair accu­sa­tions and reduc­ing their capac­i­ty for per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty? “Post­mod­ernism.”

    To under­stand Peterson’s use of the word “post­mod­ernism,” you need to become famil­iar with one of the most pop­u­lar and implau­si­ble fan­tasies in mod­ern con­ser­vatism: “cul­tur­al marx­ism.” Cul­tur­al marx­ism is an anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry devel­oped in the 1980s large­ly in response to affir­ma­tive action, cham­pi­oned by every­one from far-right ter­ror­ists like Anders Behring Breivik to mem­bers of Pres­i­dent Trump’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil.

    The con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry goes like this: A group of aca­d­e­mics in the 1970s real­ized that Marx­ism had failed. So instead of class war between work­ers and own­ers, they devel­oped a new idea as a revenge plot to unrav­el West­ern civ­i­liza­tion: cul­tur­al war­fare. Then, the sto­ry goes, this Marx­ist plot against white men and the nuclear fam­i­ly spread among uni­ver­si­ties and through­out the coun­try. Diver­si­ty train­ing? Black super­heroes? Trans­gen­der rights? That’s all cul­tur­al Marx­ism.

    Peterson’s “post­mod­ernism” and “neo-Marx­ism” is essen­tial­ly the same as “cul­tur­al Marx­ism,” but with some of the names changed. Peter­son not only sees Marx­ism every­where, but sees its influ­ence as the most per­va­sive threat to mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion. He often rec­om­mends the book The Gulag Arch­i­pel­ago, a 1973 his­to­ry of Sovi­et labor camps, as the essen­tial text for under­stand­ing “the cen­tral issue in our cul­ture at the moment.” This is large­ly his issue with the pro­noun debate: If we cede ground to the rad­i­cal left­ists, it’s not just pro­nouns, but our entire cul­ture that’s at stake.

    “I believe that the rea­son this has caused so much noise — tremen­dous amount of noise, tremen­dous amount of atten­tion on YouTube — is because there are things that are at stake in this dis­cus­sion, despite its sur­face nature, that strike at the very heart of our civ­i­liza­tion,” Peter­son said dur­ing a Cana­di­an broad­cast inter­view.

    So how can the young men of the West defend them­selves from a Marx­ist plot to tear apart the cul­ture and the nuclear fam­i­ly? A right­ly ordered soul.

    “What I’ve been telling young men is that there’s an actu­al rea­son why they need to grow up, which is that they have some­thing to offer,” Peter­son said in the Chan­nel 4 inter­view. “That peo­ple have with­in them this capac­i­ty to set the world straight, and that’s nec­es­sary to man­i­fest in the world.”

    Chick­en Soup for the Cap­i­tal­ist Soul

    Self-help pro­grams nat­u­ral­ly lend them­selves to a con­ser­v­a­tive world­view. Empow­er­ment gurus often teach their adher­ents to give up on blame and focus on pulling them­selves up by their spir­i­tu­al boot­straps. In The New Prophets of Cap­i­tal, Nicole Aschoff writes about how even lib­er­al heros like Oprah can divert our atten­tion away from the sys­tems that pro­duce pover­ty and anx­i­ety, and instead focus our atten­tion inward.

    “Oprah is appeal­ing pre­cise­ly because her sto­ries hide the role of polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, and social struc­tures,” Aschoff wrote. “In doing so, they make the Amer­i­can Dream seem attain­able. If we just fix our­selves, we can achieve our goals.”

    In oth­er words: Don’t wor­ry about chang­ing the world, focus on chang­ing your­self. It doesn’t mat­ter, for exam­ple, that one of the top indi­ca­tors of income is where you were born, and not the struc­ture of your fam­i­ly. The only thing that mat­ters is what you’re going to do to pre­vail.

    Peter­son has iden­ti­fied that nascent ingre­di­ent of con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics with­in self-help, and pulled its fla­vor straight to the sur­face.

    Where cre­at­ing social progress requires col­lec­tive action, Peter­son says attempt­ing to fix soci­ety at large is an arro­gant project, akin to a mon­key try­ing to repair a mil­i­tary heli­copter by bang­ing it with a wrench. He invokes the Ser­mon on the Mount — “Why do you look at the speck of saw­dust in your brother’s eye and pay no atten­tion to the plank in your own eye?” — as evi­dence that any­one who calls into ques­tion the world with­out hav­ing per­fect­ly ordered their own soul is a hyp­ocrite.

    “The dom­i­nance hier­ar­chy is not cap­i­tal­ism,” Peter­son writes in his book. “It’s not com­mu­nism, either, for that mat­ter. It’s not the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex. It’s not the patri­archy — that dis­pos­able, mal­leable, arbi­trary cul­tur­al arti­fact.”

    No, he says. Those who want to fix the world are whin­ers, unin­ter­est­ed in doing the real work of tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for them­selves.

    It’s no sur­prise that the mess of ide­olo­gies asso­ci­at­ed with the alt-right revere Peter­son, a great defend­er of the “West.” For white nation­al­ists, his writ­ing about evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy sup­ports their belief in a Dar­win­ist con­test for resources. For so-called “men’s rights” misog­y­nists, Peter­son rein­forces the idea that fem­i­nism has turned mod­ern men fee­ble. Peter­son is a philo­soph­i­cal sage for rad­i­cal anti-com­mu­nists, and a demigod of YouTube debate pedantry.

    But Peter­son rejects the far-right. Instead, he sees his work as a path away from all that, from the resent­ment and vio­lence of fringe nihilists.

    “I’ve had many, many peo­ple write me from the right, or from the fringes of the rad­i­cal right, say­ing pre­cise­ly that lis­ten­ing to my lec­tures stopped them from going all of the way,” Peter­son said in an inter­view on YouTube.

    And this is why mod­ern con­ser­vatism is so enam­ored of Peter­son.

    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.

    Now, Peter­son doesn’t him­self iden­ti­fy as con­ser­v­a­tive, but main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics are the nat­ur­al con­clu­sion of near­ly all of his teach­ings and beliefs.

    In one speech, deliv­ered at Har­vard and uploaded with the title “The Great­est Speech Every Stu­dent Should Hear,” he addressed the idea that the wealth­i­est 1% of soci­ety are hoard­ing wealth, call­ing it “absolute rub­bish.” The wealthy accu­mu­lat­ed what they have through lives of great­ness, Peter­son said, and if stu­dents would only become deserv­ing through rig­or­ous dis­ci­pline and self-improve­ment, the 1% would find no greater delight than to hand out oppor­tu­ni­ties.

    “There are few things which are more intrin­si­cal­ly mean­ing­ful, if you’re an accom­plished per­son, then to find young peo­ple who have the pos­si­bil­i­ty of being accom­plished and say, ‘Hey look, here’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for you.’”

    Peter­son believes Chris­tian­i­ty is the foun­da­tion of soci­etal great­ness, that same-sex mar­riage is a poten­tial Left­ist assault on tra­di­tion­al fam­i­ly struc­tures, and that “white priv­i­lege” is a destruc­tive con­cept that will engen­der a sui­ci­dal lev­el of guilt in the West. Self-help is all well and good for get­ting one’s life in shape, but when extrap­o­lat­ed to the lev­el of nation­al pol­i­tics, the rhetoric of “per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty” is a handy weapon for those who oppose sin­gle-pay­er health care.

    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.” It was the French philoso­pher Michel Fou­cault who observed that every­day fas­cism can arise in the pro­grams of self-dis­ci­pline that make docile, obe­di­ent work­ers of us all. Then again, Peter­son thinks Fou­cault is a treach­er­ous, bit­ter and resent­ful char­la­tan at the cen­ter of the “neo-Marx­ist” plot against the West. So that’s that.

    But if the true cause of young men’s alien­ation isn’t the rad­i­cal fem­i­nists, but the stag­na­tion of wages rel­a­tive to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, rapid decline in income equal­i­ty, reduced oppor­tu­ni­ties and the dec­i­ma­tion of fields once dom­i­nat­ed by men? If the cri­sis of the West con­tin­ues unchal­lenged by Peterson’s pro­teges, crum­bling around them as they bear the bur­den of that pain and close their ears to col­lec­tive demands for change?

    Well, then Peter­son will only have that many more alien­at­ed young men whom he can teach to per­pet­u­ate the soci­ety that made them.

    The real prob­lem is those god damn Marx­ists, any­way.

    ———-

    “Jor­dan Peter­son is the ris­ing self-help guru of young con­ser­v­a­tives. Here’s what he’s telling them.” by Jack Smith IV; Mic; 02/03/2018

    “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:

    ...
    Peterson’s been described as “the stu­pid man’s smart per­son,” which is a good enough euphemism for say­ing “effec­tive pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al.” Peterson’s YouTube chan­nel has more than 700,000 sub­scribers, and he has a pod­cast in which he gives long address­es on clas­si­cal phi­los­o­phy. At his well-attend­ed col­lege talks, his ador­ing, large­ly male fan­base reg­u­lar­ly approach him after­ward to say that his advice has giv­en them mean­ing and pur­pose.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    When for­mer Google engi­neer James Damore was fired after writ­ing his now-infa­mous inter­nal memo about gen­der in the work­place, he did two inter­views on YouTube before speak­ing with any­one in the main­stream press. One inter­view was with far-right talk­ing head Ste­fan Molyneux. The oth­er was with Peter­son.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Con­sid­er the lob­ster

    Jor­dan Peter­son is obsessed with lob­sters. Sev­er­al ear­ly pages in 12 Rules for Life are ded­i­cat­ed to lob­sters and their behav­ior, how they fight, how they mate, their dom­i­nance hier­ar­chies and their sero­tonin lev­els.

    “Look for your inspi­ra­tion to the vic­to­ri­ous lob­ster, with its 350 mil­lion years of prac­ti­cal wis­dom,” Peter­son wrote. “Stand up straight, with your shoul­ders back.”

    This is the first piece of advice he dis­pens­es in his book and his lec­tures, aimed large­ly at the alien­at­ed and pur­pose­less young men. Peterson’s work mix­es psy­chol­o­gy with basic self-help pablum, Joseph Campbell’s idea of the “Hero’s Jour­ney,” moti­va­tion­al speak­ing, evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, Dis­ney movies like Pinoc­chio and Chris­tian­i­ty. His advice is sim­ple: Stand up straight. Make your bed. Only use speech that makes you feel strong. Pick up the heav­i­est bur­den you can find, and make your­self stronger by bear­ing it. Slay the drag­on. Defend the West.

    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.

    When Peter­son speaks, he looks out into the crowd and sees the eyes of his most­ly male audi­ence light up at the men­tion of per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty. But it nev­er takes long before Peter­son sim­mers over from lucid, effec­tive advice and into tirades against fem­i­nists and social jus­tice war­riors. Even the lob­sters are evi­dence that biol­o­gy is biol­o­gy, and that gen­der hier­ar­chy must not be inter­rupt­ed.

    “Do male crus­taceans oppress female crus­taceans?” Peter­son asks in 12 Rules for Life. “Should their hier­ar­chies be upend­ed?”
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    So what is this force Peter­son says is bear­ing down on young men, blud­geon­ing their self-esteem with unfair accu­sa­tions and reduc­ing their capac­i­ty for per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty? “Post­mod­ernism.”

    To under­stand Peterson’s use of the word “post­mod­ernism,” you need to become famil­iar with one of the most pop­u­lar and implau­si­ble fan­tasies in mod­ern con­ser­vatism: “cul­tur­al marx­ism.” Cul­tur­al marx­ism is an anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry devel­oped in the 1980s large­ly in response to affir­ma­tive action, cham­pi­oned by every­one from far-right ter­ror­ists like Anders Behring Breivik to mem­bers of Pres­i­dent Trump’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil.

    The con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry goes like this: A group of aca­d­e­mics in the 1970s real­ized that Marx­ism had failed. So instead of class war between work­ers and own­ers, they devel­oped a new idea as a revenge plot to unrav­el West­ern civ­i­liza­tion: cul­tur­al war­fare. Then, the sto­ry goes, this Marx­ist plot against white men and the nuclear fam­i­ly spread among uni­ver­si­ties and through­out the coun­try. Diver­si­ty train­ing? Black super­heroes? Trans­gen­der rights? That’s all cul­tur­al Marx­ism.

    Peterson’s “post­mod­ernism” and “neo-Marx­ism” is essen­tial­ly the same as “cul­tur­al Marx­ism,” but with some of the names changed. Peter­son not only sees Marx­ism every­where, but sees its influ­ence as the most per­va­sive threat to mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion. He often rec­om­mends the book The Gulag Arch­i­pel­ago, a 1973 his­to­ry of Sovi­et labor camps, as the essen­tial text for under­stand­ing “the cen­tral issue in our cul­ture at the moment.” This is large­ly his issue with the pro­noun debate: If we cede ground to the rad­i­cal left­ists, it’s not just pro­nouns, but our entire cul­ture that’s at stake.

    “I believe that the rea­son this has caused so much noise — tremen­dous amount of noise, tremen­dous amount of atten­tion on YouTube — is because there are things that are at stake in this dis­cus­sion, despite its sur­face nature, that strike at the very heart of our civ­i­liza­tion,” Peter­son said dur­ing a Cana­di­an broad­cast inter­view.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    So how can the young men of the West defend them­selves from a Marx­ist plot to tear apart the cul­ture and the nuclear fam­i­ly? A right­ly ordered soul.

    “What I’ve been telling young men is that there’s an actu­al rea­son why they need to grow up, which is that they have some­thing to offer,” Peter­son said in the Chan­nel 4 inter­view. “That peo­ple have with­in them this capac­i­ty to set the world straight, and that’s nec­es­sary to man­i­fest in the world.”

    Chick­en Soup for the Cap­i­tal­ist Soul

    Self-help pro­grams nat­u­ral­ly lend them­selves to a con­ser­v­a­tive world­view. Empow­er­ment gurus often teach their adher­ents to give up on blame and focus on pulling them­selves up by their spir­i­tu­al boot­straps. In The New Prophets of Cap­i­tal, Nicole Aschoff writes about how even lib­er­al heros like Oprah can divert our atten­tion away from the sys­tems that pro­duce pover­ty and anx­i­ety, and instead focus our atten­tion inward.

    “Oprah is appeal­ing pre­cise­ly because her sto­ries hide the role of polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, and social struc­tures,” Aschoff wrote. “In doing so, they make the Amer­i­can Dream seem attain­able. If we just fix our­selves, we can achieve our goals.”

    In oth­er words: Don’t wor­ry about chang­ing the world, focus on chang­ing your­self. It doesn’t mat­ter, for exam­ple, that one of the top indi­ca­tors of income is where you were born, and not the struc­ture of your fam­i­ly. The only thing that mat­ters is what you’re going to do to pre­vail.

    Peter­son has iden­ti­fied that nascent ingre­di­ent of con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics with­in self-help, and pulled its fla­vor straight to the sur­face.

    Where cre­at­ing social progress requires col­lec­tive action, Peter­son says attempt­ing to fix soci­ety at large is an arro­gant project, akin to a mon­key try­ing to repair a mil­i­tary heli­copter by bang­ing it with a wrench. He invokes the Ser­mon on the Mount — “Why do you look at the speck of saw­dust in your brother’s eye and pay no atten­tion to the plank in your own eye?” — as evi­dence that any­one who calls into ques­tion the world with­out hav­ing per­fect­ly ordered their own soul is a hyp­ocrite.

    “The dom­i­nance hier­ar­chy is not cap­i­tal­ism,” Peter­son writes in his book. “It’s not com­mu­nism, either, for that mat­ter. It’s not the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex. It’s not the patri­archy — that dis­pos­able, mal­leable, arbi­trary cul­tur­al arti­fact.”

    No, he says. Those who want to fix the world are whin­ers, unin­ter­est­ed in doing the real work of tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for them­selves.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    It’s no sur­prise that the mess of ide­olo­gies asso­ci­at­ed with the alt-right revere Peter­son, a great defend­er of the “West.” For white nation­al­ists, his writ­ing about evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy sup­ports their belief in a Dar­win­ist con­test for resources. For so-called “men’s rights” misog­y­nists, Peter­son rein­forces the idea that fem­i­nism has turned mod­ern men fee­ble. Peter­son is a philo­soph­i­cal sage for rad­i­cal anti-com­mu­nists, and a demigod of YouTube debate pedantry.

    But Peter­son rejects the far-right. Instead, he sees his work as a path away from all that, from the resent­ment and vio­lence of fringe nihilists.

    “I’ve had many, many peo­ple write me from the right, or from the fringes of the rad­i­cal right, say­ing pre­cise­ly that lis­ten­ing to my lec­tures stopped them from going all of the way,” Peter­son said in an inter­view on YouTube.

    And this is why mod­ern con­ser­vatism is so enam­ored of Peter­son.

    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.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    Now, Peter­son doesn’t him­self iden­ti­fy as con­ser­v­a­tive, but main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics are the nat­ur­al con­clu­sion of near­ly all of his teach­ings and beliefs.

    In one speech, deliv­ered at Har­vard and uploaded with the title “The Great­est Speech Every Stu­dent Should Hear,” he addressed the idea that the wealth­i­est 1% of soci­ety are hoard­ing wealth, call­ing it “absolute rub­bish.” The wealthy accu­mu­lat­ed what they have through lives of great­ness, Peter­son said, and if stu­dents would only become deserv­ing through rig­or­ous dis­ci­pline and self-improve­ment, the 1% would find no greater delight than to hand out oppor­tu­ni­ties.

    “There are few things which are more intrin­si­cal­ly mean­ing­ful, if you’re an accom­plished per­son, then to find young peo­ple who have the pos­si­bil­i­ty of being accom­plished and say, ‘Hey look, here’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for you.’”

    Peter­son believes Chris­tian­i­ty is the foun­da­tion of soci­etal great­ness, that same-sex mar­riage is a poten­tial Left­ist assault on tra­di­tion­al fam­i­ly struc­tures, and that “white priv­i­lege” is a destruc­tive con­cept that will engen­der a sui­ci­dal lev­el of guilt in the West. Self-help is all well and good for get­ting one’s life in shape, but when extrap­o­lat­ed to the lev­el of nation­al pol­i­tics, the rhetoric of “per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty” is a handy weapon for those who oppose sin­gle-pay­er health care.

    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.” It was the French philoso­pher Michel Fou­cault who observed that every­day fas­cism can arise in the pro­grams of self-dis­ci­pline that make docile, obe­di­ent work­ers of us all. Then again, Peter­son thinks Fou­cault is a treach­er­ous, bit­ter and resent­ful char­la­tan at the cen­ter of the “neo-Marx­ist” plot against the West. So that’s that.
    ...

    “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:

    The Out­line

    The Alt-right is recruit­ing depressed peo­ple
    Alt-right fig­ures are tar­get­ing vul­ner­a­ble com­mu­ni­ties with videos and, unfor­tu­nate­ly, it seems to be work­ing.

    Paris Mar­tineau
    Feb—26—2018 02:02PM EST

    A video on YouTube enti­tled “Advice For Peo­ple With Depres­sion” has over half a mil­lion views. The title is gener­ic enough, and to the unsus­pect­ing view­er, lec­tur­er Jor­dan Peter­son could even look legit­i­mate or knowl­edgable — a quick Google search will reveal that he even spoke at Har­vard once. But as the video wears on, Peter­son argues that men are depressed and frus­trat­ed because they don’t have a high­er call­ing like women (who, accord­ing to Peter­son, are bio­log­i­cal­ly required to have and take care of infants). This leaves weak men seek­ing “impul­sive, low-class plea­sure,” he argues. Upon first glance he cer­tain­ly doesn’t seem like a dar­ling of the alt-right, but he is.

    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.

    “I still won­der, how could I have been so stu­pid?” writes Red­dit user u/pdesperaux, in a post detail­ing how he was acci­den­tal­ly seduced by the alt-right. “I was part of a cult. I know cults and I know brain­wash­ing, I have researched them exten­sive­ly, you’d think I would have noticed, right? Wrong. These are the same tac­tics that Sci­en­tol­ogy and ISIS use and I fell for them like a chump.”

    “NOBODY is talk­ing about how the online depres­sion com­mu­ni­ty has been infil­trat­ed by alt-right recruiters delib­er­ate­ly prey­ing on the vul­ner­a­ble,” writes Twit­ter user @MrHappyDieHappy in a thread on the issue. “There NEED to be pub­lic warn­ings about this. ‘Online pals’ have attempt­ed to groom me mul­ti­ple times when at my absolute low­est.”

    “You know your life is use­less and mean­ing­less,” Peter­son says in his “Advice” video, turn­ing towards the view­er, “you’re full of self-con­tempt and nihilism.” He doesn’t fol­low all of this rous­ing self-hatred with an answer, but rather mere­ly teas­es at one. “[You] have had enough of that,” he says to a class­room full of men. “Rights, rights, rights, rights…”

    Peterson’s alt-light mes­sag­ing quick­ly takes a dark­er turn. Fin­ish that video and YouTube will queue up “Jor­dan Peter­son — Don’t Be The Nice Guy” (1.3 mil­lion views), and “Jor­dan Peter­son — The Trag­ic Sto­ry of the Man-Child” (over 853,000 views), both of which are prac­ti­cal­ly right out of the redpill/incel hand­book.

    The com­mon rail­road stages of ‘help­ful’ link­ing to ‘moti­va­tion­al speak­ers’ goes ‘Jor­dan Peter­son —> Ste­fan Molyneux —> Mil­len­ni­al Woes,” writes @MrHappyDieHappy. “The first is charis­mat­ic and not as harm­ful, but his per­sua­sive­ness leaves peo­ple open for the next two, who are frankly evil and dumb.” Molyneux, an anar­cho-cap­i­tal­ist who pro­motes sci­en­tif­ic racism and eugen­ics, has grown wild­ly pop­u­lar amongst the alt-right as of late. His videos — which argue, among oth­er things, that rape is a “moral right” — are often used to help tran­si­tion vul­ner­a­ble young men into the vit­ri­olic and racist core of the alt-right.

    Though it may seem like a huge ide­o­log­i­cal leap, it makes sense, in a way. For some dis­il­lu­sioned and hope­less­ly con­fused young men, the alt-right offers two things they feel a seri­ous lack of in the throes of depres­sion: accep­tance and com­mu­ni­ty. These primer videos and their asso­ci­at­ed “sup­port” groups do a shock­ing­ly good job of acknowl­edg­ing the valid­i­ty of the depressed man’s exis­tence — some­thing men don’t often feel they expe­ri­ence — and cap­i­tal­ize on that good will by gal­va­niz­ing their mem­bers into a plan of action (which gen­er­al­ly involves fight­ing against some group or class of peo­ple des­ig­nat­ed as “the ene­my”). These sort of move­ments allot the depressed per­son a form of agency which they may nev­er have expe­ri­enced before. And whether it’s ground­ed in real­i­ty or not, that’s an addict­ing feel­ing.

    Accord­ing to Chris­t­ian Pic­ci­oli­ni, a for­mer neo-nazi who co-found­ed the peace advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion, Life After Hate, these sort of recruit­ing tac­tics aren’t just com­mon, but sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly enforced. “[The recruiters] are active­ly look­ing for these kind of bro­ken indi­vid­u­als who they can promise accep­tance, who they can promise iden­ti­ty to,” Pic­ci­oli­ni said in an inter­view with Sam Seder. “Because in real life, per­haps these peo­ple are social­ly awk­ward — they’re not fit­ting in; they may be bul­lied — and they’re des­per­ate­ly look­ing for some­thing. And the ide­ol­o­gy and the dog­ma are not what dri­ve peo­ple to this extrem­ism, it’s in fact, I think, a bro­ken search for that accep­tance and that pur­pose and com­mu­ni­ty.”

    ...

    Some of the most tox­ic unof­fi­cial alt-right com­mu­ni­ties online have oper­at­ed on this prin­ci­ple. r/Incels (which is now banned, thank­ful­ly), began as a place for the “invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate” to com­mis­er­ate, but quick­ly became the place for extreme misog­y­nists to gath­er and blame their prob­lems on women and minori­ties. “Men going their own way,” (MGTOW) was ini­tial­ly a space for men to com­mune and pro­tect their sov­er­eign­ty as dudes “above all else,” it devolved into an infi­nite­ly racist and misog­y­nis­tic hell­hole. Sim­i­lar fates have befall­en r/Redpill, r/MensRights, and count­less oth­ers. Com­mis­er­a­tion begets com­mu­ni­ty begets a vul­ner­a­ble trend towards group­think.

    While it’s easy to iso­late pure­ly hate­ful con­tent, the type that preys upon the dis­en­fran­chised and uses much more insid­i­ous meth­ods to bring them into the fold is much more dif­fi­cult to man­age on expan­sive plat­forms like YouTube. Par­tic­u­lar­ly because the mes­sage being sent isn’t one of obvi­ous in-your-face hate speech, or some­thing so obvi­ous­ly objec­tion­able, but rather more of a slow burn. It’s not the sort of thing you can train algo­rithms to spot — or at least, not yet — mak­ing the issue of con­tain­ment that much hard­er to address.

    ———-

    “The Alt-right is recruit­ing depressed peo­ple” by Paris Mar­tineau; The Out­line; 02/26/2018

    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:

    ...
    “I still won­der, how could I have been so stu­pid?” writes Red­dit user u/pdesperaux, in a post detail­ing how he was acci­den­tal­ly seduced by the alt-right. “I was part of a cult. I know cults and I know brain­wash­ing, I have researched them exten­sive­ly, you’d think I would have noticed, right? Wrong. These are the same tac­tics that Sci­en­tol­ogy and ISIS use and I fell for them like a chump.”

    “NOBODY is talk­ing about how the online depres­sion com­mu­ni­ty has been infil­trat­ed by alt-right recruiters delib­er­ate­ly prey­ing on the vul­ner­a­ble,” writes Twit­ter user @MrHappyDieHappy in a thread on the issue. “There NEED to be pub­lic warn­ings about this. ‘Online pals’ have attempt­ed to groom me mul­ti­ple times when at my absolute low­est.”
    ...

    And that stream self-help Alt-Right gate­way videos includes the Jor­dan Peter­son. Then it turns to ‘red­pilled’ Jor­dan Peter­son videos:

    ...
    “You know your life is use­less and mean­ing­less,” Peter­son says in his “Advice” video, turn­ing towards the view­er, “you’re full of self-con­tempt and nihilism.” He doesn’t fol­low all of this rous­ing self-hatred with an answer, but rather mere­ly teas­es at one. “[You] have had enough of that,” he says to a class­room full of men. “Rights, rights, rights, rights…”

    Peterson’s alt-light mes­sag­ing quick­ly takes a dark­er turn. Fin­ish that video and YouTube will queue up “Jor­dan Peter­son — Don’t Be The Nice Guy” (1.3 mil­lion views), and “Jor­dan Peter­son — The Trag­ic Sto­ry of the Man-Child” (over 853,000 views), both of which are prac­ti­cal­ly right out of the redpill/incel hand­book.

    The com­mon rail­road stages of ‘help­ful’ link­ing to ‘moti­va­tion­al speak­ers’ goes ‘Jor­dan Peter­son —> Ste­fan Molyneux —> Mil­len­ni­al Woes,” writes @MrHappyDieHappy. “The first is charis­mat­ic and not as harm­ful, but his per­sua­sive­ness leaves peo­ple open for the next two, who are frankly evil and dumb.” Molyneux, an anar­cho-cap­i­tal­ist who pro­motes sci­en­tif­ic racism and eugen­ics, has grown wild­ly pop­u­lar amongst the alt-right as of late. His videos — which argue, among oth­er things, that rape is a “moral right” — are often used to help tran­si­tion vul­ner­a­ble young men into the vit­ri­olic and racist core of the alt-right.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Though it may seem like a huge ide­o­log­i­cal leap, it makes sense, in a way. For some dis­il­lu­sioned and hope­less­ly con­fused young men, the alt-right offers two things they feel a seri­ous lack of in the throes of depres­sion: accep­tance and com­mu­ni­ty. These primer videos and their asso­ci­at­ed “sup­port” groups do a shock­ing­ly good job of acknowl­edg­ing the valid­i­ty of the depressed man’s exis­tence — some­thing men don’t often feel they expe­ri­ence — and cap­i­tal­ize on that good will by gal­va­niz­ing their mem­bers into a plan of action (which gen­er­al­ly involves fight­ing against some group or class of peo­ple des­ig­nat­ed as “the ene­my”). These sort of move­ments allot the depressed per­son a form of agency which they may nev­er have expe­ri­enced before. And whether it’s ground­ed in real­i­ty or not, that’s an addict­ing feel­ing.

    Accord­ing to Chris­t­ian Pic­ci­oli­ni, a for­mer neo-nazi who co-found­ed the peace advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion, Life After Hate, these sort of recruit­ing tac­tics aren’t just com­mon, but sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly enforced. “[The recruiters] are active­ly look­ing for these kind of bro­ken indi­vid­u­als who they can promise accep­tance, who they can promise iden­ti­ty to,” Pic­ci­oli­ni said in an inter­view with Sam Seder. “Because in real life, per­haps these peo­ple are social­ly awk­ward — they’re not fit­ting in; they may be bul­lied — and they’re des­per­ate­ly look­ing for some­thing. And the ide­ol­o­gy and the dog­ma are not what dri­ve peo­ple to this extrem­ism, it’s in fact, I think, a bro­ken search for that accep­tance and that pur­pose and com­mu­ni­ty.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Some of the most tox­ic unof­fi­cial alt-right com­mu­ni­ties online have oper­at­ed on this prin­ci­ple. r/Incels (which is now banned, thank­ful­ly), began as a place for the “invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate” to com­mis­er­ate, but quick­ly became the place for extreme misog­y­nists to gath­er and blame their prob­lems on women and minori­ties. “Men going their own way,” (MGTOW) was ini­tial­ly a space for men to com­mune and pro­tect their sov­er­eign­ty as dudes “above all else,” it devolved into an infi­nite­ly racist and misog­y­nis­tic hell­hole. Sim­i­lar fates have befall­en r/Redpill, r/MensRights, and count­less oth­ers. Com­mis­er­a­tion begets com­mu­ni­ty begets a vul­ner­a­ble trend towards group­think.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 11, 2018, 7:56 pm
  15. 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:

    Newsweek

    Neo-Nazis, ‘Future School Shoot­ers’ Using Lead­ing Gam­ing App to Post Hate­ful Con­tent in Hun­dreds of Groups: Report

    By Michael Edi­son Hay­den
    On 3/7/18 at 5:43 PM

    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.

    The report notes that these Steam groups—which typ­i­cal­ly have between 30 and 200 active mem­bers—glo­ri­fy men like 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, who killed six peo­ple and injured over a dozen oth­ers in the vicin­i­ty of the cam­pus of Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Bar­bara, before com­mit­ting sui­cide in 2014.

    Rodger was a vir­u­lent misog­y­nist and want­ed to pun­ish women for reject­ing him. Oth­er shoot­ers, like Seung-Hui Cho, the Vir­ginia Tech senior who killed 32 peo­ple in 2007, are also hailed in these Steam groups. The groups have names like “School Shoot­ers Are Heroes” and “Shoot Up a School.” Some of them allude to “future” school shoot­ings yet to take place and are filled with racist lan­guage.

    ...

    The link between vio­lence and the scat­tered cul­ture of inter­net Nazism has received greater scruti­ny in recent weeks, fol­low­ing a CBS News report that sus­pect­ed Park­land, Flori­da, mass shoot­er Niko­las Cruz alleged­ly pos­sessed gun mag­a­zines engraved with swastikas. Gam­ing apps like Steam have become increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar with­in that com­mu­ni­ty.

    One exam­ple of neo-Nazis using Steam is Andrew “Weev” Auern­heimer, who han­dles the tech­ni­cal side of the white suprema­cist troll web­site Dai­ly Stormer, and sev­er­al months ago appeared to threat­en to “slaugh­ter” Jew­ish chil­dren in retal­i­a­tion for his web­site being tak­en offline. Auern­heimer appears to have a group on the app, which dis­cuss­es games in the con­text of whether they por­tray Adolf Hitler in a favor­able light. The broad­er com­mu­ni­ty of Dai­ly Stormer also appears to have an active com­mu­ni­ty on Steam called “Storm Sect” with rough­ly 200 mem­bers.

    Oth­er neo-Nazi groups on Steam have more overt­ly hate­ful and vio­lent names like “Fag Lynch Squad,” which depicts shad­owy fig­ures hang­ing limply from noos­es in its pro­file pic­ture. Atom­Waf­fen Divi­sion, a neo-Nazi group linked to a num­ber of mur­ders, had its com­mu­ni­ty on Steam removed ear­li­er this month, Reveal News report­ed.

    Angela Nagle, a left­ist writer, demon­strat­ed links between the ori­gins of the alt-right and gam­ing cul­ture in her book Kill All Normies: Online Cul­ture Wars From 4Chan And Tum­blr To Trump And The Alt-Right. The ven­er­a­tion of school shoot­ers and oth­er killers is sim­i­lar­ly linked.

    It is not only on Steam where neo-Nazis have found a plat­form with­in the gam­ing world. Dis­cord, anoth­er gam­ing app, was instru­men­tal to young neo-Nazis in plan­ning the Unite the Right event that took place in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, last August, which led to the death of counter-pro­test­er Heather Hey­er. Dis­cord has made efforts to remove vio­lent and far-right con­tent from its app fol­low­ing reports of the ral­ly, but new groups con­tin­ue to pop up on that plat­form.

    Uni­corn Riot, a vol­un­teer media col­lec­tive, pub­lished record­ings and mes­sages this week that appeared to reveal inter­nal plan­ning dis­cus­sions from the young white suprema­cist group Patri­ot Front, which were ini­tial­ly host­ed on Dis­cord. Patri­ot Front splin­tered from Van­guard Amer­i­ca, the group in which the man accused of killing Hey­er alleged­ly marched dur­ing the protests in Char­lottesville.

    Dis­cord told Newsweek in a state­ment that the com­pa­ny is still try­ing to purge groups like Patri­ot Front from its app.

    “Dis­cord has a Terms of Ser­vice and Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines that we ask all of our com­mu­ni­ties and users to adhere to. These specif­i­cal­ly pro­hib­it harass­ment, threat­en­ing mes­sages, or calls to vio­lence,” a spokesper­son said, not­ing that the group recent­ly removed sev­er­al offend­ing servers. “Though we do not read people’s pri­vate mes­sages, we do inves­ti­gate and take imme­di­ate appro­pri­ate action against any report­ed Terms of Ser­vice vio­la­tion by a serv­er or user.”

    ———-

    “Neo-Nazis, ‘Future School Shoot­ers’ Using Lead­ing Gam­ing App to Post Hate­ful Con­tent in Hun­dreds of Groups: Report” by Michael Edi­son Hay­den; Newsweek; 03/17/2018

    “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:

    ...
    The report notes that these Steam groups—which typ­i­cal­ly have between 30 and 200 active mem­bers—glo­ri­fy men like 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, who killed six peo­ple and injured over a dozen oth­ers in the vicin­i­ty of the cam­pus of Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Bar­bara, before com­mit­ting sui­cide in 2014.

    Rodger was a vir­u­lent misog­y­nist and want­ed to pun­ish women for reject­ing him. Oth­er shoot­ers, like Seung-Hui Cho, the Vir­ginia Tech senior who killed 32 peo­ple in 2007, are also hailed in these Steam groups. The groups have names like “School Shoot­ers Are Heroes” and “Shoot Up a School.” Some of them allude to “future” school shoot­ings yet to take place and are filled with racist lan­guage.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    The link between vio­lence and the scat­tered cul­ture of inter­net Nazism has received greater scruti­ny in recent weeks, fol­low­ing a CBS News report that sus­pect­ed Park­land, Flori­da, mass shoot­er Niko­las Cruz alleged­ly pos­sessed gun mag­a­zines engraved with swastikas. Gam­ing apps like Steam have become increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar with­in that com­mu­ni­ty.

    One exam­ple of neo-Nazis using Steam is Andrew “Weev” Auern­heimer, who han­dles the tech­ni­cal side of the white suprema­cist troll web­site Dai­ly Stormer, and sev­er­al months ago appeared to threat­en to “slaugh­ter” Jew­ish chil­dren in retal­i­a­tion for his web­site being tak­en offline. Auern­heimer appears to have a group on the app, which dis­cuss­es games in the con­text of whether they por­tray Adolf Hitler in a favor­able light. The broad­er com­mu­ni­ty of Dai­ly Stormer also appears to have an active com­mu­ni­ty on Steam called “Storm Sect” with rough­ly 200 mem­bers.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Oth­er neo-Nazi groups on Steam have more overt­ly hate­ful and vio­lent names like “Fag Lynch Squad,” which depicts shad­owy fig­ures hang­ing limply from noos­es in its pro­file pic­ture. Atom­Waf­fen Divi­sion, a neo-Nazi group linked to a num­ber of mur­ders, had its com­mu­ni­ty on Steam removed ear­li­er this month, Reveal News report­ed.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    It is not only on Steam where neo-Nazis have found a plat­form with­in the gam­ing world. Dis­cord, anoth­er gam­ing app, was instru­men­tal to young neo-Nazis in plan­ning the Unite the Right event that took place in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, last August, which led to the death of counter-pro­test­er Heather Hey­er. Dis­cord has made efforts to remove vio­lent and far-right con­tent from its app fol­low­ing reports of the ral­ly, but new groups con­tin­ue to pop up on that plat­form.

    Uni­corn Riot, a vol­un­teer media col­lec­tive, pub­lished record­ings and mes­sages this week that appeared to reveal inter­nal plan­ning dis­cus­sions from the young white suprema­cist group Patri­ot Front, which were ini­tial­ly host­ed on Dis­cord. Patri­ot Front splin­tered from Van­guard Amer­i­ca, the group in which the man accused of killing Hey­er alleged­ly marched dur­ing the protests in Char­lottesville.

    Dis­cord told Newsweek in a state­ment that the com­pa­ny is still try­ing to purge groups like Patri­ot Front from its app.
    ...

    “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:

    Uni­corn Riot

    “We’re Amer­i­cans, And We’re Fas­cists”: Inside Patri­ot Front

    March 5, 2018

    Lans­ing, MI – As white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer is sched­uled to speak at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty on Mon­day, March 5, far-right, neo-Nazi and “alt-right” fac­tions have been arriv­ing in the area ahead of his event.

    One such group is Patri­ot Front, which was formed after mem­bers of Van­guard Amer­i­ca splin­tered off to cre­ate a new orga­ni­za­tion. Uni­corn Riot has gained access to a large amount of mate­ri­als from Patri­ot Front Dis­cord servers, includ­ing chat lots and audio record­ings of voice meet­ings. The records of con­ver­sa­tions between Patri­ot Front lead­ers and mem­bers spans months and pro­vides a unique insight into the oper­a­tions of the self-described “Amer­i­can fas­cist” orga­ni­za­tion.

    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 gangswould 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.”

    Last year Uni­corn Riot was sent the con­tents of the South­ern Front Dis­cord serv­er, which con­tained chat logs (now avail­able on our Dis­cordLeaks plat­form) from May to Sep­tem­ber 2017, show­ing the tran­si­tion of mem­bers from Van­guard Amer­i­ca to Patri­ot Front. Patri­ot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau, who posts using the name Thomas Ryan, was active in Van­guard Amer­i­ca lead­er­ship and is the own­er of the web­site BloodAndSoil.org, which had been Van­guard America’s offi­cial domain.

    Fol­low­ing a con­flict between Rousseau and Van­guard Amer­i­ca ‘CEO’ Dil­lon Irrizary (AKA Dil­lon Hop­per) after Char­lottesville, Rousseau resigned from Van­guard and took the web­site and a fair amount of active mem­bers with him. He found­ed Patri­ot Front the next day, and used the estab­lished ‘Blood and Soil’ web­site to boost its pro­file.

    Rousseau, who is 19 years old, acts as the leader of the group, which includes many old­er men in their thir­ties. He tells his side of the sto­ry of the split between Patri­ot Front and Van­guard Amer­i­ca in a Dis­cord voice call that took place on Feb­ru­ary 9. On the call, after mak­ing jokes rev­el­ing in Heather Heyer’s vio­lent death in Char­lottesville at Unite the Right on August 12, 2017, Rousseau describes the “PR night­mare” that ensued after pic­tures sur­faced of car attack­er James Alex Fields stand­ing along­side mem­bers of Van­guard Amer­i­ca, includ­ing him­self. (As of August 12, Rousseau had not yet left Van­guard Amer­i­ca to found Patri­ot Front.)

    Rousseau went on to claim that Van­guard Amer­i­ca claimed “maybe” 250 mem­bers “at its peak” with 80 mem­bers active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing. He boast­ed of accom­plish­ing “more activism with appar­ent­ly half of their peo­ple,” sug­gest­ing that Patri­ot Front has at most 125 mem­bers with per­haps 60 being reg­u­lar­ly active.

    Patri­ot Front appears to be the most active in Texas, where it has three dif­fer­ent local net­works for mem­bers. On a Feb­ru­ary 11, 2018 voice call, mem­bers esti­mat­ed that “Flori­da has 11 guys” but lament­ed that their group had lit­tle to no pres­ence in Appalachia. The group also seems to have a small but estab­lished pres­ence in New Eng­land states, such as Mass­a­chu­setts and Ver­mont.

    Van­guard Amer­i­ca is a mem­ber of the Nation­al­ist Front coali­tion, along with the Tra­di­tion­al­ist Work­er Par­ty (TWP), the League of the South, and the Nation­al Social­ist Move­ment (NSM). While Patri­ot Front is active­ly feud­ing with Nation­al­ist Front groups such as TWP, they still main­tain an infor­mal rela­tion­ship through their affil­i­a­tion with fig­ures like Richard Spencer. An oper­a­tional doc­u­ment (PDF) from Spencer’s appear­ance in Gainesville last Octo­ber lists Patri­ot Front among the pri­ma­ry groups involved in an alt-right secu­ri­ty “task force” which also includ­ed mem­bers of League of the South.

    While groups of young white men like Patri­ot Front are often used as a per­son­al secu­ri­ty force by alt-right VIPs such as Richard Spencer, Dis­cord chats show some con­fu­sion and/or denial regard­ing this rela­tion­ship. “We don’t do secu­ri­ty at alt-right events”, Rousseau wrote on Octo­ber 15, 2017. How­ev­er, just two days lat­er on Octo­ber 17, anoth­er Patri­ot Front mem­ber wrote that “Thomas, Me, etc are all going” to Richard Spencer’s speech at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da on Octo­ber 19, adding “most” were attend­ing “in a secu­ri­ty capac­i­ty.”

    Late Sun­day night after the Free­dom for the Mar­ket­place of Ideas (FMI) alt-right con­fer­ence this week­end in Detroit, mem­bers of Patri­ot Front post­ed about how they had been act­ing as armed secu­ri­ty for the event. “PF chi had to run armed patrols at FMI,” wrote user ‘Smiter IL.’ “Shit was crazy, but every­thing is ok.”

    The ‘Front and Cen­ter’ chat logs also reveal con­fu­sion and frus­tra­tion among Patri­ot Front mem­bers after three men were arrest­ed for shoot­ing at antifas­cist pro­test­ers fol­low­ing Spencer’s Flori­da speech. William Fears, a Texas neo-Nazi arrest­ed on Octo­ber 17 along with his broth­er Colton Fears and his friend Tyler Ten­brink, has repeat­ed­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Patri­ot Front although he is not an offi­cial mem­ber. Writ­ing about Fears and his two co-defen­dants now fac­ing charges of attempt­ed mur­der, Patri­ot Front Dis­cord mem­ber ‘NDO Nick – TX’ wrote,

    We will not pub­licly dis­avow these guys. With that being said Will was told by mul­ti­ple peo­ple includ­ing Cross and myself not to attend.” – Dis­cord user ‘NDO Nick – TX’, Octo­ber 20, 2017 8:41 PM

    ‘Nick’ also shared many images of him­self and oth­er white suprema­cists attend­ing Spencer’s Gainesville event.

    While Van­guard Amer­i­ca takes an open­ly nation­al social­ist approach, Thomas Rousseau and Patri­ot Front seek to present the same ide­ol­o­gy in a slight­ly more sub­tle and patri­ot­ic pack­age. While cen­ter­ing the group’s rhetoric around “Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty,” Dis­cord mes­sages reveal that Patri­ot Front’s vision is of an exclu­sive­ly white Amer­i­ca in which non-whites are dri­ven out or forced into sub­or­di­nate roles.

    The Amer­i­can Iden­ti­ty belongs to a cer­tain group of peo­ple,” Rousseau wrote in a chat on Octo­ber 15, “and cit­i­zen­ship doesn’t change that.” On Novem­ber 1st, he reit­er­at­ed his “Amer­i­can fas­cist” approach to brand­ing the group: “If any­one asks what we are, we’re Amer­i­cans, and we’re fas­cists. In that order exact­ly.” In a text chat on Novem­ber 8, anoth­er Dis­cord user in the Front and Cen­ter serv­er fur­ther explained the strate­gic val­ue of using patri­ot­ic Amer­i­can aes­thet­ics to pro­mote fas­cism.

    Patri­ot­ic Amer­i­can Imagery: Some­thing true Amer­i­cans iden­ti­fy with, and plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­i­ty for us when asso­ci­at­ed with Nazi­ism, etc.” – Dis­cord user ‘Racist Milk TX’, Novem­ber 8, 2017, 7:57 PM

    Rousseau, the group’s teenage leader, describes how his vision of an Amer­i­can eth­nos­tate would inevitably involve the forced removal of all black peo­ple. “We’re incom­pat­i­ble… either they have to go, or they get to go, depend­ing on how will­ing they are.

    Our anony­mous source who reached out to us from inside Patri­ot Front said they rep­re­sent­ed “a group of con­cerned indi­vid­u­als” and told us why they decid­ed to take steps to expose the group’s inter­nal work­ings:

    We chose to obtain and pass on infor­ma­tion about Patri­ot Front to ensure that any­one con­sid­er­ing join­ing this group or oth­ers like it under­stands what type of orga­ni­za­tion they are com­mit­ting to. This is a group that presents itself as a bul­wark for the future of white peo­ple in pub­lic, while behind closed doors they speak open­ly of vio­lent eth­nic cleans­ing, the rape of white women, the forcible abor­tion of female peo­ple of col­or and death for mem­bers of the LGBTQIA+ com­mu­ni­ty. We have seen what those like them are capa­ble of in Char­lottesville and Orange Coun­ty.”

    The new logs from the ‘Front and Cen­ter’ serv­er, as well as a few relat­ed small­er chat groups, show how Patri­ot Front has con­tin­ued orga­niz­ing into 2018. Along with most of the alt-right since Char­lottesville, Patri­ot Front tak­en up the tac­tic of short, unan­nounced ‘flash demo’ protests, in which they assem­ble in pub­lic to chant, hold ban­ners, and take pho­tos for pro­pa­gan­da before quick­ly dis­pers­ing to avoid counter-pro­test­ers. They held a short protest car­ry­ing flares and ban­ners at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas cam­pus on Novem­ber 3, 2017, before being sur­round­ed by police and quick­ly leav­ing the area. This ‘flash demo’ was writ­ten up for the Dai­ly Stormer by Robert ‘Azzmador’ Ray, who, while not a mem­ber of Patri­ot Front, gen­er­al­ly acts as an ally and sup­port­er. Oth­er Patri­ot Front ‘flash demos’ have tak­en place in Austin, Texas and more recent­ly in Burling­ton, Ver­mont, where mem­bers had to change loca­tions at the last minute due to their plans alleged­ly being leaked to local antifas­cists.

    Patri­ot Front also places a strong empha­sis on aggres­sive­ly plac­ing racist fly­ers and posters in pub­lic places, with mem­bers shar­ing hun­dreds of pic­tures of their escapades. The #activism chan­nel in Patri­ot Front’s Dis­cord serv­er shows hun­dreds of images of mass-fly­er­ing cam­paigns car­ried out by member’s dis­trib­ut­ing the group’s racist pro­pa­gan­da. Cells of Patri­ot Front activists were also encour­aged to car­ry out ban­ner drops in their area. “20 min­utes of work and we trig­ger hun­dreds,” gloat­ed ‘NDO Eric – TX’ after a ban­ner read­ing “Amer­i­ca is a white nation” was dropped from a library bal­cony at Texas State Uni­ver­si­ty in San Mar­cos, TX. While tar­gets includ­ed gov­ern­ment offices, church­es, and syn­a­gogues, the over­whelm­ing focus was on col­lege cam­pus­es, with some Patri­ot Front mem­bers dri­ving to sev­er­al dif­fer­ent cam­pus­es in one night to dis­trib­ute hun­dreds of fly­ers.

    In a Dis­cord voice meet­ing on Feb­ru­ary 13, a Patri­ot Front mem­ber with the user­name ‘Himm­ler’ described how he had hacked into hun­dreds of print­ers on col­lege cam­pus­es to print off anti-semit­ic fly­ers. The man claims to have remote­ly accessed 29,000 print­ers and describes his actions as under­tak­en in col­lab­o­ra­tion with ‘Weev’, aka Andrew Auren­heimer, con­vict­ed hack­er and sys­tems admin­is­tra­tor for the Dai­ly Stormer. ‘Himm­ler’ brags about caus­ing “upwards of $20,000” in finan­cial dam­age due to ink used in the print­ing. He named UMass and DePaul as schools he had per­son­al­ly tar­get­ed.

    One user in the Patri­ot Front Dis­cord serv­er, ‘Machi­nesmiter-IL,’ bragged about how he was secret­ly using his found­ing posi­tion at the Col­lege Repub­li­cans chap­ter at Roo­sevelt Uni­ver­si­ty in Chica­go to prime sus­cep­ti­ble young white men to be recep­tive to fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy. He boast­ed about putting up hun­dreds of fly­ers on his cam­pus and the sur­round­ing area, and how on Novem­ber 4 he “hit Fed­er­al Plaza and the whole sur­round­ing area hard… I prob­a­bly got up at least 150–200 posters down­town.

    The Chica­go-based Patri­ot Front mem­ber claimed in his fall 2017 Dis­cord posts that he planned on leav­ing school for work in a few months but want­ed to leave a racist lega­cy behind on Roo­sevelt cam­pus. On Novem­ber 8, Dis­cord user ‘Machi­nesmiter-IL’ shared his progress in groom­ing Roo­sevelt Col­lege Repub­li­can mem­bers:

    My first Col­lege Repub­li­cans turnout was excel­lent. 10 white ath­let­ic males, a cou­ple fashy hair­cuts, good dis­cus­sion. This has awe­some poten­tial. They said they came, because of my Pepe fly­er that I put up. Meme mag­ick worked won­ders for me in a 3 hour win­dow. Pepe comes in clutch. We talked Intro­duc­to­ry stuff, talked about demo­graph­ics being des­tiny, how being a straight white male makes you an ene­my, and are talk­ing about our first event. We are going to try and get Amer­i­can Flags put up on cam­pus.

    Conor Ryan, the pres­i­dent of the Col­lege Repub­li­cans chap­ter at Roo­sevelt Uni­ver­si­ty, was not avail­able for com­ment as of this writ­ing.

    In our pre­vi­ous leak from Patri­ot Front, we found that one active mem­ber of the group was work­ing as a prison guard for the Geor­gia Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tions. In the new­er serv­er logs, mem­bers of Patri­ot Front have also claimed to be col­lab­o­rat­ing with law enforce­ment against antifas­cists. “We’re going to have an Antifa arrest soon,” wrote user ‘Pale­Horse FL’ on Octo­ber 2nd, “I’m talk­ing to Detec­tive Declan Hick­ey of Char­lottesville.”

    Patri­ot Front has also repeat­ed­ly engaged in dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns in the after­math of recent mass shoot­ings. After the Las Vegas shoot­ing last year, mem­bers were post­ing memes in Dis­cord push­ing the false con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that shoot­er Stephen Pad­dock was tied to anti-racist groups. One image of the after­math of the Las Vegas shoot­ing had an added cap­tion which read “THE RADICAL LEFT AIMS TO EXTERMINATE WHITE CULTURE.” Imme­di­ate­ly after the recent shoot­ing at Park­land High School in Flori­da, Patri­ot Front mem­bers tried to paint shoot­er Nicholas Cruz, who had swastikas etched onto his ammu­ni­tion, was an antifas­cist and a left­ist. Users in the Front and Cen­ter Dis­cord serv­er also joined in online cam­paigns try­ing to slan­der sur­viv­ing stu­dents as ‘cri­sis actors.’

    Patri­ot Front is expect­ed to keep push­ing their anti­se­mit­ic, neo-Nazi mes­sage into the pub­lic sphere as they con­tin­ue orga­niz­ing in 2018. As var­i­ous alt-right fac­tions dis­tance them­selves from each oth­er as they con­tin­ue infight­ing and blam­ing each oth­er for their movement’s fail­ures, dif­fer­ent groups appear to be exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent approach­es.

    Patri­ot Front prefers a tra­di­tion­al­ly Amer­i­can nation­al­ist aes­thet­ic in an attempt to reach ordi­nary white Amer­i­cans, where­as more overt­ly nation­al social­ist groups such as the Tra­di­tion­al­ist Work­er Par­ty open­ly advo­cate for break­ing up the Unit­ed States into forcibly sep­a­rat­ed race-based nations.

    ...

    As part of our in-depth report­ing on white suprema­cist and far-right move­ments, Uni­corn Riot has added the serv­er logs from the Patri­ot Front servers to our pub­lic Dis­cord Leaks plat­form. See links to spe­cif­ic servers below, along with .MP3 down­loads of the full leaked audio record­ings.

    We con­tact­ed Dis­cord and asked them about Patri­ot Front and oth­er neo-nazi groups using their plat­form to orga­nize. They pro­vid­ed us with the fol­low­ing state­ment:

    Dis­cord has a Terms of Ser­vice (ToS) and Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines that we ask all of our com­mu­ni­ties and users to adhere to. Though we do not read people’s pri­vate mes­sages, we do inves­ti­gate and take imme­di­ate appro­pri­ate action against any report­ed ToS vio­la­tion by a serv­er or user. We will con­tin­ue to be aggres­sive to ensure that Dis­cord exists for the com­mu­ni­ty we set out to sup­port – gamers.

    As of Mon­day after­noon, Patri­ot Front’s Dis­cord servers were still online. By Tues­day after­noon, the servers appeared to have been shut down by the com­pa­ny.

    ———-

    ““We’re Amer­i­cans, And We’re Fas­cists”: Inside Patri­ot Front”; Uni­corn Riot; 03/05/2018

    “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 gangswould 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:

    ...
    Last year Uni­corn Riot was sent the con­tents of the South­ern Front Dis­cord serv­er, which con­tained chat logs (now avail­able on our Dis­cordLeaks plat­form) from May to Sep­tem­ber 2017, show­ing the tran­si­tion of mem­bers from Van­guard Amer­i­ca to Patri­ot Front. Patri­ot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau, who posts using the name Thomas Ryan, was active in Van­guard Amer­i­ca lead­er­ship and is the own­er of the web­site BloodAndSoil.org, which had been Van­guard America’s offi­cial domain.

    Fol­low­ing a con­flict between Rousseau and Van­guard Amer­i­ca ‘CEO’ Dil­lon Irrizary (AKA Dil­lon Hop­per) after Char­lottesville, Rousseau resigned from Van­guard and took the web­site and a fair amount of active mem­bers with him. He found­ed Patri­ot Front the next day, and used the estab­lished ‘Blood and Soil’ web­site to boost its pro­file.

    Rousseau, who is 19 years old, acts as the leader of the group, which includes many old­er men in their thir­ties. He tells his side of the sto­ry of the split between Patri­ot Front and Van­guard Amer­i­ca in a Dis­cord voice call that took place on Feb­ru­ary 9. On the call, after mak­ing jokes rev­el­ing in Heather Heyer’s vio­lent death in Char­lottesville at Unite the Right on August 12, 2017, Rousseau describes the “PR night­mare” that ensued after pic­tures sur­faced of car attack­er James Alex Fields stand­ing along­side mem­bers of Van­guard Amer­i­ca, includ­ing him­self. (As of August 12, Rousseau had not yet left Van­guard Amer­i­ca to found Patri­ot Front.)
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Rousseau went on to claim that Van­guard Amer­i­ca claimed “maybe” 250 mem­bers “at its peak” with 80 mem­bers active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing. He boast­ed of accom­plish­ing “more activism with appar­ent­ly half of their peo­ple,” sug­gest­ing that Patri­ot Front has at most 125 mem­bers with per­haps 60 being reg­u­lar­ly active.

    Patri­ot Front appears to be the most active in Texas, where it has three dif­fer­ent local net­works for mem­bers. On a Feb­ru­ary 11, 2018 voice call, mem­bers esti­mat­ed that “Flori­da has 11 guys” but lament­ed that their group had lit­tle to no pres­ence in Appalachia. The group also seems to have a small but estab­lished pres­ence in New Eng­land states, such as Mass­a­chu­setts and Ver­mont.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Van­guard Amer­i­ca is a mem­ber of the Nation­al­ist Front coali­tion, along with the Tra­di­tion­al­ist Work­er Par­ty (TWP), the League of the South, and the Nation­al Social­ist Move­ment (NSM). While Patri­ot Front is active­ly feud­ing with Nation­al­ist Front groups such as TWP, they still main­tain an infor­mal rela­tion­ship through their affil­i­a­tion with fig­ures like Richard Spencer. An oper­a­tional doc­u­ment (PDF) from Spencer’s appear­ance in Gainesville last Octo­ber lists Patri­ot Front among the pri­ma­ry groups involved in an alt-right secu­ri­ty “task force” which also includ­ed mem­bers of League of the South.

    While groups of young white men like Patri­ot Front are often used as a per­son­al secu­ri­ty force by alt-right VIPs such as Richard Spencer, Dis­cord chats show some con­fu­sion and/or denial regard­ing this rela­tion­ship.We don’t do secu­ri­ty at alt-right events”, Rousseau wrote on Octo­ber 15, 2017. How­ev­er, just two days lat­er on Octo­ber 17, anoth­er Patri­ot Front mem­ber wrote that “Thomas, Me, etc are all going” to Richard Spencer’s speech at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da on Octo­ber 19, adding “most” were attend­ing “in a secu­ri­ty capac­i­ty.”

    Late Sun­day night after the Free­dom for the Mar­ket­place of Ideas (FMI) alt-right con­fer­ence this week­end in Detroit, mem­bers of Patri­ot Front post­ed about how they had been act­ing as armed secu­ri­ty for the event. “PF chi had to run armed patrols at FMI,” wrote user ‘Smiter IL.’ “Shit was crazy, but every­thing is ok.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    While Van­guard Amer­i­ca takes an open­ly nation­al social­ist approach, Thomas Rousseau and Patri­ot Front seek to present the same ide­ol­o­gy in a slight­ly more sub­tle and patri­ot­ic pack­age. While cen­ter­ing the group’s rhetoric around “Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty,” Dis­cord mes­sages reveal that Patri­ot Front’s vision is of an exclu­sive­ly white Amer­i­ca in which non-whites are dri­ven out or forced into sub­or­di­nate roles.

    The Amer­i­can Iden­ti­ty belongs to a cer­tain group of peo­ple,” Rousseau wrote in a chat on Octo­ber 15, “and cit­i­zen­ship doesn’t change that.” On Novem­ber 1st, he reit­er­at­ed his “Amer­i­can fas­cist” approach to brand­ing the group: “If any­one asks what we are, we’re Amer­i­cans, and we’re fas­cists. In that order exact­ly.” In a text chat on Novem­ber 8, anoth­er Dis­cord user in the Front and Cen­ter serv­er fur­ther explained the strate­gic val­ue of using patri­ot­ic Amer­i­can aes­thet­ics to pro­mote fas­cism.
    ...

    And Patri­ot­ic Front just recruit online. It’s appar­ent­ly quite enthu­si­as­tic about leav­ing fly­ers on col­lege cam­pus­es and else­where:

    ...
    Patri­ot Front also places a strong empha­sis on aggres­sive­ly plac­ing racist fly­ers and posters in pub­lic places, with mem­bers shar­ing hun­dreds of pic­tures of their escapades. The #activism chan­nel in Patri­ot Front’s Dis­cord serv­er shows hun­dreds of images of mass-fly­er­ing cam­paigns car­ried out by member’s dis­trib­ut­ing the group’s racist pro­pa­gan­da. Cells of Patri­ot Front activists were also encour­aged to car­ry out ban­ner drops in their area. “20 min­utes of work and we trig­ger hun­dreds,” gloat­ed ‘NDO Eric – TX’ after a ban­ner read­ing “Amer­i­ca is a white nation” was dropped from a library bal­cony at Texas State Uni­ver­si­ty in San Mar­cos, TX. While tar­gets includ­ed gov­ern­ment offices, church­es, and syn­a­gogues, the over­whelm­ing focus was on col­lege cam­pus­es, with some Patri­ot Front mem­bers dri­ving to sev­er­al dif­fer­ent cam­pus­es in one night to dis­trib­ute hun­dreds of fly­ers.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    In a Dis­cord voice meet­ing on Feb­ru­ary 13, a Patri­ot Front mem­ber with the user­name ‘Himm­ler’ described how he had hacked into hun­dreds of print­ers on col­lege cam­pus­es to print off anti-semit­ic fly­ers. The man claims to have remote­ly accessed 29,000 print­ers and describes his actions as under­tak­en in col­lab­o­ra­tion with ‘Weev’, aka Andrew Auren­heimer, con­vict­ed hack­er and sys­tems admin­is­tra­tor for the Dai­ly Stormer. ‘Himm­ler’ brags about caus­ing “upwards of $20,000” in finan­cial dam­age due to ink used in the print­ing. He named UMass and DePaul as schools he had per­son­al­ly tar­get­ed.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    One user in the Patri­ot Front Dis­cord serv­er, ‘Machi­nesmiter-IL,’ bragged about how he was secret­ly using his found­ing posi­tion at the Col­lege Repub­li­cans chap­ter at Roo­sevelt Uni­ver­si­ty in Chica­go to prime sus­cep­ti­ble young white men to be recep­tive to fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy. He boast­ed about putting up hun­dreds of fly­ers on his cam­pus and the sur­round­ing area, and how on Novem­ber 4 he “hit Fed­er­al Plaza and the whole sur­round­ing area hard… I prob­a­bly got up at least 150–200 posters down­town.

    The Chica­go-based Patri­ot Front mem­ber claimed in his fall 2017 Dis­cord posts that he planned on leav­ing school for work in a few months but want­ed to leave a racist lega­cy behind on Roo­sevelt cam­pus. On Novem­ber 8, Dis­cord user ‘Machi­nesmiter-IL’ shared his progress in groom­ing Roo­sevelt Col­lege Repub­li­can mem­bers:

    My first Col­lege Repub­li­cans turnout was excel­lent. 10 white ath­let­ic males, a cou­ple fashy hair­cuts, good dis­cus­sion. This has awe­some poten­tial. They said they came, because of my Pepe fly­er that I put up. Meme mag­ick worked won­ders for me in a 3 hour win­dow. Pepe comes in clutch. We talked Intro­duc­to­ry stuff, talked about demo­graph­ics being des­tiny, how being a straight white male makes you an ene­my, and are talk­ing about our first event. We are going to try and get Amer­i­can Flags put up on cam­pus.

    Conor Ryan, the pres­i­dent of the Col­lege Repub­li­cans chap­ter at Roo­sevelt Uni­ver­si­ty, was not avail­able for com­ment as of this writ­ing.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Patri­ot Front has also repeat­ed­ly engaged in dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns in the after­math of recent mass shoot­ings. After the Las Vegas shoot­ing last year, mem­bers were post­ing memes in Dis­cord push­ing the false con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that shoot­er Stephen Pad­dock was tied to anti-racist groups. One image of the after­math of the Las Vegas shoot­ing had an added cap­tion which read “THE RADICAL LEFT AIMS TO EXTERMINATE WHITE CULTURE.Imme­di­ate­ly after the recent shoot­ing at Park­land High School in Flori­da, Patri­ot Front mem­bers tried to paint shoot­er Nicholas Cruz, who had swastikas etched onto his ammu­ni­tion, was an antifas­cist and a left­ist. Users in the Front and Cen­ter Dis­cord serv­er also joined in online cam­paigns try­ing to slan­der sur­viv­ing stu­dents as ‘cri­sis actors.’
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 18, 2018, 10:34 pm
  16. 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:

    The Dai­ly Beast

    Paul Ryan’s Retire­ment Gives a Big Boost to the Most Promi­nent White Nation­al­ist in U.S. Pol­i­tics
    Paul Nehlen was banned from Twit­ter. Then he was banned from the Twit­ter of the Alt Right. Now, he’s well posi­tioned to be the GOP nom­i­nee in Wisconsin’s 1st Dis­trict

    Lach­lan Markay
    04.11.18 12:23 PM ET

    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.

    In a Face­book post hail­ing the news, GOP can­di­date Paul Nehlen called Ryan’s retire­ment “good news for Amer­i­ca, bad news for spe­cial inter­ests who bought Paul Ryan’s vote. My focus has always been on YOU.”

    In fact, Nehlen’s focus has not always been on “YOU,” his vot­ers. Pre­vi­ous­ly, his cam­paign crit­i­cized Ryan’s “silence on issues of [Jew­ish] media rep­re­sen­ta­tion.”

    The antipa­thy is appar­ent­ly mutu­al. Ryan’s cam­paign pulled no punch­es in a state­ment on Wednes­day after­noon. “There are many qual­i­fied con­ser­v­a­tives who would be effec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tives for Wisconsin’s 1st Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict, and Paul Nehlen isn’t one of them,” said Kevin Seifert, the head of Ryan’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion. “His big­ot­ed rhetoric and his rep­re­hen­si­ble state­ments should dis­qual­i­fy him from hold­ing any pub­lic office and we are con­fi­dent vot­ers in South­ern Wis­con­sin feel the same way.”

    In large part because of his pen­chant for racial­ly inflam­ma­to­ry or anti-Semit­ic remarks, Nehlan’s polit­i­cal prospects have not been tak­en all that seri­ous­ly. Ryan defeat­ed him by near­ly 70 points in the 2016 Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry and the expec­ta­tion was that the same would hap­pen again this cycle.

    With Ryan’s retire­ment, those expec­ta­tions change. Nehlen is one of two Repub­li­cans who had vied to replace Ryan in 2018, and while oth­er Repub­li­cans are like­ly to jump into the con­test before the district’s August pri­ma­ry, Nehlen has more vis­i­bil­i­ty and polit­i­cal expe­ri­ence than his sole exist­ing oppo­nent, Army spe­cial forces vet­er­an and busi­ness­man Nick Polce. He also is per­son­al­ly wealthy, though local media has inves­ti­gat­ed his com­pa­ny, Blue Skies Glob­al LLC, and found scant evi­dence that it does any actu­al busi­ness.

    ...

    With cash to spare and his major pri­ma­ry oppo­nent out of the way, Nehlen is not just a threat to win the nom­i­na­tion, but also is like­ly to solid­i­fy his place as the most promi­nent white nation­al­ist in U.S. pol­i­tics today. His brand of pol­i­tics is so tox­ic that even Bre­it­bart News, which has pre­vi­ous­ly iden­ti­fied with the Alt Right and pro­vid­ed exten­sive and favor­able cov­er­age to Nehlen, recent­ly dis­avowed him. And while Nehlen may be run­ning as a Repub­li­can, the Wis­con­sin GOP wants noth­ing to do with him.

    “Nehlen and his ideas have no place in the Repub­li­can Par­ty,” a state par­ty spokesper­son said in Feb­ru­ary, short­ly after Nehlen tweet­ed out a racist image of Meghan Markle, the bira­cial actress slat­ed to mar­ry Prince Har­ry next month.

    For that tweet, Nehlen was banned from the plat­form. But he found oth­er ways to muse about race and pol­i­tics online. He joined Gab, a Twit­ter alter­na­tive pop­u­lar among the Alt Right. Last week, how­ev­er, he was banned from that plat­form too.

    Nehlen’s tra­vails on social media have inspired him to make online cen­sor­ship the cor­ner­stone of his pol­i­cy plat­form. He pro­pos­es to “extend Amer­i­cans’ First Amend­ment free speech pro­tec­tions onto major social media plat­forms,” though he insists that such a move would not require a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment.

    Nehlen hails from the Trumpian wing of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. And he rode hard on the president’s coat­tails dur­ing his thor­ough­ly unsuc­cess­ful 2016 run. But last year, Nehlen took a hard turn even fur­ther right, embrac­ing the per­son­al­i­ties, affec­ta­tions, and big­ot­ed racial, reli­gious, and polit­i­cal views of the country’s resur­gent white nation­al­ist com­mu­ni­ty.

    Last month, Nehlen post­ed a link on his Gab page to an essay on the Dai­ly Stormer, a lead­ing neo-Nazi forum. The piece, writ­ten by the site’s founder, Andrew Anglin, alleged a “Jew­ish pol­i­cy of using vio­lence, intim­i­da­tion and threats of finan­cial ruin to silence crit­i­cism of them.” Anglin added, “it sim­ply is not con­tro­ver­sial that Amer­i­ca is run by Jews to the detrain­ment of the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.”

    On East­er, Nehlen shared a pho­to­shopped image of him­self sit­ting at the Oval Office desk sur­round­ed by the sev­ered heads of a group of Hasidic Jews.

    Though Nehlen has appeared on radio pro­grams host­ed by for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and oth­er Alt Right lead­ers, his bla­tant anti-Semi­tism has been too much for some in the move­ment. Last month, Jared Tay­lor, the lead­ing of white nation­al­ist group Amer­i­can Renais­sance, dis­in­vit­ed Nehlen from a con­fer­ence the group was host­ing.

    Nehlen fur­ther drew the Alt Right’s ire last week when he revealed the iden­ti­ty of a racist pro-Trump troll who goes by the name Ricky Vaughn. Nehlen’s “dox­ing” of Dou­glass Mack­ey, the man behind Ricky Vaughn, is was pre­cip­i­tat­ed his ban­ish­ment from Gab.

    That’s left Nehlen with few allies even in the fringe cor­ners of the right-wing fever swamps where he was once hailed as a hero. But Nehlen’s polit­i­cal allies con­tin­ue to make inroads in some cor­ners of the polit­i­cal right. For­mer Nehlen cam­paign con­sul­tants recent­ly acquired a right wing news web­site, Big League Pol­i­tics, that they have used to advance the polit­i­cal inter­ests of their cur­rent and for­mer clients, includ­ing Nehlen, for­mer Alaba­ma Sen­ate can­di­date Roy Moore, and Vir­ginia Sen­ate can­di­date Corey Stew­art.

    ———-

    “Paul Ryan’s Retire­ment Gives a Big Boost to the Most Promi­nent White Nation­al­ist in U.S. Pol­i­tics” by Lach­lan Markay; The Dai­ly Beast.; 04/11/2018

    “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):

    ...
    In large part because of his pen­chant for racial­ly inflam­ma­to­ry or anti-Semit­ic remarks, Nehlan’s polit­i­cal prospects have not been tak­en all that seri­ous­ly. Ryan defeat­ed him by near­ly 70 points in the 2016 Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry and the expec­ta­tion was that the same would hap­pen again this cycle.

    With Ryan’s retire­ment, those expec­ta­tions change. Nehlen is one of two Repub­li­cans who had vied to replace Ryan in 2018, and while oth­er Repub­li­cans are like­ly to jump into the con­test before the district’s August pri­ma­ry, Nehlen has more vis­i­bil­i­ty and polit­i­cal expe­ri­ence than his sole exist­ing oppo­nent, Army spe­cial forces vet­er­an and busi­ness­man Nick Polce. He also is per­son­al­ly wealthy, though local media has inves­ti­gat­ed his com­pa­ny, Blue Skies Glob­al LLC, and found scant evi­dence that it does any actu­al busi­ness.

    ...

    With cash to spare and his major pri­ma­ry oppo­nent out of the way, Nehlen is not just a threat to win the nom­i­na­tion, but also is like­ly to solid­i­fy his place as the most promi­nent white nation­al­ist in U.S. pol­i­tics today. His brand of pol­i­tics is so tox­ic that even Bre­it­bart News, which has pre­vi­ous­ly iden­ti­fied with the Alt Right and pro­vid­ed exten­sive and favor­able cov­er­age to Nehlen, recent­ly dis­avowed him. And while Nehlen may be run­ning as a Repub­li­can, the Wis­con­sin GOP wants noth­ing to do with him.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    In a Face­book post hail­ing the news, GOP can­di­date Paul Nehlen called Ryan’s retire­ment “good news for Amer­i­ca, bad news for spe­cial inter­ests who bought Paul Ryan’s vote. My focus has always been on YOU.”

    In fact, Nehlen’s focus has not always been on “YOU,” his vot­ers. Pre­vi­ous­ly, his cam­paign crit­i­cized Ryan’s “silence on issues of [Jew­ish] media rep­re­sen­ta­tion.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    “Nehlen and his ideas have no place in the Repub­li­can Par­ty,” a state par­ty spokesper­son said in Feb­ru­ary, short­ly after Nehlen tweet­ed out a racist image of Meghan Markle, the bira­cial actress slat­ed to mar­ry Prince Har­ry next month.

    For that tweet, Nehlen was banned from the plat­form. But he found oth­er ways to muse about race and pol­i­tics online. He joined Gab, a Twit­ter alter­na­tive pop­u­lar among the Alt Right. Last week, how­ev­er, he was banned from that plat­form too.

    Nehlen’s tra­vails on social media have inspired him to make online cen­sor­ship the cor­ner­stone of his pol­i­cy plat­form. He pro­pos­es to “extend Amer­i­cans’ First Amend­ment free speech pro­tec­tions onto major social media plat­forms,” though he insists that such a move would not require a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment.
    ...

    And then Nehlen will prob­a­bly use his sud­den promi­nence to pro­mote arti­cles from places like the Dai­ly Stormer to attack the Jews some more:

    ...
    Nehlen hails from the Trumpian wing of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. And he rode hard on the president’s coat­tails dur­ing his thor­ough­ly unsuc­cess­ful 2016 run. But last year, Nehlen took a hard turn even fur­ther right, embrac­ing the per­son­al­i­ties, affec­ta­tions, and big­ot­ed racial, reli­gious, and polit­i­cal views of the country’s resur­gent white nation­al­ist com­mu­ni­ty.

    Last month, Nehlen post­ed a link on his Gab page to an essay on the Dai­ly Stormer, a lead­ing neo-Nazi forum. The piece, writ­ten by the site’s founder, Andrew Anglin, alleged a “Jew­ish pol­i­cy of using vio­lence, intim­i­da­tion and threats of finan­cial ruin to silence crit­i­cism of them.” Anglin added, “it sim­ply is not con­tro­ver­sial that Amer­i­ca is run by Jews to the detrain­ment of the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.”

    On East­er, Nehlen shared a pho­to­shopped image of him­self sit­ting at the Oval Office desk sur­round­ed by the sev­ered heads of a group of Hasidic Jews.
    ...

    Final­ly, Nehlen will prob­a­bly say or do some­thing so out­ra­geous that even his fel­low white nation­al­ists dis­tance them­selves from him:

    ...
    Though Nehlen has appeared on radio pro­grams host­ed by for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and oth­er Alt Right lead­ers, his bla­tant anti-Semi­tism has been too much for some in the move­ment. Last month, Jared Tay­lor, the lead­ing of white nation­al­ist group Amer­i­can Renais­sance, dis­in­vit­ed Nehlen from a con­fer­ence the group was host­ing.

    Nehlen fur­ther drew the Alt Right’s ire last week when he revealed the iden­ti­ty of a racist pro-Trump troll who goes by the name Ricky Vaughn. Nehlen’s “dox­ing” of Dou­glass Mack­ey, the man behind Ricky Vaughn, is was pre­cip­i­tat­ed his ban­ish­ment from Gab.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 12, 2018, 11:06 pm
  17. 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:

    The Guardian

    ‘Raw hatred’: why the ‘incel’ move­ment tar­gets and ter­roris­es women

    The man accused of car­ry­ing out the Toron­to van attack has alleged links to ‘invol­un­tary celi­bate’ online com­mu­ni­ties. The lan­guage they use may be absurd, but the threat they pose could be dead­ly

    Zoe Williams

    Wed 25 Apr 2018 13.13 EDT
    Last mod­i­fied on Wed 25 Apr 2018 13.29 EDT

    When a van was dri­ven on to a Toron­to pave­ment on Tues­day, killing 10 peo­ple and injur­ing 15, police chief Mark Saun­ders said that, while the inci­dent appeared to be a delib­er­ate act, there was no evi­dence of ter­ror­ism. The pub­lic safe­ty min­is­ter Ralph Goodale backed this up, deem­ing the event “not part of an organ­ised ter­ror plot”. Cana­da has rules about these things: to count as ter­ror­ism, the attack­er must have a polit­i­cal, reli­gious or social moti­va­tion, some­thing beyond “want­i­ng to ter­rorise”.

    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.)

    There is a reluc­tance to ascribe to the “incel” move­ment any­thing so lofty as an “ide­ol­o­gy” or cred­it it with any devel­oped, con­nect­ed think­ing, part­ly because it is so bizarre in con­cep­tion.

    Stand­ing for “invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate”, the term was orig­i­nal­ly invent­ed 20 years ago by a woman known only as Alana, who coined the term as a name for an online sup­port forum for sin­gles, basi­cal­ly a lone­ly hearts club. “It feels like being the sci­en­tist who fig­ured out nuclear fis­sion and then dis­cov­ers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she says, describ­ing the feel­ing of watch­ing it mutate into a Red­dit muster point for vio­lent misog­y­ny.

    It is part of the “manos­phere”, but is dis­tin­guished from men’s rights activism by what Wendling – who is also the edi­tor of BBC Trend­ing, the broadcaster’s social media inves­ti­ga­tion unit – calls its “raw hatred. It is vile. It is just incred­i­bly unhinged and sep­a­rate from real­i­ty and com­plete­ly raw.” It has some crossover with white suprema­cism, in the sense that its adher­ents hang out in the same online spaces and share some of the same ter­mi­nol­o­gy, but it is quite dis­tinc­tive in its hate fig­ures: Sta­cys (attrac­tive women); Chads (attrac­tive men); and Normies (peo­ple who aren’t incels, ie can find part­ners but aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly attrac­tive). Basi­cal­ly, incels can­not get laid and they vio­lent­ly loathe any­one who can.

    Some of the fault, in their eyes, is with attrac­tive men who have sex with too many women – “We need to do some­thing about the polygamy prob­lem,” said the Incelcast, an aston­ish­ing three-hour pod­cast about the Toron­to attack – but, of course, the main prob­lem is women them­selves, who become foes as peo­ple, but also as a polit­i­cal enti­ty. There is a lot of dis­cus­sion about how best to pun­ish them, with mass rape fan­tasies and threads on how to fol­low women with­out get­ting arrest­ed, just for the thrill of hav­ing them notice you. Fem­i­nism is held respon­si­ble for a dude who can’t get laid, and birth con­trol is said to have caused “women to date only Chads. It caus­es all sorts of neg­a­tive social ram­i­fi­ca­tions”.

    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.”

    Angela Nagle is the author of Kill All Normies: Online Cul­ture Wars from 4Chan and Tum­blr to Trump and the Alt-Right. She says: “There is a real­ly inter­est­ing irony in the incel style of qua­si­pol­i­tics – they are both a response to and advo­cates of almost an Ayn Ran­di­an view of romance and human rela­tion­ships. So they rail against the lone­li­ness and the iso­la­tion and the indi­vid­u­al­ism of mod­ern life, but they seem to advo­cate it as well, in that they love the lan­guage of the strong tri­umph­ing over the weak. But they them­selves are the weak.”

    Their land­scape is strewn with com­plete­ly unsquarable con­tra­dic­tion: “They’ll say how ter­ri­ble it is that the left has won the cul­ture wars and we should return to tra­di­tion­al hier­ar­chies, but then they’ll use terms like ‘bang­ing sluts’, which doesn’t make any sense, right?” Nagle con­tin­ues. “Because you have to pick one. They want sex­u­al avail­abil­i­ty and yet, at the same time, they express this dis­gust at promis­cu­ity.”

    Incels obsess over their own unat­trac­tive­ness – divid­ing the world into alphas and betas, with betas just your aver­age, frus­trat­ed idiot dude, and omegas, as the incels often call them­selves, the low­est of the low, scorned by every­one – they then use that self-accep­tance as an insu­la­tion. They feel this makes them untouch­able in their quest for suprema­cy over sluts.

    They bor­row a lot of lan­guage from the equality/civil rights agen­da – soci­ety “treats sin­gle men like trash, and it has to stop. The peo­ple in pow­er, women, can change this, but they refuse to. They have blood on their hands,” read one post the morn­ing after the Toron­to attack. Basi­cal­ly, their vir­gin­i­ty is a dis­crim­i­na­tion or apartheid issue, and only a state-dis­trib­uted girl­friend pro­gramme, out­law­ing mul­ti­ple part­ners, can rec­ti­fy this grand injus­tice. Yet at the same time, they hate vic­tims, snowflakes, lib­er­als, those who cam­paign for any actu­al equal­i­ty.

    The less sense their out­look makes, the more sense it makes, on some ele­men­tal lev­el. Coher­ence, con­sis­ten­cy, rea­son – these are all tools by which we under­stand, accom­mo­date, include and lis­ten to one anoth­er. In a pure­ly author­i­tar­i­an world­view, those are the rules you most enjoy not play­ing by. That makes it very dif­fi­cult to for­mu­late a response to, on an intel­lec­tu­al lev­el, let alone a prac­ti­cal one: you can’t argue with a schema whose prin­ci­ple is that it will not brook argu­ment. But the reg­u­lar alter­na­tive – ridicule – is not nec­es­sar­i­ly wise, or right.

    Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, uploaded a video to YouTube about his “ret­ri­bu­tion” against attrac­tive women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and the attrac­tive men they would sleep with) before killing six peo­ple in 2014. He was named by the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter (which tracks activ­i­ty on the far right) as the first ter­ror­ist of the “alt-right”: so even if incels don’t describe the full extent of far-right activ­i­ty, so far they have been its most dev­as­tat­ing sub­group.

    There is this huge dis­con­nect between the threat they pose – which is, even if we accept Rodger as only a foot sol­dier, dead­ly – and the things they talk about, which are often absurd. In the sphere of the “pick­up”, seduc­tion is weaponised in the gen­der war: there is a huge amount of dis­cus­sion about its fin­er points, but its core and only prin­ci­ple is that you get women to sleep with you (and behave) by mak­ing them feel inse­cure.

    When this, amaz­ing­ly, doesn’t work, incels dis­ap­pear down the worm­hole of the black pill: the game is rigged from the start. Appear­ance is every­thing. If you’re dealt a bad hand, you’ve lost before you’ve start­ed. This esca­lates to vio­lent fan­ta­sy, since if the game is rigged, then the only thing that will get attrac­tive women to sleep with you is force. Attrac­tive men are col­lat­er­al dam­age in the vio­lent fan­ta­sy, though it is inter­est­ing that mes­sage boards can get away with a lot of mass rape fan­ta­sy, only to be shut down when a man starts fan­ta­sis­ing about cas­trat­ing his male room­mate.

    From the way cha­t­room mod­er­a­tors respond to threats of vio­lence against women, to the reluc­tance among author­i­ties to name this as a ter­ror­ist threat, I am filled with this unset­tling sense that because incels main­ly want to kill, maim or assault women, they are sim­ply not tak­en as seri­ous­ly as if they want­ed to kill pret­ty much any­one else. Doesn’t every­one want to kill women, some­times, is the impli­ca­tion? Or at least give them a fright?

    Their behav­iour is often ridicu­lous – some­one last week got a tat­too of Jor­dan Peterson’s face (he is the pop philoso­pher of menin­ism) across his entire arm. The incels’ folk hero is the 30-year-old vir­gin wiz­ard – if you can make it to 30 with­out hav­ing sex, you will be endowed with mag­i­cal pow­ers. And the threads are so pathet­ic that it is hard to feel any­thing but ambi­ent pity (on the site Wiz Chan – sub­ti­tle “dis­re­gard females, acquire mag­ic” – one thread titled How do I live in my sedan? is like a short sto­ry).

    Puz­zling in the abstract, weird­ly inevitable in the flesh, their stance com­bines that utter­ly flaky 90s jok­ing-not-jok­ing (“Hey, I was only jok­ing when I said I want­ed to rape you! Unless we’re actu­al­ly in an alley and there’s no one else around”), rag­ing self-pity, false appro­pri­a­tion and super­hero cos­tumes, all deliv­ered with the deaf­en­ing rage of the rep­til­ian brain. It makes Four Lions look like Wittgen­stein.

    But this fails to reflect, or reflect on, what mod­ern ter­ror­ism is: the per­pe­tra­tors don’t have to meet and their bal­a­clavas don’t have to match. All they have to do is estab­lish their hate fig­ures and be con­sis­tent.

    ...

    ———-

    “‘Raw hatred’: why the ‘incel’ move­ment tar­gets and ter­roris­es women” by Zoe Williams; The Guardian; 04/25/2018

    “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 is a reluc­tance to ascribe to the “incel” move­ment any­thing so lofty as an “ide­ol­o­gy” or cred­it it with any devel­oped, con­nect­ed think­ing, part­ly because it is so bizarre in con­cep­tion.

    Stand­ing for “invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate”, the term was orig­i­nal­ly invent­ed 20 years ago by a woman known only as Alana, who coined the term as a name for an online sup­port forum for sin­gles, basi­cal­ly a lone­ly hearts club. “It feels like being the sci­en­tist who fig­ured out nuclear fis­sion and then dis­cov­ers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she says, describ­ing the feel­ing of watch­ing it mutate into a Red­dit muster point for vio­lent misog­y­ny.

    It is part of the “manos­phere”, but is dis­tin­guished from men’s rights activism by what Wendling – who is also the edi­tor of BBC Trend­ing, the broadcaster’s social media inves­ti­ga­tion unit – calls its “raw hatred. It is vile. It is just incred­i­bly unhinged and sep­a­rate from real­i­ty and com­plete­ly raw.” It has some crossover with white suprema­cism, in the sense that its adher­ents hang out in the same online spaces and share some of the same ter­mi­nol­o­gy, but it is quite dis­tinc­tive in its hate fig­ures: Sta­cys (attrac­tive women); Chads (attrac­tive men); and Normies (peo­ple who aren’t incels, ie can find part­ners but aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly attrac­tive). Basi­cal­ly, incels can­not get laid and they vio­lent­ly loathe any­one who can.

    Some of the fault, in their eyes, is with attrac­tive men who have sex with too many women – “We need to do some­thing about the polygamy prob­lem,” said the Incelcast, an aston­ish­ing three-hour pod­cast about the Toron­to attack – but, of course, the main prob­lem is women them­selves, who become foes as peo­ple, but also as a polit­i­cal enti­ty. There is a lot of dis­cus­sion about how best to pun­ish them, with mass rape fan­tasies and threads on how to fol­low women with­out get­ting arrest­ed, just for the thrill of hav­ing them notice you. Fem­i­nism is held respon­si­ble for a dude who can’t get laid, and birth con­trol is said to have caused “women to date only Chads. It caus­es all sorts of neg­a­tive social ram­i­fi­ca­tions”.

    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.”
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    Angela Nagle is the author of Kill All Normies: Online Cul­ture Wars from 4Chan and Tum­blr to Trump and the Alt-Right. She says: “There is a real­ly inter­est­ing irony in the incel style of qua­si­pol­i­tics – they are both a response to and advo­cates of almost an Ayn Ran­di­an view of romance and human rela­tion­ships. So they rail against the lone­li­ness and the iso­la­tion and the indi­vid­u­al­ism of mod­ern life, but they seem to advo­cate it as well, in that they love the lan­guage of the strong tri­umph­ing over the weak. But they them­selves are the weak.”

    Their land­scape is strewn with com­plete­ly unsquarable con­tra­dic­tion: “They’ll say how ter­ri­ble it is that the left has won the cul­ture wars and we should return to tra­di­tion­al hier­ar­chies, but then they’ll use terms like ‘bang­ing sluts’, which doesn’t make any sense, right?” Nagle con­tin­ues. “Because you have to pick one. They want sex­u­al avail­abil­i­ty and yet, at the same time, they express this dis­gust at promis­cu­ity.”

    Incels obsess over their own unat­trac­tive­ness – divid­ing the world into alphas and betas, with betas just your aver­age, frus­trat­ed idiot dude, and omegas, as the incels often call them­selves, the low­est of the low, scorned by every­one – they then use that self-accep­tance as an insu­la­tion. They feel this makes them untouch­able in their quest for suprema­cy over sluts.

    They bor­row a lot of lan­guage from the equality/civil rights agen­da – soci­ety “treats sin­gle men like trash, and it has to stop. The peo­ple in pow­er, women, can change this, but they refuse to. They have blood on their hands,” read one post the morn­ing after the Toron­to attack. Basi­cal­ly, their vir­gin­i­ty is a dis­crim­i­na­tion or apartheid issue, and only a state-dis­trib­uted girl­friend pro­gramme, out­law­ing mul­ti­ple part­ners, can rec­ti­fy this grand injus­tice. Yet at the same time, they hate vic­tims, snowflakes, lib­er­als, those who cam­paign for any actu­al equal­i­ty.

    The less sense their out­look makes, the more sense it makes, on some ele­men­tal lev­el. Coher­ence, con­sis­ten­cy, rea­son – these are all tools by which we under­stand, accom­mo­date, include and lis­ten to one anoth­er. In a pure­ly author­i­tar­i­an world­view, those are the rules you most enjoy not play­ing by. That makes it very dif­fi­cult to for­mu­late a response to, on an intel­lec­tu­al lev­el, let alone a prac­ti­cal one: you can’t argue with a schema whose prin­ci­ple is that it will not brook argu­ment. But the reg­u­lar alter­na­tive – ridicule – is not nec­es­sar­i­ly wise, or right.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, uploaded a video to YouTube about his “ret­ri­bu­tion” against attrac­tive women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and the attrac­tive men they would sleep with) before killing six peo­ple in 2014. He was named by the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter (which tracks activ­i­ty on the far right) as the first ter­ror­ist of the “alt-right”: so even if incels don’t describe the full extent of far-right activ­i­ty, so far they have been its most dev­as­tat­ing sub­group.

    There is this huge dis­con­nect between the threat they pose – which is, even if we accept Rodger as only a foot sol­dier, dead­ly – and the things they talk about, which are often absurd. In the sphere of the “pick­up”, seduc­tion is weaponised in the gen­der war: there is a huge amount of dis­cus­sion about its fin­er points, but its core and only prin­ci­ple is that you get women to sleep with you (and behave) by mak­ing them feel inse­cure.

    When this, amaz­ing­ly, doesn’t work, incels dis­ap­pear down the worm­hole of the black pill: the game is rigged from the start. Appear­ance is every­thing. If you’re dealt a bad hand, you’ve lost before you’ve start­ed. This esca­lates to vio­lent fan­ta­sy, since if the game is rigged, then the only thing that will get attrac­tive women to sleep with you is force. Attrac­tive men are col­lat­er­al dam­age in the vio­lent fan­ta­sy, though it is inter­est­ing that mes­sage boards can get away with a lot of mass rape fan­ta­sy, only to be shut down when a man starts fan­ta­sis­ing about cas­trat­ing his male room­mate.

    From the way cha­t­room mod­er­a­tors respond to threats of vio­lence against women, to the reluc­tance among author­i­ties to name this as a ter­ror­ist threat, I am filled with this unset­tling sense that because incels main­ly want to kill, maim or assault women, they are sim­ply not tak­en as seri­ous­ly as if they want­ed to kill pret­ty much any­one else. Doesn’t every­one want to kill women, some­times, is the impli­ca­tion? Or at least give them a fright?
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Their behav­iour is often ridicu­lous – some­one last week got a tat­too of Jor­dan Peterson’s face (he is the pop philoso­pher of menin­ism) across his entire arm. The incels’ folk hero is the 30-year-old vir­gin wiz­ard – if you can make it to 30 with­out hav­ing sex, you will be endowed with mag­i­cal pow­ers. And the threads are so pathet­ic that it is hard to feel any­thing but ambi­ent pity (on the site Wiz Chan – sub­ti­tle “dis­re­gard females, acquire mag­ic” – one thread titled How do I live in my sedan? is like a short sto­ry).
    ...

    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:

    Vox

    How the alt-right’s sex­ism lures men into white suprema­cy
    The movement’s many online com­mu­ni­ties prey on male inse­cu­ri­ty to advance a racist polit­i­cal agen­da.

    By Aja Romano
    Dec 14, 2016, 2:20pm EST

    In the wake of the elec­tion, per­haps no top­ic has been more wide­ly dis­cussed and debat­ed than the self-described “alt-right” — the racist, sex­ist, meme-hap­py, most­ly inter­net-based move­ment asso­ci­at­ed with rad­i­cal white suprema­cy that has unex­pect­ed­ly tak­en cen­ter stage in US pol­i­tics after the elec­tion of Don­ald Trump.

    Though many con­sid­er the alt-right to be pri­mar­i­ly a fringe move­ment encom­pass­ing mul­ti­ple ide­olo­gies (includ­ing white nation­al­ism and white suprema­cy), its sup­port­ers’ unortho­dox tac­tics for pro­mot­ing those ide­olo­gies were fun­da­men­tal to Trump’s cam­paign, and thus fun­da­men­tal to his vic­to­ry. Said tac­tics include engag­ing in extrem­ist dis­course, using decep­tive irony and racial­ly tinged inter­net memes to con­fuse peo­ple into dis­miss­ing the “alt-right” label as a syn­onym for inter­net trolls, and spread­ing false and mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion. Thus, it’s no sur­prise that the move­ment has become a focal point of the sub­se­quent cul­ture war and nar­ra­tive sur­round­ing the president-elect’s tran­si­tion to the White House — par­tic­u­lar­ly out­rage that Trump arguably won through racist rhetoric and that his chief strate­gist is direct­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the alt-right move­ment.

    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.

    The “alt-right” label is tricky to define, but the movement’s top pri­or­i­ty is ele­vat­ing the sta­tus of white men

    Don’t let the term “alt-right” fool you; despite the fact that it’s the self-cho­sen descrip­tor adopt­ed by many white suprema­cists, the ide­ol­o­gy under the hood is still the same. Not only do mem­bers of the alt-right sup­port the most extreme ver­sion of Trump’s cam­paign promis­es to deport mil­lions of immi­grants and cre­ate a nation­al reg­istry for Mus­lims, but their ulti­mate goal is to eth­ni­cal­ly cleanse non­white indi­vid­u­als from Amer­i­ca and estab­lish a com­plete­ly white eth­no-state.

    Mem­bers of the alt-right tend to be young white men spout­ing bla­tant­ly racist, nation­al­ist, and misog­y­nis­tic views that align eeri­ly well with his­tor­i­cal fas­cism, and many of these men open­ly advo­cate harass­ment and dis­crim­i­na­tion (or worse) of women and minor­i­ty groups. (Indeed, since the elec­tion, overt ten­sion sur­round­ing these var­i­ous spheres has led to hun­dreds of report­ed hate crimes.)

    Con­se­quent­ly, many peo­ple have pon­dered whether the “alt-right” label puts too fine a pol­ish on what is at best an ugly mix of racism, xeno­pho­bia, and misog­y­ny. In response, many news orga­ni­za­tions have grap­pled with whether it’s appro­pri­ate to use the term at all, and, if so, how to define it for their read­ers.

    But no mat­ter what you call it, the move­ment is plain­ly built around a polit­i­cal agen­da that seeks to advance the rights of white male cit­i­zens at the expense of every­body else.

    The alt-right’s indoc­tri­na­tion process starts out look­ing like a healthy way for men to social­ize

    In a wide­ly shared Twit­ter thread the morn­ing after the elec­tion, writer Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa out­lined what she views as the insid­i­ous process by which young men are rad­i­cal­ized into the alt-right.

    If peo­ple fol­lowed the alt-right groups on Red­dit, they would know that young white Amer­i­cans were told to hide their sup­port of Trump.— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    These col­lege edu­cat­ed young men were then ripe enough to be sold idea that Trump rep­re­sent­ed a return to Men Being Real Men— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    Many of these rad­i­cal white men were raised by sin­gle fem­i­nist moth­ers. Inter­net groups rad­i­cal­ized their sex­u­al frus­tra­tion into big­otry.
    — Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    These online groups found young white men at their most vul­ner­a­ble & con­vinced them lib­er­als were col­lud­ing to destroy white West­ern man­hood— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    When we talk about online rad­i­cal­iza­tion we always talk about Mus­lims. But the rad­i­cal­iza­tion of white men online is at astro­nom­i­cal lev­els— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    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.

    Though var­i­ous branch­es of the move­ment are often at odds with one anoth­er, they share a num­ber of core beliefs — and a com­mon meme-fla­vored ver­nac­u­lar — that serve to unite them in what is some­times called “the manos­phere.” This realm includes the “men’s rights” move­ment, pick­up artist cul­ture (a com­mu­ni­ty of men also labeled “PUAs” that essen­tial­ly makes a game of the art of bed­ding women), “incels” (men who are “invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate” because they feel women reject them), and geek gate­keep­ers like sup­port­ers of the Gamer­gate move­ment.

    On the sur­face, PUA com­mu­ni­ties and incel com­mu­ni­ties have a lot of gener­ic appeal: The PUA lifestyle empha­sizes self-esteem and con­fi­dence build­ing along with phys­i­cal health, while the incel com­mu­ni­ty allows men to bond over their strug­gle to achieve all of the above in spite of their sour luck with women. Mean­while, gamers and geeks habit­u­al­ly tout the impor­tance of gam­ing in pro­vid­ing social inter­ac­tion for young men.

    These spaces fos­ter the kind of male friend­ship whose impor­tance doesn’t get a lot of atten­tion in the real world. But the ben­e­fits of their exis­tence are often accom­pa­nied (and some­times negat­ed) by their ten­den­cy to instill in their mem­bers a new­found artic­u­la­tion of fun­da­men­tal anx­i­ety over their posi­tion as men in a soci­ety where women are active­ly seek­ing empow­er­ment.

    And in build­ing its mem­ber­ship from so many dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties of white men who ulti­mate­ly feel threat­ened and reject­ed by women, the move­ment pro­motes a sense of male enti­tle­ment that is eas­i­ly rad­i­cal­ized into white nation­al­ism and white suprema­cy.

    How sex­ism serves as the alt-right’s gate­way drug

    In many alt-right com­mu­ni­ties, men are encour­aged to view women as sex­u­al and/or polit­i­cal tar­gets that men must dom­i­nate. The men in these com­mu­ni­ties don’t see them­selves as sex­ist; they see them­selves as fight­ing against their own emas­cu­la­tion and sex­u­al repres­sion at the hands of stri­dent fem­i­nists. (For instance, one alt-right blog described the activist group Code Pink as “a sort of lib­er­al, fem­i­nist ver­sion of the West­boro Bap­tist Church.”)

    All of these indi­vid­ual com­mu­ni­ties advo­cate a dis­trust of fem­i­nism and an insis­tence that female empow­er­ment nec­es­sar­i­ly dis­em­pow­ers men. One of the most famous, Reddit’s r/TheRedPill, even paints this ide­ol­o­gy as a reli­gious con­ver­sion: an “awak­en­ing,” or “tak­ing the red pill” (a ref­er­ence bor­rowed from The Matrix) to under­stand what they regard as the life-alter­ing “truth” that fem­i­nism has ruined mod­ern soci­ety for every­one (but espe­cial­ly for men). Many peo­ple who’ve tried engag­ing with r/TheRedPill only to walk away have described it as a place where rela­tion­ships are viewed pri­mar­i­ly in terms of pow­er strug­gles rather than mutu­al respect and equal­i­ty. “In prac­tice,” one Red­dit user wrote, “their ideas become pret­ty tox­ic real­ly fast.”

    Red­di­tor RZRtv expe­ri­enced this first-hand; he found his way to r/TheRedPill after wit­ness­ing his father’s painful expe­ri­ence in court dur­ing a messy divorce. He told Vox that despite being social­ly pro­gres­sive for most of his life, he had been drawn to the movement’s anti-fem­i­nist mes­sage, feel­ing resent­ment for the way fem­i­nism seemed to be blam­ing white men for every­thing.

    “I was grate­ful for the com­mu­ni­ty to be rais­ing points that affect­ed my father and my life,” he told Vox, not­ing that Reddit’s var­i­ous men’s rights forums were full of “great points” about how soci­ety expects men to be emo­tion­al­ly reserved. They also pro­vid­ed a basic form of sup­port in acknowl­edg­ing that men are allowed to be emo­tion­al, flawed humans, which he found to be “a big sell­ing point.”

    Of course, many fem­i­nists fre­quent­ly point out that gen­der stereo­types about men are unfair, harm­ful, and need dis­man­tling, but fem­i­nists and men’s rights activists (com­mon­ly referred to as MRAs) rarely lis­ten to each oth­er. “Nei­ther side seems to accu­rate­ly assess its trib­al­ism,” he said.

    RZRtv spent near­ly two years in the com­mu­ni­ty, but grad­u­al­ly soured on its mes­sage due to the over­whelm­ing hatred, which “got to the point where every­thing seemed to be about tak­ing down women or minori­ties, rather than help­ing men in the areas they faced dis­crim­i­na­tion,” he said.

    “The tip­ping point, where I was final­ly fed up, is mem­o­rable. There was an arti­cle post­ed to /r/MensRights with the title ‘Hillary Clin­ton will be worse for men than Don­ald Trump will be for women,’ which I knew was com­plete bull­shit ... [T]he bla­tant bull­shit allowed to prop­a­gate in the com­mu­ni­ty had final­ly reached a boil­ing point, and I stopped putting effort into the same caus­es.”

    It’s impor­tant to note that while sex­ism and big­otry ulti­mate­ly drove RZRtv away from Reddit’s men’s rights com­mu­ni­ties, he says he nev­er sought out a great deal of emo­tion­al sup­port from them to begin with, “as I’m a pret­ty pri­vate per­son and don’t seek that type of thing out.” But oth­er men who do lean on these com­mu­ni­ties for emo­tion­al sup­port may be prone to falling fur­ther into the hate-filled envi­ron­ment.

    Mohut­si­wa argued in her tweet­storm that we have been pay­ing the wrong kind of atten­tion to the alt-right’s inter­net havens. “When we talk about online rad­i­cal­iza­tion we always talk about Mus­lims. But the rad­i­cal­iza­tion of white men online is at astro­nom­i­cal lev­els,” she wrote. “That’s why I nev­er got one strat­e­gy of Clin­ton’s cam­paign: high­light­ing Trump’s sex­ism. Trump sup­port­ers love him BECAUSE of his sex­ism.”

    The alt-right’s ver­nac­u­lar is full of sex­ist lan­guage. “Weak” mod­er­ates or lib­er­als who buy into the fem­i­nist agen­da are deemed “cucks,” a term derived from “cuck­old,” the arcane Old Eng­lish word for a man whose wife cheats on him. Many of the movement’s var­i­ous sub­com­mu­ni­ties have insist­ed that the word is (warn­ing: the fol­low­ing two links con­tain hate speech) strict­ly racist and that its ori­gins cen­ter on white men being dis­em­pow­ered by mis­ce­gena­tion and oth­er forms of inter­ac­tion with mem­bers of oth­er races. But in its prac­ti­cal use by the alt-right at large — most fre­quent­ly to harass women online — the com­mon impli­ca­tion is that pro­gres­sive men are sex­u­al­ly dis­em­pow­ered by manip­u­la­tive women.

    This ide­ol­o­gy inevitably has polit­i­cal ram­i­fi­ca­tions. On PUA forums, where men proud­ly talk about their “lay counts,” the default assump­tion in the days lead­ing up to the elec­tion was that a vote for Hillary Clin­ton sig­ni­fied weak­ness that no real man would dis­play. Wit­ness this exchange that took place on one PUA forum the morn­ing after the elec­tion:

    [see screen­shot of PUA mes­sage board]

    The basic idea that “women are get­ting too out of hand” is the patri­ar­chal com­mon denom­i­na­tor. And it aligns per­fect­ly with male rage against “social jus­tice” activism, which in turn paves the way for white nation­al­ism and white suprema­cy to gain a foothold.

    The alt-right’s ongo­ing fight against “social jus­tice war­riors” fuels a larg­er cam­paign of white suprema­cy

    These online groups found young white men at their most vul­ner­a­ble & con­vinced them lib­er­als were col­lud­ing to destroy white West­ern man­hood— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    Over the past few years, Gamer­gate and male-cen­tric Red­dit com­mu­ni­ties have pop­u­lar­ized the idea of “social jus­tice war­riors,” com­mon­ly abbre­vi­at­ed as SJWs. This dis­parag­ing label is an updat­ed way to accuse pro­gres­sives of extreme polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness. The “SJW” label is a huge and suc­cess­ful weapon in the alt-right’s arse­nal; it paints fem­i­nists as manip­u­la­tive, over­sen­si­tive, shrill women who attack men with claims of sex­ism at the tini­est of provo­ca­tions while reject­ing their sex­u­al advances.

    Men who deploy the “SJW” attack seek to reestab­lish con­trol and agency over the cul­tur­al con­ver­sa­tion by ridi­cul­ing pro­gres­sive attempts to seek greater diver­si­ty and rep­re­sen­ta­tion in media, and to dis­miss basi­cal­ly any­thing that could be deemed “mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism” or rep­re­sen­ta­tion (see: Gamer­gate and this year’s Ghost­busters back­lash).

    How­ev­er, nest­ed with­in the alt-right’s fight against SJWs is a fla­grant­ly rad­i­cal, white suprema­cist ele­ment.

    Mem­bers of the alt-right fre­quent­ly refer to pro­gres­sive cul­ture as “cul­tur­al Marx­ism” — a favored catch­phrase of Bre­it­bart founder Andrew Bre­it­bart. The aca­d­e­m­ic term “cul­tur­al Marx­ism” is a pos­i­tive one that denotes the spread of Marx­ist val­ues through­out cul­ture, but its com­mon use today is much more pejo­ra­tive. Mem­bers of the alt-right view SJWs who are active­ly try­ing to make art and cul­ture more inclu­sive as attempt­ing to incite socio­cul­tur­al and socioe­co­nom­ic upheaval under the guise of “diver­si­ty.”

    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.”

    The updat­ed alt-right ver­sion of this idea pri­mar­i­ly tar­gets fem­i­nists and pro­gres­sives as the insti­ga­tors of this cul­tur­al demise. Their belief in insid­i­ous cul­tur­al plots against white patri­archy leads them to over­lap and inter­act with anoth­er branch of the alt-right — the innu­mer­able online right-wing con­spir­a­cy groups that see Jew­ish, Islam­ic, and for­eign plots in per­ceived attacks on white patri­ar­chal cul­ture. The all-or-noth­ing urgency and the bla­tant nation­al­ism and white suprema­cy of Hitler’s ver­sion of the phrase is still intact.

    The Trump Vic­to­ry marks an impor­tant moment in His­to­ry­It was the day good peo­ple stood up & defeat­ed evil­Cul­tur­al Marx­ism has been smashed pic.twitter.com/XF4TT7NPpz— Trutho­phobes (@truthophobes) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    Regres­sive left has cli­maxed with Trump and Milo Effect, and 20 years of con­di­tion­ing of cul­tur­al Marx­ism will soon be laid to rest. https://t.co/ogxTjTenA2— Kristi­na Dabic (@moonchildwander) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    In essence, many men who were drawn to these com­mu­ni­ties because they want­ed to get laid and gain self-con­fi­dence have found them­selves embroiled in a cul­ture war, one that start­ed as a way to boost indi­vid­ual male auton­o­my and evolved into a way to wrest back con­trol of the coun­try — nay, the world — from shrill fem­i­nists and their weak­ling cuck sup­port­ers, which include “lib­tard” shills in the main­stream media.

    Young men came to these online groups for tips on pick­ing up girls & came out believ­ing that it was up to them to save West­ern civ­i­liza­tion— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    Ulti­mate­ly, these groups found their hero in Don­ald Trump.

    Gamer­gate fore­shad­owed the alt-right’s rise — and cre­at­ed an unset­tling tem­plate for the move­ment to expand

    In the wake of Trump’s vic­to­ry, many have point­ed to Gamergate’s sex­ist assault on fem­i­nism as a har­bin­ger of things to come. Far more than the “fringe” com­po­nents of the alt-right, the Gamer­gate move­ment drew main­stream atten­tion from its begin­nings in August 2014 and gained exten­sive cov­er­age from pop­u­lar geek media out­lets as well as inter­na­tion­al news orga­ni­za­tions as it grew. Though it peaked around the spring of 2015, the move­ment is still active; writ­ing at the Guardian, Matt Lees points out that its sup­port­ers’ “tech­niques” of harass­ment and rhetor­i­cal vic­tim blam­ing “have become the stan­dard toolset of far-right voic­es online.”

    Writ­ers who’ve report­ed on and/or been tar­get­ed by Gamer­gate have also not­ed the con­ver­gence of the group’s mem­ber­ship with that of the alt-right. David Futrelle is a jour­nal­ist who has spent the past five years main­tain­ing a men’s rights watch blog, We Hunt­ed the Mam­moth. In an email to Vox, he said that it’s “close to impos­si­ble to over­state the role of Gamer­gate in the process of [alt-right] rad­i­cal­iza­tion.”

    From the start, Gamer­gate was based on the same sense of aggriev­ed enti­tle­ment that dri­ves the alt-right — and many Trump vot­ers. While Trump warned of the puta­tive dan­gers of Mus­lims and Mex­i­cans ‘invad­ing’ Amer­i­ca, Gamer­gaters talked about the dan­gers of so-called social jus­tice war­riors “invad­ing” the world of gam­ing; many defined gam­ing as a “male space” or even a “male safe space,” and so it was no coin­ci­dence that they focused so much of their anger at sup­posed female inter­lop­ers — [includ­ing gam­ing cul­tur­al crit­ics like] Ani­ta Sar­keesian, Zoe Quinn, Bri­an­na Wu and oth­ers.

    By pre­sent­ing them­selves as belea­guered defend­ers of gam­ing’s “safe space,” gamer­gaters man­aged to con­vince them­selves that their harass­ment of peo­ple like Sar­keesian and Quinn was in fact a defense of an imper­iled cul­ture. They were sav­ing the world!

    One of the fem­i­nist tar­gets of Gamer­gate was gam­ing jour­nal­ist Leigh Alexan­der, who recent­ly wrote about the movement’s expan­sion and con­ver­gence with the alt-right move­ment.

    “When I was harassed in an attempt to get me to aban­don [pro­gres­sive crit­i­cal stances on the rela­tion­ship between pop cul­ture and pol­i­tics] dur­ing the embar­rass­ment that was ‘Gamer­Gate,’ every­one told me it was just a radar blip,” she wrote.

    They said that the hit pieces on Bre­it­bart about me, oth­er women, and pro­gres­sive voic­es in tech­nol­o­gy were just fringe issues. We should not give them any more atten­tion, every­one said. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

    Now the CEO of Bre­it­bart, Steve Ban­non, is an advi­sor to incom­ing Pres­i­dent Trump. And in the last few weeks all those same old peo­ple, the dross of image­board cul­ture with their same assem­bly-line right-wing memes, are back in my Twit­ter time­line let­ting me know they “won.” ... These people’s fears, their pow­er fan­tasies, are now steer­ing the world.

    Futrelle point­ed out to Vox that Gamergate’s explic­it sex­ism led many of its mem­bers to 4chan and to 4chan’s even more extreme sib­ling 8chan (which became a haven for Gamer­gate after the move­ment was offi­cial­ly boot­ed off 4chan for misog­y­ny). In those enclaves, Futrelle says, “there were hordes of neo-qua­si-Nazis (some ‘iron­ic’ Nazis but many oth­ers utter­ly sin­cere) ready to tell them that it was­n’t just gam­ing that need­ed sav­ing, but West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion itself.”

    He con­tin­ued: “They weren’t fight­ing for the right to look at boobs in videogames any more, but fight­ing against ‘white geno­cide.’ Sud­den­ly the weird­ly inflat­ed, often melo­dra­mat­ic rhetoric of Gamer­gate made more sense.”

    Gamer­gate-inspired vio­lence also pre­saged the wave of hate crimes that have been report­ed since the elec­tion. Exam­ples from the past two years include the threat of a mass shoot­ing at a major pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty because the uni­ver­si­ty host­ed Gamer­gate ene­my Ani­ta Sar­keesian; the many pro-rape state­ments made on PUA hubs and social media accounts by promi­nent pick­up artists like the noto­ri­ous inter­net troll Roosh V, who bragged about com­mit­ting rape; and final­ly, the 2014 mass stab­bing and shoot­ing of six UC San­ta Bar­bara stu­dents by Elliot Rodger, a man who for­ti­fied his misog­y­ny and sense of alien­ation via the incel com­mu­ni­ties he fre­quent­ed online.

    ...

    ———-

    “How the alt-right’s sex­ism lures men into white suprema­cy” by Aja Romano; Vox; 12/14/2016

    “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:

    ...
    The alt-right’s indoc­tri­na­tion process starts out look­ing like a healthy way for men to social­ize

    In a wide­ly shared Twit­ter thread the morn­ing after the elec­tion, writer Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa out­lined what she views as the insid­i­ous process by which young men are rad­i­cal­ized into the alt-right.

    If peo­ple fol­lowed the alt-right groups on Red­dit, they would know that young white Amer­i­cans were told to hide their sup­port of Trump.— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    These col­lege edu­cat­ed young men were then ripe enough to be sold idea that Trump rep­re­sent­ed a return to Men Being Real Men— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    Many of these rad­i­cal white men were raised by sin­gle fem­i­nist moth­ers. Inter­net groups rad­i­cal­ized their sex­u­al frus­tra­tion into big­otry.
    — Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    These online groups found young white men at their most vul­ner­a­ble & con­vinced them lib­er­als were col­lud­ing to destroy white West­ern man­hood— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    When we talk about online rad­i­cal­iza­tion we always talk about Mus­lims. But the rad­i­cal­iza­tion of white men online is at astro­nom­i­cal lev­els— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    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.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    Though var­i­ous branch­es of the move­ment are often at odds with one anoth­er, they share a num­ber of core beliefs — and a com­mon meme-fla­vored ver­nac­u­lar — that serve to unite them in what is some­times called “the manos­phere.” This realm includes the “men’s rights” move­ment, pick­up artist cul­ture (a com­mu­ni­ty of men also labeled “PUAs” that essen­tial­ly makes a game of the art of bed­ding women), “incels” (men who are “invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate” because they feel women reject them), and geek gate­keep­ers like sup­port­ers of the Gamer­gate move­ment.

    On the sur­face, PUA com­mu­ni­ties and incel com­mu­ni­ties have a lot of gener­ic appeal: The PUA lifestyle empha­sizes self-esteem and con­fi­dence build­ing along with phys­i­cal health, while the incel com­mu­ni­ty allows men to bond over their strug­gle to achieve all of the above in spite of their sour luck with women. Mean­while, gamers and geeks habit­u­al­ly tout the impor­tance of gam­ing in pro­vid­ing social inter­ac­tion for young men.

    These spaces fos­ter the kind of male friend­ship whose impor­tance doesn’t get a lot of atten­tion in the real world. But the ben­e­fits of their exis­tence are often accom­pa­nied (and some­times negat­ed) by their ten­den­cy to instill in their mem­bers a new­found artic­u­la­tion of fun­da­men­tal anx­i­ety over their posi­tion as men in a soci­ety where women are active­ly seek­ing empow­er­ment.

    And in build­ing its mem­ber­ship from so many dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties of white men who ulti­mate­ly feel threat­ened and reject­ed by women, the move­ment pro­motes a sense of male enti­tle­ment that is eas­i­ly rad­i­cal­ized into white nation­al­ism and white suprema­cy.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    How sex­ism serves as the alt-right’s gate­way drug

    In many alt-right com­mu­ni­ties, men are encour­aged to view women as sex­u­al and/or polit­i­cal tar­gets that men must dom­i­nate. The men in these com­mu­ni­ties don’t see them­selves as sex­ist; they see them­selves as fight­ing against their own emas­cu­la­tion and sex­u­al repres­sion at the hands of stri­dent fem­i­nists. (For instance, one alt-right blog described the activist group Code Pink as “a sort of lib­er­al, fem­i­nist ver­sion of the West­boro Bap­tist Church.”)

    All of these indi­vid­ual com­mu­ni­ties advo­cate a dis­trust of fem­i­nism and an insis­tence that female empow­er­ment nec­es­sar­i­ly dis­em­pow­ers men. One of the most famous, Reddit’s r/TheRedPill, even paints this ide­ol­o­gy as a reli­gious con­ver­sion: an “awak­en­ing,” or “tak­ing the red pill” (a ref­er­ence bor­rowed from The Matrix) to under­stand what they regard as the life-alter­ing “truth” that fem­i­nism has ruined mod­ern soci­ety for every­one (but espe­cial­ly for men). Many peo­ple who’ve tried engag­ing with r/TheRedPill only to walk away have described it as a place where rela­tion­ships are viewed pri­mar­i­ly in terms of pow­er strug­gles rather than mutu­al respect and equal­i­ty. “In prac­tice,” one Red­dit user wrote, “their ideas become pret­ty tox­ic real­ly fast.”

    ...

    Mohut­si­wa argued in her tweet­storm that we have been pay­ing the wrong kind of atten­tion to the alt-right’s inter­net havens. “When we talk about online rad­i­cal­iza­tion we always talk about Mus­lims. But the rad­i­cal­iza­tion of white men online is at astro­nom­i­cal lev­els,” she wrote. “That’s why I nev­er got one strat­e­gy of Clin­ton’s cam­paign: high­light­ing Trump’s sex­ism. Trump sup­port­ers love him BECAUSE of his sex­ism.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The alt-right’s ver­nac­u­lar is full of sex­ist lan­guage. “Weak” mod­er­ates or lib­er­als who buy into the fem­i­nist agen­da are deemed “cucks,” a term derived from “cuck­old,” the arcane Old Eng­lish word for a man whose wife cheats on him. Many of the movement’s var­i­ous sub­com­mu­ni­ties have insist­ed that the word is (warn­ing: the fol­low­ing two links con­tain hate speech) strict­ly racist and that its ori­gins cen­ter on white men being dis­em­pow­ered by mis­ce­gena­tion and oth­er forms of inter­ac­tion with mem­bers of oth­er races. But in its prac­ti­cal use by the alt-right at large — most fre­quent­ly to harass women online — the com­mon impli­ca­tion is that pro­gres­sive men are sex­u­al­ly dis­em­pow­ered by manip­u­la­tive women.

    This ide­ol­o­gy inevitably has polit­i­cal ram­i­fi­ca­tions. On PUA forums, where men proud­ly talk about their “lay counts,” the default assump­tion in the days lead­ing up to the elec­tion was that a vote for Hillary Clin­ton sig­ni­fied weak­ness that no real man would dis­play. Wit­ness this exchange that took place on one PUA forum the morn­ing after the elec­tion:

    [see screen­shot of PUA mes­sage board]

    The basic idea that “women are get­ting too out of hand” is the patri­ar­chal com­mon denom­i­na­tor. And it aligns per­fect­ly with male rage against “social jus­tice” activism, which in turn paves the way for white nation­al­ism and white suprema­cy to gain a foothold.

    The alt-right’s ongo­ing fight against “social jus­tice war­riors” fuels a larg­er cam­paign of white suprema­cy

    These online groups found young white men at their most vul­ner­a­ble & con­vinced them lib­er­als were col­lud­ing to destroy white West­ern man­hood— Siyan­da Mohut­si­wa (@SiyandaWrites) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    Over the past few years, Gamer­gate and male-cen­tric Red­dit com­mu­ni­ties have pop­u­lar­ized the idea of “social jus­tice war­riors,” com­mon­ly abbre­vi­at­ed as SJWs. This dis­parag­ing label is an updat­ed way to accuse pro­gres­sives of extreme polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness. The “SJW” label is a huge and suc­cess­ful weapon in the alt-right’s arse­nal; it paints fem­i­nists as manip­u­la­tive, over­sen­si­tive, shrill women who attack men with claims of sex­ism at the tini­est of provo­ca­tions while reject­ing their sex­u­al advances.

    Men who deploy the “SJW” attack seek to reestab­lish con­trol and agency over the cul­tur­al con­ver­sa­tion by ridi­cul­ing pro­gres­sive attempts to seek greater diver­si­ty and rep­re­sen­ta­tion in media, and to dis­miss basi­cal­ly any­thing that could be deemed “mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism” or rep­re­sen­ta­tion (see: Gamer­gate and this year’s Ghost­busters back­lash).

    How­ev­er, nest­ed with­in the alt-right’s fight against SJWs is a fla­grant­ly rad­i­cal, white suprema­cist ele­ment.

    Mem­bers of the alt-right fre­quent­ly refer to pro­gres­sive cul­ture as “cul­tur­al Marx­ism” — a favored catch­phrase of Bre­it­bart founder Andrew Bre­it­bart. The aca­d­e­m­ic term “cul­tur­al Marx­ism” is a pos­i­tive one that denotes the spread of Marx­ist val­ues through­out cul­ture, but its com­mon use today is much more pejo­ra­tive. Mem­bers of the alt-right view SJWs who are active­ly try­ing to make art and cul­ture more inclu­sive as attempt­ing to incite socio­cul­tur­al and socioe­co­nom­ic upheaval under the guise of “diver­si­ty.”

    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.”

    The updat­ed alt-right ver­sion of this idea pri­mar­i­ly tar­gets fem­i­nists and pro­gres­sives as the insti­ga­tors of this cul­tur­al demise. Their belief in insid­i­ous cul­tur­al plots against white patri­archy leads them to over­lap and inter­act with anoth­er branch of the alt-right — the innu­mer­able online right-wing con­spir­a­cy groups that see Jew­ish, Islam­ic, and for­eign plots in per­ceived attacks on white patri­ar­chal cul­ture. The all-or-noth­ing urgency and the bla­tant nation­al­ism and white suprema­cy of Hitler’s ver­sion of the phrase is still intact.
    ...

    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:

    ...

    The Trump Vic­to­ry marks an impor­tant moment in His­to­ry­It was the day good peo­ple stood up & defeat­ed evil­Cul­tur­al Marx­ism has been smashed pic.twitter.com/XF4TT7NPpz— Trutho­phobes (@truthophobes) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    Regres­sive left has cli­maxed with Trump and Milo Effect, and 20 years of con­di­tion­ing of cul­tur­al Marx­ism will soon be laid to rest. https://t.co/ogxTjTenA2— Kristi­na Dabic (@moonchildwander) Novem­ber 9, 2016

    In essence, many men who were drawn to these com­mu­ni­ties because they want­ed to get laid and gain self-con­fi­dence have found them­selves embroiled in a cul­ture war, one that start­ed as a way to boost indi­vid­ual male auton­o­my and evolved into a way to wrest back con­trol of the coun­try — nay, the world — from shrill fem­i­nists and their weak­ling cuck sup­port­ers, which include “lib­tard” shills in the main­stream media.
    ...

    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”.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 25, 2018, 3:45 pm
  18. 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:

    Newsweek

    Repub­li­can Sen­ate Can­di­date, Who Has Called for Coun­try ‘Free From Jews,’ Could be Dianne Feinstein’s Chal­lenger

    By Michael Edi­son Hay­den On 4/28/18 at 8:20 AM

    Overt anti-Semi­tes have been slow­ly creep­ing into Repub­li­can pol­i­tics in the after­math of Pres­i­dent Trump’s suc­cess­ful, pop­ulist can­di­da­cy, and now one of them has a fight­ing chance of rep­re­sent­ing the Repub­li­can Par­ty in a Sen­ate race.

    The man in ques­tion is Patrick Lit­tle, an extrem­ist with hard­line anti-Semit­ic views who is backed by David Duke and oth­er far-right extrem­ists. Lit­tle will be squar­ing off in a top-two pri­ma­ry with 10 oth­er Repub­li­cans as well as Democ­rats and inde­pen­dents on June 5 for the chance to oppose vet­er­an Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor Dianne Fein­stein. Accord­ing to a recent poll, released last week, he very much has a chance of win­ning the right to face off with the incum­bent.

    A poll con­duct­ed by local ABC News affil­i­ates along with the polling com­pa­ny Sur­vey USA, sug­gest­ed that Lit­tle is polling at 18 per­cent of the vote on the Repub­li­can tick­et, a full 10 points ahead of his next strongest oppo­nent. The 84-year-old Fein­stein, who entered office in 1992, at the start of Bill Clinton’s first term, remains a sol­id favorite to win the state—polling at 39 per­cent.

    It’s unclear how pre­dic­tive the poll will prove to be, or whether many Cal­i­for­ni­ans are inti­mate­ly famil­iar with Little’s views, but the notion that he has any via­bil­i­ty at all in the state is like­ly to raise alarm. Lit­tle has said he believes Jews should have no say over white non-Jews and wants to see them removed from the coun­try alto­geth­er. On Gab, a social media site with large swaths of extrem­ist users, he argues that the neo-Nazi web­site Dai­ly Stormer, whose pro­pri­etors praise Adolf Hitler and have appeared to call for acts of vio­lence against Jew­ish peo­ple, is too Jew­ish.

    “I pro­pose a gov­ern­ment that makes counter-semi­tism cen­tral to all aims of the state,” he wrote on that web­site, refer­ring to a white nation­al­ist euphemism for a hatred of Jews. He argued for for­bid­ding “all immi­gra­tion except of bio­log­i­cal kin, where no per­son of Jew­ish ori­gin may live, vaca­tion or tra­verse.”

    He also wrote that he want­ed to keep Amer­i­cans “free from Jews.”

    Matt Bar­reto, a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ences at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, told Newsweek that while the poll is con­cern­ing due to Little’s views, it isn’t a strong indi­ca­tor that he will ever become Sen­a­tor.

    “There’s been no cam­paign to speak of. All the dis­cus­sion has been between Fein­stein and [Demo­c­ra­t­ic chal­lenger] Kevin de León,” Bar­reto said. “I don’t believe that this can­di­date has much out­reach.”

    He not­ed that many peo­ple may have no idea who Lit­tle is, and are sim­ply respond­ing to the fact that his name was grouped with the Repub­li­cans. He said that if his views became more wide­ly known, it would like­ly sink his can­di­da­cy.

    [See screen­shot of Patrick Lit­tle’s post on Gab say­ing: “Jews have no seat at the table in mat­ters of white self-deter­mi­na­tion.

    We don’t have a seat at the table for how Japese rule them­selves, why should Semi­tes have on at ours?”]

    ...

    Bar­reto not­ed that Democ­rats dom­i­nate Cal­i­for­nia pol­i­tics and that the state Repub­li­can par­ty is focused on issues of tax­a­tion. He described them as being more open-mind­ed than the nation­al par­ty on issues like immi­gra­tion, gay mar­riage and mar­i­jua­na legal­iza­tion, even if there are pock­ets of white suprema­cist vot­ers in places like Orange Coun­ty.

    Lit­tle did not respond to a request for com­ment on this sto­ry. His overt­ly anti-Semit­ic posts in the runup to an elec­tion fol­low the can­di­da­cy of Wis­con­sin-based Repub­li­can con­gres­sion­al can­di­date Paul Nehlen, who has veered so far to the right that he has been dis­avowed by some promi­nent white nation­al­ists.

    White Suprema­cist Richard Spencer wrote on Twit­ter this month that Nehlen “needs to just go away,” sug­gest­ing that he had embar­rassed their cause of build­ing a state for only whites by being too open­ly prej­u­diced. Most recent­ly, Nehlen appeared on an extrem­ist pod­cast inspired by racist mass mur­der­er Dylann Roof. It’s unclear whether or not Lit­tle, whose polit­i­cal ambi­tions have so far received less scruti­ny than Nehlen’s, will be sim­i­lar­ly dis­avowed.

    Lit­tle is a vocal fan of Christo­pher Cantwell, an anti-Semit­ic pod­cast host and one of the white nation­al­ists who marched in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, in August of 2017. Cantwell is an out­spo­ken sup­port­er of Adolf Hitler has made a hatred of Jews the crux of his polit­i­cal argu­ment when he speaks to his audi­ence. He told Newsweek Fri­day that Lit­tle has a slim chance of win­ning, even if they share the same prej­u­dices.

    “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.”

    ———-

    “Repub­li­can Sen­ate Can­di­date, Who Has Called for Coun­try ‘Free From Jews,’ Could be Dianne Feinstein’s Chal­lenger” by Michael Edi­son Hay­den; Newsweek; 04/28/2018

    ““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:

    ...
    The man in ques­tion is Patrick Lit­tle, an extrem­ist with hard­line anti-Semit­ic views who is backed by David Duke and oth­er far-right extrem­ists. Lit­tle will be squar­ing off in a top-two pri­ma­ry with 10 oth­er Repub­li­cans as well as Democ­rats and inde­pen­dents on June 5 for the chance to oppose vet­er­an Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor Dianne Fein­stein. Accord­ing to a recent poll, released last week, he very much has a chance of win­ning the right to face off with the incum­bent.

    A poll con­duct­ed by local ABC News affil­i­ates along with the polling com­pa­ny Sur­vey USA, sug­gest­ed that Lit­tle is polling at 18 per­cent of the vote on the Repub­li­can tick­et, a full 10 points ahead of his next strongest oppo­nent. The 84-year-old Fein­stein, who entered office in 1992, at the start of Bill Clinton’s first term, remains a sol­id favorite to win the state—polling at 39 per­cent.
    ...

    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”:

    ...
    It’s unclear how pre­dic­tive the poll will prove to be, or whether many Cal­i­for­ni­ans are inti­mate­ly famil­iar with Little’s views, but the notion that he has any via­bil­i­ty at all in the state is like­ly to raise alarm. Lit­tle has said he believes Jews should have no say over white non-Jews and wants to see them removed from the coun­try alto­geth­er. On Gab, a social media site with large swaths of extrem­ist users, he argues that the neo-Nazi web­site Dai­ly Stormer, whose pro­pri­etors praise Adolf Hitler and have appeared to call for acts of vio­lence against Jew­ish peo­ple, is too Jew­ish.

    “I pro­pose a gov­ern­ment that makes counter-semi­tism cen­tral to all aims of the state,” he wrote on that web­site, refer­ring to a white nation­al­ist euphemism for a hatred of Jews. He argued for for­bid­ding “all immi­gra­tion except of bio­log­i­cal kin, where no per­son of Jew­ish ori­gin may live, vaca­tion or tra­verse.”

    He also wrote that he want­ed to keep Amer­i­cans “free from Jews.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Lit­tle did not respond to a request for com­ment on this sto­ry. His overt­ly anti-Semit­ic posts in the runup to an elec­tion fol­low the can­di­da­cy of Wis­con­sin-based Repub­li­can con­gres­sion­al can­di­date Paul Nehlen, who has veered so far to the right that he has been dis­avowed by some promi­nent white nation­al­ists.

    White Suprema­cist Richard Spencer wrote on Twit­ter this month that Nehlen “needs to just go away,” sug­gest­ing that he had embar­rassed their cause of build­ing a state for only whites by being too open­ly prej­u­diced. Most recent­ly, Nehlen appeared on an extrem­ist pod­cast inspired by racist mass mur­der­er Dylann Roof. It’s unclear whether or not Lit­tle, whose polit­i­cal ambi­tions have so far received less scruti­ny than Nehlen’s, will be sim­i­lar­ly dis­avowed.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    Matt Bar­reto, a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ences at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, told Newsweek that while the poll is con­cern­ing due to Little’s views, it isn’t a strong indi­ca­tor that he will ever become Sen­a­tor.

    “There’s been no cam­paign to speak of. All the dis­cus­sion has been between Fein­stein and [Demo­c­ra­t­ic chal­lenger] Kevin de León,” Bar­reto said. “I don’t believe that this can­di­date has much out­reach.”

    He not­ed that many peo­ple may have no idea who Lit­tle is, and are sim­ply respond­ing to the fact that his name was grouped with the Repub­li­cans. He said that if his views became more wide­ly known, it would like­ly sink his can­di­da­cy.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 5, 2018, 12:39 am
  19. 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:

    Rightwing Watch

    Mark Tay­lor: Trump Is ‘A Polit­i­cal Prophet’ And ‘An Anoint­ed Spir­i­tu­al Machine’

    By Kyle Manty­la
    June 1, 2018 10:55 am

    Self-pro­claimed “fire­fight­er prophet” and right-wing con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist Mark Tay­lor appeared on the “Watch­men Radio” pro­gram on Tues­day, where he said that Pres­i­dent Trump is a “prophet” and declared that Chris­tians who refuse to sup­port him are harm­ing the faith.

    Tay­lor, whose sto­ry is the focus of an upcom­ing movie from Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty, declared that in 2016, Chris­tians had a choice between vot­ing for “a demon-pos­sessed witch” and “a man of God” and host Richard Kelt­ner agreed, call­ing Hillary Clin­ton “a satan­ic, Illu­mi­nat­ic witch that’s into Piz­za­gate, child-hump­ing and satan­ic rit­u­als.”

    ...

    Tay­lor said that Chris­t­ian lead­ers who crit­i­cized Trump for his infa­mous remarks about being able to sex­u­al­ly assault women with impuni­ty because of his fame were exposed as frauds because “this man got born again way after that fact.”

    “Why were they com­ing against this man?” he angri­ly asked. “Because the Bible says your sins are wiped com­plete­ly clean, they are washed clean in the blood of Jesus. Why are you even bring­ing this up? Peri­od. Because of the polit­i­cal and social pres­sure they caved into. That right there exposed these lead­ers, they should have been shamed beyond belief because who in their right mind would ever want to come to Christ with these lead­ers as a leader, know­ing that they’re going to come out pub­licly and con­demn me for some­thing I did 15 years ago?”

    “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.”

    [audio clip avail­able here]

    ———-

    ” Mark Tay­lor: Trump Is ‘A Polit­i­cal Prophet’ And ‘An Anoint­ed Spir­i­tu­al Machine’” by Kyle Manty­la; Rightwing Watch; 06/01/2018

    ““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:

    ...
    Tay­lor, whose sto­ry is the focus of an upcom­ing movie from Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty, declared that in 2016, Chris­tians had a choice between vot­ing for “a demon-pos­sessed witch” and “a man of God” and host Richard Kelt­ner agreed, call­ing Hillary Clin­ton “a satan­ic, Illu­mi­nat­ic witch that’s into Piz­za­gate, child-hump­ing and satan­ic rit­u­als.”
    ...

    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:

    Rightwing Watch

    Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty Is Mak­ing A Movie About Trump-Lov­ing ‘Fire­fight­er Prophet’ Mark Tay­lor

    By Kyle Manty­la
    March 21, 2018 3:52 pm

    Mark Tay­lor is a for­mer fire­fight­er who claims that while he was watch­ing Fox News back in 2011, God per­son­al­ly told him that Don­ald Trump would become pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. Tay­lor ini­tial­ly thought that meant that Trump would chal­lenge Pres­i­dent Oba­ma when he ran for re-elec­tion in 2012, but when that didn’t hap­pen, Tay­lor real­ized that was because it was God’s plan to keep Oba­ma in office for a sec­ond term so that Amer­i­cans could “build a right­eous anger” nec­es­sary to elect Trump and there­by save the world.

    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.

    In the last year, Tay­lor has claimed that God told him that Trump will replace five mem­bers of the Supreme Court, three of whom will be removed from the bench after being indict­ed for cor­rup­tion, and that two of the five cur­rent­ly liv­ing for­mer pres­i­dents will die as pun­ish­ment for crit­i­ciz­ing Trump, while the oth­er three will be impris­oned and pos­si­bly exe­cut­ed for trea­son.

    Tay­lor, who claims that Trump will release the cures for can­cer and Alzheimer’s dis­ease dur­ing his sec­ond term in office and assert­ed that God made jour­nal­ist Meg­yn Kel­ly ill as a “warn­ing shot” to all those who would dare to crit­i­cize Trump, believes that thou­sands of elite satan­ic pedophiles have been secret­ly arrest­ed and that we will soon start see­ing them pros­e­cut­ed via mil­i­tary tri­bunals that will “make Nurem­berg look like a cake­walk.” Tay­lor actu­al­ly pre­dict­ed that we’d see mass arrests in Feb­ru­ary, but the fact that that obvi­ous­ly didn’t hap­pen doesn’t seem to have harmed his stand­ing as a “prophet” in any way.

    Last year, Tay­lor assert­ed that Hur­ri­canes Har­vey and Irma, which dev­as­tat­ed parts of Texas and Flori­da respec­tive­ly, were cre­at­ed and con­trolled by the Illu­mi­nati to pun­ish the areas of the coun­try that vot­ed for Trump and to serve as a “train­ing run” for a mas­sive witch­craft attack against the pres­i­dent. On top of that, Tay­lor warned that the Freema­sons and the Illu­mi­nati are using a spe­cial fre­quen­cy to change people’s DNA in order to make them hate Trump so that they are unable to see how God is using him to save Amer­i­ca.

    [audio clip avail­able here]

    With an amaz­ing track record like this, it was prob­a­bly only a mat­ter of time before Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty decid­ed to turn Taylor’s life sto­ry into a fea­ture film, which is a thing that is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing:

    It was offi­cial­ly announced Jan. 26 that the Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty Cin­e­mat­ic Arts depart­ment would be work­ing on a fea­ture film get­ting nation­al the­atri­cal release.

    “Com­man­der” comes after the program’s first fea­ture film “Extra­or­di­nary,” and a series of short films. “Com­man­der” is an adap­ta­tion of the book “The Trump Prophe­cies.”

    The film, which is slat­ed to be released in Octo­ber, is the true sto­ry of an ex-fire­fight­er named Mark Tay­lor who in 2011, while recov­er­ing from PTSD, had a vision that Don­ald Trump would be Pres­i­dent.

    ...

    The mes­sage the film’s pro­duc­er and financier Rick Eldridge wants to get across is how there is pow­er in prayer and the impact it can have on a group of peo­ple mixed with patri­o­tism.

    “I real­ly want it to be a patri­ot­ic, a God and coun­try mes­sage that we can under­stand,” Eldridge said. “The best thing I can take away is when peo­ple leave the the­ater they are real­ly feel­ing proud about their coun­try and the things God has blessed us with.”

    Pre­dictably, this project is not sit­ting well with some Lib­er­ty stu­dents and alum­ni who have start­ed a peti­tion to get the uni­ver­si­ty to can­cel this “hereti­cal film project” on the grounds that “this movie could reflect very poor­ly on all Lib­er­ty stu­dents and Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty as a whole,” espe­cial­ly those enrolled in the Cin­e­mat­ic Arts pro­gram who “do not want this movie on their resume and … are even con­sid­er­ing using alias­es on IMDB or drop­ping out.”

    Lib­er­ty University’s pres­i­dent, Jer­ry Fal­well Jr., has been an enthu­si­as­tic and loy­al sup­port­er of Trump’s, which has also not gone over well with some stu­dents and alum­ni.

    ———-

    “Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty Is Mak­ing A Movie About Trump-Lov­ing ‘Fire­fight­er Prophet’ Mark Tay­lor” By Kyle Manty­la; Rightwing Watch; 03/21/2018

    “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:

    ...
    With an amaz­ing track record like this, it was prob­a­bly only a mat­ter of time before Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty decid­ed to turn Taylor’s life sto­ry into a fea­ture film, which is a thing that is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing:

    It was offi­cial­ly announced Jan. 26 that the Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty Cin­e­mat­ic Arts depart­ment would be work­ing on a fea­ture film get­ting nation­al the­atri­cal release.

    “Com­man­der” comes after the program’s first fea­ture film “Extra­or­di­nary,” and a series of short films. “Com­man­der” is an adap­ta­tion of the book “The Trump Prophe­cies.”

    The film, which is slat­ed to be released in Octo­ber, is the true sto­ry of an ex-fire­fight­er named Mark Tay­lor who in 2011, while recov­er­ing from PTSD, had a vision that Don­ald Trump would be Pres­i­dent.

    ...

    The mes­sage the film’s pro­duc­er and financier Rick Eldridge wants to get across is how there is pow­er in prayer and the impact it can have on a group of peo­ple mixed with patri­o­tism.

    “I real­ly want it to be a patri­ot­ic, a God and coun­try mes­sage that we can under­stand,” Eldridge said. “The best thing I can take away is when peo­ple leave the the­ater they are real­ly feel­ing proud about their coun­try and the things God has blessed us with.”

    ...

    ““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:

    Vox

    The bib­li­cal sto­ry the Chris­t­ian right uses to defend Trump
    Why evan­gel­i­cals are call­ing Trump a “mod­ern-day Cyrus.”

    By Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton
    Mar 5, 2018, 9:20am EST

    It’s a typ­i­cal morn­ing seg­ment on Pat Robertson’s Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Net­work, late in 2016. The con­tro­ver­sial Access Hol­ly­wood tapes, on which then-can­di­date Don­ald Trump can be heard boast­ing about grab­bing women by the gen­i­tals, have just been released.

    Stand­ing on a sun­ny street, reporter Chris Mitchell says, “Chris­tians are divid­ed about what to do on Don­ald Trump.”

    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?

    Mitchell runs swift­ly through the first two options, cit­ing both a con­dem­na­tion of Trump and an endorse­ment by Focus on the Family’s James Dob­son. But it’s the third option — that God him­self has cho­sen Trump to be pres­i­dent — that Mitchell focus­es on.

    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.”

    Mitchell notes that some evan­gel­i­cals dis­agree but does not name or cite them. Instead, he cites the grow­ing threat of Chi­na, Rus­sia, and Iran, before Wall­nau con­cludes, “America’s going to have a chal­lenge either way. With Trump, I believe we have a Cyrus to nav­i­gate through the storm.”

    The com­par­i­son comes up fre­quent­ly in the evan­gel­i­cal world. Many evan­gel­i­cal speak­ers and media out­lets com­pare Trump to Cyrus, a his­tor­i­cal Per­sian king who, in the sixth cen­tu­ry BCE, con­quered Baby­lon and end­ed the Baby­lon­ian cap­tiv­i­ty, a peri­od dur­ing which Israelites had been forcibly reset­tled in exile. This allowed Jews to return to the area now known as Israel and build a tem­ple in Jerusalem. Cyrus is ref­er­enced most promi­nent­ly in the Old Tes­ta­ment book of Isa­iah, in which he appears as a fig­ure of deliv­er­ance.

    That com­par­i­son has become more and more explic­it in the wake of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy. Last week, an Israeli orga­ni­za­tion, the Mik­dash Edu­ca­tion­al Cen­ter, mint­ed a com­mem­o­ra­tive “Tem­ple Coin” depict­ing Trump and Cyrus side by side, in hon­or of Trump’s deci­sion to move the Amer­i­can embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. It was among the most brazen, pub­lic links between Trump and Cyrus; one that takes the years of sub­text run­ning through out­lets like Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Net­work and, quite lit­er­al­ly, sealed the com­par­i­son.

    Mon­day, how­ev­er, an even high­er-pro­file fig­ure linked Trump and Cyrus. Dur­ing his vis­it to Wash­ing­ton, DC, Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Netanyahu heav­i­ly implied Trump was Cyrus’s spir­i­tu­al heir. Thank­ing Trump for mov­ing the Amer­i­can embassy to Jerusalem, Netanyahu said, “We remem­ber the procla­ma­tion of the great King Cyrus the Great — Per­sian King. Twen­ty-five hun­dred years ago, he pro­claimed that the Jew­ish exiles in Baby­lon can come back and rebuild our tem­ple in Jerusalem...And we remem­ber how a few weeks ago, Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump rec­og­nized Jerusalem as Israel’s cap­i­tal. Mr. Pres­i­dent, this will be remem­bered by our peo­ple through­out the ages.”

    While Cyrus is not Jew­ish and does not wor­ship the God of Israel, he is nev­er­the­less por­trayed in Isa­iah as an instru­ment of God — an unwit­ting con­duit through which God effects his divine plan for his­to­ry. Cyrus is, there­fore, the arche­type of the unlike­ly “ves­sel”: some­one God has cho­sen for an impor­tant his­tor­i­cal pur­pose, despite not look­ing like — or hav­ing the reli­gious char­ac­ter of — an obvi­ous man of God.

    For believ­ers who sub­scribe to this account, Cyrus is a per­fect his­tor­i­cal antecedent to explain Trump’s pres­i­den­cy: a non­be­liev­er who nev­er­the­less served as a ves­sel for divine inter­est.

    For these lead­ers, the bib­li­cal account of Cyrus allows them to devel­op a “ves­sel the­ol­o­gy” around Don­ald Trump, one that allows them to rec­on­cile his per­son­al his­to­ry of wom­an­iz­ing and alleged sex­u­al assault with what they see as his divine­ly ordained pur­pose to restore a Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca.

    “I think in some ways this is a kind of bap­tism of Don­ald Trump,” says John Fea, a pro­fes­sor of evan­gel­i­cal his­to­ry at Mes­si­ah Col­lege in Har­ris­burg, Penn­syl­va­nia. “It’s the theopo­lit­i­cal ver­sion of mon­ey laun­der­ing, tak­ing Scrip­ture to … clean [up] your can­di­date.”

    This fram­ing allows for the cre­ation of Trump as a viable evan­gel­i­cal can­di­date regard­less of his per­son­al beliefs or actions. It allows evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers, and to a less­er extent ordi­nary evan­gel­i­cals, to pro­vide a com­pelling nar­ra­tive for their sup­port for him that tran­scends the mere prag­mat­ic fact that he is a Repub­li­can. Instead of hav­ing to jus­ti­fy their views of Trump’s con­tro­ver­sial past, includ­ing reports of sex­u­al mis­con­duct and adul­tery, the evan­gel­i­cal estab­lish­ment can say Trump’s pres­i­den­cy was arranged by God, and thus legit­imize their sup­port for him — a sup­port that has begun to divide ordi­nary evan­gel­i­cals and cre­ate a kind of “schism.”

    Trump has cap­i­tal­ized on this idea of “ves­sel the­ol­o­gy”

    Numer­ous evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers have used the Trump-as-Cyrus com­par­i­son to explain how a leader who, while not (orig­i­nal­ly) reli­gious, might nev­er­the­less fig­ure into a divine his­tor­i­cal plan.

    In Decem­ber, Chris­t­ian evan­gel­i­cal leader Mike Evans made the com­par­i­son while prais­ing Trump’s deci­sion to move the Amer­i­can embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, anoth­er act with deep the­o­log­i­cal con­no­ta­tions. Before see­ing Trump right after the announce­ment, Evans said, “the first word I’m going to say to him, ‘Cyrus, you’re Cyrus.’” He explained that Cyrus “was used as an instru­ment of God for deliv­er­ance in the Bible, and God has used this imper­fect ves­sel, this flawed human being like you or I, this imper­fect ves­sel, and he’s using him in an incred­i­ble, amaz­ing way to ful­fill his plans and pur­pos­es.”

    Like­wise, last year, Cre­ation Muse­um founder Ken Ham used the same rhetoric to explain how God had, in his view, brought Trump to pow­er: “God is in total con­trol,” Ham told the Deseret Dai­ly News ear­ly last year. “He makes that very clear in the Bible where he tells us that he rais­es up kings and destroys king­doms. He even calls a pagan king, Cyrus, his anoint­ed, or his ser­vant to do the things that he wants him to do.”

    Trump him­self seemed to bol­ster this par­tic­u­lar com­par­i­son. He ref­er­enced a (fake) quote from Cyrus in March 2017 as part of a speech com­mem­o­rat­ing Nowruz, the Per­sian New Year.

    Adher­ing the Cyrus motif to an Amer­i­can pres­i­dent — and par­tic­u­lar­ly using it to jus­ti­fy evan­gel­i­cal sup­port of the Trump pres­i­den­cy — is unique.

    Anbara Kha­li­di, a for­mer research asso­ciate at Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford’s Wad­ham Col­lege and an expert on Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal apoc­a­lyp­tic nar­ra­tives, says she has not come across the Cyrus nar­ra­tive in her pre­vi­ous study of evan­gel­i­cals and pol­i­tics. “I actu­al­ly have per­son­al­ly nev­er heard any of the Chris­t­ian evan­gel­i­cals I’ve researched refer to any politi­cian as Cyrus,” she said in an email.

    Often, she said, the end-times-con­scious evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties she researched in the pre-Trump era were far more ret­i­cent to make spe­cif­ic asso­ci­a­tions between bib­li­cal fig­ures and present-day ones.

    Kha­li­di said most evan­gel­i­cals tend to be “pret­ty cau­tious” about asso­ci­at­ing indi­vid­u­als in his­to­ry with bib­li­cal fig­ures or prophe­cies. Rather, she says, many evan­gel­i­cals tra­di­tion­al­ly speak more gen­er­al­ly about “signs of the times” or indi­ca­tors that the end, more broad­ly, may be at hand, with­out speak­ing specif­i­cal­ly about link­ing mod­ern politi­cians to giv­en bib­li­cal prophe­cies or par­al­lels.

    How­ev­er, Kha­li­di said, the Trump-Cyrus asso­ci­a­tion has gained trac­tion in recent years, espe­cial­ly among those “who have rec­og­nized its polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy.” Fur­ther­more, Trump seems to have been encour­aged to pub­licly embrace these asso­ci­a­tions.

    Trump’s deci­sion to move the Amer­i­can embassy in Israel to Jerusalem late last year, for exam­ple, might have been seen as one such curat­ed response, evok­ing the his­tor­i­cal asso­ci­a­tion between Cyrus and the lib­er­a­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple as a kind of dog whis­tle to evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers that he’s on their side.

    Fea point­ed out that among a cer­tain sub­set of evan­gel­i­cals, even innocu­ous details seem to be evi­dence of prophe­cy. The most famous bib­li­cal verse about Cyrus as God’s “anoint­ed” is found in Isa­iah 45 — and Trump is the 45th pres­i­dent. Wall­nau made this con­nec­tion explic­it, telling the Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Net­work that God spoke to him direct­ly to tell him, “Isa­iah 45 will be the 45th pres­i­dent ... Isa­iah 45 is Cyrus.”

    Andrew White­head, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at Clem­son Uni­ver­si­ty who focus­es on the rise of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, agreed with Fea. “Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist rhetoric, defend­ing America’s Chris­t­ian her­itage” — all these, he said, were com­mon tropes through­out Amer­i­can his­to­ry. “But what makes Trump inter­est­ing, a test as to the pow­er of this Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist rhetoric, is that regard­less of per­son­al piety … his use of that rhetoric still res­onat­ed, and peo­ple still vot­ed for him.” Trump man­aged to cap­ture the evan­gel­i­cal imag­i­na­tion with­out being par­tic­u­lar­ly evan­gel­i­cal — or, indeed, per­son­al­ly reli­gious — him­self.

    The Cyrus nar­ra­tive allows evan­gel­i­cals to thread a dif­fi­cult rhetor­i­cal nee­dle. It allows them to see Trump as “their” can­di­date — a can­di­date who will effect God’s will that Amer­i­ca become a tru­ly Chris­t­ian nation — with­out requir­ing Trump him­self to man­i­fest any Chris­t­ian virtues. He is, like Cyrus, anoint­ed by God and thus has divine legit­i­ma­cy (Trump’s spir­i­tu­al advis­ers, includ­ing evan­gel­i­cal fig­ures Robert Jef­fress and Paula White, have repeat­ed­ly ham­mered this point), but he has no oblig­a­tion to live out Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples in his per­son­al life.

    Accord­ing to Fea, this nar­ra­tive works because it allows evan­gel­i­cals to cap­i­tal­ize on Trump’s “strong­man” per­sona — in prac­ti­cal terms, his abil­i­ty to get votes — while allow­ing them to jus­ti­fy their sup­port the­o­log­i­cal­ly and pre­serve their sense of Trump as a God-backed can­di­date.

    Some­one like Ted Cruz, Fea says, may ini­tial­ly have been a “pur­er can­di­date” as far as evan­gel­i­cals were con­cerned. But when it became clear that Trump was per­form­ing bet­ter in the Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry, they shift­ed tac­tics. “They have to have some kind of bib­li­cal or the­o­log­i­cal or Chris­t­ian rea­son ... for their sup­port,” he says. But they also have to back a win­ner.

    ...

    Trump’s rhetoric ties into and sig­nif­i­cant­ly expands on a robust his­tor­i­cal tra­di­tion of lan­guage and thought about God, and a kind of “ves­sel the­ol­o­gy,” in Amer­i­can polit­i­cal his­to­ry.

    White­head says the idea that God plays a divine role in pol­i­tics is noth­ing new. When it comes to the pres­i­den­cy, nar­ra­tives of divine inter­ven­tion have been woven into Amer­i­can cul­tur­al dis­course from the begin­ning of what White­head calls Amer­i­ca’s “civ­il reli­gion,” which he describes as a fusion of polit­i­cal and reli­gious imagery.

    For exam­ple, after George Wash­ing­ton died, White­head said, “sto­ries cropped up about his reli­gios­i­ty, about what a great man he was.”

    “Great lead­ers [have been his­tor­i­cal­ly] iden­ti­fied with how God was using them, or that God placed them there for a pur­pose,” he said. For Amer­i­ca, a rel­a­tive­ly new nation, this Chris­t­ian mythos became a foun­da­tion­al ele­ment of cre­at­ing a nation­al iden­ti­ty. “Colo­nials had clos­er ties to Britain than they had to each oth­er. Chris­tian­i­ty became a part of that.”

    Fea con­curs. Through­out the ear­ly his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca, he notes, Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism and a par­tic­u­lar blend of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism — see­ing Amer­i­ca as a kind of new cho­sen land for God’s inter­ven­tion on a par­al­lel with the Israel of the Old Tes­ta­ment — went hand in hand. He ref­er­ences the ide­al of the “city on a hill,” an image from Jesus’s Ser­mon on the Mount, used by Puri­tan set­tler John Winthrop to describe how the new Amer­i­can colonies would serve as a mod­el for Chris­t­ian liv­ing.

    Fea ref­er­ences, too, the work of ear­ly Amer­i­can revival­ist preach­ers like Jonathan Edwards, who believed the sec­ond com­ing of Christ was immi­nent in Boston dur­ing the 18th cen­tu­ry. Fea says the ide­al­is­tic nature of America’s found­ing — as a coun­try that believes in “lib­er­ty and free­dom” — has lent itself to appro­pri­a­tion by Chris­t­ian nar­ra­tives. “It’s sort of tak­ing these Enlight­en­ment ideas [of free­dom and lib­er­ty],” he added. “Since day one, they have been kind of ‘bap­tized’ by evan­gel­i­cals who say in a very unthought­ful way, ‘Amer­i­ca is for free­dom. God is for free­dom. There­fore, God must priv­i­lege the US.’”

    This sense that God has “cho­sen” Amer­i­ca as a spe­cial peo­ple, or that he acts direct­ly in Amer­i­can affairs, has, Fea argues, giv­en us quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Amer­i­can his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­na such as Man­i­fest Des­tiny, the impe­ri­al­ist expan­sion of the Unit­ed States across North Amer­i­ca.

    There­fore, at the very least, the idea that God inter­venes direct­ly in Amer­i­can polit­i­cal affairs, and uses Amer­i­can polit­i­cal fig­ures as ves­sels to effect divine will, is deeply root­ed in cen­turies of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism.

    Trump’s whole team fur­thers the Cyrus nar­ra­tive

    The con­tin­ued preva­lence of the Cyrus nar­ra­tive through­out the cam­paign and the first year of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy speaks to its longevi­ty and pow­er. But it speaks, too, to the degree to which those around Trump — from his unof­fi­cial evan­gel­i­cal advi­so­ry coun­cil to Chris­t­ian sup­port­ers on CBN — are able to sig­nal to sup­port­ers that the evan­gel­i­cal agen­da is receiv­ing atten­tion in the White House regard­less of Trump’s actions, or even regard­less of whether Trump is aware of what’s going on.

    After all, Trump him­self has men­tioned Cyrus just once (and made up a quote in the process). But every time those around Trump men­tion Cyrus, they’re sig­nal­ing to their lis­ten­ers that because Trump is noth­ing but a ves­sel for God’s will, he’s also some­what irrel­e­vant in the scheme of things.

    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.

    But Trump, too, is doing his share of influ­enc­ing, dog-whistling to evan­gel­i­cal rhetoric of an unex­pect­ed or incon­gru­ous “divine plan.”

    With­in that par­a­digm, his some­what incon­gru­ous anec­dote dur­ing the State of the Union address about the New Mex­i­co cou­ple that adopt­ed a home­less, hero­in-addict­ed woman’s baby makes far more sense.

    Trump says of Ryan Holets, the New Mex­i­co police offi­cer who adopt­ed the baby, that “Ryan said he felt God speak to him: ‘You will do it — because you can.’”

    With­in the con­text of a pres­i­den­tial address, the anec­dote felt jar­ring, out of place. But as a the­o­log­i­cal nod, the anec­dote made per­fect sense. The image of an unlike­ly indi­vid­ual cho­sen unex­pect­ed­ly by God to shoul­der a dif­fi­cult and divine­ly ordained bur­den is a pop­u­lar nar­ra­tive with­in Chris­t­ian, and more specif­i­cal­ly evan­gel­i­cal, dis­course.

    And it’s a nar­ra­tive that Trump will con­tin­ue to cap­i­tal­ize on to keep his evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers close.

    ———

    “The bib­li­cal sto­ry the Chris­t­ian right uses to defend Trump” by Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton; Vox; 03/05/2018

    “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:

    ...
    Mitchell runs swift­ly through the first two options, cit­ing both a con­dem­na­tion of Trump and an endorse­ment by Focus on the Family’s James Dob­son. But it’s the third option — that God him­self has cho­sen Trump to be pres­i­dent — that Mitchell focus­es on.

    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.”

    Mitchell notes that some evan­gel­i­cals dis­agree but does not name or cite them. Instead, he cites the grow­ing threat of Chi­na, Rus­sia, and Iran, before Wall­nau con­cludes, “America’s going to have a chal­lenge either way. With Trump, I believe we have a Cyrus to nav­i­gate through the storm.”

    The com­par­i­son comes up fre­quent­ly in the evan­gel­i­cal world. Many evan­gel­i­cal speak­ers and media out­lets com­pare Trump to Cyrus, a his­tor­i­cal Per­sian king who, in the sixth cen­tu­ry BCE, con­quered Baby­lon and end­ed the Baby­lon­ian cap­tiv­i­ty, a peri­od dur­ing which Israelites had been forcibly reset­tled in exile. This allowed Jews to return to the area now known as Israel and build a tem­ple in Jerusalem. Cyrus is ref­er­enced most promi­nent­ly in the Old Tes­ta­ment book of Isa­iah, in which he appears as a fig­ure of deliv­er­ance.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    That com­par­i­son has become more and more explic­it in the wake of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy. Last week, an Israeli orga­ni­za­tion, the Mik­dash Edu­ca­tion­al Cen­ter, mint­ed a com­mem­o­ra­tive “Tem­ple Coin” depict­ing Trump and Cyrus side by side, in hon­or of Trump’s deci­sion to move the Amer­i­can embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. It was among the most brazen, pub­lic links between Trump and Cyrus; one that takes the years of sub­text run­ning through out­lets like Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Net­work and, quite lit­er­al­ly, sealed the com­par­i­son.

    Mon­day, how­ev­er, an even high­er-pro­file fig­ure linked Trump and Cyrus. Dur­ing his vis­it to Wash­ing­ton, DC, Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Netanyahu heav­i­ly implied Trump was Cyrus’s spir­i­tu­al heir. Thank­ing Trump for mov­ing the Amer­i­can embassy to Jerusalem, Netanyahu said, “We remem­ber the procla­ma­tion of the great King Cyrus the Great — Per­sian King. Twen­ty-five hun­dred years ago, he pro­claimed that the Jew­ish exiles in Baby­lon can come back and rebuild our tem­ple in Jerusalem...And we remem­ber how a few weeks ago, Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump rec­og­nized Jerusalem as Israel’s cap­i­tal. Mr. Pres­i­dent, this will be remem­bered by our peo­ple through­out the ages.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    While Cyrus is not Jew­ish and does not wor­ship the God of Israel, he is nev­er­the­less por­trayed in Isa­iah as an instru­ment of God — an unwit­ting con­duit through which God effects his divine plan for his­to­ry. Cyrus is, there­fore, the arche­type of the unlike­ly “ves­sel”: some­one God has cho­sen for an impor­tant his­tor­i­cal pur­pose, despite not look­ing like — or hav­ing the reli­gious char­ac­ter of — an obvi­ous man of God.

    For believ­ers who sub­scribe to this account, Cyrus is a per­fect his­tor­i­cal antecedent to explain Trump’s pres­i­den­cy: a non­be­liev­er who nev­er­the­less served as a ves­sel for divine inter­est.

    For these lead­ers, the bib­li­cal account of Cyrus allows them to devel­op a “ves­sel the­ol­o­gy” around Don­ald Trump, one that allows them to rec­on­cile his per­son­al his­to­ry of wom­an­iz­ing and alleged sex­u­al assault with what they see as his divine­ly ordained pur­pose to restore a Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca.

    “I think in some ways this is a kind of bap­tism of Don­ald Trump,” says John Fea, a pro­fes­sor of evan­gel­i­cal his­to­ry at Mes­si­ah Col­lege in Har­ris­burg, Penn­syl­va­nia. “It’s the theopo­lit­i­cal ver­sion of mon­ey laun­der­ing, tak­ing Scrip­ture to … clean [up] your can­di­date.”

    This fram­ing allows for the cre­ation of Trump as a viable evan­gel­i­cal can­di­date regard­less of his per­son­al beliefs or actions. It allows evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers, and to a less­er extent ordi­nary evan­gel­i­cals, to pro­vide a com­pelling nar­ra­tive for their sup­port for him that tran­scends the mere prag­mat­ic fact that he is a Repub­li­can. Instead of hav­ing to jus­ti­fy their views of Trump’s con­tro­ver­sial past, includ­ing reports of sex­u­al mis­con­duct and adul­tery, the evan­gel­i­cal estab­lish­ment can say Trump’s pres­i­den­cy was arranged by God, and thus legit­imize their sup­port for him — a sup­port that has begun to divide ordi­nary evan­gel­i­cals and cre­ate a kind of “schism.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Trump him­self seemed to bol­ster this par­tic­u­lar com­par­i­son. He ref­er­enced a (fake) quote from Cyrus in March 2017 as part of a speech com­mem­o­rat­ing Nowruz, the Per­sian New Year.

    ...

    Kha­li­di said most evan­gel­i­cals tend to be “pret­ty cau­tious” about asso­ci­at­ing indi­vid­u­als in his­to­ry with bib­li­cal fig­ures or prophe­cies. Rather, she says, many evan­gel­i­cals tra­di­tion­al­ly speak more gen­er­al­ly about “signs of the times” or indi­ca­tors that the end, more broad­ly, may be at hand, with­out speak­ing specif­i­cal­ly about link­ing mod­ern politi­cians to giv­en bib­li­cal prophe­cies or par­al­lels.

    How­ev­er, Kha­li­di said, the Trump-Cyrus asso­ci­a­tion has gained trac­tion in recent years, espe­cial­ly among those “who have rec­og­nized its polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy.” Fur­ther­more, Trump seems to have been encour­aged to pub­licly embrace these asso­ci­a­tions.

    Trump’s deci­sion to move the Amer­i­can embassy in Israel to Jerusalem late last year, for exam­ple, might have been seen as one such curat­ed response, evok­ing the his­tor­i­cal asso­ci­a­tion between Cyrus and the lib­er­a­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple as a kind of dog whis­tle to evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers that he’s on their side.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Adher­ing the Cyrus motif to an Amer­i­can pres­i­dent — and par­tic­u­lar­ly using it to jus­ti­fy evan­gel­i­cal sup­port of the Trump pres­i­den­cy — is unique.

    Anbara Kha­li­di, a for­mer research asso­ciate at Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford’s Wad­ham Col­lege and an expert on Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal apoc­a­lyp­tic nar­ra­tives, says she has not come across the Cyrus nar­ra­tive in her pre­vi­ous study of evan­gel­i­cals and pol­i­tics. “I actu­al­ly have per­son­al­ly nev­er heard any of the Chris­t­ian evan­gel­i­cals I’ve researched refer to any politi­cian as Cyrus,” she said in an email.

    Often, she said, the end-times-con­scious evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties she researched in the pre-Trump era were far more ret­i­cent to make spe­cif­ic asso­ci­a­tions between bib­li­cal fig­ures and present-day ones.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Andrew White­head, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at Clem­son Uni­ver­si­ty who focus­es on the rise of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, agreed with Fea. “Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist rhetoric, defend­ing America’s Chris­t­ian her­itage” — all these, he said, were com­mon tropes through­out Amer­i­can his­to­ry. “But what makes Trump inter­est­ing, a test as to the pow­er of this Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist rhetoric, is that regard­less of per­son­al piety … his use of that rhetoric still res­onat­ed, and peo­ple still vot­ed for him.” Trump man­aged to cap­ture the evan­gel­i­cal imag­i­na­tion with­out being par­tic­u­lar­ly evan­gel­i­cal — or, indeed, per­son­al­ly reli­gious — him­self.

    The Cyrus nar­ra­tive allows evan­gel­i­cals to thread a dif­fi­cult rhetor­i­cal nee­dle. It allows them to see Trump as “their” can­di­date — a can­di­date who will effect God’s will that Amer­i­ca become a tru­ly Chris­t­ian nation — with­out requir­ing Trump him­self to man­i­fest any Chris­t­ian virtues. He is, like Cyrus, anoint­ed by God and thus has divine legit­i­ma­cy (Trump’s spir­i­tu­al advis­ers, includ­ing evan­gel­i­cal fig­ures Robert Jef­fress and Paula White, have repeat­ed­ly ham­mered this point), but he has no oblig­a­tion to live out Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples in his per­son­al life.

    Accord­ing to Fea, this nar­ra­tive works because it allows evan­gel­i­cals to cap­i­tal­ize on Trump’s “strong­man” per­sona — in prac­ti­cal terms, his abil­i­ty to get votes — while allow­ing them to jus­ti­fy their sup­port the­o­log­i­cal­ly and pre­serve their sense of Trump as a God-backed can­di­date.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Trump’s rhetoric ties into and sig­nif­i­cant­ly expands on a robust his­tor­i­cal tra­di­tion of lan­guage and thought about God, and a kind of “ves­sel the­ol­o­gy,” in Amer­i­can polit­i­cal his­to­ry.

    White­head says the idea that God plays a divine role in pol­i­tics is noth­ing new. When it comes to the pres­i­den­cy, nar­ra­tives of divine inter­ven­tion have been woven into Amer­i­can cul­tur­al dis­course from the begin­ning of what White­head calls Amer­i­ca’s “civ­il reli­gion,” which he describes as a fusion of polit­i­cal and reli­gious imagery.

    For exam­ple, after George Wash­ing­ton died, White­head said, “sto­ries cropped up about his reli­gios­i­ty, about what a great man he was.”

    “Great lead­ers [have been his­tor­i­cal­ly] iden­ti­fied with how God was using them, or that God placed them there for a pur­pose,” he said. For Amer­i­ca, a rel­a­tive­ly new nation, this Chris­t­ian mythos became a foun­da­tion­al ele­ment of cre­at­ing a nation­al iden­ti­ty. “Colo­nials had clos­er ties to Britain than they had to each oth­er. Chris­tian­i­ty became a part of that.”

    Fea con­curs. Through­out the ear­ly his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca, he notes, Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism and a par­tic­u­lar blend of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism — see­ing Amer­i­ca as a kind of new cho­sen land for God’s inter­ven­tion on a par­al­lel with the Israel of the Old Tes­ta­ment — went hand in hand. He ref­er­ences the ide­al of the “city on a hill,” an image from Jesus’s Ser­mon on the Mount, used by Puri­tan set­tler John Winthrop to describe how the new Amer­i­can colonies would serve as a mod­el for Chris­t­ian liv­ing.

    Fea ref­er­ences, too, the work of ear­ly Amer­i­can revival­ist preach­ers like Jonathan Edwards, who believed the sec­ond com­ing of Christ was immi­nent in Boston dur­ing the 18th cen­tu­ry. Fea says the ide­al­is­tic nature of America’s found­ing — as a coun­try that believes in “lib­er­ty and free­dom” — has lent itself to appro­pri­a­tion by Chris­t­ian nar­ra­tives. “It’s sort of tak­ing these Enlight­en­ment ideas [of free­dom and lib­er­ty],” he added. “Since day one, they have been kind of ‘bap­tized’ by evan­gel­i­cals who say in a very unthought­ful way, ‘Amer­i­ca is for free­dom. God is for free­dom. There­fore, God must priv­i­lege the US.’”

    This sense that God has “cho­sen” Amer­i­ca as a spe­cial peo­ple, or that he acts direct­ly in Amer­i­can affairs, has, Fea argues, giv­en us quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Amer­i­can his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­na such as Man­i­fest Des­tiny, the impe­ri­al­ist expan­sion of the Unit­ed States across North Amer­i­ca.

    There­fore, at the very least, the idea that God inter­venes direct­ly in Amer­i­can polit­i­cal affairs, and uses Amer­i­can polit­i­cal fig­ures as ves­sels to effect divine will, is deeply root­ed in cen­turies of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Trump’s whole team fur­thers the Cyrus nar­ra­tive

    The con­tin­ued preva­lence of the Cyrus nar­ra­tive through­out the cam­paign and the first year of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy speaks to its longevi­ty and pow­er. But it speaks, too, to the degree to which those around Trump — from his unof­fi­cial evan­gel­i­cal advi­so­ry coun­cil to Chris­t­ian sup­port­ers on CBN — are able to sig­nal to sup­port­ers that the evan­gel­i­cal agen­da is receiv­ing atten­tion in the White House regard­less of Trump’s actions, or even regard­less of whether Trump is aware of what’s going on.

    After all, Trump him­self has men­tioned Cyrus just once (and made up a quote in the process). But every time those around Trump men­tion Cyrus, they’re sig­nal­ing to their lis­ten­ers that because Trump is noth­ing but a ves­sel for God’s will, he’s also some­what irrel­e­vant in the scheme of things.

    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.
    ...

    “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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 10, 2018, 2:19 am
  20. 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:

    The Dai­ly Beast

    Trump Endors­es Corey Stew­art, the Alt-Right’s Favorite Can­di­date
    A pro-Con­fed­er­ate friend of anti-Semi­tes got a pres­i­den­tial boost after win­ning the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion for Sen­ate in Vir­ginia.

    Kel­ly Weill
    Gideon Resnick
    06.13.18 1:11 PM ET

    Two years ago, Corey Stew­art was too extreme for the Trump cam­paign. This morn­ing, he got Trump’s endorse­ment to run for Sen­ate.

    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.

    “Con­grat­u­la­tions to Corey Stew­art for his great vic­to­ry for Sen­a­tor from Vir­ginia,” Trump tweet­ed Wednes­day. “Now he runs against a total stiff, Tim Kaine, who is weak on crime and bor­ders, and wants to raise your tax­es through the roof. Don’t under­es­ti­mate Corey, a major chance of win­ning!”

    Kaine’s spokesper­son called Stew­art a “crud­er imi­ta­tion of Don­ald Trump who stokes white suprema­cy and brags about being ‘ruth­less and vicious.’”

    While the pres­i­dent got behind him, Sen. Cory Gard­ner, chair of the Nation­al Sen­ate Repub­li­can Com­mit­tee, did not. “We have a big map, right now we are focused on Flori­da, North Dako­ta, Mis­souri, Indi­ana,” Gard­ner told CNN’s Manu Raju. “I don’t see Vir­ginia in it.”

    In 2016, Stew­art was a local offi­cial in Prince William Coun­ty and Vir­ginia co-chair­man of Trump’s cam­paign. After the Access Hol­ly­wood tape came out, he defend­ed Trump’s remarks about sex­u­al­ly assault­ing women, say­ing Trump “act­ed like a frat boy, as a lot of guys do.” He went to take part in a protest out­side Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee head­quar­ters, mak­ing ref­er­ences to “estab­lish­ment pukes,” and was kicked off the cam­paign short­ly after.

    As chair­man of the Prince William Board of Coun­ty Super­vi­sors, Stew­art pushed Trumpian posi­tions includ­ing a pro­pos­al to allow coun­ty police to check the immi­gra­tion sta­tus of any­one they arrest­ed.

    Almost a year ago to the day, Stew­art shocked polit­i­cal observers by near­ly win­ning the GOP guber­na­to­r­i­al pri­ma­ry in Vir­ginia against Ed Gille­spie, the for­mer chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee. Stew­art once even called Gille­spie a “cuck­ser­v­a­tive.” (Gille­spie was trounced by Demo­c­rat Ralph Northam last Novem­ber.)

    Stew­art cam­paigned on the preser­va­tion of Con­fed­er­ate mon­u­ments in the state after a push across the coun­try to tear down the mon­u­ments. Stew­art defend­ed the Con­fed­er­ate flag as “not about racism” dur­ing a speech at an “Old South Ball” in April 2017, sur­round­ed by Con­fed­er­ate flags and peo­ple dressed in Ante­bel­lum South cos­play.

    Stew­art, orig­i­nal­ly from Min­neso­ta, also sought to cap­i­tal­ize on a plan to remove the stat­ue of Robert E. Lee from a local park in Char­lottesville.

    “Noth­ing is worse than a Yan­kee telling a South­ern­er that his mon­u­ments don’t mat­ter,” he tweet­ed.

    Stew­art also tout­ed the entire­ly base­less claim that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma wasn’t born in Amer­i­ca.

    As Gille­spie dis­ap­point­ed some mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans by turn­ing towards cul­tur­al issues in his guber­na­to­r­i­al cam­paign—includ­ing a mail­er about NFL play­ers kneel­ing dur­ing the Nation­al Anthem—Stewart told The Dai­ly Beast that those deci­sions would be the rea­son why he won.

    “The Repub­li­can par­ty is chang­ing,” Stew­art told The Dai­ly Beast. “It’s becom­ing more pop­ulist. “There are going to be some dinosaurs out there who refuse to change and even­tu­al­ly they’re going to go extinct.”

    Since los­ing, Stew­art has made mul­ti­ple press appear­ances with Jason Kessler, one of the lead orga­niz­ers of Unite the Right, a white suprema­cist ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia last August. The pair attend­ed a pro­to-Unite the Right ral­ly togeth­er in Feb­ru­ary 2017, when they ral­lied against the removal of the Lee stat­ue in Char­lottesville .

    Stew­art also spoke along­side Kessler at a Feb­ru­ary 2017 event for the group “Uni­ty & Secu­ri­ty for Amer­i­ca,” a group Kessler found­ed for “defend­ing West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion includ­ing its his­to­ry, cul­ture and peo­ples while utter­ly dis­man­tling Cul­tur­al Marx­ism.” Cul­tur­al Marx­ism is a favorite con­spir­a­cy on the far-right, which holds that lib­er­als (Jews) are try­ing to destroy West­ern (white) soci­ety through pop­u­lar cul­ture.

    After Unite the Right, where a white suprema­cist alleged­ly killed an anti-racist pro­test­er with his car, Stew­art con­demned his fel­low Repub­li­cans for con­demn­ing Nazis.

    “All the weak Repub­li­cans, they couldn’t apol­o­gize fast enough,” Stew­art told The Wash­ing­ton Post after the mur­der at the Kessler-orga­nized ral­ly. “They played right into the hands of the left wing. Those [Nazi] peo­ple have noth­ing to do with the Repub­li­can Par­ty. There was no rea­son to apologize.”He blamed “half the vio­lence” on counter-pro­test­ers.

    Stew­art also has ties to Paul Nehlen, a Repub­li­can run­ning for Rep. Paul Ryan’s House seat on an anti-Semit­ic, anti-Mus­lim plat­form. A for­mer Bre­it­bart con­trib­u­tor, Nehlen lost the alt-right outlet’s back­ing after he was revealed to have made anti-semit­ic com­ments on for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s pod­cast. Nehlen was banned from Twit­ter after a racist tweet about Meghan Markle. On Gab, a social-media plat­form beloved by the alt-right, Nehlen post­ed pho­to­shops of Jews’ heads on pikes, before get­ting banned for reveal­ing the name of a for­mer­ly anony­mous alt-right char­ac­ter.

    Despite Nehlen’s feuds with oth­er mem­bers of the far-right, he found a wel­come with Stew­art, who paid him a $759 “fundrais­ing com­mis­sion” in May 2017, CNN first report­ed. Ear­li­er that year, Stew­art was also filmed prais­ing Nehlen as one of his “per­son­al heroes” and cit­ing Nehlen’s cam­paigns as an inspi­ra­tion.

    Stew­art dis­avowed Nehlen in a state­ment to the Wash­ing­ton Post last week, say­ing he dis­tanced him­self from Nehlen “when he start­ed say­ing all that crazy stuff.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Trump Endors­es Corey Stew­art, the Alt-Right’s Favorite Can­di­date” by Kel­ly Weill and Gideon Resnick; The Dai­ly Beast; 06/13/2018

    “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:

    ...
    “Con­grat­u­la­tions to Corey Stew­art for his great vic­to­ry for Sen­a­tor from Vir­ginia,” Trump tweet­ed Wednes­day. “Now he runs against a total stiff, Tim Kaine, who is weak on crime and bor­ders, and wants to raise your tax­es through the roof. Don’t under­es­ti­mate Corey, a major chance of win­ning!”
    ...

    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):

    ...
    In 2016, Stew­art was a local offi­cial in Prince William Coun­ty and Vir­ginia co-chair­man of Trump’s cam­paign. After the Access Hol­ly­wood tape came out, he defend­ed Trump’s remarks about sex­u­al­ly assault­ing women, say­ing Trump “act­ed like a frat boy, as a lot of guys do.” He went to take part in a protest out­side Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee head­quar­ters, mak­ing ref­er­ences to “estab­lish­ment pukes,” and was kicked off the cam­paign short­ly after.

    As chair­man of the Prince William Board of Coun­ty Super­vi­sors, Stew­art pushed Trumpian posi­tions includ­ing a pro­pos­al to allow coun­ty police to check the immi­gra­tion sta­tus of any­one they arrest­ed.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Almost a year ago to the day, Stew­art shocked polit­i­cal observers by near­ly win­ning the GOP guber­na­to­r­i­al pri­ma­ry in Vir­ginia against Ed Gille­spie, the for­mer chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee. Stew­art once even called Gille­spie a “cuck­ser­v­a­tive.” (Gille­spie was trounced by Demo­c­rat Ralph Northam last Novem­ber.)

    Stew­art cam­paigned on the preser­va­tion of Con­fed­er­ate mon­u­ments in the state after a push across the coun­try to tear down the mon­u­ments. Stew­art defend­ed the Con­fed­er­ate flag as “not about racism” dur­ing a speech at an “Old South Ball” in April 2017, sur­round­ed by Con­fed­er­ate flags and peo­ple dressed in Ante­bel­lum South cos­play.

    Stew­art, orig­i­nal­ly from Min­neso­ta, also sought to cap­i­tal­ize on a plan to remove the stat­ue of Robert E. Lee from a local park in Char­lottesville.

    “Noth­ing is worse than a Yan­kee telling a South­ern­er that his mon­u­ments don’t mat­ter,” he tweet­ed.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Since los­ing, Stew­art has made mul­ti­ple press appear­ances with Jason Kessler, one of the lead orga­niz­ers of Unite the Right, a white suprema­cist ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia last August. The pair attend­ed a pro­to-Unite the Right ral­ly togeth­er in Feb­ru­ary 2017, when they ral­lied against the removal of the Lee stat­ue in Char­lottesville .

    Stew­art also spoke along­side Kessler at a Feb­ru­ary 2017 event for the group “Uni­ty & Secu­ri­ty for Amer­i­ca,” a group Kessler found­ed for “defend­ing West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion includ­ing its his­to­ry, cul­ture and peo­ples while utter­ly dis­man­tling Cul­tur­al Marx­ism.” Cul­tur­al Marx­ism is a favorite con­spir­a­cy on the far-right, which holds that lib­er­als (Jews) are try­ing to destroy West­ern (white) soci­ety through pop­u­lar cul­ture.
    ...

    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”:

    ...
    After Unite the Right, where a white suprema­cist alleged­ly killed an anti-racist pro­test­er with his car, Stew­art con­demned his fel­low Repub­li­cans for con­demn­ing Nazis.

    “All the weak Repub­li­cans, they couldn’t apol­o­gize fast enough,” Stew­art told The Wash­ing­ton Post after the mur­der at the Kessler-orga­nized ral­ly. “They played right into the hands of the left wing. Those [Nazi] peo­ple have noth­ing to do with the Repub­li­can Par­ty. There was no rea­son to apol­o­gize.”He blamed “half the vio­lence” on counter-pro­test­ers.
    ...

    And, of course, Stew­art could­n’t say enough nice things about Paul Nehlen...until last week when he belat­ed dis­avowed him:

    ...
    Stew­art also has ties to Paul Nehlen, a Repub­li­can run­ning for Rep. Paul Ryan’s House seat on an anti-Semit­ic, anti-Mus­lim plat­form. A for­mer Bre­it­bart con­trib­u­tor, Nehlen lost the alt-right outlet’s back­ing after he was revealed to have made anti-semit­ic com­ments on for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s pod­cast. Nehlen was banned from Twit­ter after a racist tweet about Meghan Markle. On Gab, a social-media plat­form beloved by the alt-right, Nehlen post­ed pho­to­shops of Jews’ heads on pikes, before get­ting banned for reveal­ing the name of a for­mer­ly anony­mous alt-right char­ac­ter.

    Despite Nehlen’s feuds with oth­er mem­bers of the far-right, he found a wel­come with Stew­art, who paid him a $759 “fundrais­ing com­mis­sion” in May 2017, CNN first report­ed. Ear­li­er that year, Stew­art was also filmed prais­ing Nehlen as one of his “per­son­al heroes” and cit­ing Nehlen’s cam­paigns as an inspi­ra­tion.

    Stew­art dis­avowed Nehlen in a state­ment to the Wash­ing­ton Post last week, say­ing he dis­tanced him­self from Nehlen “when he start­ed say­ing all that crazy stuff.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 13, 2018, 3:32 pm
  21. 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:

    The New York Times

    How Trump Came to Enforce a Prac­tice of Sep­a­rat­ing Migrant Fam­i­lies

    By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear
    June 16, 2018

    WASHINGTON — 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.

    Chil­dren would be sep­a­rat­ed from their par­ents if the fam­i­lies had been appre­hend­ed enter­ing the coun­try ille­gal­ly, John F. Kel­ly, then the home­land secu­ri­ty sec­re­tary, said in March 2017, “in order to deter more move­ment along this ter­ri­bly dan­ger­ous net­work.”

    For more than a decade, even as ille­gal immi­gra­tion lev­els fell over­all, sea­son­al spikes in unau­tho­rized bor­der cross­ings had bedev­iled Amer­i­can pres­i­dents in both polit­i­cal par­ties, prompt­ing them to cast about for increas­ing­ly aggres­sive ways to dis­cour­age migrants from mak­ing the trek.

    Yet for George W. Bush and Barack Oba­ma, the idea of cry­ing chil­dren torn from their par­ents’ arms was sim­ply too inhu­mane — and too polit­i­cal­ly per­ilous — to embrace as pol­i­cy, and Mr. Trump, though he had made an immi­gra­tion crack­down one of the cen­tral issues of his cam­paign, suc­cumbed to the same real­i­ty, pub­licly drop­ping the idea after Mr. Kelly’s com­ments touched off a swift back­lash.

    Last month, fac­ing a sharp uptick in ille­gal bor­der cross­ings, Mr. Trump ordered a new effort to crim­i­nal­ly pros­e­cute any­one who crossed the bor­der unlaw­ful­ly — with few excep­tions for par­ents trav­el­ing with their minor chil­dren.

    And now Mr. Trump faces the con­se­quences. With thou­sands of chil­dren detained in makeshift shel­ters, his spokes­men this past week had to deny accu­sa­tions that the admin­is­tra­tion was act­ing like Nazis. Even evan­gel­i­cal sup­port­ers like Franklin Gra­ham said its pol­i­cy was “dis­grace­ful.”

    Among those who have pro­fessed objec­tions to the pol­i­cy is the pres­i­dent him­self, who despite his tough rhetoric on immi­gra­tion and his clear direc­tive to show no mer­cy in enforc­ing the law, has searched pub­licly for some­one else to blame for divid­ing fam­i­lies. He has false­ly claimed that Democ­rats are respon­si­ble for the prac­tice. But the kind of pic­tures so feared by Mr. Trump’s pre­de­ces­sors could end up defin­ing a major domes­tic pol­i­cy issue of his term.

    Inside the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, cur­rent and for­mer offi­cials say, there is con­sid­er­able unease about the pol­i­cy, which is regard­ed by some charged with car­ry­ing it out as unfea­si­ble in prac­tice and ques­tion­able moral­ly. Kirst­jen Nielsen, the cur­rent home­land secu­ri­ty sec­re­tary, has clashed pri­vate­ly with Mr. Trump over the prac­tice, some­times invit­ing furi­ous lec­tures from the pres­i­dent that have pushed her to the brink of res­ig­na­tion.

    But Mr. Miller has expressed none of the president’s mis­giv­ings. “No nation can have the pol­i­cy that whole class­es of peo­ple are immune from immi­gra­tion law or enforce­ment,” he said dur­ing an inter­view in his West Wing office this past week. “It was a sim­ple deci­sion by the admin­is­tra­tion to have a zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy for ille­gal entry, peri­od. The mes­sage is that no one is exempt from immi­gra­tion law.”

    The administration’s crit­ics are not buy­ing that expla­na­tion. “This is not a zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy, this is a zero human­i­ty pol­i­cy, and we can’t let it go on,” said Sen­a­tor Jeff Merkley, Demo­c­rat of Ore­gon.

    “Rip­ping chil­dren out of their par­ents’ arms to inflict harm on the child to influ­ence the par­ents,” he added, “is unac­cept­able.”

    Beyond those moral objec­tions, Jeh C. John­son, who as sec­re­tary of home­land secu­ri­ty was the point man for the Oba­ma administration’s own strug­gles with ille­gal immi­gra­tion, argued that deter­rence, in and of itself, is nei­ther prac­ti­cal nor a long-term solu­tion to the prob­lem.

    “I’ve seen this movie before, and I feel like what we are doing now, with the zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy and sep­a­rat­ing par­ents and chil­dren for the pur­pose of deter­rence, is bang­ing our heads against the wall,” he said. “Whether it’s fam­i­ly deten­tion, mes­sag­ing about dan­gers of the jour­ney, or mes­sag­ing about sep­a­rat­ing fam­i­lies and zero tol­er­ance, it’s always going to have at best a short-term reac­tion.”

    And that view was based on hard expe­ri­ence.

    When Cen­tral Amer­i­can migrants, includ­ing many unac­com­pa­nied chil­dren, began surg­ing across the bor­der in ear­ly 2014, Mr. Oba­ma, the antithe­sis of his impul­sive suc­ces­sor, had his own char­ac­ter­is­tic reac­tion: He formed a mul­ti­a­gency team at the White House to fig­ure out what should be done.

    “This was the bane of my exis­tence for three years,” Mr. John­son said. “No mat­ter what you did, some­body was going to be very angry at you.”

    The offi­cials met in the office of Denis R. McDo­nough, the White House chief of staff, and con­vened a series of meet­ings in the Sit­u­a­tion Room to go through their options. Migrants were increas­ing­ly exploit­ing exist­ing immi­gra­tion laws and court rul­ings, and using chil­dren as a way to get adults into the coun­try, on the the­o­ry that fam­i­lies were being treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly from sin­gle peo­ple.

    “The agen­cies were sur­fac­ing every pos­si­ble idea,” Cecil­ia Muñoz, Mr. Obama’s top domes­tic pol­i­cy advis­er, recalled, includ­ing whether to sep­a­rate par­ents from their chil­dren. “I do remem­ber look­ing at each oth­er like, ‘We’re not going to do this, are we?’ We spent five min­utes think­ing it through and con­clud­ed that it was a bad idea. The moral­i­ty of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”

    They did, how­ev­er, decide to vast­ly expand the deten­tion of immi­grant fam­i­lies, open­ing new facil­i­ties along the bor­der where women and young chil­dren were held for long peri­ods while they await­ed a chance to have their cas­es processed.

    Mr. John­son wrote an open let­ter to appear in Span­ish-lan­guage news out­lets warn­ing par­ents that their chil­dren would be deport­ed if they entered the Unit­ed States ille­gal­ly. He trav­eled to Guatemala to deliv­er the mes­sage in per­son. Open­ing a large fam­i­ly immi­gra­tion deten­tion facil­i­ty in Dil­ley, Tex., he held a news con­fer­ence to show­case what he called an “effec­tive deter­rent.”

    The steps led to just the kind of bru­tal images that Mr. Obama’s advis­ers feared: hun­dreds of young chil­dren, many dirty and some in tears, who were being held with their fam­i­lies in makeshift deten­tion facil­i­ties.

    Immi­grant advo­ca­cy groups denounced the pol­i­cy, berat­ing senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials — some of whom were reduced to rue­ful apolo­gies for a pol­i­cy they said they could not jus­ti­fy — and telling Mr. Oba­ma to his face dur­ing a meet­ing at the White House in late 2014 that he was turn­ing his back on the most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple seek­ing refuge in the Unit­ed States.

    ...

    Before long, the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion would face legal chal­lenges, and be forced to stop detain­ing fam­i­lies indef­i­nite­ly. A fed­er­al judge in Wash­ing­ton ordered the admin­is­tra­tion in 2015 to stop detain­ing asy­lum-seek­ing Cen­tral Amer­i­can moth­ers and chil­dren in order to deter oth­ers from their region from com­ing into the Unit­ed States.

    Under a 1997 con­sent decree known as the Flo­res set­tle­ment, unac­com­pa­nied chil­dren could be held in immi­gra­tion deten­tion for only a short peri­od of time; in 2016, a fed­er­al judge ruled that the set­tle­ment applied to fam­i­lies as well, effec­tive­ly requir­ing that they be released with­in 20 days. Many were released — some with GPS ankle bracelets to track their move­ments — and asked to return for a court date some­time in the future.

    It was Mr. Bush, who had first­hand expe­ri­ence with the bor­der as gov­er­nor of Texas and ran for pres­i­dent as a “com­pas­sion­ate con­ser­v­a­tive,” who ini­ti­at­ed the “zero tol­er­ance” approach for ille­gal immi­gra­tion on which Mr. Trump’s pol­i­cy is mod­eled.

    In 2005, he launched Oper­a­tion Stream­line, a pro­gram along a stretch of the bor­der in Texas that referred all unlaw­ful entrants for crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion, impris­on­ing them and expe­dit­ing assem­bly-line-style tri­als geared toward quick­ly deport­ing them. The ini­tia­tive yield­ed results and was soon expand­ed to more bor­der sec­tors. Back then, how­ev­er, excep­tions were gen­er­al­ly made for adults who were trav­el­ing with minor chil­dren, as well as juve­niles and peo­ple who were ill.

    Mr. Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion employed the pro­gram at the height of the migra­tion cri­sis as well, although it gen­er­al­ly did not treat first-time bor­der crossers as pri­or­i­ties for pros­e­cu­tion, and it detained fam­i­lies togeth­er in Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment cus­tody — admin­is­tra­tive, rather than crim­i­nal, deten­tion.

    Dis­cus­sions began almost imme­di­ate­ly after Mr. Trump took office about vast­ly expand­ing Oper­a­tion Stream­line, with almost none of those lim­i­ta­tions. Even after Mr. Kel­ly stopped talk­ing pub­licly about fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion, the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty qui­et­ly test­ed the approach last sum­mer in cer­tain areas in Texas.

    Pri­vate­ly, Mr. Miller argued that bring­ing back “zero tol­er­ance” would be a potent tool in a severe­ly lim­it­ed arse­nal of strate­gies for stop­ping migrants from flood­ing across the bor­der.

    The idea was to end a prac­tice referred to by its detrac­tors as “catch and release,” in which ille­gal immi­grants appre­hend­ed at the bor­der are released into the inte­ri­or of the Unit­ed States to await the pro­cess­ing of their cas­es. Mr. Miller argued that the pol­i­cy pro­vid­ed a per­verse incen­tive for migrants, essen­tial­ly ensur­ing that if they could make it to the Unit­ed States bor­der and claim a “cred­i­ble fear” of return­ing home, they would be giv­en a chance to stay under asy­lum laws, at least tem­porar­i­ly.

    A lengthy back­log of asy­lum claims made it like­ly that it would be years before they would have to appear before a judge to back up that plea — and many nev­er returned to do so.

    The sit­u­a­tion was even more com­pli­cat­ed when chil­dren were involved. A 2008 law meant to com­bat the traf­fick­ing of minors places strict require­ments on how unac­com­pa­nied migrant chil­dren from Cen­tral Amer­i­ca are to be treat­ed.

    Minors from Mex­i­co or Cana­da — coun­tries con­tigu­ous with the Unit­ed States — can be quick­ly sent back to their home coun­tries unless it is deemed dan­ger­ous to do so. But those from oth­er nations can­not be quick­ly returned; they must be trans­ferred with­in 72 hours to the Office of Refugee Reset­tle­ment at the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices, and placed in the least restric­tive set­ting pos­si­ble. And the Flo­res rul­ing meant that chil­dren and fam­i­lies could not be held for more than 20 days.

    In Octo­ber, after Mr. Trump end­ed Deferred Action for Child­hood Arrivals, the Oba­ma-era pro­gram that gave legal sta­tus to undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants raised in the Unit­ed States, Mr. Miller insist­ed that any leg­isla­tive pack­age to cod­i­fy those pro­tec­tions con­tain changes to close what he called the loop­holes encour­ag­ing ille­gal immi­grants to come.

    And in April, after the bor­der num­bers reached their zenith, Mr. Miller was instru­men­tal in Mr. Trump’s deci­sion to ratch­et up the zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy.

    “A big name of the game is deter­rence,” Mr. Kel­ly, now the chief of staff, told NPR in May. “The chil­dren will be tak­en care of — put into fos­ter care or what­ev­er — but the big point is they elect­ed to come ille­gal­ly into the Unit­ed States, and this is a tech­nique that no one hopes will be used exten­sive­ly or for very long.”

    Tech­ni­cal­ly, there is no Trump admin­is­tra­tion pol­i­cy stat­ing that ille­gal bor­der crossers must be sep­a­rat­ed from their chil­dren. But the “zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy” results in unlaw­ful immi­grants being tak­en into fed­er­al crim­i­nal cus­tody, at which point their chil­dren are con­sid­ered unac­com­pa­nied alien minors and tak­en away.

    Unlike Mr. Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion, Mr. Trump’s is treat­ing all peo­ple who have crossed the bor­der with­out autho­riza­tion as sub­ject to crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion, even if they tell the offi­cer appre­hend­ing them that they are seek­ing asy­lum based on fear of return­ing to their home coun­try, and whether or not they have their chil­dren in tow.

    “Hav­ing chil­dren does not give you immu­ni­ty from arrest and pros­e­cu­tion,” Attor­ney Gen­er­al Jeff Ses­sions said in a speech on Thurs­day in Fort Wayne, Ind.

    “I would cite you to the Apos­tle Paul and his clear and wise com­mand in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the gov­ern­ment,” said Mr. Ses­sions, quot­ing Bible verse as he took excep­tion to evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers who have called the prac­tice abhor­rent. “Because God has ordained them for the pur­pose of order.”

    ———-

    “How Trump Came to Enforce a Prac­tice of Sep­a­rat­ing Migrant Fam­i­lies” by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear; The New York Times; 06/16/2018

    “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:

    ...
    Chil­dren would be sep­a­rat­ed from their par­ents if the fam­i­lies had been appre­hend­ed enter­ing the coun­try ille­gal­ly, John F. Kel­ly, then the home­land secu­ri­ty sec­re­tary, said in March 2017, “in order to deter more move­ment along this ter­ri­bly dan­ger­ous net­work.”
    ...

    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”:

    ...
    For more than a decade, even as ille­gal immi­gra­tion lev­els fell over­all, sea­son­al spikes in unau­tho­rized bor­der cross­ings had bedev­iled Amer­i­can pres­i­dents in both polit­i­cal par­ties, prompt­ing them to cast about for increas­ing­ly aggres­sive ways to dis­cour­age migrants from mak­ing the trek.

    Yet for George W. Bush and Barack Oba­ma, the idea of cry­ing chil­dren torn from their par­ents’ arms was sim­ply too inhu­mane — and too polit­i­cal­ly per­ilous — to embrace as pol­i­cy, and Mr. Trump, though he had made an immi­gra­tion crack­down one of the cen­tral issues of his cam­paign, suc­cumbed to the same real­i­ty, pub­licly drop­ping the idea after Mr. Kelly’s com­ments touched off a swift back­lash.

    Last month, fac­ing a sharp uptick in ille­gal bor­der cross­ings, Mr. Trump ordered a new effort to crim­i­nal­ly pros­e­cute any­one who crossed the bor­der unlaw­ful­ly — with few excep­tions for par­ents trav­el­ing with their minor chil­dren.

    And now Mr. Trump faces the con­se­quences. With thou­sands of chil­dren detained in makeshift shel­ters, his spokes­men this past week had to deny accu­sa­tions that the admin­is­tra­tion was act­ing like Nazis. Even evan­gel­i­cal sup­port­ers like Franklin Gra­ham said its pol­i­cy was “dis­grace­ful.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Among those who have pro­fessed objec­tions to the pol­i­cy is the pres­i­dent him­self, who despite his tough rhetoric on immi­gra­tion and his clear direc­tive to show no mer­cy in enforc­ing the law, has searched pub­licly for some­one else to blame for divid­ing fam­i­lies. He has false­ly claimed that Democ­rats are respon­si­ble for the prac­tice. But the kind of pic­tures so feared by Mr. Trump’s pre­de­ces­sors could end up defin­ing a major domes­tic pol­i­cy issue of his term.

    Inside the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, cur­rent and for­mer offi­cials say, there is con­sid­er­able unease about the pol­i­cy, which is regard­ed by some charged with car­ry­ing it out as unfea­si­ble in prac­tice and ques­tion­able moral­ly. Kirst­jen Nielsen, the cur­rent home­land secu­ri­ty sec­re­tary, has clashed pri­vate­ly with Mr. Trump over the prac­tice, some­times invit­ing furi­ous lec­tures from the pres­i­dent that have pushed her to the brink of res­ig­na­tion.

    But Mr. Miller has expressed none of the president’s mis­giv­ings. “No nation can have the pol­i­cy that whole class­es of peo­ple are immune from immi­gra­tion law or enforce­ment,” he said dur­ing an inter­view in his West Wing office this past week. “It was a sim­ple deci­sion by the admin­is­tra­tion to have a zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy for ille­gal entry, peri­od. The mes­sage is that no one is exempt from immi­gra­tion law.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The administration’s crit­ics are not buy­ing that expla­na­tion. “This is not a zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy, this is a zero human­i­ty pol­i­cy, and we can’t let it go on,” said Sen­a­tor Jeff Merkley, Demo­c­rat of Ore­gon.

    “Rip­ping chil­dren out of their par­ents’ arms to inflict harm on the child to influ­ence the par­ents,” he added, “is unac­cept­able.”

    Beyond those moral objec­tions, Jeh C. John­son, who as sec­re­tary of home­land secu­ri­ty was the point man for the Oba­ma administration’s own strug­gles with ille­gal immi­gra­tion, argued that deter­rence, in and of itself, is nei­ther prac­ti­cal nor a long-term solu­tion to the prob­lem.

    “I’ve seen this movie before, and I feel like what we are doing now, with the zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy and sep­a­rat­ing par­ents and chil­dren for the pur­pose of deter­rence, is bang­ing our heads against the wall,” he said. “Whether it’s fam­i­ly deten­tion, mes­sag­ing about dan­gers of the jour­ney, or mes­sag­ing about sep­a­rat­ing fam­i­lies and zero tol­er­ance, it’s always going to have at best a short-term reac­tion.”

    And that view was based on hard expe­ri­ence.

    When Cen­tral Amer­i­can migrants, includ­ing many unac­com­pa­nied chil­dren, began surg­ing across the bor­der in ear­ly 2014, Mr. Oba­ma, the antithe­sis of his impul­sive suc­ces­sor, had his own char­ac­ter­is­tic reac­tion: He formed a mul­ti­a­gency team at the White House to fig­ure out what should be done.

    “This was the bane of my exis­tence for three years,” Mr. John­son said. “No mat­ter what you did, some­body was going to be very angry at you.”

    The offi­cials met in the office of Denis R. McDo­nough, the White House chief of staff, and con­vened a series of meet­ings in the Sit­u­a­tion Room to go through their options. Migrants were increas­ing­ly exploit­ing exist­ing immi­gra­tion laws and court rul­ings, and using chil­dren as a way to get adults into the coun­try, on the the­o­ry that fam­i­lies were being treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly from sin­gle peo­ple.

    “The agen­cies were sur­fac­ing every pos­si­ble idea,” Cecil­ia Muñoz, Mr. Obama’s top domes­tic pol­i­cy advis­er, recalled, includ­ing whether to sep­a­rate par­ents from their chil­dren. “I do remem­ber look­ing at each oth­er like, ‘We’re not going to do this, are we?’ We spent five min­utes think­ing it through and con­clud­ed that it was a bad idea. The moral­i­ty of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”

    They did, how­ev­er, decide to vast­ly expand the deten­tion of immi­grant fam­i­lies, open­ing new facil­i­ties along the bor­der where women and young chil­dren were held for long peri­ods while they await­ed a chance to have their cas­es processed.

    Mr. John­son wrote an open let­ter to appear in Span­ish-lan­guage news out­lets warn­ing par­ents that their chil­dren would be deport­ed if they entered the Unit­ed States ille­gal­ly. He trav­eled to Guatemala to deliv­er the mes­sage in per­son. Open­ing a large fam­i­ly immi­gra­tion deten­tion facil­i­ty in Dil­ley, Tex., he held a news con­fer­ence to show­case what he called an “effec­tive deter­rent.”

    The steps led to just the kind of bru­tal images that Mr. Obama’s advis­ers feared: hun­dreds of young chil­dren, many dirty and some in tears, who were being held with their fam­i­lies in makeshift deten­tion facil­i­ties.

    Immi­grant advo­ca­cy groups denounced the pol­i­cy, berat­ing senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials — some of whom were reduced to rue­ful apolo­gies for a pol­i­cy they said they could not jus­ti­fy — and telling Mr. Oba­ma to his face dur­ing a meet­ing at the White House in late 2014 that he was turn­ing his back on the most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple seek­ing refuge in the Unit­ed States.
    ...

    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. A fed­er­al judge in Wash­ing­ton ordered the admin­is­tra­tion in 2015 to stop detain­ing asy­lum-seek­ing Cen­tral Amer­i­can moth­ers and chil­dren in order to deter oth­ers from their region from com­ing into the Unit­ed States.

    Under a 1997 con­sent decree known as the Flo­res set­tle­ment, unac­com­pa­nied chil­dren could be held in immi­gra­tion deten­tion for only a short peri­od of time; in 2016, a fed­er­al judge ruled that the set­tle­ment applied to fam­i­lies as well, effec­tive­ly requir­ing that they be released with­in 20 days. Many were released — some with GPS ankle bracelets to track their move­ments — and asked to return for a court date some­time in the future.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    It was Mr. Bush, who had first­hand expe­ri­ence with the bor­der as gov­er­nor of Texas and ran for pres­i­dent as a “com­pas­sion­ate con­ser­v­a­tive,” who ini­ti­at­ed the “zero tol­er­ance” approach for ille­gal immi­gra­tion on which Mr. Trump’s pol­i­cy is mod­eled.

    In 2005, he launched Oper­a­tion Stream­line, a pro­gram along a stretch of the bor­der in Texas that referred all unlaw­ful entrants for crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion, impris­on­ing them and expe­dit­ing assem­bly-line-style tri­als geared toward quick­ly deport­ing them. The ini­tia­tive yield­ed results and was soon expand­ed to more bor­der sec­tors. Back then, how­ev­er, excep­tions were gen­er­al­ly made for adults who were trav­el­ing with minor chil­dren, as well as juve­niles and peo­ple who were ill.

    Mr. Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion employed the pro­gram at the height of the migra­tion cri­sis as well, although it gen­er­al­ly did not treat first-time bor­der crossers as pri­or­i­ties for pros­e­cu­tion, and it detained fam­i­lies togeth­er in Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment cus­tody — admin­is­tra­tive, rather than crim­i­nal, deten­tion.

    Dis­cus­sions began almost imme­di­ate­ly after Mr. Trump took office about vast­ly expand­ing Oper­a­tion Stream­line, with almost none of those lim­i­ta­tions. Even after Mr. Kel­ly stopped talk­ing pub­licly about fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion, the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty qui­et­ly test­ed the approach last sum­mer in cer­tain areas in Texas.

    Pri­vate­ly, Mr. Miller argued that bring­ing back “zero tol­er­ance” would be a potent tool in a severe­ly lim­it­ed arse­nal of strate­gies for stop­ping migrants from flood­ing across the bor­der.
    ...

    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 idea was to end a prac­tice referred to by its detrac­tors as “catch and release,” in which ille­gal immi­grants appre­hend­ed at the bor­der are released into the inte­ri­or of the Unit­ed States to await the pro­cess­ing of their cas­es. Mr. Miller argued that the pol­i­cy pro­vid­ed a per­verse incen­tive for migrants, essen­tial­ly ensur­ing that if they could make it to the Unit­ed States bor­der and claim a “cred­i­ble fear” of return­ing home, they would be giv­en a chance to stay under asy­lum laws, at least tem­porar­i­ly.

    A lengthy back­log of asy­lum claims made it like­ly that it would be years before they would have to appear before a judge to back up that plea — and many nev­er returned to do so.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The sit­u­a­tion was even more com­pli­cat­ed when chil­dren were involved. A 2008 law meant to com­bat the traf­fick­ing of minors places strict require­ments on how unac­com­pa­nied migrant chil­dren from Cen­tral Amer­i­ca are to be treat­ed.

    Minors from Mex­i­co or Cana­da — coun­tries con­tigu­ous with the Unit­ed States — can be quick­ly sent back to their home coun­tries unless it is deemed dan­ger­ous to do so. But those from oth­er nations can­not be quick­ly returned; they must be trans­ferred with­in 72 hours to the Office of Refugee Reset­tle­ment at the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices, and placed in the least restric­tive set­ting pos­si­ble. And the Flo­res rul­ing meant that chil­dren and fam­i­lies could not be held for more than 20 days.

    ...

    Tech­ni­cal­ly, there is no Trump admin­is­tra­tion pol­i­cy stat­ing that ille­gal bor­der crossers must be sep­a­rat­ed from their chil­dren. But the “zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy” results in unlaw­ful immi­grants being tak­en into fed­er­al crim­i­nal cus­tody, at which point their chil­dren are con­sid­ered unac­com­pa­nied alien minors and tak­en away.

    Unlike Mr. Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion, Mr. Trump’s is treat­ing all peo­ple who have crossed the bor­der with­out autho­riza­tion as sub­ject to crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion, even if they tell the offi­cer appre­hend­ing them that they are seek­ing asy­lum based on fear of return­ing to their home coun­try, and whether or not they have their chil­dren in tow.
    ...

    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’:

    ...
    In Octo­ber, after Mr. Trump end­ed Deferred Action for Child­hood Arrivals, the Oba­ma-era pro­gram that gave legal sta­tus to undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants raised in the Unit­ed States, Mr. Miller insist­ed that any leg­isla­tive pack­age to cod­i­fy those pro­tec­tions con­tain changes to close what he called the loop­holes encour­ag­ing ille­gal immi­grants to come.
    ...

    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 in April, after the bor­der num­bers reached their zenith, Mr. Miller was instru­men­tal in Mr. Trump’s deci­sion to ratch­et up the zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy.

    “A big name of the game is deter­rence,” Mr. Kel­ly, now the chief of staff, told NPR in May. “The chil­dren will be tak­en care of — put into fos­ter care or what­ev­er — but the big point is they elect­ed to come ille­gal­ly into the Unit­ed States, and this is a tech­nique that no one hopes will be used exten­sive­ly or for very long.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    “Hav­ing chil­dren does not give you immu­ni­ty from arrest and pros­e­cu­tion,” Attor­ney Gen­er­al Jeff Ses­sions said in a speech on Thurs­day in Fort Wayne, Ind.

    “I would cite you to the Apos­tle Paul and his clear and wise com­mand in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the gov­ern­ment,” said Mr. Ses­sions, quot­ing Bible verse as he took excep­tion to evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers who have called the prac­tice abhor­rent. “Because God has ordained them for the pur­pose of order.”
    ...

    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:

    ABC News

    Not nec­es­sary to jus­ti­fy sep­a­rat­ing kids, par­ents at bor­der, ‘it’s zero tol­er­ance’: Ban­non

    By Quinn Scan­lan

    Jun 17, 2018, 12:50 PM ET

    For­mer White House Chief Strate­gist Steve Ban­non said Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump doesn’t need to “jus­ti­fy” the pol­i­cy of sep­a­rat­ing chil­dren from par­ents who are caught ille­gal­ly cross­ing the south­ern U.S. bor­der because the it is part of the admin­is­tra­tion’s “zero tol­er­ance” approach on ille­gal immi­gra­tion.

    “It’s zero tol­er­ance. I don’t think you have to jus­ti­fy it,” Ban­non, who was also CEO of Trump’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, said to ABC News Chief White House Cor­re­spon­dent Jonathan Karl in an exclu­sive inter­view on “This Week” Sun­day.

    “We ran on a pol­i­cy — very sim­ply — stop mass ille­gal immi­gra­tion and lim­it legal immi­gra­tion, get our sov­er­eign­ty back to help our work­ers, and so he went to a zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy,” Ban­non said. “It’s a crime to come across ille­gal­ly and chil­dren get sep­a­rat­ed. I mean, I hate to say it, that’s the law and he’s enforc­ing the law.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Not nec­es­sary to jus­ti­fy sep­a­rat­ing kids, par­ents at bor­der, ‘it’s zero tol­er­ance’: Ban­non” by Quinn Scan­lan; ABC News; 06/17/2018

    ““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:

    ...
    “We ran on a pol­i­cy — very sim­ply — stop mass ille­gal immi­gra­tion and lim­it legal immi­gra­tion, get our sov­er­eign­ty back to help our work­ers, and so he went to a zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy,” Ban­non said. “It’s a crime to come across ille­gal­ly and chil­dren get sep­a­rat­ed. I mean, I hate to say it, that’s the law and he’s enforc­ing the law.”
    ...

    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:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Trump advis­er says ‘nobody likes’ fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion pol­i­cy

    By JILL COLVIN
    06/17/2018

    WASHINGTON (AP) — A top White House advis­er on Sun­day dis­tanced the Trump admin­is­tra­tion from respon­si­bil­i­ty for sep­a­rat­ing migrant chil­dren from their par­ents at the U.S.-Mexico bor­der, even though the admin­is­tra­tion put in place and could eas­i­ly end a pol­i­cy that has led to a spike in cas­es of split and dis­traught fam­i­lies.

    Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has tried to blame Democ­rats, who hold no levers of pow­er in the gov­ern­ment, for a sit­u­a­tion that has sparked fury and a nation­al debate over the moral impli­ca­tions of his hard-line approach to immi­gra­tion enforce­ment.

    “Nobody likes” break­ing up fam­i­lies and “see­ing babies ripped from their moth­ers’ arms,” said Kellyanne Con­way, a coun­selor to the pres­i­dent.

    Near­ly 2,000 chil­dren were sep­a­rat­ed from their fam­i­lies over a six-week peri­od in April and May after Attor­ney Gen­er­al Jeff Ses­sions announced a new “zero-tol­er­ance” pol­i­cy that refers all cas­es of ille­gal entry for crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion. U.S. pro­to­col pro­hibits detain­ing chil­dren with their par­ents because the chil­dren are not charged with a crime and the par­ents are.

    The admin­is­tra­tion wants to send a mes­sage, said Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Repub­li­can crit­ic of the pol­i­cy, “that if you cross the bor­der with chil­dren, your chil­dren are going to be ripped away from you. That’s trau­ma­tiz­ing to the chil­dren who are inno­cent vic­tims, and it is con­trary to our val­ues in this coun­try.”

    Trump plans to meet with House Repub­li­cans on Tues­day to dis­cuss pend­ing immi­gra­tion leg­is­la­tion amid an elec­tion-sea­son debate over an issue that helped vault the New York real estate mogul into the Oval Office in 2016. The House is expect­ed to vote this week on a bill pushed by con­ser­v­a­tives that may not have enough sup­port to pass, and a com­pro­mise mea­sure that includes key pro­pos­als sup­port­ed by the pres­i­dent. The White House has indi­cat­ed Trump would sign either of those.

    Con­way reject­ed the idea that Trump was using the kids as lever­age to force Democ­rats to nego­ti­ate on immi­gra­tion and his long-promised bor­der wall, even after Trump tweet­ed Sat­ur­day: “Democ­rats can fix their forced fam­i­ly breakup at the Bor­der by work­ing with Repub­li­cans on new leg­is­la­tion, for a change!”

    She, too, put the onus on Democ­rats, say­ing if there are seri­ous about over­haul­ing the sys­tem, “they’ll come togeth­er again and try to close these loop­holes and get real immi­gra­tion reform.”

    Asked whether the pres­i­dent was will­ing to end the pol­i­cy, she said: “The pres­i­dent is ready to get mean­ing­ful immi­gra­tion reform across the board.”

    To Rep. Adam Schiff, D‑Calif., the admin­is­tra­tion is “using the grief, the tears, the pain of these kids as mor­tar to build our wall. And it’s an effort to extort a bill to their lik­ing in the Con­gress.”

    Schiff said the prac­tice was “deeply uneth­i­cal” and that Repub­li­cans’ refusal to crit­i­cize Trump rep­re­sent­ed a “sad degen­er­a­tion” of the GOP, which he said had become “the par­ty of lies.”

    “There are oth­er ways to nego­ti­ate between Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats. Using chil­dren, young chil­dren, as polit­i­cal foils is abhor­rent,” said Sen Jack Reed, D‑Rhode Island.

    Rep. Ben Ray Lujon, D‑N.M., said Trump “could pick up the phone and stop it today.”

    ...

    Trump’s for­mer chief strate­gist said Repub­li­cans would face steep con­se­quences for push­ing the com­pro­mise bill because it pro­vides a path to cit­i­zen­ship for young “Dream­er” immi­grants brought to the coun­try ille­gal­ly as chil­dren. Steve Ban­non argued that effort risked alien­at­ing Trump’s polit­i­cal base and con­tribut­ing to elec­tion loss­es in Novem­ber, when Repub­li­cans hope to pre­serve their con­gres­sion­al majori­ties.

    “I strong­ly rec­om­mend that we just wait until 2019, right, to address this,” he said, while defend­ing the administration’s prac­tice of sep­a­rat­ing par­ents from chil­dren as an exam­ple of Trump mak­ing good on a key cam­paign promise.

    “We ran on a pol­i­cy, very sim­ply, stop mass ille­gal immi­gra­tion and lim­it legal immi­gra­tion, get our sov­er­eign­ty back, and to help our work­ers, OK? And so he went to a zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy,” Ban­non said. “Zero tol­er­ance, it’s a crime to come across ille­gal­ly, and chil­dren get sep­a­rat­ed,.”

    Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D‑Texas, said he was work­ing on leg­is­la­tion that would end the prac­tice of fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion.

    Speak­ing from Texas, where he was lead­ing a march to a town where a new tent struc­ture for chil­dren recent­ly opened, O’Rourke said “we can do the right thing by this coun­try and for those kids, and not do it at the price of a 2,000-mile, 30-foot-high, $30 bil­lion wall, not doing it at the price of deport­ing peo­ple who are seek­ing asy­lum, deport­ing peo­ple in some cas­es back to cer­tain death, not doing it at the cost of end­ing fam­i­ly migra­tion, which is the sto­ry of this coun­try.”

    The sit­u­a­tion now is “inhu­mane” and “un-Amer­i­can,” he said. The blame, he said, rests “on all of us, not just the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Trump advis­er says ‘nobody likes’ fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion pol­i­cy” by JILL COLVIN; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 06/17/2018

    ““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:

    ...
    Con­way reject­ed the idea that Trump was using the kids as lever­age to force Democ­rats to nego­ti­ate on immi­gra­tion and his long-promised bor­der wall, even after Trump tweet­ed Sat­ur­day: “Democ­rats can fix their forced fam­i­ly breakup at the Bor­der by work­ing with Repub­li­cans on new leg­is­la­tion, for a change!”

    She, too, put the onus on Democ­rats, say­ing if there are seri­ous about over­haul­ing the sys­tem, “they’ll come togeth­er again and try to close these loop­holes and get real immi­gra­tion reform.”

    Asked whether the pres­i­dent was will­ing to end the pol­i­cy, she said: “The pres­i­dent is ready to get mean­ing­ful immi­gra­tion reform across the board.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Trump plans to meet with House Repub­li­cans on Tues­day to dis­cuss pend­ing immi­gra­tion leg­is­la­tion amid an elec­tion-sea­son debate over an issue that helped vault the New York real estate mogul into the Oval Office in 2016. The House is expect­ed to vote this week on a bill pushed by con­ser­v­a­tives that may not have enough sup­port to pass, and a com­pro­mise mea­sure that includes key pro­pos­als sup­port­ed by the pres­i­dent. The White House has indi­cat­ed Trump would sign either of those.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Trump’s for­mer chief strate­gist said Repub­li­cans would face steep con­se­quences for push­ing the com­pro­mise bill because it pro­vides a path to cit­i­zen­ship for young “Dream­er” immi­grants brought to the coun­try ille­gal­ly as chil­dren. Steve Ban­non argued that effort risked alien­at­ing Trump’s polit­i­cal base and con­tribut­ing to elec­tion loss­es in Novem­ber, when Repub­li­cans hope to pre­serve their con­gres­sion­al majori­ties.

    “I strong­ly rec­om­mend that we just wait until 2019, right, to address this,” he said, while defend­ing the administration’s prac­tice of sep­a­rat­ing par­ents from chil­dren as an exam­ple of Trump mak­ing good on a key cam­paign promise.

    “We ran on a pol­i­cy, very sim­ply, stop mass ille­gal immi­gra­tion and lim­it legal immi­gra­tion, get our sov­er­eign­ty back, and to help our work­ers, OK? And so he went to a zero tol­er­ance pol­i­cy,” Ban­non said. “Zero tol­er­ance, it’s a crime to come across ille­gal­ly, and chil­dren get sep­a­rat­ed,.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 18, 2018, 9:26 am
  22. 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:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Livewire

    Trump Says U.S. Should Expel Migrants With­out Due Process

    By Matt Shuham
    June 24, 2018 2:29 pm

    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.

    We can­not allow all of these peo­ple to invade our Coun­try. When some­body comes in, we must imme­di­ate­ly, with no Judges or Court Cas­es, bring them back from where they came. Our sys­tem is a mock­ery to good immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy and Law and Order. Most chil­dren come with­out par­ents...— Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2018

    ....Our Immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those peo­ple who have gone through the sys­tem legal­ly and are wait­ing on line for years! Immi­gra­tion must be based on mer­it — we need peo­ple who will help to Make Amer­i­ca Great Again!— Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2018

    “The right to Due Process of law is enshrined in the Con­sti­tu­tion and extends to every per­son in the Unit­ed States, irre­spec­tive of immi­gra­tion sta­tus,” Jere­my McK­in­ney, an immi­gra­tion attor­ney and sec­re­tary of the Amer­i­can Immi­gra­tion Lawyers Asso­ci­a­tion, told TPM in an email respond­ing to Trump’s tweet.

    “The Supreme Court, for well over a cen­tu­ry has express­ly rec­og­nized a per­son can­not be deport­ed with­out Due Process. Due Process at its core means notice and a full and fair oppor­tu­ni­ty to be heard.”

    “I hate that we (as attor­neys and media) have to spend any time on this stu­pid­i­ty,” he added.

    Trump has attacked immi­grants’ legal rights before: In a speech ear­li­er this month, he called some immi­gra­tion lawyers “bad peo­ple” because they advise their clients with asy­lum claims on what to say in court.

    And he attacked law­mak­ers who’ve called for more immi­gra­tion judges to help light­en the bur­dened system’s case­load, lying by say­ing the gov­ern­ment was “hir­ing thou­sands and thou­sands” of new immi­gra­tion judges. (It’s not.)

    “We don’t want judges, we want secu­ri­ty on the bor­der,” he said in the same speech. “We don’t want peo­ple com­ing in, we want them to come in through a legal process like every­body else who’s wait­ing to come into our coun­try.”

    Some undoc­u­ment­ed peo­ple are in fact eli­gi­ble to be deport­ed with­out hav­ing their case heard by an immi­gra­tion judge, due to what’s known as “expe­dit­ed removal,” a part of the Immi­gra­tion and Nation­al­i­ty Act the use of which has dra­mat­i­cal­ly expand­ed in recent decades.

    How­ev­er — even aside from many immi­grant advo­cates’ claims that the process has been vast­ly overused, and that many immi­grants are not made ful­ly aware of their full legal rights dur­ing expe­dit­ed removal pro­ceed­ings — the law still requires immi­gra­tion judges hear out the claims of asy­lum-seek­ers and those who fear per­se­cu­tion if they are eject­ed from the coun­try.

    “If, dur­ing the expe­dit­ed removal process before a DHS offi­cer, an indi­vid­ual indi­cates either an inten­tion to apply for asy­lum or any fear of return to his or her home coun­try, the offi­cer must refer the indi­vid­ual for an inter­view with an asy­lum offi­cer,” read a 2017 prac­tice advi­so­ry from the Amer­i­can Immi­gra­tion Coun­cil, Nation­al Immi­gra­tion Project of the Nation­al Lawyers Guild and ACLU Immi­grants’ Rights Project.

    If an asy­lum offi­cer rejects an asy­lum-seek­ers claim of “cred­i­ble fear,” the asy­lum-seek­er can appeal to an immi­gra­tion judge.

    “That’s not a loop­hole,” McK­in­ney told TPM. “That’s Due Process and con­sis­tent not only with fed­er­al law but our inter­na­tion­al oblig­a­tions to pro­tect refugees and asylees.”

    Trump’s tweet made no such dis­tinc­tions.

    “What Pres­i­dent Trump sug­gest­ed here is both ille­gal and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al,” the ACLU respond­ed in a tweet. “Any offi­cial who has sworn an oath to uphold the Con­sti­tu­tion and laws should dis­avow it unequiv­o­cal­ly.”

    ?? What Pres­i­dent Trump sug­gest­ed here is both ille­gal and unconstitutional.Any offi­cial who has sworn an oath to uphold the Con­sti­tu­tion and laws should dis­avow it unequiv­o­cal­ly. https://t.co/qsy58VACSB— ACLU (@ACLU) June 24, 2018

    “First immi­grants don’t get due process,” Rep. Ruben Gal­lego (D‑AZ) wrote in response to Trump’s tweet. “Then it will be crim­i­nals. Then the poor. Then any­one that dis­agrees with Trump.”

    U.S. and inter­na­tion­al law pro­hib­it the Unit­ed States from turn­ing away or oth­er­wise penal­iz­ing asy­lum-seek­ers, the for­mer of which many advo­cates allege is evi­dent in the now-fre­quent line to asy­lum-seek­ers at ports of entry that they are “at capac­i­ty.”

    “We are not absolute­ly say­ing that they can­not (make an asy­lum claim), we are just say­ing that we can­not process them at this time,” a bor­der offi­cial protest­ed to one advo­cate who’d accom­pa­nied asy­lum-seek­ers to a port of entry, as record­ed by the Texas Month­ly. The same report described bor­der agents stand­ing direct­ly on the U.S.-Mexico bor­der line, so as to pre­vent asy­lum-seek­ers from com­plet­ing the nec­es­sary step of being on Amer­i­can soil before declar­ing asy­lum.

    ...

    A sep­a­rate law­suit filed recent­ly by three asy­lum seek­ers alleges Trump’s “zero tol­er­ance” pol­i­cy vio­lat­ed the law by pun­ish­ing them, via detain­ing them and sep­a­rat­ing their fam­i­lies, despite their asy­lum-seek­ing sta­tus.

    ———-

    “Trump Says U.S. Should Expel Migrants With­out Due Process” by Matt Shuham; Talk­ing Points Memo; 06/24/2018

    “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:

    ...

    We can­not allow all of these peo­ple to invade our Coun­try. When some­body comes in, we must imme­di­ate­ly, with no Judges or Court Cas­es, bring them back from where they came. Our sys­tem is a mock­ery to good immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy and Law and Order. Most chil­dren come with­out par­ents...— Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2018

    ....Our Immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those peo­ple who have gone through the sys­tem legal­ly and are wait­ing on line for years! Immi­gra­tion must be based on mer­it — we need peo­ple who will help to Make Amer­i­ca Great Again!— Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2018

    ...

    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:

    ...
    “The right to Due Process of law is enshrined in the Con­sti­tu­tion and extends to every per­son in the Unit­ed States, irre­spec­tive of immi­gra­tion sta­tus,” Jere­my McK­in­ney, an immi­gra­tion attor­ney and sec­re­tary of the Amer­i­can Immi­gra­tion Lawyers Asso­ci­a­tion, told TPM in an email respond­ing to Trump’s tweet.

    “The Supreme Court, for well over a cen­tu­ry has express­ly rec­og­nized a per­son can­not be deport­ed with­out Due Process. Due Process at its core means notice and a full and fair oppor­tu­ni­ty to be heard.”

    “I hate that we (as attor­neys and media) have to spend any time on this stu­pid­i­ty,” he added.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Trump has attacked immi­grants’ legal rights before: In a speech ear­li­er this month, he called some immi­gra­tion lawyers “bad peo­ple” because they advise their clients with asy­lum claims on what to say in court.

    And he attacked law­mak­ers who’ve called for more immi­gra­tion judges to help light­en the bur­dened system’s case­load, lying by say­ing the gov­ern­ment was “hir­ing thou­sands and thou­sands” of new immi­gra­tion judges. (It’s not.)

    “We don’t want judges, we want secu­ri­ty on the bor­der,” he said in the same speech. “We don’t want peo­ple com­ing in, we want them to come in through a legal process like every­body else who’s wait­ing to come into our coun­try.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Some undoc­u­ment­ed peo­ple are in fact eli­gi­ble to be deport­ed with­out hav­ing their case heard by an immi­gra­tion judge, due to what’s known as “expe­dit­ed removal,” a part of the Immi­gra­tion and Nation­al­i­ty Act the use of which has dra­mat­i­cal­ly expand­ed in recent decades.

    How­ev­er — even aside from many immi­grant advo­cates’ claims that the process has been vast­ly overused, and that many immi­grants are not made ful­ly aware of their full legal rights dur­ing expe­dit­ed removal pro­ceed­ings — the law still requires immi­gra­tion judges hear out the claims of asy­lum-seek­ers and those who fear per­se­cu­tion if they are eject­ed from the coun­try.

    “If, dur­ing the expe­dit­ed removal process before a DHS offi­cer, an indi­vid­ual indi­cates either an inten­tion to apply for asy­lum or any fear of return to his or her home coun­try, the offi­cer must refer the indi­vid­ual for an inter­view with an asy­lum offi­cer,” read a 2017 prac­tice advi­so­ry from the Amer­i­can Immi­gra­tion Coun­cil, Nation­al Immi­gra­tion Project of the Nation­al Lawyers Guild and ACLU Immi­grants’ Rights Project.

    If an asy­lum offi­cer rejects an asy­lum-seek­ers claim of “cred­i­ble fear,” the asy­lum-seek­er can appeal to an immi­gra­tion judge.

    “That’s not a loop­hole,” McK­in­ney told TPM. “That’s Due Process and con­sis­tent not only with fed­er­al law but our inter­na­tion­al oblig­a­tions to pro­tect refugees and asylees.”

    Trump’s tweet made no such dis­tinc­tions.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    U.S. and inter­na­tion­al law pro­hib­it the Unit­ed States from turn­ing away or oth­er­wise penal­iz­ing asy­lum-seek­ers, the for­mer of which many advo­cates allege is evi­dent in the now-fre­quent line to asy­lum-seek­ers at ports of entry that they are “at capac­i­ty.”

    “We are not absolute­ly say­ing that they can­not (make an asy­lum claim), we are just say­ing that we can­not process them at this time,” a bor­der offi­cial protest­ed to one advo­cate who’d accom­pa­nied asy­lum-seek­ers to a port of entry, as record­ed by the Texas Month­ly. The same report described bor­der agents stand­ing direct­ly on the U.S.-Mexico bor­der line, so as to pre­vent asy­lum-seek­ers from com­plet­ing the nec­es­sary step of being on Amer­i­can soil before declar­ing asy­lum.

    ...

    A sep­a­rate law­suit filed recent­ly by three asy­lum seek­ers alleges Trump’s “zero tol­er­ance” pol­i­cy vio­lat­ed the law by pun­ish­ing them, via detain­ing them and sep­a­rat­ing their fam­i­lies, despite their asy­lum-seek­ing sta­tus.

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 24, 2018, 9:33 pm
  23. 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:

    The Huff­in­g­ton Post

    From Nazis To Incels: How One Tech Com­pa­ny Helps Hate Groups Thrive
    Cloud­flare refus­es to reg­u­late the sadis­tic con­tent it opti­mizes and pro­tects online.

    By Jes­se­lyn Cook
    07/25/2018 05:46 am ET

    By all stan­dards, the forum Incels.me is a hate group. Lit­tered through well over 1 mil­lion mes­sages is a cas­cade of posts call­ing for women to be raped, decap­i­tat­ed, stabbed, starved, poi­soned, skinned, can­ni­bal­ized, blind­ed, muti­lat­ed, sodom­ized, tor­tured, beat­en, burned, enslaved and oth­er­wise bru­tal­ly killed, sim­ply because they are women. (Unedit­ed excerpts from some of these mes­sages appear below. Read­ers may find them dis­turb­ing.)

    Many of Incels.me’s 6,800 mem­bers — sex­u­al­ly frus­trat­ed men who iden­ti­fy as invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate (incel) — are strik­ing­ly can­did about their vio­lent misog­y­ny. Posts such as “I wan­na rape her then behead her,” “We have to strike back at all these whores,” “I have groped girls against their will, you should try it” and “I want to kill [women] so fuc king bad. I want to take their lives. I want them to fuc king suf­fer” are stan­dard fare on the rapid­ly grow­ing web­site.

    Its sis­ter site, Ince­lo­ca­lypse, is a mes­sage board for incels who want to make women and chil­dren their “rape-slaves.” As Huff­Post uncov­ered in May, it was cre­at­ed by Nathan Lar­son, a con­gres­sion­al can­di­date in Vir­ginia who is an open­ly pro-rape pedophile. The page has been dumped and tem­porar­i­ly forced offline by mul­ti­ple web domain reg­is­trars (most recent­ly Russia’s RU Cen­ter), but it resur­faces each time. Its mem­bers have repeat­ed­ly encour­aged each oth­er to com­mit crimes includ­ing kid­nap­ping, rape, incest and homi­cide.

    One man on the Ince­lo­ca­lypse forum attempt­ed to com­mis­sion a guide on “how to rape” for $100 last month, not­ing “the guide should explain how to lure a vic­tim, kill it, what to do with the corpse, and any­thing else that you think is impor­tant.” Anoth­er said he would rape female tod­dlers because “they will all become worth­less sluts.”

    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.

    From Nazis To Incels And Pedophiles

    You may not have heard of Cloud­flare. The mas­sive but lit­tle-known inter­net secu­ri­ty com­pa­ny has devel­oped a rep­u­ta­tion for keep­ing con­tro­ver­sial web­sites online. It has attract­ed clients includ­ing fas­cists, hack­ers, ter­ror­ists, incels and pedophiles, and it has sparked debate about web com­pa­nies’ extrale­gal role in reg­u­lat­ing the online hate speech they opti­mize and ampli­fy.

    Cloud­flare made rare head­lines last year in the wake of an alleged mur­der, when it found itself embroiled in a fiery dis­pute over free speech online with hordes of neo-Nazis. It was mid-August, and a far-right protest in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, had turned dead­ly after a man slammed a vehi­cle into a crowd of peo­ple, killing a coun­ter­pro­test­er named Heather Hey­er. The “Unite the Right” ral­ly was orga­nized in part by The Dai­ly Stormer, a Cloud­flare-pro­tect­ed neo-Nazi web­site that encour­aged atten­dees to be vio­lent. After Heyer’s death, the site called her a fat “slut” and urged its read­ers to crash her funer­al.

    Pub­lic out­rage erupt­ed, lead­ing one domain reg­is­trar after anoth­er to drop The Dai­ly Stormer, briefly shut­ting it down until it scram­bled to find a new home online that would tol­er­ate its hate­ful con­tent. In a state­ment explain­ing why it cut the site loose, inter­net com­pa­ny Tucows wrote: “Like Google, and GoDad­dy before them, we felt [The Dai­ly Stormer] clear­ly vio­lat­ed our terms of ser­vice by incit­ing vio­lence.” The Dai­ly Stormer also tried to find refuge with Namecheap, which denied it ser­vice and pub­lished a blog post about that deci­sion titled “Incit­ing Vio­lence vs Free­dom of Speech.”

    But Cloud­flare held its ground, stand­ing by The Dai­ly Stormer as oth­er inter­net com­pa­nies backed away. Its ser­vices — also pro­vid­ed to Incels.me, Ince­lo­ca­lypse and mil­lions of oth­er web­sites around the globe — are essen­tial for con­tro­ver­sial sites’ sur­vival. Cloud­flare shields and opti­mizes con­tent; it is not a host provider (although its “Always Online” fea­ture caches a sta­t­ic ver­sion of pages in case their serv­er goes offline). It acts as a dig­i­tal fortress, fend­ing off the kind of vig­i­lante hack­er cam­paigns that so often dis­able con­tentious sites.

    As the company’s CEO put it: “The size and scale of the attacks that can now eas­i­ly be launched online make it such that if you don’t have a net­work like Cloud­flare in front of your con­tent, and you upset any­one, you will be knocked offline.” A dia­gram from the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter illus­trates how Cloud­flare pro­tects against crip­pling cyberas­saults.

    Cloud­flare con­tin­ued to defend The Dai­ly Stormer from a cam­paign of dis­trib­uted denial-of-ser­vice (DDoS) attacks launched after Heyer’s death, assert­ing that it would main­tain a neu­tral posi­tion despite mount­ing pres­sure to aban­don the site. To be sure, Cloud­flare did not sup­port or endorse The Dai­ly Stormer’s views but rather, as tech author Steven John­son described it, “Cloud­flare was act­ing like the mus­cle guard­ing the podi­um at a Nazi ral­ly.”

    Like Ince­lo­ca­lypse, The Dai­ly Stormer sur­vived while hop­ping from one domain to the next large­ly thanks to sus­tained pro­tec­tion from Cloud­flare. Quartz offered a con­cise expla­na­tion at the time:

    “If [Cloud­flare] were to drop the Dai­ly Stormer, the site would for all intents and pur­pos­es cease to exist any time it came under con­cert­ed DDoS attack from anti-fas­cist activists. If the Dai­ly Stormer lost its web host­ing ser­vice, on the oth­er hand, it would have count­less oth­ers to choose from.”

    Remark­ably, what sealed The Dai­ly Stormer’s fate last sum­mer wasn’t its tor­rent of hate speech or its incite­ment to vio­lence. It was its report­ed claim amid the post-Char­lottesville chaos that Cloud­flare staff were, in fact, “secret­ly sup­port­ers of their ide­ol­o­gy.”

    “We could not remain neu­tral after these claims of secret sup­port by Cloud­flare,” the com­pa­ny said in a state­ment upon ter­mi­nat­ing the neo-Nazi site, not­ing its deci­sion marked a reluc­tant, unprece­dent­ed rever­sal of its pol­i­cy and was a “dan­ger­ous” use of cen­sor­ship. With­out a com­mit­ted domain reg­is­trar or cyber­pro­tec­tion, The Dai­ly Stormer retreat­ed to the dark web with its com­mu­ni­ty of fas­cists, who pro­claimed they’d been unjust­ly silenced.

    Cloud­flare, how­ev­er, still serves dozens of oth­er hate groups, includ­ing Stormfront.org, anoth­er major neo-Nazi site that was estab­lished by a Ku Klux Klan leader. As the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter points out, far-right Nor­we­gian ter­ror­ist Anders Breivik (now known as Fjo­tolf Hansen) spent time on Storm­front before killing 77 peo­ple in 2011. Cloud­flare has also been accused of pro­vid­ing cyber­se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices to ter­ror­ist web­sites.

    Free Speech vs. Vio­lent Hate Speech

    Found­ed in 2009 to “pow­er and pro­tect the entire inter­net,” Cloud­flare now han­dles near­ly 10 per­cent of all inter­net requests for more than 2.5 bil­lion peo­ple world­wide, accord­ing to its web­site. It gained pres­tige after mit­i­gat­ing mul­ti­ple record-break­ing cyberas­saults, includ­ing one in 2014 that was the internet’s largest known DDoS attack at the time. The San Fran­cis­co-based com­pa­ny has wres­tled with the issue of cen­sor­ship since its start-up days — long before neo-Nazis, incels and pedophiles were flock­ing to use its ser­vices.

    With­out a legal require­ment to reg­u­late hate speech, inter­net com­pa­nies are left to nav­i­gate the deeply com­plex sphere of decid­ing what is and what is not allowed on their plat­forms — an issue that has spawned count­less edi­to­ri­als and think pieces. Draw­ing the line at extreme misog­y­nist and fas­cist con­tent in an effort to pre­vent real-life vio­lence may seem like a no-brain­er to many, but experts warn it could set a dan­ger­ous prece­dent.

    Civ­il lib­er­ties orga­ni­za­tion Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion released a poignant state­ment in the after­math of the Char­lottesville vio­lence, high­light­ing the trou­ble with selec­tive cen­sor­ship: “All fair-mind­ed peo­ple must stand against the hate­ful vio­lence and aggres­sion that seems to be grow­ing across our coun­try. But we must also rec­og­nize that on the inter­net, any tac­tic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against oth­ers, includ­ing peo­ple whose opin­ions we agree with” such as the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment, it said.

    Rais­ing such con­cerns, Cloudflare’s gen­er­al coun­sel, Doug Kramer, explained why the com­pa­ny holds a firm­ly neu­tral stance, with very few excep­tions, regard­ing con­tent on the sites it serves.

    “We try to bal­ance the desire for an open inter­net on the one hand, where it’s not just state-con­trolled inter­ests or mon­eyed inter­ests that get access to a safe and secure inter­net, but on the oth­er hand … [we find that] pass­ing judg­ment on what is and is not appro­pri­ate con­tent online is a dif­fi­cult and inap­pro­pri­ate place for us to be,” Kramer told Huff­Post. He declined to com­ment on Incels.me, Ince­lo­ca­lypse or any spe­cif­ic Cloud­flare client.

    Inter­nal con­ver­sa­tions about con­tro­ver­sial clients first arose when Cloud­flare became entan­gled in the Turk­ish sex trade in 2011, as scores of escort ser­vices in the coun­try rec­og­nized its dis­tin­guished abil­i­ty to keep pages online, accord­ing to a Wired report.After fac­ing back­lash for some of the objec­tion­able con­tent flow­ing through Cloudflare’s sys­tems, CEO Matthew Prince argued that a web­site is sim­ply “speech” and “not a bomb.”

    “No provider has an affir­ma­tive oblig­a­tion to mon­i­tor and make deter­mi­na­tions about the the­o­ret­i­cal­ly harm­ful nature of speech a site may con­tain,” Prince said in 2013, adding there is “no immi­nent dan­ger [a web­site] cre­ates.”

    But that was before Char­lottesville, before oth­er pre­ventable tragedies spawned in the dark cor­ners of the inter­net. The notion that a web­site “is noth­ing but speech,” as Prince sug­gest­ed, seems almost quaint today. Online writ­ings about harm­ing peo­ple aren’t always jokes or fan­tasies, and count­less indi­vid­u­als — includ­ing incels — have been rad­i­cal­ized in online groups to com­mit acts of mass vio­lence.

    In April, a man rammed a van into a crowd of peo­ple in Toron­to, killing eight women and two men. Short­ly before the attack, the sus­pect pub­lished a post online cel­e­brat­ing the “Incel Rebel­lion.” His mes­sage includ­ed unique ter­mi­nol­o­gy that is com­mon­ly used in incel forums includ­ing Incels.me and Ince­lo­ca­lypse (where he was sub­se­quent­ly hailed as a “hero” and an “inspi­ra­tion”), cast­ing incels into the spot­light and draw­ing media atten­tion to both web­sites.

    Ghoul­ish­ly, death has proved to be the most effec­tive tool for shut­ting down vio­lent online hate groups.

    In 2014, a self-pro­claimed incel named Elliot Rodger killed him­self and six oth­ers in Isla Vista, Cal­i­for­nia, after threat­en­ing to do so online. Reports quick­ly sur­faced of his past posts on one of Incels.me’s pre­de­ces­sors, PUAHate.com, includ­ing “Don’t you want to pun­ish women for reject­ing you?” and “Once women are brought to their knees, things can be reformed. The soon­er this hap­pens, the bet­ter.” The site was per­ma­nent­ly removed soon after.

    Domain hosts will some­times take a site down if they receive com­plaints about its con­tent, but Cloud­flare can hin­der this process as well. It offers ser­vices that can hide a site’s host provider and IP address, as it appears to be doing for Incels.me, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for con­cerned neti­zens to know where to direct their com­plaints.

    When Cloud­flare receives a com­plaint about a web­site it pro­tects, it will for­ward the report to the site’s host provider (as it did with Ince­lo­ca­lypse) instead of direct­ly inter­ven­ing. This got the com­pa­ny into Nazi-relat­ed trou­ble even before the Char­lottesville ral­ly last year. Many peo­ple who had sub­mit­ted com­plaints about The Dai­ly Stormer became vic­tims of tar­get­ed harass­ment after Cloud­flare for­ward­ed their con­tact infor­ma­tion to the neo-Nazi site, effec­tive­ly rat­ting them out to a venge­ful bul­ly. Cloud­flare has since adjust­ed its sys­tem.

    Draw­ing The Line

    Pri­vate inter­net com­pa­nies can reserve the right to ter­mi­nate a client’s web­site if its users post con­tent that vio­lates their terms of ser­vice, as many did with The Dai­ly Stormer. GoDad­dy, for exam­ple, does not allow its clients to use their sites in a man­ner that “pro­motes, encour­ages or engages in ter­ror­ism, vio­lence against peo­ple, ani­mals, or prop­er­ty,” or for “moral­ly objec­tion­able activ­i­ties.”

    Cloud­flare, of course, is also free to set such terms, but has argued that it has no busi­ness reg­u­lat­ing con­tent because it is a secu­ri­ty and deliv­ery net­work, not a host provider.

    “If you look at the way our sys­tem runs, it is a sys­tem that moves bits around the inter­net as quick­ly and secure­ly as pos­si­ble but doesn’t do any­thing with the con­tent there­in, the way that a host or a social media plat­form might,” said Kramer. “So we think get­ting into that busi­ness for the pur­pos­es of mak­ing deci­sions about con­tent, which we’re not equipped to do because it’s not our exper­tise, cre­ates more prob­lems than ben­e­fits.” He com­pared this prac­tice to “going to AT&T and ask­ing them to lis­ten in on phone calls.”

    Oth­er deliv­ery net­works don’t seem to see it that way, and have placed explic­it restric­tions on con­tent. Aka­mai, one of Cloudflare’s com­peti­tors, states that it “takes no respon­si­bil­i­ty for any cus­tomer or user con­tent cre­at­ed,” but also for­bids clients from dis­trib­ut­ing or stor­ing “mate­r­i­al that is ille­gal, defam­a­to­ry, libelous, inde­cent, obscene, porno­graph­ic” and so forth. Like­wise, Incap­su­la clients must agree not to “trans­mit or post con­tent that is harm­ful, threat­en­ing, abu­sive, defam­a­to­ry, or ... any mate­r­i­al that encour­ages con­duct that could con­sti­tute a crim­i­nal offense or pro­motes harm or injury against any group or indi­vid­ual.”

    Cloud­flare does not pro­hib­it any kind of abu­sive behav­ior or incite­ment to vio­lence. Instead, it broad­ly requires clients to use their web­sites “in com­pli­ance with any and all applic­a­ble laws and reg­u­la­tions,” and reserves the right to sus­pend or ter­mi­nate its ser­vices with­out notice or rea­son.

    As such, com­ments includ­ing “All the time, I think of new schemes by which incels might kid­nap and rape femoids [women],” “I’ve gone to sleep every night fan­ta­siz­ing about tor­tur­ing women,” “We need to shat­ter fem­i­nists’ sense of secu­ri­ty and ter­ror­ize the crap out of them,” “I hope the cu nt [his moth­er] gets gang raped and her body chopped up and left on the side of the road like a piece of sh it,” “I’m obsessed with mur­der­ing some of them [women he knows],” and oth­er alarm­ing posts — some which are too grue­some to repub­lish here — are ram­pant on Incels.me and remain post­ed there today with­out con­se­quence.

    This kind of extreme misog­y­ny has prompt­ed a hand­ful of inter­net com­pa­nies to proac­tive­ly sev­er ties with vio­lent incel web­sites. Namecheap ter­mi­nat­ed incel.life in Feb­ru­ary. DreamHost took Ince­lo­ca­lypse offline in May, before it reap­peared on RU Cen­ter short­ly there­after with sus­tained pro­tec­tion from Cloud­flare. RU Cen­ter shut it down in late June, but Lar­son, Incelocalypse’s pro-rape and ‑pedophil­ia cre­ator, told Huff­Post he’s been look­ing for a new host. Essen­tial­ly, as long as such sites are guard­ed by Cloud­flare, they can keep spring­ing back up with­out real reper­cus­sions after host providers pull the plug.

    A new forum for incels and pedophiles has already popped up to fill the void left by Ince­lo­ca­lypse for the time being. It’s pro­tect­ed by Cloud­flare.

    ...

    ———-

    “From Nazis To Incels: How One Tech Com­pa­ny Helps Hate Groups Thrive” by Jes­se­lyn Cook; The Huff­in­g­ton Post; 07/25/2018

    “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:

    ...
    By all stan­dards, the forum Incels.me is a hate group. Lit­tered through well over 1 mil­lion mes­sages is a cas­cade of posts call­ing for women to be raped, decap­i­tat­ed, stabbed, starved, poi­soned, skinned, can­ni­bal­ized, blind­ed, muti­lat­ed, sodom­ized, tor­tured, beat­en, burned, enslaved and oth­er­wise bru­tal­ly killed, sim­ply because they are women. (Unedit­ed excerpts from some of these mes­sages appear below. Read­ers may find them dis­turb­ing.)

    Many of Incels.me’s 6,800 mem­bers — sex­u­al­ly frus­trat­ed men who iden­ti­fy as invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate (incel) — are strik­ing­ly can­did about their vio­lent misog­y­ny. Posts such as “I wan­na rape her then behead her,” “We have to strike back at all these whores,” “I have groped girls against their will, you should try it” and “I want to kill [women] so fuc king bad. I want to take their lives. I want them to fuc king suf­fer” are stan­dard fare on the rapid­ly grow­ing web­site.

    Its sis­ter site, Ince­lo­ca­lypse, is a mes­sage board for incels who want to make women and chil­dren their “rape-slaves.” As Huff­Post uncov­ered in May, it was cre­at­ed by Nathan Lar­son, a con­gres­sion­al can­di­date in Vir­ginia who is an open­ly pro-rape pedophile. The page has been dumped and tem­porar­i­ly forced offline by mul­ti­ple web domain reg­is­trars (most recent­ly Russia’s RU Cen­ter), but it resur­faces each time. Its mem­bers have repeat­ed­ly encour­aged each oth­er to com­mit crimes includ­ing kid­nap­ping, rape, incest and homi­cide.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    One man on the Ince­lo­ca­lypse forum attempt­ed to com­mis­sion a guide on “how to rape” for $100 last month, not­ing “the guide should explain how to lure a vic­tim, kill it, what to do with the corpse, and any­thing else that you think is impor­tant.” Anoth­er said he would rape female tod­dlers because “they will all become worth­less sluts.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    From Nazis To Incels And Pedophiles

    You may not have heard of Cloud­flare. The mas­sive but lit­tle-known inter­net secu­ri­ty com­pa­ny has devel­oped a rep­u­ta­tion for keep­ing con­tro­ver­sial web­sites online. It has attract­ed clients includ­ing fas­cists, hack­ers, ter­ror­ists, incels and pedophiles, and it has sparked debate about web com­pa­nies’ extrale­gal role in reg­u­lat­ing the online hate speech they opti­mize and ampli­fy.

    Cloud­flare made rare head­lines last year in the wake of an alleged mur­der, when it found itself embroiled in a fiery dis­pute over free speech online with hordes of neo-Nazis. It was mid-August, and a far-right protest in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, had turned dead­ly after a man slammed a vehi­cle into a crowd of peo­ple, killing a coun­ter­pro­test­er named Heather Hey­er. The “Unite the Right” ral­ly was orga­nized in part by The Dai­ly Stormer, a Cloud­flare-pro­tect­ed neo-Nazi web­site that encour­aged atten­dees to be vio­lent. After Heyer’s death, the site called her a fat “slut” and urged its read­ers to crash her funer­al.

    Pub­lic out­rage erupt­ed, lead­ing one domain reg­is­trar after anoth­er to drop The Dai­ly Stormer, briefly shut­ting it down until it scram­bled to find a new home online that would tol­er­ate its hate­ful con­tent. In a state­ment explain­ing why it cut the site loose, inter­net com­pa­ny Tucows wrote: “Like Google, and GoDad­dy before them, we felt [The Dai­ly Stormer] clear­ly vio­lat­ed our terms of ser­vice by incit­ing vio­lence.” The Dai­ly Stormer also tried to find refuge with Namecheap, which denied it ser­vice and pub­lished a blog post about that deci­sion titled “Incit­ing Vio­lence vs Free­dom of Speech.”

    But Cloud­flare held its ground, stand­ing by The Dai­ly Stormer as oth­er inter­net com­pa­nies backed away. Its ser­vices — also pro­vid­ed to Incels.me, Ince­lo­ca­lypse and mil­lions of oth­er web­sites around the globe — are essen­tial for con­tro­ver­sial sites’ sur­vival. Cloud­flare shields and opti­mizes con­tent; it is not a host provider (although its “Always Online” fea­ture caches a sta­t­ic ver­sion of pages in case their serv­er goes offline). It acts as a dig­i­tal fortress, fend­ing off the kind of vig­i­lante hack­er cam­paigns that so often dis­able con­tentious sites.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    As the company’s CEO put it: “The size and scale of the attacks that can now eas­i­ly be launched online make it such that if you don’t have a net­work like Cloud­flare in front of your con­tent, and you upset any­one, you will be knocked offline.” A dia­gram from the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter illus­trates how Cloud­flare pro­tects against crip­pling cyberas­saults.

    Cloud­flare con­tin­ued to defend The Dai­ly Stormer from a cam­paign of dis­trib­uted denial-of-ser­vice (DDoS) attacks launched after Heyer’s death, assert­ing that it would main­tain a neu­tral posi­tion despite mount­ing pres­sure to aban­don the site. To be sure, Cloud­flare did not sup­port or endorse The Dai­ly Stormer’s views but rather, as tech author Steven John­son described it, “Cloud­flare was act­ing like the mus­cle guard­ing the podi­um at a Nazi ral­ly.”

    Like Ince­lo­ca­lypse, The Dai­ly Stormer sur­vived while hop­ping from one domain to the next large­ly thanks to sus­tained pro­tec­tion from Cloud­flare. Quartz offered a con­cise expla­na­tion at the time:

    “If [Cloud­flare] were to drop the Dai­ly Stormer, the site would for all intents and pur­pos­es cease to exist any time it came under con­cert­ed DDoS attack from anti-fas­cist activists. If the Dai­ly Stormer lost its web host­ing ser­vice, on the oth­er hand, it would have count­less oth­ers to choose from.”

    ...

    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:

    ...
    Remark­ably, what sealed The Dai­ly Stormer’s fate last sum­mer wasn’t its tor­rent of hate speech or its incite­ment to vio­lence. It was its report­ed claim amid the post-Char­lottesville chaos that Cloud­flare staff were, in fact, “secret­ly sup­port­ers of their ide­ol­o­gy.”

    “We could not remain neu­tral after these claims of secret sup­port by Cloud­flare,” the com­pa­ny said in a state­ment upon ter­mi­nat­ing the neo-Nazi site, not­ing its deci­sion marked a reluc­tant, unprece­dent­ed rever­sal of its pol­i­cy and was a “dan­ger­ous” use of cen­sor­ship. With­out a com­mit­ted domain reg­is­trar or cyber­pro­tec­tion, The Dai­ly Stormer retreat­ed to the dark web with its com­mu­ni­ty of fas­cists, who pro­claimed they’d been unjust­ly silenced.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Cloud­flare, how­ev­er, still serves dozens of oth­er hate groups, includ­ing Stormfront.org, anoth­er major neo-Nazi site that was estab­lished by a Ku Klux Klan leader. As the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter points out, far-right Nor­we­gian ter­ror­ist Anders Breivik (now known as Fjo­tolf Hansen) spent time on Storm­front before killing 77 peo­ple in 2011. Cloud­flare has also been accused of pro­vid­ing cyber­se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices to ter­ror­ist web­sites.

    Free Speech vs. Vio­lent Hate Speech

    Found­ed in 2009 to “pow­er and pro­tect the entire inter­net,” Cloud­flare now han­dles near­ly 10 per­cent of all inter­net requests for more than 2.5 bil­lion peo­ple world­wide, accord­ing to its web­site. It gained pres­tige after mit­i­gat­ing mul­ti­ple record-break­ing cyberas­saults, includ­ing one in 2014 that was the internet’s largest known DDoS attack at the time. The San Fran­cis­co-based com­pa­ny has wres­tled with the issue of cen­sor­ship since its start-up days — long before neo-Nazis, incels and pedophiles were flock­ing to use its ser­vices.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    With­out a legal require­ment to reg­u­late hate speech, inter­net com­pa­nies are left to nav­i­gate the deeply com­plex sphere of decid­ing what is and what is not allowed on their plat­forms — an issue that has spawned count­less edi­to­ri­als and think pieces. Draw­ing the line at extreme misog­y­nist and fas­cist con­tent in an effort to pre­vent real-life vio­lence may seem like a no-brain­er to many, but experts warn it could set a dan­ger­ous prece­dent.

    Civ­il lib­er­ties orga­ni­za­tion Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion released a poignant state­ment in the after­math of the Char­lottesville vio­lence, high­light­ing the trou­ble with selec­tive cen­sor­ship: “All fair-mind­ed peo­ple must stand against the hate­ful vio­lence and aggres­sion that seems to be grow­ing across our coun­try. But we must also rec­og­nize that on the inter­net, any tac­tic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against oth­ers, includ­ing peo­ple whose opin­ions we agree with” such as the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment, it said.
    ...

    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):

    ...
    Rais­ing such con­cerns, Cloudflare’s gen­er­al coun­sel, Doug Kramer, explained why the com­pa­ny holds a firm­ly neu­tral stance, with very few excep­tions, regard­ing con­tent on the sites it serves.

    “We try to bal­ance the desire for an open inter­net on the one hand, where it’s not just state-con­trolled inter­ests or mon­eyed inter­ests that get access to a safe and secure inter­net, but on the oth­er hand … [we find that] pass­ing judg­ment on what is and is not appro­pri­ate con­tent online is a dif­fi­cult and inap­pro­pri­ate place for us to be,” Kramer told Huff­Post. He declined to com­ment on Incels.me, Ince­lo­ca­lypse or any spe­cif­ic Cloud­flare client.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Inter­nal con­ver­sa­tions about con­tro­ver­sial clients first arose when Cloud­flare became entan­gled in the Turk­ish sex trade in 2011, as scores of escort ser­vices in the coun­try rec­og­nized its dis­tin­guished abil­i­ty to keep pages online, accord­ing to a Wired report.After fac­ing back­lash for some of the objec­tion­able con­tent flow­ing through Cloudflare’s sys­tems, CEO Matthew Prince argued that a web­site is sim­ply “speech” and “not a bomb.”

    “No provider has an affir­ma­tive oblig­a­tion to mon­i­tor and make deter­mi­na­tions about the the­o­ret­i­cal­ly harm­ful nature of speech a site may con­tain,” Prince said in 2013, adding there is “no immi­nent dan­ger [a web­site] cre­ates.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    But that was before Char­lottesville, before oth­er pre­ventable tragedies spawned in the dark cor­ners of the inter­net. The notion that a web­site “is noth­ing but speech,” as Prince sug­gest­ed, seems almost quaint today. Online writ­ings about harm­ing peo­ple aren’t always jokes or fan­tasies, and count­less indi­vid­u­als — includ­ing incels — have been rad­i­cal­ized in online groups to com­mit acts of mass vio­lence.

    In April, a man rammed a van into a crowd of peo­ple in Toron­to, killing eight women and two men. Short­ly before the attack, the sus­pect pub­lished a post online cel­e­brat­ing the “Incel Rebel­lion.” His mes­sage includ­ed unique ter­mi­nol­o­gy that is com­mon­ly used in incel forums includ­ing Incels.me and Ince­lo­ca­lypse (where he was sub­se­quent­ly hailed as a “hero” and an “inspi­ra­tion”), cast­ing incels into the spot­light and draw­ing media atten­tion to both web­sites.

    Ghoul­ish­ly, death has proved to be the most effec­tive tool for shut­ting down vio­lent online hate groups.

    In 2014, a self-pro­claimed incel named Elliot Rodger killed him­self and six oth­ers in Isla Vista, Cal­i­for­nia, after threat­en­ing to do so online. Reports quick­ly sur­faced of his past posts on one of Incels.me’s pre­de­ces­sors, PUAHate.com, includ­ing “Don’t you want to pun­ish women for reject­ing you?” and “Once women are brought to their knees, things can be reformed. The soon­er this hap­pens, the bet­ter.” The site was per­ma­nent­ly removed soon after.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Domain hosts will some­times take a site down if they receive com­plaints about its con­tent, but Cloud­flare can hin­der this process as well. It offers ser­vices that can hide a site’s host provider and IP address, as it appears to be doing for Incels.me, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for con­cerned neti­zens to know where to direct their com­plaints.

    When Cloud­flare receives a com­plaint about a web­site it pro­tects, it will for­ward the report to the site’s host provider (as it did with Ince­lo­ca­lypse) instead of direct­ly inter­ven­ing. This got the com­pa­ny into Nazi-relat­ed trou­ble even before the Char­lottesville ral­ly last year. Many peo­ple who had sub­mit­ted com­plaints about The Dai­ly Stormer became vic­tims of tar­get­ed harass­ment after Cloud­flare for­ward­ed their con­tact infor­ma­tion to the neo-Nazi site, effec­tive­ly rat­ting them out to a venge­ful bul­ly. Cloud­flare has since adjust­ed its sys­tem.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Draw­ing The Line

    Pri­vate inter­net com­pa­nies can reserve the right to ter­mi­nate a client’s web­site if its users post con­tent that vio­lates their terms of ser­vice, as many did with The Dai­ly Stormer. GoDad­dy, for exam­ple, does not allow its clients to use their sites in a man­ner that “pro­motes, encour­ages or engages in ter­ror­ism, vio­lence against peo­ple, ani­mals, or prop­er­ty,” or for “moral­ly objec­tion­able activ­i­ties.”

    Cloud­flare, of course, is also free to set such terms, but has argued that it has no busi­ness reg­u­lat­ing con­tent because it is a secu­ri­ty and deliv­ery net­work, not a host provider.

    “If you look at the way our sys­tem runs, it is a sys­tem that moves bits around the inter­net as quick­ly and secure­ly as pos­si­ble but doesn’t do any­thing with the con­tent there­in, the way that a host or a social media plat­form might,” said Kramer. “So we think get­ting into that busi­ness for the pur­pos­es of mak­ing deci­sions about con­tent, which we’re not equipped to do because it’s not our exper­tise, cre­ates more prob­lems than ben­e­fits.” He com­pared this prac­tice to “going to AT&T and ask­ing them to lis­ten in on phone calls.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Oth­er deliv­ery net­works don’t seem to see it that way, and have placed explic­it restric­tions on con­tent. Aka­mai, one of Cloudflare’s com­peti­tors, states that it “takes no respon­si­bil­i­ty for any cus­tomer or user con­tent cre­at­ed,” but also for­bids clients from dis­trib­ut­ing or stor­ing “mate­r­i­al that is ille­gal, defam­a­to­ry, libelous, inde­cent, obscene, porno­graph­ic” and so forth. Like­wise, Incap­su­la clients must agree not to “trans­mit or post con­tent that is harm­ful, threat­en­ing, abu­sive, defam­a­to­ry, or ... any mate­r­i­al that encour­ages con­duct that could con­sti­tute a crim­i­nal offense or pro­motes harm or injury against any group or indi­vid­ual.”

    Cloud­flare does not pro­hib­it any kind of abu­sive behav­ior or incite­ment to vio­lence. Instead, it broad­ly requires clients to use their web­sites “in com­pli­ance with any and all applic­a­ble laws and reg­u­la­tions,” and reserves the right to sus­pend or ter­mi­nate its ser­vices with­out notice or rea­son.

    As such, com­ments includ­ing “All the time, I think of new schemes by which incels might kid­nap and rape femoids [women],” “I’ve gone to sleep every night fan­ta­siz­ing about tor­tur­ing women,” “We need to shat­ter fem­i­nists’ sense of secu­ri­ty and ter­ror­ize the crap out of them,” “I hope the cu nt [his moth­er] gets gang raped and her body chopped up and left on the side of the road like a piece of sh it,” “I’m obsessed with mur­der­ing some of them [women he knows],” and oth­er alarm­ing posts — some which are too grue­some to repub­lish here — are ram­pant on Incels.me and remain post­ed there today with­out con­se­quence.

    This kind of extreme misog­y­ny has prompt­ed a hand­ful of inter­net com­pa­nies to proac­tive­ly sev­er ties with vio­lent incel web­sites. Namecheap ter­mi­nat­ed incel.life in Feb­ru­ary. DreamHost took Ince­lo­ca­lypse offline in May, before it reap­peared on RU Cen­ter short­ly there­after with sus­tained pro­tec­tion from Cloud­flare. RU Cen­ter shut it down in late June, but Lar­son, Incelocalypse’s pro-rape and ‑pedophil­ia cre­ator, told Huff­Post he’s been look­ing for a new host. Essen­tial­ly, as long as such sites are guard­ed by Cloud­flare, they can keep spring­ing back up with­out real reper­cus­sions after host providers pull the plug.

    A new forum for incels and pedophiles has already popped up to fill the void left by Ince­lo­ca­lypse for the time being. It’s pro­tect­ed by Cloud­flare.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 6, 2018, 7:41 pm
  24. 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:

    The Guardian

    Essays reveal Stephen Hawk­ing pre­dict­ed race of ‘super­hu­mans’

    Physi­cist said genet­ic edit­ing may cre­ate species that could destroy rest of human­i­ty

    Sarah Marsh

    Sun 14 Oct 2018 08.28 EDT
    Last mod­i­fied on Sun 14 Oct 2018 14.55 EDT

    The late physi­cist and author Prof Stephen Hawk­ing has caused con­tro­ver­sy by sug­gest­ing a new race of super­hu­mans could devel­op from wealthy peo­ple choos­ing to edit their and their children’s DNA.

    Hawk­ing, the author of A Brief His­to­ry of Time, who died in March, made the pre­dic­tions in a col­lec­tion of arti­cles and essays.

    The sci­en­tist pre­sent­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty that genet­ic engi­neer­ing could cre­ate a new species of super­hu­man that could destroy the rest of human­i­ty. The essays, pub­lished in the Sun­day Times, were writ­ten in prepa­ra­tion for a book that will be pub­lished on Tues­day.

    “I am sure that dur­ing this cen­tu­ry, peo­ple will dis­cov­er how to mod­i­fy both intel­li­gence and instincts such as aggres­sion,” he wrote.

    “Laws will prob­a­bly be passed against genet­ic engi­neer­ing with humans. But some peo­ple won’t be able to resist the temp­ta­tion to improve human char­ac­ter­is­tics, such as mem­o­ry, resis­tance to dis­ease and length of life.”

    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.

    Hawk­ing raised the prospect that break­throughs in genet­ics will make it attrac­tive for peo­ple to try to improve them­selves, with impli­ca­tions for “unim­proved humans”.

    “Once such super­hu­mans appear, there will be sig­nif­i­cant polit­i­cal prob­lems with unim­proved humans, who won’t be able to com­pete,” he wrote. “Pre­sum­ably, they will die out, or become unim­por­tant. Instead, there will be a race of self-design­ing beings who are improv­ing at an ever-increas­ing rate.”

    The com­ments refer to tech­niques such as Crispr-Cas9, a DNA-edit­ing sys­tem that was invent­ed six years ago, allow­ing sci­en­tists to mod­i­fy harm­ful genes or add new ones. Great Ormond Street hos­pi­tal for chil­dren in Lon­don has used gene edit­ing to treat chil­dren with an oth­er­wise incur­able form of leukaemia.

    How­ev­er, ques­tions have been raised about whether par­ents would risk using such tech­niques for fear that the enhance­ments would have side-effects.

    ...

    ———-

    “Essays reveal Stephen Hawk­ing pre­dict­ed race of ‘super­hu­mans’ ” by Sarah Marsh; The Guardian; 10/14/2018

    “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:

    ...
    “I am sure that dur­ing this cen­tu­ry, peo­ple will dis­cov­er how to mod­i­fy both intel­li­gence and instincts such as aggres­sion,” he wrote.

    “Laws will prob­a­bly be passed against genet­ic engi­neer­ing with humans. But some peo­ple won’t be able to resist the temp­ta­tion to improve human char­ac­ter­is­tics, such as mem­o­ry, resis­tance to dis­ease and length of life.”
    ...

    And that group of super­hu­mans could effec­tive­ly cre­ate a new species that would out­com­pete and even­tu­al­ly destroy human­i­ty:

    ...
    The sci­en­tist pre­sent­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty that genet­ic engi­neer­ing could cre­ate a new species of super­hu­man that could destroy the rest of human­i­ty. The essays, pub­lished in the Sun­day Times, were writ­ten in prepa­ra­tion for a book that will be pub­lished on Tues­day.”

    ...

    Hawk­ing raised the prospect that break­throughs in genet­ics will make it attrac­tive for peo­ple to try to improve them­selves, with impli­ca­tions for “unim­proved humans”.

    “Once such super­hu­mans appear, there will be sig­nif­i­cant polit­i­cal prob­lems with unim­proved humans, who won’t be able to com­pete,” he wrote. “Pre­sum­ably, they will die out, or become unim­por­tant. Instead, there will be a race of self-design­ing beings who are improv­ing at an ever-increas­ing rate.”
    ...

    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 New States­man

    The first men to con­quer death will cre­ate a new social order – a ter­ri­fy­ing one

    Immense­ly wealthy and pow­er­ful men like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk want to live for­ev­er. But at what cost?

    By San­jana Vargh­ese
    25 August 2017

    In a 2011 New York­er pro­file, Peter Thiel, tech-phil­an­thropist and bil­lion­aire, sur­mised that “prob­a­bly the most extreme form of inequal­i­ty is between peo­ple who are alive and peo­ple who are dead”. While he may not be tech­ni­cal­ly wrong, Thiel and oth­er eccen­tric, wealthy tech-celebri­ties, such as Elon Musk and Mark Zucker­berg, have tak­en the next step to coun­ter­act that inequal­i­ty – by embark­ing on a quest to live for­ev­er.

    Thiel and many like him have been invest­ing in research on life exten­sion, part of tran­shu­man­ism. Draw­ing on fields as diverse as neu­rotech­nol­o­gy, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, bio­med­ical engi­neer­ing and phi­los­o­phy, tran­shu­man­ists believe that the lim­i­ta­tions of the human body and mor­tal­i­ty can be tran­scend­ed by machines and tech­nol­o­gy. The ulti­mate aim is immor­tal­i­ty. Some believe this is achiev­able by 2045.

    Of course, humans have long har­nessed tech­nol­o­gy, from vac­ci­na­tions to smart­phones, to improve and extend our lives. But that doesn’t admit you into the tran­shu­man­ist club. Want­i­ng to live for­ev­er, and pos­sess­ing vast sums of mon­ey and time to research, does.

    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.

    Tran­shu­man­ism is no longer a fringe move­ment either. Darpa, the US government’s research arm into advanced weapon­ry, cre­at­ed a func­tion­al pro­to­type of a super sol­dier exoskele­ton in 2014, which will be ful­ly func­tion­al in 2018, and is research­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an arti­fi­cial human brain.

    “Tran­shu­man­ism does­n’t have much to say about social ques­tions. To the extent that they see the world chang­ing, it’s near­ly always in a busi­ness-as-usu­al way – tech­no-cap­i­tal­ism con­tin­ues to deliv­er its excel­lent boun­ties, and the peo­ple who ben­e­fit from the cur­rent social arrange­ment con­tin­ue to ben­e­fit from it,” says Mark O’Con­nell, the author of To be a Machine, who fol­lowed var­i­ous tran­shu­man­ists in Los Ange­les.“You basi­cal­ly can’t sep­a­rate tran­shu­man­ism from cap­i­tal­ism. An idea that’s so enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly pur­sued by Musk and Peter Thiel, and by the founders of Google, is one that needs to be seen as a muta­tion of cap­i­tal­ism, not a cure for it.”

    Sil­i­con Val­ley is char­ac­terised by a blind belief in tech­no­log­i­cal progress, a dis­re­gard for social accept­abil­i­ty and an empha­sis on indi­vid­ual suc­cess. It’s no sur­prise, then, that it is here that the idea of liv­ing for­ev­er seems most desir­able.

    Musk has pub­licly declared that we have to merge with arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent machines that over­take human­i­ty in order to sur­vive. Ray Kurzweil, the inven­tor and futur­ist who pio­neered the Sin­gu­lar­i­ty, is now an engi­neer at Google. O’Con­nell points out that “you’d have to be com­ing from a par­tic­u­lar­ly rar­efied priv­i­lege to look at the world today and make the assess­ment, as some­one like Thiel does, that the biggest prob­lem we face as a species is the fact that peo­ple die of old age”.

    On an even more basic lev­el, a tran­shu­man­ist soci­ety would undoubt­ed­ly be shaped by the ideals of those who cre­at­ed it and those who came before it. Zoltan Ist­van, the tran­shu­man­ist can­di­date for gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia, told Tech Insid­er that “a lot of the most impor­tant work in longevi­ty is com­ing from a hand­ful of the billionaires...around six or sev­en of them”.

    Immor­tal­i­ty as defined by straight, white men could draw out cycles of oppres­sion. With­out old atti­tudes dying off and replaced by the impa­tience of youth, social change might become impos­si­ble. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has already been shown to absorb the bias­es of its cre­ators. Upload­ing someone’s brain into a clone of them­selves doesn’t make them less like­ly to dis­crim­i­nate. Thiel and Musk, for exam­ple, iden­ti­fy as lib­er­tar­i­ans and have fre­quent­ly sug­gest­ed that tax­es are obso­lete and that gov­ern­men­tal mil­i­tary spend­ing needs to be curbed (and put into life-enhanc­ing tech­nolo­gies).

    Thiel him­self is a Don­ald Trump sup­port­er. A one-time asso­ciate Michael Anis­si­mov, pre­vi­ous media offi­cer at Machine Intel­li­gence Research Insti­tute, a Thiel-fund­ed AI think tank, has pub­lished a white nation­al­ist man­i­festo. In a 2013 inter­view, Anis­si­mov said that there were already sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences in intel­li­gence between the races, and that a tran­shu­man­ist soci­ety would inevitably lead to “peo­ple lord­ing it over oth­ers in a way that has nev­er been seen before in his­to­ry”. It doesn’t take much to guess who would be doing the “lord­ing”.

    “The first enhanced humans will not be ordi­nary peo­ple; they’ll be the peo­ple who have already made those ordi­nary peo­ple eco­nom­i­cal­ly obso­lete through automa­tion. They’ll be tech bil­lion­aires,” says O’Con­nell.

    If those who form soci­ety in the age of tran­shu­man­ism are men like Musk and Thiel, it’s prob­a­ble that this soci­ety will have few social safe­ty nets. There will be an uneven rate of tech­no­log­i­cal progress glob­al­ly; even a post-human soci­ety can repli­cate the unequal glob­al wealth dis­tri­b­u­tion which we see today. In some cities and coun­tries, inhab­i­tants may live for­ev­er, while in oth­ers the res­i­dents die of mal­nu­tri­tion. If peo­ple don’t die off, the envi­ron­men­tal con­se­quences – from wide­spread nat­ur­al resource dev­as­ta­tion to unsus­tain­able ener­gy demands – would be wide­spread.

    It would be remiss to tar all tran­shu­man­ists with one brush. In 2014, The Huff­in­g­ton Post that the mem­ber­ship of tran­shu­man­ist soci­eties and Face­book groups has start­ed to expand in num­ber and in diver­si­ty, draw­ing in young and old peo­ple of all polit­i­cal per­sua­sions and nation­al­i­ties.

    ...

    It remains the case, though, that the major­i­ty of the mon­ey invest­ed in mak­ing tran­shu­man­ism a real­i­ty comes from rich, white men. As the descen­dants of a species with a ten­den­cy to exploit the down­trod­den, any posthu­mans must guard against repli­cat­ing those same bias­es in a new soci­ety. For some, poten­tial­ly in the near future, death might become option­al. For oth­ers, death will remain inevitable.

    ———-

    “The first men to con­quer death will cre­ate a new social order – a ter­ri­fy­ing one” by San­jana Vargh­ese; The New States­man; 08/25/2017

    “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:

    ...
    Thiel and many like him have been invest­ing in research on life exten­sion, part of tran­shu­man­ism. Draw­ing on fields as diverse as neu­rotech­nol­o­gy, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, bio­med­ical engi­neer­ing and phi­los­o­phy, tran­shu­man­ists believe that the lim­i­ta­tions of the human body and mor­tal­i­ty can be tran­scend­ed by machines and tech­nol­o­gy. The ulti­mate aim is immor­tal­i­ty. Some believe this is achiev­able by 2045.

    ...

    Of course, humans have long har­nessed tech­nol­o­gy, from vac­ci­na­tions to smart­phones, to improve and extend our lives. But that doesn’t admit you into the tran­shu­man­ist club. Want­i­ng to live for­ev­er, and pos­sess­ing vast sums of mon­ey and time to research, does.

    ...

    On an even more basic lev­el, a tran­shu­man­ist soci­ety would undoubt­ed­ly be shaped by the ideals of those who cre­at­ed it and those who came before it. Zoltan Ist­van, the tran­shu­man­ist can­di­date for gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia, told Tech Insid­er that “a lot of the most impor­tant work in longevi­ty is com­ing from a hand­ful of the billionaires...around six or sev­en of them”.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    Musk has pub­licly declared that we have to merge with arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent machines that over­take human­i­ty in order to sur­vive. Ray Kurzweil, the inven­tor and futur­ist who pio­neered the Sin­gu­lar­i­ty, is now an engi­neer at Google. O’Con­nell points out that “you’d have to be com­ing from a par­tic­u­lar­ly rar­efied priv­i­lege to look at the world today and make the assess­ment, as some­one like Thiel does, that the biggest prob­lem we face as a species is the fact that peo­ple die of old age”.
    ...

    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:

    ...

    Tran­shu­man­ism is no longer a fringe move­ment either. Darpa, the US government’s research arm into advanced weapon­ry, cre­at­ed a func­tion­al pro­to­type of a super sol­dier exoskele­ton in 2014, which will be ful­ly func­tion­al in 2018, and is research­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an arti­fi­cial human brain.

    “Tran­shu­man­ism does­n’t have much to say about social ques­tions. To the extent that they see the world chang­ing, it’s near­ly always in a busi­ness-as-usu­al way – tech­no-cap­i­tal­ism con­tin­ues to deliv­er its excel­lent boun­ties, and the peo­ple who ben­e­fit from the cur­rent social arrange­ment con­tin­ue to ben­e­fit from it,” says Mark O’Con­nell, the author of To be a Machine, who fol­lowed var­i­ous tran­shu­man­ists in Los Ange­les. “You basi­cal­ly can’t sep­a­rate tran­shu­man­ism from cap­i­tal­ism. An idea that’s so enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly pur­sued by Musk and Peter Thiel, and by the founders of Google, is one that needs to be seen as a muta­tion of cap­i­tal­ism, not a cure for it.”

    Sil­i­con Val­ley is char­ac­terised by a blind belief in tech­no­log­i­cal progress, a dis­re­gard for social accept­abil­i­ty and an empha­sis on indi­vid­ual suc­cess. It’s no sur­prise, then, that it is here that the idea of liv­ing for­ev­er seems most desir­able.
    ...

    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”:

    ...
    Immor­tal­i­ty as defined by straight, white men could draw out cycles of oppres­sion. With­out old atti­tudes dying off and replaced by the impa­tience of youth, social change might become impos­si­ble. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has already been shown to absorb the bias­es of its cre­ators. Upload­ing someone’s brain into a clone of them­selves doesn’t make them less like­ly to dis­crim­i­nate. Thiel and Musk, for exam­ple, iden­ti­fy as lib­er­tar­i­ans and have fre­quent­ly sug­gest­ed that tax­es are obso­lete and that gov­ern­men­tal mil­i­tary spend­ing needs to be curbed (and put into life-enhanc­ing tech­nolo­gies).

    Thiel him­self is a Don­ald Trump sup­port­er. A one-time asso­ciate Michael Anis­si­mov, pre­vi­ous media offi­cer at Machine Intel­li­gence Research Insti­tute, a Thiel-fund­ed AI think tank, has pub­lished a white nation­al­ist man­i­festo. In a 2013 inter­view, Anis­si­mov said that there were already sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences in intel­li­gence between the races, and that a tran­shu­man­ist soci­ety would inevitably lead to “peo­ple lord­ing it over oth­ers in a way that has nev­er been seen before in his­to­ry”. It doesn’t take much to guess who would be doing the “lord­ing”.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 14, 2018, 8:55 pm
  25. 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:

    Heavy.com

    Robert Bow­ers: See Squir­rel Hill Suspect’s Social Media

    By Jes­si­ca McBride

    Updat­ed Oct 27, 2018 at 7:22pm

    Robert Bow­ers, the man accused of per­pe­trat­ing a mass shoot­ing at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life syn­a­gogue, had a social media account on which he alleged­ly telegraphed his inten­tions for the shoot­ing and shared anti-Semit­ic and white suprema­cist com­men­tary.

    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.

    Gab is a social media net­work that posi­tions itself as an alter­na­tive to Twit­ter and Face­book because it cham­pi­ons free speech. Bow­ers is in cus­tody; he has gun­shot wounds and is in fair con­di­tion, author­i­ties said. Gab has pushed back at crit­i­cism in the wake of the shoot­ing, and released a state­ment. “Short­ly after the attack, Gab was alert­ed to a user pro­file of the alleged Tree of Life Syn­a­gogue shoot­er. The account was ver­i­fied and matched the name of the alleged shooter’s name, which was men­tioned on police scan­ners. This per­son also had accounts on oth­er social net­works,” it reads in part..

    Hi Will,

    The only per­son with blood on their hands is the shoot­er.

    Not Gab.
    Not the Pres­i­dent.
    Not the gun.

    It’s called indi­vid­ual respon­si­bil­i­ty and account­abil­i­ty.

    Have a blessed day. https://t.co/C6fMTTOprx

    — Gab.com?? (@getongab) Octo­ber 27, 2018

    Three days ago, Robert Bow­ers, who also goes by the name Rob Bow­ers, wrote on the Gab account, “Dai­ly Reminder: Diver­si­ty means chas­ing down the last white per­son.” His pro­file pic­ture on Gab, where he’s had an account since Jan­u­ary 2018, reads, “jews are the chil­dren of satan. (john 8:44) — —- the lord jesus christ is come in the flesh.” He also post­ed about weapon­ry. One post show­ing off guns includ­ed the phrase “my glock fam­i­ly.”

    Here is an archive of his Gab account. Here’s a sec­ond archive. Be aware that it takes a while to load because there are so many images in it.

    He shared, 17 days ago, the web­site of HIAS, which includ­ed a graph­ic of the “Nation­al Refugee Shab­bat, a project of HIAS.”

    He wrote, “Why hel­lo there HIAS! You like to bring in hos­tile invaders to dwell among us? We appre­ci­ate the list of friends you have pro­vid­ed.” He then shared a link to a HIAS list of con­gre­ga­tions. He also indi­cat­ed sup­port for Holo­caust denial and referred to “oven dodgers” in one post.

    The web­site of HIAS describes it as an orga­ni­za­tion that was “found­ed in 1881 orig­i­nal­ly to assist Jews flee­ing pogroms in Rus­sia and East­ern Europe, HIAS has touched the life of near­ly every Jew­ish fam­i­ly in Amer­i­ca and now wel­comes all who have fled per­se­cu­tion.”

    The link he shared to the HIAS web­site directs to a page that says, “Nation­al Refugee Shab­bat 2018 is a moment for con­gre­ga­tions, orga­ni­za­tions, and indi­vid­u­als around the coun­try to cre­ate a Shab­bat expe­ri­ence ded­i­cat­ed to refugees.” It then list­ed par­tic­i­pat­ing con­gre­ga­tions.

    Robert Bow­ers is list­ed as an unaf­fil­i­at­ed vot­er in Penn­syl­va­nia vot­er records:
    [see screen­shot of Bow­er­s’s vot­ing record]

    Here’s what you need to know:

    The Sus­pect Expressed Dis­like of Pres­i­dent Trump & Shared Vir­u­lent­ly Anti-Semit­ic Com­men­tary

    Robert Bow­ers doesn’t appear to be a Don­ald Trump fan from his social account. He also wrote sev­er­al hours before the shoot­ing in a com­ment thread, “For the record, I did not vote for him nor have I owned, worn or even touched a maga hat.” That com­ment was a reply to a post that men­tioned Trump.

    Here’s a screen­shot of that com­ment:
    [see screen­shot of Gab com­ment]

    In a post two days before the mass shoot­ing, he alleged­ly wrote, “Trump is a glob­al­ist, not a nation­al­ist. There is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infes­ta­tion. #Qanon is here to get patri­ots that were against mar­tial law in the 90’s to be the ones beg­ging for it now to drain muh swamp. But go ahead and keep say­ing you are #Win­ning.”

    Trump has com­ment­ed on the syn­a­gogue shoot­ing, say­ing this:

    Pres­i­dent Trump, asked about gun laws, says the Pitts­burgh syn­a­gogue should have had armed secu­ri­ty at the bris and the gun­man wouldn’t be able to do what he did pic.twitter.com/y9Cq59wPM5

    — Justin Fen­ton (@justin_fenton) Octo­ber 27, 2018

    “This was an anti-Semit­ic act. You wouldn’t think this would be pos­si­ble in this day and age. But we just don’t seem to learn from the past,” the pres­i­dent said.

    Robert Bow­ers shared vir­u­lent­ly anti-Semit­ic and white suprema­cist com­men­tary. Some of his posts involved weapons.

    ??Robert Bow­ers ban­ner pic is his bal­lis­tic chrono­graph show­ing 1488 (the veloc­i­ty of a bul­let leav­ing a bar­rel of a gun) Trans­lat­ed, that was the tem­per­a­ture of the Nazi cre­ma­to­ri­ums?? pic.twitter.com/O6gYlGZDHq

    — Ven­ture Cap­i­tal (@kelly2277) Octo­ber 27, 2018

    He re-post­ed oth­er anti-Semit­ic posts from oth­er peo­ple. For exam­ple, one claimed, “Jews love per­se­cu­tion. It jus­ti­fies offense and rein­forces the need for strength in num­bers to divide and con­quer.”

    He shared a car­toon some­one else shared that showed a Jew­ish man say­ing in a fake con­ver­sa­tion to Don­ald Trump, “Your char­ac­ter will appear to the pub­lic as a white racist. Its (sic) how we con­trol Whites.” The Trump char­ac­ter responds, “yes sir” in a com­ment bub­ble.

    The post shared by Bow­ers said, “The char­ac­ter we’ve cho­sen for you is of a good, strong white leader who is act­ing in the inter­ests of his coun­try. We must keep whites asleep for a few more years so they are total­ly out­num­bered by our non-white min­ions and can nev­er regain their coun­try. Do this and we’ll keep your fam­i­ly safe & wealthy, & we won’t tell any­one about your trips to Loli­ta Island.”

    He shared a post from some­one else who used swasti­ka and SS sym­bols with their name. “Kick the Jews OUT! This is Not Their Home!” it read.

    He shared a post by some­one else that read, “First Trump came for the Char­lottesville 4 but I kept sup­port­ing Trump because he is bet­ter than Hillary Clin­ton. Then Trump came for the Rise Above Move­ment but I kept sup­port­ing Trump because he is bet­ter than Hillary Clin­ton. Then Trump came for the Proud Boys but I kept sup­port­ing Trump because he is bet­ter than Hillary Clin­ton. Then Trump came for me…”

    He also repost­ed a com­ment from some­one else that said, “Thought for the day: there are peo­ple run­ning around warn­ing you to not lis­ten to the Nazis. 90% of the time these peo­ple are Jews…”

    He also wrote, “(anoth­er person’s han­dle) be like: ‘Q is the way, the truth and the LARP. No one comes to the MAGA but by him.’ Also, you are still dodg­ing my sim­ple ques­tion. Are you or are you not a Jew?”

    He shared anoth­er post that read, “Jews are wag­ing a pro­pa­gan­da war against West­ern civ­i­liza­tion and it is so effec­tive that we are head­ed towards cer­tain extinc­tion.”

    Police Dis­patch Audio Indi­cates the Shoot­er Said He Want­ed All Jews to Die

    Chan­nel 11 sources con­firm there have been mul­ti­ple casu­al­ties at Tree of Life Syn­a­gogue in Squir­rel Hill. The sus­pect is in cus­tody pic.twitter.com/idSqlBotbf

    — Aaron Mar­tin (@WPXIAaronMartin) Octo­ber 27, 2018

    The active shoot­er at the Squir­rel Hill Tree of Life Syn­a­gogue in Pitts­burgh, Penn­syl­va­nia made com­ments about want­i­ng all Jews to die, accord­ing to police dis­patch audio.

    The audio, from Broad­cas­ti­fy, cap­tured offi­cers relay­ing the suspect’s alleged com­ments to dis­patch.

    “Sus­pect talk­ing about all these Jews need to die. We’re still com­mu­ni­cat­ing with him,” said one offi­cer on the dis­patch audio. A short time lat­er, anoth­er offi­cer fol­lowed up with a sim­i­lar dis­turb­ing com­ment.

    “The sus­pect is talk­ing about killing Jews. He doesn’t want any of them to live,” said anoth­er offi­cer. One offi­cer said the shoot­er claimed to be head­ing to his vehi­cle when he “engaged offi­cers respond­ing.”

    Police con­firmed that there are mul­ti­ple vic­tims.

    “We have mul­ti­ple casu­al­ties,” Pitts­burgh police con­firmed in a press con­fer­ence. “We have dis­patched to active gun­fire at the Tree of Life syn­a­gogue in Squir­rel Hill.” Police asked neigh­bors to shel­ter in place.

    CBS Pitts­burgh report­ed the sus­pect is a white male who was crawl­ing and wound­ed. A Sat­ur­day ser­vice was under­way at the syn­a­gogue when the mass shoot­ing occurred.

    RT @NBCNews: BREAKING: Pitts­burgh police: Mul­ti­ple casu­al­ties at Tree of Life syn­a­gogue in Squir­rel Hill pic.twitter.com/Xo5MpEUy6Q

    — Trixy Wh (@trixywh) Octo­ber 27, 2018

    Accord­ing to dis­patch audio, there was a shot offi­cer down on the sec­ond floor, and a mil­i­tary style pack­age was found. Offi­cers referred to mul­ti­ple weapons, includ­ing an AR-15. Offi­cers were nego­ti­at­ing with the sus­pect to sur­ren­der. Scan­ner traf­fic is always pre­lim­i­nary and sub­ject to change as more infor­ma­tion comes out. In the audio, author­i­ties were refer­ring to devices while clear­ing the syn­a­gogue. Author­i­ties were fly­ing a drone over the build­ing to see if they could have an access point to check out a “device.”

    The syn­a­gogue was described as a land­mark and anchor to the neigh­bor­hood.

    The syn­a­gogue on the news is as much a Pitts­burgh land­mark for those who live in Squir­rel Hill as the Point. It’s one of the anchors of the neighborhood’s thriv­ing Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty. These peo­ple lived and wor­shipped where I grew up and now to see this is dev­as­tat­ing.

    — Chris Zubak-Skees (@zubakskees) Octo­ber 27, 2018

    Reporter Myles Miller, of PIX11, not­ed, “For those who don’t know, Squir­rel Hill is Pittsburgh’s largest Jew­ish neigh­bor­hood. Tree of Life * Or L’Simcha is per­haps the biggest con­gre­ga­tion in the area.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Robert Bow­ers: See Squir­rel Hill Suspect’s Social Media” by Jes­si­ca McBride; Heavy.com; 10/27/2018

    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:

    ...
    Three days ago, Robert Bow­ers, who also goes by the name Rob Bow­ers, wrote on the Gab account, “Dai­ly Reminder: Diver­si­ty means chas­ing down the last white per­son.” His pro­file pic­ture on Gab, where he’s had an account since Jan­u­ary 2018, reads, “jews are the chil­dren of satan. (john 8:44) — —- the lord jesus christ is come in the flesh.” He also post­ed about weapon­ry. One post show­ing off guns includ­ed the phrase “my glock fam­i­ly.”

    ...

    He shared, 17 days ago, the web­site of HIAS, which includ­ed a graph­ic of the “Nation­al Refugee Shab­bat, a project of HIAS.”

    He wrote, “Why hel­lo there HIAS! You like to bring in hos­tile invaders to dwell among us? We appre­ci­ate the list of friends you have pro­vid­ed.” He then shared a link to a HIAS list of con­gre­ga­tions. He also indi­cat­ed sup­port for Holo­caust denial and referred to “oven dodgers” in one post.

    ...

    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:

    ...
    Robert Bow­ers doesn’t appear to be a Don­ald Trump fan from his social account. He also wrote sev­er­al hours before the shoot­ing in a com­ment thread, “For the record, I did not vote for him nor have I owned, worn or even touched a maga hat.” That com­ment was a reply to a post that men­tioned Trump.

    Here’s a screen­shot of that com­ment:
    [see screen­shot of Gab com­ment]

    In a post two days before the mass shoot­ing, he alleged­ly wrote, “Trump is a glob­al­ist, not a nation­al­ist. There is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infes­ta­tion. #Qanon is here to get patri­ots that were against mar­tial law in the 90’s to be the ones beg­ging for it now to drain muh swamp. But go ahead and keep say­ing you are #Win­ning.”

    ...

    Robert Bow­ers shared vir­u­lent­ly anti-Semit­ic and white suprema­cist com­men­tary. Some of his posts involved weapons.

    ??Robert Bow­ers ban­ner pic is his bal­lis­tic chrono­graph show­ing 1488 (the veloc­i­ty of a bul­let leav­ing a bar­rel of a gun) Trans­lat­ed, that was the tem­per­a­ture of the Nazi cre­ma­to­ri­ums?? pic.twitter.com/O6gYlGZDHq

    — Ven­ture Cap­i­tal (@kelly2277) Octo­ber 27, 2018

    He re-post­ed oth­er anti-Semit­ic posts from oth­er peo­ple. For exam­ple, one claimed, “Jews love per­se­cu­tion. It jus­ti­fies offense and rein­forces the need for strength in num­bers to divide and con­quer.”

    He shared a car­toon some­one else shared that showed a Jew­ish man say­ing in a fake con­ver­sa­tion to Don­ald Trump, “Your char­ac­ter will appear to the pub­lic as a white racist. Its (sic) how we con­trol Whites.” The Trump char­ac­ter responds, “yes sir” in a com­ment bub­ble.

    The post shared by Bow­ers said, “The char­ac­ter we’ve cho­sen for you is of a good, strong white leader who is act­ing in the inter­ests of his coun­try. We must keep whites asleep for a few more years so they are total­ly out­num­bered by our non-white min­ions and can nev­er regain their coun­try. Do this and we’ll keep your fam­i­ly safe & wealthy, & we won’t tell any­one about your trips to Loli­ta Island.”

    He shared a post from some­one else who used swasti­ka and SS sym­bols with their name. “Kick the Jews OUT! This is Not Their Home!” it read.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    He shared a post by some­one else that read, “First Trump came for the Char­lottesville 4 but I kept sup­port­ing Trump because he is bet­ter than Hillary Clin­ton. Then Trump came for the Rise Above Move­ment but I kept sup­port­ing Trump because he is bet­ter than Hillary Clin­ton. Then Trump came for the Proud Boys but I kept sup­port­ing Trump because he is bet­ter than Hillary Clin­ton. Then Trump came for me…”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    He shared anoth­er post that read, “Jews are wag­ing a pro­pa­gan­da war against West­ern civ­i­liza­tion and it is so effec­tive that we are head­ed towards cer­tain extinc­tion.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 28, 2018, 2:05 am
  26. 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.

    Posted by Dennis | October 28, 2018, 7:00 pm
  27. 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:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    In the wake of the Pitts­burgh attack, Rep. Steve King’s Iowa sup­port­ers brush aside con­cern about his white nation­al­ist views

    By Julie Zauzmer
    Octo­ber 28 at 6:37 PM

    REMSEN, Iowa — As the pol­ka band played and the vol­un­teers start­ed serv­ing the bratwurst, word slow­ly rip­pled through the annu­al Okto­ber­fest in this remote Iowa farm town: Eleven Jews had been mas­sa­cred in Pitts­burgh, gunned down at their syn­a­gogue.

    “Hatred,” Iowans gath­ered for the cel­e­bra­tion said. “Sad.” “Awful.” “Makes me sick.”

    No one ques­tioned whether their well-liked rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Steve King — the U.S. con­gress­man most open­ly affil­i­at­ed with white nation­al­ism — might be con­tribut­ing to anti-Semi­tism or racism through his unapolo­getic embrace of white nation­al­ist rhetoric and his praise of far-right politi­cians and groups in oth­er nations.

    “There’s still groups out there that praise Hitler and believe every­thing he taught. ... A lot of that is going to get mis­con­strued,” said Joe Schuttpelz. If King’s goal is defend­ing the sta­tus of native-born Amer­i­cans as immi­grants move in, then Schuttpelz approves. “He’s not so much pro­tect­ing us from get­ting tak­en over as giv­ing us some advan­tages that every­body else has when they come here,” he said.

    The belief he expressed Sat­ur­day in Rem­sen, in the wake of the dead­liest attack on Amer­i­can Jews in his­to­ry, is preva­lent across Iowa’s 4th Dis­trict, where King is seek­ing a ninth term in Con­gress.

    In his 16 years in the House, King has become bet­ter known for mak­ing incen­di­ary remarks about immi­gra­tion and race than for pass­ing a bill. He has maligned some Lati­nos as hav­ing “calves the size of can­taloupes because they’re haul­ing 75 pounds of mar­i­jua­na across the desert.” He has defend­ed the Con­fed­er­ate flag and dis­played one on his desk.

    He has embraced far-right Dutch politi­cian Geert Wilders and recent­ly endorsed Faith Goldy, a fringe can­di­date for Toron­to may­or who was fired by a far-right pub­li­ca­tion for appear­ing on a pod­cast pro­duced by the neo-Nazi site Dai­ly Stormer.

    In an August inter­view with mem­bers of a far-right Aus­tri­an par­ty with his­tor­i­cal Nazi ties, King lament­ed that “West­ern civ­i­liza­tion is on the decline” because of immi­grants and crit­i­cized Jew­ish financier George Soros.

    “What does this diver­si­ty bring that we don’t already have?” he asked then.

    In an inter­view after Saturday’s shoot­ing in Pitts­burgh, King said he was not anti-Semit­ic, tout­ing his strong sup­port for Israel and insist­ing there’s “a spe­cial place in hell” for any­one who per­pe­trates reli­gious or race-based vio­lence.

    “How do you call Steve King anti-Semit­ic?” he asked, just before giv­ing a speech sup­port­ing gun rights at a din­ner cel­e­brat­ing the first day of pheas­ant hunt­ing sea­son in the west­ern Iowa town of Akron.

    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.

    “If they were in Amer­i­ca push­ing the plat­form that they push, they would be Repub­li­cans,” King said.

    King’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic oppo­nent, J.D. Scholten, has sig­nif­i­cant­ly out­raised him and has mount­ed a far more aggres­sive in-per­son cam­paign across the dis­trict. The Sioux City Jour­nal on Fri­day endorsed Scholten, revers­ing its back­ing of King in past years.

    “Each time King immers­es him­self in con­tro­ver­sy, he holds up this dis­trict to ridicule and mar­gin­al­izes him­self with­in the leg­isla­tive body he serves, nei­ther of which pro­vides ben­e­fit to Iowans who live and work here,” the endorse­ment said, cit­ing King for tying him­self to “intol­er­ant ugli­ness.”

    Last week, Scholten, on the 37th stop of his third 39-coun­ty swing through the area, large­ly avoid­ed bash­ing King, and even more rarely talked about Pres­i­dent Trump. Like many Mid­west­ern Democ­rats, he has focused on health care and agri­cul­ture.

    On Sat­ur­day, a Scholten aide said the Pitts­burgh shoot­ing had sparked a new wave of dona­tions to his cam­paign.

    In an inter­view, Scholten said King has failed through­out his career to denounce hate groups.

    “It goes against every­thing we are taught in church,” he said. “What­ev­er you believe in, this dis­trict has strong faith, and none of these faiths preach this.”

    But King remains pop­u­lar; many vot­ers do not con­sid­er his posi­tions dis­qual­i­fy­ing.

    Bob Scott, the may­or of Sioux City — the largest town in the sprawl­ing dis­trict — says Iowans don’t share King’s views, although they do vote for him.

    “They may have prob­lems with immi­gra­tion. They may have prob­lems about race rela­tions for what­ev­er rea­son,” he said. “But the major­i­ty won’t agree with what goes on when he’s meet­ing with those peo­ple from Aus­tria. I just don’t see that type of racism here, and that’s what it is.”

    Across the 4th Dis­trict — a high­ly con­ser­v­a­tive swath of Iowa near­ly 200 miles wide, mile upon mile of fer­tile farm­land dot­ted with towns the length of a two-block Main Street — King has wide­spread sup­port.

    “Steve’s Steve. He’s a local guy. He grad­u­at­ed from high school here. He comes in for break­fast on Sun­days,” says Craw­ford Coun­ty Super­vi­sor Eric Skoog, who with his wife, Ter­ri, owns what they believe to be the old­est con­tin­u­ous­ly oper­at­ing restau­rant in Iowa.

    At the counter of Cronk’s, which has been open since 1929, Skoog says he dis­agrees with King on immi­gra­tion and hasn’t been afraid to share his con­flict­ing views. Skoog has worked hard to help local schools adjust to the influx of immi­grant chil­dren in Deni­son, one place in the heav­i­ly white dis­trict where a major meat­pack­ing plant has drawn a siz­able His­pan­ic com­mu­ni­ty.

    Still, Skoog said, “I don’t see him as racist. I don’t know. He’s just Steve.” Come Novem­ber, he said, he’ll prob­a­bly vote for him.

    Some in the dis­trict wel­come King’s blunt talk.

    “We’re get­ting pret­ty hap­py in this coun­try about kick­ing the white guy. Only one group of peo­ple haven’t achieved minor­i­ty sta­tus, and it’s white men,” says Steve Sorensen, a for­mer truck dri­ver, watch­ing the World Series in a Hamp­ton bar. “You can fire a white man every time you want. He’s got no recourse. Try that with any­body else.”

    Mindy Rain­er also believes that oth­ers get gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits more eas­i­ly than she does, as a white woman. “There are peo­ple out there that are des­per­ate as hell, and I’m one of them,” she says, slid­ing up to the bar at the restau­rant in the town of Chero­kee where she works.

    Rainer’s hus­band was injured on a job site 25 years ago, she said, and denied dis­abil­i­ty ben­e­fits because of bureau­crat­ic hur­dles. She has sup­port­ed them both, but now her kid­neys are fail­ing and she fears that she won’t be able to work for the eight years until her hus­band can col­lect Social Secu­ri­ty.

    Rain­er recalled lin­ing up to try to get help with her util­i­ty bills when she lived in South Car­oli­na and becom­ing sus­pi­cious of the oth­ers in line, almost all of them African Amer­i­can.

    “What upset me more than any­thing was all them black babies were dressed up in the best clothes,” she said. “When their kids are wear­ing $150 ten­nis shoes, what do you think?”

    She sides with King when he talks about immi­gra­tion. “Why should we feed oth­ers when we can’t feed our­selves?” she asked.

    King’s nativist views are far less pop­u­lar among the area’s busi­ness lead­ers, who see immi­gra­tion as essen­tial to fill­ing the needs of meat-pro­cess­ing plants and oth­er com­pa­nies.

    “We need more peo­ple. We have great-pay­ing jobs. We just need more peo­ple to fill the jobs,” said Kel­ly Hal­st­ed, the eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment direc­tor for the Greater Fort Dodge Growth Alliance, a busi­ness orga­ni­za­tion. Immi­gra­tion into Iowa, she says, is “com­plete­ly a pos­i­tive.”

    King’s stance on the issue is total­ly wrong, she said, but she’ll still vote for him because she believes he has helped steer mon­ey to Iowa projects: “You have to take the good with the bad, right?”

    ...

    ———-

    “In the wake of the Pitts­burgh attack, Rep. Steve King’s Iowa sup­port­ers brush aside con­cern about his white nation­al­ist views” by Julie Zauzmer; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 10/28/2018

    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:

    ...
    “If they were in Amer­i­ca push­ing the plat­form that they push, they would be Repub­li­cans,” King said.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    “There’s still groups out there that praise Hitler and believe every­thing he taught. ... A lot of that is going to get mis­con­strued,” said Joe Schuttpelz. If King’s goal is defend­ing the sta­tus of native-born Amer­i­cans as immi­grants move in, then Schuttpelz approves. “He’s not so much pro­tect­ing us from get­ting tak­en over as giv­ing us some advan­tages that every­body else has when they come here,” he said.

    The belief he expressed Sat­ur­day in Rem­sen, in the wake of the dead­liest attack on Amer­i­can Jews in his­to­ry, is preva­lent across Iowa’s 4th Dis­trict, where King is seek­ing a ninth term in Con­gress.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Some in the dis­trict wel­come King’s blunt talk.

    “We’re get­ting pret­ty hap­py in this coun­try about kick­ing the white guy. Only one group of peo­ple haven’t achieved minor­i­ty sta­tus, and it’s white men,” says Steve Sorensen, a for­mer truck dri­ver, watch­ing the World Series in a Hamp­ton bar. “You can fire a white man every time you want. He’s got no recourse. Try that with any­body else.

    Mindy Rain­er also believes that oth­ers get gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits more eas­i­ly than she does, as a white woman. “There are peo­ple out there that are des­per­ate as hell, and I’m one of them,” she says, slid­ing up to the bar at the restau­rant in the town of Chero­kee where she works.

    Rainer’s hus­band was injured on a job site 25 years ago, she said, and denied dis­abil­i­ty ben­e­fits because of bureau­crat­ic hur­dles. She has sup­port­ed them both, but now her kid­neys are fail­ing and she fears that she won’t be able to work for the eight years until her hus­band can col­lect Social Secu­ri­ty.

    Rain­er recalled lin­ing up to try to get help with her util­i­ty bills when she lived in South Car­oli­na and becom­ing sus­pi­cious of the oth­ers in line, almost all of them African Amer­i­can.

    “What upset me more than any­thing was all them black babies were dressed up in the best clothes,” she said. “When their kids are wear­ing $150 ten­nis shoes, what do you think?”

    She sides with King when he talks about immi­gra­tion. “Why should we feed oth­ers when we can’t feed our­selves?” she asked.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 28, 2018, 9:00 pm
  28. @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:

    CNN

    How the alleged bomber was caught

    By Kara Scan­nell, Evan Perez and Shi­mon Proku­pecz

    Updat­ed 1615 GMT (0015 HKT) Octo­ber 29, 2018

    (CNN)DNA, fin­ger­prints and pings from a cell phone tow­er led author­i­ties to an auto parts store park­ing lot in south Flori­da where they arrest­ed a 56-year-old man Fri­day morn­ing. The arrest brought an end to a four-day nation­wide man­hunt for the alleged mail­er of over a dozen sus­pect­ed pipe bombs to promi­nent crit­ics of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.

    A key break in the case for inves­ti­ga­tors came Thurs­day, accord­ing to a crim­i­nal com­plaint and mul­ti­ple law enforce­ment offi­cials, when they traced five pack­ages to the Opa-Loc­ka pro­cess­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ter out­side of Mia­mi.

    That break allowed author­i­ties to nar­row their search, which — com­bined with DNA and fin­ger­print sam­ples left on a pack­age sent to Rep. Max­ine Waters and cell phone geolo­ca­tion infor­ma­tion — led to Cesar Say­oc, even as new devices were being found in New York and Cal­i­for­nia.

    FBI agents arrest­ed Say­oc at an Auto­Zone park­ing lot in Plan­ta­tion, Flori­da, about six miles west of Fort Laud­erdale, Fri­day morn­ing as he was near­ing his white van, which has been cov­ered with images polit­i­cal in nature, includ­ing images of notable lib­er­als such as Hillary Clin­ton and for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma.

    A “CNN Sucks” stick­er was also on the van. Two of the pack­ages with explo­sive devices were addressed to the CNN New York bureau.

    Oth­er tar­gets include for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden, and crit­ics of Don­ald Trump includ­ing Waters, actor-direc­tor Robert De Niro, and Sens. Cory Book­er and Kamala Har­ris. A sus­pi­cious pack­age sim­i­lar to the oth­ers this week was also found Fri­day in the San Fran­cis­co Bay area addressed to Demo­c­ra­t­ic bil­lion­aire donor Tom Stey­er.

    Fri­day’s arrest was the cul­mi­na­tion of a mul­ti-agency fed­er­al, state and local law enforce­ment and civil­ian effort that began Mon­day when the first sus­pect­ed pipe bomb sent to George Soros, a bil­lion­aire phil­an­thropist who has sup­port­ed Democ­rats, was inter­cept­ed.

    ...

    The inves­ti­ga­tion, led by the FBI and its Joint Ter­ror­ism Task Force, the NYPD, the US Postal Inspec­tors and oth­er fed­er­al agen­cies and local law enforce­ment, depend­ed heav­i­ly on the quick work of pri­vate secu­ri­ty and US postal work­ers who detect­ed bombs as they arrived at office build­ings and post offices.

    Author­i­ties were also aid­ed by mis­takes made by the alleged bomber who left traces of evi­dence inves­ti­ga­tors scram­bled to under­stand.

    As explo­sive devices were sent to the FBI foren­sics lab in Quan­ti­co, inves­ti­ga­tors there detect­ed DNA and a fin­ger­print found on the device intend­ed for Waters and, work­ing with local law enforce­ment, matched it late Thurs­day night to a sam­ple of Say­oc’s DNA that had been pre­vi­ous­ly col­lect­ed, Wray said.

    Traces of DNA col­lect­ed from two oth­er of the bombs appeared relat­ed to Say­oc, accord­ing to the com­plaint filed in fed­er­al court Fri­day.

    With his pos­si­ble iden­ti­ty known, inves­ti­ga­tors checked his cell phone num­ber against cell phone tow­ers in the vicin­i­ty to see if they matched the loca­tion and tim­ing for when the pack­ages orig­i­nat­ed, accord­ing to a law enforce­ment offi­cial.

    By Thurs­day night, agents and law enforce­ment offi­cers, con­fi­dent they had found the alleged bomber, were comb­ing through social media posts of Say­oc and began sur­veilling him either Thurs­day night or Fri­day morn­ing, the law enforce­ment offi­cial said.

    Clues appeared to con­firm their sus­pi­cions. Say­oc mis­spelled words on posts that matched some of those on the pack­ages. Some posts said, “Hilary” instead of “Hillary” Clin­ton, while anoth­er said “Shultz” instead of Schultz for Deb­bie Wasser­man Schultz.

    Inves­ti­ga­tors first went to the home of Say­oc’s moth­er in Aven­tu­ra, but were told he was­n’t there, accord­ing to a law enforce­ment offi­cial. As of Fri­day after­noon, author­i­ties were search­ing his moth­er’s res­i­den­tial com­plex.

    Mean­while, they detect­ed a ping iden­ti­fy­ing Say­oc’s cell phone. In the Auto­Zone park­ing lot, agents found the white van, where he appeared to be liv­ing.

    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.

    Although Say­oc is in cus­tody, FBI direc­tor Wray cau­tioned that there could be more poten­tial explo­sive devices sent that have yet to be detect­ed.

    “Today’s arrest does not mean we are all out of the woods,” Wray told reporters. “There may be more pack­ages in tran­sit now.”

    ———-

    “How the alleged bomber was caught” by Kara Scan­nell, Evan Perez and Shi­mon Proku­pecz; CNN; 10/29/2018

    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:

    The Mia­mi Her­ald

    Cesar Say­oc claims to be affil­i­at­ed with Semi­noles, but tribe dis­avows any con­nec­tion

    By Daniel Chang And David Smi­ley

    Octo­ber 26, 2018 03:29 PM
    Updat­ed Octo­ber 27, 2018 01:31 PM

    From the pro-Trump stick­ers on his white van to the pro­file infor­ma­tion on his Twit­ter account, Cesar Say­oc, the Aven­tu­ra man arrest­ed Fri­day for alleged­ly mail­ing pipe bombs to promi­nent Democ­rats, trum­pets his affil­i­a­tion to the Semi­nole Tribe of Flori­da.

    “Native Amer­i­cans for Trump” reads one stick­er of the Semi­nole flag post­ed on the white pas­sen­ger van that police towed from the Auto­Zone in Plan­ta­tion where Say­oc, 56, was arrest­ed.

    “Book­ing Agent / Sales / Mar­ket­ing / Pro­mo­tions / Project Mgr Live Events Semi­nole Hard Rock Live,” reads one of at least two Twit­ter pro­files asso­ci­at­ed with Say­oc.

    “Semi­nole Indi­ans: An Uncon­quered Tribe,” reads a slide-show frame post­ed on Oct. 12 to a Twit­ter account, @hardrock2016, that appears to belong to Say­oc and includes a pho­to him hold­ing up a sign of the Amer­i­can flag, with the let­ter­ing, “Wel­come Pres­i­dent Trump”.

    But the Semi­nole Tribe strong­ly denies that Say­oc has ever been a mem­ber of the promi­nent Native Amer­i­can group, which owns a glob­al busi­ness of casi­nos, restau­rants and hotels, includ­ing the Semi­nole Hard Rock Hotel and Casi­no near Hol­ly­wood. The Semi­nole enter­tain­ment empire gen­er­ates an esti­mat­ed annu­al oper­at­ing prof­it of $1.5 bil­lion, accord­ing to Forbes mag­a­zine.

    Tribe spokesman Gary Bit­ner, allud­ing to the many social media pro­files that appear to be asso­ci­at­ed with Say­oc, flat­ly reject­ed the asser­tion that Say­oc is affil­i­at­ed with the tribe.

    “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.”

    Say­oc, who claims to be a for­mer pro­fes­sion­al soc­cer play­er, wrestler and cage fight­er in a Twit­ter account pro­file, has lived in South Flori­da for decades, accord­ing to court fil­ings, prop­er­ty records and oth­er doc­u­ments.

    He was born in Brook­lyn in 1962, the son of a Fil­ipino immi­grant, and attend­ed North Mia­mi Beach High School, accord­ing to infor­ma­tion from ancestry.com, the geneal­o­gy com­pa­ny that tests the DNA of cus­tomers to reveal ances­tral roots.

    Say­oc has a crim­i­nal his­to­ry in Mia­mi-Dade and Broward coun­ties — includ­ing a 2002 charge of threat­en­ing to throw a bomb and charges of grand theft, bat­tery and pos­ses­sion with intent to sell a mus­cle-build­ing steroid. He grad­u­at­ed from North Mia­mi Beach High in 1980, accord­ing to year­book pho­tos. While at Bre­vard Col­lege, he belonged to the Catholic club.

    It’s not clear if Say­oc earned a degree at Bre­vard. But by 2013, he was man­ag­ing a road show for a male strip danc­ing com­pa­ny based in Ohio, accord­ing to a let­ter filed on Sayoc’s behalf in a Broward Coun­ty crim­i­nal case charg­ing him with grand theft and bat­tery.

    ...

    Those who knew Say­oc say he has no Semi­nole blood.

    Ron Lowy, a Mia­mi attor­ney, rep­re­sent­ed Say­oc when he was charged with threat­en­ing to bomb Flori­da Pow­er & Light over a pricey elec­tric bill in 2002. Lowy said his for­mer client is a mis­fit who cre­at­ed a “fan­ta­sy” iden­ti­ty in order to feel like he belonged.

    “He want­ed a back­ground,” Lowy said. “He want­ed to be liked by peo­ple so he cre­at­ed this sto­ry.”

    ———-

    “Cesar Say­oc claims to be affil­i­at­ed with Semi­noles, but tribe dis­avows any con­nec­tion” by Daniel Chang And David Smi­ley; The Mia­mi Her­ald; 10/26/2018

    “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:

    ...
    Those who knew Say­oc say he has no Semi­nole blood.

    Ron Lowy, a Mia­mi attor­ney, rep­re­sent­ed Say­oc when he was charged with threat­en­ing to bomb Flori­da Pow­er & Light over a pricey elec­tric bill in 2002. Lowy said his for­mer client is a mis­fit who cre­at­ed a “fan­ta­sy” iden­ti­ty in order to feel like he belonged.

    “He want­ed a back­ground,” Lowy said. “He want­ed to be liked by peo­ple so he cre­at­ed this sto­ry.”
    ...

    He’s also got an ancestry.com entry that lists him as the son of a Fil­ipino immi­grant:

    ...
    Say­oc, who claims to be a for­mer pro­fes­sion­al soc­cer play­er, wrestler and cage fight­er in a Twit­ter account pro­file, has lived in South Flori­da for decades, accord­ing to court fil­ings, prop­er­ty records and oth­er doc­u­ments.

    He was born in Brook­lyn in 1962, the son of a Fil­ipino immi­grant, and attend­ed North Mia­mi Beach High School, accord­ing to infor­ma­tion from ancestry.com, the geneal­o­gy com­pa­ny that tests the DNA of cus­tomers to reveal ances­tral roots.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    “Semi­nole Indi­ans: An Uncon­quered Tribe,” reads a slide-show frame post­ed on Oct. 12 to a Twit­ter account, @hardrock2016, that appears to belong to Say­oc and includes a pho­to him hold­ing up a sign of the Amer­i­can flag, with the let­ter­ing, “Wel­come Pres­i­dent Trump”.

    But the Semi­nole Tribe strong­ly denies that Say­oc has ever been a mem­ber of the promi­nent Native Amer­i­can group, which owns a glob­al busi­ness of casi­nos, restau­rants and hotels, includ­ing the Semi­nole Hard Rock Hotel and Casi­no near Hol­ly­wood. The Semi­nole enter­tain­ment empire gen­er­ates an esti­mat­ed annu­al oper­at­ing prof­it of $1.5 bil­lion, accord­ing to Forbes mag­a­zine.
    ...

    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:

    The Dai­ly Beast

    Mail Bomb Sus­pect Cesar Sayoc’s Rage Against Mom Drove Him to Trump, Lawyer Claims

    “He said ‘I hate you. I don’t want any­thing more to do with you.’”

    Tarp­ley Hitt
    10.28.18 12:21 AM ET

    MIAMI—Madeline Gia­rdiel­lo woke up from surgery Fri­day morn­ing to find out that her son, 56-year-old Cesar Say­oc, had just been arrest­ed by the FBI for alleged­ly mail­ing home­made explo­sives to 13 high-pro­file Democ­rats.

    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.

    That’s when Say­oc “drew the line,” Lowy said dur­ing an inter­view on Sat­ur­day. “He said ‘I hate you. I don’t want any­thing more to do with you.’”

    Sayoc’s estrange­ment from his fam­i­ly, Lowy said, was instru­men­tal in shap­ing him into the man who, accord­ing to pros­e­cu­tors, sent crude pipe bombs to crit­ics of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, includ­ing for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma, Hillary Clin­ton, Sens. Cory Book­er and Kamala Har­ris, bil­lion­aire George Soros and actor Robert De Niro.

    Say­oc, who was born in Brook­lyn but had lived in Flori­da for more than 30 years, had long strug­gled with men­tal ill­ness, the lawyer said. He sug­gest­ed psy­cho­log­i­cal issues were behind an an exten­sive crim­i­nal record that dat­ed to a 1991 charge of grand theft but also includ­ed arrests for an alleged bomb threat, pos­ses­sion of steroids and shoplift­ing.

    Until recent­ly, the Fil­ipino-Ital­ian event pro­mot­er had a nar­row set of inter­ests: body­build­ing, exot­ic danc­ing, and the Semi­nole tribe of Flori­da. In fact, he pre­sent­ed him­self as a mem­ber of the tribe, though a Semi­nole spokesper­son said there was “no evi­dence” that Say­oc had any rela­tion­ship with the nation or the casi­no it oper­ates.

    For years, Say­oc cob­bled togeth­er odd jobs and pas­times at the inter­sec­tion of his inter­ests. When Lowy first met him, Say­oc came to his office with a scrap­book under his arm that con­tained auto­graphed images of his favorite exot­ic dancers. His car was cov­ered in Native Amer­i­can mem­o­ra­bil­ia and his Face­book pages were filled with adver­tise­ments for male revues and dis­count cloth­ing.

    But by 2018, Sayoc’s obses­sions had shift­ed. The 56-year-old had reg­is­tered to vote as a Repub­li­can and moved into a white van plas­tered with pro-Trump, anti-Demo­c­rat decals, includ­ing an image of Hillary Clin­ton in the crosshair. The man­ag­er of a pizze­ria where he worked as a deliv­ery­man described him to the Dai­ly Beast as “anti-black, anti-gay, anti-Jews.”

    “Who is this per­son? This per­son did not exist three years ago,” said Lowy, who has known Say­oc since defend­ing him against a shoplift­ing charge in 2000. “Nev­er heard a racist word out of his mouth when I knew him.”

    In Lowy’s view, the trans­for­ma­tion of Say­oc had a lot to do with a fraught fam­i­ly dynam­ic.

    “If you want to know about cau­sa­tion,” the attor­ney said, “there are three rea­sons.

    “Num­ber one: He was iso­lat­ed from his fam­i­ly. Num­ber two: He hat­ed his moth­er for being a Democrat—this is a nice way to get back at her, don’t you think? And the third: He heard a voice call­ing his name, say­ing that there’s a war hap­pen­ing, that the Democ­rats are the ene­my, that the media is the ene­my, and that you are my sol­diers.”

    Trump, the lawyer observed, rep­re­sent­ed every­thing Sayoc’s own moth­er did not.

    Lowy met Gia­rdiel­lo in the 1990s, when a local cir­cuit judge referred him to her in a com­mer­cial suit involv­ing her make­up com­pa­ny. “It was such a plea­sure work­ing with her,” the attor­ney recalled. “She was so classy. There’s an air about her of such charis­ma, of such sophis­ti­ca­tion, you know you are deal­ing with a woman of depth.”

    After the suit set­tled, Lowy and Gia­rdiel­lo remained friends. The lawyer says Sayoc’s moth­er plays a major role in the wealthy, sub­ur­ban com­mu­ni­ty of Aven­tu­ra, where they both live.

    “She served on the Mar­ket­ing Coun­cil of Aven­tu­ra,” he said. “She was pres­i­dent of her con­do asso­ci­a­tion. And this is just a tiny exam­ple: Yes­ter­day, the Aven­tu­ra Police Chief went to the hos­pi­tal just to vis­it her, and to ask if there’s any­thing he can do for her and to express how bad­ly he feels about what’s hap­pened with her son. This is a woman of integri­ty, respon­si­bil­i­ty, com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice.”

    Say­oc, on the oth­er hand, wasn’t Lowy’s usu­al type of client. “I don’t rep­re­sent peo­ple in vans very fre­quent­ly,” the lawyer not­ed. Also, Lowy is an active Demo­c­rat. “I was a del­e­gate for Bill Clin­ton at the con­ven­tion,” he said. “I was on the rules com­mit­tee for the nation­al par­ty.”

    The attor­ney had no com­punc­tion about giv­ing his opin­ions on Say­oc’s pol­i­tics. While he has been very media-friend­ly, Lowy refused to give inter­views with Fox News. And in the hours after Sayoc’s arrest, when peo­ple dubbed him the “MAGA bomber,” Lowy called him by a dif­fer­ent nick­name: The Repub­li­can Bomber.

    “I don’t like MAGA bomber, hon­est­ly, because he was real­ly inspired by crazy Repub­li­cans,” Lowry said. “I want peo­ple to think of the word ‘Repub­li­can’ with ‘bomber.’”

    Still, Lowy admits that Say­oc’s polit­i­cal views cen­tered on Trump. “You can see how much he came to idol­ize Trump, if you look at his van,” he said. “Every sin­gle per­son Trump hat­ed became his ene­my.” The van’s license plate, a senior law enforce­ment offi­cial told the Dai­ly Beast, is actu­al­ly a nov­el­ty plate that shows Trump and Vice Pres­i­dent Pence wav­ing .

    Say­oc had been liv­ing in the van at the time of his arrest, which took place hours after he fin­ished a DJ shift a non­de­script West Palm Beach strip joint called Ultra. Author­i­ties believe that the white Dodge Ram was more than just Sayoc’s home, but the place where he alleged­ly built the explo­sive device—a rolling bomb fac­to­ry.

    A fin­ger­print on one of the pack­ages led fed­er­al agents to Say­oc, who was arrest­ed Fri­day morn­ing near the van short­ly after author­i­ties inter­cept­ed two more bombs, includ­ing one sent to for­mer Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence James Clap­per.

    ...

    ———-

    “Mail Bomb Sus­pect Cesar Sayoc’s Rage Against Mom Drove Him to Trump, Lawyer Claims” by Tarp­ley Hitt; The Dai­ly Beast; 10/28/2018

    “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:

    ...
    That’s when Say­oc “drew the line,” Lowy said dur­ing an inter­view on Sat­ur­day. “He said ‘I hate you. I don’t want any­thing more to do with you.’”

    Sayoc’s estrange­ment from his fam­i­ly, Lowy said, was instru­men­tal in shap­ing him into the man who, accord­ing to pros­e­cu­tors, sent crude pipe bombs to crit­ics of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, includ­ing for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma, Hillary Clin­ton, Sens. Cory Book­er and Kamala Har­ris, bil­lion­aire George Soros and actor Robert De Niro.

    Say­oc, who was born in Brook­lyn but had lived in Flori­da for more than 30 years, had long strug­gled with men­tal ill­ness, the lawyer said. He sug­gest­ed psy­cho­log­i­cal issues were behind an an exten­sive crim­i­nal record that dat­ed to a 1991 charge of grand theft but also includ­ed arrests for an alleged bomb threat, pos­ses­sion of steroids and shoplift­ing.
    ...

    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 met Gia­rdiel­lo in the 1990s, when a local cir­cuit judge referred him to her in a com­mer­cial suit involv­ing her make­up com­pa­ny. “It was such a plea­sure work­ing with her,” the attor­ney recalled. “She was so classy. There’s an air about her of such charis­ma, of such sophis­ti­ca­tion, you know you are deal­ing with a woman of depth.”

    After the suit set­tled, Lowy and Gia­rdiel­lo remained friends. The lawyer says Sayoc’s moth­er plays a major role in the wealthy, sub­ur­ban com­mu­ni­ty of Aven­tu­ra, where they both live.

    “She served on the Mar­ket­ing Coun­cil of Aven­tu­ra,” he said. “She was pres­i­dent of her con­do asso­ci­a­tion. And this is just a tiny exam­ple: Yes­ter­day, the Aven­tu­ra Police Chief went to the hos­pi­tal just to vis­it her, and to ask if there’s any­thing he can do for her and to express how bad­ly he feels about what’s hap­pened with her son. This is a woman of integri­ty, respon­si­bil­i­ty, com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice.”

    Say­oc, on the oth­er hand, wasn’t Lowy’s usu­al type of client. “I don’t rep­re­sent peo­ple in vans very fre­quent­ly,” the lawyer not­ed. Also, Lowy is an active Demo­c­rat. “I was a del­e­gate for Bill Clin­ton at the con­ven­tion,” he said. “I was on the rules com­mit­tee for the nation­al par­ty.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Until recent­ly, the Fil­ipino-Ital­ian event pro­mot­er had a nar­row set of inter­ests: body­build­ing, exot­ic danc­ing, and the Semi­nole tribe of Flori­da. In fact, he pre­sent­ed him­self as a mem­ber of the tribe, though a Semi­nole spokesper­son said there was “no evi­dence” that Say­oc had any rela­tion­ship with the nation or the casi­no it oper­ates.

    For years, Say­oc cob­bled togeth­er odd jobs and pas­times at the inter­sec­tion of his inter­ests. When Lowy first met him, Say­oc came to his office with a scrap­book under his arm that con­tained auto­graphed images of his favorite exot­ic dancers. His car was cov­ered in Native Amer­i­can mem­o­ra­bil­ia and his Face­book pages were filled with adver­tise­ments for male revues and dis­count cloth­ing.
    ...

    Amaz­ing­ly, author­i­ties appear to believe Say­oc actu­al­ly made all of these bombs in his van:

    ...
    Say­oc had been liv­ing in the van at the time of his arrest, which took place hours after he fin­ished a DJ shift a non­de­script West Palm Beach strip joint called Ultra. Author­i­ties believe that the white Dodge Ram was more than just Sayoc’s home, but the place where he alleged­ly built the explo­sive device—a rolling bomb fac­to­ry.

    ...

    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:

    ...
    But by 2018, Sayoc’s obses­sions had shift­ed. The 56-year-old had reg­is­tered to vote as a Repub­li­can and moved into a white van plas­tered with pro-Trump, anti-Demo­c­rat decals, includ­ing an image of Hillary Clin­ton in the crosshair. The man­ag­er of a pizze­ria where he worked as a deliv­ery­man described him to the Dai­ly Beast as “anti-black, anti-gay, anti-Jews.”

    “Who is this per­son? This per­son did not exist three years ago,” said Lowy, who has known Say­oc since defend­ing him against a shoplift­ing charge in 2000. “Nev­er heard a racist word out of his mouth when I knew him.”

    In Lowy’s view, the trans­for­ma­tion of Say­oc had a lot to do with a fraught fam­i­ly dynam­ic.

    “If you want to know about cau­sa­tion,” the attor­ney said, “there are three rea­sons.

    “Num­ber one: He was iso­lat­ed from his fam­i­ly. Num­ber two: He hat­ed his moth­er for being a Democrat—this is a nice way to get back at her, don’t you think? And the third: He heard a voice call­ing his name, say­ing that there’s a war hap­pen­ing, that the Democ­rats are the ene­my, that the media is the ene­my, and that you are my sol­diers.”

    Trump, the lawyer observed, rep­re­sent­ed every­thing Sayoc’s own moth­er did not.

    ...

    The attor­ney had no com­punc­tion about giv­ing his opin­ions on Say­oc’s pol­i­tics. While he has been very media-friend­ly, Lowy refused to give inter­views with Fox News. And in the hours after Sayoc’s arrest, when peo­ple dubbed him the “MAGA bomber,” Lowy called him by a dif­fer­ent nick­name: The Repub­li­can Bomber.

    “I don’t like MAGA bomber, hon­est­ly, because he was real­ly inspired by crazy Repub­li­cans,” Lowry said. “I want peo­ple to think of the word ‘Repub­li­can’ with ‘bomber.’”

    Still, Lowy admits that Say­oc’s polit­i­cal views cen­tered on Trump. “You can see how much he came to idol­ize Trump, if you look at his van,” he said. “Every sin­gle per­son Trump hat­ed became his ene­my.” The van’s license plate, a senior law enforce­ment offi­cial told the Dai­ly Beast, is actu­al­ly a nov­el­ty plate that shows Trump and Vice Pres­i­dent Pence wav­ing .
    ...

    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:

    Mia­mi New Times

    Ex-Mem­ber of Mur­der­ous Mia­mi Cult Leads Press-Bash­ing Chant at Tam­pa Trump Ral­ly

    Tim Elfrink | August 1, 2018 | 8:21am

    For a sec­ond, Don­ald Trump seemed to be back­ing off his vit­ri­olic attacks on the free press. After five jour­nal­ists were mas­sa­cred at the Annapo­lis Cap­i­tal Gazette, Trump briefly toned down his slurs. He even invit­ed New York Times pub­lish­er A.G. Sulzburg­er to the White House to clear the air. But it did­n’t last.

    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.

    The scene left many polit­i­cal watch­ers deeply shak­en, includ­ing Acos­ta:

    Just a sam­ple of the sad scene we faced at the Trump ral­ly in Tam­pa. I’m very wor­ried that the hos­til­i­ty whipped up by Trump and some in con­ser­v­a­tive media will result in some­body get­ting hurt. We should not treat our fel­low Amer­i­cans this way. The press is not the ene­my. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R— Jim Acos­ta (@Acosta) August 1, 2018

    But most nation­al press watch­ers did­n’t notice who was right at the cen­ter of that mob hurl­ing invec­tive at Acos­ta and his col­leagues: Yep, it was Michael the Black Man, AKA Mau­rice Symon­ette, a for­mer mem­ber of Miami’s mur­der­ous Yah­weh ben Yawheh cult who once faced charges of con­spir­ing in the group’s mur­ders.

    That’s him with his instant­ly rec­og­niz­able “Blacks for Trump” sign:

    .@Acosta is try­ing to do a stand-up at #trump­tam­pa and the crowd is boo­ing and chant­i­ng “CNN sucks” behind him. pic.twitter.com/XiULajB1Li— Emi­ly L. Mahoney (@mahoneysthename) July 31, 2018

    Symon­ette has been a main­stay at Flori­da Trump ral­lies and over the past year has popped up at oth­er Trump-linked events around the nation. Just last week, he flew to Ari­zona to film a video at the bor­der with dis­graced for­mer sher­iff Joe Arpaio. Trump’s staff reg­u­lar­ly gives Symon­ette front-and-cen­ter seats where he waves his black-and-white sign on nation­al tele­vi­sion.

    Here’s some back­ground on Symon­ette from New Times’ ear­li­er report­ing on him:

    He’s also a for­mer mem­ber of the mur­der­ous Yah­weh ben Yah­weh cult, which was led by the charis­mat­ic preach­er Hulon Mitchell Jr., who was charged by the feds in 1990 with con­spir­a­cy in killings that includ­ed a grue­some behead­ing in the Ever­glades.

    Michael, along with 15 oth­er Yah­weh fol­low­ers, was charged for alleged­ly con­spir­ing in two mur­ders; his broth­er, who was also in the cult, told jurors that Michael had helped beat one man who was lat­er killed and stuck a sharp­ened stick into anoth­er man’s eye­ball. But jurors found Michael (and six oth­er Yah­weh fol­low­ers) inno­cent. They sent Mitchell away for 20 years in the fed­er­al pen.

    In the years that fol­lowed, he changed his last name to Symon­ette, made a career as a musi­cian, start­ed a radio sta­tion in Mia­mi and then re-invent­ed him­self as Michael the Black Man, an anti-gay, anti-lib­er­al preach­er with a gold­en instinct for get­ting on TV at GOP events. He’s planned events with Rick San­to­rum and got­ten cable news play for bash­ing Oba­ma.

    Since 1997, he’s been charged with grand theft auto, car­ry­ing a weapon onto an air­plane and threat­en­ing a police offi­cer, but nev­er con­vict­ed in any of those cas­es.

    In oth­er words, he’s exact­ly the kind of guy you might not want to dri­ve into a blind rage at jour­nal­ists who are just try­ing to do their jobs. Yet there he was in Tam­pa, right in the mid­dle of the crowd scream­ing at Acos­ta — who, inci­den­tal­ly, took time to talk to the crowds who were so angry with him:

    After each live shot, @Acosta would walk down and polite­ly talk to the peo­ple who just heck­led him. He talked to one group for at least 15 min­utes. pic.twitter.com/J26nlxfD6k— Christo­pher Heath (@CHeathWFTV) August 1, 2018

    ...

    ———-

    “Ex-Mem­ber of Mur­der­ous Mia­mi Cult Leads Press-Bash­ing Chant at Tam­pa Trump Ral­ly” by Tim Elfrink; Mia­mi New Times; 08/01/2018

    “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:

    ...
    But most nation­al press watch­ers did­n’t notice who was right at the cen­ter of that mob hurl­ing invec­tive at Acos­ta and his col­leagues: Yep, it was Michael the Black Man, AKA Mau­rice Symon­ette, a for­mer mem­ber of Miami’s mur­der­ous Yah­weh ben Yawheh cult who once faced charges of con­spir­ing in the group’s mur­ders.

    ...

    Symon­ette has been a main­stay at Flori­da Trump ral­lies and over the past year has popped up at oth­er Trump-linked events around the nation. Just last week, he flew to Ari­zona to film a video at the bor­der with dis­graced for­mer sher­iff Joe Arpaio. Trump’s staff reg­u­lar­ly gives Symon­ette front-and-cen­ter seats where he waves his black-and-white sign on nation­al tele­vi­sion.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 29, 2018, 8:00 pm
  29. @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?

    Posted by Dennis | October 29, 2018, 11:39 pm
  30. @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:

    Mia­mi New Times

    Ex-Cult Mem­ber Behind “Blacks for Trump” Is Bank­rupt, So Who’s Pay­ing for His Trump Ral­ly Trips?

    Tim Elfrink | August 8, 2018 | 1:09pm

    At Pres­i­dent Trump’s ral­ly in Tam­pa last week, a famil­iar face made it back in the nation­al news. Mau­rice Symon­ette, also known as Michael the Black Man, was front and cen­ter in a crowd hurl­ing invec­tive at CNN reporter Jim Acos­ta, wav­ing a “Blacks for Trump” sign. Symon­ette has been a reg­u­lar at Trump ral­lies all over Flori­da and as far away as Ari­zona. Just last month, he popped up at the U.S. bor­der to appear in a video with dis­graced sher­iff-turned-par­doned-Sen­ate-can­di­date Joe Arpaio.

    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.

    It seems unlike­ly Symon­ette is fronting the cash for his trav­el him­self because he filed for bank­rupt­cy this past May. In fed­er­al court records, he reports that he’s unem­ployed, gen­er­ates no income, and has $0 in the bank. He also says four banks have staked claims on $2.9 mil­lion worth of prop­er­ty around Dade Coun­ty.

    So how is he get­ting to Ari­zona and Tam­pa to stand behind Trump on nation­al TV? Reached on his cell phone, Symon­ette declined to dis­cuss his group’s financ­ing. “You guys are hor­ri­ble racists,” he said. “You are law­break­ers and you’re mean... God is going to pun­ish you hor­ri­bly.”

    Through­out the ’80s, Symon­ette — then known as Mau­rice Wood­side — was a devot­ed fol­low­er of Yah­weh ben Yah­weh, a charis­mat­ic preach­er who wore white robes and called him­self the Mes­si­ah. Fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors lat­er accused Yah­weh, whose real name was Hulon Mitchell Jr., of order­ing his fol­low­ers to mur­der at least 14 peo­ple, includ­ing ran­dom white vagrants who were mas­sa­cred as an ini­ti­a­tion rite.

    Symon­ette was charged in fed­er­al court along with Mitchell and 15 oth­er fol­low­ers in 1990; while the cult’s leader was lat­er con­vict­ed of 14 charges of mur­der con­spir­a­cy and served near­ly two decades in prison, Symon­ette and six oth­er cult mem­bers were acquit­ted.

    In the decades since, Symon­ette has been charged with crimes includ­ing grand theft auto, car­ry­ing a weapon onto an air­plane, and threat­en­ing a police offi­cer, but has nev­er been con­vict­ed. (He does have a pend­ing case on a munic­i­pal ordi­nance charge in Hol­ly­wood after police showed up to a real­ly loud par­ty he threw.)

    Since Trump’s elec­tion, Symon­ette has carved out an unlike­ly new niche as one of Pres­i­dent Trump’s most vis­i­ble African-Amer­i­can sup­port­ers. He has a knack for get­ting prime place­ment direct­ly behind Trump and has hand­ed out hun­dreds of his “Blacks for Trump” signs. They adver­tise his web­site, which is full of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about Chero­kees run­ning the U.S. bank­ing sys­tem. (Real­ly.)

    Symon­ette was even fea­tured at a Mia­mi Trump ral­ly that pros­e­cu­tors lat­er alleged had been fund­ed by Russ­ian nation­als look­ing to dis­rupt the elec­tion.

    Symon­ette filed for Chap­ter 7 bank­rupt­cy on May 16, list­ing Wash­ing­ton Mutu­al, Home­com­ings Finan­cial, HSBC Bank, and Indy­mac Bank as his cred­i­tors; each insti­tu­tion laid claim to one of four hous­es. Three are in North Mia­mi-Dade Coun­ty, and one is near Kendall.

    In court docs, his only list­ed assets are cloth­ing, watch­es, var­i­ous house­hold items, and a pool table. He does say that his live-in girl­friend, whom he does­n’t iden­ti­fy by name, pro­vides him with $2,000 per month.

    Could that mon­ey from his sig­nif­i­cant oth­er cov­er Blacks for Trump’s var­i­ous trips around the coun­try to sup­port the pres­i­dent on TV? Symon­ette would­n’t dis­cuss that with a New Times reporter.

    ...

    In his bank­rupt­cy case, he’s repeat­ed those alle­ga­tions about the bank­ing sys­tem being crooked to Judge Lau­rel M. Isi­coff. He’s also repeat­ed­ly sought to change hear­ings that over­lapped with Trump events. Symon­ette sug­gest­ed the sched­ul­ing con­flicts are a sin­is­ter plot to keep him away from the spot­light at Trump ral­lies.

    “Cred­i­tors know that I have a ral­ly in Ari­zona on July 25 and delib­er­ate­ly set the hear­ing on that date to cause me and my musi­cal band to miss the per­for­mance and the ral­ly with the bus we rent­ed,” he wrote in a motion filed the same morn­ing as the Phoenix ral­ly. “The cred­i­tors over­heard that at the house we are dis­put­ing... and set that hear­ing on the same date just to harm me.”

    That motion was denied, as was anoth­er he filed on July 30, just before Trump’s Tam­pa ral­ly. “As founder of Blacks for Trump, (I) have rent­ed vans to go to Trump’s ral­ly. We need to make the coun­try aware how the banks (FOREIGNERS FROM THE EAST) are ille­gal­ly tak­ing WHITE AND BLACK PEOPLE’S hous­es away.”

    ———-

    “Ex-Cult Mem­ber Behind “Blacks for Trump” Is Bank­rupt, So Who’s Pay­ing for His Trump Ral­ly Trips?” by Tim Elfrink; Mia­mi New Times; 08/08/2018

    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:

    ...
    It seems unlike­ly Symon­ette is fronting the cash for his trav­el him­self because he filed for bank­rupt­cy this past May. In fed­er­al court records, he reports that he’s unem­ployed, gen­er­ates no income, and has $0 in the bank. He also says four banks have staked claims on $2.9 mil­lion worth of prop­er­ty around Dade Coun­ty.

    So how is he get­ting to Ari­zona and Tam­pa to stand behind Trump on nation­al TV? Reached on his cell phone, Symon­ette declined to dis­cuss his group’s financ­ing. “You guys are hor­ri­ble racists,” he said. “You are law­break­ers and you’re mean... God is going to pun­ish you hor­ri­bly.

    ...

    Symon­ette filed for Chap­ter 7 bank­rupt­cy on May 16, list­ing Wash­ing­ton Mutu­al, Home­com­ings Finan­cial, HSBC Bank, and Indy­mac Bank as his cred­i­tors; each insti­tu­tion laid claim to one of four hous­es. Three are in North Mia­mi-Dade Coun­ty, and one is near Kendall.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    In court docs, his only list­ed assets are cloth­ing, watch­es, var­i­ous house­hold items, and a pool table. He does say that his live-in girl­friend, whom he does­n’t iden­ti­fy by name, pro­vides him with $2,000 per month.

    Could that mon­ey from his sig­nif­i­cant oth­er cov­er Blacks for Trump’s var­i­ous trips around the coun­try to sup­port the pres­i­dent on TV? Symon­ette would­n’t dis­cuss that with a New Times> reporter.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    “Cred­i­tors know that I have a ral­ly in Ari­zona on July 25 and delib­er­ate­ly set the hear­ing on that date to cause me and my musi­cal band to miss the per­for­mance and the ral­ly with the bus we rent­ed,” he wrote in a motion filed the same morn­ing as the Phoenix ral­ly. “The cred­i­tors over­heard that at the house we are dis­put­ing... and set that hear­ing on the same date just to harm me.”

    That motion was denied, as was anoth­er he filed on July 30, just before Trump’s Tam­pa ral­ly. “As founder of Blacks for Trump, (I) have rent­ed vans to go to Trump’s ral­ly. We need to make the coun­try aware how the banks (FOREIGNERS FROM THE EAST) are ille­gal­ly tak­ing WHITE AND BLACK PEOPLE’S hous­es away.”
    ...

    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:

    Mia­mi New Times

    “Blacks for Trump” Founder Banned From Bank­rupt­cy Court for Abus­ing Sys­tem

    Tim Elfrink | Sep­tem­ber 25, 2018 | 9:57am

    Mau­rice Symon­ette has become a polit­i­cal celebri­ty thanks to Don­ald Trump’s staff, which has repeat­ed­ly giv­en the ex-mem­ber of Miami’s dead­ly Yah­weh ben Yah­weh cult prime seats behind the pres­i­dent at nation­al­ly tele­vised ral­lies to show off his “Blacks for Trump” signs. But Symon­ette recent­ly told a bank­rupt­cy court that he’s dead broke, rais­ing the ques­tion of who’s been pay­ing for his recent trips to ral­lies from Ari­zona to Tam­pa.

    Now a fed­er­al judge has banned one of Trump’s most vis­i­ble black sup­port­ers from bank­rupt­cy court for five years and accused him of repeat­ed­ly abus­ing the sys­tem.

    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.

    ...

    Symon­ette, who did­n’t return a call to his cell phone Mon­day, had argued in court that he was the vic­tim of racist abuse and that banks were pur­pose­ly sched­ul­ing meet­ings dur­ing Trump ral­lies so he could­n’t attend. He also asked Isi­coff to recuse her­self, accus­ing her of racism — a charge the judge flat-out denied in her rul­ing.

    Isi­cof­f’s order is just the lat­est bizarre chap­ter in the sto­ry of Symon­ette, also known as “Michael the Black Man,” who beat charges in the ear­ly ’90s that he par­tic­i­pat­ed in Yah­weh ben Yah­we­h’s bru­tal cult killings before trans­form­ing him­self into a local anti-Oba­ma activist.

    Trump then helped cat­a­pult him onto a nation­al stage, where he used his promi­nent place­ment at ral­lies to show off signs and T‑shirts direct­ing peo­ple to his tru­ly insane web­site, which accus­es Chero­kees of secret­ly run­ning Amer­i­ca’s bank­ing sys­tem and alleges an FDR-cre­at­ed secret pro­gram is sab­o­tag­ing con­ser­v­a­tives.

    As he trav­eled cross-coun­try to ral­lies, though, Symon­ette strug­gled finan­cial­ly in South Flori­da. He filed for bank­rupt­cy in May and report­ed hav­ing no income and zero dol­lars in the bank; he also said four banks had staked claims to $2.9 mil­lion worth of prop­er­ty around Mia­mi. In ram­bling court fil­ings, Symon­ette accused police, banks, and court offi­cials of con­spir­ing against him and tar­get­ing him for his Trump activism.

    Isi­coff, though, says the bank­rupt­cy fil­ing was actu­al­ly just the lat­est in a long series of bogus court actions by the Blacks for Trump founder. In fact, the judge found that Symon­ette had filed for bank­rupt­cy eight times since 1995, includ­ing three times since 2015; he’d also been list­ed as an own­er or ten­ant in prop­er­ty involved in two oth­er recent bank­rupt­cy fil­ings.

    Every one of those cas­es were quick­ly dis­missed, Isi­coff found, because Symon­ette “nev­er per­formed his oblig­a­tions as a debtor in any of his bank­rupt­cies.” When the judge asked him why, he told her that “once he was evict­ed from what­ev­er prop­er­ty he was occu­py­ing at the time of each bank­rupt­cy, there was no point con­tin­u­ing.”

    “In oth­er words, the Debtor con­ced­ed that he filed each bank­rupt­cy for the pur­pose of invok­ing the auto­mat­ic stay,” which tem­porar­i­ly stopped evic­tion pro­ceed­ings, Isi­coff found.

    In a response filed August 30, Symon­ette argued that his lat­est bank­rupt­cy was legit­i­mate and that he should­n’t be banned from court for five years because he’d repeat­ed­ly been racial­ly abused. One bank offi­cial, he claimed, said, “I don’t care about this bank­rupt­cy — me and the banks are going to get you black boys out.”

    He also wrote to Isi­coff that “your [sic] are a racist and I demand that you recuse your­self” before con­clud­ing his argu­ment by urg­ing the judge to “stop these peo­ple from call­ing us lit­tle Black boys and N**** with no right to stay in their White CANAANITE neigh­bor­hoods. CANAANITES are total­ly dif­fer­ent from our broth­er the White Gen­tiles. Thank God For Pres­i­dent Trump.”

    Isi­coff was not swayed. “[Symon­ette] out­lines some seri­ous alle­ga­tions regard­ing racist com­ments and actions, which, if true, are repul­sive and dis­turb­ing,” she writes. “But... he was giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to prove his alle­ga­tions, and in each instance he failed to do so.”

    She also found his claims of bias lack­ing: “[He] argues... that, because I have deter­mined that he has abused the bank­rupt­cy process and that it is appro­pri­ate to dis­miss his bank­rupt­cy case with a lengthy prej­u­dice peri­od, I am a racist, and that I must, there­fore, recuse myself,” she writes. “[He] has not cit­ed any oth­er rea­son for me to recuse myself.”

    In her final order, Isi­coff dis­missed Symon­et­te’s bank­rupt­cy claim and ruled that he “may not file bank­rupt­cy in any dis­trict in the Unit­ed States for a peri­od of five years from the date of this order.”

    ———-

    ““Blacks for Trump” Founder Banned From Bank­rupt­cy Court for Abus­ing Sys­tem” by Tim Elfrink; Mia­mi New Times; 09/25/2018

    “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:

    ...
    As he trav­eled cross-coun­try to ral­lies, though, Symon­ette strug­gled finan­cial­ly in South Flori­da. He filed for bank­rupt­cy in May and report­ed hav­ing no income and zero dol­lars in the bank; he also said four banks had staked claims to $2.9 mil­lion worth of prop­er­ty around Mia­mi. In ram­bling court fil­ings, Symon­ette accused police, banks, and court offi­cials of con­spir­ing against him and tar­get­ing him for his Trump activism.

    Isi­coff, though, says the bank­rupt­cy fil­ing was actu­al­ly just the lat­est in a long series of bogus court actions by the Blacks for Trump founder. In fact, the judge found that Symon­ette had filed for bank­rupt­cy eight times since 1995, includ­ing three times since 2015; he’d also been list­ed as an own­er or ten­ant in prop­er­ty involved in two oth­er recent bank­rupt­cy fil­ings.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Trump then helped cat­a­pult him onto a nation­al stage, where he used his promi­nent place­ment at ral­lies to show off signs and T‑shirts direct­ing peo­ple to his tru­ly insane web­site, which accus­es Chero­kees of secret­ly run­ning Amer­i­ca’s bank­ing sys­tem and alleges an FDR-cre­at­ed secret pro­gram is sab­o­tag­ing con­ser­v­a­tives.
    ...

    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:

    Yahoo News

    Blacks for Trump guy has some deeply weird views about Chero­kees, Masons and Oba­ma

    Michael Walsh
    August 23, 2017

    Any­one watch­ing Pres­i­dent Trump’s speech in Phoenix Tues­day night couldn’t miss the man con­spic­u­ous­ly seat­ed behind the podi­um hold­ing a “Blacks for Trump” sign and wear­ing a T‑shirt that reads “Trump & Repub­li­cans are not racist.”

    Michael Symon­ette, who goes by “Michael the Black Man” and some­times Mau­rice Symon­ette, is a fringe polit­i­cal fig­ure in Flori­da and has become a famil­iar face at con­ser­v­a­tive ral­lies and Trump events around Mia­mi. He was even seen march­ing with a group hold­ing “Blacks for Trump” signs through Times Square on elec­tion night last year.

    Symonette’s con­spic­u­ous place­ment behind Trump’s podi­um at many ral­lies appears to be an optics exer­cise for an admin­is­tra­tion that’s been plagued with accu­sa­tions of racism. Even a cur­so­ry glance at this supporter’s his­to­ry is enough to raise ques­tions about his prox­im­i­ty to the com­man­der in chief.

    ...

    For starters, his trade­mark T‑shirt lists a web­site Gods2.com, which redi­rects view­ers to honestfact.com, a page teem­ing with out­landish con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, com­pared to which Alex Jones is a voice of calm rea­son. He thinks the Chero­kee Indi­ans were “the real KKK slave mas­ters” and that Hillary Clin­ton is secret­ly plot­ting with ISIS to kill all black and white women in Amer­i­ca.

    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.”

    The web­site has a long list of most­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble head­lines like “ROCKERFELLER IS NIMROD KING OF THE CANAANITES & SAUD THE KING OF THE ISHMAELITES MASONIC ILLUMINATI TRILATERALIST BIG BANKS KKK.”

    ———-

    “Blacks for Trump guy has some deeply weird views about Chero­kees, Masons and Oba­ma” by Michael Walsh; Yahoo News; 08/23/2017

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 30, 2018, 3:05 pm
  31. @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.

    Posted by Dennis | October 30, 2018, 7:59 pm
  32. @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 Mia­mi New Times

    Yah­weh ben Yah­weh is back

    Tim Elfrink | June 9, 2011 | 4:00am

    In hip-hop years, Sam Fer­gu­son was geri­atric. True, on that molasses-sticky August after­noon in 2009 as he whis­tled north on Flori­da’s Turn­pike, he was still three months shy of his 48th birth­day. But years in the rap busi­ness are like time in a coal mine, espe­cial­ly when you came out of Car­ol City’s drug-rid­den ’80s scene.

    “P Man Sam,” as every­body knew him, had out­lived the thrill-ride highs of sign­ing rap­pers such as Young & Rest­less and Dis­tin­guished Gen­tle­men to major-label deals. And he had out­run felony charges for coke, guns, and assault.

    His tight-cropped hair was thin­ning at the tem­ples, but his wide, white-toothed smile and friend­ly, deep-set eyes sub­tract­ed years. He knew he was lucky to be around.

    In fact, his luck seemed to be improv­ing thanks to a star­tling rebirth as a jour­nal­ist. Ten months ear­li­er, Fer­gu­son had scooped the hip-hop world by per­suad­ing Mia­mi giant Rick Ross to admit in a mag­a­zine piece that he’d once worked as a Flori­da prison guard. (An embar­rass­ing rev­e­la­tion con­sid­er­ing his image as a street-hard­ened drug deal­er.)

    The scoop earned Fer­gu­son his own pro­file in Hip Hop Week­ly as “The Man Behind the Admis­sion.”

    It also gar­nered threats: “Fer­gu­son is a liar. He’s an infor­mant, he’s a rat, he’s a bitch. Get at me in the streets, nig­ga — you know how we play. This shit is about to get deep­er than rap,” Ross blus­tered.

    All that press had bought him a new nation­al gig too: Mia­mi pres­i­dent of Don Diva Mag­a­zine, a well-read hip-hop month­ly.

    Fer­gu­son was so focused on his new career that he like­ly did­n’t even notice when a black-tint­ed car with clear tail­lights roared up to the pas­sen­ger side of his bur­gundy sedan near the Grif­fin Road exit. It slowed to match his speed.

    The dri­ver’s win­dow slid down, and a steely gun bar­rel popped out. Before Fer­gu­son could react, bul­lets pep­pered his car, pierc­ing the shat­ter-proof glass and thud­ding into his body.

    P Man Sam slumped over the wheel. His car slammed into the medi­an, spun across the fast lane, and skid­ded to a halt.

    By the time an ambu­lance had weaved through the backed-up traf­fic, Fer­gu­son was dead.

    That was just before 2 p.m. With­in hours, the Inter­net buzzed with spec­u­la­tion: Had Ross ordered a revenge hit? Or had anoth­er rap­per? Did Fer­gu­son’s rough past final­ly catch up with him?

    But as detec­tives fol­lowed those labyrinthine clues, they instead dis­cov­ered ves­tiges of a vio­lent cult thought long dead: that of race-bait­ing ghet­to sav­ior Yah­weh ben Yah­weh, who 20 years ear­li­er had been con­vict­ed of con­spir­ing to mur­der 14 peo­ple.

    This past Feb­ru­ary, pros­e­cu­tors charged Adol­phus Symon­ette, who as a child was raised in Yah­we­h’s Tem­ple of Love. He had begun run­ning a crim­i­nal enter­prise that includ­ed fraud, kid­nap­ping, and Fer­gu­son’s mur­der.

    But the waif-thin 28-year-old, who had vir­tu­al­ly no crim­i­nal record before the indict­ment, says he did­n’t do it. The true crim­i­nal, he con­tends, is his charis­mat­ic uncle, Mau­rice, a fiery con­ser­v­a­tive activist bet­ter known as Michael the Black Man who was accused of two grue­some Yah­weh mur­ders in the ’90s and has since been charged with — but nev­er con­vict­ed of — four oth­er felonies while start­ing his own bizarre reli­gious enter­prise.

    “Adol­phus is just telling you what he thinks will get him out of prison,” Mau­rice responds to his nephew’s claims.

    Indeed there’s no direct evi­dence tying the uncle to any of the crimes. But smoke­screen or not, Adol­phus Symon­et­te’s back­ground as well as his defense throw back the cur­tain on a fright­en­ing real­i­ty: the strange, bloody lega­cy of the late Yah­weh ben Yah­weh lives on in the Mag­ic City.

    Mau­rice Wood­side was 21 years old when he first met fiery preach­er Hulon Mitchell Jr. around 1980. Mau­rice’s younger broth­er Ricar­do had already joined Mitchel­l’s flock. “He got me by just walk­ing up and say­ing, ‘All white peo­ple are the Dev­il,’?” says Mau­rice. “I was a real mil­i­tant race war­rior right then, so I said, ‘Whoa! Yeah, that’s right!’?”

    Over the next decade, Mitchell would trans­form from Afro-wear­ing black mil­i­tant to mur­der­ous, robe-clad cult leader Yah­weh ben Yah­weh. The Okla­homan would demand his ene­mies heads be dis­played on spikes and even­tu­al­ly would be sen­tenced to 20 years in the fed­er­al pen for con­spir­ing in mur­ders that includ­ed a grue­some behead­ing.

    Ricar­do and Mau­rice Wood­side would play a big role in the rise and fall of the cult. The broth­ers grew up in a tight Car­ol City fam­i­ly, raised by their moth­er, John­nie Sim­mons. Mau­rice says his father was Al Symon­ette, an Over­town archi­tect who once owned a his­toric club called Knight Beat that host­ed every­one from Aretha Franklin to B.B. King. (Mau­rice also claims his father is relat­ed to Sir Roland Symon­ette, the inde­pen­dent Bahamas’ first prime min­is­ter, whose face now graces the island’s $50 note.)

    Al Symon­ette was­n’t around much, but he passed on a love of R&B and jazz. Mau­rice and Ricar­do, who is two years younger and has a dif­fer­ent father, began singing togeth­er as kids and lat­er formed a group called the Cool Dudes. They were “very, very close,” Ricar­do would lat­er tes­ti­fy.

    “We were very involved with each oth­er and kept each oth­er laugh­ing all the time,” he said in court. “In our neigh­bor­hood, [my moth­er] was like the big sis­ter... She took all the kids to the beach.”

    But by the time Mau­rice hit his late teens, life in racial­ly charged Mia­mi was weigh­ing on him. Mariel-era Cuban arrivals were chang­ing the city’s com­plex­ion, and race riots wracked its street cor­ners. Although he was raised Chris­t­ian, he start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with Bud­dhism and Islam. After watch­ing the film based on Alex Haley’s book Roots, he migrat­ed to Black Pan­ther-style mil­i­tan­cy.

    “I was shocked and I was upset, so I became a war­rior against the whites,” Mau­rice says. “I went insane.” Ricar­do passed through a sim­i­lar rad­i­cal­iza­tion.

    They were exact­ly the kind of dis­il­lu­sioned, angry, young black men Mitchell was look­ing for. Born in 1935 in small, seg­re­gat­ed Enid, Okla­homa, the future cult leader was the old­est of 15 kids fathered by a Pen­te­costal preach­er. A bril­liant ora­tor, the younger Mitchell had a fiery pres­ence and mes­mer­iz­ing blue eyes. He earned a mas­ter’s degree in eco­nom­ics in Atlanta before rein­vent­ing him­self, first as a Mus­lim, then as a Chris­t­ian preach­er, and then as a black activist named “Broth­er Love.”

    When he land­ed in black Mia­mi in the late ’70s, many cit­i­zens wel­comed him as a Mal­colm X‑style fight­er. “He was a bright guy, and a lot of peo­ple thought he could help turn these neigh­bor­hoods around,” recalls Trudy Novic­ki, an attor­ney who lat­er pros­e­cut­ed him.

    In 1982, the broth­ers fell under Mitchel­l’s spell and moved into his for­ti­fied Lib­er­ty City head­quar­ters; six months lat­er, their moth­er and two oth­er sib­lings joined them. Soon a half-broth­er named Ruben also joined, bring­ing along a beau­ti­ful Bahami­an wife and a baby boy named Adol­phus. Yah­weh renamed the child “Solomon Israel.”

    From the out­side, the group seemed good for the neigh­bor­hoods where they set­tled. Fol­low­ers helped Yah­weh ren­o­vate dilap­i­dat­ed homes, open gro­cery stores, and start clin­ics. But Mitchell changed. He pro­claimed him­self the Mes­si­ah and gath­ered a “Cir­cle of 10” — a mus­cled group of fol­low­ers armed with six-foot wood­en “staffs of life” that were used to beat dis­si­dents. He began con­trol­ling every aspect of his devo­tees’ lives.

    Inside the Tem­ple of Love, wor­ship­pers slept on hard beds with no mat­tress­es and were often lim­it­ed to one dai­ly meal of rice, beans, and water; women “shared” hus­bands, who could have sex only in a com­mu­nal “con­ju­gal room” with Yah­we­h’s per­mis­sion; they all worked 18-hour days for no pay in the cult’s print­ing shops, stores, and offices. “You had to ded­i­cate your life total­ly to Yah­weh,” Ricar­do lat­er tes­ti­fied.

    Begin­ning as ear­ly as 1981, for a select group called his “Death Angels,” that ded­i­ca­tion includ­ed tor­ture and mur­der. A fol­low­er named Aston Green who argued with Yah­weh was beat­en to a bloody pulp until semi­con­scious and then dri­ven into the Ever­glades and slow­ly decap­i­tat­ed with a dull machete.

    Two years lat­er, a karate champ from Louisiana named Leonard Dupree was cracked over the head with a tire iron, kicked in the groin, and gored through the eyes with a sharp­ened stick.

    White drifters were reg­u­lar­ly killed as an ini­ti­a­tion rite and their ears giv­en to Yah­weh as tro­phies, wit­ness­es would lat­er tes­ti­fy.

    The Mia­mi Her­ald, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Yah­weh cov­er­age, in the mid-’80s began chron­i­cling the cult’s links to the mur­ders. But it was the Wood­side broth­ers’ falling-out — as well as Mau­rice’s alleged role in the killings — that ulti­mate­ly helped destroy the sect.

    The broth­ers’ feud appar­ent­ly began in 1985, when their moth­er was diag­nosed with can­cer. Yah­weh refused to let her seek med­ical help, pros­e­cu­tors lat­er said, instead pre­scrib­ing “veg­eta­bles, nuts, and herbs” and his per­son­al prayers. With­out chemother­a­py, she suf­fered an ago­niz­ing, pro­tract­ed death.

    Ricar­do was hor­ri­fied. He left the cult for good after her funer­al.

    Mau­rice kept the faith.

    Before he picks up the phone on the oth­er side of a smudged Plex­i­glas win­dow spi­der­webbed with key-scrawled graf­fi­ti, Adol­phus Symon­ette care­ful­ly wipes the ear­piece and mouth­piece with a tis­sue. He has del­i­cate, almost fem­i­nine almond eyes and frizzy hair grown long into a pony­tail. In the musty con­fines of the 12-sto­ry, con­crete Palm Beach Coun­ty Jail, he artic­u­late­ly unspools an almost unbe­liev­able con­spir­a­cy that he con­tends land­ed him here.

    “All this goes right back to Mau­rice,” Adol­phus says, sad­ly shak­ing his head. “I nev­er should have trust­ed my uncle.”

    He nev­er want­ed to have any­thing to do with the man his mom warned was a “con man and a snake,” he says. But the two have some­thing in com­mon: They’re among the few Miami­ans who fond­ly remem­ber Yah­weh ben Yah­we­h’s Tem­ple of Love.

    Grant­ed, Adol­phus was just a baby when he moved in. His mem­o­ries are most­ly fuzzy: “feast days” of huge spreads of food with music, white robes, and Bible class­es.

    But the three or four years Adol­phus spent at the tem­ple were about the only time his fam­i­ly stayed togeth­er. His dad, Ruben, has a his­to­ry of drug prob­lems and a lengthy felony arrest sheet. His mom, Lav­erne, nev­er secured legal papers to live in the Unit­ed States and suf­fered men­tal health prob­lems to boot.

    Life under Yah­we­h’s strict con­trol actu­al­ly helped his par­ents, Adol­phus says. After Yah­we­h’s arrest, when Adol­phus was 8 years old, the fam­i­ly left the tem­ple and his mom and dad sep­a­rat­ed. Adol­phus went to live with his grand­moth­er, Sarah, who raised him and two of his broth­ers, Rufie and Alex, in Lib­er­ty City.

    As a kid, Adol­phus was so slight — and so fond of wear­ing a flop­py blue ski cap — that every­one began call­ing him “Smurf.” The name sticks to this day. “Smurf was always the smart kid, the one who looked out for the rest of us,” says Rufie, who’s one year younger. “He’s a small guy, so he could­n’t real­ly be out there on the streets. He had to use his brain.”

    He was smart enough to get into Design & Archi­tec­ture Senior High in the Design Dis­trict — one of the nation’s top high schools, accord­ing to US News & World Report — where he learned draft­ing and tech­ni­cal draw­ing. While a lot of kids on his block spent nights play­ing bas­ket­ball, Adol­phus was a book­worm.

    “He was kind of a pret­ty boy, this don’t-want-to-get-his-nails-dirty type of dude,” says Amber Green, his best friend in high school who is now a mod­el in Tam­pa. “He came from a real­ly tough sit­u­a­tion, but he respect­ed women, he respect­ed oth­er peo­ple.”

    Before Adol­phus’s junior year, a school cop caught him with pot. Around the same time, his mom moved back to Mia­mi with a well-off boyfriend. They decid­ed he’d ben­e­fit from a stint at Bay Point, a dis­ci­pli­nary school.

    After six months there, he moved to Krop Senior High and began liv­ing with his mom. Soon Uncle Mau­rice called with an offer. If Adol­phus came to his office in North Mia­mi a few times a week, he would sign off on his work papers, a require­ment of his pro­ba­tion for the mar­i­jua­na charge.

    Adol­phus had run into his uncle on and off over the years, but they had nev­er been close. “Adol­phus respect­ed Mau­rice,” Green says. “But I have great judg­ment in peo­ple, and I always warned him to stay away from that guy.”

    She was­n’t the only one. Adol­phus’s mom pro­claimed that if she caught him with Mau­rice, she’d kick him out of the fam­i­ly home.

    But his uncle’s offer was too good to pass up. Adol­phus moved in a few months before grad­u­at­ing from high school.

    Mau­rice Wood­side — now 51 years old, with a dark beard and design­er sun­glass­es — grins and snakes his head side to side to Mar­vin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” He sits at a key­board in a flu­o­res­cent-lit room. His hair is frost­ed on top and braid­ed in the back, and he wears a bright, bag­gy polo shirt. Then he turns off the music. “It’s trou­ble for the Democ­rats, who are the Con­fed­er­ate Rebels,” he says, his cadence ris­ing like a Bap­tist preacher’s. “I want to save black peo­ple from Democ­rats, who start­ed the KKK. They are the orig­i­nal dis­crim­i­nat­ing racists who start­ed the Ku Klux Klan, who start­ed Jim Crow and were the slave mas­ters.”

    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.

    Mau­rice’s trans­for­ma­tion began Novem­ber 7, 1990, when the Tem­ple of Love was shut­tered for good. That day, fed­er­al agents arrest­ed Yah­weh and 16 of his fol­low­ers — includ­ing Ricar­do and Mau­rice Wood­side — and charged them with rack­e­teer­ing and con­spir­a­cy in 14 mur­ders and a fire­bomb­ing.

    Ricar­do, estranged from his broth­er and Yah­we­h’s tem­ple since his moth­er’s death, became a key gov­ern­ment wit­ness, quick­ly agree­ing to serve five years in prison and tes­ti­fy against Yah­weh and Mau­rice.

    Ricar­do said in court that in 1981, his broth­er had helped beat Aston Green uncon­scious and accom­pa­nied the group that behead­ed him in the Glades; two years lat­er, Mau­rice had deliv­ered the coup de grâce to karate champ Leonard Dupree by insert­ing a sharp­ened stick into his eye­ball, Ricar­do tes­ti­fied. Both broth­ers had also attempt­ed to kill anoth­er way­ward fol­low­er with “long knives,” Ricar­do claimed, but that man escaped.

    Mau­rice, mean­while, told jurors that he con­sid­ered Yah­weh “the Mes­si­ah” and that he’d nev­er seen any vio­lence in the tem­ple.

    When Ricar­do took the stand, Mau­rice burst into tears and shout­ed, “You are going to lie on me! You are going to kill me! I’m your broth­er.” He lat­er tes­ti­fied in his own defense, lit­er­al­ly singing a song in his silky vibra­to and then telling jurors: “I am like a sheep, that’s what I am. I am not a war­rior.”

    After a six-month tri­al, the jury con­vict­ed Yah­weh on 14 charges of mur­der con­spir­a­cy. But Mau­rice and six oth­er code­fen­dants walked. Richard Scrug­gs, who pros­e­cut­ed the case along with Novic­ki, says he has “no doubt” Mau­rice was involved in the crimes. “It was an acquit­tal by pity,” he says. “Wood­side had one of the worst crim­i­nal defens­es I’d ever seen.”

    Mau­rice, who legal­ly changed his last name to Symon­ette — his father’s sur­name — soon after his acquit­tal to dis­tance him­self from the case, declined to meet in per­son but spoke at length by phone about his past and his rela­tion­ship with his nephew. He says he was inno­cent of those crimes — and so was Yah­weh.

    His con­vic­tion was pure­ly polit­i­cal,” Mau­rice says. “Yah­weh had decid­ed to start sup­port­ing Repub­li­cans, and the Democ­rats were very fright­ened about that... I nev­er did any of that. They made my own broth­er say those things through threats and lies.”

    Mau­rice had to regroup after the tri­al, so he restart­ed his singing career, tour­ing with ex-Mia­mi Vice star Philip Michael Thomas — who was try­ing to launch a musi­cal career that quick­ly fiz­zled — and play­ing solo jazz shows at small clubs around town.

    In 1995, Mau­rice sued a Palm Island landown­er, claim­ing she would­n’t sell him a man­sion sim­ply because he was black. The own­er, Mary Jean Sas­soon, respond­ed that Mau­rice had stopped pay­ing a $3,000 month­ly lease. A fed­er­al judge sided with Sas­soon and tossed the case; a sep­a­rate civ­il suit against the island’s home­own­ers asso­ci­a­tion and the Mia­mi Beach Police Depart­ment (whose offi­cers had barged into the house and threat­ened him, Mau­rice claimed) was dis­missed in 1998.

    Mau­rice lat­er estab­lished head­quar­ters at a $900,000, two-sto­ry, yel­low man­sion on the Intra­coastal on NE 165th Street in North Mia­mi Beach. At a $400,000, dilap­i­dat­ed, old house on South Riv­er Road in Opa-loc­ka, he installed a tow­er­ing radio anten­na. (While try­ing to buy that house, he filed a quick­ly dis­missed, hand­writ­ten com­plaint in fed­er­al court claim­ing the home­own­er was stalling a sale because of “dis­crim­i­na­tion against the Yah­weh reli­gion.”)

    Mau­rice began throw­ing week­ly par­ties for neigh­bor­hood kids at the hous­es. He’d play R&B, and they’d ride Jet Skis and play bas­ket­ball. He’d also preach. “I told every­one: ‘You can’t smoke weed here, and you can’t fight,’ ” he says. “It was a good, god­ly place to relax.”

    He also invent­ed a new per­sona: Michael the Black Man, an anti-lib­er­al, anti-gay preach­er. He built a strange web­site, michaeldefeatssatan.com, where he posts videos of his ser­mons along­side old pho­tos of Yah­weh ben Yah­weh and a pledge to “vin­di­cate” his old leader. He now goes by Michael instead of Mau­rice.

    Before the 2000 elec­tions, he began broad­cast­ing his reli­gious tirades against Democ­rats on a pirate radio fre­quen­cy, 104.1, beamed from the Opa-loc­ka house. Between jazz and funk songs, he rant­ed against Al Gore and Jesse Jack­son.

    He burst into the nation­al spot­light dur­ing the most recent pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, when Barack Oba­ma spoke at the BankU­nit­ed Cen­ter on Sep­tem­ber 19, 2008. Michael and a gang of fol­low­ers grabbed seats in the upper deck, unfurled ban­ners that read “KKK,” and screamed about Oba­ma being in the Ku Klux Klan. The future pres­i­dent chuck­led and said, “See ya!” as secu­ri­ty escort­ed them out.

    Michael and his fol­low­ers were extolled on Fox News. Soon they were invit­ed to Tea Par­ty gath­er­ings from South Flori­da to Geor­gia, where Michael appeared in pho­tos with con­ser­v­a­tives such as then-Sen­ate can­di­date Mar­co Rubio and House hope­ful Allen West.

    But echoes of the vio­lence from his days in Yah­we­h’s cult fol­lowed. On Sep­tem­ber 15, 2008, a 25-year-old gun­man named Taytre­on Edwards charged Michael and his fol­low­ers as they board­ed a bus head­ed to a protest in Mis­sis­sip­pi. Edwards blast­ed at them with an AR-15, graz­ing Michael’s head and wound­ing a fol­low­er in the arm.

    Michael told any­one who would lis­ten that “Oba­ma ordered the hit.” (Edwards was lat­er con­vict­ed of try­ing to rob Michael and his fol­low­ers at gun­point. No tie to the pres­i­dent was ever found.)

    If you believe Adol­phus, that was just the tip of Michael’s luna­cy, which looks a lot like that of Yah­weh ben Yah­weh. When the nephew moved into a small upstairs bed­room in his uncle’s North Mia­mi head­quar­ters mid­way through his senior year at Krop, he joined a group called BOSS — Broth­ers of a Supe­ri­or Sta­tus. “The idea is that black men are the real cho­sen peo­ple,” Adol­phus claims. “They stand above every­one else.”

    The 20 or so men who lived rent-free in the var­i­ous hous­es had to gath­er every day to lis­ten and cheer dur­ing ser­mons that Michael some­times taped and uploaded to his web­site. In a stuffy room where Michael had a wall-size doc­tor­ate in the­ol­o­gy past­ed up, the meet­ings start­ed with men chant­i­ng an oath over a soft jazz riff: “One God, one mind, one love, one action.”

    “He preach­es the same thing, every day, the same thing over and over,” Adol­phus says. “He brain­wash­es you, basi­cal­ly. You for­get what day of the week it is. You for­get what else you’re sup­posed to be doing.”

    Michael strong­ly dis­putes his nephew’s descrip­tion of the group. He says the men in the room — who, in filmed videos, echo his teach­ings with reg­u­lar chants of “Yes, sir!” — are sim­ply fel­low reli­gious trav­el­ers who agree with his inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible. “Yah­weh showed me the path, but the Bible is my guide,” Michael says. “I don’t have ‘fol­low­ers.’ I’m not a leader. I don’t know where Adol­phus got all this stuff.”

    In the ser­mons post­ed online and broad­cast on his pirate sta­tion, Michael’s mes­sages are con­sis­tent: One-third of all black women are “jezebels” try­ing to destroy the world (chief among them: Oprah). Democ­rats are secret­ly the KKK and try­ing to destroy black men. And gays are abhor­rent.

    Adol­phus stayed in the North Mia­mi house on and off until 2008, he says. But he was upset about the Oba­ma inci­dent and moved to an aun­t’s home in Deer­field Beach. “I had no idea what was com­ing,” he says.

    What hap­pened was this, pros­e­cu­tors say: Less than a year lat­er, Adol­phus con­tract­ed three 20-some­thing men to kid­nap Michael’s 25-year-old son, Yachin Parham, beat him bloody, and warn him that “this is what hap­pens when you fuck with King Solomon.” Adol­phus’s nick­name was King Solomon, the feds say.

    Eight months after the beat­ing, on Decem­ber 23, 2009, pros­e­cu­tors claim, Adol­phus was dri­ving a Lexus in Ives Estates, just south of the Broward Coun­ty line, when he fired an assault rifle four times at a man named Samuel Howard IV, wound­ing him in the stom­ach.

    Soon he was arrest­ed, and dur­ing the year that fol­lowed, pros­e­cu­tors piled on the charges. First came attempt­ed mur­der in state court for the attack on Howard. Next the feds nailed him for what they called a “fraud­u­lent mort­gage scheme.” The indict­ment claims he direct­ed three men to recruit straw buy­ers who would snatch up homes, fake mort­gage doc­u­ments, flip the hous­es, and pock­et the loan mon­ey. The kid­nap­ping of Michael’s son was an attempt to “intim­i­date” any­one threat­en­ing their crime spree.

    Then, this past Feb­ru­ary 22, the feds charged that Adol­phus had ordered the killing of Sam Fer­gu­son on the Turn­pike last August, plus shot at four oth­er men, who are iden­ti­fied only by ini­tials. No motive is stat­ed in court papers.

    Pros­e­cu­tors won’t talk much about the case, but Adol­phus says it’s a set­up. He con­tends Michael per­suad­ed his son Yachin to go to the feds with the near­ly 2‑year-old sto­ry of his beat­ing (a beat­ing that was real­ly inspired by an old neigh­bor­hood fight, Adol­phus says). He adds that Michael was the main wit­ness to Howard’s shoot­ing. Final­ly, he says, the “King Solomon” nick­name was just a joke.

    “When a jury hears the real truth, they’re going to have a hard time believ­ing these charges,” Adol­phus says.

    Michael, with some jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, describes all of Adol­phus’s claims against him as the fruit of blind des­per­a­tion. But since his acquit­tal on the mur­der accu­sa­tions with the Yah­weh cult, Michael has amassed far more claims of malfe­sance than his nephew, who had noth­ing but the mar­i­jua­na case on his record before the indict­ments.

    Among the crim­i­nal alle­ga­tions against Michael, none of which has been proven:

    • 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. Again, the case was dropped.

    • In July last year, 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. That charge is pend­ing.

    Michael is adamant that he lives clean­ly. “I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I don’t sup­port any kind of activ­i­ty that goes against what God asks us to do,” he says. “You can check my record. I’ve nev­er been con­vict­ed of any­thing.”

    A man Michael calls “a close friend” and busi­ness part­ner, Alfred Davis, can’t make the same claim. The 36-year-old last month was charged with felony grand theft. In 2004, he was found guilty of fed­er­al bank fraud and served 33 months in prison.

    Sev­er­al firms list­ing Michael as a reg­is­tered agent include Davis as a co-own­er, includ­ing Boss Group, Inc. and Boss Title, Inc. In court records, Davis lists Michael’s North Mia­mi head­quar­ters as his home address.

    In the cur­rent case against Davis, pros­e­cu­tors say he recruit­ed a straw buy­er named Brit­tany Wal­don and trans­ferred 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 Wal­don filed for bank­rupt­cy to stall fore­clo­sure.

    Davis could­n’t be reached for com­ment.

    Though Adol­phus blames his uncle for set­ting him up, none of the alle­ga­tions against Michael or Davis clears Adol­phus of the crimes he’s charged with. Indeed, three accom­plices have already agreed to plead guilty and tes­ti­fy against the one­time Yah­weh cult mem­ber.

    The men like­ly don’t know much, though, about the most seri­ous alle­ga­tion against their for­mer boss: Sam Fer­gu­son’s mur­der on Flori­da’s Turn­pike.

    Before his death, the hip-hop jour­nal­ist had been work­ing close­ly with Michael on Don Diva Mag­a­zine events. Michael adds they had been friends since high school. “Sam had the biggest heart of any­one I know,” he says. “He saved me once in a night­club when I was about to get killed in a fight. I loved Sam.”

    Michael says he has “heard some the­o­ries” about why Adol­phus want­ed Fer­gu­son dead, but won’t talk about them. “That will all come out in court,” he says.

    ...

    ———-

    “Yah­weh ben Yah­weh is back” by Tim Elfrink; The Mia­mi New Times; 06/09/2011

    “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’s trans­for­ma­tion began Novem­ber 7, 1990, when the Tem­ple of Love was shut­tered for good. That day, fed­er­al agents arrest­ed Yah­weh and 16 of his fol­low­ers — includ­ing Ricar­do and Mau­rice Wood­side — and charged them with rack­e­teer­ing and con­spir­a­cy in 14 mur­ders and a fire­bomb­ing.

    Ricar­do, estranged from his broth­er and Yah­we­h’s tem­ple since his moth­er’s death, became a key gov­ern­ment wit­ness, quick­ly agree­ing to serve five years in prison and tes­ti­fy against Yah­weh and Mau­rice.

    Ricar­do said in court that in 1981, his broth­er had helped beat Aston Green uncon­scious and accom­pa­nied the group that behead­ed him in the Glades; two years lat­er, Mau­rice had deliv­ered the coup de grâce to karate champ Leonard Dupree by insert­ing a sharp­ened stick into his eye­ball, Ricar­do tes­ti­fied. Both broth­ers had also attempt­ed to kill anoth­er way­ward fol­low­er with “long knives,” Ricar­do claimed, but that man escaped.

    Mau­rice, mean­while, told jurors that he con­sid­ered Yah­weh “the Mes­si­ah” and that he’d nev­er seen any vio­lence in the tem­ple.

    When Ricar­do took the stand, Mau­rice burst into tears and shout­ed, “You are going to lie on me! You are going to kill me! I’m your broth­er.” He lat­er tes­ti­fied in his own defense, lit­er­al­ly singing a song in his silky vibra­to and then telling jurors: “I am like a sheep, that’s what I am. I am not a war­rior.”

    After a six-month tri­al, the jury con­vict­ed Yah­weh on 14 charges of mur­der con­spir­a­cy. But Mau­rice and six oth­er code­fen­dants walked. Richard Scrug­gs, who pros­e­cut­ed the case along with Novic­ki, says he has “no doubt” Mau­rice was involved in the crimes. “It was an acquit­tal by pity,” he says. “Wood­side had one of the worst crim­i­nal defens­es I’d ever seen.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    His con­vic­tion was pure­ly polit­i­cal,” Mau­rice says. “Yah­weh had decid­ed to start sup­port­ing Repub­li­cans, and the Democ­rats were very fright­ened about that... I nev­er did any of that. They made my own broth­er say those things through threats and lies.”
    ...

    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!):

    ...
    Mau­rice had to regroup after the tri­al, so he restart­ed his singing career, tour­ing with ex-Mia­mi Vice star Philip Michael Thomas — who was try­ing to launch a musi­cal career that quick­ly fiz­zled — and play­ing solo jazz shows at small clubs around town.

    In 1995, Mau­rice sued a Palm Island landown­er, claim­ing she would­n’t sell him a man­sion sim­ply because he was black. The own­er, Mary Jean Sas­soon, respond­ed that Mau­rice had stopped pay­ing a $3,000 month­ly lease. A fed­er­al judge sided with Sas­soon and tossed the case; a sep­a­rate civ­il suit against the island’s home­own­ers asso­ci­a­tion and the Mia­mi Beach Police Depart­ment (whose offi­cers had barged into the house and threat­ened him, Mau­rice claimed) was dis­missed in 1998.

    Mau­rice lat­er estab­lished head­quar­ters at a $900,000, two-sto­ry, yel­low man­sion on the Intra­coastal on NE 165th Street in North Mia­mi Beach. At a $400,000, dilap­i­dat­ed, old house on South Riv­er Road in Opa-loc­ka, he installed a tow­er­ing radio anten­na. (While try­ing to buy that house, he filed a quick­ly dis­missed, hand­writ­ten com­plaint in fed­er­al court claim­ing the home­own­er was stalling a sale because of “dis­crim­i­na­tion against the Yah­weh reli­gion.”)

    Mau­rice began throw­ing week­ly par­ties for neigh­bor­hood kids at the hous­es. He’d play R&B, and they’d ride Jet Skis and play bas­ket­ball. He’d also preach. “I told every­one: ‘You can’t smoke weed here, and you can’t fight,’ ” he says. “It was a good, god­ly place to relax.”

    He also invent­ed a new per­sona: Michael the Black Man, an anti-lib­er­al, anti-gay preach­er. He built a strange web­site, michaeldefeatssatan.com, where he posts videos of his ser­mons along­side old pho­tos of Yah­weh ben Yah­weh and a pledge to “vin­di­cate” his old leader. He now goes by Michael instead of Mau­rice.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Before the 2000 elec­tions, he began broad­cast­ing his reli­gious tirades against Democ­rats on a pirate radio fre­quen­cy, 104.1, beamed from the Opa-loc­ka house. Between jazz and funk songs, he rant­ed against Al Gore and Jesse Jack­son.

    He burst into the nation­al spot­light dur­ing the most recent pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, when Barack Oba­ma spoke at the BankU­nit­ed Cen­ter on Sep­tem­ber 19, 2008. Michael and a gang of fol­low­ers grabbed seats in the upper deck, unfurled ban­ners that read “KKK,” and screamed about Oba­ma being in the Ku Klux Klan. The future pres­i­dent chuck­led and said, “See ya!” as secu­ri­ty escort­ed them out.

    Michael and his fol­low­ers were extolled on Fox News. Soon they were invit­ed to Tea Par­ty gath­er­ings from South Flori­da to Geor­gia, where Michael appeared in pho­tos with con­ser­v­a­tives such as then-Sen­ate can­di­date Mar­co Rubio and House hope­ful Allen West.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    But echoes of the vio­lence from his days in Yah­we­h’s cult fol­lowed. On Sep­tem­ber 15, 2008, a 25-year-old gun­man named Taytre­on Edwards charged Michael and his fol­low­ers as they board­ed a bus head­ed to a protest in Mis­sis­sip­pi. Edwards blast­ed at them with an AR-15, graz­ing Michael’s head and wound­ing a fol­low­er in the arm.

    Michael told any­one who would lis­ten that “Oba­ma ordered the hit.” (Edwards was lat­er con­vict­ed of try­ing to rob Michael and his fol­low­ers at gun­point. No tie to the pres­i­dent was ever found.)

    If you believe Adol­phus, that was just the tip of Michael’s luna­cy, which looks a lot like that of Yah­weh ben Yah­weh. When the nephew moved into a small upstairs bed­room in his uncle’s North Mia­mi head­quar­ters mid­way through his senior year at Krop, he joined a group called BOSS — Broth­ers of a Supe­ri­or Sta­tus. “The idea is that black men are the real cho­sen peo­ple,” Adol­phus claims. “They stand above every­one else.”

    The 20 or so men who lived rent-free in the var­i­ous hous­es had to gath­er every day to lis­ten and cheer dur­ing ser­mons that Michael some­times taped and uploaded to his web­site. In a stuffy room where Michael had a wall-size doc­tor­ate in the­ol­o­gy past­ed up, the meet­ings start­ed with men chant­i­ng an oath over a soft jazz riff: “One God, one mind, one love, one action.”

    “He preach­es the same thing, every day, the same thing over and over,” Adol­phus says. “He brain­wash­es you, basi­cal­ly. You for­get what day of the week it is. You for­get what else you’re sup­posed to be doing.”

    Michael strong­ly dis­putes his nephew’s descrip­tion of the group. He says the men in the room — who, in filmed videos, echo his teach­ings with reg­u­lar chants of “Yes, sir!” — are sim­ply fel­low reli­gious trav­el­ers who agree with his inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible. “Yah­weh showed me the path, but the Bible is my guide,” Michael says. “I don’t have ‘fol­low­ers.’ I’m not a leader. I don’t know where Adol­phus got all this stuff.”

    In the ser­mons post­ed online and broad­cast on his pirate sta­tion, Michael’s mes­sages are con­sis­tent: One-third of all black women are “jezebels” try­ing to destroy the world (chief among them: Oprah). Democ­rats are secret­ly the KKK and try­ing to destroy black men. And gays are abhor­rent.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Adol­phus stayed in the North Mia­mi house on and off until 2008, he says. But he was upset about the Oba­ma inci­dent and moved to an aun­t’s home in Deer­field Beach. “I had no idea what was com­ing,” he says.

    What hap­pened was this, pros­e­cu­tors say: Less than a year lat­er, Adol­phus con­tract­ed three 20-some­thing men to kid­nap Michael’s 25-year-old son, Yachin Parham, beat him bloody, and warn him that “this is what hap­pens when you fuck with King Solomon.” Adol­phus’s nick­name was King Solomon, the feds say.

    Eight months after the beat­ing, on Decem­ber 23, 2009, pros­e­cu­tors claim, Adol­phus was dri­ving a Lexus in Ives Estates, just south of the Broward Coun­ty line, when he fired an assault rifle four times at a man named Samuel Howard IV, wound­ing him in the stom­ach.

    Soon he was arrest­ed, and dur­ing the year that fol­lowed, pros­e­cu­tors piled on the charges. First came attempt­ed mur­der in state court for the attack on Howard. Next the feds nailed him for what they called a “fraud­u­lent mort­gage scheme.” The indict­ment claims he direct­ed three men to recruit straw buy­ers who would snatch up homes, fake mort­gage doc­u­ments, flip the hous­es, and pock­et the loan mon­ey. The kid­nap­ping of Michael’s son was an attempt to “intim­i­date” any­one threat­en­ing their crime spree.

    Then, this past Feb­ru­ary 22, the feds charged that Adol­phus had ordered the killing of Sam Fer­gu­son on the Turn­pike last August, plus shot at four oth­er men, who are iden­ti­fied only by ini­tials. No motive is stat­ed in court papers.

    Pros­e­cu­tors won’t talk much about the case, but Adol­phus says it’s a set­up. He con­tends Michael per­suad­ed his son Yachin to go to the feds with the near­ly 2‑year-old sto­ry of his beat­ing (a beat­ing that was real­ly inspired by an old neigh­bor­hood fight, Adol­phus says). He adds that Michael was the main wit­ness to Howard’s shoot­ing. Final­ly, he says, the “King Solomon” nick­name was just a joke.

    “When a jury hears the real truth, they’re going to have a hard time believ­ing these charges,” Adol­phus says.
    ...

    Intrigu­ing­ly, while Mau­rice has been charged with a num­ber of crimes over the years, none of them are ever pros­e­cut­ed:

    ...
    Michael, with some jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, describes all of Adol­phus’s claims against him as the fruit of blind des­per­a­tion. But since his acquit­tal on the mur­der accu­sa­tions with the Yah­weh cult, Michael has amassed far more claims of malfe­sance than his nephew, who had noth­ing but the mar­i­jua­na case on his record before the indict­ments.

    Among the crim­i­nal alle­ga­tions against Michael, none of which has been proven:

    • 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. Again, the case was dropped.

    • In July last year, 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. That charge is pend­ing.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    A man Michael calls “a close friend” and busi­ness part­ner, Alfred Davis, can’t make the same claim. The 36-year-old last month was charged with felony grand theft. In 2004, he was found guilty of fed­er­al bank fraud and served 33 months in prison.

    Sev­er­al firms list­ing Michael as a reg­is­tered agent include Davis as a co-own­er, includ­ing Boss Group, Inc. and Boss Title, Inc. In court records, Davis lists Michael’s North Mia­mi head­quar­ters as his home address.

    In the cur­rent case against Davis, pros­e­cu­tors say he recruit­ed a straw buy­er named Brit­tany Wal­don and trans­ferred 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 Wal­don filed for bank­rupt­cy to stall fore­clo­sure.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 1, 2018, 10:56 pm
  33. 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:

    USA Today

    Post Pitts­burgh shoot­ing, Trump blames media for ‘anger,’ sin­gles out CNN as ‘fake news’

    David Jack­son, USA TODAY Pub­lished 9:00 a.m. ET Oct. 29, 2018 | Updat­ed 8:52 p.m. ET Oct. 29, 2018

    WASHINGTON – In the wake of a bomb plot and a a mass killing at a syn­a­gogue in Pitts­burgh, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has again blamed the media for anger that has turned dead­ly – some­thing his crit­ics say only stokes divi­sion.

    “There is great anger in our Coun­try caused in part by inac­cu­rate, and even fraud­u­lent, report­ing of the news,” Trump tweet­ed Mon­day morn­ing.

    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.”

    Lat­er Mon­day, White House press sec­re­tary Sarah Sanders argued that “the very first thing the media did” after the shoot­ing was “blame the pres­i­dent.” She refused to specif­i­cal­ly name out­lets that Trump believed were fake.

    Hours lat­er on Twit­ter, Trump sin­gled out CNN as being in the “Fake News Busi­ness” and added that there was a “very big dif­fer­ence” between legit­i­mate and false news out­lets.

    “CNN and oth­ers in the Fake News Busi­ness keep pur­pose­ly and inac­cu­rate­ly report­ing that I said the “Media is the Ene­my of the Peo­ple.” Wrong!,” Trump tweet­ed. “I said that the “Fake News (Media) is the Ene­my of the Peo­ple,” a very big dif­fer­ence. When you give out false infor­ma­tion — not good!”

    CNN and oth­ers in the Fake News Busi­ness keep pur­pose­ly and inac­cu­rate­ly report­ing that I said the “Media is the Ene­my of the Peo­ple.” Wrong! I said that the “Fake News (Media) is the Ene­my of the Peo­ple,” a very big dif­fer­ence. When you give out false infor­ma­tion — not good!
    — Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Octo­ber 30, 2018

    In a sec­ond tweet, Trump wrote, “Check out tweets from last two days. I refer to Fake News Media when men­tion­ing Ene­my of the Peo­ple — but dis­hon­est reporters use only the word “Media.” The peo­ple of our Great Coun­try are angry and dis­il­lu­sioned at receiv­ing so much Fake News. They get it, and ful­ly under­stand!”

    The Flori­da man sus­pect­ed of send­ing a series of sus­pi­cious pack­ages through the mail addressed two envelopes with bomb-like devices to CNN.

    Crit­ics of the pres­i­dent have said it is the pres­i­den­t’s aggres­sive rhetoric – which often attacks his polit­i­cal oppo­nents, the media and the like – that cre­ates divi­sion and can lead unbal­anced peo­ple to con­tem­plate vio­lence.

    ...

    Last week, author­i­ties arrest­ed a Trump sup­port­er for alleged­ly mail­ing pipe bombs to polit­i­cal oppo­nents, includ­ing for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma and 2016 Trump elec­tion oppo­nent Hillary Clin­ton.

    Trump has con­demned both the bomb­ing plot and the syn­a­gogue shoot­ing. Last week, in the wake of the bomb threats, he seemed to attempt a more somber tone and refrained from call­ing the media “fake.”

    But even then, he still laid some of the blame for the polit­i­cal­ly charged atmos­phere on the media.

    Fol­low­ing the Pitts­burgh shoot­ing, in which a gun­man killed 11 peo­ple at the Tree of Life syn­a­gogue, Trump again lashed out at the media Sun­day night.

    He again tweet­ed about “fake news,” say­ing it was “doing every­thing in their pow­er to blame Repub­li­cans, Con­ser­v­a­tives and me for the divi­sion and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Coun­try. Actu­al­ly, it is their Fake & Dis­hon­est report­ing which is caus­ing prob­lems far greater than they under­stand!

    Julian Zeliz­er, a pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry and pub­lic affairs at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, called Trump’s reac­tions “utter­ly pre­dictable.”

    “Noth­ing dis­tracts Pres­i­dent Trump from his polit­i­cal mes­sage,” Zeliz­er said. “He has a series of oppo­nents, with the media right up top, and crises, scan­dals, and tur­moil does not dis­tract him from return­ing to these themes. He is refus­ing to let the events of the past week con­trol the agen­da, and he is find­ing a way to fit the pipe bombs, the shoot­ing and more into his famil­iar nar­ra­tive of his being unfair­ly attacked by the media.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Post Pitts­burgh shoot­ing, Trump blames media for ‘anger,’ sin­gles out CNN as ‘fake news’ ” by David Jack­son; USA TODAY; 10/29/2018

    “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:

    ...
    Fol­low­ing the Pitts­burgh shoot­ing, in which a gun­man killed 11 peo­ple at the Tree of Life syn­a­gogue, Trump again lashed out at the media Sun­day night.

    He again tweet­ed about “fake news,” say­ing it was “doing every­thing in their pow­er to blame Repub­li­cans, Con­ser­v­a­tives and me for the divi­sion and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Coun­try. Actu­al­ly, it is their Fake & Dis­hon­est report­ing which is caus­ing prob­lems far greater than they under­stand!
    ...

    And Trump was very spe­cif­ic about CNN being the kind of ‘fake news’ out­let that is fan­ning ‘the flame’ of vio­lence:

    ...
    Lat­er Mon­day, White House press sec­re­tary Sarah Sanders argued that “the very first thing the media did” after the shoot­ing was “blame the pres­i­dent.” She refused to specif­i­cal­ly name out­lets that Trump believed were fake.

    Hours lat­er on Twit­ter, Trump sin­gled out CNN as being in the “Fake News Busi­ness” and added that there was a “very big dif­fer­ence” between legit­i­mate and false news out­lets.

    “CNN and oth­ers in the Fake News Busi­ness keep pur­pose­ly and inac­cu­rate­ly report­ing that I said the “Media is the Ene­my of the Peo­ple.” Wrong!,” Trump tweet­ed. “I said that the “Fake News (Media) is the Ene­my of the Peo­ple,” a very big dif­fer­ence. When you give out false infor­ma­tion — not good!”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    In a sec­ond tweet, Trump wrote, “Check out tweets from last two days. I refer to Fake News Media when men­tion­ing Ene­my of the Peo­ple — but dis­hon­est reporters use only the word “Media.” The peo­ple of our Great Coun­try are angry and dis­il­lu­sioned at receiv­ing so much Fake News. They get it, and ful­ly under­stand!”
    ...

    “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’:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    News

    Trump To Reporters: ‘You’re Cre­at­ing Vio­lence By Your Ques­tions’

    By Nicole Lafond
    Novem­ber 2, 2018 3:15 pm

    Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump took his “ene­my of the peo­ple” dia­tribe a step fur­ther on Fri­day, accus­ing “fake news” and reporters of “cre­at­ing vio­lence” by their “ques­tions.”

    “No, no, you know what, you’re cre­at­ing vio­lence by your ques­tions,” he said. “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.”

    “And you know what?” he con­tin­ued. “The peo­ple that sup­port Trump and the peo­ple that sup­port us, which is a lot of peo­ple, most peo­ple, many peo­ple, those peo­ple know when a sto­ry is true and they know when a sto­ry is false. And I’ll tell you what, if the media would write cor­rect­ly and write accu­rate­ly and write fair­ly, you’d have a lot less vio­lence in the coun­try.”

    Trump’s com­ments fol­low days of intense crit­i­cism for his divi­sive, and often vio­lent rhetoric against the media and his crit­ics. Some have linked his tone to recent attacks, like the pipe bombs that were sent through the mail to high-lev­el Democ­rats — includ­ing the Oba­mas and the Clin­tons — and the mas­sacre at a Pitts­burgh syn­a­gogue over the week­end.

    Trump: “Fake news is cre­at­ing vio­lence” pic.twitter.com/YB69b3nfci

    — TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) Novem­ber 2, 2018

    ———-

    “Trump To Reporters: ‘You’re Cre­at­ing Vio­lence By Your Ques­tions’” by Nicole Lafond; Talk­ing Points Memo; 11/02/2018

    “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:

    ...
    “And you know what?” he con­tin­ued. “The peo­ple that sup­port Trump and the peo­ple that sup­port us, which is a lot of peo­ple, most peo­ple, many peo­ple, those peo­ple know when a sto­ry is true and they know when a sto­ry is false. And I’ll tell you what, if the media would write cor­rect­ly and write accu­rate­ly and write fair­ly, you’d have a lot less vio­lence in the coun­try.”
    ...

    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:

    Vox

    Poll: GOP vot­ers blame news for divi­sion in Amer­i­ca; Democ­rats blame Trump
    The Morn­ing Consult/Politico poll comes a few days after Trump slammed the media as the “true Ene­my of the Peo­ple.”

    By Stavros Ago­rakis
    Nov 1, 2018, 12:50pm EDT

    Dur­ing a week that includ­ed pipe bombs set to promi­nent lib­er­als and Democ­rats and an anti-Semit­ic mass shoot­ing at a Pitts­burgh syn­a­gogue, Amer­i­cans said the media was more divi­sive than Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.

    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.

    The poll was con­duct­ed between Octo­ber 25 and Octo­ber 30, at the height of news cov­er­age of the pipe bombs and the Pitts­burgh shoot­ing. It was released short­ly after Trump slammed the news media once again for their “inac­cu­rate, and even fraud­u­lent” report­ing, call­ing them the “true Ene­my of the Peo­ple” on Twit­ter.

    Amid ques­tions about whether Trump’s rhetoric was to blame for the vio­lence, the White House has been dou­bling down on blam­ing the media. In a brief­ing Mon­day, White House press sec­re­tary Sarah Sanders defend­ed Trump’s rhetoric, say­ing he won’t stop his attacks on his oppo­nents and that it’s irre­spon­si­ble for news media to “not just blame the pres­i­dent, but blame mem­bers of his admin­is­tra­tion for those heinous acts.”

    “The Fake News is doing every­thing in their pow­er to blame Repub­li­cans, Con­ser­v­a­tives and me for the divi­sion and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Coun­try,” Trump tweet­ed in the evening of Octo­ber 28, a mere 24 hours after the Pitts­burgh syn­a­gogue shoot­ing and days after the pipe bomb threats tar­get­ing promi­nent Democ­rats. “Actu­al­ly, it is their Fake & Dis­hon­est report­ing which is caus­ing prob­lems far greater than they under­stand!”

    There is great anger in our Coun­try caused in part by inac­cu­rate, and even fraud­u­lent, report­ing of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Ene­my of the Peo­ple, must stop the open & obvi­ous hos­til­i­ty & report the news accu­rate­ly & fair­ly. That will do much to put out the flame...
    — Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Octo­ber 29, 2018

    It’s hard to say how much Trump’s most recent rhetoric about the media influ­enced these respons­es, since some respon­dents might have answered before it hap­pened. But the respons­es sug­gest that many Amer­i­cans are will­ing to believe the media is respon­si­ble for divi­sions in the coun­try.

    ...

    ———–

    “Poll: GOP vot­ers blame news for divi­sion in Amer­i­ca; Democ­rats blame Trump” by Stavros Ago­rakis; Vox; 11/01/2018

    “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:

    ...
    The poll was con­duct­ed between Octo­ber 25 and Octo­ber 30, at the height of news cov­er­age of the pipe bombs and the Pitts­burgh shoot­ing. It was released short­ly after Trump slammed the news media once again for their “inac­cu­rate, and even fraud­u­lent” report­ing, call­ing them the “true Ene­my of the Peo­ple” on Twit­ter.
    ...

    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:

    Ari­zona Repub­lic

    Don­ald Trump is (acci­den­tal­ly) right about ‘fake news’

    Bill Goodykoontz, Ari­zona Repub­lic Pub­lished 4:03 p.m. MT Oct. 29, 2018 | Updat­ed 4:03 p.m. MT Oct. 29, 2018

    Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump on Mon­day called the “fake news media” the “true ene­my of the peo­ple.” It wasn’t for the first time. And it prob­a­bly won’t be the last.

    Fun­ny, I don’t feel like an ene­my of any­thing, par­tic­u­lar­ly. Healthy eat­ing, maybe. But the pres­i­dent keeps say­ing it.

    Here is what Trump said in two tweets Mon­day morn­ing:

    “There is great anger in our Coun­try caused in part by inac­cu­rate, and even fraud­u­lent, report­ing of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Ene­my of the Peo­ple, must stop the open & obvi­ous hos­til­i­ty & report the news accu­rate­ly & fair­ly. That will do much to put out the flame of Anger and Out­rage and we will then be able to bring all sides togeth­er in Peace and Har­mo­ny. Fake News Must End!”?

    There is great anger in our Coun­try caused in part by inac­cu­rate, and even fraud­u­lent, report­ing of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Ene­my of the Peo­ple, must stop the open & obvi­ous hos­til­i­ty & report the news accu­rate­ly & fair­ly. That will do much to put out the flame...
    — Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Octo­ber 29, 2018

    ....of Anger and Out­rage and we will then be able to bring all sides togeth­er in Peace and Har­mo­ny. Fake News Must End!
    — Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Octo­ber 29, 2018

    Much has been said and writ­ten about the tim­ing of the president’s tweets, com­ing so soon after a sus­pect was arrest­ed in a bomb plot whose tar­gets includ­ed CNN offices and after the mass mur­der of Jew­ish peo­ple in a syn­a­gogue in Pitts­burgh. Much has been said and writ­ten about the tone and tenor of Trump’s ral­lies, in which he often ver­bal­ly attacks his per­ceived ene­mies, includ­ing a night­ly put-down of the press. It’s a con­stant drum beat and beat-down.

    There’s plen­ty of false sto­ries out there

    What you don’t see dis­cussed very often is the pos­si­bil­i­ty that, at least about the “fake news” part, Trump is right.

    Real­ly?

    Yes. He’s just wrong about what’s fake.

    There have been plen­ty of false sto­ries about the migrant car­a­van mak­ing its way north to the U.S. bor­der, for instance.

    Despite what you may hear on some talk-radio and cable-news shows, there is no evi­dence it’s being fund­ed by Democ­rats or George Soros. There’s no evi­dence that any of the migrants are car­ry­ing dis­eases. There are no known crim­i­nals in the crowd.

    Shep­herd Smith, a Fox News anchor, said Mon­day of the car­a­van, “There is no inva­sion. No one’s com­ing to get you. There’s noth­ing at all to be wor­ried about.”

    But Trump doesn’t mean that.

    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. Some in the media have backed away from or apol­o­gized for pro­mot­ing that the­o­ry; oth­ers haven’t.

    But Trump doesn’t mean that.

    What he means, of course, are sto­ries that are crit­i­cal of him or his poli­cies or of can­di­dates he sup­ports. He rejects those sto­ries and the out­lets that report them, and he says so all the time. And the media tires of defend­ing them­selves or decides that doing so may do more harm than good by ampli­fy­ing Trump’s tweets and remarks.

    Sor­ry, no. We need to be remind­ed, now more than ever, that with ene­mies like us, who needs friends?

    It’s medi­a’s job to report truths peo­ple don’t like

    Yes, we may write things that the pres­i­dent doesn’t like, that you don’t like, that I don’t like. And it is essen­tial that we con­tin­ue to do so. Some­how, we need to know what’s real­ly going on in the world.

    There are cer­tain truths no one likes to face (see: healthy eat­ing, above), but it’s the job of the media to report them. And that’s going to make peo­ple mad some­times.

    Lat­er Mon­day, Sarah Sanders, the White House press sec­re­tary, when talk­ing about Trump’s polit­i­cal oppo­nents, said the pres­i­dent would “con­tin­ue to fight back when these indi­vid­u­als not only attack him, but attack mem­bers of his admin­is­tra­tion and sup­port­ers of his admin­is­tra­tion.”

    Was there ever any doubt?

    Even some con­ser­v­a­tives have hoped that Trump would tone down the rhetoric and stop play­ing the blame game with the media. So far he has not, and Sanders’ com­ments say that he won’t.

    ...

    ———-

    “Don­ald Trump is (acci­den­tal­ly) right about ‘fake news’ ” by Bill Goodykoontz; Ari­zona Repub­lic; 10/29/2018

    “What you don’t see dis­cussed very often is the pos­si­bil­i­ty that, at least about the “fake news” part, Trump is right.”

    ...
    Real­ly?

    Yes. He’s just wrong about what’s fake.

    There have been plen­ty of false sto­ries about the migrant car­a­van mak­ing its way north to the U.S. bor­der, for instance.

    Despite what you may hear on some talk-radio and cable-news shows, there is no evi­dence it’s being fund­ed by Democ­rats or George Soros. There’s no evi­dence that any of the migrants are car­ry­ing dis­eases. There are no known crim­i­nals in the crowd.

    Shep­herd Smith, a Fox News anchor, said Mon­day of the car­a­van, “There is no inva­sion. No one’s com­ing to get you. There’s noth­ing at all to be wor­ried about.”

    But Trump doesn’t mean that.

    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. Some in the media have backed away from or apol­o­gized for pro­mot­ing that the­o­ry; oth­ers haven’t.
    ...

    “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:

    ...
    But Trump doesn’t mean that.

    What he means, of course, are sto­ries that are crit­i­cal of him or his poli­cies or of can­di­dates he sup­ports. He rejects those sto­ries and the out­lets that report them, and he says so all the time. And the media tires of defend­ing them­selves or decides that doing so may do more harm than good by ampli­fy­ing Trump’s tweets and remarks.

    Sor­ry, no. We need to be remind­ed, now more than ever, that with ene­mies like us, who needs friends?
    ...

    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”:

    Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism Review

    What if the right-wing media wins?

    Con­ser­v­a­tive crit­ics of the press want more than just a loud­er voice. They want The New York Times and The Wash­ing­ton Post to go away.
    By McK­ay Cop­pins
    Fall 2017

    It was a swel­ter­ing July after­noon in the swamp, and a small group of well-dressed, con­ser­v­a­tive col­lege stu­dents from across the country—the next gen­er­a­tion of Meg­yn Kellys, George Wills, and Tuck­er Carlsons—was fil­ing into an audi­to­ri­um at the Her­itage Foundation’s Wash­ing­ton, DC, head­quar­ters. They had come to study at the feet of Bre­it­bart News Wash­ing­ton edi­tor Matt Boyle, a zeal­ous prophet of the new right-wing media. Boyle’s ser­mon was not about how to break into the main­stream media and steer the nation­al news agen­da toward con­ser­v­a­tive aims—it was about the end days of jour­nal­ism itself. And he was not about to skimp on the fire and brim­stone.

    “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.”

    Squint at the Trump era, and it’s easy to see a con­ser­v­a­tive media in cri­sis. Over the past 18 months, we have wit­nessed the fall of Bill O’Reilly, the ouster (and death) of Roger Ailes, promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive out­lets from Fox News to Bre­it­bart to The Wall Street Jour­nal op-ed page erupt in upheaval and infight­ing, Milo Yiannopou­los lose his book deal, and Tomi Lahren lose her job at The Blaze (only to land at Fox). Look clos­er, though, and you’ll see that much of that dra­ma was sim­ply a func­tion of the out­lets’ increased polit­i­cal pow­er (and the height­ened scruti­ny that’s followed)—a bit of rou­tine tur­bu­lence accom­pa­ny­ing the unprece­dent­ed ascent of the right-wing media.

    While Don­ald Trump’s rise may have, as Politico’s Eliana John­son recent­ly wrote, “scram­bled the peck­ing order” on the right—elevating Bre­it­bartesque pop­ulists over the con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als at the Jour­nal and The Week­ly Stan­dard—the con­ser­v­a­tive media com­plex as a whole is big­ger, stronger, and more influ­en­tial today than it’s ever been. And with so many of its most pow­er­ful mem­bers now pur­su­ing a scorched-earth assault on America’s jour­nal­is­tic insti­tu­tions, it’s worth con­sid­er­ing what they hope it will look like once they’re done burn­ing down our vil­lages, des­e­crat­ing our tem­ples, and howl­ing at our lamen­ta­tions.

    Boyle said his goal was sim­ple: “The full destruc­tion and elim­i­na­tion of the entire main­stream media.” Bre­it­bart played up his speech on its home­page that day, but the remarks bare­ly reg­is­tered in broad­er media cir­cles. The site and its staff have become known for this kind of blus­ter, and most jour­nal­ists have taught them­selves to tune it out. Maybe we ought to be pay­ing clos­er atten­tion.

    There is a long tra­di­tion in Repub­li­can pol­i­tics of seek­ing to dis­cred­it jour­nal­ism. Dur­ing the 1964 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, Bar­ry Goldwater’s press sec­re­tary dis­trib­uted gold pins to reporters that read “East­ern Lib­er­al Press.” Richard Nixon’s vice pres­i­dent, Spiro Agnew, in 1969 railed against the “closed fra­ter­ni­ty of priv­i­leged men” who ran the nation­al news broad­casts. Nixon’s pres­i­den­cy was ulti­mate­ly felled by reporters, but the cri­tique lived on.

    In the decades since, charges of lib­er­al bias (some of them valid, oth­ers less so) have prac­ti­cal­ly become an offi­cial plank of the GOP plat­form. The sub­ject has inspired scores of books, count­less talk-radio rants, and the cre­ation of an entire cable news empire whose slogan—“Fair and Balanced”—was coined as a con­dem­na­tion of its com­peti­tors.

    Cru­cial­ly, though, for most of that peri­od con­ser­v­a­tives main­tained a civic-mind­ed ratio­nale for their project. They said they believed in the impor­tance of non­par­ti­san jour­nal­ism; in the neces­si­ty of a strong, inde­pen­dent press that pro­vid­ed the cit­i­zen­ry with an accu­rate account of the day’s events. Ulti­mate­ly, they claimed, they were prac­tic­ing tough love—offering their crit­i­cisms in the spir­it of reform. Bernard Goldberg—a CBS News vet­er­an whose tell-all book Bias entered the con­ser­v­a­tive canon as soon as it was pub­lished in 2001—captured this sen­ti­ment dur­ing a seg­ment on The O’Reilly Fac­tor. “We all know that you can’t live in a free coun­try with­out a free press,” Gold­berg told host O’Reilly. “But you know what else? You can’t live in a free coun­try for long with­out a fair press. We need a strong main­stream media. That’s why you and I crit­i­cize it.”

    Of course, some of this stat­ed con­cern for the Fourth Estate and its lack of objec­tiv­i­ty has been disin­gen­u­ous. But there was val­ue even in the play­act­ing. By pay­ing lip ser­vice to the ide­al of “fair and bal­anced” news, con­ser­v­a­tives helped sus­tain the post-WWII con­sen­sus that our mod­ern democ­ra­cy works best with a robust non­par­ti­san press func­tion­ing as the com­mon denom­i­na­tor.

    It was Don­ald Trump who dropped this pre­tense. Rather than con­ceal his true mean­ing with earnest pleas for a fair­er press, he fired off tweets cast­ing the media as “ene­my of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.” Rather than feign rev­er­ence for the First Amend­ment, he promised to “open up our libel laws” to make suing jour­nal­ists eas­i­er. At cam­paign ral­lies, he would keep reporters con­fined to met­al press pens, and lead his crowds in a rit­u­al­is­tic boo­ing. As some­one who cov­ered dozens of those events, I always thought I could tell when he was going through the motions with his press-bash­ing, and when he real­ly meant it. Dur­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly bad news cycles, his voice would take on a growl­ing qual­i­ty, and he’d punc­tu­ate his stan­dard stump-speech line with an extra excla­ma­tion: “Absolute scum. Remem­ber that. Scum. Scum. Total­ly dis­hon­est peo­ple.”

    Trump’s histri­on­ics were always strate­gic. He was able to suc­cess­ful­ly under­mine months of crit­i­cal cov­er­age and duti­ful fact-check­ing by cast­ing reporters as vil­lains. Each time his cam­paign was in trou­ble, the can­di­date esca­lat­ed the cul­ture war on the press. By the end of the elec­tion, we were not just biased or corrupt—we were dan­ger­ous, con­spir­a­to­r­i­al, part of a shad­owy glob­al­ist cabal. Just days after Trump was sworn into office, chief White House strate­gist Steve Ban­non told The New York Times, “You’re the oppo­si­tion par­ty. Not the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party....The media’s the oppo­si­tion par­ty.”

    ...

    It doesn’t require an over­ly active imag­i­na­tion to pic­ture the post-apoc­a­lyp­tic news land­scape that so many con­ser­v­a­tives seem to be work­ing toward. Media frag­men­ta­tion accel­er­ates to warp speed. Agen­da-dri­ven publishers—be they pro­fes­sion­al­ly staffed web­sites or one-man YouTube channels—churn out nar­row­ly tai­lored news for increas­ing­ly niche audi­ences. There’s still plen­ty of fac­tu­al report­ing to turn to when you want hur­ri­cane updates or celebri­ty news, and adver­sar­i­al inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism doesn’t quite go out of style. But it’s eas­i­er than ever for news con­sumers to ensconce them­selves in her­met­i­cal­ly sealed infor­ma­tion bub­bles and ignore rev­e­la­tions that chal­lenge their world­views. For most peo­ple, “news” ceas­es to func­tion as a means of enlight­en­ment, and becomes fod­der for vit­ri­olic polit­i­cal debates that play out end­less­ly on social media. (Like I said, it’s not hard to imag­ine.) Inevitably, the rich and powerful—those who can afford to buy and bankroll their own per­son­al Pravdas—benefit most in this brave new world.

    This is, of course, a worst-case sce­nario. But is it real­ly so far-fetched? Already, many of the nation’s most impor­tant outlets—the pub­li­ca­tions and net­works that com­prise the core of Amer­i­can journalism—have seen their audi­ence shrink and splin­ter; their cred­i­bil­i­ty plum­met among vast swathes of the pub­lic; and their finan­cial futures turn bleak. If The New York Times and ABC News were to shut down or, more like­ly, dwin­dle into shells of their for­mer selves, would they be replaced with new mega-out­lets that share their resources, their reach, and their edi­to­r­i­al val­ues? It’s pos­si­ble. But it seems just as like­ly that they wouldn’t be replaced at all.

    “This whole idea of media objec­tiv­i­ty is rel­a­tive­ly new,” says Ben Shapiro, a for­mer Bre­it­bart edi­tor at large who found­ed and runs the right-wing web­site Dai­ly Wire. Like oth­er con­ser­v­a­tives I talked to, he envi­sions a return to the media con­ven­tions of cen­turies past, when news was deliv­ered large­ly by the organs of par­ties and ide­o­log­i­cal move­ments. “At the found­ing, it was a bunch of par­ti­san press going after each oth­er.” If Shapiro had his way, the news would be a polem­i­cal free-for-all and media out­lets would give up any pre­tense of non-par­ti­san­ship. He dis­missed the Pulitzer-win­ning fact-check site Poli­ti­Fact as a “left­ist out­let,” and gen­er­al­ly reject­ed the idea that any news orga­ni­za­tions should be held up as “grand arbiters of truth and fal­si­ty.” The very notion, he says, is “anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic.”

    “Basi­cal­ly, I think we ought to get away from draw­ing strict bound­aries around ‘jour­nal­ism,’” Shapiro told me. He point­ed to James O’Keefe, a con­ser­v­a­tive activist who is famous for pro­duc­ing secret­ly record­ed (and often selec­tive­ly edit­ed) videos that pur­port to expose the sins of acad­e­mia, the media, and the gov­ern­ment. “Is he an activist?” Shapiro asks. “Yes. Does he com­mit jour­nal­ism? Yes. Is he a jour­nal­ist? Well, it depends on whether he’s com­mit­ting acts of jour­nal­ism in that moment.”

    Ann Coul­ter, the vocif­er­ous­ly pro-Trump pun­dit and author, echoed these sen­ti­ments in our email exchange. She told me that vir­tu­al­ly all news cov­er­age of the pres­i­dent by the “elite” media—a group she says includes not just The Wash­ing­ton Post and NBC, but also many old-line con­ser­v­a­tive publications—has been dis­hon­est, friv­o­lous, and pack-like. “Chuck Todd agree­ing with Jeff Flake about what a bar­bar­ian Trump is isn’t news!” Coul­ter says. “I guess what I’d like, in my ide­al world, is that we all start argu­ing about issues and ideas.”

    I asked her if there was any room in that vision for news out­lets that play a neu­tral, ref­er­ee-like role—contributing to the debate only by adding facts and debunk­ing false­hoods. Coul­ter seemed unin­ter­est­ed in the ques­tion. The pub­li­ca­tions that have tried to serve that func­tion, she con­tends, have become “too screechy and inac­cu­rate,” and have right­ly lost the public’s trust. “No seri­ous per­son would trust either the NYT or WaPo’s ‘FACT CHECK’!”

    The con­cept of an obsti­nate­ly objec­tive press has been under assault in Amer­i­ca for some time now, of course, and not just from the right. Crit­ics like NYU’s Jay Rosen argue per­sua­sive­ly that news out­lets do a dis­ser­vice to their audi­ences when they coat their jour­nal­ism in a sheen of arti­fi­cial neu­tral­i­ty. Bet­ter to aim for trans­paren­cy, the argu­ment goes—to be hon­est about where you’re com­ing from, and to then strive for fair­ness and open-mind­ed engage­ment. But there is a con­sid­er­able dif­fer­ence between the pro­po­nents of this the­o­ry and those who cyn­i­cal­ly cel­e­brate the “weaponiza­tion of infor­ma­tion” and the rise of “alter­na­tive facts.”

    The so-called mar­ket­place of ideas only works when real­i­ty serves as a reg­u­lat­ing force. For con­struc­tive debates to take place in a soci­ety like ours—and for nation­al con­sen­sus to emerge on any giv­en question—it’s essen­tial we start from a broad­ly agreed-upon set of basic facts. Who will pro­vide them if the main­stream media col­laps­es into a melee of war­ring par­ti­san pub­li­ca­tions?

    Late one after­noon in July, I met with Matthew Con­tinet­ti, edi­tor in chief of the Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con, in a pizze­ria on the ground floor of the Watergate—the DC office com­plex that stands today as a con­crete bru­tal­ist mon­u­ment to the most icon­ic jour­nal­is­tic tri­umph of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Con­tinet­ti is not a bomb-throw­er by nature. He is polite and cere­bral and metic­u­lous about his diction—often paus­ing for sev­er­al sec­onds to con­sid­er his words before answer­ing a ques­tion. On the day we met, he had just come from George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, where he teach­es a class on the his­to­ry of the intel­lec­tu­al con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment.

    Con­tinet­ti grew up in the mid­dle-class sub­urbs of north­ern Vir­ginia with par­ents whom he describes as not “par­tic­u­lar­ly polit­i­cal.” His con­ver­sion to con­ser­vatism came at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, while study­ing Plato’s Repub­lic dur­ing an under­grad class on polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. It was around this same time that he decid­ed to pur­sue jour­nal­ism, writ­ing arti­cles for the stu­dent news­pa­per as well as for a con­ser­v­a­tive nation­al mag­a­zine called Cam­pus. Aspir­ing jour­nal­ists who lean to the right often face a choice as they pre­pare to enter the indus­try: try to carve out a career in the main­stream press, or fol­low the well-trod path into con­ser­v­a­tive media? Con­tinet­ti opt­ed for the latter—working as an intern at Nation­al Review while he was attend­ing Colum­bia, and becom­ing a star writer at The Week­ly Stan­dard after grad­u­at­ing. (In 2012, he mar­ried Anne Kris­tol, the daugh­ter of Bill Kris­tol, the magazine’s founder.)

    The site Con­tinet­ti edits today con­tains a fair amount of trolling—a run­ning series of Kate Upton click­bait; wink­ing head­lines like “Great­est Liv­ing Pres­i­dent Is Also Fan­tas­tic Painter”—but it has also earned a rep­u­ta­tion for real-deal jour­nal­ism. Its reporters run down leads, work their sources, call for com­ment, and issue cor­rec­tions when nec­es­sary. If a par­ti­san press real­ly is the future, we could do worse than the Free Bea­con.

    I hoped Con­tinet­ti might have a more opti­mistic out­look on the world after the main­stream media’s demise. But as we spoke, he was unremit­ting­ly bear­ish on the prospect that any 21st-cen­tu­ry out­let could win the trust of a broad, diverse cross-sec­tion of news con­sumers. “One of the rea­sons there’s no com­mon denom­i­na­tor in media is there’s real­ly no com­mon denom­i­na­tor in Amer­i­can life,” he told me. “As a gen­er­al rule, we are a divid­ed soci­ety. We have very real dis­agree­ments about val­ues, about what’s impor­tant.”

    I couldn’t help but inter­ject: Shouldn’t facts be the com­mon denom­i­na­tor? I asked, painful­ly aware that I was exhibit­ing the kind of jour­nal­is­tic sanc­ti­mo­ny that the Free Bea­con reg­u­lar­ly ridicules.

    Con­tinet­ti exhaled, patient­ly, and shook his head. “I think the prob­lem you describe is unsolv­able,” he told me. “Peo­ple are going to believe what they want. It’s not my job to tell them what to believe. It’s my job to edit a site that pro­vides new infor­ma­tion and adds val­ue every day. Cer­tain­ly, there are many peo­ple, like Howard Dean, who say it’s ‘fake news.’ But OK, I’m not going to con­trol what Howard Dean thinks. He has every right.” A smirk appeared on Continetti’s face. “And I don’t believe a word he says, either.”

    In many ways, Don­ald Trump was the per­fect can­di­date to chan­nel the con­ser­v­a­tive media—the talk radio id per­son­i­fied and plopped onto a debate stage. As some­one whose sta­tus as a per­pet­u­al­ly aggriev­ed media crit­ic long pre­dat­ed his con­ver­sion to con­ser­vatism, Trump quick­ly dis­cov­ered that rank-and-file Repub­li­can vot­ers were an enthu­si­as­tic audi­ence for his gripes about the press. And as Trump worked to rein­vent him­self as a Repub­li­can polit­i­cal celebri­ty, he nat­u­ral­ly took his cues from the pop­u­lar right-wing media. His first major for­ay into con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics was as the world’s most famous “birther,” cham­pi­oning a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that was gain­ing steam on talk radio and right-wing blogs. Lat­er, as a can­di­date, he punc­tu­at­ed his stump speech­es with sto­ries he’d read on Bre­it­bart and par­rot­ed the talk­ing points he’d picked up watch­ing Fox & Friends.

    Trump did face real oppo­si­tion in the pri­maries from the con­ser­v­a­tive intel­li­gentsia. Kris­tol and New York Times op-ed colum­nist Ross Douthat were ear­ly and out­spo­ken crit­ics, while Nation­al Review pub­lished an entire anti-Trump issue in the run-up to the Iowa cau­cus­es. But those with the loud­est megaphones—people like Rush Lim­baugh and Sean Hannity—saw Trump’s affec­tion for them and their tribe, and reward­ed it by pro­vid­ing the kind of boos­t­er­ism that Mitt Rom­ney would have sold one of his sons for.

    And so, when Trump won in 2016, it wasn’t just a vic­to­ry for him and his cam­paign. It was a coup for the con­ser­v­a­tive media, whose destruc­tion­ist atti­tude toward the main­stream press can now be found at vir­tu­al­ly every level—from the hosts of Fox News, to the ascen­dant inter­net per­son­al­i­ties of the alt-right. “Noth­ing is grander, noth­ing is more glo­ri­ous, noth­ing is more sat­is­fy­ing, noth­ing is sweet­er, noth­ing is more val­i­dat­ing, noth­ing is bet­ter for Amer­i­ca than the death of the main­stream media’s polit­i­cal pow­er,” John Nolte crowed in the Dai­ly Wire the day after the elec­tion.

    The Gate­way Pun­dit flat­ly declared, “The main­stream media is your ene­my.” And Infowars cap­tured the sen­ti­ment by fea­tur­ing an edi­to­r­i­al car­toon depict­ing right-wing media fig­ures as aster­oids hurtling toward earth where news-net­work dinosaurs await their “extinc­tion.”

    In a decid­ed­ly dystopi­an spin on ser­vice jour­nal­ism, some in the con­ser­v­a­tive media have begun pro­vid­ing their audi­ences with how-to guides for fin­ish­ing off the jour­nal­is­tic estab­lish­ment. Lim­baugh told his lis­ten­ers they should stop con­sum­ing news from the main­stream press alto­geth­er. “I’ll let you know what they’re up to,” he assured them. “And as a bonus, I’ll nuke it!” Han­ni­ty urged his view­ers to start tar­get­ing indi­vid­ual journalists—and their bosses—on social media. And the alt-right blog­ger Roosh Val­izadeh has called for a coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign of bul­ly­ing aimed at reporters. “Make them appear as ‘uncool’ salary­men in the eyes of the pub­lic,” he wrote. “Mock their appear­ance, their man­ner­isms, and their weak­ness­es.”

    ...

    Mainstream’s right turn

    Today’s right-wing media world didn’t sur­face overnight. Below, a time­line of its devel­op­ment.

    1947

    Hen­ry Reg­n­ery founds con­ser­v­a­tive book and mag­a­zine com­pa­ny Reg­n­ery Pub­lish­ing. William F. Buck­ley Jr. lat­er advis­es him: “I would rec­om­mend that you state that in your opin­ion an objec­tive read­ing of the facts tends to make one con­ser­v­a­tive and Chris­t­ian; that there­fore your firm is both objec­tive and par­ti­san in behalf of these val­ues.”

    1954

    Clarence Man­ion begins the Man­ion Forum radio show, of which he bragged, “Every speak­er over our net­work has been 100 per­cent Right Wing....You may rest assured, no Left Winger, no inter­na­tion­al Social­ist, no One-Worlder, no Com­mu­nist will ever be heard over the 110 sta­tions of the Man­ion Forum net­work.”

    1964

    So fre­quent­ly does Bar­ry Goldwater’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign com­plain about bias in the cov­er­age of his can­di­da­cy that his press sec­re­tary jovial­ly hands out pins that read “East­ern Lib­er­al Press” to the reporters on the cam­paign plane.

    1969

    Vice Pres­i­dent Spiro Agnew gives a tele­vised speech com­plain­ing about how Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon’s Viet­nam War poli­cies are cov­ered by the press. “Per­haps the place to start look­ing for a cred­i­bil­i­ty gap is not in the offices of the Gov­ern­ment in Wash­ing­ton,” he says, “but in the stu­dios of the net­works in New York.”

    1973

    Nixon sup­port­ers dis­miss the Water­gate scan­dal as a witch hunt by a lib­er­al media. “Water­gate,” says Sen­a­tor Jesse Helms, “became the lever by which embit­tered lib­er­al pun­dits have sought to reverse the 1972 con­ser­v­a­tive judg­ment of the peo­ple.”

    1988

    The Rush Lim­baugh Show quick­ly becomes one of the country’s most pop­u­lar syn­di­cat­ed radio pro­grams. “In those days the main­stream lib­er­als had a media monop­oly,” Lim­baugh lat­er says. “Nobody did polit­i­cal talk, let alone con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal talk.”

    1996

    Announc­ing the Fox News Chan­nel, its chief exec­u­tive Roger Ailes says the 24-hour news net­work “would like to restore objec­tiv­i­ty where we find it lacking....We just expect to do fine, bal­anced jour­nal­ism.”

    2004

    Dan Rather steps down as CBS Evening News anchor after mem­os in a CBS report alleg­ing George W. Bush received pref­er­en­tial treat­ment while serv­ing in the Texas Air Nation­al Guard are revealed by con­ser­v­a­tive blog­gers as fakes.

    2009

    Andrew Bre­it­bart announces that his epony­mous web­site will launch a “Big Jour­nal­ism” ver­ti­cal with the inten­tion to “fight the main­stream media...who have repeat­ed­ly, and under the guise of objec­tiv­i­ty and polit­i­cal neu­tral­i­ty, pro­mot­ed a bla­tant­ly left-of-cen­ter, pro-Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty agen­da.”

    2016

    Don­ald Trump makes attacks against jour­nal­ists a hall­mark of his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. He bans a num­ber of out­lets from attend­ing his ral­lies and events. Less than a month after tak­ing office, Trump refers to the media in a tweet as “the ene­my of the Amer­i­can Peo­ple!”

    ———-

    “What if the right-wing media wins?” by McK­ay Cop­pins; Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism Review; Fall 2017

    “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.”:

    ...
    Boyle said his goal was sim­ple: “The full destruc­tion and elim­i­na­tion of the entire main­stream media.” Bre­it­bart played up his speech on its home­page that day, but the remarks bare­ly reg­is­tered in broad­er media cir­cles. The site and its staff have become known for this kind of blus­ter, and most jour­nal­ists have taught them­selves to tune it out. Maybe we ought to be pay­ing clos­er atten­tion.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    While Don­ald Trump’s rise may have, as Politico’s Eliana John­son recent­ly wrote, “scram­bled the peck­ing order” on the right—elevating Bre­it­bartesque pop­ulists over the con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als at the Jour­nal and The Week­ly Stan­dard—the con­ser­v­a­tive media com­plex as a whole is big­ger, stronger, and more influ­en­tial today than it’s ever been. And with so many of its most pow­er­ful mem­bers now pur­su­ing a scorched-earth assault on America’s jour­nal­is­tic insti­tu­tions, it’s worth con­sid­er­ing what they hope it will look like once they’re done burn­ing down our vil­lages, des­e­crat­ing our tem­ples, and howl­ing at our lamen­ta­tions.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    There is a long tra­di­tion in Repub­li­can pol­i­tics of seek­ing to dis­cred­it jour­nal­ism. Dur­ing the 1964 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, Bar­ry Goldwater’s press sec­re­tary dis­trib­uted gold pins to reporters that read “East­ern Lib­er­al Press.” Richard Nixon’s vice pres­i­dent, Spiro Agnew, in 1969 railed against the “closed fra­ter­ni­ty of priv­i­leged men” who ran the nation­al news broad­casts. Nixon’s pres­i­den­cy was ulti­mate­ly felled by reporters, but the cri­tique lived on.

    In the decades since, charges of lib­er­al bias (some of them valid, oth­ers less so) have prac­ti­cal­ly become an offi­cial plank of the GOP plat­form. The sub­ject has inspired scores of books, count­less talk-radio rants, and the cre­ation of an entire cable news empire whose slogan—“Fair and Balanced”—was coined as a con­dem­na­tion of its com­peti­tors.

    Cru­cial­ly, though, for most of that peri­od con­ser­v­a­tives main­tained a civic-mind­ed ratio­nale for their project. They said they believed in the impor­tance of non­par­ti­san jour­nal­ism; in the neces­si­ty of a strong, inde­pen­dent press that pro­vid­ed the cit­i­zen­ry with an accu­rate account of the day’s events. Ulti­mate­ly, they claimed, they were prac­tic­ing tough love—offering their crit­i­cisms in the spir­it of reform. Bernard Goldberg—a CBS News vet­er­an whose tell-all book Bias entered the con­ser­v­a­tive canon as soon as it was pub­lished in 2001—captured this sen­ti­ment dur­ing a seg­ment on The O’Reilly Fac­tor. “We all know that you can’t live in a free coun­try with­out a free press,” Gold­berg told host O’Reilly. “But you know what else? You can’t live in a free coun­try for long with­out a fair press. We need a strong main­stream media. That’s why you and I crit­i­cize it.”

    Of course, some of this stat­ed con­cern for the Fourth Estate and its lack of objec­tiv­i­ty has been disin­gen­u­ous. But there was val­ue even in the play­act­ing. By pay­ing lip ser­vice to the ide­al of “fair and bal­anced” news, con­ser­v­a­tives helped sus­tain the post-WWII con­sen­sus that our mod­ern democ­ra­cy works best with a robust non­par­ti­san press func­tion­ing as the com­mon denom­i­na­tor.

    It was Don­ald Trump who dropped this pre­tense. Rather than con­ceal his true mean­ing with earnest pleas for a fair­er press, he fired off tweets cast­ing the media as “ene­my of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.” Rather than feign rev­er­ence for the First Amend­ment, he promised to “open up our libel laws” to make suing jour­nal­ists eas­i­er. At cam­paign ral­lies, he would keep reporters con­fined to met­al press pens, and lead his crowds in a rit­u­al­is­tic boo­ing. As some­one who cov­ered dozens of those events, I always thought I could tell when he was going through the motions with his press-bash­ing, and when he real­ly meant it. Dur­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly bad news cycles, his voice would take on a growl­ing qual­i­ty, and he’d punc­tu­ate his stan­dard stump-speech line with an extra excla­ma­tion: “Absolute scum. Remem­ber that. Scum. Scum. Total­ly dis­hon­est peo­ple.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    It doesn’t require an over­ly active imag­i­na­tion to pic­ture the post-apoc­a­lyp­tic news land­scape that so many con­ser­v­a­tives seem to be work­ing toward. Media frag­men­ta­tion accel­er­ates to warp speed. Agen­da-dri­ven publishers—be they pro­fes­sion­al­ly staffed web­sites or one-man YouTube channels—churn out nar­row­ly tai­lored news for increas­ing­ly niche audi­ences. There’s still plen­ty of fac­tu­al report­ing to turn to when you want hur­ri­cane updates or celebri­ty news, and adver­sar­i­al inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism doesn’t quite go out of style. But it’s eas­i­er than ever for news con­sumers to ensconce them­selves in her­met­i­cal­ly sealed infor­ma­tion bub­bles and ignore rev­e­la­tions that chal­lenge their world­views. For most peo­ple, “news” ceas­es to func­tion as a means of enlight­en­ment, and becomes fod­der for vit­ri­olic polit­i­cal debates that play out end­less­ly on social media. (Like I said, it’s not hard to imag­ine.) Inevitably, the rich and powerful—those who can afford to buy and bankroll their own per­son­al Pravdas—benefit most in this brave new world.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    “This whole idea of media objec­tiv­i­ty is rel­a­tive­ly new,” says Ben Shapiro, a for­mer Bre­it­bart edi­tor at large who found­ed and runs the right-wing web­site Dai­ly Wire. Like oth­er con­ser­v­a­tives I talked to, he envi­sions a return to the media con­ven­tions of cen­turies past, when news was deliv­ered large­ly by the organs of par­ties and ide­o­log­i­cal move­ments. “At the found­ing, it was a bunch of par­ti­san press going after each oth­er.” If Shapiro had his way, the news would be a polem­i­cal free-for-all and media out­lets would give up any pre­tense of non-par­ti­san­ship. He dis­missed the Pulitzer-win­ning fact-check site Poli­ti­Fact as a “left­ist out­let,” and gen­er­al­ly reject­ed the idea that any news orga­ni­za­tions should be held up as “grand arbiters of truth and fal­si­ty.” The very notion, he says, is “anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic.”
    ...

    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’:

    ...
    “Basi­cal­ly, I think we ought to get away from draw­ing strict bound­aries around ‘jour­nal­ism,’” Shapiro told me. He point­ed to James O’Keefe, a con­ser­v­a­tive activist who is famous for pro­duc­ing secret­ly record­ed (and often selec­tive­ly edit­ed) videos that pur­port to expose the sins of acad­e­mia, the media, and the gov­ern­ment. “Is he an activist?” Shapiro asks. “Yes. Does he com­mit jour­nal­ism? Yes. Is he a jour­nal­ist? Well, it depends on whether he’s com­mit­ting acts of jour­nal­ism in that moment.”
    ...

    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’:

    ...
    The con­cept of an obsti­nate­ly objec­tive press has been under assault in Amer­i­ca for some time now, of course, and not just from the right. Crit­ics like NYU’s Jay Rosen argue per­sua­sive­ly that news out­lets do a dis­ser­vice to their audi­ences when they coat their jour­nal­ism in a sheen of arti­fi­cial neu­tral­i­ty. Bet­ter to aim for trans­paren­cy, the argu­ment goes—to be hon­est about where you’re com­ing from, and to then strive for fair­ness and open-mind­ed engage­ment. But there is a con­sid­er­able dif­fer­ence between the pro­po­nents of this the­o­ry and those who cyn­i­cal­ly cel­e­brate the “weaponiza­tion of infor­ma­tion” and the rise of “alter­na­tive facts.”

    The so-called mar­ket­place of ideas only works when real­i­ty serves as a reg­u­lat­ing force. For con­struc­tive debates to take place in a soci­ety like ours—and for nation­al con­sen­sus to emerge on any giv­en question—it’s essen­tial we start from a broad­ly agreed-upon set of basic facts. Who will pro­vide them if the main­stream media col­laps­es into a melee of war­ring par­ti­san pub­li­ca­tions?

    Late one after­noon in July, I met with Matthew Con­tinet­ti, edi­tor in chief of the Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con, in a pizze­ria on the ground floor of the Watergate—the DC office com­plex that stands today as a con­crete bru­tal­ist mon­u­ment to the most icon­ic jour­nal­is­tic tri­umph of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Con­tinet­ti is not a bomb-throw­er by nature. He is polite and cere­bral and metic­u­lous about his diction—often paus­ing for sev­er­al sec­onds to con­sid­er his words before answer­ing a ques­tion. On the day we met, he had just come from George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, where he teach­es a class on the his­to­ry of the intel­lec­tu­al con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment.

    ...

    I hoped Con­tinet­ti might have a more opti­mistic out­look on the world after the main­stream media’s demise. But as we spoke, he was unremit­ting­ly bear­ish on the prospect that any 21st-cen­tu­ry out­let could win the trust of a broad, diverse cross-sec­tion of news con­sumers. “One of the rea­sons there’s no com­mon denom­i­na­tor in media is there’s real­ly no com­mon denom­i­na­tor in Amer­i­can life,” he told me. “As a gen­er­al rule, we are a divid­ed soci­ety. We have very real dis­agree­ments about val­ues, about what’s impor­tant.”

    I couldn’t help but inter­ject: Shouldn’t facts be the com­mon denom­i­na­tor? I asked, painful­ly aware that I was exhibit­ing the kind of jour­nal­is­tic sanc­ti­mo­ny that the Free Bea­con reg­u­lar­ly ridicules.

    Con­tinet­ti exhaled, patient­ly, and shook his head. “I think the prob­lem you describe is unsolv­able,” he told me. “Peo­ple are going to believe what they want. It’s not my job to tell them what to believe. It’s my job to edit a site that pro­vides new infor­ma­tion and adds val­ue every day. Cer­tain­ly, there are many peo­ple, like Howard Dean, who say it’s ‘fake news.’ But OK, I’m not going to con­trol what Howard Dean thinks. He has every right.” A smirk appeared on Continetti’s face. “And I don’t believe a word he says, either.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    And so, when Trump won in 2016, it wasn’t just a vic­to­ry for him and his cam­paign. It was a coup for the con­ser­v­a­tive media, whose destruc­tion­ist atti­tude toward the main­stream press can now be found at vir­tu­al­ly every level—from the hosts of Fox News, to the ascen­dant inter­net per­son­al­i­ties of the alt-right. “Noth­ing is grander, noth­ing is more glo­ri­ous, noth­ing is more sat­is­fy­ing, noth­ing is sweet­er, noth­ing is more val­i­dat­ing, noth­ing is bet­ter for Amer­i­ca than the death of the main­stream media’s polit­i­cal pow­er,” John Nolte crowed in the Dai­ly Wire the day after the elec­tion.

    The Gate­way Pun­dit flat­ly declared, “The main­stream media is your ene­my.” And Infowars cap­tured the sen­ti­ment by fea­tur­ing an edi­to­r­i­al car­toon depict­ing right-wing media fig­ures as aster­oids hurtling toward earth where news-net­work dinosaurs await their “extinc­tion.”

    In a decid­ed­ly dystopi­an spin on ser­vice jour­nal­ism, some in the con­ser­v­a­tive media have begun pro­vid­ing their audi­ences with how-to guides for fin­ish­ing off the jour­nal­is­tic estab­lish­ment. Lim­baugh told his lis­ten­ers they should stop con­sum­ing news from the main­stream press alto­geth­er. “I’ll let you know what they’re up to,” he assured them. “And as a bonus, I’ll nuke it!” Han­ni­ty urged his view­ers to start tar­get­ing indi­vid­ual journalists—and their bosses—on social media. And the alt-right blog­ger Roosh Val­izadeh has called for a coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign of bul­ly­ing aimed at reporters. “Make them appear as ‘uncool’ salary­men in the eyes of the pub­lic,” he wrote. “Mock their appear­ance, their man­ner­isms, and their weak­ness­es.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 3, 2018, 5:16 pm
  34. 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”:

    CNN

    NBC and Fox News pull Trump cam­paign’s racist ad after ‘Sun­day Night Foot­ball’ back­lash

    By Oliv­er Dar­cy and Bri­an Stel­ter, CNN Busi­ness

    Updat­ed 2:33 PM ET, Mon Novem­ber 5, 2018

    (CNN)NBC and Fox News said in sep­a­rate state­ments on Mon­day that their net­works will no longer air the Trump cam­paign’s racist anti-immi­grant adver­tise­ment.

    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.

    “After fur­ther review,” NBC said, “we rec­og­nize the insen­si­tive nature of the ad and have decid­ed to cease air­ing it across our prop­er­ties as soon as pos­si­ble.”

    Fox soon fol­lowed suit.

    “Upon fur­ther review, Fox News pulled the ad yes­ter­day and it will not appear on either Fox News Chan­nel or Fox Busi­ness Net­work,” ad sales pres­i­dent Mar­i­anne Gam­bel­li told CNN in a state­ment.

    The ad ran mul­ti­ple times on both Fox News and Fox Busi­ness before being pulled.

    Face­book also came under scruti­ny for let­ting the Trump cam­paign run the ad on its plat­form. On Mon­day after­noon the com­pa­ny said “this ad vio­lates Face­book’s adver­tis­ing pol­i­cy against sen­sa­tion­al con­tent so we are reject­ing it. While the video is allowed to be post­ed on Face­book, it can­not receive paid dis­tri­b­u­tion.”

    The ad was released by the Trump cam­paign late last week. It vil­i­fied the thou­sands of migrants walk­ing toward the US south­ern bor­der, wrong­ly por­tray­ing them as invaders and crim­i­nals. It seemed designed to stoke fear ahead of the midterm elec­tions and increase Repub­li­can turnout.

    CNN deter­mined that the ad was racist and declined to sell air­time for it. But oth­er net­works agreed to sell the time.

    Many view­ers were stunned when it aired dur­ing “Sun­day Night Foot­ball,” which reg­u­lar­ly aver­ages more than 10 mil­lion view­ers.

    This week’s game had a par­tic­u­lar­ly big audi­ence as it fea­tured a high­ly-antic­i­pat­ed matchup between two of the league’s pre­mier quar­ter­backs, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers.

    ...

    Along with the NBC broad­cast net­work, NBCU­ni­ver­sal allowed the ad to air mul­ti­ple times on MSNBC before Mon­day’s deci­sion was made.

    An NBC source said the ad was cleared by the broad­cast net­work’s stan­dards and prac­tices team. “We regret the deci­sion that the ad ran at all,” the source said, “and it will not air on any NBCU­ni­ver­sal prop­er­ty, local­ly or nation­al­ly.”

    Fox News did not explain why it pulled the ad. The 30-sec­ond spot was not only racist, it also con­tained fac­tu­al inac­cu­ra­cies, and it is not uncom­mon for net­works to reject adver­tise­ments on such grounds.

    Fox’s deci­sion was par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­pris­ing giv­en the net­work’s close prox­im­i­ty and friend­ly rela­tion­ship with the White House.

    Crit­ics of the net­work say its hosts and com­men­ta­tors employ some of the same racist rhetoric and scare tac­tics that were used in the ad.

    “How does Fox News square this with offer­ing hours of the same racial fear-mon­ger­ing in prime­time to pro­mote Trump (at no cost) on a night­ly basis?” asked Jesse Lehrich, com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for the pro­gres­sive group Orga­niz­ing for Amer­i­ca and a for­mer Hillary Clin­ton spokesman.

    On Twit­ter, Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 cam­paign man­ag­er, ignored the deci­sion by Fox to pull the ad.

    Instead, Parscale lam­bast­ed NBC, CNN, and Face­book and said the “#Fak­e­News­Me­dia” was “try­ing to con­trol what you see and how you think.”

    A lit­tle while lat­er, the pres­i­dent was asked about the con­tro­ver­sy by a reporter. He said “I don’t know about it. I mean, you’re telling me some­thing I don’t know about.” He added: “We have a lot of ads, and they cer­tain­ly are effec­tive based on the num­bers we are see­ing.”

    When asked about the offen­sive nature of the ad, Trump said, “Well, a lot of things are offen­sive. Your ques­tions are offen­sive a lot of the times.”

    Peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter told CNN that the adver­tise­ment was not sub­mit­ted to either CBS or ABC, so those net­works did­n’t have to decide whether to sell the air­time or not.

    CNN had to make the deci­sion on Fri­day when the ad was sub­mit­ted there.

    The next day, Don­ald Trump Jr. com­plained on Twit­ter that CNN “refused to run” the adver­tise­ment.

    A CNN spokesper­son respond­ed in a tweet, say­ing, “CNN has made it abun­dant­ly clear in its edi­to­r­i­al cov­er­age that this ad is racist. When pre­sent­ed with an oppor­tu­ni­ty to be paid to take a ver­sion of this ad, we declined. Those are the facts.”

    ———-

    “NBC and Fox News pull Trump cam­paign’s racist ad after ‘Sun­day Night Foot­ball’ back­lash” by Oliv­er Dar­cy and Bri­an Stel­ter; CNN; 11/05/2018

    “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?

    ...
    Many view­ers were stunned when it aired dur­ing “Sun­day Night Foot­ball,” which reg­u­lar­ly aver­ages more than 10 mil­lion view­ers.

    This week’s game had a par­tic­u­lar­ly big audi­ence as it fea­tured a high­ly-antic­i­pat­ed matchup between two of the league’s pre­mier quar­ter­backs, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers.

    ...

    “After fur­ther review,” NBC said, “we rec­og­nize the insen­si­tive nature of the ad and have decid­ed to cease air­ing it across our prop­er­ties as soon as pos­si­ble.”
    ...

    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:

    ...

    Fox soon fol­lowed suit.

    “Upon fur­ther review, Fox News pulled the ad yes­ter­day and it will not appear on either Fox News Chan­nel or Fox Busi­ness Net­work,” ad sales pres­i­dent Mar­i­anne Gam­bel­li told CNN in a state­ment.

    The ad ran mul­ti­ple times on both Fox News and Fox Busi­ness before being pulled.

    ...

    Fox News did not explain why it pulled the ad. The 30-sec­ond spot was not only racist, it also con­tained fac­tu­al inac­cu­ra­cies, and it is not uncom­mon for net­works to reject adver­tise­ments on such grounds.

    Fox’s deci­sion was par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­pris­ing giv­en the net­work’s close prox­im­i­ty and friend­ly rela­tion­ship with the White House.

    Crit­ics of the net­work say its hosts and com­men­ta­tors employ some of the same racist rhetoric and scare tac­tics that were used in the ad.

    “How does Fox News square this with offer­ing hours of the same racial fear-mon­ger­ing in prime­time to pro­mote Trump (at no cost) on a night­ly basis?” asked Jesse Lehrich, com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for the pro­gres­sive group Orga­niz­ing for Amer­i­ca and a for­mer Hillary Clin­ton spokesman.
    ...

    Even Face­book pulled the ad, although they just pulled it from paid dis­tri­b­u­tion. Face­book users can still pro­mote the ads them­selves on Face­book:

    ...
    Face­book also came under scruti­ny for let­ting the Trump cam­paign run the ad on its plat­form. On Mon­day after­noon the com­pa­ny said “this ad vio­lates Face­book’s adver­tis­ing pol­i­cy against sen­sa­tion­al con­tent so we are reject­ing it. While the video is allowed to be post­ed on Face­book, it can­not receive paid dis­tri­b­u­tion.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    On Twit­ter, Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 cam­paign man­ag­er, ignored the deci­sion by Fox to pull the ad.

    Instead, Parscale lam­bast­ed NBC, CNN, and Face­book and said the “#Fak­e­News­Me­dia” was “try­ing to con­trol what you see and how you think.”

    A lit­tle while lat­er, the pres­i­dent was asked about the con­tro­ver­sy by a reporter. He said “I don’t know about it. I mean, you’re telling me some­thing I don’t know about.” He added: “We have a lot of ads, and they cer­tain­ly are effec­tive based on the num­bers we are see­ing.”

    When asked about the offen­sive nature of the ad, Trump said, “Well, a lot of things are offen­sive. Your ques­tions are offen­sive a lot of the times.”
    ...

    “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:

    CNN

    Trump ‘hat­ed’ his cam­paign’s clos­ing ad and insist­ed on immi­gra­tion piv­ot

    By Jeff Zele­ny, Senior White House Cor­re­spon­dent
    Updat­ed 6:46 PM ET, Mon Novem­ber 5, 2018

    (CNN) Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump was not pleased by the mar­quee clos­ing TV ad his cam­paign unveiled last week fea­tur­ing upbeat themes about the econ­o­my.

    “He hat­ed it,” one Repub­li­can offi­cial said, speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss inter­nal con­ver­sa­tions the Pres­i­dent had with allies.

    Instead, he insist­ed to aides that his clos­ing argu­ment for the midterm elec­tions would be a hard­line anti-immi­gra­tion mes­sage to fire up his core sup­port­ers, two Repub­li­can offi­cials famil­iar with the mat­ter tell CNN.

    House Repub­li­can sources who had been frus­trat­ed with the Pres­i­dent for a num­ber of rea­sons this elec­tion year very much liked the ad tout­ing the econ­o­my because it was a rare appeal to the very sub­ur­ban female vot­er they are wor­ried about los­ing big time — large­ly because of the Pres­i­den­t’s polar­iz­ing rhetoric.

    This mixed mes­sag­ing is yet anoth­er indi­ca­tion of the divide play­ing out inside Trump’s inner cir­cle — and Repub­li­cans at large — on the eve of the midterm elec­tions. The debate remains whether the mes­sage of fear and divi­sion over immi­gra­tion was the best course for the Pres­i­dent to take, rather than to talk more about the boom­ing econ­o­my as many GOP lead­ers have implored Trump to do.

    That lat­est ad, which was racist in its tone and sub­ject mat­ter, was ini­tial­ly reject­ed by CNN and lat­er NBC and Fox News on Mon­day. The Pres­i­dent retweet­ed the racist mes­sage from his offi­cial Twit­ter account, a sign of his per­son­al approval, which he nev­er did with the slick ad cre­at­ed by his cam­paign.

    The Pres­i­dent had signed off on the clos­ing ad, over­seen by cam­paign man­ag­er Brad Parscale, but in the wake of the Pitts­burgh syn­a­gogue shoot­ing and the arrest of the alleged Flori­da pipe bomb mak­er, Trump did not think the opti­mistic mes­sage on the econ­o­my was suf­fi­cient or the right approach, the two GOP offi­cials said.

    It’s unclear whether the Pres­i­dent is hold­ing Parscale per­son­al­ly respon­si­ble for the ad, but the two Repub­li­can offi­cials said Trump was agi­tat­ed at him over the $6 mil­lion nation­wide ad buy.

    ...

    The ad, which had echoes of Ronald Rea­gan’s epic 1984 “Morn­ing in Amer­i­ca” polit­i­cal com­mer­cial, had the look and feel of a Super Bowl ad. It did not fea­ture Trump, which the two GOP offi­cials said also did not please the Pres­i­dent.

    ———-

    “Trump ‘hat­ed’ his cam­paign’s clos­ing ad and insist­ed on immi­gra­tion piv­ot” by Jeff Zele­ny; CNN; 11/05/2018

    “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:

    ...
    “He hat­ed it,” one Repub­li­can offi­cial said, speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss inter­nal con­ver­sa­tions the Pres­i­dent had with allies.

    Instead, he insist­ed to aides that his clos­ing argu­ment for the midterm elec­tions would be a hard­line anti-immi­gra­tion mes­sage to fire up his core sup­port­ers, two Repub­li­can offi­cials famil­iar with the mat­ter tell CNN.

    ...

    That lat­est ad, which was racist in its tone and sub­ject mat­ter, was ini­tial­ly reject­ed by CNN and lat­er NBC and Fox News on Mon­day. The Pres­i­dent retweet­ed the racist mes­sage from his offi­cial Twit­ter account, a sign of his per­son­al approval, which he nev­er did with the slick ad cre­at­ed by his cam­paign.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The Pres­i­dent had signed off on the clos­ing ad, over­seen by cam­paign man­ag­er Brad Parscale, but in the wake of the Pitts­burgh syn­a­gogue shoot­ing and the arrest of the alleged Flori­da pipe bomb mak­er, Trump did not think the opti­mistic mes­sage on the econ­o­my was suf­fi­cient or the right approach, the two GOP offi­cials said.

    It’s unclear whether the Pres­i­dent is hold­ing Parscale per­son­al­ly respon­si­ble for the ad, but the two Repub­li­can offi­cials said Trump was agi­tat­ed at him over the $6 mil­lion nation­wide ad buy.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 5, 2018, 4:50 pm
  35. 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:

    The Huff­in­g­ton Post

    Steve King’s Gov­ern­ment Web­site Still Links To White Nation­al­ist Blog
    Ear­li­er this month the racist Iowa con­gress­man claimed to reject the “evil ide­ol­o­gy” of white suprema­cy.

    By Christo­pher Math­ias
    01/29/2019 11:35 am ET Updat­ed

    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.

    The top of King’s house.gov web­site cur­rent­ly fea­tures a YouTube video of King, in a Jan. 15 speech on the floor of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, claim­ing to reject the “evil ide­ol­o­gy” of white suprema­cy. “That ide­ol­o­gy nev­er shows up in my head,” he tells his con­gres­sion­al col­leagues, who were vot­ing on a res­o­lu­tion con­demn­ing racist com­ments King made this month to The New York Times.

    Yet just beneath King’s YouTube video is a link to “Ille­gal Immi­grant Sto­ries,” a sec­tion of King’s web­site he’s devot­ed to cher­ry-picked news arti­cles false­ly por­tray­ing Lati­nos as prone to com­mit­ting crimes. Many of the news clips King cites are from dis­rep­utable far-right pro­pa­gan­da out­lets like Bre­it­bart, The Dai­ly Caller, World­Net­Dai­ly, and The Gate­way Pun­dit. One of the news clips King uses is from the patent­ly white nation­al­ist web­site VDare.com.

    VDare is a hate site named after Vir­ginia Dare, said to be the first white baby born in the “New World.” It has rou­tine­ly fea­tured the writ­ing of eugeni­cists, anti-Semi­tes and Nazi sym­pa­thiz­ers, includ­ing promi­nent white suprema­cists Richard Spencer, Kevin Mac­Don­ald, Sam Fran­cis and Jared Tay­lor.

    King’s office did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to a Huff­Post request for com­ment Tues­day as to why, if King rejects the “evil ide­ol­o­gy” of white nation­al­ism, he’s still using his offi­cial gov­ern­ment web­site to pro­mote and legit­imize a white nation­al­ist web­site.

    King’s house.gov web­site specif­i­cal­ly directs read­ers to a 2016 VDare piece head­lined “Drunk Dri­ving Ille­gal Alien Kills Woman, Is Grant­ed Bail and Dis­ap­pears.” The arti­cle is by Bren­da Walk­er, a deeply racist anti-immi­grant blog­ger.

    Walk­er has writ­ten that Mex­i­cans are “an eth­nic group that has nei­ther inter­est nor apti­tude.” She has stat­ed, false­ly, that “the influx of mil­lions of Mex­i­cans has brought their way of crime, includ­ing kid­nap­ping, along [sic] the rest of their cul­ture.”

    Walk­er has also stat­ed, false­ly, that “sex with chil­dren is social­ly accept­able in Mex­i­co” and that “His­pan­ics, and par­tic­u­lar­ly Mex­i­cans, are aca­d­e­m­ic under­achiev­ers because their cul­ture does not val­ue edu­ca­tion.”

    Media Mat­ters first report­ed in June 2018 that King was cit­ing Walker’s VDare arti­cle on his house.gov web­site. That report was then cit­ed in mul­ti­ple major news out­lets, includ­ing a July 2018 Huff­Post arti­cle that argued King is a white suprema­cist — an arti­cle King read.

    Huff­Post first asked King if he’s a white nation­al­ist in Decem­ber 2017, after he tweet­ed “diver­si­ty is not our strength.” We asked again, in June 2018, after he pro­mot­ed a neo-Nazi on Twit­ter. We asked in August, after he pro­mot­ed anoth­er white suprema­cist on Twit­ter. We asked again in Sep­tem­ber, after we unearthed an inter­view he gave to an Aus­tri­an web­site affil­i­at­ed with Europe’s neo-fas­cist “iden­ti­tar­i­an” move­ment.

    He nev­er denied being a white nation­al­ist to us. In Octo­ber, he told an Iowa TV host that he didn’t think the term “white nation­al­ist” was deroga­to­ry. He won re-elec­tion any­way in Novem­ber, but by the slimmest mar­gin of his long con­gres­sion­al career.

    It was only ear­li­er this month — after he told The New York Times he didn’t under­stand why terms like “white suprema­cy” and “white nation­al­ism” were offen­sive — that House GOP lead­er­ship decid­ed to pun­ish him, strip­ping him of his com­mit­tee assign­ments.

    An effort by two rank-and-file House Democ­rats to cen­sure him, a rare and for­mal rep­ri­mand, was quashed by Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­er­ship over fears that it would set a prece­dent for pun­ish­ing speech made out­side the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

    “Obvi­ous­ly, it’s not what I want,” Rep. Tim Ryan (D‑Ohio), told reporters after his res­o­lu­tion to cen­sure King was reject­ed. “The next time some­thing like this hap­pens, we’ll bring it out of com­mit­tee, and I think we move to expel him at that point.”

    Major GOP fig­ures includ­ing Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minor­i­ty Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Rep. Liz Cheney, the chair­woman of the House Repub­li­can Con­fer­ence, along with a slew of rank-and-file Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats, called on King to resign.

    King has said, how­ev­er, that he will not resign, and has made the dubi­ous claim that The New York Times took his com­ments about white suprema­cy out of con­text.

    ...

    ———-

    “Steve King’s Gov­ern­ment Web­site Still Links To White Nation­al­ist Blog” by Christo­pher Math­ias; The Huff­in­g­ton Post; 01/29/2019

    “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:

    ...
    Yet just beneath King’s YouTube video is a link to “Ille­gal Immi­grant Sto­ries,” a sec­tion of King’s web­site he’s devot­ed to cher­ry-picked news arti­cles false­ly por­tray­ing Lati­nos as prone to com­mit­ting crimes. Many of the news clips King cites are from dis­rep­utable far-right pro­pa­gan­da out­lets like Bre­it­bart, The Dai­ly Caller, World­Net­Dai­ly, and The Gate­way Pun­dit. One of the news clips King uses is from the patent­ly white nation­al­ist web­site VDare.com.

    ...

    King’s house.gov web­site specif­i­cal­ly directs read­ers to a 2016 VDare piece head­lined “Drunk Dri­ving Ille­gal Alien Kills Woman, Is Grant­ed Bail and Dis­ap­pears.” The arti­cle is by Bren­da Walk­er, a deeply racist anti-immi­grant blog­ger.

    Walk­er has writ­ten that Mex­i­cans are “an eth­nic group that has nei­ther inter­est nor apti­tude.” She has stat­ed, false­ly, that “the influx of mil­lions of Mex­i­cans has brought their way of crime, includ­ing kid­nap­ping, along [sic] the rest of their cul­ture.”

    Walk­er has also stat­ed, false­ly, that “sex with chil­dren is social­ly accept­able in Mex­i­co” and that “His­pan­ics, and par­tic­u­lar­ly Mex­i­cans, are aca­d­e­m­ic under­achiev­ers because their cul­ture does not val­ue edu­ca­tion.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Media Mat­ters first report­ed in June 2018 that King was cit­ing Walker’s VDare arti­cle on his house.gov web­site. That report was then cit­ed in mul­ti­ple major news out­lets, includ­ing a July 2018 Huff­Post arti­cle that argued King is a white suprema­cist — an arti­cle King read.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    It was only ear­li­er this month — after he told The New York Times he didn’t under­stand why terms like “white suprema­cy” and “white nation­al­ism” were offen­sive — that House GOP lead­er­ship decid­ed to pun­ish him, strip­ping him of his com­mit­tee assign­ments.

    ...

    Major GOP fig­ures includ­ing Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minor­i­ty Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Rep. Liz Cheney, the chair­woman of the House Repub­li­can Con­fer­ence, along with a slew of rank-and-file Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats, called on King to resign.

    King has said, how­ev­er, that he will not resign, and has made the dubi­ous claim that The New York Times took his com­ments about white suprema­cy out of con­text.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 3, 2019, 11:38 pm
  36. 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:

    Inquisitr

    Trump Tweets QAnon, Piz­za­gate Con­spir­a­cy The­o­rists’ Con­tent

    Damir Mujezi­novic
    March 17, 2019

    A pro­lif­ic Twit­ter user, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump does not shy away from shar­ing mes­sages from jour­nal­ists and media per­son­al­i­ties whose view­points he shares. On Sun­day, Trump went a step fur­ther. Retweet­ing more than a dozen mes­sages in under an hour, the pres­i­dent pro­mot­ed con­tent from QAnon and Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists.

    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.

    One of the tweets Trump shared con­tains a hate­ful mes­sage aimed at late Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor John McCain.

    “We hat­ed McCain for his ties to the Russ­ian dossier & his vote against repeal­ing Oba­macare,” the post reads.

    As Rupar points out, Trump also pro­mot­ed con­tent post­ed by a QAnon fol­low­er. The person’s avatar is the let­ter “Q” with a MAGA hat. A glance at the individual’s account reveals that they are not only a ded­i­cat­ed QAnon fol­low­er, but also a Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist.

    The Dai­ly Beast con­trib­u­tor Justin Barag­o­na observes that Trump also pro­mot­ed tweets by right-wing social media per­son­al­i­ty Jack Poso­biec. The New York Times once described Poso­biec as “one of the pro­mul­ga­tors of fake news, includ­ing the Piz­za­gate sto­ry that claimed that Hillary Clin­ton helped run a child sex-traf­fick­ing ring out of a piz­za par­lor.”

    ...

    As pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed by The Inquisitr, QAnon is a far-right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry cre­at­ed by an anony­mous mes­sage board poster nick­named Q, and embraced by some Trump sup­port­ers. Q, a per­son who claims to pos­sess a high-lev­el secu­ri­ty clear­ance, alleges that Pres­i­dent Trump is bat­tling a secre­tive deep state cabal in order to save the Unit­ed States.

    Although unre­lat­ed to the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, Piz­za­gate is embraced by the far-right as well. Accord­ing to Fast Com­pa­ny, this the­o­ry alleged that mem­bers of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty ran a pedophile ring from the base­ment of a Wash­ing­ton, D.C., pizze­ria.

    In August, Pres­i­dent Trump met with one of the most vocal pro­po­nents of the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, accord­ing to GQ. Trump met in the Oval Office with Michael Lionel Lebron, a social media per­son­al­i­ty known for being a fol­low­er of Q.

    Sim­i­lar­ly, in Novem­ber of last year, Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence post­ed to social media a pic­ture of him­self meet­ing a SWAT offi­cer with a QAnon con­spir­a­cy patch, accord­ing to The Wash­ing­ton Post.

    ———-

    “Trump Tweets QAnon, Piz­za­gate Con­spir­a­cy The­o­rists’ Con­tent” by Damir Mujezi­novic; Inquisitr; 03/17/2019

    “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’

    ...
    As Rupar points out, Trump also pro­mot­ed con­tent post­ed by a QAnon fol­low­er. The person’s avatar is the let­ter “Q” with a MAGA hat. A glance at the individual’s account reveals that they are not only a ded­i­cat­ed QAnon fol­low­er, but also a Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist.

    The Dai­ly Beast con­trib­u­tor Justin Barag­o­na observes that Trump also pro­mot­ed tweets by right-wing social media per­son­al­i­ty Jack Poso­biec. The New York Times once described Poso­biec as “one of the pro­mul­ga­tors of fake news, includ­ing the Piz­za­gate sto­ry that claimed that Hillary Clin­ton helped run a child sex-traf­fick­ing ring out of a piz­za par­lor.”
    ...

    And this is unfor­tu­nate­ly mere­ly the lat­est instance of the Trump White House pro­mot­ing QAnon:

    ...
    In August, Pres­i­dent Trump met with one of the most vocal pro­po­nents of the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, accord­ing to GQ. Trump met in the Oval Office with Michael Lionel Lebron, a social media per­son­al­i­ty known for being a fol­low­er of Q.

    Sim­i­lar­ly, in Novem­ber of last year, Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence post­ed to social media a pic­ture of him­self meet­ing a SWAT offi­cer with a QAnon con­spir­a­cy patch, accord­ing to The Wash­ing­ton Post.
    ...

    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:

    New York Dai­ly News

    Iowa Con­gress­man Steve King posts red state-blue state civ­il war meme on Face­book

    By David Matthews
    Mar 17, 2019 | 8:10 PM

    Repub­li­can Iowa Rep. Steve King — no stranger to con­tro­ver­sial social media posts — post­ed a meme on Face­book Sat­ur­day, spec­u­lat­ing about a poten­tial sec­ond civ­il war in the Unit­ed States.

    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.

    “Folks keep talk­ing about anoth­er civ­il war,” the meme reads. “One side has about 8 tril­lion bul­lets, while the oth­er side doesn’t know which bath­room to use” — a con­fus­ing ref­er­ence to trans­gen­der bath­room bills that many states have enact­ed or reversed.

    In June 2018, King said the Unit­ed States was mov­ing toward a sec­ond civ­il war.

    In 2016, King was pho­tographed at his desk which dis­played a Con­fed­er­ate flag. Iowa’s 4th Dis­trict, which King has rep­re­sent­ed since 2013, falls square­ly over ter­ri­to­ry that was on the Union side in the 1860s con­flict.

    King has a long and detailed his­to­ry of mak­ing racist remarks that has grown and become more pub­lic with his reg­u­lar post­ing of memes on social media.

    pic.twitter.com/CvdLHveisX
    — Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) Jan­u­ary 15, 2019

    King has also retweet­ed sev­er­al open and promi­nent white nation­al­ists on Twit­ter in the past year alone.

    ...

    ———-

    “Iowa Con­gress­man Steve King posts red state-blue state civ­il war meme on Face­book” by David Matthews; New York Dai­ly News; 03/17/2019

    “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:

    ...
    “Folks keep talk­ing about anoth­er civ­il war,” the meme reads. “One side has about 8 tril­lion bul­lets, while the oth­er side doesn’t know which bath­room to use” — a con­fus­ing ref­er­ence to trans­gen­der bath­room bills that many states have enact­ed or reversed.

    In June 2018, King said the Unit­ed States was mov­ing toward a sec­ond civ­il war.

    In 2016, King was pho­tographed at his desk which dis­played a Con­fed­er­ate flag. Iowa’s 4th Dis­trict, which King has rep­re­sent­ed since 2013, falls square­ly over ter­ri­to­ry that was on the Union side in the 1860s con­flict.

    ...

    King has also retweet­ed sev­er­al open and promi­nent white nation­al­ists on Twit­ter in the past year alone.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 17, 2019, 10:58 pm
  37. 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:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Edi­tor’s Blog

    White­wash: Trump Takes New Approach To San­i­tiz­ing Char­lottesville Protests

    By Alle­gra Kirk­land
    April 26, 2019 12:21 pm

    Depart­ing the White House for the NRA con­ven­tion, Pres­i­dent Trump offered new com­ments san­i­tiz­ing the white nation­al­ist melee that tore through the city of Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia in August 2017.

    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.

    “I was talk­ing about peo­ple that went because they felt very strong­ly about the mon­u­ment to Robert E. Lee, a great gen­er­al,” Trump said of his “per­fect” com­ment.

    “Peo­ple were there protest­ing the tak­ing down of the mon­u­ment of Robert E. Lee,” who, Trump said, was “one of the great gen­er­als.”

    “Every­body knows that,” the pres­i­dent said.

    This insis­tence on fram­ing the dead­ly Char­lottesville ral­ly as a clash over a his­tor­i­cal monument—and one ded­i­cat­ed to the man who led the Con­fed­er­ate army in a war to pre­serve the insti­tu­tion of slav­ery, at that—obfuscates what the event was all about. The two-day “Unite the Right” ral­ly was, as par­tic­i­pants’ pub­lic state­ments and pri­vate chats con­firm, explic­it­ly orga­nized as a pub­lic dis­play of white nation­al­ist vio­lence.

    Protest­ing the removal of Charlottesville’s famous stat­ue of the Con­fed­er­ate gen­er­al may have been how the event was framed to the press, but it was ulti­mate­ly utter­ly besides the point.

    The President’s com­ments came in response to 2020 pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Joe Biden, who said Trump’s “both sides” remark “assigned a moral equiv­a­len­cy between those spread­ing hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”

    They are the lat­est in a long string of defen­sive, mis­lead­ing com­ments from Trump about Char­lottesville itself and his response to it, which white nation­al­ists have latched onto as proof that the Pres­i­dent is on their side.

    From the very start, Trump, who was golf­ing at his New Jer­sey course while the ral­ly was unfold­ing, framed the white nation­al­ist marchers and those there to denounce them as equal­ly cul­pa­ble.

    On the day of the Sat­ur­day Aug. 12 ral­ly, Trump con­demned “in the strongest pos­si­ble terms this egre­gious dis­play of hatred, big­otry and vio­lence on many sides, on many sides.”

    The response was so per­func­to­ry and vague that Repub­li­can sen­a­tors includ­ing Corey Gard­ner (R‑VA) and Mar­co Rubio (R‑FL) urged Trump to be explic­it about blam­ing white nation­al­ists for unleash­ing the vio­lence that left dozens injured and counter-pro­test­er Heather Hey­er dead.

    The rest of the admin­is­tra­tion did cleanup for Trump, with Vice Pres­i­dent Pence and the White House insist­ing that the Pres­i­dent obvi­ous­ly meant to con­demn white nation­al­ists, even if he hadn’t said as much.

    White House home­land secu­ri­ty advis­er Tom Bossert even said on Sun­day that Trump didn’t men­tion these groups by name because he didn’t want to “dig­ni­fy” their move­ment.

    Then came the infa­mous Mon­day press con­fer­ence in the Trump Tow­er lob­by. A defi­ant, com­bat­ive Trump not only stood by his com­ments, but took them fur­ther.

    Asked about Sen. John McCain (R‑AZ) blam­ing the “alt-right” for the Char­lottesville attack, Trump chal­lenged the reporter to “define alt-right to me.”

    “Define it for me,” Trump chal­lenged. “Come on, let’s go. Define it for me.”

    “What about the alt-left that came charg­ing at — excuse me, what about the alt-left that came charg­ing at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any sem­blance of guilt?” Trump asked, again equat­ing those who com­mit­ted racist vio­lence to those who came out to fight against it.

    Mul­ti­ple reporters appeared aghast, ask­ing Trump is he was “putting these pro­tes­tors on the same lev­el as neo-Nazis” and if “the alt-left [is] as bad as white suprema­cy.”

    Pret­ty much, Trump replied.

    “You have — you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the oth­er side that was also very vio­lent,” he said. “And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. You had a group — you had a group on the oth­er side that came charg­ing in, with­out a per­mit, and they were very, very vio­lent.”

    Trump repeat­ed­ly said he’d “con­demned neo-Nazis,” but pre­viewed his Robert E. Lee defense, insist­ing that “not all of those peo­ple were white suprema­cists by any stretch.”

    “Those peo­ple were also there because they want­ed to protest the tak­ing down of a stat­ue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said. “So 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 know, you real­ly do have to ask your­self, where does it stop?”

    It’s unclear who exact­ly con­sti­tut­ed this peace­ful, non-racist, pro-Lee con­tin­gent Trump referred to. The orga­niz­er of the “Unite the Right” event, Jason Kessler, had claimed he put the ral­ly togeth­er to protest the Lee statue’s removal. Kessler is him­self a white nation­al­ist.

    In fact, the talk of eras­ing his­to­ry by remov­ing Con­fed­er­ate stat­ues is a com­mon trope in the white nation­al­ist move­ment. The white nation­al­ist site VDare reg­u­lar­ly pub­lish­es arti­cles on this top­ic, and white nation­al­ists like Charleston church shoot­er Dylann Roof embrace Con­fed­er­ate mem­o­ra­bil­ia as visu­al short­hand for their racist views.

    When a reporter point­ed out to Trump that George Wash­ing­ton and Lee were not the same, Trump shot back that Wash­ing­ton “was a slave own­er.”

    “So you know what, it’s fine. You’re chang­ing his­to­ry. You’re chang­ing cul­ture,” Trump said. “And you had peo­ple — and I’m not talk­ing about the neo-Nazis and the white nation­al­ists — because they should be con­demned total­ly. But you had many peo­ple in that group oth­er than neo-Nazis and white nation­al­ists. Okay?”

    Trump even point­ed out that Kessler’s group was there law­ful­ly as they had a per­mit, while the counter-pro­test­ers did not.

    ...

    ———-

    “White­wash: Trump Takes New Approach To San­i­tiz­ing Char­lottesville Protests” by Alle­gra Kirk­land; Talk­ing Points Memo; 04/26/2019

    “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”:

    ...
    Trump repeat­ed­ly said he’d “con­demned neo-Nazis,” but pre­viewed his Robert E. Lee defense, insist­ing that “not all of those peo­ple were white suprema­cists by any stretch.”

    “Those peo­ple were also there because they want­ed to protest the tak­ing down of a stat­ue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said. “So 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 know, you real­ly do have to ask your­self, where does it stop?”

    It’s unclear who exact­ly con­sti­tut­ed this peace­ful, non-racist, pro-Lee con­tin­gent Trump referred to. The orga­niz­er of the “Unite the Right” event, Jason Kessler, had claimed he put the ral­ly togeth­er to protest the Lee statue’s removal. Kessler is him­self a white nation­al­ist.

    In fact, the talk of eras­ing his­to­ry by remov­ing Con­fed­er­ate stat­ues is a com­mon trope in the white nation­al­ist move­ment. The white nation­al­ist site VDare reg­u­lar­ly pub­lish­es arti­cles on this top­ic, and white nation­al­ists like Charleston church shoot­er Dylann Roof embrace Con­fed­er­ate mem­o­ra­bil­ia as visu­al short­hand for their racist views.

    When a reporter point­ed out to Trump that George Wash­ing­ton and Lee were not the same, Trump shot back that Wash­ing­ton “was a slave own­er.”

    “So you know what, it’s fine. You’re chang­ing his­to­ry. You’re chang­ing cul­ture,” Trump said. “And you had peo­ple — and I’m not talk­ing about the neo-Nazis and the white nation­al­ists — because they should be con­demned total­ly. But you had many peo­ple in that group oth­er than neo-Nazis and white nation­al­ists. Okay?

    Trump even point­ed out that Kessler’s group was there law­ful­ly as they had a per­mit, while the counter-pro­test­ers did not.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Then came the infa­mous Mon­day press con­fer­ence in the Trump Tow­er lob­by. A defi­ant, com­bat­ive Trump not only stood by his com­ments, but took them fur­ther.

    Asked about Sen. John McCain (R‑AZ) blam­ing the “alt-right” for the Char­lottesville attack, Trump chal­lenged the reporter to “define alt-right to me.”

    “Define it for me,” Trump chal­lenged. “Come on, let’s go. Define it for me.”

    What about the alt-left that came charg­ing at — excuse me, what about the alt-left that came charg­ing at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any sem­blance of guilt?” Trump asked, again equat­ing those who com­mit­ted racist vio­lence to those who came out to fight against it.
    ...

    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”:

    Vox

    Trump’s new defense of his Char­lottesville com­ments is incred­i­bly false
    The 2017 “Unite the Right” ral­ly was orga­nized by and intend­ed for white suprema­cists and white nation­al­ists.

    By Jane Coas­ton
    Apr 26, 2019, 2:30pm EDT

    Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump is still defend­ing his infa­mous remarks in the wake of the Unite the Right ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, in 2017, when he said, “You also had some very fine peo­ple on both sides.”

    The lat­est attempt came Fri­day: “I was talk­ing about peo­ple that went because they felt very strong­ly about the mon­u­ment to Robert E. Lee,” Trump told reporters. “Peo­ple there were protest­ing the tak­ing down of the mon­u­ment to Robert E. Lee. Every­body knows that.”

    Trump defend­ed his response to the vio­lence in Char­lottesville in 2017 when he said there were “very fine peo­ple on both sides.”

    He said the was talk­ing about peo­ple who “felt very strong­ly about the mon­u­ment to Robert E. Lee. A great gen­er­al, whether you like it or not.” pic.twitter.com/fulPWpY4zC
    — POLITICO (@politico) April 26, 2019

    Trump isn’t alone in attempt­ing to recast his “both sides” Char­lottesville remarks; his sup­port­ers are, too. With­in the past few months, Dil­bert cre­ator Scott Adams, Mor­ton Klein, head of Zion­ists of Amer­i­ca, and writ­ers for Bre­it­bart and the Fed­er­al­ist have done the same, as the Dai­ly Beast’s Will Som­mer report­ed a few weeks ago.

    These writ­ers argue that Trump’s “very fine peo­ple on both sides” com­ments were meant to refer to the pro­test­ers in atten­dance who were attempt­ing to stop the removal of a stat­ue of Con­fed­er­ate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a pub­lic square in Char­lottesville, not the neo-Nazis and white nation­al­ists who made up the bulk of the event’s atten­dees.

    As Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics’ Steve Cortes argued, “Despite the clear evi­dence of Trump’s state­ments regard­ing Char­lottesville, major media fig­ures insist on spread­ing the calum­ny that Trump called neo-Nazis ‘fine peo­ple.’”

    But here’s the thing: He did.

    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.

    What Trump should have known about Unite the Right

    The Unite the Right ral­ly, which was sched­uled to take place on August 12, 2017, was the most vis­i­ble dis­play of white nation­al­ist and white suprema­cist hate en masse in the Unit­ed States in years. And it was brand­ed as such long before it took place.

    The Unite the Right ral­ly was the third such event in Char­lottesville in 2017 — and each of these ral­lies was led and sup­port­ed by self-pro­claimed white nation­al­ists and racists, appar­ent­ly invig­o­rat­ed by an April 2017 deci­sion by the Char­lottesville City Coun­cil to remove a stat­ue of Robert E. Lee from Lee Park.

    At the time, Con­fed­er­ate stat­ues and mon­u­ments across the coun­try were under increased scruti­ny, espe­cial­ly fol­low­ing the mur­der of nine black church­go­ers in Charleston, South Car­oli­na, by an avowed racist who enjoyed Con­fed­er­ate sym­bol­o­gy.

    In May 2017, white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer led a ral­ly and torch­lit parade through Lee Park, where atten­dees chant­ed “You will not replace us” and “Blood and soil.” In response, the chair of the Char­lottesville Repub­li­can Par­ty released a state­ment say­ing, “Who­ev­er these peo­ple were, the intol­er­ance and hatred they seek to pro­mote is utter­ly dis­gust­ing and dis­turb­ing beyond words.”

    Lee Park right now.... pic.twitter.com/WZ2x0JsueE
    — Alli­son Wrabel (@craftypanda) May 14, 2017

    In July 2017, mem­bers of Loy­al White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan also protest­ed against the removal of the Lee stat­ue in Char­lottesville, with one mem­ber telling USA Today that he was protest­ing the “cul­tur­al geno­cide” of white peo­ple he believed was behind the call for the statue’s removal.

    Klans­men arrive amid jeers and shouts of “Racists go home!” @USATODAY pic.twitter.com/8WSRDacqwB
    — Sarah Toy (@sarahtoy17) July 8, 2017

    So by August 2017, when the Unite the Right ral­ly was sched­uled to take place, it was fair­ly clear that the orga­niz­ers behind the ral­lies on behalf of keep­ing the Lee stat­ue in place had a very spe­cif­ic ide­o­log­i­cal bent. That was clear in a police affi­davit detail­ing who was expect­ed at Unite the Right — includ­ing rough­ly 250 to 500 Klans­men and more than 150 “Alt-Knights,” the mil­i­tary divi­sion of the Proud Boys.

    Police affi­davit on tomor­row’s “Unite the Right” atten­dees:
    • 150+ Alt Knights
    • 250–500 Klu Klux Klan
    • 500 “3% Risen”
    • 200–300 Mili­tia pic.twitter.com/Xfg44vmQlT
    — Jack Smith IV (@JackSmithIV) August 12, 2017

    The affil­i­a­tions of the orga­niz­ers were also clear. Jason Kessler, a “pro-white” activist, filed the per­mits for the ral­ly.

    On a radio show before the event, Kessler said, “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.”

    In fact, going back through the pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als for Unite the Right, it is fas­ci­nat­ing just how lit­tle the stat­ue of Lee, or hon­or­ing Con­fed­er­ate vet­er­ans, seemed to mat­ter to the orga­niz­ers and atten­dees of Unite the Right, an event that, despite its name, had noth­ing to do with con­ser­vatism writ large.

    Take, for exam­ple, this image cre­at­ed for the ral­ly and approved by both Kessler and Richard Spencer.

    The names list­ed here are of promi­nent white suprema­cists and alt-right activists: Spencer, Kessler, Holo­caust denier and failed Sen­ate can­di­date Augus­tus Invic­tus, Matthew Heim­bach (a white nation­al­ist who head­ed the Tra­di­tion­al Work­ers Par­ty), and Pax Dick­in­son, for­mer­ly the chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer for Busi­ness Insid­er before he was forced out over misog­y­nis­tic tweets and became a “neo­re­ac­tionary.”

    Just so we’re extreme­ly clear, here is a video of some of Heimbach’s sup­port­ers at a neo-Nazi ral­ly in Pikesville, Ken­tucky, held after Unite the Right. The man in the fore­ground giv­ing a fas­cist salute is wear­ing a shirt embla­zoned with the acronym “RAHOWA,” which means, in white suprema­cist par­lance, “racial holy war.”

    Oth­er white nation­al­ists were lat­er added to the pro­gram — includ­ing Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, an Amer­i­can neo-Nazi and founder of the neo-Nazi pod­cast The Dai­ly Shoah (an insult­ing ref­er­ence to the Holo­caust), inter­net fig­ure and not­ed anti-Semi­te Baked Alas­ka, fel­low anti-Semi­te and Dai­ly Shoah con­trib­u­tor John­ny Monox­ide, neo-Nazi Christo­pher Cantwell, and Michael Hill, co-founder of the League of the South and a slav­ery pro­po­nent who lam­bast­ed “orga­nized Jew­ry” on his group’s Face­book page.

    The atten­dees of Unite the Right were crys­tal clear as to what the event was sup­posed to be — not a show of sup­port for his­to­ry, but a “pro-white” activist event. Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin described the upcom­ing Unite the Right ral­ly as in a post on the neo-Nazi web­site the Dai­ly Stormer on August 8, 2017:

    Although the ral­ly was ini­tial­ly planned in sup­port of the Lee Mon­u­ment, which the Jew May­or and his Negroid Deputy have marked for destruc­tion, it has become some­thing much big­ger than that. It is now an his­toric ral­ly, which will serve as a ral­ly­ing point and bat­tle cry for the ris­ing Alt-Right move­ment.

    His post also includes the 14 Words — a phrase coined by a white suprema­cist who killed a Jew­ish radio host in 1984.

    The Dai­ly Stormer cre­at­ed a poster tout­ing its involve­ment in the event.

    [see image of Dai­ly Stormer poster]

    None of this was very sub­tle.

    In Dis­cord chats and dis­cus­sions revealed by legal pro­ceed­ings that have tak­en place since Unite the Right, atten­dees and orga­niz­ers stat­ed again and again what the point of the event was: “If you want to defend the South and West­ern civ­i­liza­tion from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Char­lottesville on 12 August.”

    How Trump respond­ed

    On August 15, 2017, Trump made his third state­ment on the events of Char­lottesville. (On August 12, Trump said, “We con­demn in the strongest pos­si­ble terms this egre­gious dis­play of hatred, big­otry and vio­lence on many sides, on many sides.” Nation­al Review called his remarks “vague and equiv­o­cal,” while Anglin hailed them.)

    You can watch his August 15 remarks below or read them here.

    Those wish­ing to defend Trump on this issue have focused on this part of his remarks:

    Racism is evil, and those who cause vio­lence in its name are crim­i­nals and thugs, includ­ing the KKK, neo-Nazis, white suprema­cists, and oth­er hate groups that are repug­nant to every­thing we hold dear as Amer­i­cans.

    His sup­port­ers have tak­en that as the total­i­ty of his com­ments on Char­lottesville. As Mor­ton Klein said dur­ing a House Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee hear­ing ear­li­er this month, “In that state­ment, he con­demned neo-Nazis and white nation­al­ists. He did not mean that they are fine peo­ple.”

    But Trump said a lot more, which his defend­ers seem strange­ly unwill­ing to reck­on with. Here is how Trump described what took place at Unite the Right:

    TRUMP: I am not putting any­body on a moral plane, what I’m say­ing is this: you had a group on one side and a group on the oth­er, and they came at each oth­er with clubs and it was vicious and hor­ri­ble and it was a hor­ri­ble thing to watch, but there is anoth­er side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left, that came vio­lent­ly attack­ing the oth­er group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.

    REPORTER: You said there was hatred and vio­lence on both sides?

    TRUMP: I do think there is blame – yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you report­ed it accu­rate­ly, you would say.

    REPORTER: The neo-Nazis start­ed this thing. They showed up in Char­lottesville.

    TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put them­selves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad peo­ple in that group. But you also had peo­ple that were very fine peo­ple on both sides. You had peo­ple in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pic­tures as you did. You had peo­ple in that group that were there to protest the tak­ing down, of to them, a very, very impor­tant stat­ue and the renam­ing of a park from Robert E. Lee to anoth­er name.

    As should be clear by now, there were no “very fine peo­ple” who were part of the orga­niz­ing or pro­mo­tion of Unite the Right. Unite the Right was an event planned not by tra­di­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tives, but by groups and indi­vid­u­als that despise tra­di­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tives, like Peinovich, who helped coin the term “cuck­ser­v­a­tive” to refer to tra­di­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tives who spoke out against racism and anti-Semi­tism.

    And dur­ing that same press con­fer­ence, Trump added this:

    No, no. There were peo­ple in that ral­ly, and I looked the night before. If you look, they were peo­ple protest­ing very qui­et­ly, the tak­ing down the stat­ue of Robert E. Lee. 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. So I only tell you this: there are two sides to a sto­ry. I thought what took place was a hor­ri­ble moment for our coun­try, a hor­ri­ble moment. But there are two sides to the coun­try. Does any­body have a final – does any­body have a final ques­tion? You have an infra­struc­ture ques­tion.

    “The night before” is refer­ring to the Fri­day night torch­lit ral­ly of August 11, where more than 200 atten­dees held tiki torch­es on the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia and chant­ed “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil.” What­ev­er this event may have been, it was cer­tain­ly not “peo­ple protest­ing very qui­et­ly.”

    In short, Unite the Right was orga­nized not by indi­vid­u­als who, in Trump’s words, “felt very strong­ly about the mon­u­ment to Robert E. Lee,” but by ardent white suprema­cists and white nation­al­ists.

    On mul­ti­ple occa­sions before Unite the Right, atten­dees stat­ed that the Con­fed­er­ate memo­r­i­al that was sup­pos­ed­ly their pur­pose was actu­al­ly the least of their con­cerns. We have their state­ments, their videos, their posters, and their words.

    ...

    ———-

    “Trump’s new defense of his Char­lottesville com­ments is incred­i­bly false” by Jane Coas­ton; Vox; 04/26/2019

    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:

    ...
    What Trump should have known about Unite the Right

    The Unite the Right ral­ly, which was sched­uled to take place on August 12, 2017, was the most vis­i­ble dis­play of white nation­al­ist and white suprema­cist hate en masse in the Unit­ed States in years. And it was brand­ed as such long before it took place.

    The Unite the Right ral­ly was the third such event in Char­lottesville in 2017 — and each of these ral­lies was led and sup­port­ed by self-pro­claimed white nation­al­ists and racists, appar­ent­ly invig­o­rat­ed by an April 2017 deci­sion by the Char­lottesville City Coun­cil to remove a stat­ue of Robert E. Lee from Lee Park.

    At the time, Con­fed­er­ate stat­ues and mon­u­ments across the coun­try were under increased scruti­ny, espe­cial­ly fol­low­ing the mur­der of nine black church­go­ers in Charleston, South Car­oli­na, by an avowed racist who enjoyed Con­fed­er­ate sym­bol­o­gy.

    ...

    So by August 2017, when the Unite the Right ral­ly was sched­uled to take place, it was fair­ly clear that the orga­niz­ers behind the ral­lies on behalf of keep­ing the Lee stat­ue in place had a very spe­cif­ic ide­o­log­i­cal bent. That was clear in a police affi­davit detail­ing who was expect­ed at Unite the Right — includ­ing rough­ly 250 to 500 Klans­men and more than 150 “Alt-Knights,” the mil­i­tary divi­sion of the Proud Boys.

    Police affi­davit on tomor­row’s “Unite the Right” atten­dees:
    • 150+ Alt Knights
    • 250–500 Klu Klux Klan
    • 500 “3% Risen”
    • 200–300 Mili­tia pic.twitter.com/Xfg44vmQlT
    — Jack Smith IV (@JackSmithIV) August 12, 2017

    ...

    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:

    ...
    The affil­i­a­tions of the orga­niz­ers were also clear. Jason Kessler, a “pro-white” activist, filed the per­mits for the ral­ly.

    On a radio show before the event, Kessler said, “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.”

    In fact, going back through the pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als for Unite the Right, it is fas­ci­nat­ing just how lit­tle the stat­ue of Lee, or hon­or­ing Con­fed­er­ate vet­er­ans, seemed to mat­ter to the orga­niz­ers and atten­dees of Unite the Right, an event that, despite its name, had noth­ing to do with con­ser­vatism writ large.

    ...

    The atten­dees of Unite the Right were crys­tal clear as to what the event was sup­posed to be — not a show of sup­port for his­to­ry, but a “pro-white” activist event. Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin described the upcom­ing Unite the Right ral­ly as in a post on the neo-Nazi web­site the Dai­ly Stormer on August 8, 2017:

    Although the ral­ly was ini­tial­ly planned in sup­port of the Lee Mon­u­ment, which the Jew May­or and his Negroid Deputy have marked for destruc­tion, it has become some­thing much big­ger than that. It is now an his­toric ral­ly, which will serve as a ral­ly­ing point and bat­tle cry for the ris­ing Alt-Right move­ment.

    His post also includes the 14 Words — a phrase coined by a white suprema­cist who killed a Jew­ish radio host in 1984.
    ...

    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 dur­ing that same press con­fer­ence, Trump added this:

    No, no. There were peo­ple in that ral­ly, and I looked the night before. If you look, they were peo­ple protest­ing very qui­et­ly, the tak­ing down the stat­ue of Robert E. Lee. 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. So I only tell you this: there are two sides to a sto­ry. I thought what took place was a hor­ri­ble moment for our coun­try, a hor­ri­ble moment. But there are two sides to the coun­try. Does any­body have a final – does any­body have a final ques­tion? You have an infra­struc­ture ques­tion.

    “The night before” is refer­ring to the Fri­day night torch­lit ral­ly of August 11, where more than 200 atten­dees held tiki torch­es on the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia and chant­ed “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil.” What­ev­er this event may have been, it was cer­tain­ly not “peo­ple protest­ing very qui­et­ly.”
    ...

    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:

    The Dai­ly Beast

    Fox News Reporter Rips Col­leagues Over Char­lottesville: You Sound Like ‘White Suprema­cist Chat Room’
    In emails obtained by The Dai­ly Beast, one bold Fox reporter stands up to two of his col­leagues who defend­ed Trump’s ‘both sides’ com­ment about neo-Nazi ral­ly­go­ers.

    Maxwell Tani,
    Andrew Kirell
    04.26.19 10:14 AM ET

    A Fox News reporter on Thurs­day called out two of his col­leagues for sound­ing “like a White Suprema­cist chat room” when they attempt­ed to defend Pres­i­dent Trump’s infa­mous “both sides” com­ment about white suprema­cists in Char­lottesville, accord­ing to inter­nal emails reviewed by The Dai­ly Beast.

    Short­ly after for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden launched his 2020 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign with a video bash­ing Trump’s com­ments that there were “good peo­ple on both sides” at the dead­ly 2017 Unite the Right ral­ly, gen­er­al assign­ment reporter Doug McK­el­way sprang into action to defend the pres­i­dent.

    McK­el­way, a nine-year Fox News vet­er­an, sent an email to dozens of net­work employ­ees, say­ing he was “Putting this Biden state­ment out there, next to Trump’s orig­i­nal press­er, and a live inter­view I did in C‑ville with ‘good peo­ple on both sides’” to sup­pos­ed­ly fact-check Biden. The emails were first pub­lished by FTV Live.

    McK­el­way began his email with a Win­ston Churchill quote: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” He then pro­ceed­ed to echo the pro-Trump claim that the pres­i­dent nev­er said what he said about the neo-Nazis who marched at the dead­ly event.

    McK­el­way con­trast­ed por­tions of Biden’s script against the same quotes that pro-Trump out­lets have used to claim the pres­i­dent nev­er defend­ed white nation­al­ists. And then the reporter high­light­ed a quote from his own inter­view with Bri­an Lam­bert, an armed Unite the Right attendee, who por­trayed the neo-Nazi ral­ly­go­ers as vic­tims: “They’re deny­ing peo­ple their right to assem­ble. They’re deny­ing their right to speak freely, how­ev­er hate­ful their views may be,” he bemoaned.

    Moments lat­er, Fox News dig­i­tal senior edi­tor Cody Derespina replied-all, agree­ing with McK­el­way, and adding to it a snip­pet of 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 stat­ue of Con­fed­er­ate gen­er­al Robert E. Lee.

    With­in min­utes of that email, Fox News Radio’s White House cor­re­spon­dent Jon Deck­er stepped in to chas­tise his col­leagues.

    “I real­ly don’t under­stand the point you are mak­ing,” he wrote. “Jar­rod Kuhn was one of those indi­vid­u­als in Char­lottesville hold­ing a tiki torch while the mob chant­ed ‘Jews will not replace us.’”

    An hour lat­er, a seem­ing­ly hum­bled McK­el­way returned to the thread, walk­ing back his pre­vi­ous words. He linked to an arti­cle from C‑Ville, a Char­lottesville alt-week­ly, that showed his one-time inter­vie­wee Bri­an Lam­bert was, in fact, a white nation­al­ist who tres­passed in local parks, removed tarps off Con­fed­er­ate stat­ues, placed rebel flag stick­ers on sur­faces, and flashed a white-pow­er sym­bol to sup­port­ers dur­ing his sen­tenc­ing hear­ing.

    “[I]t appears Lam­bert revealed him­self to be not the squeaky clean 1st amend­ment sup­port­er he claimed to be on live TV,” McK­el­way con­fessed.

    ...

    He scold­ed McK­el­way for “invok­ing Churchill to what hap­pened in Char­lottesville,” call­ing it “rather offen­sive.”

    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.

    McK­el­way has a his­to­ry of ques­tion­able com­ments about the dead­ly Char­lottesville ral­ly. Sev­er­al days after anti-racism pro­test­er Heather Hey­er was killed by white nation­al­ist James Alex Fields at the ral­ly, McK­el­way retweet­ed one user telling his Fox News col­league Shep Smith to “keep some com­ments to your­self.”

    As it turns out, moments before, when McK­el­way equiv­o­cat­ed on-air to Smith about how all Char­lottesville residents—regardless of polit­i­cal beliefs—couldn’t wait for the nation­al media to leave town, Smith replied, “Yeah, they prob­a­bly can’t wait for the neo-Nazis to leave either.”

    When asked for com­ment on the retweet telling his col­league to shut up, McK­el­way snark­i­ly offered an auto­graphed pic­ture of him­self.

    Addi­tion­al­ly, pri­or to the 2016 elec­tion, McK­el­way defend­ed the alt-right on Fox News, claim­ing it was sim­ply “using the same tac­tics that the left has used for gen­er­a­tions now.” He fur­ther assert­ed that the alt-right is “much more than” an anti-Semit­ic, white-nation­al­ist move­ment, cit­ing Milo Yiannopou­los for his efforts in com­bat­ing “the left’s obses­sion with... safe spaces.”

    And a year before that, McK­el­way com­pared the removal of the Con­fed­er­ate flag from South Carolina’s state­house to the Sovi­et prac­tice of air­brush­ing purged dis­si­dents out of offi­cial pho­tographs.

    And in the after­math of the dead­ly Char­lottesville ral­ly, sev­er­al promi­nent Fox News hosts like Smith did admon­ish Trump for his “both sides” com­ment, but plen­ty of oth­ers pub­licly defend­ed him. Most notably: The Five co-host and Trump boost­er Jesse Wat­ters said the pres­i­dent was just try­ing to get “all the facts,” while host and unof­fi­cial Trump advis­er Sean Han­ni­ty asked why the media was not focus­ing on the “alt-left.”

    ———-

    “Fox News Reporter Rips Col­leagues Over Char­lottesville: You Sound Like ‘White Suprema­cist Chat Room’” by Maxwell Tani, Andrew Kirell; The Dai­ly Beast; 04/26/2019

    “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:

    ...
    Short­ly after for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden launched his 2020 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign with a video bash­ing Trump’s com­ments that there were “good peo­ple on both sides” at the dead­ly 2017 Unite the Right ral­ly, gen­er­al assign­ment reporter Doug McK­el­way sprang into action to defend the pres­i­dent.

    ...

    McK­el­way con­trast­ed por­tions of Biden’s script against the same quotes that pro-Trump out­lets have used to claim the pres­i­dent nev­er defend­ed white nation­al­ists. And then the reporter high­light­ed a quote from his own inter­view with Bri­an Lam­bert, an armed Unite the Right attendee, who por­trayed the neo-Nazi ral­ly­go­ers as vic­tims: “They’re deny­ing peo­ple their right to assem­ble. They’re deny­ing their right to speak freely, how­ev­er hate­ful their views may be,” he bemoaned.

    Moments lat­er, Fox News dig­i­tal senior edi­tor Cody Derespina replied-all, agree­ing with McK­el­way, and adding to it a snip­pet of 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 stat­ue of Con­fed­er­ate gen­er­al Robert E. Lee.
    ..

    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...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 27, 2019, 10:48 pm
  38. 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:

    Media Mat­ters

    Don’t let Fox gaslight you over Lau­ra Ingraham’s defense of Paul Nehlen

    May 31, 2019 3:50 PM EDT
    MATT GERTZ

    Fox News has again found itself in a firestorm over the abhor­rent con­duct of its prime-time hosts, this time over Lau­ra Ingraham’s defense of Paul Nehlen, a promi­nent white nation­al­ist and anti-Semi­te. The net­work is try­ing to bul­ly, blus­ter, and gaslight its way out of poten­tial fall­out from adver­tis­ers with the ridicu­lous claim that Ingra­ham wasn’t actu­al­ly defend­ing Nehlen.

    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.

    Dur­ing the seg­ment, Owens said that efforts at “silenc­ing and ban­ning con­ser­v­a­tives” would be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive and would lead to Trump’s reelec­tion. Ingra­ham agreed, say­ing peo­ple “know when they are being silenced, they know when they are being lied to, I think. Most peo­ple are onto this game.”

    Ingra­ham then aired a graph­ic fea­tur­ing eight peo­ple, includ­ing Nehlen, who have been sus­pend­ed or claim to have had their activ­i­ty imped­ed by social media com­pa­nies (it also includ­ed the arch con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist Alex Jones and the dis­graced white suprema­cist ally Milo Yiannopoulous). The graph­ic described the group as “Promi­nent Voic­es Cen­sored On Social Media.” Ingra­ham went on to defend the group.

    “Face­book, now, what do they mon­i­tor, quote, ‘hate’?” Ingra­ham said. “That sounds good until you real­ize hate — and these are some of the peo­ple they’ve shunned,” she added, refer­ring to the graph­ic. After Ingra­ham and Owens shared a laugh over Owens being includ­ed on the graph­ic — indi­cat­ing that they saw it — the Fox host char­ac­ter­ized the “cen­sored” voic­es as “peo­ple who believe in bor­der enforce­ment, peo­ple who believe in nation­al sov­er­eign­ty.”

    “Can­dace, I think this is going to be a moment, though, for us to stand up to these cen­sors,” Ingra­ham con­clud­ed.

    The seg­ment went viral after Media Mat­ters drew atten­tion to the fact that Nehlen, a white nation­al­ist and vir­u­lent anti-Semi­te, was among the “promi­nent voic­es” Ingra­ham defend­ed.

    Fox responds to the uproar with gaslight­ing

    Fox ignored requests for com­ment as the sto­ry swept across the media before final­ly issu­ing an unsigned state­ment Fri­day after­noon.

    “It is obscene to sug­gest that Lau­ra Ingra­ham was defend­ing Paul Nehlen’s despi­ca­ble actions. Some of the names on the graph­ic were pulled from an Asso­ci­at­ed Press report on best known polit­i­cal extrem­ists banned from Face­book,” the net­work said. “Any­one who watch­es Laura’s show knows that she is a fierce pro­tec­tor of free­dom of speech and the intent of the seg­ment was to high­light the grow­ing trend of uni­lat­er­al cen­sor­ship in Amer­i­ca.”

    This is non­sense. Ingra­ham was clear­ly defend­ing Nehlen — the point of the seg­ment was to sug­gest that actions social media com­pa­nies have tak­en against “promi­nent voic­es” like him were attacks on con­ser­v­a­tives in gen­er­al.

    The list of eight “voic­es” was curat­ed by Fox. The Asso­ci­at­ed Press arti­cle Fox was seem­ing­ly ref­er­enc­ing lists six com­men­ta­tors Face­book banned. Some­one at Fox select­ed four of those indi­vid­u­als for inclu­sion in the graph­ic (Nehlen, Yiannopou­los, Jones, and Lau­ra Loomer), leav­ing out two (Paul Joseph Wat­son and Louis Far­rakhan), and adding four oth­er com­men­ta­tors who were not men­tioned in the arti­cle (Michelle Malkin, Dan Scav­i­no, James Woods, and Owens).

    And nei­ther Ingra­ham nor her graph­ic iden­ti­fied Nehlen or the oth­er voic­es as “extrem­ists,” as did the AP report. Instead, she mocked the notion that Face­book had been restrict­ing peo­ple due to their hate­ful com­men­tary, instead sug­gest­ing that they sim­ply had gar­den-vari­ety con­ser­v­a­tive views.

    For her part, Ingra­ham offered up a ludi­crous con­dem­na­tion of peo­ple who had crit­i­cized her for defend­ing Nehlen, sug­gest­ing that they had made him “very hap­py” by high­light­ing his big­ot­ed com­ments.

    Retweet­ing screen­shots of despi­ca­ble old tweets by racists and/or anti-semi­tes must make those racists & anti-semi­tes very hap­py. Unfor­tu­nate­ly it does zero to ele­vate the debate in Amer­i­ca. cc. @CNN

    — Lau­ra Ingra­ham (@IngrahamAngle) May 31, 2019

    Fox’s state­ment is intend­ed to cause con­fu­sion and paci­fy adver­tis­ers

    The pur­pose of issu­ing a state­ment like this is to cloud the issue.

    When its per­son­al­i­ties get into trou­ble, Fox is often will­ing to sim­ply remain silent and wait for the atten­tion to fade away. But numer­ous Ingra­ham adver­tis­ers have fled over the last year due to her big­ot­ed com­men­tary, and the show remains vul­ner­a­ble. Indeed, the Nehlen seg­ment is already hav­ing an impact — the pho­to-fin­ish­ing com­pa­ny Frac­ture said in a state­ment this after­noon it would pull its adver­tise­ment from her show rather than con­tin­u­ing to “sup­port hate speech with our adver­tis­ing dol­lars.”

    If the net­work had remained silent, more adver­tis­ers could have dropped under pres­sure from activists. But if the net­work acknowl­edged what had actu­al­ly hap­pened, it would be admit­ting guilt and caus­ing addi­tion­al con­flict with Ingra­ham and oth­er net­work stars who hate to back down in the face of wide­spread back­lash to their extrem­ism.

    So instead, Fox is throw­ing up some chaff and hop­ing to change the sto­ry. The network’s per­son­al­i­ties, and per­haps some of its allies, can ral­ly around the faulty notion that Ingra­ham has been wronged. The network’s crit­ics will point out that Fox is bull­shit­ting. But the result will be an argu­ment, a cloud of dust that leaves peo­ple who are only mar­gin­al­ly pay­ing atten­tion con­fused about what to believe.

    ...

    ———-

    “Don’t let Fox gaslight you over Lau­ra Ingraham’s defense of Paul Nehlen” by Matt Gertz; Media Mat­ters; 05/31/2019

    “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:

    ...
    Dur­ing the seg­ment, Owens said that efforts at “silenc­ing and ban­ning con­ser­v­a­tives” would be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive and would lead to Trump’s reelec­tion. Ingra­ham agreed, say­ing peo­ple “know when they are being silenced, they know when they are being lied to, I think. Most peo­ple are onto this game.”

    Ingra­ham then aired a graph­ic fea­tur­ing eight peo­ple, includ­ing Nehlen, who have been sus­pend­ed or claim to have had their activ­i­ty imped­ed by social media com­pa­nies (it also includ­ed the arch con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist Alex Jones and the dis­graced white suprema­cist ally Milo Yiannopoulous). The graph­ic described the group as “Promi­nent Voic­es Cen­sored On Social Media.” Ingra­ham went on to defend the group.

    “Face­book, now, what do they mon­i­tor, quote, ‘hate’?” Ingra­ham said. “That sounds good until you real­ize hate — and these are some of the peo­ple they’ve shunned,” she added, refer­ring to the graph­ic. After Ingra­ham and Owens shared a laugh over Owens being includ­ed on the graph­ic — indi­cat­ing that they saw it — the Fox host char­ac­ter­ized the “cen­sored” voic­es as “peo­ple who believe in bor­der enforce­ment, peo­ple who believe in nation­al sov­er­eign­ty.”

    “Can­dace, I think this is going to be a moment, though, for us to stand up to these cen­sors,” Ingra­ham con­clud­ed.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Fox responds to the uproar with gaslight­ing

    Fox ignored requests for com­ment as the sto­ry swept across the media before final­ly issu­ing an unsigned state­ment Fri­day after­noon.

    “It is obscene to sug­gest that Lau­ra Ingra­ham was defend­ing Paul Nehlen’s despi­ca­ble actions. Some of the names on the graph­ic were pulled from an Asso­ci­at­ed Press report on best known polit­i­cal extrem­ists banned from Face­book,” the net­work said. “Any­one who watch­es Laura’s show knows that she is a fierce pro­tec­tor of free­dom of speech and the intent of the seg­ment was to high­light the grow­ing trend of uni­lat­er­al cen­sor­ship in Amer­i­ca.”

    This is non­sense. Ingra­ham was clear­ly defend­ing Nehlen — the point of the seg­ment was to sug­gest that actions social media com­pa­nies have tak­en against “promi­nent voic­es” like him were attacks on con­ser­v­a­tives in gen­er­al.

    The list of eight “voic­es” was curat­ed by Fox. The Asso­ci­at­ed Press arti­cle Fox was seem­ing­ly ref­er­enc­ing lists six com­men­ta­tors Face­book banned. Some­one at Fox select­ed four of those indi­vid­u­als for inclu­sion in the graph­ic (Nehlen, Yiannopou­los, Jones, and Lau­ra Loomer), leav­ing out two (Paul Joseph Wat­son and Louis Far­rakhan), and adding four oth­er com­men­ta­tors who were not men­tioned in the arti­cle (Michelle Malkin, Dan Scav­i­no, James Woods, and Owens).

    And nei­ther Ingra­ham nor her graph­ic iden­ti­fied Nehlen or the oth­er voic­es as “extrem­ists,” as did the AP report. Instead, she mocked the notion that Face­book had been restrict­ing peo­ple due to their hate­ful com­men­tary, instead sug­gest­ing that they sim­ply had gar­den-vari­ety con­ser­v­a­tive views.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    For her part, Ingra­ham offered up a ludi­crous con­dem­na­tion of peo­ple who had crit­i­cized her for defend­ing Nehlen, sug­gest­ing that they had made him “very hap­py” by high­light­ing his big­ot­ed com­ments.

    Retweet­ing screen­shots of despi­ca­ble old tweets by racists and/or anti-semi­tes must make those racists & anti-semi­tes very hap­py. Unfor­tu­nate­ly it does zero to ele­vate the debate in Amer­i­ca. cc. @CNN

    — Lau­ra Ingra­ham (@IngrahamAngle) May 31, 2019

    ...

    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:

    ...
    Fox’s state­ment is intend­ed to cause con­fu­sion and paci­fy adver­tis­ers

    The pur­pose of issu­ing a state­ment like this is to cloud the issue.

    When its per­son­al­i­ties get into trou­ble, Fox is often will­ing to sim­ply remain silent and wait for the atten­tion to fade away. But numer­ous Ingra­ham adver­tis­ers have fled over the last year due to her big­ot­ed com­men­tary, and the show remains vul­ner­a­ble. Indeed, the Nehlen seg­ment is already hav­ing an impact — the pho­to-fin­ish­ing com­pa­ny Frac­ture said in a state­ment this after­noon it would pull its adver­tise­ment from her show rather than con­tin­u­ing to “sup­port hate speech with our adver­tis­ing dol­lars.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 2, 2019, 12:47 am
  39. 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:

    The New York Times

    8chan Is a Mega­phone for Gun­men. ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says Its Cre­ator.

    By Kevin Roose
    Aug. 4, 2019

    Fredrick Bren­nan was get­ting ready for church at his home in the Philip­pines when the news of a mass shoot­ing in El Paso arrived. His response was imme­di­ate and instinc­tive.

    “When­ev­er I hear about a mass shoot­ing, I say, ‘All right, we have to research if there’s an 8chan con­nec­tion,’” he said about the online mes­sage board he start­ed in 2013.

    It didn’t take him long to find one.

    Moments before the El Paso shoot­ing on Sat­ur­day, a four-page mes­sage whose author iden­ti­fied him­self as the gun­man appeared on 8chan. The per­son who post­ed the mes­sage encour­aged his “broth­ers” on the site to spread the con­tents far and wide.

    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.

    Mr. Bren­nan start­ed the online mes­sage board as a free speech utopia. But now, 8chan is known as some­thing else: a mega­phone for mass shoot­ers, and a recruit­ing plat­form for vio­lent white nation­al­ists.

    And it has become a focal point for those seek­ing to dis­rupt the path­ways of online extrem­ism. On Sun­day, crit­ics char­ac­ter­ized the site as a breed­ing ground for vio­lence, and lob­bied the site’s ser­vice providers to get it tak­en down. One of those providers, Cloud­flare, a ser­vice that pro­tects web­sites against cyber­at­tacks, said it would stop work­ing with 8chan on Sun­day night. And Mr. Bren­nan, who stopped work­ing with the site’s cur­rent own­er last year, called for it to be tak­en offline before it leads to fur­ther vio­lence.

    “Shut the site down,” Mr. Bren­nan said in an inter­view. “It’s not doing the world any good. It’s a com­plete neg­a­tive to every­body except the users that are there. And you know what? It’s a neg­a­tive to them, too. They just don’t real­ize it.”

    Mr. Bren­nan, who has claimed that he got the idea for 8chan while on psy­che­del­ic mush­rooms, set out to cre­ate what he called a free speech alter­na­tive to 4chan, a bet­ter-known online mes­sage board. He was upset that 4chan had become too restric­tive, and he envi­sioned a site where any legal speech would be wel­come, no mat­ter how tox­ic.

    The site remained on the fringes until 2014, when some sup­port­ers of Gamer­Gate — a loose reac­tionary col­lec­tion of anti-fem­i­nist video gamers — flocked to 8chan after being kicked off 4chan.

    Since Gamer­Gate, 8chan has become a catchall web­site for inter­net-based com­mu­ni­ties whose behav­ior gets them evict­ed from more main­stream sites. It hosts one of the largest gath­er­ings of sup­port­ers of QAnon, who claim that there is an inter­na­tion­al bureau­cra­cy plot­ting against the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. And it has been an online home for “incels,” men who lament being “invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate,” and oth­er fringe move­ments.

    “8chan is almost like a bul­letin board where the worst offend­ers go to share their ter­ri­ble ideas,” said Jonathan Green­blatt, the chief exec­u­tive of the Anti-Defama­tion League. “It’s become a sound­ing board where peo­ple share ideas, and where these kinds of ide­olo­gies are ampli­fied and expand­ed on, and ulti­mate­ly, peo­ple are rad­i­cal­ized as a result.”

    8chan has been run out of the Philip­pines by Jim Watkins, a Unit­ed States Army vet­er­an, since 2015, when Mr. Bren­nan gave up con­trol of the site.

    The site remains near­ly com­plete­ly unmod­er­at­ed, and its com­mit­ment to keep­ing up even the most vio­lent speech has made it a venue for extrem­ists to test out ideas, share vio­lent lit­er­a­ture and cheer on the per­pe­tra­tors of mass killings. Users on 8chan fre­quent­ly lion­ize mass gun­men using jokey inter­net ver­nac­u­lar, refer­ring to their body counts as “high scores” and cre­at­ing memes prais­ing the killers.

    Mr. Bren­nan, who has a con­di­tion known as brit­tle-bone dis­ease and uses a wheel­chair, has tried to dis­tance him­self from 8chan and its cur­rent own­ers. In a March inter­view with The Wall Street Jour­nal, he expressed his regrets over his role in the site’s cre­ation, and warned that the vio­lent cul­ture that had tak­en root on 8chan’s boards could lead to more mass shoot­ings.

    After the El Paso shoot­ing, he seemed resigned to the fact that it had.

    “Anoth­er 8chan shoot­ing?” he tweet­ed on Sat­ur­day. “Am I ever going to be able to move on with my life?”

    Mr. Watkins, who runs 8chan along with his son, Ronald, has remained defi­ant in the face of crit­i­cism, and has resist­ed calls to mod­er­ate or shut down the site. On Sun­day, a ban­ner at the top of 8chan’s home page read, “Wel­come to 8chan, the Dark­est Reach­es of the Inter­net.”

    “I’ve tried to under­stand so many times why he keeps it going, and I just don’t get it,” Mr. Bren­nan said. “After Christchurch, after the Tree of Life shoot­ing, and now after this shoot­ing, they think this is all real­ly fun­ny.”

    ...

    Over the week­end, 8chan’s crit­ics tried a dif­fer­ent tack to get the site shut down, by pres­sur­ing the site’s ser­vice providers, includ­ing its web host, to cut off Mr. Watkins.

    One of these providers, the secu­ri­ty com­pa­ny Cloud­flare, ini­tial­ly indi­cat­ed on Sun­day that it would not cut off 8chan’s access to its net­work. But lat­er in the day, Cloud­flare said it would ban the site after all, depriv­ing Mr. Watkins of a crit­i­cal tool for keep­ing the site online.

    Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s chief exec­u­tive, said the deci­sion to shut off 8chan’s pro­tec­tions was made after deter­min­ing that the site had allowed an envi­ron­ment of vio­lent extrem­ism to fes­ter, and that 8chan ignored com­plaints about vio­lent con­tent in a way that larg­er plat­forms, such as Face­book and Twit­ter, have not.

    “We’ve seen a pat­tern where this law­less com­mu­ni­ty has demon­strat­ed its abil­i­ty to cre­ate real harm and real dam­age,” Mr. Prince said of 8chan. “If we see a bad thing in the world and we can help get in front of it, we have some oblig­a­tion to do that.”

    Anoth­er com­pa­ny, Tucows, which con­trols 8chan’s domain name reg­is­tra­tion, had no plans as of Sun­day evening to dis­able the site’s web address.

    “We have no imme­di­ate plans oth­er than to keep dis­cussing inter­nal­ly,” said Graeme Bun­ton, man­ag­er of pub­lic pol­i­cy at Tucows.

    In the ear­ly days of 8chan, Mr. Bren­nan defend­ed the right of 8chan users to post anony­mous­ly, with­out cen­sor­ship. And he dis­missed inci­dents of harass­ment or vio­lence by users of the site as the price of being an open forum.

    “Anonymi­ty should not be tak­en away from every­one just because of a few bad apples,” he told Ars Tech­ni­ca, the tech­nol­o­gy web­site, in a 2015 inter­view.

    But more recent­ly, Mr. Bren­nan, who has begun attend­ing a Bap­tist church, has tried to per­suade Mr. Watkins to shut down the site. He and Mr. Watkins live near each oth­er in the Philip­pines, he said, and he often dri­ves past Mr. Watkins’s house on his way to church.

    Mr. Bren­nan said that oth­er web­sites, like Face­book and Twit­ter, also play a role in spread­ing the kinds of vio­lent mes­sages that often orig­i­nate on 8chan. But he said that those sites have been more proac­tive about remov­ing dan­ger­ous con­tent, mak­ing them less appeal­ing venues for a would-be ter­ror­ist.

    “Shut­ting it down, hav­ing these chan sites pushed under­ground, it wouldn’t total­ly stop these kinds of things from hap­pen­ing,” he said. “But it wouldn’t hap­pen every few months.”

    Mr. Bren­nan said he doubt­ed that Mr. Watkins makes mon­ey from 8chan, since it is free to use and cost­ly to main­tain, and since its tox­ic con­tent has made it radioac­tive to adver­tis­ers. (In a 2017 inter­view, Mr. Watkins said of run­ning 8chan, “It doesn’t make mon­ey, but it’s a lot of fun.”) And Mr. Bren­nan is hope­ful that sus­tained pres­sure on Mr. Watkins and his son will get them to change their minds even­tu­al­ly, and take down 8chan for good.

    “How long are they just going to allow this to go on?” he asked.

    ———-

    “8chan Is a Mega­phone for Gun­men. ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says Its Cre­ator.” by Kevin Roose; The New York Times; 08/04/2019

    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:

    ...
    The site remained on the fringes until 2014, when some sup­port­ers of Gamer­Gate — a loose reac­tionary col­lec­tion of anti-fem­i­nist video gamers — flocked to 8chan after being kicked off 4chan.

    Since Gamer­Gate, 8chan has become a catchall web­site for inter­net-based com­mu­ni­ties whose behav­ior gets them evict­ed from more main­stream sites. It hosts one of the largest gath­er­ings of sup­port­ers of QAnon, who claim that there is an inter­na­tion­al bureau­cra­cy plot­ting against the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. And it has been an online home for “incels,” men who lament being “invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate,” and oth­er fringe move­ments.

    ...

    The site remains near­ly com­plete­ly unmod­er­at­ed, and its com­mit­ment to keep­ing up even the most vio­lent speech has made it a venue for extrem­ists to test out ideas, share vio­lent lit­er­a­ture and cheer on the per­pe­tra­tors of mass killings. Users on 8chan fre­quent­ly lion­ize mass gun­men using jokey inter­net ver­nac­u­lar, refer­ring to their body counts as “high scores” and cre­at­ing memes prais­ing the killers.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Over the week­end, 8chan’s crit­ics tried a dif­fer­ent tack to get the site shut down, by pres­sur­ing the site’s ser­vice providers, includ­ing its web host, to cut off Mr. Watkins.

    One of these providers, the secu­ri­ty com­pa­ny Cloud­flare, ini­tial­ly indi­cat­ed on Sun­day that it would not cut off 8chan’s access to its net­work. But lat­er in the day, Cloud­flare said it would ban the site after all, depriv­ing Mr. Watkins of a crit­i­cal tool for keep­ing the site online.

    Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s chief exec­u­tive, said the deci­sion to shut off 8chan’s pro­tec­tions was made after deter­min­ing that the site had allowed an envi­ron­ment of vio­lent extrem­ism to fes­ter, and that 8chan ignored com­plaints about vio­lent con­tent in a way that larg­er plat­forms, such as Face­book and Twit­ter, have not.

    “We’ve seen a pat­tern where this law­less com­mu­ni­ty has demon­strat­ed its abil­i­ty to cre­ate real harm and real dam­age,” Mr. Prince said of 8chan. “If we see a bad thing in the world and we can help get in front of it, we have some oblig­a­tion to do that.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 4, 2019, 9:33 pm
  40. 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:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    News

    Infa­mous White Nation­al­ist, For­mer Sen­ate Can­di­date Arrest­ed On Kid­nap­ping War­rant

    By Matt Shuham
    Jan­u­ary 2, 2020 4:30 p.m.

    A polit­i­cal­ly active white nation­al­ist known for once drink­ing goat blood has been arrest­ed on a kid­nap­ping war­rant.

    Augus­tus Sol Invic­tus alleged­ly kid­napped his wife at gun­point in South Car­oli­na and drove to Flori­da, where he was arrest­ed and is being held with­out bond. A Bre­vard Coun­ty, Flori­da prob­a­ble cause affi­davit for Invic­tus said he was want­ed for kid­nap­ping, “high & aggra­vat­ed” domes­tic vio­lence and pos­ses­sion of a firearm dur­ing a crime of vio­lence.

    ...

    Born Austin Gille­spie, Invic­tus lat­er legal­ly changed his name and has been known in the extrem­ism world for years.

    In 2015, he ran for U.S. Sen­ate in Flori­da as a lib­er­tar­i­an. The chair­man of the state’s Lib­er­tar­i­an Par­ty, Adri­an Wyl­lie, resigned from that posi­tion after the par­ty failed to denounce Invic­tus, who was the party’s only can­di­date for the U.S. Sen­ate nom­i­na­tion at the time. (Anoth­er lib­er­tar­i­an can­di­date ulti­mate­ly trounced Invic­tus for the party’s nom­i­na­tion; Mar­co Rubio even­tu­al­ly won reelec­tion to the seat.)

    Wyl­lie object­ed to Invic­tus’ fas­cist pol­i­tics and for “sadis­ti­cal­ly dis­mem­ber­ing a goat in a rit­u­al­is­tic sac­ri­fice” — what Invic­tus lat­er con­firmed was an instance in 2013 when he slaugh­tered a goat and drank its blood. The fra­ter­nal-reli­gious group Ordo Tem­pli Ori­en­tis, of which Invic­tus had been a mem­ber, kicked him to the curb after the stunt.

    In 2017, Invic­tus was a speak­er at the white nation­al­ist Unite the Right ral­ly in Char­lottesville, and lat­er estab­lished a legal defense fund for sev­er­al mem­bers of the white nation­al­ist Rise Above Move­ment who were pros­e­cut­ed for their actions at the event and in sep­a­rate vio­lent skir­mish­es in Cal­i­for­nia.

    Invic­tus announced a pres­i­den­tial bid in August, jour­nal­ist Nick Mar­tin report­ed. Among his posi­tions as list­ed in an archived web­site for the cam­paign, is a “Ban on all kosher or halal slaugh­ter” and the asser­tion that “Only white male cit­i­zens have the right to vote.”

    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.

    The final draft includes such high­lights as “Whites alone defined Amer­i­ca as a Euro­pean soci­ety and polit­i­cal order,” “We oppose fem­i­nism, devian­cy, the futile denial of bio­log­i­cal real­i­ty, and every­thing destruc­tive to healthy rela­tions between men and women” and “Left­ism is an ide­ol­o­gy of death and must be con­front­ed and defeat­ed.”

    As the Dai­ly Beast not­ed, Invic­tus has faced accu­sa­tions of domes­tic vio­lence in the past but nev­er faced crim­i­nal charges for them.

    ———–

    “Infa­mous White Nation­al­ist, For­mer Sen­ate Can­di­date Arrest­ed On Kid­nap­ping War­rant” by Matt Shuham; 01/02/2020

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 4, 2020, 5:57 pm
  41. 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:

    AZ Mir­ror

    Leaked chats show neo-Nazis, extrem­ists tried to sway 2018 Ari­zona elec­tions

    By Jerod Mac­Don­ald-Evoy -
    May 5, 2020
    Last Updat­ed: May 5, 2020 11:27 am

    Self pro­claimed Neo-Nazis and oth­er extrem­ists worked togeth­er to try and sway the out­come of Arizona’s 2018 midterm elec­tion by a vari­ety of means includ­ing pro­mot­ing can­di­dates they liked or ones they felt were doomed to fail, accord­ing to leaked chat logs.

    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.

    The group turned the chat logs into a search­able data­base they’ve dubbed Project Whis­pers.

    One chat serv­er named “Red Storm” was part of an oper­a­tion to influ­ence the 2018 elec­tion.

    “This Dis­cord is for the pur­pose of dis­cus­sion, orga­ni­za­tion, and influ­en­tial action for the 2018 Midterms, in the inter­ests of under­min­ing the Left and ele­vat­ing the Right,” an intro­duc­to­ry post says.

    The server’s admin­is­tra­tors were up front about the racist views that users would find there.

    “This is a big tent right wing Dis­cord,” the intro­duc­to­ry post goes on to say. “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.

    The serv­er was split into sep­a­rate chan­nels for the states that were hav­ing midterm elec­tions as well as dif­fer­ent top­ics. Such as “how to make sock accounts,” which gave advice on cre­at­ing fake social media pro­files, and a sep­a­rate “oper­a­tion” in which users tried to find con­tro­ver­sial things lib­er­als said in order to scare peo­ple into vot­ing Repub­li­can.

    In the Ari­zona chan­nel, users dis­cussed ways in which they could sway vot­ers, includ­ing pos­si­bly infil­trat­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.

    “Maybe be dou­ble agents for the Dems here?” one user poised.

    Oth­ers spoke about mak­ing phone calls to as many peo­ple as they could, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on help­ing U.S. Rep. Deb­bie Lesko hold off a chal­lenge from Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee Hiral Tipir­neni.

    “They might vote Lesko because the nice young man on the phone said she was a great can­di­date,” one user said.

    “Elders love talk­ing to youth, AKA most of this dis­cord,” anoth­er user replied.

    That same user also expressed inter­est in paint­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic chal­lengers as extrem­ists, play­ing off an ear­li­er dis­cus­sion the group had of a belief that abol­ish­ing affir­ma­tive action is “cru­cial to white pop­u­la­tion growth.”

    Ari­zo­nans on the Red Storm serv­er also shared their thoughts on the can­di­dates and bal­lot mea­sures on the bal­lot in 2018, and admin­is­tra­tors made endorse­ments.

    Users seemed to agree that for­mer Mari­co­pa Coun­ty Sher­iff Joe Arpaio could not win an elec­tion against Kyrsten Sine­ma and broad­ly felt that Martha McSal­ly would defeat Sine­ma and sup­port Trump, but the offi­cial endorse­ment went to Kel­li Ward.

    The group even advised users which bal­lot propo­si­tions to vote for.

    ...

    One user, who said he wished he could paint swastikas on the hous­es of “left­ists” said in anoth­er com­ment that he was not even of vot­ing age.

    The Mir­ror has iden­ti­fied oth­er Ari­zona con­nec­tions in the chat logs as well, such as a 20-year-old man who claimed to be a mem­ber of the mil­i­tary and is a fas­cist who plans to “per­sue (sic) a career in pol­i­tics or sci­ence” when he fin­ish­es his mil­i­tary ser­vice.

    ———-

    “Leaked chats show neo-Nazis, extrem­ists tried to sway 2018 Ari­zona elec­tions” by Jerod Mac­Don­ald-Evoy; AZ Mir­ror; 05/05/2020

    “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:

    ...
    “This is a big tent right wing Dis­cord,” the intro­duc­to­ry post goes on to say. “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.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    One chat serv­er named “Red Stormwas part of an oper­a­tion to influ­ence the 2018 elec­tion.

    “This Dis­cord is for the pur­pose of dis­cus­sion, orga­ni­za­tion, and influ­en­tial action for the 2018 Midterms, in the inter­ests of under­min­ing the Left and ele­vat­ing the Right,” an intro­duc­to­ry post says.

    ...

    In the Ari­zona chan­nel, users dis­cussed ways in which they could sway vot­ers, includ­ing pos­si­bly infil­trat­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.

    “Maybe be dou­ble agents for the Dems here?” one user poised.

    ...

    The Mir­ror has iden­ti­fied oth­er Ari­zona con­nec­tions in the chat logs as well, such as a 20-year-old man who claimed to be a mem­ber of the mil­i­tary and is a fas­cist who plans to “per­sue (sic) a career in pol­i­tics or sci­ence” when he fin­ish­es his mil­i­tary ser­vice.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 10, 2020, 12:40 am
  42. 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:

    Alter­Net

    QAnon-lov­ing Sen­ate can­di­date wants mar­tial law declared in Ore­gon to com­bat ‘antifa’

    Writ­ten by David Nei­w­ert / Dai­ly Kos June 7, 2020

    The Ore­gon GOP nom­i­nee for the U.S. Sen­ate, Jo Rae Perkins, decid­ed to let her “Q light” shine on a Face­book livestream ear­li­er this week—and it was a doozy.

    Perkins, an unre­pen­tant “QAnon” con­spir­a­cy cultist, told her audi­ence that the state needs to be placed under mar­tial law, with the Nation­al Guard being sent not just to Portland—where there have been vio­lent protests over police brutality—but to rur­al places like Kla­math Falls and Bend. Her rea­son­ing: Bus­loads of nefar­i­ous antifa activists, financed by the evil George Soros, are fan­ning out to these towns to wreak destruc­tion.

    The only prob­lem with Perkins’ sce­nario: They’re not. The only places “antifa” activists (as well as many oth­ers) have clashed with police—and the only protests in which dam­age has occurred—have been in Port­land.

    There have, how­ev­er, been a string of far-right hoax­es that have found audi­ences with cred­u­lous res­i­dents and even law-enforce­ment offi­cers in these rur­al areas—utterly spu­ri­ous reports of bus­es loaded up with black-clad antifas­cists, com­ing to their towns to break win­dows and harass local busi­ness­es. In turn, large crowds of heav­i­ly armed men have turned out on the streets of those towns to fend off the invad­ing antifa hordes.

    Perkins hap­pi­ly pro­mot­ed those hoax­es, as well as a panoply of asso­ci­at­ed con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, includ­ing the noto­ri­ous­ly false and anti-Semit­ic claim that financier George Soros is secret­ly fund­ing “antifa.” She also offered a new twist, claim­ing that the antifa hordes are “the army that Oba­ma put togeth­er a few years ago.”

    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.”

    She con­tin­ued: “Let’s think about this. We’ve been under a soft mar­tial law since March, the mid­dle of March … You know that and I know that. And in some places, it is far beyond a soft mar­tial law. It has gone into a hard­core mar­tial law.”

    The solu­tion, she said, was to call in troops: “The Nation­al Guard needs to come in because there is not enough police offi­cers to squash what is going on. We need the Nation­al Guard to do that.”

    Perkins said she was “in pure shock” at read­ing reports that bus­fuls of antifa pro­test­ers were head­ing to these towns: “This is ridicu­lous. In Kla­math Falls?” she said. “Peo­ple are out to pro­tect their busi­ness­es. Two or three bus­es full of antifa came down from Port­land. Wow! Wow!”

    She began pray­ing aloud dur­ing the livestream: “But Lord, now we have this evil, this antifa, Father God. And we say no more. Lord God, I ask that you bring out your war­ring angels to pro­tect the cities, to pro­tect the inno­cent peo­ple, to pro­tect the busi­ness own­ers, Lord God.”

    Perkins repeat­ed­ly described “antifa” as “evil”: “These can­not be peo­ple,” she said. “All I can see, Lord, is just the demon­ic out­cry, oh God, of peo­ple that just peo­ple that feel they can just … total dis­re­gard, total dis­re­gard for oth­er peo­ple, for their prop­er­ty. All in the name of jus­tice for George Floyd.”

    In short order, this became an attack on George Soros:

    Lord, these peo­ple have no sense of moral­i­ty, of what is right and what is wrong, Lord God. Not the ones that are caus­ing this may­hem. This antifa. Father God, shut down George Soros, Lord God. End his reign of ter­ror, Lord God. We know that he is fund­ing this. Lord, we say. ‘Strip that mon­ey, strip that mon­ey strip that mon­ey.’ If there is a way, Father God, that Pres­i­dent Trump’s admin­is­tra­tion can block him from being able to spend any more mon­ey, Lord God, then allow that hap­pen.

    She lat­er reit­er­at­ed: “Then we have the antifa thugs. Many many peo­ple believe that they are being paid for by George Soros. And I have seen any­thing to dis­pel that rumor. I have nev­er seen George Soros come out and say he has noth­ing to do with it.”

    Perkins added that “the media are sup­port­ing antifa because they are all part of the same cabal,” which she went on to explain was “the Deep State.”

    But it wasn’t just Soros to blame, accord­ing to Perkins. So was for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma:

    Clear­ly there’s crazy peo­ple out there. Clear­ly we need to get a grip. Clear­ly we need to be pray­ing. Clear­ly we need some strong lead­er­ship in our states. That is clear. Ore­gon needs Gov­er­nor Brown to call out the Nation­al Guard. The Nation­al Guard is here, they need to be deployed, they need to be acti­vat­ed. Ash­land, Kla­math Falls, Eugene, Salem, Port­land. Where else are they gonna pop up? Bend? I will bet you guys that Bend is gonna hap­pen next. It will be next, because Bend is a large town. Bend, and Pendle­ton. They are deploy­ing all over the place.

    This is the army—this is the army that Oba­ma put togeth­er a few years ago. Wasn’t there an army that he put togeth­er a few years ago? I just read about it.

    For the record: No bus­es bear­ing hordes of raven­ing antifas­cists appeared in Kla­math Falls, or any oth­er of the mul­ti­ple loca­tions where they were rumored to be about to descend—which in Ore­gon includ­ed such towns as Med­ford, Grants Pass, and Coquille. (In Cur­ry Coun­ty, the local sher­iff shared the false rumor with his con­stituents on Face­book, then lat­er delet­ed the post when it became appar­ent there was no there there.) There still are no reports, yet, of sim­i­lar myth­i­cal bus­es head­ed for Bend or Pendle­ton, but giv­en the ease with which they appear to spread on Face­book and among “QAnon” con­spir­acists, that like­ly is just a mat­ter of time.

    ...

    ————-

    “QAnon-lov­ing Sen­ate can­di­date wants mar­tial law declared in Ore­gon to com­bat ‘antifa’” by David Nei­w­ert; Alter­Net; 06/07/2020

    “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:

    ...
    Perkins said she was “in pure shock” at read­ing reports that bus­fuls of antifa pro­test­ers were head­ing to these towns: “This is ridicu­lous. In Kla­math Falls?” she said. “Peo­ple are out to pro­tect their busi­ness­es. Two or three bus­es full of antifa came down from Port­land. Wow! Wow!”

    ...

    Perkins repeat­ed­ly described “antifa” as “evil”: “These can­not be peo­ple,” she said. “All I can see, Lord, is just the demon­ic out­cry, oh God, of peo­ple that just peo­ple that feel they can just … total dis­re­gard, total dis­re­gard for oth­er peo­ple, for their prop­er­ty. All in the name of jus­tice for George Floyd.”

    ...

    She lat­er reit­er­at­ed: “Then we have the antifa thugs. Many many peo­ple believe that they are being paid for by George Soros. And I have seen any­thing to dis­pel that rumor. I have nev­er seen George Soros come out and say he has noth­ing to do with it.”

    Perkins added that “the media are sup­port­ing antifa because they are all part of the same cabal,” which she went on to explain was “the Deep State.”

    But it wasn’t just Soros to blame, accord­ing to Perkins. So was for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma:

    Clear­ly there’s crazy peo­ple out there. Clear­ly we need to get a grip. Clear­ly we need to be pray­ing. Clear­ly we need some strong lead­er­ship in our states. That is clear. Ore­gon needs Gov­er­nor Brown to call out the Nation­al Guard. The Nation­al Guard is here, they need to be deployed, they need to be acti­vat­ed. Ash­land, Kla­math Falls, Eugene, Salem, Port­land. Where else are they gonna pop up? Bend? I will bet you guys that Bend is gonna hap­pen next. It will be next, because Bend is a large town. Bend, and Pendle­ton. They are deploy­ing all over the place.

    This is the army—this is the army that Oba­ma put togeth­er a few years ago. Wasn’t there an army that he put togeth­er a few years ago? I just read about it.

    ...

    “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...:

    Flori­da Pol­i­tics

    ‘You will be mur­dered’: Hills­bor­ough GOP chair­man under fire for George Floyd pro­test­er claims

    Jim Wau­r­ishuk claims Black Lives Mat­ter pro­test­ers will mur­der any­one.

    By Janelle Irwin Tay­lor

    on June 7, 2020

    Hills­bor­ough Coun­ty Repub­li­can Par­ty Chair Jim Wau­r­ishuk has spent the past sev­er­al days ral­ly­ing against pro­test­ers speak­ing out against police bru­tal­i­ty and sys­temic racism fol­low­ing George Floyd’s mur­der in Min­neapo­lis, prompt­ing calls to resign from with­in his own par­ty.

    On Tues­day, Wau­r­ishuk shared an arti­cle about for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s state­ments on the protests call­ing them “a real turn­ing point” in the fight for police reform.

    His post was full of fiery rhetoric and claims that pro­test­ers were bent on mur­der. Wau­r­ishuk said the post was not aimed at all pro­test­ers, just “vio­lent hard core rad­i­cal polit­i­cal left extrem­ists.”

    “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.

    The post claimed Oba­ma admit­ted “that the coor­di­nat­ed may­hem was all about ener­giz­ing their base to get out the vote … by any means nec­es­sary.”

    “This leaves no doubt remain­ing that the Pro­gres­sive Polit­i­cal-left Com­mies are will­ing t destroy and kill to achieve their goals,” Wau­r­ishuk wrote.

    The post drew praise from like­mind­ed indi­vid­u­als com­ment­ing, but rebuke from the local Repub­li­can estab­lish­ment offi­cials seek­ing to unite in a time of mass divi­sion.

    “It seems there was no pur­pose to that post,” for­mer Hills­bor­ough Coun­ty Repub­li­can Par­ty Chair Deb­o­rah Tamar­go said. “How does this address issues we’re deal­ing with today?”

    She called his com­ments “heart­break­ing.”

    Rep. Jack­ie Tole­do sim­ply called the com­ments “absolute­ly unac­cept­able.”

    She wants him to apol­o­gize and resign. So does Rep. Jamie Grant.

    “I’ve made it clear I’m not going to be a part of the Repub­li­can Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee if he’s there,” Grant said. “If the lead­er­ship of an orga­ni­za­tion con­tin­ues to make provoca­tive state­ments and I’m affil­i­at­ed with that orga­ni­za­tion, at what point are those com­ments are mine?”

    Rep. Lawrence McClure stopped short of call­ing for his res­ig­na­tion. He fig­ures plen­ty of oth­ers are already doing that, but said the com­ments were trou­bling in a time when heal­ing, not divi­sion, is need­ed.

    “We need to be hav­ing a holis­tic con­ver­sa­tion about how to heal our com­mu­ni­ty,” McClure said. “We don’t need to be putting prover­bial gas on the fire.”

    It’s no secret Oba­ma is uni­ver­sal­ly loathed with­in cer­tain sects of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. But Wau­r­ishuk didn’t stop there.

    “Democ­rats just real­ized the riots aren’t going to last for­ev­er and the econ­o­my has already start­ed to rebound. Now they need a new hoax,” he wrote Fri­day night.

    An hour before that he post­ed an image of rifle bul­lets with the words “Wel­come to rur­al Amer­i­ca. We don’t use rub­ber bul­lets.”

    In anoth­er post, he called pro­test­ers “pathet­ic low-life cow­ards.”

    The same day he said for­mer Deputy Attor­ney Gen­er­al Rod Rosen­stein, for­mer FBI Direc­tor James Comey, for­mer FBI Deputy Direc­tor Andrew McCabe, for­mer FBI agent Peter Str­zok, for­mer FBI attor­ney Lisa Page, Hillary Clin­ton, for­mer Attor­ney Gen­er­al Loret­ta Lynch, for­mer CIA Direc­tor John Bren­nan, for­mer Nation­al Intel­li­gence Direc­tor James Clap­per, for­mer Fusion GPS con­trac­tor Nel­lie Ohr and “a host of oth­ers” should be “remand­ed into cus­tody to swing on the gal­lows in the pub­lic square.”

    “With every­thing going on in the world today, we need real lead­ers to call for calm, bring peo­ple togeth­er and find solu­tions. Jim’s posts are unbe­com­ing of a leader of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. They are symp­to­matic of a total lack of under­stand­ing and lead­er­ship. It’s sad his lack of judge­ment has fur­ther weak­ened us, here local­ly,” Repub­li­can polit­i­cal con­sul­tant Antho­ny Pedici­ni said.

    It’s not the first time Wau­r­ishuk has faced crit­i­cism and calls to resign with­in his own par­ty. In 2018, par­ty lead­ers want­ed him to resign after lack­lus­ter per­for­mance in the midterm elec­tions.

    Not only did Wau­r­ishuk resist calls to resign, he con­tin­ued his divi­sive rhetoric into 2019, post­ing images and state­ments on social media that prompt­ed crit­i­cism, and in some cas­es, posts actu­al­ly being removed. Some of those includ­ed images of noos­es and actu­al lynch­ings, made in ref­er­ence to the Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump impeach­ment hear­ings, accord­ing to Cre­ative Loaf­ing.

    ...

    ———–

    “‘You will be mur­dered’: Hills­bor­ough GOP chair­man under fire for George Floyd pro­test­er claims” by Janelle Irwin Tay­lor; Flori­da Pol­i­tics; 06/07/2020

    ““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:

    ...
    The post claimed Oba­ma admit­ted “that the coor­di­nat­ed may­hem was all about ener­giz­ing their base to get out the vote … by any means nec­es­sary.”

    “This leaves no doubt remain­ing that the Pro­gres­sive Polit­i­cal-left Com­mies are will­ing t destroy and kill to achieve their goals,” Wau­r­ishuk wrote.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The same day he said for­mer Deputy Attor­ney Gen­er­al Rod Rosen­stein, for­mer FBI Direc­tor James Comey, for­mer FBI Deputy Direc­tor Andrew McCabe, for­mer FBI agent Peter Str­zok, for­mer FBI attor­ney Lisa Page, Hillary Clin­ton, for­mer Attor­ney Gen­er­al Loret­ta Lynch, for­mer CIA Direc­tor John Bren­nan, for­mer Nation­al Intel­li­gence Direc­tor James Clap­per, for­mer Fusion GPS con­trac­tor Nel­lie Ohr and “a host of oth­ers” should be “remand­ed into cus­tody to swing on the gal­lows in the pub­lic square.”
    ...

    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...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 7, 2020, 10:14 pm
  43. 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:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Leaked doc­u­ment makes Trump campaign’s use of Nazi-era sym­bol look worse

    By Greg Sar­gent
    Opin­ion writer
    June 19, 2020 at 11:10 AM EDT

    Pres­i­dent Trump’s cam­paign is under fire for employ­ing a sym­bol once used by Nazis in a new batch of Face­book ads — a red invert­ed tri­an­gle that appeared along­side a warn­ing about the dire threat posed by “antifa,” a loose mot­ley group allied against neo-fas­cist activ­i­ty.

    An inter­nal Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty doc­u­ment — which I obtained from a con­gres­sion­al source — makes the Trump campaign’s use of this sym­bol, and its jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for it, look a whole lot worse, by under­cut­ting the claim that antifa rep­re­sents any kind of threat in the first place.

    After Face­book removed the ads amid an out­cry, the Trump cam­paign con­tin­ued to defend use of the image — which was used by Nazis to iden­ti­fy polit­i­cal pris­on­ers — by claim­ing it’s a “com­mon Antifa sym­bol.”

    The sug­ges­tion, of course, is that the image is jus­ti­fied by the idea that it’s asso­ci­at­ed with antifa, so it’s mere­ly a warn­ing of a con­tin­u­ing men­ace to the coun­try. “STOP ANTIFA,” the ads say, warn­ing of “dan­ger­ous MOBS of far-left groups” that are “DESTROYING our cities.”

    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.

    But the DHS doc­u­ment I obtained under­cuts this series of claims.

    The doc­u­ment — which is an assess­ment of ongo­ing “protest-relat­ed” threats to law enforce­ment dat­ed June 17 — makes no men­tion at all of antifa in its cat­a­loging of those threats.

    The DHS doc­u­ment states that “anar­chist and anti-gov­ern­ment extrem­ists pose the most sig­nif­i­cant threat of tar­get­ed low-lev­el, protest-relat­ed assaults against law enforce­ment.”

    It bases this assess­ment on “the observed ide­olo­gies of recent attack­ers and the body of report­ing of tac­tics not­ed by vio­lent oppor­tunists used over the last two weeks.”

    Thus, as of this week, “anar­chist and anti-gov­ern­ment extrem­ists” pose the most seri­ous ongo­ing threat, accord­ing to Trump’s own Home­land Secu­ri­ty depart­ment.

    The doc­u­ment defines “anar­chist extrem­ists” as:

    groups or indi­vid­u­als who facil­i­tate or engage in acts of unlaw­ful vio­lence as a means of chang­ing the gov­ern­ment and soci­ety in sup­port of the belief that all forms of cap­i­tal­ism and cor­po­rate glob­al­iza­tion should be opposed and that gov­ern­ing insti­tu­tions are unnec­es­sary and harm­ful to soci­ety.

    Not only does this doc­u­ment not name antifa, this descrip­tion of gener­ic “anar­chist extrem­ists” does not describe what we’ve come to under­stand “antifa” to be. While there might be some loose over­lap between antifa and anar­chists, antifa isn’t even a group, and adher­ents are char­ac­ter­ized by spe­cif­ic resis­tance to per­ceived neo-fas­cist move­ments.

    Mean­while, the DHS doc­u­ment defines “anti-gov­ern­ment extrem­ists” as moti­vat­ed by “their belief that their lib­er­ties are being tak­en away by the per­ceived uncon­sti­tu­tion­al or oth­er­wise ille­git­i­mate actions of gov­ern­ment offi­cials or law enforce­ment.”

    Obvi­ous­ly, that’s not antifa, either.

    “This doc­u­ment shows that the gov­ern­ment itself does not view antifa as a sig­nif­i­cant threat in the home­land,” Juli­ette Kayyem, a for­mer DHS offi­cial who reviewed the doc­u­ment at my request, told me.

    “The doc­u­ment shows how absurd the Trump campaign’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for using the sym­bol real­ly is,” Kayyem added. “It under­cuts their defense.”

    The Anti-Defama­tion League has harsh­ly crit­i­cized the Trump cam­paign for employ­ing a sym­bol that “is prac­ti­cal­ly iden­ti­cal to that used by the Nazi regime to clas­si­fy polit­i­cal pris­on­ers in con­cen­tra­tion camps.”

    Kayyem said the doc­u­ment is a bul­letin cus­tom­ar­i­ly sent by DHS to “state and local law enforce­ment” to alert them as to “what they should be look­ing out for in terms of threats.”

    The doc­u­ment also notes that “over­all protest-relat­ed vio­lence” has been “decreas­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly dur­ing the last week,” which also under­mines con­tin­ued Trump fear­mon­ger­ing.

    The doc­u­ment does assess that there may be “height­ened” threats to law enforce­ment in com­ing days in the form of “exploita­tion of oth­er­wise law­ful protests” by “vio­lent oppor­tunists,” and cites “white suprema­cist” and “black suprema­cist” extrem­ists.

    Notably, the con­tin­u­ing threat to law enforce­ment has been thrust to the fore­front by the charg­ing of Steven Car­ril­lo for the alleged killing of one secu­ri­ty offi­cer and the wound­ing of anoth­er. Car­ril­lo is an alleged adher­ent of the “booga­loo boys,” an extrem­ist move­ment try­ing to exploit protests to incite race war.

    The DHS doc­u­ment actu­al­ly does cite the “Booga­loo move­ment” as a threat in this con­text. It notes that Car­ril­lo is like­ly asso­ci­at­ed with it, defin­ing it as “a term used by some vio­lent extrem­ists from a vari­ety of move­ments who seek to incite a race war or the col­lapse of soci­ety.”

    And yet, accord­ing to CNN reporter Mar­shall Cohen, Trump has yet to men­tion this as a threat, even though, as Craig Tim­berg demon­strates, it’s increas­ing­ly obvi­ous this threat is becom­ing a seri­ous one.

    At the same time, the Trump cam­paign con­tin­ues to cite antifa as a threat — and is using this to jus­ti­fy its use of that sym­bol in ads — even though an assess­ment from Trump’s own gov­ern­ment doesn’t cast antifa as such.

    Sim­i­lar­ly, anoth­er leaked intel­li­gence doc­u­ment ear­li­er this month assessed the great­est threat as com­ing from “lone offend­ers with racial­ly or eth­ni­cal­ly moti­vat­ed vio­lent extrem­ist ide­olo­gies,” not from antifa.

    The new DHS doc­u­ment shows that the non-assess­ment of the threat of antifa hasn’t changed — even as the claims about antifa con­tin­ue.

    The broad­er sto­ry here, as Isaac Stan­ley-Beck­er details, is that the con­tin­ued fear­mon­ger­ing about antifa by Trump and many top offi­cials seems designed to dis­tort the true nature of these mul­tira­cial, large­ly peace­ful and broad­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive nation­al protests in a very fun­da­men­tal way.

    There’s anoth­er per­ni­cious angle here, too. As anoth­er for­mer DHS offi­cial not­ed, this doc­u­ment cites the pos­si­bil­i­ty of more attacks on law enforce­ment — but con­cert­ed dis­tor­tions of what’s dri­ving that threat are them­selves destruc­tive to efforts to com­bat them.

    ...

    ———-

    “Leaked doc­u­ment makes Trump campaign’s use of Nazi-era sym­bol look worse” by Greg Sar­gent; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 06/19/2020

    “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:

    ...
    The doc­u­ment — which is an assess­ment of ongo­ing “protest-relat­ed” threats to law enforce­ment dat­ed June 17 — makes no men­tion at all of antifa in its cat­a­loging of those threats.

    ...

    Not only does this doc­u­ment not name antifa, this descrip­tion of gener­ic “anar­chist extrem­ists” does not describe what we’ve come to under­stand “antifa” to be. While there might be some loose over­lap between antifa and anar­chists, antifa isn’t even a group, and adher­ents are char­ac­ter­ized by spe­cif­ic resis­tance to per­ceived neo-fas­cist move­ments.

    Mean­while, the DHS doc­u­ment defines “anti-gov­ern­ment extrem­ists” as moti­vat­ed by “their belief that their lib­er­ties are being tak­en away by the per­ceived uncon­sti­tu­tion­al or oth­er­wise ille­git­i­mate actions of gov­ern­ment offi­cials or law enforce­ment.”

    Obvi­ous­ly, that’s not antifa, either.

    “This doc­u­ment shows that the gov­ern­ment itself does not view antifa as a sig­nif­i­cant threat in the home­land,” Juli­ette Kayyem, a for­mer DHS offi­cial who reviewed the doc­u­ment at my request, told me.

    “The doc­u­ment shows how absurd the Trump campaign’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for using the sym­bol real­ly is,” Kayyem added. “It under­cuts their defense.”

    ...

    Sim­i­lar­ly, anoth­er leaked intel­li­gence doc­u­ment ear­li­er this month assessed the great­est threat as com­ing from “lone offend­ers with racial­ly or eth­ni­cal­ly moti­vat­ed vio­lent extrem­ist ide­olo­gies,” not from antifa.

    The new DHS doc­u­ment shows that the non-assess­ment of the threat of antifa hasn’t changed — even as the claims about antifa con­tin­ue.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Pres­i­dent Trump’s cam­paign is under fire for employ­ing a sym­bol once used by Nazis in a new batch of Face­book ads — a red invert­ed tri­an­gle that appeared along­side a warn­ing about the dire threat posed by “antifa,” a loose mot­ley group allied against neo-fas­cist activ­i­ty.

    ...

    The Anti-Defama­tion League has harsh­ly crit­i­cized the Trump cam­paign for employ­ing a sym­bol that “is prac­ti­cal­ly iden­ti­cal to that used by the Nazi regime to clas­si­fy polit­i­cal pris­on­ers in con­cen­tra­tion camps.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The DHS doc­u­ment actu­al­ly does cite the “Booga­loo move­ment” as a threat in this con­text. It notes that Car­ril­lo is like­ly asso­ci­at­ed with it, defin­ing it as “a term used by some vio­lent extrem­ists from a vari­ety of move­ments who seek to incite a race war or the col­lapse of soci­ety.”

    And yet, accord­ing to CNN reporter Mar­shall Cohen, Trump has yet to men­tion this as a threat, even though, as Craig Tim­berg demon­strates, it’s increas­ing­ly obvi­ous this threat is becom­ing a seri­ous one.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 20, 2020, 12:30 am
  44. 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:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Asked about QAnon, Trump declines to denounce the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry
    In doing so, he like­ly gave it addi­tion­al oxy­gen.

    By Philip Bump
    August 14, 2020 at 2:56 PM EDT

    Last spring, the FBI released an intel­li­gence bul­letin inform­ing law enforce­ment about the threat of “fringe polit­i­cal con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries” which, the bureau said, would “very like­ly moti­vate some domes­tic extrem­ists to com­mit crim­i­nal [and] some­times vio­lent activ­i­ty.” Among the the­o­ries specif­i­cal­ly cit­ed was QAnon, a sprawl­ing, bizarre set of the­o­ries cen­tered on the idea that Pres­i­dent Trump is engaged in a hid­den bat­tle against a cabal of pedophiles and sex traf­fick­ers which involves an end­less array of celebri­ties, pub­lic fig­ures and gov­ern­ment offi­cials.

    There was good rea­son to include QAnon. Two months pri­or, a man alleged­ly influ­enced by the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry shot and killed a sus­pect­ed Mafia boss on Stat­en Island. When he appeared in court for an extra­di­tion hear­ing, he held up the palm of his hand, on which he’d scrawled a Q — a ref­er­ence to the anony­mous fig­ure whose cryp­tic mes­sages pur­port­ing to reveal secret gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion pow­er the move­ment. In June 2018, a QAnon adher­ent had blocked access to the Hoover Dam, demand­ing the release of a secret report Q had sug­gest­ed exist­ed. The month before that, QAnon adher­ents had gone around the Tuc­son area look­ing for secret child sex traf­fick­ing camps they believed exist­ed.

    At first, QAnon was a some­what eso­teric out­growth of a con­spir­a­to­r­i­al world that Trump lever­aged for polit­i­cal sup­port in the 2016 elec­tion. Over the sum­mer of 2018, QAnon sup­port­ers began attract­ing media atten­tion, pop­ping up at Trump ral­lies and try­ing to work Q signs into the back­ground of his speech­es. Trump’s words and actions were scru­ti­nized for sig­nals, with sup­port­ers unsur­pris­ing­ly pick­ing alleged sig­nals out of the noise of what the pres­i­dent did.

    It’s now become big enough to be a legit­i­mate polit­i­cal move­ment of its own, if one pred­i­cat­ed on bizarre, obvi­ous­ly false alle­ga­tions. QAnon groups on social media have mil­lions of fol­low­ers, pow­ered in part by a recent surge in inter­est. Dozens of polit­i­cal can­di­dates, most Repub­li­cans, have either casu­al­ly or enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly made ref­er­ence to the move­ment — at times appar­ent­ly to reach out to a fringe con­stituen­cy; at times, appar­ent­ly, from a sin­cere belief in what QAnon alleges. As of ear­ly July, more than 600,000 votes had been cast for can­di­dates around the coun­try who indi­cat­ed some accep­tance of QAnon.

    Anoth­er 43,000 were cast this week when Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene won a runoff con­test in the Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry for Georgia’s 14th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict. Greene falls into the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry of can­di­dates who flirt with QAnon, express­ing, in the past, a full-throat­ed embrace of the the­o­ry. She advo­cat­ed for peo­ple to learn more about Q, sug­gest­ing in one tweet, since delet­ed, that peo­ple should “trust the plan” — a com­mon phrase in Q cir­cles refer­ring to the broad, murky fight against the evil­do­ers.

    After Greene won that runoff, Trump offered his con­grat­u­la­tions on Twit­ter, despite how the vic­to­ry drew new atten­tion to her views. Trump’s cam­paign obvi­ous­ly rec­og­nizes the util­i­ty of a large, high­ly engaged group of sup­port­ers but it has not explic­it­ly embraced or endorsed QAnon. Or it hadn’t, any­way. When Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R‑Ill.) called QAnon “a fab­ri­ca­tion” that had “no place in Con­gress” on Tues­day, a com­mu­ni­ca­tions staffer for Trump’s cam­paign attacked him.

    Dur­ing a news con­fer­ence Fri­day, the Asso­ci­at­ed Press’s Jill Colvin asked Trump specif­i­cal­ly about QAnon.

    “You con­grat­u­lat­ed Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene in a tweet. You called her a future Repub­li­can star,” Colvin said. “Greene has been a pro­po­nent of the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry. She said it’s some­thing that should be — would be worth lis­ten­ing to. Do you agree with her on that?”

    “Well, she did very well in the elec­tion,” Trump replied. “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.”

    This, in a nut­shell, seems to sum­ma­rize Trump’s view of the sit­u­a­tion: she’s pop­u­lar and can get votes, so who’s he to object to what she does?

    After offer­ing his non-answer, Trump tried to call on anoth­er reporter.

    “Specif­i­cal­ly on QAnon and her appear­ance to embrace that con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry,” Colvin pressed. “Do you agree with her on that?”

    Trump ignored the fol­low-up, again call­ing on anoth­er reporter.

    There are real­ly three ways in which this could have gone.

    Most pres­i­dents, it’s safe to assume, would have offered some cau­tion­ary words dis­cred­it­ing the the­o­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly if the the­o­ry sug­gest­ed that the pres­i­dent him­self was involved in its machi­na­tions, as QAnon sug­gests about Trump.

    He could also have offered a bold endorse­ment of the move­ment, which was the least like­ly option. Instead, Trump took the mid­dle road of ignor­ing the ques­tion. He does this some­times, as he did on Thurs­day when he was asked about his habit of mak­ing untrue claims or lying to the pub­lic.

    In this case, though, his silence is unlike­ly to be read as an indi­ca­tor of indif­fer­ence or absten­tion. By not specif­i­cal­ly deny­ing or reject­ing the the­o­ry, he gave it oxy­gen, inten­tion­al­ly or not. QAnon adher­ents who parse punc­tu­a­tion in his tweets, the back­ground of images he posts on Twit­ter or track where he points dur­ing speech­es for sig­nals that he is part of “the plan” are not going to under­stand Trump’s silence as a mark of restraint. They are, instead, going to apply the same parei­do­liac sen­si­bil­i­ty that guides the rest of their absorp­tion of Q mate­r­i­al and see in his silence a wink.

    Trump has a habit of refus­ing to reject con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries or obvi­ous­ly false asser­tions if they’re polit­i­cal­ly use­ful; see his embrace of non­sen­si­cal alle­ga­tions about Sen. Kamala D. Har­ris (D‑Calif.) on Thurs­day or his long-stand­ing claims about Barack Obama’s birth­place. He’s also gen­er­al­ly loathe to crit­i­cize sup­port­ers, not mat­ter how tox­ic. His rejec­tions of white nation­al­ists who sup­port his admin­is­tra­tion, for exam­ple, are often con­strained or belat­ed.

    QAnon is an unusu­al mix of both: tox­ic, false and risky. But it’s also swelling in an elec­tion year and pred­i­cat­ed almost entire­ly on see­ing Trump as a hero, a nec­es­sary foil against evil. It’s pop­u­lar­i­ty derives from the extent to which it fits the moment for Trump sup­port­ers, mak­ing it that much less like­ly that Trump will go out of his way to denounce it.

    If his­to­ry is a guide, we’ll see a pre­pared state­ment from the White House, per­haps bear­ing Trump’s sig­na­ture, reject­ing QAnon in some fash­ion. But adher­ents — and, real­ly, most peo­ple — would under­stand that such a state­ment does­n’t real­ly cap­ture Trump’s views as sin­cere­ly as his silence from the lectern on Fri­day.

    ...

    ———–

    “Asked about QAnon, Trump declines to denounce the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry” by Philip Bump; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 08/14/2020

    “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:

    ...
    After offer­ing his non-answer, Trump tried to call on anoth­er reporter.

    “Specif­i­cal­ly on QAnon and her appear­ance to embrace that con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry,” Colvin pressed. “Do you agree with her on that?”

    Trump ignored the fol­low-up, again call­ing on anoth­er reporter.

    There are real­ly three ways in which this could have gone.

    Most pres­i­dents, it’s safe to assume, would have offered some cau­tion­ary words dis­cred­it­ing the the­o­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly if the the­o­ry sug­gest­ed that the pres­i­dent him­self was involved in its machi­na­tions, as QAnon sug­gests about Trump.

    He could also have offered a bold endorse­ment of the move­ment, which was the least like­ly option. Instead, Trump took the mid­dle road of ignor­ing the ques­tion. He does this some­times, as he did on Thurs­day when he was asked about his habit of mak­ing untrue claims or lying to the pub­lic.

    In this case, though, his silence is unlike­ly to be read as an indi­ca­tor of indif­fer­ence or absten­tion. By not specif­i­cal­ly deny­ing or reject­ing the the­o­ry, he gave it oxy­gen, inten­tion­al­ly or not. QAnon adher­ents who parse punc­tu­a­tion in his tweets, the back­ground of images he posts on Twit­ter or track where he points dur­ing speech­es for sig­nals that he is part of “the plan” are not going to under­stand Trump’s silence as a mark of restraint. They are, instead, going to apply the same parei­do­liac sen­si­bil­i­ty that guides the rest of their absorp­tion of Q mate­r­i­al and see in his silence a wink.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 14, 2020, 11:31 pm
  45. 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:

    FiveThir­tyEight

    Trump Helped Take Extrem­ist Views From The Fringes Of Soci­ety To A Mob Attack­ing The Capi­tol

    By Nathaniel Rakich, Kaleigh Rogers and Geof­frey Skel­ley
    Jan. 8, 2021, at 3:18 PM

    Faith in the integri­ty of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion has been con­cern­ing­ly low for months — in large part because of Pres­i­dent Trump’s repeat­ed false claims that the elec­tion was stolen from him. And on Wednes­day, we saw an extreme exam­ple of the con­se­quences of that mis­trust when pro-Trump extrem­ists briefly but vio­lent­ly occu­pied the U.S. Capi­tol.

    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.

    “There were no ordi­nary peo­ple in Char­lottesville, it was just the hard­core extrem­ists. But on Wednes­day there were [ordi­nary peo­ple],” said Jonathan Green­blatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defama­tion League. “In many ways it’s a metaphor for Trump­ism. He has tak­en these ideas and main­streamed them in a way I think no one thought pos­si­ble. It came to light Wednes­day in an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly ugly and vio­lent way.”

    Polls so far — and we are still very ear­ly in this news cycle — have found that a sol­id major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans opposed the unrest in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. In a YouGov poll, 71 per­cent of reg­is­tered vot­ers opposed the “storm­ing of the Capi­tol” (63 per­cent of them “strong­ly”), and 62 per­cent viewed it as “a threat to democ­ra­cy.” Sim­i­lar­ly, 70 per­cent of respon­dents to an Ipsos poll opposed “the pro­test­ers who broke into the Capi­tol.” And, accord­ing to a Morn­ing Consult/Politico sur­vey, 59 per­cent of reg­is­tered vot­ers think the per­pe­tra­tors should be viewed as “domes­tic ter­ror­ists.”

    How­ev­er, a not-small 19 per­cent of Ipsos respon­dents said that they sup­port­ed the riot­ers. In the YouGov poll, 21 per­cent said the same (includ­ing 14 per­cent who strong­ly sup­port­ed storm­ing the Capi­tol), and 32 per­cent did not believe that the occu­pa­tion con­sti­tut­ed a threat to democ­ra­cy. Those who backed it were dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly Repub­li­can: 45 per­cent of GOP vot­ers sup­port­ed the siege, while 43 per­cent opposed it.

    Old­er polls ask­ing how Amer­i­cans feel about the legit­i­ma­cy of the Novem­ber elec­tion — the griev­ance that fueled the upris­ing — are also telling. A cou­ple weeks after the elec­tion, our col­league Dhru­mil Mehta wrote that between two-thirds and three-quar­ters of Repub­li­cans doubt­ed that the elec­tion was con­duct­ed fair­ly (it was), accord­ing to sev­er­al polls. And a recent gold-stan­dard1 nation­al poll, con­duct­ed Dec. 16–20 by Suf­folk Uni­ver­si­ty, found that 37 per­cent of reg­is­tered vot­ers — includ­ing 78 per­cent of Repub­li­cans — did not believe Joe Biden was legit­i­mate­ly elect­ed pres­i­dent.

    Those polls asked about people’s con­fi­dence in the elec­tion results — not whether they were will­ing to accept the results, which is much hard­er to mea­sure. You can imag­ine, for instance, that some peo­ple thought the elec­tion was unfair but were resigned to the fact that Biden would even­tu­al­ly take office. But there are some polls that sug­gest a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of Repub­li­cans want­ed to actu­al­ly over­turn the result of a free and fair elec­tion and install Trump for a sec­ond term. The exact num­ber depends on the poll and its ques­tion word­ing, but in gen­er­al it is close to the half of Repub­li­cans who have said they sup­port­ed the siege on the Capi­tol. To wit:

    * Accord­ing to a sur­vey con­duct­ed just before Elec­tion Day by Bren­dan Hart­nett and Alexan­dra Haver of Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty, around 40 per­cent of Trump sup­port­ers want­ed Trump to attempt to stay in office even if he lost. Notably, between a third and half of Trump vot­ers said the same thing almost regard­less of how much Trump lost by, sug­gest­ing that those respon­dents were will­ing to over­turn the elec­tion even in the event of an over­whelm­ing Biden win (up to about 12 points) in order to get their pre­ferred pres­i­dent.
    * A YouGov/Bright Line Watch poll from short­ly after Biden won the elec­tion found that 48 per­cent of Trump sup­port­ers expect­ed Trump to be inau­gu­rat­ed on Jan. 20. And around 20 per­cent of Trump sup­port­ers said they would resort to vio­lence if Democ­rats won the elec­tion.
    * And in the afore­men­tioned Suf­folk poll, 26 per­cent of all vot­ers, includ­ing 57 per­cent of Repub­li­cans, still thought Trump should not con­cede the elec­tion, even though the Elec­toral Col­lege had already vot­ed, seal­ing Biden’s win, by the time the poll was con­duct­ed.
    * Most recent­ly, in a poll con­duct­ed Mon­day and Tues­day (just before the attack), Morn­ing Con­sult found that just 24 per­cent of all reg­is­tered vot­ers said mem­bers of Con­gress should object to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege vote. How­ev­er, a major­i­ty (53 per­cent) of Repub­li­cans thought Con­gress should object.

    In try­ing to put this week into con­text, we don’t have a clear ana­log. How­ev­er, one com­par­i­son would be the riot­ing and vio­lence at the Unite the Right ral­ly in Char­lottesville in August 2017, where a counter-pro­tes­tor was killed. Trump weak­ly con­demned those events, as he did with the mob at the Capi­tol on Wednes­day, and in both cas­es the vio­lence was inex­tri­ca­bly linked to issues of white iden­ti­ty and griev­ance — issues that moti­vat­ed many per­pe­tra­tors of the attack on Wash­ing­ton this week.

    Polling con­duct­ed after Char­lottesville found that Repub­li­cans were more like­ly to express a strong attach­ment to a white iden­ti­ty than oth­er Amer­i­cans. For instance, a sur­vey from Reuters/Ipsos and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia Cen­ter for Pol­i­tics found that while about one-third of Amer­i­cans agreed that “Amer­i­ca must pre­serve its White Euro­pean her­itage,” twice as many Repub­li­cans (44 per­cent) agreed as Democ­rats (22 per­cent). And where­as 38 per­cent of Repub­li­cans felt that racial minori­ties were “under attack” in the Unit­ed States, 63 per­cent said the same of white peo­ple. So even though polls gen­er­al­ly found that 10 per­cent or less of all respon­dents were sup­port­ive of con­cepts like “white nation­al­ism” or groups like the “alt-right” when they were called by those names, a sub­stan­tial num­ber of Repub­li­cans felt their white iden­ti­ty was under threat and need­ed to be pro­tect­ed, align­ing them­selves with ele­ments of white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy once the label was removed.

    Repub­li­cans also were much more like­ly to hold favor­able views of Trump’s response to the vio­lence — in which he said there were “very fine peo­ple on both sides” — than were most Amer­i­cans. For instance, Quin­nip­i­ac Uni­ver­si­ty found that only 32 per­cent of reg­is­tered vot­ers approved of Trump’s response, but 69 per­cent of Repub­li­cans backed it. And 59 per­cent of all respon­dents thought Trump’s deci­sions and behav­ior had encour­aged white suprema­cist groups, but only 18 per­cent of Repub­li­cans felt that way.

    How­ev­er, it does seem as if more Amer­i­cans — includ­ing Repub­li­cans — might be will­ing to fault Trump this time around than after Char­lottesville. That poll from Morn­ing Con­sult found, for instance, that 63 per­cent of reg­is­tered vot­ers think Trump was respon­si­ble for the mob attack in Wash­ing­ton, includ­ing 41 per­cent of Repub­li­cans. Sim­i­lar­ly, 66 per­cent of vot­ers told YouGov that Trump was to blame, though in that poll, only 28 per­cent of Repub­li­cans agreed.

    What hap­pened fol­low­ing Char­lottesville might still pro­vide some clues to where things will go from here. After the Unite the Right ral­ly, there was some splin­ter­ing among far-right groups, accord­ing to Alex New­house, the research lead at the Cen­ter on Ter­ror­ism, Extrem­ism, and Coun­tert­er­ror­ism at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege. The Proud Boys, for exam­ple, bat­tled inter­nal tur­moil over some mem­bers’ atten­dance at the ral­ly and some of its lead­ers made an effort to dis­tance the group from white suprema­cy, at least on paper, New­house said. But oth­er far-right groups were roused by the events in Char­lottesville.

    “Despite the pub­lic out­rage, despite the death of a woman and the arrests that fol­lowed, the white suprema­cists were embold­ened, espe­cial­ly after the pres­i­dent said there were ‘fine peo­ple on both sides,’” said Green­blatt.

    For the wider Amer­i­can pub­lic, Char­lottesville was a wake-up call that revealed how hearty the white suprema­cist and neo-Nazi move­ments remain in the Unit­ed States. But while many politi­cians, includ­ing Repub­li­cans, con­demned the ral­ly, Trump’s response only fur­ther bol­stered exist­ing far-right views, New­house said.

    ...

    There are many dif­fer­ences between these two events, but one impor­tant dis­tinc­tion is the fact that, as Green­blatt men­tioned, the Unite the Right ral­ly was attend­ed almost exclu­sive­ly by white nation­al­ists, while Wednesday’s insur­rec­tion at the Capi­tol includ­ed many more peo­ple who aren’t part of an orga­nized white suprema­cist group. This, Green­blatt stressed, is con­cern­ing as it indi­cates that these ideas are seep­ing out of the fringes and into the main­stream. And that seep­age, com­bined with fears over white iden­ti­ty and Trump’s incite­ment, may have broad­ened Repub­li­can recep­tive­ness to polit­i­cal vio­lence.. A Jan­u­ary 2020 study of Repub­li­can vot­ers by polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Lar­ry Bar­tels found that 51 per­cent agreed that the “tra­di­tion­al Amer­i­can way of life is dis­ap­pear­ing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

    And these dra­mat­ic events are prod­ucts of a much larg­er issue: Faith in our insti­tu­tions and in democ­ra­cy itself is erod­ing in this coun­try. Last year, a report from the Democ­ra­cy Fund’s Vot­er Study Group found that a third of Amer­i­cans had sup­port­ed author­i­tar­i­an ideas at some point in the pre­vi­ous three years, and polling from YouGov Blue that our col­leagues report­ed on last year found that Repub­li­cans, in par­tic­u­lar, were sour­ing on democ­ra­cy and the insti­tu­tions that uphold it. As the events of Wednes­day make fright­en­ing­ly clear, this is not sim­ply a philo­soph­i­cal debate. It’s a real and present threat to our very way of life.

    ————

    “Trump Helped Take Extrem­ist Views From The Fringes Of Soci­ety To A Mob Attack­ing The Capi­tol” by Nathaniel Rakich, Kaleigh Rogers and Geof­frey Skel­ley; FiveThir­tyEight; 01/08/2021

    “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:

    ...
    “There were no ordi­nary peo­ple in Char­lottesville, it was just the hard­core extrem­ists. But on Wednes­day there were [ordi­nary peo­ple],” said Jonathan Green­blatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defama­tion League. “In many ways it’s a metaphor for Trump­ism. He has tak­en these ideas and main­streamed them in a way I think no one thought pos­si­ble. It came to light Wednes­day in an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly ugly and vio­lent way.”

    Polls so far — and we are still very ear­ly in this news cycle — have found that a sol­id major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans opposed the unrest in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. In a YouGov poll, 71 per­cent of reg­is­tered vot­ers opposed the “storm­ing of the Capi­tol” (63 per­cent of them “strong­ly”), and 62 per­cent viewed it as “a threat to democ­ra­cy.” Sim­i­lar­ly, 70 per­cent of respon­dents to an Ipsos poll opposed “the pro­test­ers who broke into the Capi­tol.” And, accord­ing to a Morn­ing Consult/Politico sur­vey, 59 per­cent of reg­is­tered vot­ers think the per­pe­tra­tors should be viewed as “domes­tic ter­ror­ists.”

    How­ev­er, a not-small 19 per­cent of Ipsos respon­dents said that they sup­port­ed the riot­ers. In the YouGov poll, 21 per­cent said the same (includ­ing 14 per­cent who strong­ly sup­port­ed storm­ing the Capi­tol), and 32 per­cent did not believe that the occu­pa­tion con­sti­tut­ed a threat to democ­ra­cy. Those who backed it were dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly Repub­li­can: 45 per­cent of GOP vot­ers sup­port­ed the siege, while 43 per­cent opposed it.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 8, 2021, 9:36 pm

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