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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: This broadcast updates coverage of key aspects of the Nazi/fascist, oops, we mean “alt-right” milieu that moved into government courtesy of the Trumpenkampfverbande and Breitbart.
Further developing the terrifying reality of what Artificial Intellligence (AI) can accomplish for the dedicated fascist, oops, we mean “alt-right,” adherent, we note an important address given at SXSW. Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford gave a speech titled “Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism.” The presentation highlighted the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems. The take home message? By delegating powers to Bid Data-driven AIs, those AIs could become fascist’s dream: Incredible power over the lives of others with minimal accountability: ” . . . .‘This is a fascist’s dream,’ she said. ‘Power without accountability.’ . . . .”
Turning next to the political philosophy of Steve Bannon and the seminal influences on its development, we refresh our acquaintance with Curtis Yarvin, aka “Mencius Moldbug,” a herald of the Dark Enlightment.
Curtis Yarvin has actually opened a backchannel advisory connection to the White House.
Note that the Bannon influences all seem to agree that what is needed is “a shock to the system.” We may very well experience just that. ” . . . . . . . . Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. . . . ”
Fascist philosopher Julius Evola is another of the key influences on Bannon. Evola was an early occult fascist, with strong connections with Mussolini’s Italy. Eventually Evola established strong, lasting connections with the Nazi SS, both operationally and ideologically.
He is another advocate of the “shock to the system”/“blow it up” approach to the status quo. ” . . . Changing the system, Evola argued, was ‘not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.’ . . . .”
A revealing influence on Bannon is a French novel The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. “. . . . The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. ‘The Fall of Constantinople,’ Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, ‘is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.’ . . . . ”
In FTR #947, we highlighted Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart alumnus and Hungarian fascist. Gorka is now the Trump administration’s point man working against Islamic terrorism. His view (and Bannon’s) that we are engaged in an historic clash of civilizations. That is precisely the point of view expressed by ISIS (and The Camp of the Saints) and will play into their hands.
That, in turn, will help propel the U.S. into more endless wars on the periphery of our empire, ultimately sapping the nation’s vitality and leading to the fall of the U.S. in a manner delineated in FTR #944.
After reviewing Gorka’s anti-Semitism, his profound connections to three generations of Hungarian fascism dating to the pre-World War II period and confirmation of his allegiance to the Order of Vitezi Rend, we highlight the fact that Gorka is part of the Strategic Initiatives Group, something of a parallel NSC formed by Steve Bannon. It reminds us of Hitler’s creation of a parallel general staff, born of a mistrust of his own senior officers and a desire to have a trusted cadre to obey his orders.
” . . . . In the United States, Gorka, who was appointed deputy assistant to the president on January 20, is known as a television commentator, a professor and an “alt-right” writer who describes himself as a counterterrorism expert. A close associate of Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, Gorka is now part of Bannon’s key in-house White House think tank, the Strategic Initiatives Group. The newly formed group consists of figures close to Trump and is seen by some as a rival to the National Security Council in formulating policies for the president. . . .”
The conclusion of the program foreshadows discussion in our next broadcast, which will critically examine Bernie Sanders campaign and disturbing indications that his candidacy may have been generated by the Underground Reich as a vehicle for infiltrating and destabilizing the Democratic Party.
In FTR #941, we highlighted the push by Bernie Sanders and his prominent backer Tulsi Gabbard to have Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim to be head of the DNC. He was not elected head of the DNC, but is now deputy chair of the DNC, the position formerly held by Gabbard.
Ellison is networked with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Nation of Islam as well. ” . . . . Indeed, the June 21, 1998 article states that at that time – that is, three years after Farrakhan’s march – Ellison was a member of the Nation of Islam: ‘Ellison has been active in the community, but not within the established DFL party [the Democratic Party in Minnesota]. A member of the Nation of Islam, Ellison was the coordinator of the Minnesota participants in the Million Man March and the subsequent community group that formed.’ . . . .”
In a point of discussion that will be conducted at greater length in our next program, we conclude by noting that another of Keith Ellison’s supporters to head the DNC was Faisal Gill, a Grover Norquist protege whom we covered in FTR #467.
Program Highlights Include:
- Review of Gorka’s formation of a fascist party in Hungary in the last decade.
- Review of Gorka’s doctrinaire anti-Semitism.
- Review of Gorka’s networking with members of the Jobbik Party in Hungary.
- Review of Gorka’s supportive attitude toward the Arrow Cross Party, which allied with Hitler.
- Review of Jobbik’s affinity with Julius Evola.
- Review of Karl Rove’s and Grover Norquist’s seminal support for the creation of a Muslim Brotherhood branch of the GOP.
1a. At the SXSW event, Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford gave a speech about her work titled “Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism,” the presentation highlighted the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems. The take home message? By delegating powers to Bid Data-driven AIs, those AIs could become fascist’s dream: Incredible power over the lives of others with minimal accountability: ” . . . .‘This is a fascist’s dream,’ she said. ‘Power without accountability.’ . . . .”
Microsoft’s Kate Crawford tells SXSW that society must prepare for authoritarian movements to test the ‘power without accountability’ of AI
As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, people need to make sure it’s not used by authoritarian regimes to centralize power and target certain populations, Microsoft Research’s Kate Crawford warned on Sunday.
In her SXSW session, titled Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism, Crawford, who studies the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems, explained ways that automated systems and their encoded biases can be misused, particularly when they fall into the wrong hands.
“Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism,” she said.
All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said.
One of the key problems with artificial intelligence is that it is often invisibly coded with human biases. She described a controversial piece of research from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, where authors claimed to have developed a system that could predict criminality based on someone’s facial features. The machine was trained on Chinese government ID photos, analyzing the faces of criminals and non-criminals to identify predictive features. The researchers claimed it was free from bias.
“We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are described as free from bias if it’s been trained on human-generated data,” Crawford said. “Our biases are built into that training data.”
In the Chinese research it turned out that the faces of criminals were more unusual than those of law-abiding citizens. “People who had dissimilar faces were more likely to be seen as untrustworthy by police and judges. That’s encoding bias,” Crawford said. “This would be a terrifying system for an autocrat to get his hand on.”
Crawford then outlined the “nasty history” of people using facial features to “justify the unjustifiable”. The principles of phrenology, a pseudoscience that developed across Europe and the US in the 19th century, were used as part of the justification of both slavery and the Nazi persecution of Jews.
With AI this type of discrimination can be masked in a black box of algorithms, as appears to be the case with a company called Faceception, for instance, a firm that promises to profile people’s personalities based on their faces. In its ownmarketing material, the company suggests that Middle Eastern-looking people with beards are “terrorists”, while white looking women with trendy haircuts are “brand promoters”.
Another area where AI can be misused is in building registries, which can then be used to target certain population groups. Crawford noted historical cases of registry abuse, including IBM’s role in enabling Nazi Germany to track Jewish, Roma and other ethnic groups with the Hollerith Machine, and the Book of Life used in South Africa during apartheid. [We note in passing that Robert Mercer, who developed the core programs used by Cambridge Analytica did so while working for IBM. We discussed the profound relationship between IBM and the Third Reich in FTR #279–D.E.]
Donald Trump has floated the idea of creating a Muslim registry. “We already have that. Facebook has become the default Muslim registry of the world,” Crawford said, mentioning research from Cambridge University that showed it is possible to predict people’s religious beliefs based on what they “like” on the social network. Christians and Muslims were correctly classified in 82% of cases, and similar results were achieved for Democrats and Republicans (85%). That study was concluded in 2013, since when AI has made huge leaps.
Crawford was concerned about the potential use of AI in predictive policing systems, which already gather the kind of data necessary to train an AI system. Such systems are flawed, as shown by a Rand Corporation study of Chicago’s program. The predictive policing did not reduce crime, but did increase harassment of people in “hotspot” areas. Earlier this year the justice department concluded that Chicago’s police had for years regularly used “unlawful force”, and that black and Hispanic neighborhoods were most affected.
Another worry related to the manipulation of political beliefs or shifting voters, something Facebook and Cambridge Analytica claim they can already do. Crawford was skeptical about giving Cambridge Analytica credit for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, but thinks what the firm promises – using thousands of data points on people to work out how to manipulate their views – will be possible “in the next few years”.
“This is a fascist’s dream,” she said. “Power without accountability.”
Such black box systems are starting to creep into government. Palantir is building an intelligence system to assist Donald Trump in deporting immigrants.
“It’s the most powerful engine of mass deportation this country has ever seen,” she said. . . .
1b. One of the influences on Bannon is Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, who has actually opened a backchannel advisory connection to the White House.
Note that the Bannon influences all seem to agree that what is needed is “a shock to the system.” We may very well experience just that. ” . . . . . . . . Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. . . . ”
“What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read” by Eliana Johnson and Eli Stokols; Politico; 2/07/2017.
. . . . Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. And they tend to have a dark, apocalyptic tone that at times echoes Bannon’s own public remarks over the years—a sense that humanity is at a hinge point in history. His ascendant presence in the West Wing is giving once-obscure intellectuals unexpected influence over the highest echelons of government. . . .
. . . . Before he emerged on the political scene, an obscure Silicon Valley computer programmer with ties to Trump backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel was explaining his behavior. Curtis Yarvin, the self-proclaimed ‘neoreactionary’ who blogs under the name ‘Mencius Moldbug,’ attracted a following in 2008 when he published a wordy treatise asserting, among other things, that ‘nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth.’ When the organizer of a computer science conference canceled Yarvin’s appearance following an outcry over his blogging under his nom de web, Bannon took note: Breitbart News decried the act of censorship in an article about the programmer-blogger’s dismissal.
Moldbug’s dense, discursive musings on history—‘What’s so bad about the Nazis?’ he asks in one 2008 post that condemns the Holocaust but questions the moral superiority of the Allies—include a belief in the utility of spreading misinformation that now looks like a template for Trump’s approach to truth. ‘To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable [sic] demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army,’ he writes in a May 2008 post.‘It’s been a while since I posted anything really controversial and offensive here,’ he begins in a July 25, 2007, post explaining why he associates democracy with ‘war, tyranny, destruction and poverty.’
Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. . . .
1c. Fascist philosopher Julius Evola is another of the key influences on Bannon. Evola was an early occult fascist, with strong connections with Mussolini’s Italy. Eventually Evola established strong, lasting connections with the Nazi SS, both operationally and ideologically.
Evola has also influenced Alexander Dugin, a prominent Russian ideologue and politician.
He is another advocate of the “shock to the system”/“blow it up” approach to the status quo. ” . . . Changing the system, Evola argued, was ‘not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.’ . . . .”
Those trying to divine the roots of Stephen K. Bannon’s dark and at times apocalyptic worldview have repeatedly combed over a speech that Mr. Bannon, President Trump’s ideological guru, made in 2014 to a Vatican conference, where he expounded on Islam, populism and capitalism.
But for all the examination of those remarks, a passing reference by Mr. Bannon to an esoteric Italian philosopher has gone little noticed, except perhaps by scholars and followers of the deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated thinker, Julius Evola.
“The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant,” said Mark Sedgwick, a leading scholar of Traditionalists at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Evola, who died in 1974, wrote on everything from Eastern religions to the metaphysics of sex to alchemy. But he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.
Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.
They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.
More important for the current American administration, Evola also caught on in the United States with leaders of the alt-right movement, which Mr. Bannon nurtured as the head of Breitbart News and then helped harness for Mr. Trump.
“Julius Evola is one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century,” said Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who is a top figure in the alt-right movement, which has attracted white supremacists, racists and anti-immigrant elements.
In the days after the election, Mr. Spencer led a Washington alt-right conference in chants of “Hail Trump!” But he also invoked Evola’s idea of a prehistoric and pre-Christian spirituality — referring to the awakening of whites, whom he called the Children of the Sun.
Mr. Spencer said “it means a tremendous amount” that Mr. Bannon was aware of Evola and other Traditionalist thinkers.
“Even if he hasn’t fully imbibed them and been changed by them, he is at least open to them,” he said. “He at least recognizes that they are there. That is a stark difference to the American conservative movement that either was ignorant of them or attempted to suppress them.”
Mr. Bannon, who did not return a request for comment for this article, is an avid and wide-ranging reader. He has spoken enthusiastically about everything from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” to “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which sees history in cycles of cataclysmic and order-obliterating change. His awareness of and reference to Evola in itself only reflects that reading. But some on the alt-right consider Mr. Bannon a door through which Evola’s ideas of a hierarchical society run by a spiritually superior caste can enter in a period of crisis.
“Evolists view his ship as coming in,” said Prof. Richard Drake at the University of Montana, who wrote about Evola in his book “The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy.”
For some of them, it has been a long time coming.
“It’s the first time that an adviser to the American president knows Evola, or maybe has a Traditionalist formation,” said Gianfranco De Turris, an Evola biographer and apologist based in Rome who runs the Evola Foundation out of his apartment.
“If Bannon has these ideas, we have to see how he influences the politics of Trump,” he said.
A March article titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” in Breitbart, the website then run by Mr. Bannon, included Evola as one of the thinkers in whose writings the “origins of the alternative right” could be found.
The article was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur who is wildly popular with conservatives on college campuses. Mr. Trump recently defended Mr. Yiannopoulos as a symbol of free speech after demonstrators violently protested his planned speech at the University of California, Berkeley.
The article celebrated the youthful internet trolls who give the alt-right movement its energy and who, motivated by a common and questionable sense of humor, use anti-Semitic and racially charged memes “in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion.”
“It’s hard to imagine them reading Evola,” the article continued. “They may be inclined to sympathize to those causes, but mainly because it annoys the right people.”
Evola, who has more than annoyed people for nearly a century, seems to be having a moment.
“When I started working on Evola, you had to plow through Italian,” said Mr. Sedgwick, who keeps track of Traditionalist movements and thought on his blog, Traditionalists. “Now he’s available in English, German, Russian, Serbian, Greek, Hungarian. First I saw Evola boom, and then I realized the number of people interested in that sort of idea was booming.”
Born in 1898, Evola liked to call himself a baron and in later life sported a monocle in his left eye.
A brilliant student and talented artist, he came home after fighting in World War I and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions.
Evola’s early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants.”
Under the influence of René Guénon, a French metaphysicist and convert to Islam, Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values.
It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth.
Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.” . . . .
1d. It’s time for another peek into Steve Bannon’s psyche. Which unfortunately means we have to take another peek into far-right hate literature.
“. . . . The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. ‘The Fall of Constantinople,’ Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, ‘is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.’ . . . . ”
“The Camp of the Saints” tells a grotesque tale about a migrant invasion to destroy Western civilization.
Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelers, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history.
“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.
“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”
“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”
“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. … I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”
Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.
But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist.
“[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”
The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”
Upon the novel’s release in the United States in 1975, the influential book review magazine Kirkus Reviews pulled no punches: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”
Linda Chavez, a Republican commentator who has worked for GOP presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush but opposed Trump’s election, also reviewed the book back then. Forty years later, she hasn’t forgotten it.
“It is really shockingly racist,” Chavez told The Huffington Post, “and to have the counselor to the president see this as one of his touchstones, I think, says volumes about his attitude.”
The plot of The Camp of the Saints follows a poor Indian demagogue, named “the turd-eater” because he literally eats sh it, and the deformed, apparently psychic child who sits on his shoulders. Together, they lead an “armada” of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Dithering European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a liberal pope from Latin America, debate whether to let the ships land and accept the Indians or to do the right thing — in the book’s vision — by recognizing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.
The non-white people of Earth, meanwhile, wait silently for the Indians to reach shore. The landing will be the signal for them to rise up everywhere and overthrow white Western society.
The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle among themselves as the Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people literally overrun Western civilization. Chinese people pour into Russia; the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Raspail’s rogue heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed in the process.
Calgues, the obvious Raspail stand-in, is one of those taking up arms against the migrants and their culturally “cuckolded” white supporters. Just before killing a radical hippie, Calgues compares his own actions to past heroic, sometimes mythical defenses of European Christendom. He harkens back to famous battles that fit the clash-of-civilizations narrative — the defense of Rhodes against the Ottoman Empire, the fall of Constantinople to the same — and glorifies colonial wars of conquest and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Only white Europeans like Calgues are portrayed as truly human in The Camp of the Saints. The Indian armada brings “thousands of wretched creatures” whose very bodies arouse disgust: “Scraggy branches, brown and black … All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms.” Poor brown children are spoiled fruit “starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold.”
The ship’s inhabitants are also sexual deviants who turn the voyage into a grotesque orgy. “Everywhere, rivers of sperm,” Raspail writes. “Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.”
The white Christian world is on the brink of destruction, the novel suggests, because these black and brown people are more fertile and more numerous, while the West has lost that necessary belief in its own cultural and racial superiority. As he talks to the hippie he will soon kill, Calgues explains how the youth went so wrong: “That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains.”
The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. “The Fall of Constantinople,” Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, “is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.”
Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1972 and 1973, after a stay at his aunt’s house near Cannes on the southern coast of France. Looking out across the Mediterranean, he had an epiphany: “And what if they came?” he thought to himself. “This ‘they’ was not clearly defined at first,” he told the conservative publication Le Point in 2015. “Then I imagined that the Third World would rush into this blessed country that is France.”
Raspail’s novel has been published in the U.S. several times, each time with the backing of the anti-immigration movement.
The U.S. publishing house Scribner was the first to translate the book into English in 1975, but it failed to reach a wide audience amid withering reviews by critics. A rare favorable take appeared in National Review. “Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health,” then-Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart wrote in 1975. “Raspail is to genocide what [D.H. Lawrence] was to sex.” Hart added that “a great fuss” was being made over “Raspail’s supposed racism,” but that the “liberal rote anathema on ‘racism’ is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.”
The book received a second life in 1983 when Cordelia Scaife May, heiress to the Mellon fortune and sister to right-wing benefactor Richard Mellon Scaife, funded its republication and distribution. This time it gained a cult following among immigration opponents.
May’s money has also been instrumental in funding the efforts of John Tanton, the godfather of the anti-immigration movement in the U.S. Tanton, who began as an environmentalist and population control proponent, founded a host of groups focused on restricting immigration, including the Federation of American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA and U.S. English. May’s fortune has fueled these groups with tens of millions of dollars in contributions over the years.
Linda Chavez was recruited in 1987 to head U.S. English, which advocates for English to be designated the country’s official language. But then a series of disturbing stories painted Tanton’s motives in a racial light. Among other issues, Chavez said she learned that his funding came from the pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund and from May, who Chavez knew had helped publish The Camp of the Saints. Chavez recalled seeing Tanton’s staffers carrying the book around their offices. She quit the group.
Tanton, who insists his opposition to immigration is not connected to race at all, told The Washington Post in 2006 that his mind “became focused” on the issue after reading The Camp of the Saints. In 1995, his small publishing house, Social Contract Press, brought the book back into print for a third time in the U.S., again with funding from May. Historians Paul Kennedy and Matt Connelly tied the book to then-current concerns about global demographic trends in a cover story for The Atlantic.
“Over the years the American public has absorbed a great number of books, articles, poems and films which exalt the immigrant experience,” Tanton wrote in 1994. “It is easy for the feelings evoked by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to obscure the fact that we are currently receiving too many immigrants (and receiving them too fast) for the health of our environment and of our common culture. Raspail evokes different feelings and that may help to pave the way for policy changes.”
In 2001, the book was republished one more time, again by Tanton, and again gained a cult following among opponents of immigration like the border-patrolling Minutemen and eventually the online “alt-right.”
Bannon’s alt-right-loving Breitbart has run multiple articles over the past three years referencing the novel. When Pope Francis told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. should open its arms to refugees in September 2015, Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, now an aide to Bannon in the White House, compared his admonition to Raspail’s liberal Latin American pontiff. And the novel’s thesis that migration is invasion in disguise is often reflected in Bannon’s public comments.
The refugee crisis “didn’t just happen by happenstance,” Bannon said in an April 2016 radio interview with Sebastian Gorka, who now works for the National Security Council. “These are not war refugees. It’s something much more insidious going on.”
Bannon has also echoed the novel’s theory that secular liberals who favor immigration and diversity weaken the West.
…
Now Bannon sits at the right hand of the U.S. president, working to beat back what Bannon calls “this Muslim invasion.” And Trump is all in on the project. During the campaign, he called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country. His Jan. 28 executive order, since blocked in the courts, turned this campaign idea into executive policy.
Trump has continued to defend the executive order as a life-or-death national security issue. “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America,” he said in his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
Five days earlier, Trump had called his immigration enforcement efforts a “military operation.”
Although Department of Homeland Security officials walked back that statement, the president’s conflation of immigration with warfare did not go unnoticed.
“They see this as a war,” Chavez said.
Chavez, who supports some of Trump’s economic policy proposals, called the direction the White House is taking on immigration and race “extremely dangerous.” She said Trump’s immigration moves are “a kind of purging of America of anything but our Northern European roots.” Bannon, she added, “wants to make America white again.”
1e. In FTR #947, we highlighted Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart alumnus and Hungarian fascist. Gorka is now the Trump administration’s point man working against terrorism. His view (and Bannon’s) that we are engaged in an historic clash of civilizations. That is precisely the point of view expressed by ISIS (and The Camp of the Saints) and will play into their hands.
That, in turn, will help propel the U.S. into more endless wars on the periphery of our empire, ultimately sapping the nation’s vitality and leading to the fall of the U.S. in a manner delineated in FTR #944.
The new point man for the Trump administration’s counterjihadist team is Sebastian Gorka, an itinerant instructor in the doctrine of irregular warfare and former national security editor at Breitbart. Stephen K. Bannon and Stephen Miller, the chief commissars of the Trump White House, have framed Islam as an enemy ideology and predicted a historic clash of civilizations.
Mr. Gorka, who has been appointed deputy assistant to the president, is the expert they have empowered to translate their prediction into national strategy. Mr. Gorka was born and raised in Britain, the son of Hungarian émigrés. As a political consultant in post Communist Hungary, he acquired a doctorate and involved himself with ultranationalist politics. He later moved to the United States and became a citizen five years ago, while building a career moderating military seminars and establishing a reputation as an ill-informed Islamophobe. (He has responded to such claims by stating that he has read the Quran in translation.) . . .
2a. Supplementing information about Sebastian Gorka presented in FTR #948, we note that he is, indeed a member of the Order of Vitezi Rend, a reconstituted Hungarian fascist order.
“EXCLUSIVE: Nazi-Allied Group Claims Top Aide Sebastian Gorka as Member” by Lily Bayer and Larry Cohler-Esses; Forward; 3/16/2017.
Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s top counter-terrorism adviser, is a formal member of a Hungarian far-right group that is listed by the U.S. State Department as having been “under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany” during World War II, leaders of the organization have told the Forward.
The elite order, known as the Vitézi Rend, was established as a loyalist group by Admiral Miklos Horthy, who ruled Hungary as a staunch nationalist from 1920 to October 1944. A self-confessed anti-Semite, Horthy imposed restrictive Jewish laws prior to World War II and collaborated with Hitler during the conflict. His cooperation with the Nazi regime included the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews into Nazi hands.
Gorka’s membership in the organization — if these Vitézi Rend leaders are correct, and if Gorka did not disclose this when he entered the United States as an immigrant — could have implications for his immigration status. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual specifies that members of the Vitézi Rend “are presumed to be inadmissible” to the country under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Gorka — who Vitézi Rend leaders say took a lifelong oath of loyalty to their group — did not respond to multiple emails sent to his work and personal accounts, asking whether he is a member of the Vitézi Rend and, if so, whether he disclosed this on his immigration application and on his application to be naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2012. The White House also did not respond to a request for comment.
But Bruce Einhorn, a retired immigration judge who now teaches nationality law at Pepperdine University, said of this, “His silence speaks volumes.”
The group to which Gorka reportedly belongs is a reconstitution of the original group on the State Department list, which was banned in Hungary until the fall of Communism in 1989. There are now two organizations in Hungary that claim to be the heirs of the original Vitézi Rend, with Gorka, according to fellow members, belonging to the so-called “Historical Vitézi Rend.” Though it is not known to engage in violence, the Historical Vitézi Rend upholds all the nationalist and oftentimes racial principles of the original group as established by Horthy. . . .
2b. It should surprise no one to learn that Sebastian Gorka has a long and extensive relationship with the Hungarian far-right, including founding a Hungarian political party with two prominent members of Jobbik. In FTR #947, we noted that a member of Jobbik had written a glowing preface to a volume authored by fascist ideologue Julius Evola, one of the philosophical ifluences on Stephen Bannon.
We note that Gorka is a member of what appears to be a parallel NSC, The Strategic Initiatives Group. They may well be in a position to implement the shock to the system hoped for by Bannon, Evola, Yarvin et al.
When photographs recently emerged showing Sebastian Gorka, President Donald Trump’s high-profile deputy assistant, wearing a medal associated with the Nazi collaborationist regime that ruled Hungary during World War II, the controversial security strategist was unapologetic.
“I’m a proud American now and I wear that medal now and again,” Gorka told Breitbart News. Gorka, 46, who was born in Britain to Hungarian parents and is now an American citizen, asked rhetorically, “Why? To remind myself of where I came from, what my parents suffered under both the Nazis and the Communists, and to help me in my work today.”
But an investigation by the Forward into Gorka’s activities from 2002 to 2007, while he was active in Hungarian politics and journalism, found that he had close ties then to Hungarian far-right circles, and has in the past chosen to work with openly racist and anti-Semitic groups and public figures.
Gorka’s involvement with the far right includes co-founding a political party with former prominent members of Jobbik, a political party with a well-known history of anti-Semitism; repeatedly publishing articles in a newspaper known for its anti-Semitic and racist content; and attending events with some of Hungary’s most notorious extreme-right figures.
When Gorka was asked — in an email exchange with the Forward — about the anti-Semitic records of some of the groups and individuals he has worked with, he instead pivoted to talk about his family’s history.
“My parents, as children, lived through the nightmare of WWII and the horrors of the Nyilas puppet fascist regime,” he said, referring to the Arrow Cross regime that took over Hungary near the very end of World War II and murdered thousands of Jews.
In the United States, Gorka, who was appointed deputy assistant to the president on January 20, is known as a television commentator, a professor and an “alt-right” writer who describes himself as a counterterrorism expert. A close associate of Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, Gorka is now part of Bannon’s key in-house White House think tank, the Strategic Initiatives Group. The newly formed group consists of figures close to Trump and is seen by some as a rival to the National Security Council in formulating policies for the president.
Gorka, who views Islam as a religion with an inherent predilection for militancy, has strong supporters among some right-leaning think tanks in Washington. “Dr. Gorka is one of the most knowledgeable, well-read and studied experts on national security that I’ve ever met,” Joseph Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society, told the Forward. Humire has known Gorka for nearly a decade, and considers him “top-notch.”
Born in London to parents who fled Hungary’s post-World War II Communist regime, Gorka has had a career that’s marked by frequent job changes and shifting national allegiances. The U.S. government is the third sovereign state to hire him in a national security role. As a young man, he was a member of the United Kingdom’s Territorial Army reserves, where he served in the Intelligence Corps. Then, following the fall of Communism in Hungary, he was employed in 1992 by the country’s Ministry of Defense. He worked there for five years, apparently on issues related to Hungary’s accession to NATO.
Gorka’s marriage in 1996 to an American, Katharine Cornell, an heir to Pennsylvania-based Cornell Iron Works, helped him become a U.S. citizen in 2012.
A Web of Deep Ties to Hungary’s Far Right
It was during his time in Hungary that Gorka developed ties to the country’s anti-Semitic and ultranationalist far right.
During large-scale anti-government demonstrations in Hungary in 2006, Gorka took on an active role, becoming closely involved with a protest group called the Hungarian National Committee (Magyar Nemzeti Bizottság). Gorka took on the roles of translator, press coordinator and adviser for the group.
Among the four Committee members named as the group’s political representatives was László Toroczkai, then head of the 64 Counties Youth Movement. Toroczkai founded that group in 2001 to advocate for the return of parts of modern-day Serbia, Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine to form a Greater Hungary, restoring the country’s pre-World War I borders.
In 2004, two years before the Movement’s involvement in the 2006 protests, Hungarian authorities opened an investigation into the Movement’s newspaper, Magyar Jelen, when an article referred to Jews as “Galician upstarts” and went on to argue: “We should get them out. In fact, we need to take back our country from them, take back our stolen fortunes. After all, these upstarts are sucking on our blood, getting rich off our blood.” At the time of the article’s publication, Toroczkai was both an editor at the paper and the Movement’s official leader.
Gorka co-founded his political party with three other politicians. Two of his co-founders, Tamás Molnár and Attila Bégány, were former members of Jobbik. Molnár, a senior Jobbik politician, served as the party’s vice president until shortly before joining Gorka’s new initiative, and was also a member of the Hungarian National Committee during the 2006 protests, issuing statements together with extremist militant figures such as Toroczkai.
Toroczkai currently serves as vice president of Jobbik and is the mayor of a village near the border Hungary shares with Serbia. Last year, he gained notoriety in the West for declaring a goal of banning Muslims and gays from his town.In January 2007, inspired by the 2006 protests and his experience with the Hungarian National Committee, Gorka announced plans to form a new political party, to be known as the New Democratic Coalition. Gorka had previously served as an adviser to Viktor Orbán, now Hungary’s right-wing nationalist prime minister. But following Orbán’s failed attempts to bring down Hungary’s then-Socialist government, Gorka grew disenchanted with Orbán’s Fidesz party.
In his email exchange with the Forward for this article, Gorka explained: “The Coalition was established in direct response to the unhealthy patterns visible at the time in Hungarian conservative politics. It became apparent to me that the effect of decades of Communist dictatorship had taken a deeper toll on civil society than was expected.”
Gorka co-founded his political party with three other politicians. Two of his co-founders, Tamás Molnár and Attila Bégány, were former members of Jobbik. Molnár, a senior Jobbik politician, served as the party’s vice president until shortly before joining Gorka’s new initiative, and was also a member of the Hungarian National Committee during the 2006 protests, issuing statements together with extremist militant figures such as Toroczkai.
Jobbik has a long history of anti-Semitism. In 2006, when Gorka’s political allies were still members of Jobbik, the party’s official online blog included articles such as “The Roots of Jewish Terrorism” and “Where Were the Jews in 1956?”, a reference to the country’s revolution against Soviet rule. In one speech in 2010, Jobbik leader Gabor Vona said that “under communism we licked Moscow’s boots, now we lick Brussels’ and Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s.”
In founding the New Democratic Coalition, Gorka and the former Jobbik politicians aimed to represent “conservative values, decidedly standing up to corruption and bringing Christianity into the Constitution,” according to the party’s original policy program. At the time, Hungary’s constitution was secular.
The party’s founders did not see themselves as far right or anti-Semitic.
“I knew Gorka as a strongly Atlanticist, conservative person,” Molnár, the former Jobbik vice president and co-founder of Gorka’s party, told the Forward in a phone conversation. He added that he could not imagine Gorka having anti-Semitic views.
Molnár first met Gorka at a book launch event for Gorka’s father, Pál Gorka, in 2002. The younger Gorka and Molnár became friends, bonding over their shared interest in the history of Hungary’s 1956 revolution and the fact that both had parents who were jailed under the country’s Communist regime.
Molnár became involved with Jobbik in 2003, in the far-right party’s early days, and quit in 2006. In his words, “Jobbik went in a militant direction that I did not like.”
Gorka rejects the notion that he knew any of his political allies had connections to the far right.
“I only knew Molnár as an artist and Bégány as a former conservative local politician (MDF if I recall),” Gorka wrote in response to a question regarding the Jobbik affiliations of his former party co-founders. “What they did after I left Hungary is not something I followed.” (MDF is an acronym for the Hungarian Democratic Forum, a now-defunct center-right party.)
In fact, both Molnár and Bégány were members of Jobbik before, and not after, they founded the new party with Gorka. Molnár was Jobbik’s high-profile vice president until September 2006, before he, Gorka and Bégány launched the New Democratic Coalition in early 2007.
Gorka appeared at a press conference with Molnár on September 21, 2006 — one day after Molnár resigned his position as Jobbik’s vice president. Gorka was also photographed on September 23, 2006, wearing a badge with the Hungarian National Committee’s logo as he was standing next to Molnár at a podium while Molnár briefed the press on the Committee’s activities. At the time Gorka was making these public appearances with the Hungarian National Committee’s leadership, extreme-right leader Toroczkai was already a top member of the Committee.
Bégány, meanwhile, had indeed been a member of MDF for a time, but in 2005 he joined Jobbik and served formally as a member of Budapest’s District 5 Council representing the far-right party. Bégány’s formal party biography, posted on the Jobbik website in 2006, said it is his “belief that without belonging to the Hungarian nation or to God it is possible to live, but not worth it.” Like Molnár, Bégány left Jobbik only a few months before starting the new party with Gorka.
Molnár, Bégány and the Hungarian National Committee were not Gorka’s only connection to far-right circles. Between 2006 and 2007, Gorka wrote a series of articles in Magyar Demokrata, a newspaper known for publishing the writings of prominent anti-Semitic and racist Hungarian public figures.
The newspaper’s editor-in-chief, András Bencsik, is notorious in Hungary for his own long-standing anti-Semitic views. In 1995, the Hungarian Jewish publication Szombat criticized Bencsik for writing that “the solid capital, which the Jews got after Auschwitz, has run out.” That same year, Szombat noted, Bencsik wrote in Magyar Demokrata, “In Hungary the chief conflict is between national and cosmopolitan aspirations.” In Hungarian society, “cosmopolitan” is generally a code word for Jews.
In December 2004, the U.S. State Department reported bluntly to Congress that, “the weekly newspaper Magyar Demokrata published anti-Semitic articles and featured articles by authors who have denied the Holocaust.”
In the summer of 2007, Bencsik became one of the founders of the Hungarian Guard, a now-banned paramilitary organization known for assaulting and intimidating members of Hungary’s Roma community. The perpetrators in a spate of racially motivated murders of Roma in 2008 and 2009 were found to have connections to the Guard.
Gorka’s articles for Magyar Demokrata focused not only on decrying Hungary’s then-Socialist government, but also on highlighting the perceived injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, the post-World War I agreement that led to the loss of two-thirds of prewar Hungary’s territory.
“We fought on the wrong side of a war for which we were not responsible, and were punished to an extent that was likely even more unjust — with the exception of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire — than any other punishment in the modern age,” Gorka wrote in a 2006 article in Magyar Demokrata.
Asked about his choice of journalistic outlets, Gorka wrote, “I am […] unfamiliar with Bencsik. I believe it was one of his colleagues who asked me if I wanted to write some OpEds.” Gorka told the Forward that his writing at the time shows “how everything I did was in the interests of a more transparent and healthy democracy in Hungary. This included a rejection of all revanchist tendencies and xenophobic cliques.”
Gorka’s claim to be unfamiliar with Bencsik must be weighed against his deep immersion in Hungarian politics and Benscik’s status as a major figure in Hungary’s right-wing political scene. At the time, Gorka gave public interviews as an “expert” on the Hungarian Guard, which Bencsik helped to found. In one 2007 interview, Gorka clarified his own view of the Guard, saying, “It’s not worth talking about banning” the group. Despite its extreme rhetoric against minorities, Gorka said, “The government and media are inflating this question.”
An Affinity for Nationalist Symbols
It was in mid-February that Gorka’s affinity for Hungarian nationalist and far-right ideas first came to the American public’s attention. Eli Clifton of the news website Lobelog noticed from a photograph that the new deputy assistant to the president had appeared at an inauguration ball in January wearing a Hungarian medal known as Vitézi Rend. The medal signifies a knightly order of merit founded in 1920 by Admiral Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s longtime anti-Semitic ruler and Hitler’s ally during World War II. Notwithstanding this alliance, and the group’s designation as Nazi-collaborators by the U.S. State Department, many within Hungary’s right revere Horthy for his staunch nationalism during the overall course of his rule from 1920 to 1944.
Breitbart, the “alt-right” publication, where Gorka himself served as national security editor prior to joining the White House staff, defended his wardrobe choice, writing on February 14 that, “as any of his Breitbart News colleagues could testify, Gorka is not only pro-Israel but ‘pro-Jewish,’ and defends both against the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.”
“In 1979 my father was awarded a declaration for his resistance to a dictatorship, and although he passed away 14 years ago, I wear that medal in remembrance of what my family went through and what it represents today, to me, as an American,” Gorka told Breibart on February 15, as the controversy regarding his choice to wear a Horthy-era medal intensified.
But the medal was not the first time Gorka expressed appreciation for symbols that many associate with Hungary’s World War II-era Nazi sympathizers. In 2006, Gorka defended the use of the Arpad flag, which Hungary’s murderous Arrow Cross Party used as their symbol. The Hungarian Arrow Cross Party killed thousands of Jews during World War II, shooting many of them alongside the Danube River and throwing them into the water. Gorka told the news agency JTA at the time that “if you say eight centuries of history can be eradicated by 18 months of fascist distortion of symbols, you’re losing historic perspective.”
Gorka’s Unlikely Transformation
After the failure of his new party in 2007, Gorka moved to the United States and over the past 10 years has worked for the Department of Justice, Marine Corps University, National Defense University, and Joint Special Operations University.
Former colleagues in the States questioned the quality of Gorka’s work on Islam, and said that he shied away from publishing in peer-reviewed journals, according to the Washington Post.
Retired Lt. Col. Mike Lewis told the Post that when Gorka was lecturing to members of the armed forces, he “made a difficult and complex situation simple and confirmed the officers’ prejudices and assumptions.”
But Humire, of the Center for a Secure Free Society, defended Gorka’s worldview. “Since I’ve known him he has been emphasizing a point that is not properly understood by most conventional counterterrorism experts,” said Humire, “that the modern battlefield is fought with words, images, and ideas, not just bombs and bullets. If you study asymmetric war, this emphasizes the mental battle of attrition and the moral battle of legitimacy over the physical battle for the terrain. Dr. Gorka understands this at a very high level and has taught this to our war fighters for several years,” said Humire.
…
3a. In FTR #941, we highlighted the push by Bernie Sanders and his prominent backer Tulsi Gabbard to have Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim to be head of the DNC. He was not elected head of the DNC, but is now deputy chair of the DNC, the position formerly held by Gabbard.
Ellison is networked with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Nation of Islam as well.
We have covered Farrakhan’s highly suspicious behavior in connection with the murder of Malcom X, whose mantle the then “Louis X” assumed, in FTR #21.
We have also covered Farrakhan’s outrageous defense of contemporary enslavement of Africans by Arabs.
. . . . If you are like most people, you probably don’t know much about Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, but after you read what I have posted below, you will see that describing it as “radical black Muslims” trivializes the horror of an apparatus of fascists – photographic negative images of David Duke and company – thus supporting the impression, which David Corn and others wish to convey, that the Ellison controversy is nothing more than the politically motivated harassment of a progressive politician, exploiting some minor indiscretions, long, long ago. . . .
. . . . As Pioneer Press, the second highest circulation newspaper in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, reported in a June 21, 1998 article on Ellison’s campaign for the office of State representative, Ellison had been the Minnesota ‘coordinator’ [7] of the so-called Million Man March. Given that Farrakhan’s march was a Nation of Islam project, it follows that the Minnesota coordinator was either a member of the Nation of Islam or so close to the NOI as to be indistinguishable from a member. Indeed, the June 21, 1998 article states that at that time – that is, three years after Farrakhan’s march – Ellison was a member of the Nation of Islam:“Ellison has been active in the community, but not within the established DFL party [the Democratic Party in Minnesota]. A member of the Nation of Islam, Ellison was the coordinator of the Minnesota participants in the Million Man March and the subsequent community group that formed.” [See footnote 7]
In the next article in this series, I will present hard evidence that Ellison was already a member in 1995, when he was organizing for Farrakhan’s march.
(During the current debate over Ellison’s Nation of Islam ties, nobody else has mentioned the June 21, 1998 Pioneer Press article, let alone posted it on the Internet. You can read it in Appendix I, where we have copied it for Fair Use – very fair, since it contains information vital for assessing a key politician. Let’s get this information out to as many people as possible!) . . . .
3b. In a point of discussion that will be conducted at greater length in our next program, we note that another of Keith Ellison’s supporters to head the DNC was Faisal Gill, a Grover Norquist protege whom we covered in FTR #467.
“To have a Muslim and immigrant to be the state party chair sends a really strong message to Trump and his type of politics that this is not where the country is at,” he told NBC News.
The White House released a new executive order Monday restricting travel from six Muslim-majority countries after a federal court halted an earlier version. Trump says the move is necessary for security, but Gill and other critics say it’s merely an attempt to legally discriminate against Muslims.
Gill is an outsider in ultra-white, ultra-liberal Vermont in more ways than one. In a state that is nearly 95 percent white, a Pakistani-born former Republican from Virginia stands out.
“Us and Wyoming keep going back and forth for least diverse,” Gill quipped.
After emigrating to the U.S. and going to law school, Gill served five years in the Navy’s JAG corps before entering Republican politics in Virginia. That led to a post in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. . . .
Uncle Sam and The Swastika
True or not, about Keith Ellison’s ties to the people you write about him being tied to, what is on the public record is on the public record, and it does not manner how strong or weak these ties are. If all Keith Ellison ever did was to help CAIR with a food drive for poor Muslim children, he would be damaged goods, as the Republicans use that fact to tar him to the degree that it would not be possible to get any work done even if he wanted to. And the left talks about people voting for Trump being stupid? Well, I think this pushing for Keith Ellison by the left shows them to be just as stupid.
The following is a mainstream media article (CNN) about Congressman Keith Ellison’s questionable association with Nation of Islam.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/politics/kfile-keith-ellison-nation-of-islam/
Rep. Keith Ellison faces renewed scrutiny over past ties to Nation of Islam, defense of anti-Semitic figures
(CNN)Rep. Keith Ellison’s past ties to the Nation of Islam and his defense of its anti-Semitic leader, Louis Farrakhan, are resurfacing as he campaigns to lead the Democratic National Committee.
Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, publicly renounced his association with the Nation of Islam in 2006 after it became an issue during his run for Congress, when local Republican bloggers began publishing his old law school columns and photos connecting him to the organization.
“I have long since distanced myself from and rejected the Nation of Islam due to its propagation of bigoted and anti-Semitic ideas and statements, as well as other issues,” Ellison wrote at the time.
But several outlets have resurfaced Ellison’s past writings as he runs for DNC chair, raising new concerns about his own views and what they would mean for the Democratic Party if he were to be its leader. A CNN KFile review of Ellison’s past writings and public statements during the late 1980s through the 1990s reveal his decade-long involvement in the Nation of Islam and his repeated defense of Farrakhan and other radical black leaders against accusations of anti-Semitism in columns and statements to the press. None of the records reviewed found examples of Ellison making any anti-Semitic comments himself.
Pelosi fight exposes Democratic fault lines, puts power to check Trump in question
In one scathing column from 1990 unearthed by CNN’s KFile, Ellison accused the university’s president of chilling the free expression of black students by openly criticizing a controversial speaker invited to speak on campus by the Africana Student Cultural Center. That speaker, Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael), had publicly claimed that Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis in World War II and has been quoted as saying “Zionism must be destroyed.”
University of Minnesota President Nils Hasselmo said he “personally found the statements in Ture’s speech concerning alleged Zionist collaboration with the Nazis deeply offensive.” Ellison, writing under the name “Keith E. Hakim” for the Minnesota Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Minnesota where Ellison attended law school, argued that Hasselmo “denounced Ture’s comment without offering any factual refutation of it,” and defended Ture’s right to speak on campus and to question Zionism.
Ellison wrote, “Concerning Zionism and Ture’s speech, the ASCC’s position is simply this: Whether one supports or opposes the establishment of Israel in Palestine and Israel’s present policies, Zionism, the ideological undergirding of Israel, is a debatable political philosophy. Anyone, including black people, has the right to hear and voice alternative views on the subject — notwithstanding our nominal citizenship.”
He added, “Alternatively, the University’s position appears to be this: Political Zionism is off-limits no matter what dubious circumstances Israel was founded under; no matter what the Zionists do to the Palestinians; and no matter what wicked regimes Israel allies itself with — like South Africa. This position is untenable.”
According to an account by the Anti-Defamation League, Ture said in his speech on UM’s campus that “the Zionists joined with the Nazis in murdering Jews, so they would flee to Palestine.”
Ellison wrote other columns in law school defending Farrakhan against charges of racism and arguing for reparations for slavery.
A spokesperson for Ellison told CNN that Ellison “rejects all forms of anti-Semitism” and said “the right wing has been pushing these stories for years to drive a wedge between Congressman Ellison and the Jewish community.” Since announcing his candidacy for the DNC chair, Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and J‑Street have come to Ellison’s defense on his past associations and writings.
Ellison’s involvement with the Nation of Islam would continue after he graduated from law school in 1990. Ellison helped organized the Minnesota delegation to the 1995 Million Man March, which was led by Farrakhan. The Star Tribune reported at the time that Ellison spoke ahead of the controversial Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who was kicked out of the Nation of Islam by Farrakhan two years earlier for making blatantly anti-Semitic comments, at the University of Minnesota in efforts to raise funds for the Million Man March. According to The Star Tribune report, Muhammed’s speech at the university was racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic.
Ellison’s spokesperson noted to CNN that “President Obama, Stevie Wonder, Maya Angelou, and many others also attended the March” and said he “had no additional involvement with March organizer Louis Farrakhan or his organizations, has long since denounced him, and rejects all forms of anti-Semitism.”
Ellison continued to defend Farrakhan against accusations of anti-Semitism throughout the 1990s.
“Minister Farrakhan is a role model for black youth,” wrote Ellison in an Insight News op-ed in 1995. “He is not an anti-Semite.”
When the then-executive director of The Minneapolis Initiative Against Racism, Joanne Jackson, came under fire in 1997 for allegedly saying during a forum that Jews are the most racist white people she knows and that she did not think Farrakhan was a racist, Ellison, who identified by his religious name of Keith Ellison-Muhammad, defended her, saying, “She is correct about Minister Farrakhan. He is not a racist. He is also not an anti-Semite.” (Ellison would later address this incident in 2006, writing in a letter to a local Jewish group, “While some at that meeting justified her comments, I spoke out in favor of increased dialogue between the Jewish and African-American communities. I believe that Ms. Jackson’s alleged remarks were clearly bigoted, discriminatory story, inappropriate, and even ridiculous.”)
In 1998, Ellison launched a bid for Minnesota state representative, a race he lost after failing to gain the endorsement of the Democratic Party in the state, known as the DFL. Both the Star-Tribune and Insight News identified Ellison, who at time was still going by Keith Ellison-Muhammed, as deeply involved in the Nation of Islam at the time. During that race, Ellison rebuffed any insinuation he was, himself, anti-Semitic.
“I am opposed to the subjugation of any class or person on account of their religion, national origin, sex, race, or gender,” Ellison said. “I reject anti-Jewish attitude from whatever source.”
At the time, Ellison hosted a local radio show “Black Power Perspectives.” The show, which aired on KMOJ radio, was hosted by Ellison for years under the name “Keith Muhammad.”
That same year, Ellison was pictured with copies of The Final Call, the official newspaper of the Nation of Islam. The picture, which was uncovered by the Minnesota Democrat Exposed blog in 2006, was taken at a rally against police brutality.
“The source of this photo is an old right-wing attack blog whose author now regrets his writings,” an Ellison spokesman told CNN’s KFile. “He readily admits he made ‘mountains out of molehills’ and speaks favorably about Congressman Ellison’s work.”
Michael Brodkorb, the blogger who uncovered the photo told CNN: “Ellison will face new scrutiny about his past associations, but he will have the advantage of balancing this discussion with his extensive work in Congress since being elected a decade ago.”
WASHINGTON — APRIL 17: U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D‑MN) speaks to the Consultation on Conscience held by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism at the Cannon House Office Building April 17, 2007 on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images)
As recent as 2000, Ellison publicly defended violent, fringe elements of the far-left. He appeared at a fundraiser that year for domestic terrorist Sara Jane Olson, a member of the self-styled revolutionary group the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), which is best known for kidnapping heiress Patricia Hearst. Olson was apprehended in 1999 in relation to the 1975 attempted bombings of two police cars and the slaying of Myrna Opsah during a bank robbery.
At the event, Ellison told the Pioneer Press he believed the prosecution of Olson was political. In his speech, Ellison noted he didn’t know much about the SLA and he thought Olson was being prosecuted in the court of public opinion because of some of her political beliefs.
“I’m a supporter of anybody who’s subject to political prosecution based on their being in a vilified group,” he told the Pioneer Press. “Your chances of getting a fair trial are low. I’ve been waiting for the evidence against her. I don’t think they would not cheat to prosecute this woman.”
Ellison also spoke favorably of convicted cop killer Assata Shakur and expressed his opposition to any attempt to extradite her to the United States from Cuba, where she had fled after escaping prison.
“I am praying that Castro does not get to the point where he has to really barter with these guys over here because they’re going to get Assata Shakur, they’re going to get a whole lot of other people,” Ellison said at the event, which also included a silent auction and speech by former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn. “I hope the Cuban people can stick to it, because the freedom of some good decent people depends on it.”
Other prominent black leaders also opposed Shakur’s extradition at the time, including Rep. Maxine Waters of California when she chaired the Congressional Black Caucus.
During his successful 2006 run for Congress, Ellison distanced himself from his past support for the Nation of Islam and Farrakhan when the local Republican blogs, Minnesota Democrats Exposed and Powerline Blog, uncovered many of Ellison’s past writings.
Ellison publicly renounced the Nation of Islam in a 2006 letter to Jewish groups.
In the letter, Ellison wrote he had seen the Nation of Islam and the Million Man March as positive effort to promote responsibility and economic development in the black community and that he had failed to scrutinize the views of Farrakhan and Khalid Abdul Muhammad and wrongly dismissed concerns they were anti-Semitic.
During the race, Ellison told the Washington Post that his political beliefs had moderated over time. While he said he never said anything homophobic or anti-Semitic, he acknowledged he had been slow to judge those who did.
Ellison’s work in the Minnesota legislature, like helping with an ethics complaint against a Minnesota representative who denied that Nazis persecuted gays during the Holocaust, was able to garner him the support of some Jewish groups during his 2006 run for Congress. Those groups stood by him when his past comments on Farrakhan surfaced.
“When several local right wing blogs began attacking him, those in the Jewish community who know and work with Keith rallied behind him,” said Rep. Frank Hornstein, a longtime member of Minnesota’s House of Representatives. The American Jewish World endorsed Ellison saying they were” convinced that Ellison has had a real change of heart and mind.”
Speaking to a synagogue in 2006, Ellison said he was confronting a past he wasn’t proud of.
“I wasn’t proud of my work with the Nation of Islam,” Ellison said, “but I was hoping it wouldn’t come up. I have come face to face with my past.”
After initial publication of this story, a spokesperson for Ellison pointed CNN’s KFile to a post by the congressman on Medium published Wednesday night, where he wrote, “In my effort to pursue justice for the African-American community, I neglected to scrutinize the words of those like Khalid Muhammed and Farrakhan who mixed a message of African American empowerment with scapegoating of other communities. These men organize by sowing hatred and division, including, anti-Semitism, homophobia and a chauvinistic model of manhood. I disavowed them long ago, condemned their views, and apologized.”
Minnesota Daily staff contributed research to this report.
Here’s the latest example of a conservative mega-donor turning out to be a secret Nazi: Since at least 2002, Robert Rotella — the Bellevue, Washington–based founder of Rotella Capital Management — has donated $5.8 million to to a number of libertarian and conservative organizations like the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, and Turning Point USA. And, of course, we’re now learning that the Robert P. Rotella Foundation (RPRF) has been giving not insignificant donations to a number of white nationalist organizations since 2014. For example, since 2014, RPRF has donated $105,000 to white nationalist 0organizations like Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute (NPI). It donated $2,500 to NPI in 2014, $5,000 in 2015, and another $5,000 in 2016. The Charles Martel Society, which published the ‘race science’-focused Occidental Quartly recieved $40,000 from 2013–2017. Similarly, the New Century Foundation, publisher of the digital outlet American Renaissance, received $35,000 during that same period. And John Tanton’s Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) received $17,500 since 2015.
As the article notes, while these individual donations, like $5,000 to NPI in a year, might not seem significant, they are actually pretty significant in the world of white nationalist organizations which are often operated on relatively small budgets. As long as someone like Spencer can find around 20 wealthy figures like Rotella to donate $5,000 a year that more or less covers the cost of his annual salary which is most of the cost of running NPI. Rotella is only the second donor to NPI ever publicly revealed so this is a relatively rare look at the network of obscure figures behind the financing of the Alt Right.
Interestingly, in addition to that $105,000 for overtly far right groups, the RPRF also donates to a number of organizations involved with topics of like UFOs, remote viewing, and psychic phenomena. This includes $35,000 to the ExoPolitics institute and $25,000 to the Farsight Institute. As we’ll see in the second article below, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, which appears to be based on Edgar Cayce’s teachings, is also a recipient. Given that the far right has long as an interest in these topics it’s not particularly surprising that groups of this nature were also being promoted by RPRF but it’s notable in terms of giving us an idea of the who is funding these movements.
So while much of the financing of the Alt Right and white nationalist groups in the US remains hidden, now we at least know about the Robert P. Rotella Foundation. A foundation that has given millions to mainstream conservative groups. When asked about these donations to overt Nazi organizations like NPI, the RPRF claims it didn’t realize the political nature of these organizations and that the donations were a mistake. The organization also claims its going to shutdown soon because the family lacked “the manpower to do it correctly”:
“Of the $5.8 million the foundation has donated to various causes since 2002, roughly $105,000 has gone to organizations like the National Policy Institute, or NPI, which is led by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. A comprehensive review of the foundation’s available 990 reports indicates that its financial support for white nationalism began in 2014 and continued through 2018. Though $105,000 is not an exceptionally large sum of money, white nationalist organizations are small, and it doesn’t take much money to keep them afloat. “Annual recurring donations are kind of where it’s at for these guys because they all have financial limits, imposed by federal law, on how large the donations can be,” explained David Neiwert, the author of Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump.”
$105,000 for the far right from 2014–2018. That breaks down to $12,500 for the overt neo-Nazi National Policy Institute. $40,000 for the Charles Martel Society. $17,5000 for John Tanton’s the Federation for American Immigration Reform. And $35,000 for the New Century Foundation. And while that may not seem like a massive amount of money, it’s significant for the world of white nationalist propaganda outfits where the operating costs are largely just salaries for figures like Richard Spencer:
So what does the Rotella Foundation say when asked about these donations that have suddenly come to light? Well, they claim they didn’t know about the nature of these groups. Something that would require having done virtually no due diligence about the groups in the first place since they don’t hide at all their nature. But that’s what they claim, along with the claim that the foundation is going to be shutting down soon:
So it’ll be interesting to see if the foundation actually shuts down. And if it does shut down, it will be interesting to see if a new one quietly pops up to replace it. Or perhaps Rotella will find an entirely new way of laundering money to these groups that’s harder to track. We’ll see, but if the foundation is shut down and his funding of these groups really does end, that could be a significant loss for the various UFO/remote viewing foundations like the Farsight institute which received $25,000 from the foundation:
Ok, now to given an idea of how well hidden the Rotella Foundation’s white nationalist donations were, here’s a profile on the foundation from Inside Philanthropy. It’s an undated profile but had to at least be from after 2017 since it notes that the foundation awarded around $585,000 in grants in 2017. And while the profile mentions that the foundation has given to mainstream conservative groups like the Cato Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute and also mentions groups with a more paranormal interest like the Association for Research and Enlightenment (based on Edgard Cayce’s teachings), there’s not mention at all of the overtly white nationalist groups like the NPI. So until that New York Magazine article from a few weeks ago, somehow the Rotella Foundation was keeping its far right donations off the radar:
“OVERVIEW: Robert and Rosemarie Rotella move their philanthropy through the Robert P. Rotella Foundation, which according to available tax filings, awarded around $585,000 in grants in 2017. The foundation’s grantmaking focuses on policy and environmental organizations.”
$585,000 in grants in 2017 alone. That may not be at the Koch Brothers level of donations but it’s not trivial. A half a million dollars a year adds up fast. Especially for all of the smaller “unconventional organizations” like the Association for Research and Enlightenment:
But there’s no mention in the profile of any “unconventional organizations” of a Nazi-nature. You have to wonder if the person creating the profile simply didn’t recognize the nature of groups with innocuous sounding names like the “National Policy Institute”.
So as the story of the Rotella Foundation reminds us, we have a lot to learn when it comes to financing of the far right. As the first article mentioned, Rotella is only the second publicly known financier of the National Policy Institute. And based on the amounts he donated there are clearly other donors. Who are these people and what other causes are they donating to?
It’s also worth keeping in mind that one of the grand long-term goals of the far right is some sort of massive society-wide event (likely a hoax) that fundamentally shift’s the public’s sense of what is real and who to trust. It’s reflected in how much far right propaganda frames its cause in ‘End Times’-style conflicts and part of the utility of “Illumaniti”-centric narratives that have at their core the message that virtually everything you know is wrong and the only groups you can trust are these ‘alternative’ sources. So in that sense we probably should expect that the financiers of Nazis are making investments in the kind of paranormal foundations that could be useful in generating massive society-shaking events involving things like UFOs or ‘End Times’-style events. There’s an unfortunate potential synergy there.
Here’s an update on Steve Bannon’s scheming. He’s got a new scheme. An extra stupid scheme even by the standards of Steve Bannon’s history of scheme. But extra stupid in a manner that will probably resonate with his target audience of marks:
First, recall how Bannon has already been charged with fraud over the “We Build the Wall” charity scam that raised $25 millions to build parts of a wall between the US and Mexico millions. But then Bannon was pardoned by then-President Trump and the charges were dropped.
Then there’s Bannon’s role in the criminally charged scamming of investors in Guo Wengui’s media empire. A scam that involved raising investor money for a new media enterprise and betting large sums of the funds on the destabilization of the Hong Kong Dollar. A scam that also happened to include a significant cryptocurrency component. First it was the G‑Coins/G‑Dollars, which Guo’s followers could purchase with promises of high returns and/or the ability to purchase goods and services of Guo-affiliated companies on the G‑Media platform. But then the SEC fined Guo $539 million over these investment scams, so they switched over to a new “Himalaya Coin” scheme that sounds like basically the same idea but under a new name.
So here’s the new Steve Bannon scheme. It should sound familiar by now: Bannon had teamed up with ex-Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn to promote a new obscure joke cryptocurrency as the MAGA crypto of choice. The $FJB Coin — stands for “F#ck Joe Biden” — is the creation of a recent college graduate. Bannon called the coin a way for purchasers of the currency to show “your total and complete independence” from the government and “non-reliance on their financial system.” It’s not just a scam. It’s a revolutionary scam that will free you from the financial matrix. You’re free now!
But there’s a catch. It turns out users have to pay an 8 percent fee each time they buy or sell any coins. We’re told the fee covers “our marketing initiatives” and veteran and first responder charities. Yes, they fee is going to charity. *wink* How much of this fee is going to charity and which charities? They aren’t saying. *wink* *wink*
Oh, and there’s another catch. This is where this scam is taken to a new stupid level: the code running the crypto currency is all publicly available and people have observed something rather anomalous about how this cryptocurrency operates. It gives the operators of the currency the power to control when or if someone can sell their coins. Yep.
How about the operators of $FJB? Can they buy and sell coins at will? Yep. The control over who can sell is completely manual and there’s nothing mandating that the owners face the same restrictions. It’s like the Roach Motel of cryptocurrencies. You can enter. You may not be allowed to leave. But Bannon and Epshteyn will be allowed to leave whenever they want.
Keep in mind that Steve Bannon is arguably the beating heart of the MAGA movement at this point, even more so than Donald Trump. That’s why this isn’t just another random crypto-scam. This is a Bannon scam. Those things make serious money because Bannon knows how to scam at scale. And get away with it:
“On his podcast, Bannon began talking up the coin, of which they both had acquired significant amounts, as a “currency for the MAGA movement.” During one episode, Epshteyn hailed the $FJB coin as a tool to help Trump fanatics “let your feelings, your primal disapproval, your primal disgust with Biden be heard.” But $FJB buyers might want to beware. Not only does every purchase bolster the value of Bannon’s and Epshteyn’s holdings, crypto experts say the currency is designed in a way that affords its operators an unusual amount of discretion in blocking owners of coins from selling their tokens—a power that could cause problems for investors. ”
It’s as if gimmicky scam-coins are are Steve Bannon’s new hobby. First he gets involved with the G‑Coin/G‑Dollar crypto scheme with Guo Wengui that traps investors into buy products with the coin from Guo’s affiliated sellers. Then, following $539 million SEC fine delivered to Guo over investor fraud in relation to this scheme, they moved on to promoting a cryptocurrency that sounds like a clone of the G‑Coin/G‑Dollar scheme: the Himalaya Coin. And we learn about a whole new crypto-scam with Boris Epshteyn. A scam coin that manages to look like an even more blatant scam that G‑Coin or Himalaya Coin: The $FJB coin. A coin that grants Bannon and Epshteyn the power to control your ability to cash out. Control they’re already wielding according to reports:
And the cherry on top of this scam is an 8 percent fee charged whenever someone buys or (good luck!) sells. The fees go, in part, to veteran and first responder charities. They don’t say which charities or how much is going to them. But we are assured the money is going to charity. Assurances from a guy who was facing federal charges or criminal embezzlement of the $25 million he raised as part of the “We Build the Wall” crowd-raising movement until Trump pardoned him of the charges. It’s like Bannon psychically feeds off of charity fraud or something. The guy can’t stop:
As we can see, the scam-coin operated on manipulated marketplaces is heating up! The Himalaya Coins have competition. It raises the question of whether or not Bannon ended up bringing over some of the scam lessons he learned from his experiences on Guo’s coins over to this new $FSB project. So we’ll see in the end which scam coins come out on top, but odds are Bannon is an investor. Scam-coins are clearly his thing now.
With the reality of a rogue Supreme Court sinking in for millions of Americans as the Court’s historic 2022 term winds down, here’s an article from last month that points towards another kind of judicial insurrection we should expect to happen with increasing frequency. A judicial insurrection at the bottom of the judicial hierarchy in the form of Trump loving jurors who refuse to convict conservative figures over a sense of Big Liberal Government persecution of conservatives.
That’s what appeared to transpire in the prosecution of Tim Shea, one of the figures involved with Steve Bannon in the “We Build the Wall” fundraising scam. Recall how Steve Bannon was arrested on August 20, 2020, by US officials while he was being hosted on Guo Wengui’s yacht for his involvement in the scam, only to be pardoned by President Trump on his last day in office. But Trump didn’t pardon all of the figures involved wit the scheme, including Colorado businessman Tim Shea. And as the following article describes, Shea’s trial ended in a mistrial last month. A mistrial that appears to have been driven by the convictions of one of the twelve juror that the whole thing was part of a Big Government persecution of conservatives. At least that’s what we can infer from the explanations we were given by this lone juror. According to “Roberto”, he made his decision based on his suspicions that the government intentionally brought Shea to trial in Manhattan in order to get a liberal-voting jury. Other jurors report that Roberto was also suspicious that maybe Donald Trump donated the money to the group, implying that no mass fraud of small donors actually took place. No evidence that Trump made such donations has been reported, but this juror was pretty intent on finding a reason, any reason, to refuse to convict this Trump figure.
So as we’re entering an era where a far right Supreme Court majority appears to be ready and willing to just make up legal doctrines as needed to achieve their far right objectives, the story of the mistrial of Tim Shea serves as reminder that the ‘ends justify the means’ sentiments that appear to be motivating the Supreme Court’s far right majority are very widely held sentiments these days across the conservative movement. A cultivated sentiment. And it’s the kind of sentiment that is probably going to end up infecting a lot more jury pools as the Republican Party’s descent into open fascism, criminality, and insurrection plays out and leads to more prosecutions. It’s another aspect of the darkness in the US’s foreseeable future and the normalization of far right crimes, whether political crimes or just traditional scams: the more the far right memes about mass government prosecution of conservatives take hole within the broader populace, the harder it’s going to be to ever get a conviction for any these crimes:
“After the trial concluded Tuesday afternoon, a juror identified himself to reporters as the only member of the panel who did not vote to convict Shea. Roberto, no last name given, spoke briefly and evasively to reporters about his belief that there was reasonable doubt that the case should have been brought in the Southern District of New York at all. Roberto said he was “very surprised” the case was brought in Manhattan since “99 percent [the donations to We Build the Wall] are from somewhere else.””
The lone hold out juror scenario. So what was the basis for this lone juror’s dispute? Well, it sounds like “Roberto” felt like the case was part of some sort of left-wing legal plot against conservatives. According Roberto, Shea should have been tried in a Southern State and was only tried in New York City because they “knew people here vote differently” and this was all part of a “government witch-hunt” against Shea. It’s the kind of ‘legal argument’ that could come in extremely handy during virtually any legal proceeding involving Republicans in a Blue-state. Like, for example, the potential New York State charges against Steve Bannon over his role in the “We Build the Wall” scam. Charges that were already pardoned by President Trump at the federal level on his last day in office:
We’ll see if Steve Bannon ends up facing charges in New York State over his involvement in this blatant scam. But as this story makes clear, jury-shopping is a viable strategy for Bannon and other Trump-affiliated figures finding themselves on trial. Because when ‘Roberto’ was hung up on the location of the trial, he was implicitly suggesting that a jury of Trump-supporting conservatives would have been perfectly fine with the blatant fundraiser scamming Bannon was engaged in. Because for Roberto, the trial of Tim Shea wasn’t about the alleged crimes he committed. No, it was instead all part of the larger culture war and Big Government persecution of conservatives. Big Liberal Government was on trial for persecuting conservatives. Refusing to convict was Roberto’s method of voting the government guilty. Guilty of rigging the trial against Shea and guilty of being persecuting conservatives in general.
So we have to ask: is this an anomalous case of jury nullification? Or a sign of things to come? It’s a potentially big question. And not just for any future potential prosecutions of Steve Bannon, whether it’s a state-level prosecution of the We Build the Wall scam or maybe prosecutions related to his many other scams. Don’t forget that prosecutions in relation to the January 6 Capitol insurrection involve juries too. And while the juries that have been judging the cases involving the numerous low-level insurrection haven’t been shying from arriving at convictions, it’s not just going to be low-level people no one put on trial over the insurrection. At least hopefully not.
With the prospects of the GOP capture of one or both houses of congress in the upcoming midterm elections two weeks from now seemingly growing by the day, here’s a fascinating interview just published in Vox of a figure whose influence is only going to growing in the ensuing period of government gridlock and turmoil in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election cycle. A figure who has seen his influence quietly growing in conservative circles for well over a decade now: Curtis “Mencious Moldbug” Yarvin, the intellectual godfather of the ‘Dark Enlightenment’. As we’ve seen, in addition to Yarvin’s role as a kind of ideological fellow traveler of Peter Thiel and an influence on Seasteading movement, Yarvin is also reportedly close to Steve Bannon, creating a backchannel between Yarvin and the Trump White House. Yarvin and Bannon even worked together to turn Brietbart into a mainstreaming vehicle for the ‘Alt Right’.
That was Yarvin’s growing stature in the conservative movement back in 2016 and 2017 at the start of the Trump administration. The election of Trump was, in many respects, the culmination of Yarvin’s political ambitions. Or at least the start of that culmination. But as the following article makes clear, there was another event since Trump’s election that has only propelled Yarvin’s relevance to greater heights inside the conservative movement: the January 6 Capitol insurrection. It was almost everything Yarvin has been pining for. And Yarvin appears to be doing what he can to ensure the next coup attempt is far more successful. And more popular.
It’s the predicted popularity of the next coup attempt that is perhaps the most disturbing part of Yarvin’s new writings. Disturbing because it’s hard to disagree with that assessment post-Jan 6. Yarvin even calls for the next GOP candidate to openly campaign on the idea of just seizing power upon getting elected. Do it under the banner of saving the country and the public will love it. Then, upon getting elected, Trump (or whoever the new Caesar ends up being ) should activate his based of supporters into a kind of vigilante mob army that takes to the streets in support of his agenda. An agenda that would involve the mass firing of virtually all federal workers and the replacement of those agencies with new entities. Courts would be demoted to an ‘advisory’ role and could be ignore. The threat of impeachment would be nullified because non-loyal members of the president’s party would be purged in the primaries. Policing powers would be centralized and local and state governments under Democratic control would be nullified. It would all have to happen so rapidly that the general public is left confused and overwhelmed. A fascist bureaucratic blitzkrieg.
And if this sounds like an outlandish idea that even today’s radicalized GOP wouldn’t support, that’s demonstrably not the case. Ohio GOP Senate candidate JD Vance — who is widely seen as a proxy for Peter Thiel — has already said Trump really should carry out mass firings at the beginning of a second term and just ignore the courts if they try to block it. Vance appears to be on the verge of getting elected in two weeks as part of what could be the GOP capture of congress. A capture of congress that is almost certain ensure no meaningful legislation will happen for the next two years. Nothing will be solved. Problems will only be created. And that brings us to the other big part of Yarvin’s plot: He wants to have as much left-wing buy-in as possible on the new Caesar model for the US. How is is planning on getting that buy-in? Through despair. Breaking faith in the idea that democracy even can work is at the core of the plot.
Yarvin appears to view the US as already being so far down that path of civic despair that he imagines someone being able to running and winning on this ‘I’m going to end democracy to save the country’ in 2024. And, really, is he wrong? So with the US set for a renewed round of utterly broken government following the mid-terms, it’s going to be important to keep in mind that breaking the functioning of government isn’t just a plot to get frustrated voters to voter for Republicans in 2024. We’re well past that. At this point, it’s going to be part of a plot to frustrate voters so much that the vote to end democracy in 2024:
“But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.”
A lot has changed for Curtis Yarvin over the years. He isn’t just focused on promoting the Dark Enlightenment philosophy. He has a more actionable goal: gaming out the collapse of the US democracy. And as this article makes clear, he’s no longer some obscure blogger ranting into the wilderness. His ideas for how to carry out a government coup are basically mainstream ideas within the contemporary Trumpified conservative movement. He’s even has his writings published by the Claremont Institute starting in 2019. Recall how the Claremont Institute was running the “79 Days report” election simulations in the final weeks of the 2020 election that ironically envisioned all sorts of scenarios involving leftist mobs occupying capitols. The Claremont Institute happens to have John Eastman, one of the central figures in developing legal justifications for the events that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. You can’t really make sense of the insurrectionary fervor of the GOP without accounting for the growing influence of Yarvin’s ideas:
And as Yarvin has observed, his ideas for overthrowing democracy are already so mainstream within the conservative movement that he now advocates that someone run for the presidency on a platform of ending democracy and seizing power. It would be a popular platform, as Yarvin sees it. It’s also worth noting the keen interest of figures like Peter Thiel, Steven Bannon, and Robert Mercer in the growing field of psychedelic medicine and the evidence showing that psychedelics can help people resist authoritarian worldviews. It should be pretty clear by now that a population gripped by authoritarian mindsets is absolutely central to the futures envisioned by these fascist networks:
And after winning on a platform of consolidating power as a new Caesar, Yarvin recommends a kind of bureaucratic blitzkrieg. Mass firings of federal workers under the ‘Schedule F’ plot would happen immediately, with new entities and agencies replacing them. It’s a recipe for a mass privatization of the government. And to pay for it all, the new Caesar should have his appointees take over the Federal Reserve:
The courts would then be demoted to an “advisory” branch of government and ignored. How believable is such a scenario? Well, Thiel-backed Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance actually advocated that exact approach for a Trump second term:
Then we get to the plan to get around the threat of an impeachment: stacking the GOP with authoritarian loyalists who will back the new Caesar in everything he does. That’s already the status quo, as Jan 6 and the resulting enduring support for Donald Trump amply demonstrates:
State and local governments, which will frequently be under Democratic control, will have to be dissolved, along with all major universities. Poof. Gone. This will presumably all fall under the plan of creating a sense of ‘shock and awe’ in the opening rounds of this coup plot:
So what should this aspiring Caesar do in the face of the inevitable popular resistance to this plot? Organize vigilante mobs in support for the new regime. Something like a “Trump App” that allows the president to issue orders to his supporters is potentially all that would be required. The mob would take care of the rest:
It’s worth noting that Trump’s “Truth Social” app just got added to the Google app store a couple of weeks ago. Will Truth Social be the app-of-choice for organizing Trumpian street mobs to ‘keep the peace’ after the bureaucratic blitzkrieg gets underway in early 2025? That remains to be seen. But at this point it’s pretty obvious that Curtis Yarvin has a lot of fellow travelers in 2022, and they’re about to take control of Congress in two weeks.
Plenty of questions are being asked about what the Republicans are actually planning on doing once they recapture control of one of both houses of Congress after all the dust has settled over the looming mid-term election. But as the following NY Times article reminds us, the a ‘Red Wave’ during the mid-terms won’t just be a sign of the success of the ‘MAGA’ movement at energize conservative voters. We should also expect to see some pretty big wins for Steve Bannon’s ‘precinct strategy’. Recall how Bannon has been pushing to have ‘MAGA’ die-hards overwhelm the elections of thousands of normally obscure local elections for positions like precinct officers. Guess what: it’s already working. That’s the situation described in the following article about how the normally not-very-MAGA Republicans of wealth Greenwich, CT, found their local Republican Committee completely captured at the precinct and school board level. Greenwich is Trump/Bannon country now, at least as far as the local GOP party infrastructure goes, with all of the ‘culture war’ and ‘anti-wokism’ antics that come with such political coups.
But it wasn’t entirely a local effort. The ‘precinct strategy’ for Greenwich included some national help, albeit national help rallied by local Greenwich residents. Specifically, Newsmax host Carl Higbie and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe are both Greenwich residents and both used the power of their organizations to drive the local non-MAGA Republican officials out of office. Higbie used his Newsmax weekend morning new show to specifically target two Greenwich officials, while O’Keefe produced a heavily edited video that seemed to show a Greenwich elementary school vice principal boasting to an unseen woman that he tried to block the hiring of conservatives, Roman Catholics and people over 30 (the vice principle didn’t actually move those unilateral decisions). When local voters showed up to caucuses in January of this year to elect the local precinct members to a two year term is was a ‘blood bath’ for the establishment Republicans, with 41 out of 63 precinct seats going to ‘MAGA’ insurgents. MAGA candidates basically took over the Greenwich GOP.
So we have to ask: how typical or atypical is the story of Greenwich’s GOP in 2022? Is this a relatively isolated example of Bannon’s ‘precinct strategy’ at work? Or is it an example of what was happening at the local Republican Party in communities across the US? Either way, the message is clear: 2022 was the year of the non-‘Trumplican’ purge at all levels of the Republican Party:
“The culture wars were destined to spill someday into the rarefied precincts of Greenwich. But who in the name of George Bush would have expected the charge to be led by a band of Trump acolytes who have taken control of the town’s Republican committee?”
the decidedly non-‘Trumpublican’ town of Greenwich had its local Republican committee taken over by Trump acolytes who immediately proceeded to wage the kind of ‘culture war’-style politics not normally seen in Greenwich. What happened? Steve Bannon’s “precinct strategy” happened. This is what it looks like:
But as the article describes, this wasn’t simply a successful local coup by a well-organized group of Trump supporters. The effort had national support. Like Carl Higbie, a local Greenwich resident who also happens to have a morning weekend program on Newsmax. Local non-‘Trumplicans’ like Republican Town Committee chairman Dan Quigley and schoolboard member Michael-Joseph Mercanti-Anthony suddenly became the targets of Higbie’s national Newsmax show:
Then there’s another notable Greenwich resident James O’Keefe, notorious for his fraudulently edited hidden-camera videos and ties to white supremacists. As we’ve sen, O’Keefe has been building what amounts to a private intelligence network with training provided by Erik Prince. So we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that O’Keefe released another heavily edited video designed to foment parental unrest directed at Greenwich’s public schools and create hysteria out ‘wokeism’ in the classroom:
But the efforts by Higbie and O’Keefe were just part of the overall effort. The other major part of the strategy is simply overwhelming the vote in these obscure local elections for seats like the Greenwich Republican Town Committee, which decides who appears on a party’s endorsed ballot for the school board, the town council, the state legislature. It’s Bannon’s ‘precinct strategy’ in action:
And don’t forget that part if the reason for Bannon’s precinct-level purge was to deal with Republican precinct officials who were unwilling to go along with Republican proposals for a ‘forensic audit’ of the 2020 vote. Anyone in the GOP unwilling to go along with virtually any ‘anti-voter fraud’ scheme has been removed. Bannon’s army of operatives replaced them. In a year with exceptionally tight polling between the two parties, suggesting we’re going to see an abundance of tight races were every vote counts. So if it feels like 2024 us guaranteed to the ultimate clusterf#ck of an election, don’t forget that 2022 is sort of like the 2024 practice run for Steve Bannon’s new precinct-level army.
A nexus of awfulness. That’s one way to describe the grimly fascinating TPM piece about Vish Burra, the ‘man behind George Santos’. A man who has come to embrace of the awfulness.
As we’re going to see, NY congressman George Santos — who has become a kind of national punch-line for apparently winning office on a wildly fabricated personal biography — has a new chief of operations with a pretty wild personal biography of his own. The big difference being that Burra’s biography doesn’t appear to be fake. It’s an absurd biography, yes. But the kind of very-real absurdism that appears to be a defining feature in the troll-oriented ‘Alt Right’ Republican party of today. And as we’re also going to see, Burra’s story includes a lot more than just his new role as Santo’s chief of operations, and includes playing a founding role producing Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. A role that ended up putting Burra in a position to directly work with the Hunter Biden’s ‘acquired’ laptop. Yep, as Burra tells it, he was the guy making copies of the laptop and distributing it to other conservative activists. Recall the numerous questions about the efficacy of the sourcing of those laptop documents. It’s another complication in parsing that story.
Finally, as we’re also going to see, it doesn’t sound like Burra has any plans on encourage George Santos to resign or somehow pull back from his serial lying. Quite the contrary, Burra appears to see Santos as a kind of ultimate truth-teller who is revealing to the world the gross hypocrisy of DC, where lies reign supreme. Yep, George Santos is lying for the truth. Or as he told TPM, “One part of this is going to be, like, you know, just exposing the farce for what it is.” Everything is a farce. George Santos is just exposing that reality. That appears to be the spin Burra is going with.
But, again, it’s not just Burra backing this sticking-with-Santos strategy. Burra has backers. Backers who helped Burra become one of the officers of the New York Young Republican Club and effectively ‘red-pill’ it and turn the club into an ‘Alt Right’ bastion. Backers that obviously include Steve Bannon but there’s an unnamed figure in this story. As Burra tells it, he first got in touch with Bannon via an unnamed “mentor”.
It’s worth keeping in mind that one of the names that does NOT show up in the following story is that of Peter Thiel, despite the article describing a network of people very much in Thiel’s orbit working to execute the broader ‘red-pilling’ of the conservative party. So we have to ask: Is Thiel Burra’s unnamed “mentor.” We don’t know at this point. But it sure sounds like there’s a good chance we’ll find out eventually. Because Vish Burra isn’t going anywhere. On the contrary, he’s a disturbingly quintessential example of the kind of future version of the GOP that Bannon, Thiel, and their fellow travelers have been trying to build for years. A GOP imbued with a ‘burn it all down to purify it’ mentality that synergizes quite well with the idea that everything is a farce and nothing matters. LOL:
“Burra, who recently became Santos’ director of operations, thrives on chaos and revels in controversy. As reporters have swarmed outside Santos’ office each day, Burra has quite literally stood behind the embattled politico. And while Capitol Hill staffers typically stay away from the cameras, behind the scenes, that’s not Burra style: He was a high-profile activist in his own right before joining Santos’ team, and this isn’t Burra’s first time in the eye of the storm. In his wide ranging conversation with TPM, Burra talked about his political philosophy and past experience leading a controversial Republican club, standing by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R‑FL) during another recent scandal, and playing a pivotal role in the Hunter Biden laptop saga.”
George Santos’s director of operations is a Steven Bannon acolyte who played a key role in the Hunter Biden laptop story. Because of course that’s the case. It’s how politics works now. The theater of the absurd.
But as we’re going to see, George Santos isn’t just an example of the absurdist theatrics that defined the MAGA-era of conservative politics. He’s more like a kind of Dada-ist art. An absurd figure intended to highlight the absurdity of it all. Or at least that’s Vish Burra’s spin. This is s good time to recall how Julius Evola was himself at big fan of the Dada movement. It’s a reminder that the subversive power of art can be used by reactionaries too.
And that gets at one of the really disturbing aspects of this story: it appears that the ‘Alt-Right’ network of figures around Steve Bannon see George Santos as a potentially useful tool in building a larger nihilistic narrative about how everyone in DC is lying all the time about everything. It’s all a giant farce and George Santos is helping to expose it. All the lies and bad actions are just a giant ‘f%ck you!’ to the larger corrupt system. By lying nonstop, George Santos is putting a mirror up to the pervasive lies of DC. That’s the spin at work here:
It’s also noteworthy how Burra, like so many prominent ‘Alt Right’ figures today, didn’t appear to really get into Republican politics at all until Donald Trump’s campaign started in 2015. Here we find Burra, having just had his drug dealing “empire” busted in 2014, suddenly becoming enamored with Trump’s form of red-pilling politics. Burra is one more example of the identity crisis facing the modern GOP: the guy has zero interest in ‘traditional’ GOP politics and policy and is entirely focused on ‘shitposting’ and general far right trolling. When this is where the young energy in the party is coming from, it’s hard to imagine a future iteration of the GOP that isn’t fundamentally an ‘Alt Right’ entity. Trump won. Along with Steve Bannon and all the other reactionaries in the GOP establishment:
But it’s also worth noting how Vish Burra’s rise inside the NYC Republican circles isn’t just another story of an Alt Right capture of another Republican institution. This is the capture of the New York City Republican organizations. New York City maybe a Democratic Party base, but it’s also the home of Wall Street and major big money players in both parties. So when we learn about the ‘red-pilling’ of groups like the New York Young Republican Club, keep in mind we’re talking about political organizations in the heart of the Wall Street beast:
Following his takeover the of New York Young Republican Club, Burra apparently became a “founding producer” of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast in 2020 after being introduced to Bannon by an unnamed “mentor.” It’s a further indication that Burra’s capture of the NYC GOP is a sponsored campaign. Bannon and other powerful fellow travelers want this to happen:
And then we get to this highly interesting detail about Burra’s work with Bannon: he was apparently the ‘tech’ figure working directly with Hunter Biden’s laptops. So the guy acting as chief of operations of a serial liar congressman was the guy handing Hunter Biden’s laptop contents. It’s not like there weren’t already major questions about the nature of the network of figures involved with that story. We can add a few more major questions:
Also note how we’re still seeing the New York Young Republican Club hosting figures like Peter and Lydia Brimelow as recently as back in December. Recall how Brimelow was found to play an important role as a kind of intermediary between the overtly white nationalist far right and Trump administration. And don’t forget how an anonymous mega-donor used the Koch-backed DonorsTrust dark money outlet to anonymously donate $1.5 million to VDARE in 2019 that appears to have been used to purchase a historic castle. Also recall Peter Thiel’s close ties to this same network and Thiel’s long-standing ambitions in reshaping the GOP in a more ‘red-pilled’ manner. So given Burra’s anonymous “mentor”, combined with the lack of any mention of Thiel in this piece, we have to ask: is Peter Thiel the unnamed “mentor”? Signs sure point in that direction:
And just a quick note on Marjorie Taylor Greene speech at the event last month attended by figures like Brimelow, where Greene bragged that had she and Bannon planned the January 6 Capitol insurrection it would have been armed and they would have won, keep in mind that Greene and Bannon both did appear to play significant roles and there was indeed the “Quick Reaction Force” of heavy arms brought to DC for the purpose of arming the crowd, along with the armed figures Trump wanted the Secret Service to allow into the rally area on Jan 6 despite the security concerns. In other words, the insurrectionary lesson Greene really should have taken from her experiences was to have more arms available sooner:
Where will Vish Burra take his sh#tposting crusade next? We’ll see, but he’s clearly got the backing of some powerful figures in the conservative movement. And keeping the George Santos crazy train going for as long as possible is now part of his mission. And that’s why we have to ask: is the George Santos saga being spun into a kind of Dada-ist trolling ‘red-pilling’ theater of the absurd intentionally as a kind of ‘everyone lies all the time, George is just being honest about it!’ narrative? Because it’s hard not to notice how the ‘everyone is lying all the time’ narrative synergizes quite effectively with the underlying ‘burn it all down’ political nihilism animating much of this. ‘Burn it all down’ political nihilism that is very aligned with far right goals:
Burra isn’t backing away from Santos. Which presumably means Burra’s sponsors, like Steve Bannon, aren’t backing away either. There’s a perceived value in the George Santos theater of the absurd. Nihilistic value. Don’t forget that getting the public in the kind of mood to ‘burn it all down’ is clearly one of the far right’s primary goals. Undirected rage redirected at the target enemies. That’s the long-term goal here. And it’s a lot easier to get people to stop caring about an utterly absurd system than one that actually works.
Oh, and also note that we got reports that at Santos reportedly told his fellow House Republicans that he wanted to be removed from his committee assignments until his “issues” are resolved. That report came out at almost the same time the TPM piece was published. Now, maybe it’s just coincidental timing, but the fact that this report coincided with a TPM piece hinting at deeper establishment backing for Santos is hard to ignore. It’s a remind that at, while creating a theater of the absurd may be part of the strategy here, that theater probably isn’t supposed to include all the scheme by far right oligarchs to drive society insane. The goal is theater of the absurd. Not a power-politics history lesson.