Trou­ble in par­adise? It appears so: The ‘Alt Right’ appears to have a sex­u­al harass­ment prob­lem. Yep, it turns out the women in this coali­tion of neo-Nazis, white nation­al­ists, misog­y­nists and rape apol­o­gist aren’t being treat­ed very well by a num­ber of their fel­low Alt Right-ists. Imag­ine that.

But as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, the Alt Right’s sex­u­al harass­ment prob­lem has a num­ber of sim­i­lar­i­ties to sex­u­al harass­ment every­where, but also some notable dif­fer­ences. Because the women of the Alt Right want to live under a patri­archy where their roles are lim­it­ed to that of home­mak­ing and child-rear­ing. They are very open and clear about this. But they don’t want to be dis­re­spect­ed by all the Alt Right misog­y­nists while they’re doing it. In oth­er words, they want their tra­di­tion­al female roles in their eth­nona­tion­al­ist patri­archy to be roles respect­ed by men, but all the misog­y­nists in the move­ment can’t do that because they patho­log­i­cal­ly hate women. It’s a grim­ly fas­ci­nat­ing divide.

And as the arti­cle also notes, it’s not a new divide. The KKK had a sim­i­lar prob­lem almost a cen­tu­ry ago. Women active­ly played an impor­tant role in both the pub­lic image of the Klan but also just the logis­tics of run­ning it. But that role quick­ly turned into a sub­servient role and led to real inter-gen­der ten­sions.
But that divide is poten­tial­ly even more chal­leng­ing time around because while male Klan mem­bers are like­ly to be misog­y­nists, they aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly the kinds of ide­o­log­i­cal misog­y­nists that you’re going to find in the overt misog­y­nist wing of the today’s ‘Alt Right’. And it’s those overt focused misog­y­nists who are wag­ing the harass­ment cam­paign on the promi­nent women of the Alt Right. Promi­nent women like Lau­ren South­ern and Kirsten Lau­ryn, a ris­ing YouTube star and a self-described ‘Catholic monar­chist’, with large YouTube audi­ences who play a crit­i­cal role in shap­ing the far-right’s pub­lic face.

And this places the men of the Alt Right who aren’t pri­mar­i­ly dri­ven by misog­y­ny — and prob­a­bly instead are large­ly dri­ven by racism, anti­semitism, and a love of author­i­tar­i­an­ism — are forced to make a choice: stand up to their hyper-misog­y­nist Alt Right bros in sup­port of the women of the Alt Right or stand with them in the hopes of turn­ing these misog­y­nists into neo-Nazis. And it’s not obvi­ous which side they’ll pick.

It’s being framed as a ‘Red Pill vs Black Pill’ polar­iza­tion in the move­ment: the ‘Red Pill’-ers want to fight for a Nazi future while the ‘Black Pill’-poppers are just nihilists who want to burn every­thing down (and can’t stand women except as sex objects). The ‘Red Pill’-ers neo-Nazis are, rel­a­tive­ly speak­ing, the rel­a­tive-fem­i­nists in this fight, which is just amaz­ing but that’s what hap­pens when you team up with rape apol­o­gists.

The ‘Black Pill’ crowd also presents a whole new pub­lic image headache for the Alt Right: they active­ly pro­mote the idea of ‘White Sharia’. It’s appar­ent­ly a meme with them and rep­re­sents the hyper-misog­y­nists’ vision of how soci­ety should be struc­tured: a strict Sharia-like set of rules design under a Patri­ar­chal hyper-macho world­view where women are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly sub­ju­gat­ed. They basi­cal­ly want like Wahabist-style treat­ment of women and open­ly talk and joke about it. And there’s no rea­son to believe they aren’t seri­ous too because that’s the nature of misog­y­nists who team up with neo-Nazis. They are very seri­ous about their misog­y­ny. “White Sharia” is exact­ly the kind of thing they would want. And that presents quite a stark con­trast to the ‘Red Pill’ neo-Nazi brand that ven­er­ates women like Lau­ren South­ern and Kirsten Lau­ryn.

And, yes, if the ‘Red Pill” neo-Nazis ever took total con­trol and sub­ju­gat­ed every­one (sub­ju­gat­ing every­one is a Nazi goal, don’t for­get), it would prob­a­bly be much clos­er to the ‘Black Pill’ real­i­ty for both men and women than the ‘Red Pill’ ethnonationalist/Nazi types want to admit in their pub­lic mus­ings. But that just makes not alien­at­ing all the Alt Right women all the more impor­tant for the Alt Right men. And yet they clear­ly have no respect for women, ‘Red Pill’ or ‘Black Pill’. It’s quite a dilem­ma and it’s clear­ly hard for them to hide this.

Can the Alt Right’s hyper-misog­y­nist “White Sharia” fans stop them­selves from dis­re­spect­ing the women who choose to join their move­ment? It’s a real Alt Right conun­drum and we have yet to learn the answer:

Mic

The women of the “alt-right” are speak­ing out against misog­y­ny. They’d pre­fer absolute patri­archy.

by Jack Smith IV
Pub­lished Dec. 8, 2017

The white suprema­cist right has a slo­gan, a clar­i­on call that binds the move­ment across coun­tries and gen­er­a­tions. It’s called the “14 words”: “We must secure the exis­tence of our peo­ple and a future for white chil­dren.”

Buried with­in that mantra is a dan­ger­ous impli­ca­tion for an extrem­ist move­ment dom­i­nat­ed by white men: They’re going to need a lot of white nation­al­ist women.

But over the past few weeks, a small fac­tion of devot­ed misog­y­nists with­in the far-right is lead­ing a wave of harass­ment against promi­nent white nation­al­ist women. Male chau­vin­ist celebri­ties have lead online “thot patrols” and dug up pho­tos of far-right women who’ve alleged­ly dat­ed men of col­or.

“Men in the alt-right are going to have to decide whether they will con­tin­ue to passively/actively endorse this behav­ior, or speak out against it,” far-right video per­son­al­i­ty Tara McCarthy wrote in a now-delet­ed series of tweets. “If you want more women speak­ing pub­licly about eth­no-nation­al­ism, I sug­gest you choose the lat­ter.”

This recent con­flict has been poor­ly framed in the media as the women of the alt-right sud­den­ly dis­cov­er­ing misog­y­ny with­in the move­ment. But the nation­al­ist right’s most promi­nent women, many of whom are Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists, are per­fect­ly fine with a patri­archy that wants to rel­e­gate women to the roles of home­mak­ers and child-bear­ers.

The true reck­on­ing among white nation­al­ists is one that’s been com­ing to a boil since the incep­tion of the so-called “alt-right.” In its infan­cy, the rise of the alt-right brought white nation­al­ists into an uneasy alliance with some of the internet’s most destruc­tive misog­y­nists. And now that there’s a ris­ing uptick against nation­al­ist women, the men of the far-right must either mit­i­gate or exile this new strain of misog­y­nist extrem­ism, or risk can­ni­bal­iz­ing their most effec­tive stars and pro­pa­gan­dists.

Women with­in the far-right told Mic they were hes­i­tant to speak about the issue with reporters, and that the con­ver­sa­tion had become an unfor­tu­nate inter­nal debate between two fac­tions that could nev­er tru­ly coex­ist.

Dur­ing the 2016 elec­tion sea­son, the alt-right mate­ri­al­ized as an umbrel­la group pulling togeth­er a range of reac­tionary sects. There were the anti-fem­i­nists of the Gamer­Gate move­ment, the frat­ty “pro-West” Proud Boys, right-wing provo­ca­teurs, tra­di­tion­al neo-Nazis, South­ern Nation­al­ists and even some ele­ments of the mili­tia move­ment. It was a jum­bled cor­nu­copia of dis­parate ide­olo­gies bound togeth­er only by sup­port of then-can­di­date Don­ald Trump and a com­mon ene­my embod­ied by the dread­ed “social jus­tice war­riors.”

The big tent couldn’t hold for long. Soon after the elec­tion, the alt-right began to frac­ture, often along the lines of who was or was not deemed suf­fi­cient­ly racist. Mili­ti­a­men scuf­fled with 4channers at a ral­ly in Hous­ton and pro-Trump provo­ca­teurs like Mike Cer­novich and Jack Poso­biec dis­tanced them­selves from the ded­i­cat­ed racists. Soon, the only ones will­ing to even tac­it­ly wear the label of “alt-right” were avowed white nation­al­ists.

But along the way, the white nation­al­ist move­ment was intro­duced to a new source of recruit­ment: the vir­u­lent misog­y­nists and men’s rights activists who came into the alt-right through forums like 4chan and Red­dit. While eth­no-nation­al­ists preach ven­er­a­tion of white women will­ing to sub­mit to patri­archy and tra­di­tion­al­ism, many MRAs ani­mat­ed pure­ly by male griev­ance pre­fer explic­it hatred for women. Where most on the right refer to the process of awak­en­ing to the evils of lib­er­al­ism as tak­ing the “red pill,” these are men who describe their phi­los­o­phy as the “black pill” of apoc­a­lyp­tic nihilism.

A favorite meme of this crowd is “white sharia,” which white nation­al­ist and ex-marine Sac­co Van­dal described in a recent blog post as “a ral­ly­ing cry for the dis­il­lu­sioned young men in our move­ment as well as their guid­ing light.”

“Sharia law, though prac­ticed today by some of the world’s most despi­ca­ble races, is the only liv­ing exam­ple of any­thing that even remote­ly approx­i­mates the patri­ar­chal soci­ety that West­ern man once had him­self,” Van­dal wrote.

The worst of this scorn is often reserved for the women with­in the far-right, under­tak­ing sex­ist witch hunts meant to shame them for show­ing lead­er­ship in what they see as a man’s move­ment.

“I’m not going to get mar­ried at 22 years old just so that I won’t be called a degen­er­ate on the inter­net,” nation­al­ist fig­ure­head Lau­ren South­ern said in a recent video address­ing her harassers.

This reck­on­ing was first pre­dict­ed by alt-right researcher Angela Nagle, who wrote in Feb­ru­ary that “the philo­soph­i­cal irrec­on­cil­abil­i­ty between its paleo-con­ser­vatism, which aims for a return to tra­di­tion­al mar­riage while dis­ap­prov­ing of porn and promis­cu­ity, and the amoral lib­er­tine Inter­net cul­ture from which all the real ener­gy has emerged, will soon begin to show.”

And the reck­on­ing has come, with a vengeance. In the past few weeks, the MRAs have reg­u­lar­ly hurled sex­ist slurs at women like Lau­ren South­ern, Tara McCarthy and Lau­ren Rose, lev­el­ing the tired accu­sa­tion that they’re pos­ing as tra­di­tion­al­ists for mere fame and atten­tion.

“They’re trick­ing a lot of men into think­ing they’re the ide­al, tra­di­tion­al woman when they’re no dif­fer­ent than the skank I can find in any night­club here,” Roosh V, a famous rape apol­o­gist blog­ger, said in a YouTube video post­ed Dec. 4. “In fact, in some cas­es, they are worse.”

Sewing the white robes

The far-right needs women as evan­ge­lists more than the misog­y­nist extrem­ists rec­og­nize. Nation­al­ist women have been his­tor­i­cal­ly use­ful in cloak­ing the vio­lent machis­mo of fascis­tic move­ments as a project for restora­tion of sacred val­ues and civ­il soci­ety.

“These women are very effec­tive as pro­pa­gan­dists,” James All­sup, a nation­al­ist speak­er and for­mer Col­lege Repub­li­cans chap­ter pres­i­dent, told Mic. “There’s a clear and objec­tive ben­e­fit in a move­ment to have peo­ple with the abil­i­ty to reach the mass­es.”

As his­to­ri­an Lin­da Gor­don writes in The Sec­ond Com­ing of the KKK, women, who had recent­ly won the right to vote, were vital to build­ing Klan pow­er through­out the 1920s, not just as a cul­tur­al pow­er­house for white suprema­cist mes­sag­ing, but in deliv­er­ing a new elec­toral con­stituen­cy to the polls for sen­a­tors and con­gress­men sym­pa­thet­ic to the Klan.

The KKK noto­ri­ous­ly exag­ger­at­ed its mem­ber­ship rolls in its pro­pa­gan­da, but Gor­don esti­mates that as many as 1,500,000 women were mem­bers of Women’s Klu Klux Klan.

“Women did a tremen­dous amount of Klan labor,” Gor­don said. “Every time they put on a big pageants, or a big lec­ture, you can be sure it would be women doing the pub­lic­i­ty, col­lect­ing the food, and oth­er stan­dard women’s roles.”

Even­tu­al­ly, the vision of empow­er­ment offered to the women of the KKK found its lim­its. Men stepped in to exert their pow­er, assign­ing their own lead­er­ship over the WKKK, as women resist­ed send­ing their mon­e­tary dues up to the male lead­er­ship of the Klan. In 1923, women lead­ers even moved their head­quar­ters to Lit­tle Rock, Arkansas, away from the Atlanta head­quar­ters of the KKK, as a ges­ture of their auton­o­my. All the while, it was large­ly women hold­ing fundrais­ers and run­ning Sun­day school-like youth pro­grams to train the next gen­er­a­tion of the Klan.

By this time, it was clear women would be expect­ed to uphold all of the respon­si­bil­i­ties of male KKK orga­niz­ers, while also tak­ing a back­seat and ful­fill­ing essen­tial domes­tic oblig­a­tions.

The Red Pill, or the Black Pill

This pow­er dynam­ic isn’t rel­e­gat­ed to the 1920s. As a for­mer skin­head, Shan­non Mar­tinez saw this sto­ry play out in her own rela­tion­ship with the white pow­er move­ment of the 1990s, pulling dou­ble-duty as a home­mak­er for ado­les­cent racists even as she tried orga­niz­ing her own efforts for recruit­ment and evan­ge­lism.

“We could orga­nize and put up fliers, but it was expect­ed that I asked per­mis­sion from what­ev­er guy I was dat­ing,” Mar­tinez told Mic.

Mar­tinez has ded­i­cat­ed her time since leav­ing the move­ment 25 years ago — a boyfriend’s moth­er helped pull her out — to help­ing oth­er young peo­ple get out, too. She vol­un­teers with Life After Hate, a group that helps white suprema­cists leave their com­mu­ni­ties by pro­vid­ing an empa­thet­ic sup­port net­work to young mem­bers of mod­ern hate groups so that they can find a path away.

Mar­tinez isn’t the only one who sees an oppor­tu­ni­ty to teach and reform. There are white nation­al­ists who believe that these extreme misog­y­nists can be reha­bil­i­tat­ed through the same fascis­tic appeals that have led dis­af­fect­ed young men into the arms of extrem­ist groups for a cen­tu­ry.

“What we need to do to counter the nihilism is give them a vision of the future,” Matthew Heim­bach, one of the country’s lead­ing neo-Nazi lead­ers, told Mic. “When they get up in the morn­ing, they need to know their sac­ri­fice means some­thing, and their life mat­ters.”

Kirsten Lau­ryn, a ris­ing right-wing YouTu­ber who iden­ti­fies as a Catholic “monar­chist,” told Mic that though she’s been on the receiv­ing end of these aggres­sors, she knows their pain. Though she refers to her harassers as “pathet­ic weasels,” she sees their griev­ances as akin to her own strug­gles with women she grew up with, who want­ed inde­pen­dence and a career over a future as home­mak­er.

“I feel sym­pa­thy for these men who’ve giv­en up, because it’s some­thing I’ve felt in my own life toward women friends I’ve known in the past — the pro­gres­sive types who are keen on destroy­ing mar­riages,” Lau­ryn said.

These war­ring visions of patri­archy — an agrar­i­an return to the home and kitchen for women, ver­sus the “white sharia” of overt vio­lence and oppres­sion — are both ani­mat­ed by the same clas­sic tropes of fascis­tic obses­sion: an alleged down­fall of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, the ero­sion of so-called fam­i­ly val­ues and the fear of lost sta­tus amid the increased enfran­chise­ment of oppressed minori­ties. While the white nation­al­ists of the new far-right see the two visions as incom­pat­i­ble, even some of their strongest voic­es have trou­ble imag­in­ing a com­pro­mise.

...

Even with­out the explic­it misog­y­nists and MRAs, South­ern and the women of the far-right will have to reck­on with exact­ly how much inde­pen­dence the men at the helm of white nation­al­ism are will­ing to tol­er­ate. The irony, if not absolute hypocrisy, is lost on no one.

“Admit it, Lau­ren,” one com­menter respond­ed. “You’re focus­ing on your career.”

———-

“The women of the “alt-right” are speak­ing out against misog­y­ny. They’d pre­fer absolute patri­archy.” by Jack Smith IV; Mic; 12/08/2017

“But over the past few weeks, a small fac­tion of devot­ed misog­y­nists with­in the far-right is lead­ing a wave of harass­ment against promi­nent white nation­al­ist women. Male chau­vin­ist celebri­ties have lead online “thot patrols” and dug up pho­tos of far-right women who’ve alleged­ly dat­ed men of col­or.”

That’s right, in the mid­dle of thise #metoo moment for the broad­er pub­lic, a group of Alt Right misog­y­nists decid­ed to harass the promi­nent women of the Alt Right. It’s rather instruc­tion­al. And the harassers include some promi­nent YouTube per­son­al­i­ties:

...
And the reck­on­ing has come, with a vengeance. In the past few weeks, the MRAs have reg­u­lar­ly hurled sex­ist slurs at women like Lau­ren South­ern, Tara McCarthy and Lau­ren Rose, lev­el­ing the tired accu­sa­tion that they’re pos­ing as tra­di­tion­al­ists for mere fame and atten­tion.

“They’re trick­ing a lot of men into think­ing they’re the ide­al, tra­di­tion­al woman when they’re no dif­fer­ent than the skank I can find in any night­club here,” Roosh V, a famous rape apol­o­gist blog­ger, said in a YouTube video post­ed Dec. 4. “In fact, in some cas­es, they are worse.”
...

Roosh V, a famous rape apol­o­gist blog­ger (that’s a thing), just called the ‘tra­di­tion­al­ist’ YouTube video blog­gers of the Alt Right phonies who are skanks. We prob­a­bly should have seen this com­ing. Which some did see com­ing:

...
This reck­on­ing was first pre­dict­ed by alt-right researcher Angela Nagle, who wrote in Feb­ru­ary that “the philo­soph­i­cal irrec­on­cil­abil­i­ty between its paleo-con­ser­vatism, which aims for a return to tra­di­tion­al mar­riage while dis­ap­prov­ing of porn and promis­cu­ity, and the amoral lib­er­tine Inter­net cul­ture from which all the real ener­gy has emerged, will soon begin to show.”
...

Behold the Alt Right cul­ture clash: the tra­di­tion­al­ists who want a patri­archy that at least pre­tends to exalt white women vs the con­tem­po­rary lib­er­tine Inter­net cul­ture troll­ish Alt Right male who wants noth­ing to do with those pre­tens­es and gets a thrill out of humil­i­at­ing women and jokes/fantasizes about ‘White Sharia’. It’s quite a cul­ture clash. And the ‘tra­di­tion­al­ist’ men have to make a choice in this clash because they need to choose sides and its unclear which one they’ll pick:

...
“Men in the alt-right are going to have to decide whether they will con­tin­ue to passively/actively endorse this behav­ior, or speak out against it,” far-right video per­son­al­i­ty Tara McCarthy wrote in a now-delet­ed series of tweets. “If you want more women speak­ing pub­licly about eth­no-nation­al­ism, I sug­gest you choose the lat­ter.”

This recent con­flict has been poor­ly framed in the media as the women of the alt-right sud­den­ly dis­cov­er­ing misog­y­ny with­in the move­ment. But the nation­al­ist right’s most promi­nent women, many of whom are Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists, are per­fect­ly fine with a patri­archy that wants to rel­e­gate women to the roles of home­mak­ers and child-bear­ers.

The true reck­on­ing among white nation­al­ists is one that’s been com­ing to a boil since the incep­tion of the so-called “alt-right.” In its infan­cy, the rise of the alt-right brought white nation­al­ists into an uneasy alliance with some of the internet’s most destruc­tive misog­y­nists. And now that there’s a ris­ing uptick against nation­al­ist women, the men of the far-right must either mit­i­gate or exile this new strain of misog­y­nist extrem­ism, or risk can­ni­bal­iz­ing their most effec­tive stars and pro­pa­gan­dists.
...

“And now that there’s a ris­ing uptick against nation­al­ist women, the men of the far-right must either mit­i­gate or exile this new strain of misog­y­nist extrem­ism, or risk can­ni­bal­iz­ing their most effec­tive stars and pro­pa­gan­dists.”

Are the ‘Red Pill’ men of the Alt Right up the task of either mit­i­gat­ing or exil­ing misog­y­nist extrem­ist? On one hand, when you’re more extreme than neo-Nazis in your misog­y­ny, it seems like it should be easy to find rea­sons to exile you. But not when it’s neo-Nazis who need to do the exil­ing. The misog­y­nist extrem­ists are their nat­ur­al allies, and poten­tial future recruits. It’s a real dilem­ma for this coali­tion of haters.

But they’ll have to pick a side soon­er or lat­er, because it sounds like the extreme misog­y­nists rel­ish going after their female Alt Right allies. And just tear­ing things and peo­ple down in gen­er­al. And “White Sharia”:

...
But along the way, the white nation­al­ist move­ment was intro­duced to a new source of recruit­ment: the vir­u­lent misog­y­nists and men’s rights activists who came into the alt-right through forums like 4chan and Red­dit. While eth­no-nation­al­ists preach ven­er­a­tion of white women will­ing to sub­mit to patri­archy and tra­di­tion­al­ism, many MRAs ani­mat­ed pure­ly by male griev­ance pre­fer explic­it hatred for women. Where most on the right refer to the process of awak­en­ing to the evils of lib­er­al­ism as tak­ing the “red pill,” these are men who describe their phi­los­o­phy as the “black pill” of apoc­a­lyp­tic nihilism.

A favorite meme of this crowd is “white sharia,” which white nation­al­ist and ex-marine Sac­co Van­dal described in a recent blog post as “a ral­ly­ing cry for the dis­il­lu­sioned young men in our move­ment as well as their guid­ing light.”

“Sharia law, though prac­ticed today by some of the world’s most despi­ca­ble races, is the only liv­ing exam­ple of any­thing that even remote­ly approx­i­mates the patri­ar­chal soci­ety that West­ern man once had him­self,” Van­dal wrote.

The worst of this scorn is often reserved for the women with­in the far-right, under­tak­ing sex­ist witch hunts meant to shame them for show­ing lead­er­ship in what they see as a man’s move­ment.

“I’m not going to get mar­ried at 22 years old just so that I won’t be called a degen­er­ate on the inter­net,” nation­al­ist fig­ure­head Lau­ren South­ern said in a recent video address­ing her harassers.
...

“The worst of this scorn is often reserved for the women with­in the far-right, under­tak­ing sex­ist witch hunts meant to shame them for show­ing lead­er­ship in what they see as a man’s move­ment.”

So is the Alt Right doomed to implode under the weight of its mutu­al loathing/fearing? Well, there is hope. The women might just put up with all the harass­ment and they can all unite behind the fact that they’re all fight­ing for some form of “White Sharia”. The ‘tra­di­tion­al­ist’ ver­sion just pre­tends to respect the women. Oth­er­wise the over­lap between these fac­tions of the Alt Right is pret­ty mas­sive so it’s pos­si­ble:

...
Kirsten Lau­ryn, a ris­ing right-wing YouTu­ber who iden­ti­fies as a Catholic “monar­chist,” told Mic that though she’s been on the receiv­ing end of these aggres­sors, she knows their pain. Though she refers to her harassers as “pathet­ic weasels,” she sees their griev­ances as akin to her own strug­gles with women she grew up with, who want­ed inde­pen­dence and a career over a future as home­mak­er.

“I feel sym­pa­thy for these men who’ve giv­en up, because it’s some­thing I’ve felt in my own life toward women friends I’ve known in the past — the pro­gres­sive types who are keen on destroy­ing mar­riages,” Lau­ryn said.

These war­ring visions of patri­archy — an agrar­i­an return to the home and kitchen for women, ver­sus the “white sharia” of overt vio­lence and oppres­sion — are both ani­mat­ed by the same clas­sic tropes of fascis­tic obses­sion: an alleged down­fall of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, the ero­sion of so-called fam­i­ly val­ues and the fear of lost sta­tus amid the increased enfran­chise­ment of oppressed minori­ties. While the white nation­al­ists of the new far-right see the two visions as incom­pat­i­ble, even some of their strongest voic­es have trou­ble imag­in­ing a com­pro­mise.
...

“These war­ring visions of patri­archy — an agrar­i­an return to the home and kitchen for women, ver­sus the “white sharia” of overt vio­lence and oppres­sion — are both ani­mat­ed by the same clas­sic tropes of fascis­tic obses­sion: an alleged down­fall of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, the ero­sion of so-called fam­i­ly val­ues and the fear of lost sta­tus amid the increased enfran­chise­ment of oppressed minori­ties.”

Can’t we all just get along? That’s the ques­tion for the Alt Right these days now that the misog­y­nist extrem­ist “White Sharia” fans fig­ured out that it was fun attack­ing and tear­ing down the women on the far-right and the answer isn’t at all clear. The free­dom to fla­grant­ly not get along — until they seize con­trol and impose neo-Nazi “White Sharia” author­i­tar­i­an­ism, at which point every­one will be forced to ‘get along’ in a very unpleas­ant way — is part of what they’re fight­ing for.

Polit­i­cal umbrel­la move­ments often run into dif­fi­cul­ties get­ting along with each oth­er. But this is an umbrel­la move­ment of neo-Nazis get­ting along with “White Sharia” misog­y­nist extrem­ists who tend to be super-trolls too. That’s not a great recipe for any­one get­ting along with any­one. And yet they must if “White Sharia” is going to be real­ized. The neo-Nazis and extreme misog­y­nists are nat­ur­al allies, but they need those neo-Nazi women too. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing chal­lenge for the far-right.

So that’s how the #metoo ‘moment’ is play­ing out on the Alt Right. Of course.

There was a gen­uine­ly chill­ing recent opin­ion piece in the New York Times a par­tic­u­lar tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment that threat­ens to super-charge the Big Lies that dri­ve our world: as any­one who saw the file Star Wars film “Rogue One” knows well, the tech­nol­o­gy required to cre­ate a near­ly life-like com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed videos of a real per­son is already a real­i­ty. So far it’s a real­i­ty large­ly lim­it­ed to big movie stu­dios, but that’s not going to last. And when this tech­nol­o­gy becomes avail­able to almost any­one, it’s more or less a fore­gone con­clu­sion that we’re going to see a flood of fake videos about designed to destroy peo­ple, espe­cial­ly politi­cians:

The New York Times
Opin­ion

Our Hack­able Polit­i­cal Future

By HENRY J. FARRELL and RICK PERLSTEIN
FEB. 4, 2018

Imag­ine it is the spring of 2019. A bot­tom-feed­ing web­site, per­haps tied to Rus­sia, “sur­faces” video of a sex scene star­ring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gilli­brand. It is soon debunked as a fake, the prod­uct of a user-friend­ly video appli­ca­tion that employs gen­er­a­tive adver­sar­i­al net­work tech­nol­o­gy to con­vinc­ing­ly swap out one face for anoth­er.

It is the sum­mer of 2019, and the sto­ry, pre­dictably, has stuck around — part talk-show joke, part right-wing talk­ing point. “It’s news,” polit­i­cal jour­nal­ists say in their own defense. “Peo­ple are talk­ing about it. How can we not?”

Then it is fall. The junior sen­a­tor from New York State announces her cam­paign for the pres­i­den­cy. At a din­er in New Hamp­shire, one “low infor­ma­tion” vot­er asks anoth­er: “Kirsten What’s‑her-name? She’s run­ning for pres­i­dent? Didn’t she have some­thing to do with pornog­ra­phy?”

Wel­come to the shape of things to come. In 2016 Gareth Edwards, the direc­tor of the Star Wars film “Rogue One,” was able to cre­ate a scene fea­tur­ing a young Princess Leia by manip­u­lat­ing images of Car­rie Fish­er as she looked in 1977. Mr. Edwards had the best hard­ware and soft­ware a $200 mil­lion Hol­ly­wood bud­get could buy. Less than two years lat­er, images of sim­i­lar qual­i­ty can be cre­at­ed with soft­ware avail­able for free down­load on Red­dit. That was how a faked video sup­pos­ed­ly of the actress Emma Wat­son in a show­er with anoth­er woman end­ed up on the web­site Celeb Jihad.

Pro­grams like these have many legit­i­mate appli­ca­tions. They can help com­put­er-secu­ri­ty experts probe for weak­ness­es in their defens­es and help self-dri­ving cars learn how to nav­i­gate unusu­al weath­er con­di­tions. But as the nov­el­ist William Gib­son once said, “The street finds its own uses for things.” So do rogue polit­i­cal actors. The impli­ca­tions for democ­ra­cy are eye-open­ing.

The con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal activist James O’Keefe has cre­at­ed a cot­tage indus­try manip­u­lat­ing polit­i­cal per­cep­tions by edit­ing footage in mis­lead­ing ways. In 2018, low-tech edit­ing like Mr. O’Keefe’s is already an anachro­nism: Imag­ine what even less scrupu­lous activists could do with the pow­er to cre­ate “video” fram­ing real peo­ple for things they’ve nev­er actu­al­ly done. One har­row­ing poten­tial even­tu­al­i­ty: Fake video and audio may become so con­vinc­ing that it can’t be dis­tin­guished from real record­ings, ren­der­ing audio and video evi­dence inad­mis­si­ble in court.

A pro­gram called Face2Face, devel­oped at Stan­ford, films one per­son speak­ing, then manip­u­lates that person’s image to resem­ble some­one else’s. Throw in voice manip­u­la­tion tech­nol­o­gy, and you can lit­er­al­ly make any­one say any­thing — or at least seem to.

The tech­nol­o­gy isn’t quite there; Princess Leia was a lit­tle wood­en, if you looked care­ful­ly. But it’s clos­er than you might think. And even when fake video isn’t per­fect, it can con­vince peo­ple who want to be con­vinced, espe­cial­ly when it rein­forces offen­sive gen­der or racial stereo­types.

...

In 2007, Barack Obama’s polit­i­cal oppo­nents insist­ed that footage exist­ed of Michelle Oba­ma rant­i­ng against “whitey.” In the future, they may not have to wor­ry about whether it actu­al­ly exist­ed. If some­one called their bluff, they may sim­ply be able to invent it, using data from stock pho­tos and pre-exist­ing footage.

The next step would be one we are already famil­iar with: the exploita­tion of the algo­rithms used by social media sites like Twit­ter and Face­book to spread sto­ries viral­ly to those most inclined to show inter­est in them, even if those sto­ries are fake.

It might be impos­si­ble to stop the advance of this kind of tech­nol­o­gy. But the rel­e­vant algo­rithms here aren’t only the ones that run on com­put­er hard­ware. They are also the ones that under­gird our too eas­i­ly hacked media sys­tem, where garbage acquires the per­fumed scent of legit­i­ma­cy with all too much ease. Edi­tors, jour­nal­ists and news pro­duc­ers can play a role here — for good or for bad.

Out­lets like Fox News spread sto­ries about the mur­der of Demo­c­ra­t­ic staff mem­bers and F.B.I. con­spir­a­cies to frame the pres­i­dent. Tra­di­tion­al news orga­ni­za­tions, fear­ing that they might be left behind in the new atten­tion econ­o­my, strug­gle to max­i­mize “engage­ment with con­tent.”

This gives them a built-in incen­tive to spread infor­ma­tion­al virus­es that enfee­ble the very demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions that allow a free media to thrive. Cable news shows con­sid­er it their pro­fes­sion­al duty to pro­vide “bal­ance” by giv­ing par­ti­san talk­ing heads free rein to spout non­sense — or ampli­fy the non­sense of our cur­rent pres­i­dent.

It already feels as though we are liv­ing in an alter­na­tive sci­ence-fic­tion uni­verse where no one agrees on what it true. Just think how much worse it will be when fake news becomes fake video. Democ­ra­cy assumes that its cit­i­zens share the same real­i­ty. We’re about to find out whether democ­ra­cy can be pre­served when this assump­tion no longer holds.

———-

“Our Hack­able Polit­i­cal Future” by HENRY J. FARRELL and RICK PERLSTEIN; The New York Times; 02/04/2018

“It already feels as though we are liv­ing in an alter­na­tive sci­ence-fic­tion uni­verse where no one agrees on what it true. Just think how much worse it will be when fake news becomes fake video. Democ­ra­cy assumes that its cit­i­zens share the same real­i­ty. We’re about to find out whether democ­ra­cy can be pre­served when this assump­tion no longer holds.”

Can democ­ra­cy sur­vive the era of real­ly, real­ly con­vinc­ing­ly real fake news? Fake news that looks and sounds com­plete­ly real? We’ll see, but when you look at the hypo­thet­i­cal sce­nar­ios they described, it’s hard to imag­ine that there aren’t polit­i­cal dirty-tricks teams already work­ing over­time on car­ry­ing out exact­ly this kind of attack:

...
Imag­ine it is the spring of 2019. A bot­tom-feed­ing web­site, per­haps tied to Rus­sia, “sur­faces” video of a sex scene star­ring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gilli­brand. It is soon debunked as a fake, the prod­uct of a user-friend­ly video appli­ca­tion that employs gen­er­a­tive adver­sar­i­al net­work tech­nol­o­gy to con­vinc­ing­ly swap out one face for anoth­er.

It is the sum­mer of 2019, and the sto­ry, pre­dictably, has stuck around — part talk-show joke, part right-wing talk­ing point. “It’s news,” polit­i­cal jour­nal­ists say in their own defense. “Peo­ple are talk­ing about it. How can we not?”

Then it is fall. The junior sen­a­tor from New York State announces her cam­paign for the pres­i­den­cy. At a din­er in New Hamp­shire, one “low infor­ma­tion” vot­er asks anoth­er: “Kirsten What’s‑her-name? She’s run­ning for pres­i­dent? Didn’t she have some­thing to do with pornog­ra­phy?”

Wel­come to the shape of things to come. In 2016 Gareth Edwards, the direc­tor of the Star Wars film “Rogue One,” was able to cre­ate a scene fea­tur­ing a young Princess Leia by manip­u­lat­ing images of Car­rie Fish­er as she looked in 1977. Mr. Edwards had the best hard­ware and soft­ware a $200 mil­lion Hol­ly­wood bud­get could buy. Less than two years lat­er, images of sim­i­lar qual­i­ty can be cre­at­ed with soft­ware avail­able for free down­load on Red­dit. That was how a faked video sup­pos­ed­ly of the actress Emma Wat­son in a show­er with anoth­er woman end­ed up on the web­site Celeb Jihad.

...

A pro­gram called Face2Face, devel­oped at Stan­ford, films one per­son speak­ing, then manip­u­lates that person’s image to resem­ble some­one else’s. Throw in voice manip­u­la­tion tech­nol­o­gy, and you can lit­er­al­ly make any­one say any­thing — or at least seem to.
...

And it’s even hard­er to imag­ine that there aren’t polit­i­cal dirty-tricks teams specif­i­cal­ly being led by the right-wing’s rogue gallery of dirty-tricks polit­i­cal oper­a­tives like James O’Keefe. His ‘gotcha’ videos won’t have to rely on decep­tive edit­ing in the future. Because there’s no doubt going to be a whole right-wing dirty-tricks spe­cial effects team:

...
Pro­grams like these have many legit­i­mate appli­ca­tions. They can help com­put­er-secu­ri­ty experts probe for weak­ness­es in their defens­es and help self-dri­ving cars learn how to nav­i­gate unusu­al weath­er con­di­tions. But as the nov­el­ist William Gib­son once said, “The street finds its own uses for things.” So do rogue polit­i­cal actors. The impli­ca­tions for democ­ra­cy are eye-open­ing.

The con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal activist James O’Keefe has cre­at­ed a cot­tage indus­try manip­u­lat­ing polit­i­cal per­cep­tions by edit­ing footage in mis­lead­ing ways. In 2018, low-tech edit­ing like Mr. O’Keefe’s is already an anachro­nism: Imag­ine what even less scrupu­lous activists could do with the pow­er to cre­ate “video” fram­ing real peo­ple for things they’ve nev­er actu­al­ly done. One har­row­ing poten­tial even­tu­al­i­ty: Fake video and audio may become so con­vinc­ing that it can’t be dis­tin­guished from real record­ings, ren­der­ing audio and video evi­dence inad­mis­si­ble in court.
...

And when those future fraud­u­lent spe­cial effects videos are put out there, it’s hard to imag­ine they aren’t going to be wild­ly pro­mot­ed, either by gam­ing the social media algo­rithms or just let­ting unscrupu­lous fig­ures in the media pro­mote them for the extra clicks:

...
The next step would be one we are already famil­iar with: the exploita­tion of the algo­rithms used by social media sites like Twit­ter and Face­book to spread sto­ries viral­ly to those most inclined to show inter­est in them, even if those sto­ries are fake.

It might be impos­si­ble to stop the advance of this kind of tech­nol­o­gy. But the rel­e­vant algo­rithms here aren’t only the ones that run on com­put­er hard­ware. They are also the ones that under­gird our too eas­i­ly hacked media sys­tem, where garbage acquires the per­fumed scent of legit­i­ma­cy with all too much ease. Edi­tors, jour­nal­ists and news pro­duc­ers can play a role here — for good or for bad.
...

And let’s not for­get what just hap­pened in 2016: The Trump cam­paign and its media allies went all in on pro­mot­ing #piz­za­gate, the ‘Alt-Right’ meme of a giant piz­za par­lor pedophile con­spir­a­cy designed to smear Hillary Clin­ton. Now imag­ine a dis­in­for­ma­tion oper­a­tion like that in the era of the above describe soft­ware. That’s going to be a major fea­ture in the future of pol­i­tics. The Big Lie is about to get sup­ple­men­tary audio and video.

Fol­low­ing up on the recent arti­cle spec­u­lat­ing about the poten­tial impact on pol­i­tics and pub­lic life of the emerg­ing spe­cial effects tech­nol­o­gy used to cre­ate real­is­tic look­ing videos that super­im­pose a per­son­’s face on anoth­er body, allow­ing for all sorts of smear videos, here’s a glimpse of how far along this tech­nol­o­gy is: both Twit­ter and Porn­Hub, the online pornog­ra­phy giant, are already tak­ing action to remove numer­ous “Deep­fake” videos of celebri­ties being super-imposed onto porn actors in response to the flood of such videos that are already being gen­er­at­ed:

PC Mag­a­zine

Porn­Hub, Twit­ter Ban ‘Deep­fake’ AI-Mod­i­fied Porn
Deep­fakes, for the unini­ti­at­ed, are fake porn videos cre­at­ed by using a machine learn­ing algo­rithm to match some­one’s face to anoth­er per­son­’s body.

By Angela Moscar­i­to­lo
Feb­ru­ary 7, 2018 10:10AM EST

It might be kind of com­i­cal to see Nico­las Cage’s face on the body of a woman, but expect to see less of this type of con­tent float­ing around on Porn­Hub and Twit­ter in the future.

As Moth­er­board first report­ed, both sites are tak­ing action against arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered pornog­ra­phy, known as “deep­fakes.”

Deep­fakes, for the unini­ti­at­ed, are porn videos cre­at­ed by using a machine learn­ing algo­rithm to match some­one’s face to anoth­er per­son­’s body. Loads of celebri­ties have had their faces used in porn scenes with­out their con­sent, and the results are almost flaw­less. Check out the SFW exam­ple below for a bet­ter idea of what we’re talk­ing about.
[see chill­ing­ly real­is­tic video of Nico­las Cage’s head on a wom­an’s body]
In a state­ment to PCMag on Wednes­day, Porn­Hub Vice Pres­i­dent Corey Price said the com­pa­ny in 2015 intro­duced a sub­mis­sion form, which lets users eas­i­ly flag non­con­sen­su­al con­tent like revenge porn for removal. Peo­ple have also start­ed using that tool to flag deep­fakes, he said.

...

The com­pa­ny still has a lot of clean­ing up to do. Moth­er­board report­ed there are still tons of deep­fakes on Porn­Hub.

“I was able to eas­i­ly find dozens of deep­fakes post­ed in the last few days, many under the search term ‘deep­fakes’ or with deep­fakes and the name of celebri­ties in the title of the video,” Moth­er­board­’s Saman­tha Cole wrote.

Over on Twit­ter, mean­while, users can now be sus­pend­ed for post­ing deep­fakes and oth­er non­con­sen­su­al porn.

“We will sus­pend any account we iden­ti­fy as the orig­i­nal poster of inti­mate media that has been pro­duced or dis­trib­uted with­out the sub­jec­t’s con­sent,” a Twit­ter spokesper­son told Moth­er­board. “We will also sus­pend any account ded­i­cat­ed to post­ing this type of con­tent.”

The site report­ed that Dis­cord and Gfy­cat take a sim­i­lar stance on deep­fakes. For now, these types of videos appear to be pri­mar­i­ly cir­cu­lat­ing via Red­dit, where the deep­fake com­mu­ni­ty cur­rent­ly boasts around 90,000 sub­scribers.

———-

“Porn­Hub, Twit­ter Ban ‘Deep­fake’ AI-Mod­i­fied Porn” by Angela Moscar­i­to­lo; PC Mag­a­zine; 02/07/2018

“Deep­fakes, for the unini­ti­at­ed, are porn videos cre­at­ed by using a machine learn­ing algo­rithm to match some­one’s face to anoth­er per­son­’s body. Loads of celebri­ties have had their faces used in porn scenes with­out their con­sent, and the results are almost flaw­less. Check out the SFW exam­ple below for a bet­ter idea of what we’re talk­ing about.”

Yep, this tech­nol­o­gy is already clear­ly at the point where it’s both high­ly real­is­tic look­ing and easy enough to use that lots of peo­ple can use it. So even after Porn­Hub took these steps to remove this con­tent, the reporter from Moth­er­board was eas­i­ly able to find dozens of deep­fakes post­ed just in the last few days:

...
The com­pa­ny still has a lot of clean­ing up to do. Moth­er­board report­ed there are still tons of deep­fakes on Porn­Hub.

“I was able to eas­i­ly find dozens of deep­fakes post­ed in the last few days, many under the search term ‘deep­fakes’ or with deep­fakes and the name of celebri­ties in the title of the video,” Moth­er­board­’s Saman­tha Cole wrote.
...

So how big is this going to get as the tech­nol­o­gy devel­ops and gets eas­i­er to use? Well, Red­dit already has 90,000 sub­scribers to a “deep­fake” com­mu­ni­ty:

...
The site report­ed that Dis­cord and Gfy­cat take a sim­i­lar stance on deep­fakes. For now, these types of videos appear to be pri­mar­i­ly cir­cu­lat­ing via Red­dit, where the deep­fake com­mu­ni­ty cur­rent­ly boasts around 90,000 sub­scribers.

And keep in mind that, while this tech­nol­o­gy is pri­mar­i­ly being used for celebri­ties right now, there’s going to come a point when some­one devel­ops a sim­ple app that let’s you take a quick video of some­one and then trans­pose them on some­one else where almost no skill or train­ing is required and just a few but­ton push­es lets any­one cre­ate that incred­i­bly creep Nico­las Cage video. Imag­ine what the ‘revenge porn’ issue is going to be like when that kind of tech­nol­o­gy is wide­ly avail­able. Or pol­i­tics. Or pret­ty much any­thing where you’re rep­u­ta­tion is impor­tant.

So that’s all part of the very near future: any­one will have the abil­i­ty to cre­ate real­is­tic fake videos of almost any­one. With ease.

How will this impact soci­ety beyond the obvi­ous impli­ca­tions on stuff like ‘revenge porn’ or pol­i­tics? Well, the odds are that soci­ety will even­tu­al­ly be so inun­dat­ed with this stuff that almost all videos will just be assumed to be fakes until addi­tion­al evi­dence is pro­vid­ed. And that’s going to take us into a whole new very weird sit­u­a­tion where peo­ple just assume every­thing is fake and noth­ing can be trust­ed. And, on the one hand, that assump­tion that every­thing is fake could odd­ly cre­ate a solu­tion of sorts to the creepi­ness of liv­ing in a soci­ety where cam­eras are every­one and much of what we do is being record­ed. But on the oth­er hand, it’s hard to ignore the fact that “Fake News” has become one of the most effec­tive tech­niques used by the far-right to refute vir­tu­al­ly any sto­ry or nar­ra­tive that they find incon­ve­nient and intel­lec­tu­al­ly soft­en up their audi­ence to believe almost any­thing. It’s one of the crazy quirks of human psy­chol­o­gy: if you con­vince peo­ple that no sources of infor­ma­tion can be trust they’re going to be much more open to trust­ing very untrust­wor­thy sources.

And that points towards one of the most chill­ing poten­tial appli­ca­tions of this tech­nol­o­gy that we should expect: the aggres­sive push­ing of fake videos that are intend­ed to be exposed as fakes for the pur­pose of con­vinc­ing the pop­u­lace that noth­ing can be trust­ed.

So while the Big Lie is about to get sup­ple­men­tary audio and video, it’s worth keep­ing in mind that a lot of video will prob­a­bly be intend­ed to be exposed as a lie in order fuel dis­trust of every­thing which is exact­ly the kind of sit­u­a­tion where the Big Lie can get a lot big­ger.

It looks like the ‘Alt-Right’ cam­paign to push for­mer Sen­a­tor Al Franken to resign had help from an unex­pect­ed source: Japan­ese twit­ter bots.

Accord­ing to research by ana­lysts at Unhack the Vote, a vot­ing rights out­fit, Roger Stone isn’t the only indi­vid­ual who demon­strat­ed fore­knowl­edge of the sto­ry of Leanne Twee­den’s accu­sa­tions. It turns out there was a Japan­ese twit­ter bot net­work which con­trols a large pool of dum­my Twit­ter accounts (the “bots”) that also demon­strat­ed such fore­knowl­edge.

This bot net­work nor­mal­ly just retweet­ed tweets relat­ed post­ed on Japan­ese top­ics, celebri­ties, bit­coin, and sports. But on Novem­ber 15th, a Japan­ese devel­op­er named Atsu­fu­mi Otsu­ka reg­is­ter­ing a web domain in Japan called RealUSA.site. That’s the same day Roger Stone announced over Twit­ter that it’s Franken’s “time in the bar­rel” and one day before the sto­ry broke.

Then, on Novem­ber 20th, Alt-Right provo­ca­teur Charles John­son tweet­ed, “Think­ing of offer­ing mon­ey to peo­ple who go on tv and say Al Frank is a preda­tor.” That same day, Otsu­ka reg­is­tered a sec­ond domain in Japan for anoth­er fake-news site, VotyUS.me.

The two fake news sites were final­ly put to use on Decem­ber 7, short­ly before Democ­rats start­ed call­ing for Franken to step down. The sites re-pub­lished an arti­cle by Ijeo­ma Oluo, a lib­er­al writer, urg­ing women and activists to stop sup­port­ing Franken. Olu­o’s piece, titled “Dear Al Franken, I’ll Miss You but You Can’t Mat­ter Any­more,” was post­ed on rel­a­tive­ly obscure web­site that only had a reach of of 10,000 fol­low­ers. But once the arti­cle got repost­ed to those two fake news sites the twit­ter bot net­work­ing sud­den­ly sprang into action, with thou­sands of fake Twit­ter accounts tweet­ing the title of the article—but link­ing back to repost of the arti­cle on the fake news sites, RealUSA.site or VotyUS.me.

And while it’s not clear who paid for the Twit­ter-bot activ­i­ty, it’s hard to ignore the coin­ci­den­tal tim­ing. And researchers have con­clud­ed that it was­n’t cheap. They esti­mate that it required dozens of hours of ini­tial devel­op­ment time and at least one per­son work­ing full time to pro­duce and dis­trib­ute con­tent. So the whole task of set­ting up this Japan­ese Twit­ter bot army to ampli­fy the calls for Sen­a­tor Franken to step down was deemed by who­ev­er paid for it to be with the time and mon­ey:

Newsweek

How an Alt-Right Bot Net­work Took Down Al Franken

By Nina Burleigh
On 2/19/18 at 6:00 AM

White nation­al­ist provo­ca­teurs, a pair of fake news sites, an army of Twit­ter bots and oth­er cyber tricks helped derail Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor Al Franken last year, new research shows.

While every­one has been focused on Russ­ian med­dling in the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion to sup­port Don­ald Trump, the Franken take­down orig­i­nat­ed in—and was pro­pelled by—a strate­gic online cam­paign with dig­i­tal ten­ta­cles reach­ing to, of all places, Japan. Ana­lysts have now mapped out how Hoot­ers pin­up girl and lad-mag mod­el Leeann Twee­den’s ini­tial accu­sa­tion against Franken became effec­tive pro­pa­gan­da after right-wing black ops mas­ter Roger Stone first hint­ed at the alle­ga­tion.

A pair of Japan-based web­sites, cre­at­ed the day before Twee­den came for­ward, and a swarm of relat­ed Twit­ter bots made the Twee­den sto­ry go viral and then weaponized a lib­er­al writer’s crit­i­cism of Franken. The bot army—in tan­dem with promi­nent real, live mem­bers of the far right who have Twit­ter fol­low­ers in the mil­lions, such as Mike Cernovich—spewed thou­sands of posts, help­ing the #Franken­Fon­dles hash­tag and the “Franken is a grop­er” meme effec­tive­ly silence the tes­ti­monies of eight for­mer female staffers who defend­ed the Min­neso­ta Demo­c­rat before he resigned last year.

The oper­a­tion com­menced on Novem­ber 15, when Stone—who is now banned from Twit­ter for racism and profanity—tweeted from one of his accounts “Roger Stone says it’s Al Franken’s ‘time in the bar­rel.’ Franken next in long list of Democ­rats accused of ‘grab­by’ behav­ior.”

On the same day, a devel­op­er named Atsu­fu­mi Otsu­ka reg­is­tered a web domain in Japan called RealUSA.site, and a fake-news web­site soon emerged at that web address, accord­ing to research shared with the vot­ing rights out­fit Unhack the Vote.

Tweeden’s account of Franken grop­ing her was first ampli­fied by a net­work of right-wing media, includ­ing KABC in Los Ange­les, where Twee­den has a radio show, The Hill, Infowars and Bre­it­bart, which mobi­lized with­in hours of Stone’s tweet and the release of a pic­ture of a Twee­den and Franken at a USO per­for­mance before he was a sen­a­tor.

By Novem­ber 17, the trend­ing of “Al Franken” was offi­cial­ly also a Russ­ian intel­li­gence oper­a­tion, accord­ing to the Alliance for Secur­ing Democ­ra­cy, an orga­ni­za­tion track­ing Russ­ian social media accounts, based on a sam­ple tak­en that day of 600 of the fake accounts.

Five days lat­er, on Novem­ber 20, right-wing provo­ca­teur Charles John­son tweet­ed, “Think­ing of offer­ing mon­ey to peo­ple who go on tv and say Al Frank is a preda­tor.”

That same day, Otsu­ka reg­is­tered a sec­ond domain in Japan for anoth­er fake-news site, VotyUS.me. Both accounts used the same Google ana­lyt­ics account ID and Apple app ID, and the name of the servers and reg­is­tra­tion for both sites were vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal, researchers found.

On Decem­ber 7, just before Democ­rats start­ed call­ing for Franken to step down, the fresh­ly mint­ed Japan-based fake sites went to work and re-pub­lished an arti­cle by Ijeo­ma Oluo, a lib­er­al writer, urg­ing women and activists to stop sup­port­ing Franken. Oluo had post­ed the opin­ion piece, titled “Dear Al Franken, I’ll Miss You but You Can’t Mat­ter Any­more,” on a much small­er web­site, with a reach of 10,000 fol­low­ers.

Sud­den­ly, thou­sands of appar­ent­ly fake Twit­ter accounts were tweet­ing the title of the article—but link­ing back to one of the two Japan­ese-reg­is­tered fake-news sites cre­at­ed in con­junc­tion with the right-wing anti-Franken cam­paign. The bot accounts nor­mal­ly tweet­ed about celebri­ties, bit­coin and sports, but on that day, they were mobi­lized against Franken. Researchers have found that each bot account had 30 to 60 fol­low­ers, all Japan­ese. The first fol­low­er for each account was either Japan­ese or Russ­ian.

“We began to sus­pect that this legit­i­mate opin­ion piece [by Oluo] had been weaponized for polit­i­cal gain by dozens of twit­ter accounts, all of them repeat­ed­ly tweet­ing links to the two domains reg­is­tered in Japan in late Novem­ber,” Unhack the Vote’s Mike Farb wrote in Medi­um. “Strong sim­i­lar­i­ties between the accounts com­bined with clear con­nec­tion to the two recent­ly-estab­lished Japan­ese web­sites ver­i­fied our sus­pi­cions.”

Soon, Farb and com­pa­ny real­ized they had “stum­bled upon a sophis­ti­cat­ed bot­net being used to spread alt-right pro­pa­gan­da.”

The researcher who dis­cov­ered the bot­net has nick­named it “the Voty bot­net,” and it is still alive today, although cur­rent­ly not oper­at­ing in ser­vice of any polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­da. The researchers esti­mate that more than 400 accounts are in the bot­net, although at any giv­en time, only a sub­set are being deployed in the online Amer­i­can polit­i­cal wars.

I will ful­ly cov­er the legal expens­es of any VICTIM of a Con­gress­man who wants to come for­ward to tell her sto­ry. Break the secre­cy. #UnsealTheDeals— Mike Cer­novich ???? (@Cernovich) Novem­ber 21, 2017

The bot­net has been spread­ing pro­pa­gan­da “for over two months now,” accord­ing to the researchers, and Twit­ter is aware of it, and has not stopped it. “We know this because Twit­ter has sus­pend­ed some spam accounts that fol­low our Voty bots,” the researcher told Newsweek. “This shows that Twit­ter is aware that these ‘fol­low­er’ accounts are not legit­i­mate. But if you look at the “who to fol­low” sug­ges­tion win­dow when you are on a Voty bot­net account, the sug­ges­tions are almost always oth­er Voty Twit­ter bot accounts. This shows that Twit­ter is aware that these accounts are inter­re­lat­ed.”

One ques­tion remains: Who is pay­ing for this oper­a­tion? The researchers believe that the oper­a­tion was expen­sive. “We esti­mate dozens of hours of ini­tial devel­op­ment time and at least one per­son work­ing full time to pro­duce and dis­trib­ute con­tent,” one of the researchers told Newsweek. “Addi­tion­al­ly, it’s like­ly that an exist­ing bot farm of com­pro­mised com­put­ers is basi­cal­ly being rent­ed as a dis­trib­uted host for these accounts.”

Like tar­get­ed Face­book ads that Russ­ian troll farms used in the 2016 elec­tion, Twit­ter bots have been around for years and were orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed for sales pur­pos­es. But since the 2016 elec­tion, arguably lost due to the right’s supe­ri­or uti­liza­tion of dark­er online strate­gies, the left is not known to have cre­at­ed or mobi­lized its own fake cyber army to ampli­fy its view­point.

“Agreed we need one,” Demo­c­ra­t­ic dig­i­tal media strate­gist Jess McIn­tosh, who worked on Franken’s cam­paign and for Hillary Clin­ton’s bid for pres­i­dent, said in an email to Newsweek. “But it’s hard­er to use these tac­tics when you can’t rely on either lies OR hate to do it.”

...
———-

“How an Alt-Right Bot Net­work Took Down Al Franken” by Nina Burleigh; Newsweek;
2/19/2018

“A pair of Japan-based web­sites, cre­at­ed the day before Twee­den came for­ward, and a swarm of relat­ed Twit­ter bots made the Twee­den sto­ry go viral and then weaponized a lib­er­al writer’s crit­i­cism of Franken. The bot army—in tan­dem with promi­nent real, live mem­bers of the far right who have Twit­ter fol­low­ers in the mil­lions, such as Mike Cernovich—spewed thou­sands of posts, help­ing the #Franken­Fon­dles hash­tag and the “Franken is a grop­er” meme effec­tive­ly silence the tes­ti­monies of eight for­mer female staffers who defend­ed the Min­neso­ta Demo­c­rat before he resigned last year.”

So on the same day Roger Stone sends out his now-infa­mous tweet, a Japan­ese devel­op­er reg­is­ters one of the two fake news sites that’s going to be used in the cam­paign call­ing for Franken’s res­ig­na­tion:

...
The oper­a­tion com­menced on Novem­ber 15, when Stone—who is now banned from Twit­ter for racism and profanity—tweeted from one of his accounts “Roger Stone says it’s Al Franken’s ‘time in the bar­rel.’ Franken next in long list of Democ­rats accused of ‘grab­by’ behav­ior.”

On the same day, a devel­op­er named Atsu­fu­mi Otsu­ka reg­is­tered a web domain in Japan called RealUSA.site, and a fake-news web­site soon emerged at that web address, accord­ing to research shared with the vot­ing rights out­fit Unhack the Vote.
...

And then, five days lat­er, we have Charles John­son tweet­ing about his inter­est in pay­ing peo­ple who go on tv to call Franken a preda­tor. And the sec­ond fake new domain gets set up:

...
Five days lat­er, on Novem­ber 20, right-wing provo­ca­teur Charles John­son tweet­ed, “Think­ing of offer­ing mon­ey to peo­ple who go on tv and say Al Frank is a preda­tor.”

That same day, Otsu­ka reg­is­tered a sec­ond domain in Japan for anoth­er fake-news site, VotyUS.me. Both accounts used the same Google ana­lyt­ics account ID and Apple app ID, and the name of the servers and reg­is­tra­tion for both sites were vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal, researchers found.
...

Then a cou­ple of weeks like, the two fake news sites get put into action. The thou­sands of fake Twit­ter accounts sud­den­ly start tweet­ing out an arti­cle writ­ten by a lib­er­al writer call­ing for Franken to resign. But they don’t link to the arti­cle on the orig­i­nal site. Instead, they link to copies of the arti­cle that were repost­ed on the two fake news sites:

...
On Decem­ber 7, just before Democ­rats start­ed call­ing for Franken to step down, the fresh­ly mint­ed Japan-based fake sites went to work and re-pub­lished an arti­cle by Ijeo­ma Oluo, a lib­er­al writer, urg­ing women and activists to stop sup­port­ing Franken. Oluo had post­ed the opin­ion piece, titled “Dear Al Franken, I’ll Miss You but You Can’t Mat­ter Any­more,” on a much small­er web­site, with a reach of 10,000 fol­low­ers.

Sud­den­ly, thou­sands of appar­ent­ly fake Twit­ter accounts were tweet­ing the title of the article—but link­ing back to one of the two Japan­ese-reg­is­tered fake-news sites cre­at­ed in con­junc­tion with the right-wing anti-Franken cam­paign. The bot accounts nor­mal­ly tweet­ed about celebri­ties, bit­coin and sports, but on that day, they were mobi­lized against Franken. Researchers have found that each bot account had 30 to 60 fol­low­ers, all Japan­ese. The first fol­low­er for each account was either Japan­ese or Russ­ian.
...

And this Japan­ese ‘bot­net’ of Twit­ter accounts is still push­ing ‘Alt-Right’ pro­pa­gan­da today. Although not exclu­sive­ly ‘Alt-Right’ pro­pa­gan­da. That’s just a sub­set of what it does, sug­gest­ing that this real­ly just a bot­net-for-hire that got hired by either Roger Stone or Charles John­son:

...
Soon, Farb and com­pa­ny real­ized they had “stum­bled upon a sophis­ti­cat­ed bot­net being used to spread alt-right pro­pa­gan­da.”

The researcher who dis­cov­ered the bot­net has nick­named it “the Voty bot­net,” and it is still alive today, although cur­rent­ly not oper­at­ing in ser­vice of any polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­da. The researchers esti­mate that more than 400 accounts are in the bot­net, although at any giv­en time, only a sub­set are being deployed in the online Amer­i­can polit­i­cal wars.

I will ful­ly cov­er the legal expens­es of any VICTIM of a Con­gress­man who wants to come for­ward to tell her sto­ry. Break the secre­cy. #UnsealTheDeals— Mike Cer­novich ???? (@Cernovich) Novem­ber 21, 2017

The bot­net has been spread­ing pro­pa­gan­da “for over two months now,” accord­ing to the researchers, and Twit­ter is aware of it, and has not stopped it. “We know this because Twit­ter has sus­pend­ed some spam accounts that fol­low our Voty bots,” the researcher told Newsweek. “This shows that Twit­ter is aware that these ‘fol­low­er’ accounts are not legit­i­mate. But if you look at the “who to fol­low” sug­ges­tion win­dow when you are on a Voty bot­net account, the sug­ges­tions are almost always oth­er Voty Twit­ter bot accounts. This shows that Twit­ter is aware that these accounts are inter­re­lat­ed.”
...

But the ques­tion of who actu­al­ly paid for this bot­net-for-hire, along with the cost of set­ting of the two fake new sites, has yet to be answered. And these ser­vices prob­a­bly were cheap:

...
One ques­tion remains: Who is pay­ing for this oper­a­tion? The researchers believe that the oper­a­tion was expen­sive. “We esti­mate dozens of hours of ini­tial devel­op­ment time and at least one per­son work­ing full time to pro­duce and dis­trib­ute con­tent,” one of the researchers told Newsweek. “Addi­tion­al­ly, it’s like­ly that an exist­ing bot farm of com­pro­mised com­put­ers is basi­cal­ly being rent­ed as a dis­trib­uted host for these accounts.”

Like tar­get­ed Face­book ads that Russ­ian troll farms used in the 2016 elec­tion, Twit­ter bots have been around for years and were orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed for sales pur­pos­es. But since the 2016 elec­tion, arguably lost due to the right’s supe­ri­or uti­liza­tion of dark­er online strate­gies, the left is not known to have cre­at­ed or mobi­lized its own fake cyber army to ampli­fy its view­point.
...

So, while it’s unclear how much actu­al impact that this Twit­ter bot army had on how this issue unfold­ed, we appear to have a real-world glimpse here of how the right-wing troll net­work is har­ness­ing such tech­nolo­gies to ampli­fy their mes­sage and cre­ate an online echo-cham­ber where ‘every­one’ is sud­den­ly say­ing the same thing. ‘Every­one’ sud­den­ly say­ing same far-right thing that some­one like Roger Stone or Charles John­son paid them to say.

Here’s an update on Milo Yiannopoulus and what hap­pened to his career after he was forced to step down as senior edi­tor at Bre­it­bart after pub­licly endors­ing adults hav­ing sex with your teens. It’s an update that is par­tic­u­lar­ly top­i­cal giv­en the recent right-wing embrace of the Alex Jone ‘cri­sis actors’ meme — that the school shoot­ing was a hoax and the stu­dents are actors — in the wake of the school shoot­ing in Flori­da: It turns out Milo found a new media home. Sell­ing over­priced sup­ple­ments at Alex Jones’s InfoWars:

AV Club

Milo Yiannopou­los has been reduced to shilling “sup­ple­ments” on InfoWars

Gabe Wor­gaftik
02/21/2018 4:13pm

The last time we saw Milo Yiannopolous he was drop­ping the law­suit he filed against pub­lish­er Simon & Schus­ter over the can­cel­la­tion of his book deal. This was despite the fact that the dis­cov­ery process had already made pub­lic the embar­rass­ing notes process in which his increas­ing­ly frus­trat­ed edi­tor repeat­ed­ly dunked all over him..

It wasn’t so long ago that Yiannopolous was a star colum­nist for Bre­it­bart. For a brief, glit­ter­ing moment, Yiannopolous man­aged to par­lay this posi­tion into many appear­ances on a num­ber of reputable(ish) out­lets, before falling vic­tim to a series of increas­ing­ly mor­ti­fy­ing self-induced pub­lic fias­cos. Today, Yiannopolous has resur­faced and, as noticed by writer Ross McCaf­fer­ty, his lat­est humil­i­a­tion finds him at an out­let and with a job much more suit­ed to his non-tal­ents: hawk­ing snake-oil health sup­ple­ments at InfoWars.

Milo is sell­ing sup­ple­ments on Infowars. This is not a drill. pic.twitter.com/zieQXOqtRi— Ross McCaf­fer­ty (@RossMcCaff) Feb­ru­ary 21, 2018

There’s a lot to savor in this 45-sec­ond clip. Enjoy the mass of papers for some rea­son all over his desk, a sta­ple of the InfoWars style. Pause to breathe in the way Yiannopolous’ British accent real­ly dri­ves home exact­ly how indig­nant Milo is at hav­ing been reduced to sell­ing garbage “Icuren 30-Day Liv­er Cleanse” to idiots via fake radio, when mere months ago he was sell­ing made-up race wars to idiots via Fox News. Lux­u­ri­ate in the muf­fled way he tries to psy­che him­self up to swal­low some sug­ar pills, wash­ing them down with bot­tled water that is sure­ly not flu­o­ride-free. This, unlike Alex Jones’ bull­shit sup­ple­ments, is the good stuff.

...

———–

“Milo Yiannopou­los has been reduced to shilling “sup­ple­ments” on InfoWars” by Gabe Wor­gaftik; AV Club; 02/21/2018

“It wasn’t so long ago that Yiannopolous was a star colum­nist for Bre­it­bart. For a brief, glit­ter­ing moment, Yiannopolous man­aged to par­lay this posi­tion into many appear­ances on a num­ber of reputable(ish) out­lets, before falling vic­tim to a series of increas­ing­ly mor­ti­fy­ing self-induced pub­lic fias­cos. Today, Yiannopolous has resur­faced and, as noticed by writer Ross McCaf­fer­ty, his lat­est humil­i­a­tion finds him at an out­let and with a job much more suit­ed to his non-tal­ents: hawk­ing snake-oil health sup­ple­ments at InfoWars.”

Has Milo found his true call­ing? Per­haps, but also keep in mind that InfoWars is one of the best sites he could have found to rebuild his career as a far-right troll provo­ca­teur. After all, Bre­it­bart and InfoWars have explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty with right-wing audi­ences in recent years, so he’s prob­a­bly reach­ing much of the same audi­ence at InfoWars tha he was at Bre­it­bart. In fact, based on “Google trends”, both Bre­it­bart and Infowars are now far more pop­u­lar than Rush Lim­baugh. So if hawk­ing over­priced sup­ple­ments is a demo­tion, it’s not much of demo­tion.

And depend­ing on how much of a cut Milo gets, who knows, he might actu­al­ly be mak­ing more mon­ey now than ever. Because as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, those over­priced sup­ple­ments are the bread and but­ter that finance Alex Jones’s media empire:

Buz­zFeed

We Sent Alex Jones’ Infowars Sup­ple­ments To A Lab. Here’s What’s In Them.

“You could grab a bot­tle for around $10 and skip the 2X+ price markup from Infowars,” one lab review reads.

Char­lie Warzel
Buz­zFeed News Reporter
Post­ed on August 9, 2017, at 5:12 p.m.

Alex Jones’ wild­ly pop­u­lar suite of Infowars sup­ple­ments prob­a­bly won’t kill you, but exten­sive tests pro­vid­ed to Buz­zFeed News have shown that they’re lit­tle more than over­priced and inef­fec­tive blends of vit­a­mins and min­er­als that have been sold in stores for ages.

The inde­pen­dent test results are the work of Lab­door, a San Francisco–based lab that tests and grades dietary sup­ple­ments. Lab­door ran full tests on six pop­u­lar Infowars sup­ple­ments to deter­mine the exact make­up of each sup­ple­ment and screen for var­i­ous dan­ger­ous and ille­gal chem­i­cals. It also inves­ti­gat­ed a few of the prod­ucts that “claimed incred­i­ble ben­e­fits for what seemed like could just be sim­ple ingre­di­ents.”

“We test­ed sam­ples in trip­li­cate, and wher­ev­er pos­si­ble, cross-checked those results with at least two inde­pen­dent ana­lyt­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries, so we have com­plete trust in our con­clu­sions,” Bri­an Bran­d­ley, Lab­door’s lab­o­ra­to­ry direc­tor, told Buz­zFeed News.

All of the test results were large­ly the same: The prod­ucts are — more or less — accu­rate­ly adver­tised. They don’t con­tain sig­nif­i­cant­ly more or less of a par­tic­u­lar ingre­di­ent than list­ed on the bot­tles, and there are no sur­prise ingre­di­ents. They’re also rea­son­ably safe, mean­ing they passed heavy met­al con­t­a­m­i­nant screen­ings and test­ed free of stim­u­lants, depres­sants, and oth­er pro­hib­it­ed drugs.

But just because the prod­ucts’ ingre­di­ents matched their labels does­n’t mean they lived up to Jones’ claims. Sur­vival Shield X‑2, for exam­ple, “is just plain iodine, the same stuff doc­tors used to pour on sur­faces as a dis­in­fec­tant,” Lab­door’s results read.

When the com­pa­ny test­ed Anthro­plex, which retails for $29.95, it found that there was so lit­tle zinc that “if you’re extreme­ly zinc defi­cient, the value...is not going to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly help­ful.” The report notes that “you could actu­al­ly get anoth­er zinc oro­tate sup­ple­ment for around $5 WITH an impact­ful serv­ing size,” before con­clud­ing sim­ply that “this prod­uct is a waste of mon­ey.”

This claim — that the Infowars sup­ple­ments often con­tained less effec­tive serv­ing sizes than their less expen­sive coun­ter­parts — was a run­ning theme in Lab­door’s results. In almost every exam­ple, Lab­door’s tests and reviews describe the prod­ucts as lit­tle more than heav­i­ly over­priced sup­ple­ments with few health ben­e­fits, if any.

As Jones’ pop­u­lar­i­ty has risen, so has his sup­ple­ments busi­ness, which sources have told Buz­zFeed News large­ly funds Jones’ high­ly con­tro­ver­sial Infowars media empire — home to incen­di­ary con­spir­a­cies includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to #Piz­za­gate, that the Sandy Hook mas­sacre was faked, and that mur­dered DNC staffer Seth Rich pro­vid­ed Wik­iLeaks with the DNC emails — in addi­tion to act­ing as a kind of lifestyle-brand com­ple­ment to Jones’ par­tic­u­lar brand of con­spir­a­cy-mind­ed, fear-fueled pro­gram­ming.

“He can sell 500 sup­ple­ments in an hour,” a for­mer employ­ee told Buz­zFeed News this spring. “It’s like QVC for con­spir­a­cy.” One esti­mate by New York mag­a­zine — which uses some back-of-the-enve­lope cal­cu­la­tions based on the num­ber of reviews of sup­ple­ments on Jones’ Infowars Life Store — sug­gests that, with an aver­age sup­ple­ment price of $30, Jones could haul in $15,000,000 in sales over a two-year peri­od. A sec­ond, less con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate from the mag­a­zine puts the fig­ure even high­er — near­ly $25,000,000 with­out includ­ing repeat cus­tomers (of which there are like­ly many).

...

———-

“We Sent Alex Jones’ Infowars Sup­ple­ments To A Lab. Here’s What’s In Them.” by Char­lie Warzel; Buz­zFeed; 08/09/2017

“As Jones’ pop­u­lar­i­ty has risen, so has his sup­ple­ments busi­ness, which sources have told Buz­zFeed News large­ly funds Jones’ high­ly con­tro­ver­sial Infowars media empire — home to incen­di­ary con­spir­a­cies includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to #Piz­za­gate, that the Sandy Hook mas­sacre was faked, and that mur­dered DNC staffer Seth Rich pro­vid­ed Wik­iLeaks with the DNC emails — in addi­tion to act­ing as a kind of lifestyle-brand com­ple­ment to Jones’ par­tic­u­lar brand of con­spir­a­cy-mind­ed, fear-fueled pro­gram­ming.”

So accord­ing to Buz­zFeed’s sources, it’s those sup­ple­ments that Yiannopou­los was hawk­ing that large­ly funds Jones’ media empire. And it’s a rapid­ly grow­ing empire so those sup­ple­ments are pre­sum­ably fuel­ing that growth too, which does­n’t sound out­landish if the fol­low­ing esti­mates about how much Jones makes each year off these sup­ple­ments are accu­rate:

...
“He can sell 500 sup­ple­ments in an hour,” a for­mer employ­ee told Buz­zFeed News this spring. “It’s like QVC for con­spir­a­cy.” One esti­mate by New York mag­a­zine — which uses some back-of-the-enve­lope cal­cu­la­tions based on the num­ber of reviews of sup­ple­ments on Jones’ Infowars Life Store — sug­gests that, with an aver­age sup­ple­ment price of $30, Jones could haul in $15,000,000 in sales over a two-year peri­od. A sec­ond, less con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate from the mag­a­zine puts the fig­ure even high­er — near­ly $25,000,000 with­out includ­ing repeat cus­tomers (of which there are like­ly many).
...

$15–25 mil­lion a year from sell­ing InfoWars-brand sup­ple­ments. That’s not chump change. It’s a chump for­tune. And that’s what Milo Yiannopou­los is now sell­ing to the InfoWars audi­ence to rebuild his career. And, iron­i­cal­ly, ped­dling over­priced sup­ple­ments is far less harm­ful and decep­tive than what Yiannopou­los was ped­dling before his down­fall. After all, these sup­ple­ments at least don’t appear to be filled with poi­sons:

...
All of the test results were large­ly the same: The prod­ucts are — more or less — accu­rate­ly adver­tised. They don’t con­tain sig­nif­i­cant­ly more or less of a par­tic­u­lar ingre­di­ent than list­ed on the bot­tles, and there are no sur­prise ingre­di­ents. They’re also rea­son­ably safe, mean­ing they passed heavy met­al con­t­a­m­i­nant screen­ings and test­ed free of stim­u­lants, depres­sants, and oth­er pro­hib­it­ed drugs.
...

So there we go: Milo Yiannopou­los has shift­ed from ped­dling far-right poi­son to now ped­dling large­ly harm­less, if over­priced, sup­ple­ments. If those sup­ple­ments weren’t fund­ing a giant infor­ma­tion-poi­son fac­to­ry like InfoWars this down­fall would almost be a pos­i­tive turn for Milo.

Here’s anoth­er exam­ple of con­tem­po­rary far-right youth out­reach efforts. It’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­turb­ing exam­ple:

A white suprema­cist was just caught work­ing for a school mid­dle Flori­da. again. They were caught large­ly because they were open­ly brag­ging about it. Open­ly but anony­mous­ly brag­ging about it on their white nation­al­ist pod­cast. Thanks to some sleuthing by the blog Angry White Men and the Huff­in­g­ton Post, the anony­mous pod­cast­er who goes by the name “Tiana Dali­chov” was iden­ti­fied as Dayan­na Volitich, a 25-year-old social stud­ies teach at Crys­tal Riv­er Mid­dle School in Flori­da.

Dur­ing her most recent pod­cast, Volitich scoffed at the notion that there aren’t racial dif­fer­ences in IQ and boast­ed about how she injects her views into the class­room and just denies it to the prin­ci­pal when the par­ents com­plain. She also agreed with her guest’s sug­ges­tion that more white suprema­cists need to infil­trate the class­room:

The Huff­in­g­ton Post

Exclu­sive: Flori­da Pub­lic School Teacher Has A White Nation­al­ist Pod­cast
Dayan­na Volitich sug­gests Mus­lims be erad­i­cat­ed from the earth, believes anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries ... and teach­es mid­dle school social stud­ies.

By Christo­pher Math­ias, Jen­na Amat­ul­li, and Rebec­ca Klein
03/03/2018 12:02 pm ET Updat­ed

UPDATE — March 4: Dayan­na Volitich has been “removed from the class­room,” Cit­rus Coun­ty School Dis­trict Super­in­ten­dent San­dra Him­mel announced Sun­day in a state­ment.

“On Fri­day, March 2, 2018, the Cit­rus Coun­ty School Dis­trict was made aware [by a Huff­Post reporter] of a con­cern­ing pod­cast,” Him­mel said in the state­ment. “The Human Resources depart­ment was noti­fied and an inves­ti­ga­tion was ini­ti­at­ed imme­di­ate­ly. The teacher has been removed from the class­room and the inves­ti­ga­tion is ongo­ing.”

PREVIOUSLY:

Dayan­na Volitich, a 25-year-old social stud­ies teacher at Crys­tal Riv­er Mid­dle School in Flori­da, has been secret­ly host­ing the white nation­al­ist pod­cast “Unapolo­getic” under the pseu­do­nym “Tiana Dali­chov” and brag­ging about teach­ing her views in a pub­lic school, Huff­Post has dis­cov­ered.

In her most recent pod­cast on Feb. 26, a guest railed against diver­si­ty in schools, dis­miss­ing the idea that “a kid from Nige­ria and a kid who came from Swe­den are sup­posed to learn exact­ly the same” and have the “same IQ.” Volitich enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly agreed with the guest, and went on to argue that “sci­ence” has proven that cer­tain races are smarter than oth­ers.

In the same episode, Volitich boast­ed about bring­ing her white nation­al­ist beliefs into the class­room and hid­ing her ide­ol­o­gy from admin­is­tra­tors. She said that when par­ents com­plained to the school’s prin­ci­pal about how she is inject­ing polit­i­cal bias into the class­room, Volitich lied to the prin­ci­pal and said it was not true.

“She believed me and backed off,” she said.

Volitich also agreed with her guest’s asser­tion that more white suprema­cists need to infil­trate pub­lic schools and become teach­ers. “They don’t have to be vocal about their views, but get in there!” her guest said. “Be more covert and just start tak­ing over those places.”

“Right,” Volitich said. “I’m absolute­ly one of them.”

After Huff­Post made inquiries about Volitich’s white nation­al­ism to the Cit­rus Coun­ty School Dis­trict on Fri­day, “Tiana Dali­chov” tweet­ed that she “might dis­ap­pear for a while” and then set her account to pri­vate. She also scrubbed the web­site for her pod­cast.

Huff­Post took screen­shots of many of the racist and incen­di­ary state­ments she made online.

[see screen­shot of tweet]
[see screen­shot of tweet]
[see screen­shot of tweet]
[see screen­shot of tweet]
We also down­loaded the episode of this week’s pod­cast, which you can lis­ten to here (start at 01:30 for the afore­men­tioned com­ments).
[see audio clip of pod­cast]

The school where Volitich works is over­whelm­ing­ly white. In the 2015–2016 school year, near­ly 90 per­cent of the school’s stu­dents iden­ti­fied as white, per the Nation­al Cen­ter for Edu­ca­tion Sta­tis­tics. Only about 4 per­cent of stu­dents iden­ti­fy as black, and 3 per­cent iden­ti­fy as His­pan­ic. Most of the school’s stu­dents qual­i­fy for free or reduced-price lunch.

...

Ear­li­er this week, the blog Angry White Men, which tracks white nation­al­ism, wrote a post about how some­one named “Tiana Dali­chov” had inter­viewed the promi­nent white suprema­cist media fig­ure Lana Lok­t­eff on this week’s episode of “Unapolo­getic.” Lok­t­eff works for the media out­fit Red Ice TV, which the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter recent­ly des­ig­nat­ed as a hate group.

In the episode, “Tiana Dalich­tov” talked open­ly about being a pub­lic school teacher, but didn’t reveal her real name or the school where she worked.

Huff­Post found a web­site pro­mot­ing the writ­ing of “Tiana Dali­chov” that had a bio sec­tion list­ing the author’s home as Crys­tal City, Flori­da. Volitich is list­ed in pub­lic records as resid­ing in Crys­tal City. She is also list­ed as being 25 years old. This year, when a fan tweet­ed at “Tiana Dali­chov” ask­ing how old she is, she respond­ed that she was 25.

On an episode of her pod­cast, she men­tioned that last school year was her first year in the dis­trict where she works. Cit­rus Coun­ty School Dis­trict con­firmed to Huff­Post that Volitich start­ed teach­ing in the dis­trict in August 2016.

Volitich’s pho­to on the Crys­tal Riv­er Mid­dle School web­site and social media pro­file pho­tos of “Tiana Dali­chov” appear to fea­ture the same per­son. The pho­tos show Volitich and “Dali­chov” wear­ing the same set of ear­rings (seen at the top of this piece).

Last­ly, the names “Tiana Dali­chov” and “Dayan­na Volitich” share all but two of the same let­ters and the same num­ber of syl­la­bles.

In her pod­cast appear­ances and social media posts, Volitich talks reg­u­lar­ly about being a teacher (even men­tion­ing she teach­es in Flori­da) and makes state­ments that are deeply alarm­ing — par­tic­u­lar­ly for some­one tasked with shap­ing the minds of mid­dle-school stu­dents.

On this week’s pod­cast, Volitich said that when stu­dents ask her ques­tions about cur­rent events, she responds with unbi­ased “facts.”

But as “Tiana Dali­chov,” Volitich has sug­gest­ed “facts” such as that ter­ror­ism will con­tin­ue unless Mus­lims are erad­i­cat­ed “from the face of the Earth.”

[see screen­shot of her call­ing for Mus­lims to be erad­i­cat­ed]
[see screen­shot of tweet where she talks about being penal­ized by Twit­ter for the sec­ond time a week for tweets about Islam]
[see tweet blam­ing ‘Islam’ for ter­ror­ism]

She has gushed about the work by anti-Semit­ic author Kevin Mac­Don­ald, and has said the “JQ is incred­i­bly com­plex.” JQ stands for the “Jew­ish Ques­tion,” an anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that Jew­ish peo­ple have undue influ­ence over the media, bank­ing and pol­i­tics that must some­how be addressed.

[see screen­shot of tweet prais­ing Kevin Mac­Don­ald book]
[see screen­shot of tweet talk­ing the ‘Jew­ish Ques­tion’]
She has repeat­ed­ly praised, defend­ed and retweet­ed neo-Nazis and white suprema­cists includ­ing David Duke, Arthur Jones, Patrick Casey, Mark Col­lett and Mike Peinovich, aka Mike Enoch.
[see screen­shot of David Duke tweet she retweet­ed]

Many white suprema­cists across Amer­i­ca today lead dou­ble lives, advo­cat­ing loud­ly and anony­mous­ly for white suprema­cy and fas­cism online while hold­ing down respectable jobs and doing their best to keep their online lives hid­den.

But over the past year, some of them have been exposed. In June, the prin­ci­pal of a char­ter school in New Orleans was fired from his job after videos sur­faced that showed him wear­ing rings asso­ci­at­ed with white nation­al­ism. He had sim­i­lar­ly appeared on white nation­al­ist pod­casts.

A for­mer Catholic sub­sti­tute teacher and field hock­ey coach in Mary­land was fired ear­li­er this year after his school learned that he was also employed by the Nation­al Pol­i­cy Insti­tute — white suprema­cist Richard Spencer’s think tank — and the web­site Altright.com. Like Volitich, he post­ed on social media under a pseu­do­nym. Addi­tion­al­ly, he was in charge of Spencer’s secu­ri­ty detail dur­ing the dead­ly “Unite the Right” ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, in August 2017.

Volitich made clear on anoth­er pod­cast this year that her stu­dents know her polit­i­cal beliefs.

On an episode of the con­ser­v­a­tive “Resis­tance Pod­cast,” she said her stu­dents often repeat­ed­ly asked her who she was going to vote for in the 2016 elec­tion.

She said we wouldn’t tell the stu­dents, fear­ing ret­ri­bu­tion from admin­is­tra­tors. But she said she told them, “if you can fig­ure out who I vot­ed for, you can put the name in this bas­ket on my desk and we’ll see how many of you can fig­ure it out … I will give your class a reward.’”

She said all of her stu­dents guessed cor­rect­ly by using “log­ic” and “engag­ing” with what she was teach­ing.

———-

“Exclu­sive: Flori­da Pub­lic School Teacher Has A White Nation­al­ist Pod­cast” by Christo­pher Math­ias, Jen­na Amat­ul­li, and Rebec­ca Klein; The Huff­in­g­ton Post; 03/03/2018

“Volitich also agreed with her guest’s asser­tion that more white suprema­cists need to infil­trate pub­lic schools and become teach­ers. “They don’t have to be vocal about their views, but get in there!” her guest said. “Be more covert and just start tak­ing over those places.””

“Be more covert and just start tak­ing over those places.” That was Volitich’s mes­sage. Along with a gen­er­al white suprema­cist mes­sage. And she appar­ent­ly was quite proud of how she inject­ed this mes­sage into the class­room:

...
Dayan­na Volitich, a 25-year-old social stud­ies teacher at Crys­tal Riv­er Mid­dle School in Flori­da, has been secret­ly host­ing the white nation­al­ist pod­cast “Unapolo­getic” under the pseu­do­nym “Tiana Dali­chov” and brag­ging about teach­ing her views in a pub­lic school, Huff­Post has dis­cov­ered.

In her most recent pod­cast on Feb. 26, a guest railed against diver­si­ty in schools, dis­miss­ing the idea that “a kid from Nige­ria and a kid who came from Swe­den are sup­posed to learn exact­ly the same” and have the “same IQ.” Volitich enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly agreed with the guest, and went on to argue that “sci­ence” has proven that cer­tain races are smarter than oth­ers.

In the same episode, Volitich boast­ed about bring­ing her white nation­al­ist beliefs into the class­room and hid­ing her ide­ol­o­gy from admin­is­tra­tors. She said that when par­ents com­plained to the school’s prin­ci­pal about how she is inject­ing polit­i­cal bias into the class­room, Volitich lied to the prin­ci­pal and said it was not true.

“She believed me and backed off,” she said.
...

And she appar­ent­ly made her beliefs clear enough that all of her stu­dents knew exact­ly who she vot­ed for in the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion (undoubt­ed­ly for Trump):

...
Volitich made clear on anoth­er pod­cast this year that her stu­dents know her polit­i­cal beliefs.

On an episode of the con­ser­v­a­tive “Resis­tance Pod­cast,” she said her stu­dents often repeat­ed­ly asked her who she was going to vote for in the 2016 elec­tion.

She said we wouldn’t tell the stu­dents, fear­ing ret­ri­bu­tion from admin­is­tra­tors. But she said she told them, “if you can fig­ure out who I vot­ed for, you can put the name in this bas­ket on my desk and we’ll see how many of you can fig­ure it out … I will give your class a reward.’”

She said all of her stu­dents guessed cor­rect­ly by using “log­ic” and “engag­ing” with what she was teach­ing.

And this isn’t a some­what ‘Alt Right’-ish very con­ser­v­a­tive per­son inject­ing her views into the class­room. She repeat­ed­ly praised, defend­ed and retweet­ed neo-Nazis and white suprema­cists while post­ing as “Tiana Dali­chov” on social media. And that’s pre­sum­ably the view­point she was inject­ing into the class­room:

...
But as “Tiana Dali­chov,” Volitich has sug­gest­ed “facts” such as that ter­ror­ism will con­tin­ue unless Mus­lims are erad­i­cat­ed “from the face of the Earth.”

[see screen­shot of her call­ing for Mus­lims to be erad­i­cat­ed]
[see screen­shot of tweet where she talks about being penal­ized by Twit­ter for the sec­ond time a week for tweets about Islam]
[see tweet blam­ing ‘Islam’ for ter­ror­ism]

She has gushed about the work by anti-Semit­ic author Kevin Mac­Don­ald, and has said the “JQ is incred­i­bly com­plex.” JQ stands for the “Jew­ish Ques­tion,” an anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that Jew­ish peo­ple have undue influ­ence over the media, bank­ing and pol­i­tics that must some­how be addressed.

...

She has repeat­ed­ly praised, defend­ed and retweet­ed neo-Nazis and white suprema­cists includ­ing David Duke, Arthur Jones, Patrick Casey, Mark Col­lett and Mike Peinovich, aka Mike Enoch.
...

And, of course, this is just one instance of the inevitable real­i­ty that white suprema­cists are going to be liv­ing dou­ble lives like this all over the US. And edu­ca­tion is one of those areas that will be of high inter­est to such move­ments:

...
Many white suprema­cists across Amer­i­ca today lead dou­ble lives, advo­cat­ing loud­ly and anony­mous­ly for white suprema­cy and fas­cism online while hold­ing down respectable jobs and doing their best to keep their online lives hid­den.

But over the past year, some of them have been exposed. In June, the prin­ci­pal of a char­ter school in New Orleans was fired from his job after videos sur­faced that showed him wear­ing rings asso­ci­at­ed with white nation­al­ism. He had sim­i­lar­ly appeared on white nation­al­ist pod­casts.

A for­mer Catholic sub­sti­tute teacher and field hock­ey coach in Mary­land was fired ear­li­er this year after his school learned that he was also employed by the Nation­al Pol­i­cy Insti­tute — white suprema­cist Richard Spencer’s think tank — and the web­site Altright.com. Like Volitich, he post­ed on social media under a pseu­do­nym. Addi­tion­al­ly, he was in charge of Spencer’s secu­ri­ty detail dur­ing the dead­ly “Unite the Right” ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, in August 2017.
...

So that’s anoth­er exam­ple of how the far-right is using social media to expand its reach: infil­trat­ing school teach­ers into the class­room and then mak­ing pod­casts where they brag about it and encour­age oth­ers to do the same.

Here’s one of those sto­ries that must be music to the Alt Right’s ears: accord­ing to a recent sur­vey of Amer­i­cans, almost a third of them think “sub­stan­tial­ly less” than 6 mil­lion Jews were mur­dered in the Holo­caust and that the real death toll was at least 2 mil­lion or less. And for mil­len­ni­als this was 41 per­cent. Addi­tion­al­ly, 45 per­cent of Amer­i­cans were unable to name a sin­gle con­cen­tra­tion camp, while two thirds of mil­len­ni­als did­n’t know Auschwitz was a death camp. So at this point we just have to hope that this is more a reflec­tion of a lack of gen­er­al edu­ca­tion than a reflec­tion of the rise of the Alt Right and its Holo­caust denial­ism:

Newsweek

One-Third of Amer­i­cans Don’t Believe 6 Mil­lion Jews Were Mur­dered Dur­ing the Holo­caust

By David Bren­nan On 4/12/18 at 10:39 AM

One-third of Amer­i­cans think “sub­stan­tial­ly less” than 6 mil­lion Jews were mur­dered in the Holo­caust, accord­ing to a new sur­vey that high­lights a wor­ry­ing lack of basic knowl­edge about the World War II-era geno­cide.

The Con­fer­ence on Jew­ish Mate­r­i­al Claims Against Ger­many, or Claims Con­fer­ence, released the find­ings of its sur­vey to coin­cide with Holo­caust Remem­brance Day. They show a notable lack of under­stand­ing among Amer­i­cans, espe­cial­ly mil­len­ni­als, the group said.

The Claims Con­fer­ence said there are “crit­i­cal gaps both in aware­ness of basic facts as well as detailed knowl­edge of the Holo­caust” in Amer­i­can soci­ety, stress­ing that U.S. schools must pro­vide more com­pre­hen­sive edu­ca­tion on the crimes.

The sur­vey shows that 70 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe peo­ple care less about the Holo­caust than they used to. A major­i­ty, 58 per­cent, said they believe some­thing like the Holo­caust could hap­pen again.

Just under a third (31 per­cent) of those sur­veyed do not believe that 6 mil­lion Jews were killed dur­ing the Holo­caust and think the real death toll is at least 2 mil­lion low­er. This was true for 41 per­cent of mil­len­ni­als.

Adolf Hitler’s fas­cist Nazi regime killed approx­i­mate­ly 6 mil­lion Jews before and dur­ing World War II. The Nazis also mur­dered mil­lions of East­ern Euro­pean civil­ians, Sovi­et pris­on­ers of war, dis­abled peo­ple, homo­sex­u­als and polit­i­cal pris­on­ers. Esti­mates of the total death toll reach as high at 15 mil­lion to 20 mil­lion peo­ple.

Almost half (45 per­cent) of Amer­i­cans were unable to name a sin­gle con­cen­tra­tion camp, and the num­ber was even worse for mil­len­ni­als (49 per­cent). Two-thirds (66 per­cent) of mil­len­ni­als were unable to explain what Auschwitz was. The death camp is one of the most infa­mous ones that exist­ed in Nazi-ruled Europe, and its name has become syn­ony­mous with the geno­cide.

Fif­teen per­cent thought peo­ple should be allowed to dis­play Nazi slo­gans or sym­bols today, while 11 per­cent said it is accept­able to hold neo-Nazi views.

These fig­ures are espe­cial­ly con­cern­ing giv­en the report­ed rise in hate group num­bers num­bers, activ­i­ty and con­fi­dence in recent years. A Feb­ru­ary report from the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter claimed that the num­ber of hate groups in the U.S. has increased by 20 per­cent over the past three years. The num­ber of neo-Nazi groups increased from 99 in 2016 to 121 in 2017, the cen­ter said.

Around two-thirds (68 per­cent) of Amer­i­cans believe there is anti-Semi­tism in the U.S. today, and a major­i­ty (51 per­cent) think there is either a great deal of (17 per­cent) or many (34 per­cent) neo-Nazis in the coun­try today.

Despite the wor­ry­ing fig­ures, 93 per­cent of those asked think the Holo­caust should be taught in schools, while 96 per­cent believe that the geno­cide hap­pened.

...

The Claims Con­fer­ence said its results are based on a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple of 1,350 Amer­i­can adults inter­viewed by phone and online. Respon­dents were select­ed ran­dom­ly and reflect­ed the demo­graph­ics of the Amer­i­can adult pop­u­la­tion, it said.
———-

“One-Third of Amer­i­cans Don’t Believe 6 Mil­lion Jews Were Mur­dered Dur­ing the Holo­caust” by David Bren­nan; Newsweek; 04/12/2018 at 10:39 AM

“Just under a third (31 per­cent) of those sur­veyed do not believe that 6 mil­lion Jews were killed dur­ing the Holo­caust and think the real death toll is at least 2 mil­lion low­er. This was true for 41 per­cent of mil­len­ni­als.”

Part of what makes the high num­ber of respon­dents say­ing the real death toll of the Holo­caust were 2 mil­lion or less is that the sug­ges­tion that the Holo­caust was 2 mil­lion Jews or less is like a far right call­ing card. It would be one thing if a third of Amer­i­cans said they had no idea who many Jews died in the Holo­caust. But in this case it sounds like a large num­ber of Amer­i­cans were actu­al­ly repeat­ing far right talk­ing points.

At the same time, when you find that 45 per­cent of Amer­i­cans could­n’t name a sin­gle con­cen­tra­tion camp and two-thirds of mil­len­ni­als did­n’t know what Auschwitz was, that points much more in the direc­tion of Amer­i­cans sim­ply hav­ing no real knowl­edge about the top­ic:

...
Almost half (45 per­cent) of Amer­i­cans were unable to name a sin­gle con­cen­tra­tion camp, and the num­ber was even worse for mil­len­ni­als (49 per­cent). Two-thirds (66 per­cent) of mil­len­ni­als were unable to explain what Auschwitz was. The death camp is one of the most infa­mous ones that exist­ed in Nazi-ruled Europe, and its name has become syn­ony­mous with the geno­cide.
...

Addi­tion­al­ly, 93 per­cent of those sur­veyed did appear to thing the Holo­caust should be taught in schools, which seems like a good sign because at least that over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of that third of Amer­i­cans who ques­tion the 6 mil­lion sta­tis­tic are still in favor or teach­ing about the Holo­caust:

...
Despite the wor­ry­ing fig­ures, 93 per­cent of those asked think the Holo­caust should be taught in schools, while 96 per­cent believe that the geno­cide hap­pened.
...

At the same time, it’s hard to inter­pret whether or not the find­ing that a major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans think there are either a “great deal of” or “many” neo-Nazis in Amer­i­ca today is a sign of grow­ing aware­ness of neo-Nazi extrem­ism or a sign that peo­ple per­son­al know a lot of neo-Nazis:

...
Around two-thirds (68 per­cent) of Amer­i­cans believe there is anti-Semi­tism in the U.S. today, and a major­i­ty (51 per­cent) think there is either a great deal of (17 per­cent) or many (34 per­cent) neo-Nazis in the coun­try today.
...

So is that reflect­ing the suc­cess of the Alt Right at stay­ing in the news and main­tain­ing a media/internet pres­ence? Is it reflect­ing Don­ald Trump becom­ing pres­i­dent? Or do a large num­ber of Amer­i­cans actu­al­ly per­son­al­ly know a lot of peo­ple who open­ly hold neo-Nazi views? Well, the sur­vey gives us a hint about that, with 11 per­cent of respon­dents say­ing its accept­able to hold neo-Nazi views. And that 11 per­cent are going to know a lot of the oth­er 89 per­cent of the pub­lic:

...
Fif­teen per­cent thought peo­ple should be allowed to dis­play Nazi slo­gans or sym­bols today, while 11 per­cent said it is accept­able to hold neo-Nazi views.
...

So about 1‑in-10 Amer­i­cans think being a neo-Nazi is fine (which means they are basi­cal­ly neo-Nazis), while 1‑in‑3 Amer­i­cans have wit­ting­ly or unwit­ting­ly absorbed the kind of under­stand­ing about the Holo­caust that the far right has been push­ing for decades and 2‑in‑3 mil­len­ni­als did­n’t know any­thing about Auschwitz. And around half of Amer­i­cans believe there are “many” or “a great deal of” neo-Nazis in Amer­i­ca today.

But it was­n’t all omi­nous. At least 9‑in-10 Amer­i­cans think the Holo­caust should be taught in schools. That was pos­i­tive. Because it turns out there was anoth­er pret­ty shock­ing find­ing in this sur­vey regard­ing US mil­len­ni­als and their knowl­edge of the Holo­caust: 1‑in‑5 US mil­len­ni­als weren’t sure they had heard about the Holo­caust or knew what it was:

Jew­ish Tele­graph­ic Agency

22% of US mil­len­ni­als haven’t heard of or are not sure if they have heard of the Holo­caust, study finds

April 12, 2018 10:15am

(JTA) — Over a fifth of mil­len­ni­als in the Unit­ed States have not heard of or are unsure if they have heard of the Holo­caust, a study found.

The sur­vey, which was com­mis­sioned by the Con­fer­ence on Jew­ish Mate­r­i­al Claims Against Ger­many (also known as the Claims Con­fer­ence), found that many Amer­i­cans were unaware of basic facts about the Holo­caust.

The results were released Thurs­day, which marks Yom Hashoah, or Holo­caust Remem­brance Day. The study includ­ed 1,350 inter­views with Amer­i­cans aged 18 and over.

While 6 mil­lion Jews are esti­mat­ed killed in the Holo­caust, 31 per­cent of all respon­dents and 41 per­cent of mil­len­ni­als, aged 18 to 34, believe that num­ber is 2 mil­lion or less, accord­ing to the sur­vey.

Forty-five per­cent of all respon­dents could not name a con­cen­tra­tion camp or ghet­to from World War II, and 41 per­cent could not iden­ti­fy Auschwitz, a net­work of Nazi con­cen­tra­tion and exter­mi­na­tion camps.

...

Claims Con­fer­ence Pres­i­dent Julius Berman expressed con­cern about the lack of knowl­edge about the Holo­caust among mil­len­ni­als.

“We are alarmed that today’s gen­er­a­tion lacks some of the basic knowl­edge about these atroc­i­ties,” he said in a state­ment.

The group’s exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent, Greg Schnei­der, said the study’s find­ings high­light­ed the impor­tance of Holo­caust edu­ca­tion.

“There remain trou­bling gaps in Holo­caust aware­ness while sur­vivors are still with us; imag­ine when there are no longer sur­vivors here to tell their sto­ries,” Schnei­der said. “We must be com­mit­ted to ensur­ing the hor­rors of the Holo­caust and the mem­o­ry of those who suf­fered so great­ly are remem­bered, told and taught by future gen­er­a­tions.”

...

———-

“22% of US mil­len­ni­als haven’t heard of or are not sure if they have heard of the Holo­caust, study finds”; Jew­ish Tele­graph­ic Agency; 04/12/2018

“Over a fifth of mil­len­ni­als in the Unit­ed States have not heard of or are unsure if they have heard of the Holo­caust, a study found.”

So 1‑in‑5 mil­len­ni­als, aged ~22–37 accord­ing to the vague def­i­n­i­tion of what con­sti­tutes a “mil­len­ni­al”, have basi­cal­ly no idea what the Holo­caust is.

But, again, at least 9‑in-10 Amer­i­cans appear to agree that edu­ca­tion about the Holo­caust should be taught. Maybe Amer­i­ca should actu­al­ly do that:

Jew­ish Tele­graph­ic Agency

Law­mak­ers from 20 states pledge to man­date Holo­caust edu­ca­tion

April 24, 2017 12:32pm

(JTA) — Some 26 leg­is­la­tors rep­re­sent­ing 20 states have com­mit­ted to intro­duce leg­is­la­tion that would require pub­lic schools to teach about the Holo­caust, the Armen­ian geno­cide and oth­er geno­cides.

The states are among the 42 in the Unit­ed States that do not already require edu­ca­tion on geno­cide aware­ness and pre­ven­tion, the New York-based Anne Frank Cen­ter for Mutu­al Respect said in announc­ing that it had obtained the com­mit­ments as part of its 50 State Geno­cide Edu­ca­tion Project to man­date geno­cide edu­ca­tion in pub­lic schools across all 50 states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia.

The cen­ter made the announce­ment on Mon­day, observed this year both as Yom Hashoah, or Holo­caust Remem­brance Day, and Armen­ian Geno­cide Remem­brance Day.

It asked the state leg­is­la­tors to sign a pledge to intro­duce leg­is­la­tion that would require geno­cide edu­ca­tion, or in some cas­es to strength­en a state’s exist­ing require­ment through a com­mis­sion or task force. The 26 leg­is­la­tors have signed the pledge, the cen­ter said in a state­ment.

The 20 states are Alas­ka, Arkansas, Con­necti­cut, Col­orado, Delaware, Geor­gia, Hawaii, Ida­ho, Kansas, Ken­tucky, Louisiana, Mary­land, Mass­a­chu­setts, Mis­souri, Nebras­ka, New York, Ohio, South Car­oli­na, Vir­ginia and Wash­ing­ton.

Three states — Flori­da, Illi­nois and New Jer­sey — require geno­cide edu­ca­tion from grades K‑12, and have a state com­mis­sion or task force to keep geno­cide edu­ca­tion com­pre­hen­sive and up to date. Cal­i­for­nia and Michi­gan require geno­cide edu­ca­tion from grades 7 or 8 through 12, and have a state com­mis­sion or task force. Indi­ana, New York and Rhode Island man­date geno­cide edu­ca­tion from grades 7 or 8 through 12 but do not have a com­mis­sion or task force.

...

———-
“Law­mak­ers from 20 states pledge to man­date Holo­caust edu­ca­tion”; Jew­ish Tele­graph­ic Agency; 04/24/2017

“Three states — Flori­da, Illi­nois and New Jer­sey — require geno­cide edu­ca­tion from grades K‑12, and have a state com­mis­sion or task force to keep geno­cide edu­ca­tion com­pre­hen­sive and up to date. Cal­i­for­nia and Michi­gan require geno­cide edu­ca­tion from grades 7 or 8 through 12, and have a state com­mis­sion or task force. Indi­ana, New York and Rhode Island man­date geno­cide edu­ca­tion from grades 7 or 8 through 12 but do not have a com­mis­sion or task force.”

Yep, just 8 US states, as of 2017, actu­al­ly man­dat­ed some sort of Holo­caust edu­ca­tion in Amer­i­can pub­lic schools. And for the oth­er 42 states? Well, as the above poll made trag­i­cal­ly clear, it’s option­al.

Here’s a reminder that YouTube is far from the only major inter­net plat­form that’s friend­ly to the far right: A new study of the Nazi mate­r­i­al avail­able on Ama­zon has found far more than just hate lit­er­a­ture avail­able for sale. Every­thing from ‘hate­core’ white pow­er music to baby one­sies fea­ture burn­ing cross­es are avail­able. There’s even a chil­dren’s book writ­ten by George Lin­coln Rock­well avail­able, with no indi­ca­tion of the nature of the book’s con­tent in the descrip­tion. Ama­zon’s self-pub­lish­ing Cre­ate­Space tool is also being used by white suprema­cists to pub­lish a vari­ety of hate lit­er­a­ture. And there’s no short­age of Nazi items for sale, like leather WWII Ger­man Waf­fen SS repli­ca hat, swasti­ka neck­laces, Nazi swords, and para­pher­na­lia with the Nazi skull logo.

And, yes, this all goes against Ama­zon’s poli­cies. But as the study also found, Ama­zon does­n’t appear to actu­al­ly enforce those poli­cies unless there’s a pub­lic out­cry:

The Dai­ly Beast

Nazi Children’s Books, KKK One­sies Are for Sale on Ama­zon
Hate pro­pa­gan­da mar­ket­ed for kids is sold through the online retail­er, researchers found, and they’ve so far dodged cen­sors.

Kel­ly Weill
07.06.18 1:28 PM ET

Despite its own poli­cies against hate­ful con­tent, Ama­zon still sells racist products—some of them mar­ket­ed at chil­dren, a new study finds.

Baby one­sies fea­tur­ing a burn­ing cross, swasti­ka neck­laces, and “cos­tumes” depict­ing a black man being lynched have all found a recent home on Ama­zon, accord­ing to a new study by the Action Cen­ter on Race and the Econ­o­my and the Part­ner­ship for Work­ing Fam­i­lies. The study also found a trove of white suprema­cist lit­er­a­ture that has been cre­at­ed on Amazon’s pub­lish­ing plat­form. Those prod­ucts lin­gered on the site despite Amazon’s pol­i­cy pro­hibit­ing “prod­ucts that pro­mote or glo­ri­fy hatred, vio­lence, racial, sex­u­al or reli­gious intol­er­ance or pro­mote orga­ni­za­tions with such views,” the com­pa­ny states on its web­site.

Ama­zon, which takes a cut of sales, often doesn’t take action against the prod­ucts unless fac­ing pub­lic back­lash, the study found. While some of the prod­ucts cit­ed in the study have since been removed from Ama­zon, oth­ers remain for sale on the site.

“Third par­ty sell­ers who use our Mar­ket­place ser­vice must fol­low our guide­lines and those who don’t are sub­ject to swift action includ­ing poten­tial removal of their account,” an Ama­zon spokesper­son told The Dai­ly Beast of the study.

Retail­ers aren’t exact­ly hid­ing their Nazi prod­ucts. A “leather WWII Ger­man Waf­fen SS” repli­ca hat was allowed on the site, despite it being mod­eled after Nazi uni­forms, the study found. The same goes for a swasti­ka neck­lace, Nazi swords, and para­pher­na­lia with the “Totenkopf,” a Nazi skull logo that has since been adopt­ed by vio­lent neo-Nazi groups.

A num­ber of those prod­ucts were mar­ket­ed at chil­dren, includ­ing a series of cus­tom Legos mod­i­fied to look like Nazi troops, and a “for girls” back­pack fea­tur­ing Pepe, a car­toon frog that has become a sym­bol of the far right. The Pepe on the girls’ back­pack is wear­ing a Nazi SS cap. Oth­er Pepe prod­ucts flagged in the study include a Pepe-fied Don­ald Trump children’s back­pack and a baby romper fea­tur­ing Pepe in a tur­ban and thick beard for an anti-Mus­lim vari­ant on the meme. Baby rompers fea­tur­ing burn­ing cross­es, images often asso­ci­at­ed with the Ku Klux Klan, were also avail­able.

Ama­zon also hosts neo-Nazi children’s lit­er­a­ture. The study found Ama­zon sell­ing phys­i­cal and Kin­dle ver­sions of The Fable of the Ducks and the Hens, a children’s book by George Lin­coln Rock­well, the late founder of the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty.

“The descrip­tion on Amazon’s site makes no men­tion of Rockwell’s back­ground or the racist pro­pa­gan­da in the book,” the study reads. “Par­ents con­sid­er­ing the book would see it described as a ‘wit­ty,’ col­or­ful­ly illus­trat­ed sto­ry about ducks whose lives are ruined by ‘an influx of pushy, schem­ing hens.’ Those tak­ing a clos­er look might notice a user review approv­ing­ly describ­ing the book as a ‘Great Nation­al Social­ist Kids book’ that ‘teach­es our chil­dren to be care­ful and don’t let refugees into your coun­try’ and illus­trates how ‘we’ are ‘screwed by the col­ored birds!’”

Rockwell’s name should, in the­o­ry, be easy to screen for. One of America’s most promi­nent Nazis, Rock­well is fre­quent­ly name-checked by promi­nent racists includ­ing for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. His children’s book even appears in full on the Amer­i­can Nazi Party’s web­site.

Ama­zon isn’t just sell­ing white suprema­cist lit­er­a­ture. It’s also giv­ing racists the tools to cre­ate those texts through Cre­ate­Space, a self-pub­lish­ing plat­form.

“At least sev­en SPLC-iden­ti­fied hate groups are pub­lish­ing mate­ri­als in Ama­zon Kin­dle for­mat as of June 2018, per a review of Amazon’s site,” the study found, refer­ring to the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter. “The white nation­al­ist pub­lish­ing house Counter-Cur­rents has 50 titles avail­able in Kin­dle for­mat.”

Oth­er white suprema­cist books include a “blood­thirsty white nation­al­ist fan­ta­sy” nov­el from Kyle Bris­tow, a lawyer who pre­vi­ous­ly rep­re­sent­ed white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer, and 18 books by the neo-Nazi Bil­ly Rop­er. One of his books adver­tis­es tips on how to become an influ­en­tial fig­ure in the white suprema­cist move­ment.

Amazon’s music-stream­ing ser­vices also host white pow­er or “hate­core” bands. Although some of those bands have slight­ly mod­i­fied their song titles to appear more Ama­zon-friend­ly (one song title cit­ed in the study was mod­i­fied from “Die Jew Die” to “Die Die”), the artists go under their real band names, which are known for “hate­core” music. A hate­core record label that owns the web­site whitepower.com “maintain[s] an entire store­front on Ama­zon up for sale.”

Ama­zon some­times removes con­tent that vio­lates its hate­ful prod­uct poli­cies. But often the com­pa­ny only does so after fac­ing seri­ous back­lash, the study found. In 2015, fol­low­ing a Wash­ing­ton Post exposé, Ama­zon boot­ed a hate group off an Ama­zon-run fundrais­ing ser­vice. The SPLC lat­er not­ed that it had been try­ing to oust that same group from the ser­vice for years, but that it had no luck until the Post went pub­lic with the sto­ry.

...

———-

“Nazi Children’s Books, KKK One­sies Are for Sale on Ama­zon” by Kel­ly Weill; The Dai­ly Beast; 07/06/2018

“Ama­zon, which takes a cut of sales, often doesn’t take action against the prod­ucts unless fac­ing pub­lic back­lash, the study found. While some of the prod­ucts cit­ed in the study have since been removed from Ama­zon, oth­ers remain for sale on the site.”

Yep, while all of these prod­ucts vio­late Ama­zon’s terms of ser­vice, giv­en how a num­ber of these items are bla­tant­ly Nazi prod­ucts, like a swasti­ka neck­lace, it appears that the only real vio­la­tion of Ama­zon’s terms of ser­vice is prompt­ing a pub­lic back­lash, at which point the offend­ing items will be removed:

...
Retail­ers aren’t exact­ly hid­ing their Nazi prod­ucts. A “leather WWII Ger­man Waf­fen SS” repli­ca hat was allowed on the site, despite it being mod­eled after Nazi uni­forms, the study found. The same goes for a swasti­ka neck­lace, Nazi swords, and para­pher­na­lia with the “Totenkopf,” a Nazi skull logo that has since been adopt­ed by vio­lent neo-Nazi groups.

...

Ama­zon some­times removes con­tent that vio­lates its hate­ful prod­uct poli­cies. But often the com­pa­ny only does so after fac­ing seri­ous back­lash, the study found. In 2015, fol­low­ing a Wash­ing­ton Post exposé, Ama­zon boot­ed a hate group off an Ama­zon-run fundrais­ing ser­vice. The SPLC lat­er not­ed that it had been try­ing to oust that same group from the ser­vice for years, but that it had no luck until the Post went pub­lic with the sto­ry.
...

So now that it’s now known that a num­ber of these Nazi prod­ucts are tar­get­ing chil­dren might we see the kind of sus­tained pub­lic back­lash that’s appar­ent­ly going to be required for Ama­zon to pre­emp­tive­ly remove these kinds of prod­ucts? We’ll see, but if Nazi prod­ucts for babies can’t gen­er­ate that pub­lic back­lash pret­ty much noth­ing will:

...
Baby one­sies fea­tur­ing a burn­ing cross, swasti­ka neck­laces, and “cos­tumes” depict­ing a black man being lynched have all found a recent home on Ama­zon, accord­ing to a new study by the Action Cen­ter on Race and the Econ­o­my and the Part­ner­ship for Work­ing Fam­i­lies. The study also found a trove of white suprema­cist lit­er­a­ture that has been cre­at­ed on Amazon’s pub­lish­ing plat­form. Those prod­ucts lin­gered on the site despite Amazon’s pol­i­cy pro­hibit­ing “prod­ucts that pro­mote or glo­ri­fy hatred, vio­lence, racial, sex­u­al or reli­gious intol­er­ance or pro­mote orga­ni­za­tions with such views,” the com­pa­ny states on its web­site

...

A num­ber of those prod­ucts were mar­ket­ed at chil­dren, includ­ing a series of cus­tom Legos mod­i­fied to look like Nazi troops, and a “for girls” back­pack fea­tur­ing Pepe, a car­toon frog that has become a sym­bol of the far right. The Pepe on the girls’ back­pack is wear­ing a Nazi SS cap. Oth­er Pepe prod­ucts flagged in the study include a Pepe-fied Don­ald Trump children’s back­pack and a baby romper fea­tur­ing Pepe in a tur­ban and thick beard for an anti-Mus­lim vari­ant on the meme. Baby rompers fea­tur­ing burn­ing cross­es, images often asso­ci­at­ed with the Ku Klux Klan, were also avail­able.
...

Adding the scan­dal is that, while a swasti­ka neck­lace is obvi­ous­ly neo-Nazi in nature, some prod­ucts obscured their Nazi ori­gins, like a chil­dren’s book by George Lin­coln Rock­well that made no men­tion of the fact that Rock­well was a lead­ing Amer­i­can Nazi:

...
Ama­zon also hosts neo-Nazi children’s lit­er­a­ture. The study found Ama­zon sell­ing phys­i­cal and Kin­dle ver­sions of The Fable of the Ducks and the Hens, a children’s book by George Lin­coln Rock­well, the late founder of the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty.

“The descrip­tion on Amazon’s site makes no men­tion of Rockwell’s back­ground or the racist pro­pa­gan­da in the book,” the study reads. “Par­ents con­sid­er­ing the book would see it described as a ‘wit­ty,’ col­or­ful­ly illus­trat­ed sto­ry about ducks whose lives are ruined by ‘an influx of pushy, schem­ing hens.’ Those tak­ing a clos­er look might notice a user review approv­ing­ly describ­ing the book as a ‘Great Nation­al Social­ist Kids book’ that ‘teach­es our chil­dren to be care­ful and don’t let refugees into your coun­try’ and illus­trates how ‘we’ are ‘screwed by the col­ored birds!’”

Rockwell’s name should, in the­o­ry, be easy to screen for. One of America’s most promi­nent Nazis, Rock­well is fre­quent­ly name-checked by promi­nent racists includ­ing for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. His children’s book even appears in full on the Amer­i­can Nazi Party’s web­site.
...

Then there’s the Cre­ate­Sapce self-pub­lish­ing plat­form that’s already become a place for “blood­thirsty white nation­al­ist fan­ta­sy” nov­els. So who knows, the next Turn­er Diaries-style book that inspires a domes­tic ter­ror attack might first show up on Ama­zon:

...
Ama­zon isn’t just sell­ing white suprema­cist lit­er­a­ture. It’s also giv­ing racists the tools to cre­ate those texts through Cre­ate­Space, a self-pub­lish­ing plat­form.

“At least sev­en SPLC-iden­ti­fied hate groups are pub­lish­ing mate­ri­als in Ama­zon Kin­dle for­mat as of June 2018, per a review of Amazon’s site,” the study found, refer­ring to the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter. “The white nation­al­ist pub­lish­ing house Counter-Cur­rents has 50 titles avail­able in Kin­dle for­mat.”

Oth­er white suprema­cist books include a “blood­thirsty white nation­al­ist fan­ta­sy” nov­el from Kyle Bris­tow, a lawyer who pre­vi­ous­ly rep­re­sent­ed white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer, and 18 books by the neo-Nazi Bil­ly Rop­er. One of his books adver­tis­es tips on how to become an influ­en­tial fig­ure in the white suprema­cist move­ment.
...

And for the white pow­er musi­cians there’s Ama­zon’s music-stream­ing ser­vices. You might need to change the title of your songs from “Die Jew Die”, to just “Die Die”, but that appears to be all you’ll need to do:

...
Amazon’s music-stream­ing ser­vices also host white pow­er or “hate­core” bands. Although some of those bands have slight­ly mod­i­fied their song titles to appear more Ama­zon-friend­ly (one song title cit­ed in the study was mod­i­fied from “Die Jew Die” to “Die Die”), the artists go under their real band names, which are known for “hate­core” music. A hate­core record label that owns the web­site whitepower.com “maintain[s] an entire store­front on Ama­zon up for sale.”
...

So that was all part of what the authors of this study dis­cov­ered. It’s pret­ty much a worst case sce­nario (Nazi one­sies?!).

So let’s hope there are a num­ber of very reg­u­lar high-pro­file fol­low up stud­ies on the top­ic since that appears to be the only thing that will con­vince Ama­zon to take seri­ous­ly the fact that it’s allowed itself to become a Nazi dream bazaar.

Here’s anoth­er an exam­ple of how mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy is being used to prop­a­gate far right world­views with wild suc­cess: The ‘QAnon’ phe­nom­e­na now has an app ded­i­cat­ed to alert­ing peo­ple when “Q” leaves a new “crumb” for the pub­lic. “Q” is, of course, the mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure at the cen­ter of the QAnon sto­ry who reg­u­lar­ly feeds the pub­lic clues about how Don­ald Trump and the mil­i­tary are prepar­ing for mass arrests of Hillary Clin­ton, Barack Oba­ma, numer­ous peo­ple in Hol­ly­wood and a large num­ber of oth­er ‘elites’ who are basi­cal­ly described as being child-abus­ing mem­bers of the Illu­mi­nati and send­ing them all to Git­mo. So it’s pret­ty much the sequel to ‘Piz­za­Gate’ and it’s grow­ing increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar on the Amer­i­can right-wing.

Recall the recent sto­ry about Trump pro­mot­ing the work of Liz Crokin, a far right ‘jour­nal­ist’ who claims to have reli­able sources in law enforce­ment who assure her that New York City pol­i­cy pos­sess videos of Hillary Clin­ton eat­ing live chil­dren. That was all part of this QAnon thing.

And now QAnon has an app. A wild­ly suc­cess­ful app too. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, the QDrops app has “lin­gered at the top of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store for months”. At one point after it was launched in April it was the num­ber 10 app and num­ber 1 enter­tain­ment app at Apple’s App Store. It was also in the Google Play Store enter­tain­ment section’s top 25 apps. And the pop­u­lar­i­ty of this app means Google and Apple have actu­al­ly made a decent amount of mon­ey off of an app pro­mot­ing a far right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that alleges that almost all promi­nent lib­er­als are secret Illu­mi­nati child abusers and Trump and the mil­i­tary are plan­ning on mass arrest­ing them and send­ing them to Git­mo because the app costs 99 cents and Google and Apple get a cut of that:

Giz­mo­do

Apple Yanks QAnon-Themed App From App Store After Reporters Notice, Still on Play Store Though

Tom McK­ay
07/17/2018 12:45am

Apple has report­ed­ly pulled QDrops, an app which sent alerts about the absolute­ly inane QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, from its App Store after an NBC News inquiry into why the hell it and Google’s Play Store were prof­it­ing off of it.

QAnon is an incred­i­bly elab­o­rate online con­spir­acist yarn that more or less boils down to a series of posts on mes­sage board 4chan and its bas­tard off­spring 8chan from “Q,” sup­pos­ed­ly a gov­ern­ment agent with high secu­ri­ty clear­ance, claim­ing that Don­ald Trump is prepar­ing to turn the tables on deep state agents guilty of every­thing from child sex traf­fick­ing to false flag mass shoot­ings in a com­ing purge called “The Storm.” It is, like its pre­de­ces­sor Piz­za­gate, extrem­ist horse­shit, but that hasn’t stopped it from acquir­ing a huge online fol­low­ing includ­ing celebri­ties like Roseanne Barr and inspir­ing devo­tees to ill-advised stunts with firearms.

QDrops, devel­oped by hus­band-and-wife team Richard and Adali­ta Brown of North Car­oli­na under the name Tiger Team Inc., is a 99-cent app that updates peo­ple on the lat­est rav­ings to emerge from the QAnon com­mu­ni­ty. Accord­ing to NBC, it “lin­gered at the top of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store for months, with both tech giants receiv­ing a cut of the rev­enue in the process.” At one point soon after its launch in April, NBC added, it was the num­ber 10 app on the App Store, and num­ber one in the enter­tain­ment section—and it was in the Play Store enter­tain­ment section’s top 25 apps.

In oth­er words, both Apple and Google like­ly made a fair chunk of change off of QDrops.

Apple removed the app as of Sun­day. In a state­ment to NBC, com­pa­ny spokes­woman Stephanie Saf­fer said the app had vio­lat­ed App Store poli­cies, though was not spe­cif­ic on which:

The App Store has always sup­port­ed all points of view being rep­re­sent­ed, as long as the apps are respect­ful to users with dif­fer­ing opin­ions and the qual­i­ty of the expe­ri­ence is great. We have pub­lished clear guide­lines that devel­op­ers must fol­low in order for their apps to be dis­trib­uted by the App Store, designed to fos­ter inno­va­tion and pro­vide a safe envi­ron­ment to all of our users. We will take swift action to remove any apps that vio­late our guide­lines or the law—we take this respon­si­bil­i­ty very seri­ous­ly.

The QDrops Twit­ter account remains active, with the devel­op­ers claim­ing they intend to have it back on the store soon.

As some of you know by now, QDrops has been pulled from the App Store due to this anti‑Q arti­cle https://t.co/morRm0FUGk We are work­ing with Apple to alle­vi­ate any con­cerns they may have so that we can be put back on the store. 1/2— QDrops App (@qdropsapp) July 16, 2018

As not­ed by Apple Insid­er, Apple’s senior vice pres­i­dent of Inter­net Soft­ware and Ser­vices Eddy Cue told atten­dees at the South by South­west fes­ti­val in March that the com­pa­ny believes “free speech is impor­tant, but we don’t think white suprema­cist speech or hate speech is free speech that ought to be out there” on its plat­form.

QDrop remains avail­able on the Google Play Store.

Oth­er big tech com­pa­nies includ­ing Face­book, Twit­ter, Ama­zon, and YouTube have all faced their own accu­sa­tions of pro­mot­ing or prof­it­ing off mis­in­for­ma­tion and hate speech. Apple, which is pri­mar­i­ly in the busi­ness of mak­ing hard­ware, has large­ly avoid­ed the con­tro­ver­sies court­ed by its brethren.

...

———-

“Apple Yanks QAnon-Themed App From App Store After Reporters Notice, Still on Play Store Though” by Tom McK­ay; Giz­mo­do; 07/17/2018

“Apple has report­ed­ly pulled QDrops, an app which sent alerts about the absolute­ly inane QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, from its App Store after an NBC News inquiry into why the hell it and Google’s Play Store were prof­it­ing off of it.”

Yes, one of the top-sell­ing apps for iPhones and Android phones is an app that sim­ply alerts when when “Q” sends out a new “crumb” about how Don­ald Trump is secret­ly prepar­ing for “the Storm”, when large num­bers of famous peo­ple (most­ly lib­er­als and Hol­ly­wood celebri­ties) will be round­ed up and thrown into Git­mo for run­ning child sex rings and basi­cal­ly being the Illu­mi­nati.

So how did all this get start­ed? On 4chan, of course:

...
QAnon is an incred­i­bly elab­o­rate online con­spir­acist yarn that more or less boils down to a series of posts on mes­sage board 4chan and its bas­tard off­spring 8chan from “Q,” sup­pos­ed­ly a gov­ern­ment agent with high secu­ri­ty clear­ance, claim­ing that Don­ald Trump is prepar­ing to turn the tables on deep state agents guilty of every­thing from child sex traf­fick­ing to false flag mass shoot­ings in a com­ing purge called “The Storm.” It is, like its pre­de­ces­sor Piz­za­gate, extrem­ist horse­shit, but that hasn’t stopped it from acquir­ing a huge online fol­low­ing includ­ing celebri­ties like Roseanne Barr and inspir­ing devo­tees to ill-advised stunts with firearms.
...

And this QDrops app, which costs 99-cents, was the num­ber 10 app on Apple’s App Store after launch­ing in April and the one app for “enter­tain­ment”. For Google’s Play Store it was in the top 25 for enter­tain­ment apps. And Apple and Google got a cut of all over those 99-cent pur­chas­es:

...
QDrops, devel­oped by hus­band-and-wife team Richard and Adali­ta Brown of North Car­oli­na under the name Tiger Team Inc., is a 99-cent app that updates peo­ple on the lat­est rav­ings to emerge from the QAnon com­mu­ni­ty. Accord­ing to NBC, it “lin­gered at the top of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store for months, with both tech giants receiv­ing a cut of the rev­enue in the process.” At one point soon after its launch in April, NBC added, it was the num­ber 10 app on the App Store, and num­ber one in the enter­tain­ment section—and it was in the Play Store enter­tain­ment section’s top 25 apps.

In oth­er words, both Apple and Google like­ly made a fair chunk of change off of QDrops.
...

While Apple has pulled the app from its store now, the app devel­op­ers are assur­ing peo­ple that they are work­ing with Apple to get the app back on the store soon:

...
Apple removed the app as of Sun­day. In a state­ment to NBC, com­pa­ny spokes­woman Stephanie Saf­fer said the app had vio­lat­ed App Store poli­cies, though was not spe­cif­ic on which:

The App Store has always sup­port­ed all points of view being rep­re­sent­ed, as long as the apps are respect­ful to users with dif­fer­ing opin­ions and the qual­i­ty of the expe­ri­ence is great. We have pub­lished clear guide­lines that devel­op­ers must fol­low in order for their apps to be dis­trib­uted by the App Store, designed to fos­ter inno­va­tion and pro­vide a safe envi­ron­ment to all of our users. We will take swift action to remove any apps that vio­late our guide­lines or the law—we take this respon­si­bil­i­ty very seri­ous­ly.

The QDrops Twit­ter account remains active, with the devel­op­ers claim­ing they intend to have it back on the store soon.

As some of you know by now, QDrops has been pulled from the App Store due to this anti‑Q arti­cle https://t.co/morRm0FUGk We are work­ing with Apple to alle­vi­ate any con­cerns they may have so that we can be put back on the store. 1/2— QDrops App (@qdropsapp) July 16, 2018

As not­ed by Apple Insid­er, Apple’s senior vice pres­i­dent of Inter­net Soft­ware and Ser­vices Eddy Cue told atten­dees at the South by South­west fes­ti­val in March that the com­pa­ny believes “free speech is impor­tant, but we don’t think white suprema­cist speech or hate speech is free speech that ought to be out there” on its plat­form.
...

And it’s still avail­able on Google’s app store:

...
QDrop remains avail­able on the Google Play Store.
...

And this is where we are. Major tech com­pa­nies are prof­it­ing off of the main­stream­ing of far right fan­tasies.

So how did we get here? Well, putting aside the long his­to­ry of unhinged the­ol­o­gy and right-wing con­spir­a­cies (that typ­i­cal­ly involve a great deal of pro­jec­tion) that have been prim­ing the Amer­i­can psy­che to accept all sort of high fan­ta­sy as fact, this par­tic­u­lar fan­ta­sy only real­ly emerge in Octo­ber of 2017 when some­one anony­mous­ly start­ed post­ing on on 4Chan, a major stomp­ing ground of the ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazis and troll­ish fel­low trav­el­ers, claim­ing to be some­one with a high-lev­el gov­ern­ment secu­ri­ty clear­ance and leav­ing cryp­tic clues, or “bread­crumbs”. Clues about how Don­ald Trump and the mil­i­tary are get­ting ready to sud­den­ly arrest a glob­al cabal of (most­ly lib­er­al) elites that are respon­si­ble for almost all the evil in the world, i.e. the Illu­mi­nati. And that nar­ra­tive has so cap­tured the imag­i­na­tions of Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives that there is an entire indus­try ded­i­cat­ed to ana­lyz­ing these “bread­crumbs”:

The Dai­ly Beast

What Is QAnon? The Cra­zi­est The­o­ry of the Trump Era, Explained
From celebri­ties to the grass­roots, the right is obsessed with the idea there is a secret con­spir­a­cy where Hillary is head­ed for Git­mo. Here’s every­thing you need to know.

Will Som­mer
07.06.18 10:03 PM ET

Plot­ters in the deep state tried to shoot down Air Force One and foil Pres­i­dent Trump’s North Korea sum­mit. A cabal of glob­al elites, includ­ing top fig­ures in Hol­ly­wood, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, and the intel­li­gence agen­cies, are respon­si­ble for near­ly all the evil in the world. And now Trump is going to fix it all with thou­sands of sealed indict­ments, send­ing the likes of Hillary Clin­ton and Barack Oba­ma straight to Guan­tanamo Bay.

Or at least that’s how the world is going for the believ­ers of QAnon, the com­plex pro-Trump con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that’s start­ing to hav­ing unpre­dictable effects in real life. The real news can be bad for Trump, but in QAnon-world, the pres­i­dent and his sup­port­ers real­ly are get­ting sick of win­ning.

——Who Is “Q”?—–

QAnon springs from a series of cryp­tic clues that start­ed to be post­ed online in Octo­ber 2017. Start­ing on 4Chan before migrat­ing to the even more fringe 8Chan, the anony­mous per­son behind the clues goes by “Q,” a ref­er­ence to a high-lev­el gov­ern­ment secu­ri­ty clear­ance. The “Anon” in “QAnon” refers to both Q him­self, and to Q’s name­less sup­port­ers, the “anons.”

Q is sup­posed to be reveal­ing this top-secret infor­ma­tion via the clues, which QAnon fans have dubbed “bread­crumbs.” They’re writ­ten in a short bursts, in a ref­er­ence-heavy style that’s part poem, part ran­som note. Here’s one exam­ple from June:

Think SC vote to con­firm (com­ing).

No Name action.

Every dog has its day.

Enjoy the show.

Q

“No Name” is Q’s nick­name for John McCain, and “SC” is obvi­ous­ly the Supreme Court. As for “every dog has its day” — that’s the kind of cryp­tic Q remark that has spawned a cot­tage indus­try of PDFs and 24/7 livestreams ana­lyz­ing the crumbs.

Since Q could be any­one with inter­net access and a work­ing knowl­edge of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, there’s no rea­son to think that Q is a mem­ber of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion rather than, say, a troll or YouTube huck­ster. But incred­i­bly, lots of peo­ple believe it.

In April, hun­dreds of QAnon believ­ers staged a march in down­town Wash­ing­ton, D.C. with a vague demand for “trans­paren­cy” from the Jus­tice Depart­ment. “Q” shirts have become fre­quent sites at Trump ral­lies, with one QAnon believ­er scor­ing VIP access. In June, an armed man in an home­made armored truck shut down a high­way near the Hoover Dam and held up signs ref­er­enc­ing QAnon. And celebri­ties like come­di­an Roseanne Barr and for­mer Red Sox pitch­er Curt Schilling have signed on.

The Curt Schilling Show — Bre­it­bart https://t.co/qJFV023jiS via @BreitbartNews talk with a lawyer whose firm has cas­es in front of the Supreme Court and hear about lat­est rul­ing on 1st amend­ment as well as NOAA aban­don­ing cli­mate change hoax. On iTunes lat­er today— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) June 28, 2018

Also we open up a dis­cus­sion about “Q” and why the anger and vit­ri­ol by lib­er­als at the mere men­tion if it real­ly is the fake con­spir­a­cy they claim?— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) June 28, 2018

QAnon is unusu­al, accord­ing to Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi pro­fes­sor Joseph Uscin­s­ki, because it offers Repub­li­cans an alter­nate view of the world when they already con­trol near­ly the entire gov­ern­ment. Usu­al­ly, “con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries are for losers,” Uscin­s­ki said,

“Nor­mal­ly you don’t expect the win­ning par­ty to use them, except when they’re in trou­ble,” Uscin­s­ki said.

—–The Ori­gin Sto­ry—–

Since Q’s “bread­crumbs” are so vague, it’s impos­si­ble to nail down exact­ly what the sto­ry­line is sup­posed to be. But the gen­er­al sto­ry, out­lined in a pro-QAnon video endorsed by Schilling, is that every pres­i­dent before Trump was a “crim­i­nal pres­i­dent” in league with all the nefar­i­ous groups of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries past: the glob­al bank­ing elite, death squads oper­at­ing on orders from Hillary Clin­ton, deep-state intel­li­gence oper­a­tives, and Piz­za­gate-style pedophile rings. In an effort to break this cabal’s grip, accord­ing to Q, the mil­i­tary con­vinced Trump to run for pres­i­dent.

Now Trump and his allies in the mil­i­tary are poised to arrest all these wrong­do­ers, ship­ping many of them off to Guan­tanamo Bay. That com­ing purge has been dubbed “The Storm” by QAnon fans, who claim Trump ref­er­enced it when he ref­er­enced “the calm before the storm” in Octo­ber.

While the Storm is at the cen­ter of the QAnon nar­ra­tive, it’s also flex­i­ble enough to fold in just any­thing that makes the news. Q is fond of hint­ing that each mass shoot­ing is a false-flag attack orga­nized by the cabal, and he used a blur­ry web­cam pic­ture of a flash of light near the Puget Sound to claim that the deep state had tried to shoot down Trump’s plane.

QAnon fans are obsessed with find­ing proof that who­ev­er is behind Q is actu­al­ly con­nect­ed to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Dur­ing one Trump trip to Asia, Q post­ed some pic­tures of islands, which sup­port­ers seized on as proof that Q was on Air Force One. Q is also fond of pre­dict­ing Trump tweets that, in ret­ro­spect, don’t exact­ly require top-secret clear­ance — that Trump will tweet “Sat­ur­day” on Small Busi­ness Sat­ur­day, or “June­teenth” on June 19th.

Fans also point to Trump using phras­es “pre­dict­ed” by Q as proof of the story’s legit­i­ma­cy. After one sup­port­er request­ed that Trump used the phrase “tip top” in the State of the Union Address, While Trump nev­er said “tip top” in that speech, QAnon sup­port­ers felt vin­di­cat­ed three months lat­er when Trump said it instead at the White House East­er Egg Roll. QAnon sup­port­ers have even claimed Trump uses his hands to make a “Q” sign as a sig­nal to them.

QAnon sup­port­ers love to spec­u­late about Q’s iden­ti­ty, pre­dict­ing that it’s either a high­ly placed White House staffer or even Trump him­self. Oth­er, more mun­dane the­o­ries about Q’s iden­ti­ty abound, but there’s not much com­pelling evi­dence point­ing in any direc­tion.

Even when Q’s pre­dic­tions dis­ap­point, the QAnon com­mu­ni­ty keeps going. Q hyped up the release of the Jus­tice Department’s inspec­tor gen­er­al report on the FBI’s Hillary Clin­ton email inves­ti­ga­tion, for exam­ple, promis­ing that it would con­tain the promised “Storm” of rev­e­la­tions about top Democ­rats and the deep state. When the report fiz­zled, how­ev­er, Q promised that Deputy Attor­ney Gen­er­al Rod Rosen­stein, a fre­quent tar­get of QAnon jabs, had tam­pered with the report. Trump had the real report, Q claimed, and that report’s release would solve every­thing.

—–Decod­ing It All—–

While QAnon has been the break­out con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry of the Trump era, not every­one on the right is on board. The far­ci­cal nature of QAnon’s clues has tend­ed to alien­ate many younger, more inter­net-savvy peo­ple on the right, includ­ing mem­bers of the alt-right. QAnon also alien­at­ed a swathe of the right-wing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry inter­net after Q denounced oth­er inter­net per­son­al­i­ties who had been spec­u­lat­ing about the clues, accus­ing them of try­ing to prof­it off the move­ment. But QAnon has been a hit with old­er Trump sup­port­ers, lead­ing to tech-illit­er­ate baby boomers look­ing to spread the QAnon gospel ask­ing for help in inter­net forums on “how to meme.”

Nine months after it start­ed, QAnon world has accu­mu­lat­ed an inter­nal lan­guage of its own. The mod­er­a­tors of the QAnon forums and the inter­preters of the clues call them­selves “bak­ers,” a ref­er­ence to the “bread­crumbs.” QAnon fol­low­ers are fix­at­ed on which pub­lic offi­cials are “white hats” or “black hats,” mean­ing whether they’re real­ly work­ing for Trump or are agents of the cabal. They urge one anoth­er to “fol­low the white rab­bit,” which made Trump deliv­er­ing his “tip top” speech next to the East­er Bun­ny all the more por­ten­tous.

QAnon believ­ers even have a slo­gan, “Where we go one, we go all,” which they often abbre­vi­ate to “WWG1WGA.” It’s become a ral­ly­ing cry for QAnon fans that Q has attrib­uted to Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy, although it actu­al­ly appears to come from the 1996 action movie White Squall.

we r the army of truth-wwg1w­ga— Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) June 20, 2018

...

———-

“What Is QAnon? The Cra­zi­est The­o­ry of the Trump Era, Explained” by Will Som­mer; The Dai­ly Beast; 07/06/2018

“Plot­ters in the deep state tried to shoot down Air Force One and foil Pres­i­dent Trump’s North Korea sum­mit. A cabal of glob­al elites, includ­ing top fig­ures in Hol­ly­wood, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, and the intel­li­gence agen­cies, are respon­si­ble for near­ly all the evil in the world. And now Trump is going to fix it all with thou­sands of sealed indict­ments, send­ing the likes of Hillary Clin­ton and Barack Oba­ma straight to Guan­tanamo Bay.”

A far right fan­ta­sy — the mass arrest of Barack Oba­ma, Hillary Clin­ton, Hol­ly­wood celebri­ties, etc — being suc­cess­ful­ly ped­dled as a secret real­i­ty that’s actu­al­ly play­ing out in real time: behold, the pow­er of deep trolling:

...
Or at least that’s how the world is going for the believ­ers of QAnon, the com­plex pro-Trump con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that’s start­ing to hav­ing unpre­dictable effects in real life. The real news can be bad for Trump, but in QAnon-world, the pres­i­dent and his sup­port­ers real­ly are get­ting sick of win­ning.

——Who Is “Q”?—–

QAnon springs from a series of cryp­tic clues that start­ed to be post­ed online in Octo­ber 2017. Start­ing on 4Chan before migrat­ing to the even more fringe 8Chan, the anony­mous per­son behind the clues goes by “Q,” a ref­er­ence to a high-lev­el gov­ern­ment secu­ri­ty clear­ance. The “Anon” in “QAnon” refers to both Q him­self, and to Q’s name­less sup­port­ers, the “anons.”

Q is sup­posed to be reveal­ing this top-secret infor­ma­tion via the clues, which QAnon fans have dubbed “bread­crumbs.” They’re writ­ten in a short bursts, in a ref­er­ence-heavy style that’s part poem, part ran­som note. Here’s one exam­ple from June:

Think SC vote to con­firm (com­ing).

No Name action.

Every dog has its day.

Enjoy the show.

Q

“No Name” is Q’s nick­name for John McCain, and “SC” is obvi­ous­ly the Supreme Court. As for “every dog has its day” — that’s the kind of cryp­tic Q remark that has spawned a cot­tage indus­try of PDFs and 24/7 livestreams ana­lyz­ing the crumbs.

Since Q could be any­one with inter­net access and a work­ing knowl­edge of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, there’s no rea­son to think that Q is a mem­ber of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion rather than, say, a troll or YouTube huck­ster. But incred­i­bly, lots of peo­ple believe it.
...

Just think of how many future mass hoax­es this has already inspired. “Q” could be any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion and work­ing knowl­edge of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, and yet they man­aged to cap­ture the imag­i­na­tions of a grow­ing num­ber of Amer­i­cans who real­ly do seem to believe this. Or at least are very enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly pre­tend­ing to believe it for the fun (sort of like pro-wrestling, per­haps?).

And giv­en that Trump is the hero of this nar­ra­tive, we should­n’t be sur­prised to learn that Trump ral­lies are increas­ing­ly pop­u­lat­ed by peo­ple wear­ing “Q” shirts. And then there’s there promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive icons, like Curt Schilling and Roseann Barr, who are open­ly endorsed the sto­ry:

...
In April, hun­dreds of QAnon believ­ers staged a march in down­town Wash­ing­ton, D.C. with a vague demand for “trans­paren­cy” from the Jus­tice Depart­ment. “Q” shirts have become fre­quent sites at Trump ral­lies, with one QAnon believ­er scor­ing VIP access. In June, an armed man in an home­made armored truck shut down a high­way near the Hoover Dam and held up signs ref­er­enc­ing QAnon. And celebri­ties like come­di­an Roseanne Barr and for­mer Red Sox pitch­er Curt Schilling have signed on.

The Curt Schilling Show — Bre­it­bart https://t.co/qJFV023jiS via @BreitbartNews talk with a lawyer whose firm has cas­es in front of the Supreme Court and hear about lat­est rul­ing on 1st amend­ment as well as NOAA aban­don­ing cli­mate change hoax. On iTunes lat­er today— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) June 28, 2018

Also we open up a dis­cus­sion about “Q” and why the anger and vit­ri­ol by lib­er­als at the mere men­tion if it real­ly is the fake con­spir­a­cy they claim?— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) June 28, 2018

QAnon is unusu­al, accord­ing to Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi pro­fes­sor Joseph Uscin­s­ki, because it offers Repub­li­cans an alter­nate view of the world when they already con­trol near­ly the entire gov­ern­ment. Usu­al­ly, “con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries are for losers,” Uscin­s­ki said,

“Nor­mal­ly you don’t expect the win­ning par­ty to use them, except when they’re in trou­ble,” Uscin­s­ki said.
...

And note how the QAnon nar­ra­tive is basi­cal­ly the Alex Jones nar­ra­tive: that ALL pres­i­dents in the US before Trump were all part of the same crim­i­nal cabal. A cabal run­ning death squads and Piz­za­gate-style pedophile rings. So it’s a nar­ra­tive sell­ing Trump sup­port­ers a ‘burn it all down, it’s all cor­rupt’ mes­sage that ele­vates Trump to sav­ior sta­tus:

...
—–The Ori­gin Sto­ry—–

Since Q’s “bread­crumbs” are so vague, it’s impos­si­ble to nail down exact­ly what the sto­ry­line is sup­posed to be. But the gen­er­al sto­ry, out­lined in a pro-QAnon video endorsed by Schilling, is that every pres­i­dent before Trump was a “crim­i­nal pres­i­dent” in league with all the nefar­i­ous groups of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries past: the glob­al bank­ing elite, death squads oper­at­ing on orders from Hillary Clin­ton, deep-state intel­li­gence oper­a­tives, and Piz­za­gate-style pedophile rings. In an effort to break this cabal’s grip, accord­ing to Q, the mil­i­tary con­vinced Trump to run for pres­i­dent.

Now Trump and his allies in the mil­i­tary are poised to arrest all these wrong­do­ers, ship­ping many of them off to Guan­tanamo Bay. That com­ing purge has been dubbed “The Storm” by QAnon fans, who claim Trump ref­er­enced it when he ref­er­enced “the calm before the storm” in Octo­ber.

While the Storm is at the cen­ter of the QAnon nar­ra­tive, it’s also flex­i­ble enough to fold in just any­thing that makes the news. Q is fond of hint­ing that each mass shoot­ing is a false-flag attack orga­nized by the cabal, and he used a blur­ry web­cam pic­ture of a flash of light near the Puget Sound to claim that the deep state had tried to shoot down Trump’s plane.
...

As we should also expect, many QAnon fans sus­pect Trump him­self is “Q”:

...
QAnon fans are obsessed with find­ing proof that who­ev­er is behind Q is actu­al­ly con­nect­ed to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Dur­ing one Trump trip to Asia, Q post­ed some pic­tures of islands, which sup­port­ers seized on as proof that Q was on Air Force One. Q is also fond of pre­dict­ing Trump tweets that, in ret­ro­spect, don’t exact­ly require top-secret clear­ance — that Trump will tweet “Sat­ur­day” on Small Busi­ness Sat­ur­day, or “June­teenth” on June 19th.

Fans also point to Trump using phras­es “pre­dict­ed” by Q as proof of the story’s legit­i­ma­cy. After one sup­port­er request­ed that Trump used the phrase “tip top” in the State of the Union Address, While Trump nev­er said “tip top” in that speech, QAnon sup­port­ers felt vin­di­cat­ed three months lat­er when Trump said it instead at the White House East­er Egg Roll. QAnon sup­port­ers have even claimed Trump uses his hands to make a “Q” sign as a sig­nal to them.

QAnon sup­port­ers love to spec­u­late about Q’s iden­ti­ty, pre­dict­ing that it’s either a high­ly placed White House staffer or even Trump him­self. Oth­er, more mun­dane the­o­ries about Q’s iden­ti­ty abound, but there’s not much com­pelling evi­dence point­ing in any direc­tion.

Even when Q’s pre­dic­tions dis­ap­point, the QAnon com­mu­ni­ty keeps going. Q hyped up the release of the Jus­tice Department’s inspec­tor gen­er­al report on the FBI’s Hillary Clin­ton email inves­ti­ga­tion, for exam­ple, promis­ing that it would con­tain the promised “Storm” of rev­e­la­tions about top Democ­rats and the deep state. When the report fiz­zled, how­ev­er, Q promised that Deputy Attor­ney Gen­er­al Rod Rosen­stein, a fre­quent tar­get of QAnon jabs, had tam­pered with the report. Trump had the real report, Q claimed, and that report’s release would solve every­thing.
...

And in case it was­n’t clear that Trump’s sup­port­ers are the pri­ma­ry audi­ence for this, note the demo­graph­ic that appears to be most enthralled by QAnon: old­er Trump sup­port­ers:

...
While QAnon has been the break­out con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry of the Trump era, not every­one on the right is on board. The far­ci­cal nature of QAnon’s clues has tend­ed to alien­ate many younger, more inter­net-savvy peo­ple on the right, includ­ing mem­bers of the alt-right. QAnon also alien­at­ed a swathe of the right-wing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry inter­net after Q denounced oth­er inter­net per­son­al­i­ties who had been spec­u­lat­ing about the clues, accus­ing them of try­ing to prof­it off the move­ment. But QAnon has been a hit with old­er Trump sup­port­ers, lead­ing to tech-illit­er­ate baby boomers look­ing to spread the QAnon gospel ask­ing for help in inter­net forums on “how to meme.”
...

So if your Trump-sup­port­ing grand­par­ents are anx­ious­ly ask­ing you for help get­ting a new app installed on their smart­phone, you might want to check and see which app before help­ing them. Because help­ing some­one install an app that feeds their dan­ger­ous far right fan­tasies isn’t actu­al­ly help­ing.

When­ev­er Pres­i­dent Trump does one of his ‘cam­paign-style ral­lies’ — where Trump rants for an hour or so in front of a bunch of Trump sup­port­ers — there’s usu­al­ly a post-ral­ly assess­ment of some sort on the dam­age done to the social fab­ric of the coun­try.

Usu­al­ly that dam­age assess­ment focus­es on Trump’s attempts to under­mine the free press and por­tray any­one who isn’t a Trump loy­al­ist as some sort of threat to the coun­try. And fol­low­ing Trump’s ral­ly in Tam­pa, FL, yes­ter­day, there was no short­age of dam­age of that nature to assess. One par­tic­u­lar­ly chill­ing piece of part of the event involved the crowd hurl­ing exple­tives at CNN’s Jim Acos­ta, who was there cov­er­ing the event. After Eric Trump tweet­ed in cel­e­bra­tion of that mob anger direct­ed at Acos­ta, Pres­i­dent Trump retweet­ed Eric’s tweet.

But as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, there’s a grow­ing phe­nom­e­na as these Trump ral­lies that promis­es to take the dam­age done to the social fab­ric to a whole new lev­el: The main­stream­ing of “QAnon” — the ‘Piz­za­gate’ 2.0 con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that claims Trump is get­ting ready to mass arrest a glob­al cabal of child abus­ing Satanist (who are pri­mar­i­ly lib­er­als like Hillary Clin­ton) — which was front and cen­ter as the Tam­pa ral­ly:

Think Progress

Unhinged con­ser­v­a­tive con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry goes main­stream at Trump’s Tam­pa ral­ly
QAnon has arrived. Wel­come to the hellscape.

Luke Barnes
Aug 1, 2018, 10:29 am

If there were any doubts the QAnon con­spir­a­cy has gone ful­ly main­stream, Trump’s ral­ly in Tam­pa Tues­day put at an end to them.

Sup­port­ers of the pro-Trump, far-right the­o­ry were clear­ly vis­i­ble both in the lines out­side the ral­ly and inside the expo­si­tion hall. They car­ried signs demand­ing answers to debunked con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, joined reg­u­lar Trump sup­port­ers in heck­ling the media and proud­ly rocked QAnon t‑shirts and hats — because what’s a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry with­out some­one being able to prof­it off it?

Crowd in Tam­pa ahead of the President’s ral­ly includes one per­son bear­ing a Seth Rich con­spir­a­cy poster pic.twitter.com/Ax7cln6x8o— Bet­sy Klein (@betsy_klein) July 31, 2018

Peo­ple lin­ing up for the Trump ral­ly in Tam­pa today. A lot of the chan anons might treat Q‑Anon like a LARP, but by all appear­ances there are plen­ty of peo­ple who take it seri­ous­ly irl. pic.twitter.com/uys7kmnAs1— Travis View (@travis_view) July 31, 2018

QAnon fol­lows on in sim­i­lar style from last year’s infa­mous Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry. But while Piz­za­gate focused its ire on one small pizze­ria in North­west Wash­ing­ton, the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry is much more far-reach­ing, claim­ing that a glob­al Deep State cabal is respon­si­ble for most of the world’s evil, and that Trump, along with Robert Mueller, are work­ing to deliv­er sealed indict­ments and ship every­one from Sen. John McCain (R‑AZ) to George Soros to Hillary Clin­ton off to Guan­tanamo Bay.

The expan­sive nature of the QAnon the­o­ry — it involves every­thing from bank­ing con­spir­a­cies to claims of Satan­ic Abuse and sup­posed child sex traf­fick­ing by Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers and pub­lic fig­ures — means that small­er the­o­ries can be adopt­ed into the fold as off­shoots. For exam­ple, over the last two months in Ari­zona, a group called Vet­er­ans on Patrol has been “inves­ti­gat­ing” what they claim is an aban­doned “child sex camp” tied to QAnon, and have been harass­ing pub­lic offi­cials who say that those claims are bogus.

It is stun­ning to me how many ppl in this #TRUMPTAMPA crowd have QAnon signs or t‑shirts. That is not a healthy sign for GOP or for Amer­i­ca.— Adam Smith (@adamsmithtimes) July 31, 2018

just some extreme­ly nor­mal peo­ple at an extreme­ly nor­mal polit­i­cal ral­ly for an extreme­ly nor­mal pres­i­dent https://t.co/0Gxa9sa81B pic.twitter.com/9Z2pDX9zCg— Andrew Kirell (@AndrewKirell) July 31, 2018

The QAnon the­o­ry began on 4chan before migrat­ing over to the even more obscure 8chan. These sites were instru­men­tal in help­ing craft the so-called “alt-right” dur­ing 2015 and 2016 but, as jour­nal­ist Will Som­mer at the Dai­ly Beast notes, QAnon is actu­al­ly far more pop­u­lar among baby boomers than their younger, more tech-savvy coun­ter­parts on the right.

It’s easy to dis­miss QAnon as a ridicu­lous con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, like­ly prop­a­gat­ed by a very ded­i­cat­ed troll, but it is start­ing to have some seri­ous real-world con­se­quences. On Sun­day, Michael Ave­nat­ti, the lawyer rep­re­sent­ing adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had an affair with Pres­i­dent Trump, was tar­get­ed by QAnon fol­low­ers. In June, a man with an AR-15 drove an armored vehi­cle onto the Hoover Dam and demand­ed that the gov­ern­ment “Release the OIG report,” a key part of the QAnon the­o­ry that had, in fact, been made pub­lic ear­li­er that week.

All of this is made infi­nite­ly eas­i­er by the will­ing­ness of YouTube — which has long been a hub of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries — to not only host QAnon con­spir­a­cy videos, but reg­u­lar­ly push them via its var­i­ous algo­rithms to the top of search results.

This past week­end, for instance, QAnon decid­ed that Tom Han­ks was a mem­ber of the Deep State cabal and a pedophile. On Mon­day, the top search results for Tom Han­ks on YouTube were relat­ed to QAnon accu­sa­tions before the algo­rithm revert­ed it.

Accord­ing to Buz­zfeed News, the accu­sa­tions against Han­ks stem from a sin­gle, unver­i­fied tweet by Sarah Ruth Ashcraft, claim­ing that she was pur­chased by Han­ks at 13 as a “dis­so­ci­at­ed #mind­con­trol doll.” Ashcraft lat­er boast­ed about how QAnon had helped her increase her Twit­ter fol­low­ing by 20,000.

Though the major­i­ty of voic­es pro­mot­ing the con­spir­a­cy tend to be fringe or right-wing voic­es, con­ser­v­a­tive media fig­ures like com­men­ta­tor Ben Shapiro have also retweet­ed offi­cial QAnon Twit­ter accounts in recent months. As ThinkProgress pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed, in late July, Shapiro retweet­ed the Twit­ter account “Pray­ing Medic,” one of the main QAnon pro­mot­ers. The account had tweet­ed a base­less claim about for­mer U.S. dig­ni­taries retain­ing secu­ri­ty clear­ances because they were mem­bers of the “Deep State.”

...

———-

“Unhinged con­ser­v­a­tive con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry goes main­stream at Trump’s Tam­pa ral­ly” by Luke Barnes; Think Progress; 08/01/2018

“If there were any doubts the QAnon con­spir­a­cy has gone ful­ly main­stream, Trump’s ral­ly in Tam­pa Tues­day put at an end to them.”

Yep, you can stop doubt­ing whether or not the QAnon con­spir­a­cy would go main­stream. It hap­pened. It’s main­stream. At least with­in the Repub­li­can base it’s very main­stream. Trump’s ral­ly was filled with “Q” signs and shirts and slo­gans. So you should instead focus your doubts on whether or not there’s any hope for this species:

...
Sup­port­ers of the pro-Trump, far-right the­o­ry were clear­ly vis­i­ble both in the lines out­side the ral­ly and inside the expo­si­tion hall. They car­ried signs demand­ing answers to debunked con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, joined reg­u­lar Trump sup­port­ers in heck­ling the media and proud­ly rocked QAnon t‑shirts and hats — because what’s a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry with­out some­one being able to prof­it off it?

Crowd in Tam­pa ahead of the President’s ral­ly includes one per­son bear­ing a Seth Rich con­spir­a­cy poster pic.twitter.com/Ax7cln6x8o— Bet­sy Klein (@betsy_klein) July 31, 2018

Peo­ple lin­ing up for the Trump ral­ly in Tam­pa today. A lot of the chan anons might treat Q‑Anon like a LARP, but by all appear­ances there are plen­ty of peo­ple who take it seri­ous­ly irl. pic.twitter.com/uys7kmnAs1— Travis View (@travis_view) July 31, 2018

...

It is stun­ning to me how many ppl in this #TRUMPTAMPA crowd have QAnon signs or t‑shirts. That is not a healthy sign for GOP or for Amer­i­ca.— Adam Smith (@adamsmithtimes) July 31, 2018

...

And note one of the more head-spin­ning fea­tures of the QAnon nar­ra­tive: it asserts that Trump is work with Robert Mueller to pre­pare for the mass arrests:

...
QAnon fol­lows on in sim­i­lar style from last year’s infa­mous Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry. But while Piz­za­gate focused its ire on one small pizze­ria in North­west Wash­ing­ton, the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry is much more far-reach­ing, claim­ing that a glob­al Deep State cabal is respon­si­ble for most of the world’s evil, and that Trump, along with Robert Mueller, are work­ing to deliv­er sealed indict­ments and ship every­one from Sen. John McCain (R‑AZ) to George Soros to Hillary Clin­ton off to Guan­tanamo Bay.
...

Also note that Trump said noth­ing about Mueller and the Mueller probe dur­ing this ral­ly, so you have to won­der if the abun­dance of “Q” fans in the crowd led to his selec­tive silence. It also rais­es the ques­tion of how the QAnon fans will reac­tive Mueller ends up issu­ing some sort of neg­a­tive final con­clu­sion.

But it’s not just the pro­mo­tion and embrace of the QAnon con­spir­a­cy by Trump and the right-wing media com­plex that’s been fuel­ing the main­stream­ing of this hoax. Social media has also been vital, with YouTube’s algo­rithms appar­ent­ly push­ing QAnon videos to the top of search results. For exam­ple, when an indi­vid­ual claimed Tom Han­ks is a mem­ber of the Deep State cabal of pedophiles and pur­chased her at age 13 as a “dis­so­ci­at­ed #mind­con­trol doll,” the YouTube algo­rithms made a video about these charges the top search result for a search for “Tom Han­ks”:

...
The QAnon the­o­ry began on 4chan before migrat­ing over to the even more obscure 8chan. These sites were instru­men­tal in help­ing craft the so-called “alt-right” dur­ing 2015 and 2016 but, as jour­nal­ist Will Som­mer at the Dai­ly Beast notes, QAnon is actu­al­ly far more pop­u­lar among baby boomers than their younger, more tech-savvy coun­ter­parts on the right.

It’s easy to dis­miss QAnon as a ridicu­lous con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, like­ly prop­a­gat­ed by a very ded­i­cat­ed troll, but it is start­ing to have some seri­ous real-world con­se­quences. On Sun­day, Michael Ave­nat­ti, the lawyer rep­re­sent­ing adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had an affair with Pres­i­dent Trump, was tar­get­ed by QAnon fol­low­ers. In June, a man with an AR-15 drove an armored vehi­cle onto the Hoover Dam and demand­ed that the gov­ern­ment “Release the OIG report,” a key part of the QAnon the­o­ry that had, in fact, been made pub­lic ear­li­er that week.

All of this is made infi­nite­ly eas­i­er by the will­ing­ness of YouTube — which has long been a hub of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries — to not only host QAnon con­spir­a­cy videos, but reg­u­lar­ly push them via its var­i­ous algo­rithms to the top of search results.

This past week­end, for instance, QAnon decid­ed that Tom Han­ks was a mem­ber of the Deep State cabal and a pedophile. On Mon­day, the top search results for Tom Han­ks on YouTube were relat­ed to QAnon accu­sa­tions before the algo­rithm revert­ed it.

Accord­ing to Buz­zfeed News, the accu­sa­tions against Han­ks stem from a sin­gle, unver­i­fied tweet by Sarah Ruth Ashcraft, claim­ing that she was pur­chased by Han­ks at 13 as a “dis­so­ci­at­ed #mind­con­trol doll.” Ashcraft lat­er boast­ed about how QAnon had helped her increase her Twit­ter fol­low­ing by 20,000.
...

And then there’s the main­stream­ing of it with retweets from con­ser­v­a­tive pun­dits like Ben Shapiro

...
Though the major­i­ty of voic­es pro­mot­ing the con­spir­a­cy tend to be fringe or right-wing voic­es, con­ser­v­a­tive media fig­ures like com­men­ta­tor Ben Shapiro have also retweet­ed offi­cial QAnon Twit­ter accounts in recent months. As ThinkProgress pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed, in late July, Shapiro retweet­ed the Twit­ter account “Pray­ing Medic,” one of the main QAnon pro­mot­ers. The account had tweet­ed a base­less claim about for­mer U.S. dig­ni­taries retain­ing secu­ri­ty clear­ances because they were mem­bers of the “Deep State.”
...

But as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, the main­stream­ing of QAnon has gone as far as peo­ple putting up bill­boards along high­ways. Yep, in Okla­homa and George there are already QAnon bill­boards:

Rolling Stone

As QAnon Goes Main­stream, Trump’s Ral­lies Are Turn­ing Dark­er

Under Trump, con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and an all out assault on the truth have cre­at­ed a strange new real­i­ty

By Ryan Bort
August 1, 2018 11:22AM ET

Pres­i­dent Trump was in Tam­pa, Flori­da, Tues­day night to sup­port Rep. Ron DeSan­tis’ cam­paign for gov­er­nor. As is the case with all of the president’s endorse­ment ral­lies, the appear­ance was less about the can­di­date and more about Trump’s accom­plish­ments, those crime-lov­ing Democ­rats and, of course, the dis­hon­est media. After his speech con­clud­ed, his sup­port­ers duti­ful­ly harangued CNN’s Jim Acos­ta, whom Trump famous­ly rebuffed as “fake news” dur­ing a press con­fer­ence in Lon­don last month.

Just a sam­ple of the sad scene we faced at the Trump ral­ly in Tam­pa. I’m very wor­ried that the hos­til­i­ty whipped up by Trump and some in con­ser­v­a­tive media will result in some­body get­ting hurt. We should not treat our fel­low Amer­i­cans this way. The press is not the ene­my. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R— Jim Acos­ta (@Acosta) August 1, 2018

Among the stan­dard “Women For Trump,” “Blacks For Trump” and “Promis­es Made, Promis­es Kept” signs, the video shows a few oth­ers. They fea­tured the let­ter “Q,” a ref­er­ence to QAnon, a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry gain­ing trac­tion among some of Trump’s most ardent sup­port­ers. In a nut­shell, fol­low­ers of QAnon fash­ion them­selves as detec­tives, or “bak­ers,” who try to make sense out of vague bits of infor­ma­tion, or “bread crumbs,” left for them on the Inter­net by “Q,” a mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure pur­port­ing to be a gov­ern­ment offi­cial with high-lev­el clear­ance. The clues left by “Q” have led his dis­ci­ples to believe that Spe­cial Coun­sel Mueller’s inves­ti­ga­tion is a cov­er, and Mueller is actu­al­ly work­ing in tan­dem with Trump to take down a mur­der­ous cabal of lib­er­al elites that includes every­one from Tom Han­ks to Barack Oba­ma. QAnon believes these elites have been run­ning an elab­o­rate child sex ring for years, and that there is a “storm” com­ing in which Trump will throw all of these pedophiles in jail once and for all. As NBC News reporter Ben Collins described it on Tues­day, QAnon is like “Piz­za­gate on bath salts.”

It wasn’t long ago that QAnon seemed too bla­tant­ly insane to exist any­where but on the extreme fringes of the Repub­li­can par­ty. In the past few months, how­ev­er, it has steadi­ly been seep­ing into the main­stream. When Trump trav­eled to North Dako­ta in June, kids were pho­tographed in home­made “Q” shirts.

Must-have Trump ral­ly acces­so­ry: QAnon shirts. pic.twitter.com/6wznKqXBzU— Will Som­mer (@willsommer) June 28, 2018

QAnon bill­boards have been spot­ted Okla­homa and Geor­gia.

QAnon bill­boards are a thing now. This one’s in Geor­gia. pic.twitter.com/VQ0Hn3T7h6— Will Som­mer (@willsommer) June 29, 2018

Tues­day night’s ral­ly in Tam­pa seemed dif­fer­ent. “Q” shirts and signs were preva­lent in a way that was hard to dis­miss. Mar­garet Sul­li­van of the Wash­ing­ton Post described the event a the con­spir­a­cy theory’s “com­ing out par­ty.” It wasn’t just a few peo­ple; prac­ti­cal­ly every cam­era shot of the event fea­tured a least a few “Q”s.

...
———-

“As QAnon Goes Main­stream, Trump’s Ral­lies Are Turn­ing Dark­er” by Ryan Bort; Rolling Stone; 08/01/2018

“QAnon bill­boards have been spot­ted Okla­homa and Geor­gia.”

So, between the YouTube pro­mo­tion, the bill­boards, and end­less nods and winks from the Pres­i­dent and the rest of the Repub­li­can estab­lish­ment, it’s not par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­pris­ing to see QAnon con­spir­a­cy grow in pop­u­lar­i­ty. But it’s hard to thing of some­thing that does more to main­stream this, at least main­stream it with­in Trump’s base, than the fact that these Trump Ral­lies are appar­ent­ly become QAnon ral­lies. As the arti­cle describes, the Tam­pa ral­ly “seemed dif­fer­ent”. There were just a lot more “Q” shirts and signs than before. As Mar­garet Sul­li­van put it, the ral­ly was a QAnon “com­ing out par­ty”. In oth­er words, with­in that audi­to­ri­um, QAnon was ful­ly main­stream:

...
Tues­day night’s ral­ly in Tam­pa seemed dif­fer­ent. “Q” shirts and signs were preva­lent in a way that was hard to dis­miss. Mar­garet Sul­li­van of the Wash­ing­ton Post described the event a the con­spir­a­cy theory’s “com­ing out par­ty.” It wasn’t just a few peo­ple; prac­ti­cal­ly every cam­era shot of the event fea­tured a least a few “Q”s.
...

As we can see, we have an extrav­a­gant, and wild­ly dan­ger­ous, hoax nar­ra­tive that is now very much a main­stream thing with­in the Trump base. It may not be a main­stream nar­ra­tive for the US as a whole at this point, and hope­ful­ly it nev­er gets there, but it just had a “com­ing out par­ty” for Repub­li­cans and there’s no indi­ca­tion the QAnon folks are going back in the clos­et any time soon.

And that’s all some of the dam­age done to Amer­i­can soci­ety at the Tam­pa ral­ly. There was still the attacks and the free press and creepy Brown­shirts-like mob men­tal­i­ty we are unfor­tu­nate­ly famil­iar with, but now the ral­lies include the main­stream­ing if a hoax encour­ag­ing the mass arrests of almost every­one the Trump base hates. Which appar­ent­ly includes Tom Han­ks now. Inter­est­ing times.

When Rob Ford, the late crack-smok­ing for­mer may­or of Toron­to, resigned and entered rehab, it might have been tempt­ing to assume that the polit­i­cal future of Rob’s broth­er, Doug, was going to be over. Espe­cial­ly giv­en Doug’s pub­lic defense of his broth­er at the time. The fam­i­ly’s his­to­ry of palling around with Klans­men. There was just a lot of polit­i­cal bag­gage for the Fords.

Flash for­ward to today and Doug is now the Ontario Pre­mier. So does this mean Doug has man­aged to shake off his fam­i­ly his­to­ry of court­ing con­tro­ver­sy by court­ing extrem­ists? Of course not. Instead, as the fol­low­ing piece about Ford refus­ing to con­demn a white nation­al­ist can­di­date he was palling around with — Alt Right Youtube star Faith Goldy — it’s pret­ty clear that Doug is intent on mak­ing palling around with extrem­ists part of his polit­i­cal brand. A polit­i­cal brand that appears to have a lot of appeal for Canada’s con­ser­v­a­tives these days:

The Huff­in­g­ton Post

Doug Ford Embrac­ing White Nation­al­ist Faith Goldy Is A Wake­up Call
Ford’s refusal to apol­o­gize for pos­ing with Goldy is a sign that things have changed: white nation­al­ism out loud is main­stream in Cana­da.

Davide Mas­trac­ci
Opinion/Blogs Asso­ciate Edi­tor, Huff­Post Cana­da
09/26/2018 16:24 EDT | Updat­ed 09/27/2018 09:29 EDT

On Sat­ur­day, Ontario Pre­mier Doug Ford embraced, and posed for a pho­to with, Toron­to may­oral can­di­date and white nation­al­ist Faith Goldy, at an event orga­nized by the Ontario Pro­gres­sive Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty.

As I’ve writ­ten before, far-right Rebel Media fired Goldy for going “too far” after she appeared on a neo-Nazi pod­cast. Goldy has also pub­licly recit­ed the most pop­u­lar white suprema­cist slo­gan, demand­ed a mod­ern cru­sade against Mus­lims, cham­pi­ons eth­no-nation­al­ism, bemoans “white geno­cide” and called for Cana­da to become “96% euro Cana­di­an.”

In the days after Goldy post­ed the pho­to on Twit­ter, sev­er­al oppos­ing Mem­bers of Provin­cial Par­lia­ment in Ques­tion Peri­od called on Ford to denounce her, and apol­o­gize.

This is a com­mon rit­u­al, in Ques­tion Peri­od and else­where, in which a politi­cian gives their oppo­nent an easy chance to get off the hook, either believ­ing their apol­o­gy is gen­uine or just being con­tent with the the­atri­cal points scored by hav­ing the apol­o­gy made in a pub­lic venue.

But Ford failed to take oppos­ing MPPs up on this offer, refus­ing to denounce Goldy when they asked. Days lat­er, he put out a tepid tweet that still failed to apol­o­gize for hav­ing his pho­to tak­en with her.

Many peo­ple are under­stand­ably out­raged by Ford’s deci­sion. I’m not. An apol­o­gy would do more harm than good.

I have been clear. I con­demn hate speech, anti-Semi­tism and racism in all forms- be it from Faith Goldy or any­one else.— Doug Ford (@fordnation) Sep­tem­ber 26, 2018

A sig­nif­i­cant chunk of the polit­i­cal and media class in Cana­da is obsessed with norms and deco­rum, at the expense of sub­stance. A Ford apol­o­gy would have sat­is­fied these peo­ple. They’d let Ford pose with 100 white nation­al­ists as long as he lat­er denounced each one and apol­o­gized. They’d prob­a­bly even applaud him for each shal­low con­dem­na­tion.

Ford’s refusal to denounce Goldy for days, or apol­o­gize at all, should offer a clear sign to apol­o­gists in pol­i­tics and media that things have changed: white nation­al­ism out loud is main­stream in Cana­da.

Goldy, who is cur­rent­ly polling third in the Toron­to may­oral race at six per cent, does­n’t mask her abhorent views, because pub­lic opin­ion in Cana­da has shift­ed to a point where her ilk no longer need to hide, and the Pre­mier feels com­fort­able embrac­ing her and then not apol­o­giz­ing.

Ford and Goldy aren’t iden­ti­cal, but if you ask her and oth­er white nation­al­ists, they’re on the same side in a fight for a new Ontario. In a recent robo­call sent to house­holds in Toron­to, Goldy even brand­ed her­self as the “only can­di­date who stands with Doug Ford.”

Proud to stand up for all Cana­di­ans along­side ya, Doug!— Faith J Goldy (@FaithGoldy) Sep­tem­ber 26, 2018

With this in mind, demands for Ford to denounce or apol­o­gize aren’t the sign of a strong oppo­si­tion, but a des­per­ate one. These calls are effec­tive­ly pleas for Ford to gen­u­flect to past norms that no longer apply.

I don’t mean to sound defeatist, or to dis­count the war­rant­ed fear and out­rage peo­ple are express­ing. Instead, I want to call for a change of pace going for­ward.

No doubt

Stop mak­ing excus­es for Ford.

In a recent New­stalk 1010 seg­ment, radio host Desmond Cole chas­tised Ford apol­o­gists, say­ing, “They expect me to give Doug Ford the ben­e­fit of the doubt, even though he walks, talks and acts like a white suprema­cist; even when he smiles and asso­ciates with oth­er white suprema­cists.”

Cole says he refus­es to do so, because he does­n’t want to live in a world “where you just keep step­ping on my toes, but telling me you did­n’t mean to do it. My toes are bro­ken, whether you meant it or not. Doug Ford pro­motes white suprema­cy, whether he owns it or not.”

...

No good Con­ser­v­a­tives

The next step applies to those who want to tru­ly oppose Ford and what he stands for, and who he asso­ciates with, beyond just on a cheap par­ti­san lev­el.

Ford is not the cause of the ill­ness plagu­ing Ontario, though he’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly malig­nant symp­tom. But he does not stand alone. He rep­re­sents a par­ty. He was vot­ed in by mem­bers of that par­ty. The rep­re­sen­ta­tives of that par­ty serve him, and have stood by him.

Par­ty mem­bers could jump ship if they want­ed to; they haven’t. In fact, even after Ford refused to con­demn Goldy, they report­ed­ly cheered, con­tent that he had passed the low bar of say­ing he denounces hate speech. Since then, more Con­ser­v­a­tive MPPs have been asked to denounce Goldy. They’ve refused.

They’re all respon­si­ble. They’re all com­plic­it. They should all be held to account.

We should­n’t give Ford the ben­e­fit of the doubt any longer, and the same is true for the Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty.

———-

“Doug Ford Embrac­ing White Nation­al­ist Faith Goldy Is A Wake­up Call” by Davide Mas­trac­ci; Huff­Post Cana­da; 09/26/2018

“On Sat­ur­day, Ontario Pre­mier Doug Ford embraced, and posed for a pho­to with, Toron­to may­oral can­di­date and white nation­al­ist Faith Goldy, at an event orga­nized by the Ontario Pro­gres­sive Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty.”

So on top of the fam­i­ly his­to­ry of Kathy Ford dat­ing a Klans­man, and Rob Ford pos­ing with a neo-Nazi band mem­ber, we now have Doug Ford pos­ing for a pho­to with Toron­to may­oral can­di­date Faith Goldy. And Faith Goldy does­n’t exact­ly hide her neo-Nazi nature:

...
As I’ve writ­ten before, far-right Rebel Media fired Goldy for going “too far” after she appeared on a neo-Nazi pod­cast. Goldy has also pub­licly recit­ed the most pop­u­lar white suprema­cist slo­gan, demand­ed a mod­ern cru­sade against Mus­lims, cham­pi­ons eth­no-nation­al­ism, bemoans “white geno­cide” and called for Cana­da to become “96% euro Cana­di­an.”
...

And while Ford had the option of sim­ply mak­ing a pub­lic apol­o­gy and hav­ing every­one move one, he dragged his feet and only even­tu­al­ly gave a tepid denun­ci­a­tion of Goldy:

...
In the days after Goldy post­ed the pho­to on Twit­ter, sev­er­al oppos­ing Mem­bers of Provin­cial Par­lia­ment in Ques­tion Peri­od called on Ford to denounce her, and apol­o­gize.

This is a com­mon rit­u­al, in Ques­tion Peri­od and else­where, in which a politi­cian gives their oppo­nent an easy chance to get off the hook, either believ­ing their apol­o­gy is gen­uine or just being con­tent with the the­atri­cal points scored by hav­ing the apol­o­gy made in a pub­lic venue.

But Ford failed to take oppos­ing MPPs up on this offer, refus­ing to denounce Goldy when they asked. Days lat­er, he put out a tepid tweet that still failed to apol­o­gize for hav­ing his pho­to tak­en with her.

Many peo­ple are under­stand­ably out­raged by Ford’s deci­sion. I’m not. An apol­o­gy would do more harm than good.

I have been clear. I con­demn hate speech, anti-Semi­tism and racism in all forms- be it from Faith Goldy or any­one else.— Doug Ford (@fordnation) Sep­tem­ber 26, 2018

A sig­nif­i­cant chunk of the polit­i­cal and media class in Cana­da is obsessed with norms and deco­rum, at the expense of sub­stance. A Ford apol­o­gy would have sat­is­fied these peo­ple. They’d let Ford pose with 100 white nation­al­ists as long as he lat­er denounced each one and apol­o­gized. They’d prob­a­bly even applaud him for each shal­low con­dem­na­tion.

Ford’s refusal to denounce Goldy for days, or apol­o­gize at all, should offer a clear sign to apol­o­gists in pol­i­tics and media that things have changed: white nation­al­ism out loud is main­stream in Cana­da.

Goldy, who is cur­rent­ly polling third in the Toron­to may­oral race at six per cent, does­n’t mask her abhorent views, because pub­lic opin­ion in Cana­da has shift­ed to a point where her ilk no longer need to hide, and the Pre­mier feels com­fort­able embrac­ing her and then not apol­o­giz­ing.
...

And this unabashed chum­mi­ness with Goldy isn’t lost on Goldy. She’s actu­al­ly brand­ing her­self as the “only can­di­date who stands with Doug Ford”:

...
Ford and Goldy aren’t iden­ti­cal, but if you ask her and oth­er white nation­al­ists, they’re on the same side in a fight for a new Ontario. In a recent robo­call sent to house­holds in Toron­to, Goldy even brand­ed her­self as the “only can­di­date who stands with Doug Ford.”

Proud to stand up for all Cana­di­ans along­side ya, Doug!— Faith J Goldy (@FaithGoldy) Sep­tem­ber 26, 2018

With this in mind, demands for Ford to denounce or apol­o­gize aren’t the sign of a strong oppo­si­tion, but a des­per­ate one. These calls are effec­tive­ly pleas for Ford to gen­u­flect to past norms that no longer apply.

I don’t mean to sound defeatist, or to dis­count the war­rant­ed fear and out­rage peo­ple are express­ing. Instead, I want to call for a change of pace going for­ward.
...

Note that the tweet Goldy sent out where she pro­claims that she is “Proud to stand up for all Cana­di­ans along­side ya, Doug!” was a direct reply to the tweet Ford sent where he said, “I have been clear. I con­demn hate speech, anti-Semi­tism and racism in all forms- be it from Faith Goldy or any­one else.” It’s all quite rem­i­nis­cent of when then-can­di­date Don­ald Trump took days to repu­di­ate David Duke and only after days of refus­ing to do so.

But the par­al­lels aren’t lim­it­ed to Ford and Trump. There’s also the par­al­lels between Ford’s Con­ser­v­a­tives and the GOP. Just as the GOP has shown almost no appetite for crit­i­ciz­ing Trump no mat­ter what he does, Ford’s fel­low par­ty mem­bers cheered his tepid belat­ed denun­ci­a­tion of hate speech and, them­selves, refuse to denounce Goldy when asked:

...
No good Con­ser­v­a­tives

The next step applies to those who want to tru­ly oppose Ford and what he stands for, and who he asso­ciates with, beyond just on a cheap par­ti­san lev­el.

Ford is not the cause of the ill­ness plagu­ing Ontario, though he’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly malig­nant symp­tom. But he does not stand alone. He rep­re­sents a par­ty. He was vot­ed in by mem­bers of that par­ty. The rep­re­sen­ta­tives of that par­ty serve him, and have stood by him.

Par­ty mem­bers could jump ship if they want­ed to; they haven’t. In fact, even after Ford refused to con­demn Goldy, they report­ed­ly cheered, con­tent that he had passed the low bar of say­ing he denounces hate speech. Since then, more Con­ser­v­a­tive MPPs have been asked to denounce Goldy. They’ve refused.

They’re all respon­si­ble. They’re all com­plic­it. They should all be held to account.

We should­n’t give Ford the ben­e­fit of the doubt any longer, and the same is true for the Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty.
...

And that’s what so chill­ing about this lat­est episode of the Ford fam­i­ly cud­dling up to white suprema­cists: it’s not just about the Ford fam­i­ly. It’s about Canada’s con­ser­v­a­tives qui­et­ly wel­com­ing white suprema­cy into the main­stream, one tepid belat­ed denun­ci­a­tion at a time.

Here’s a sign of how utter­ly screwed Brazil is going to be for the fore­see­able future. It’s also the lat­est sto­ry, one of many, about how What­sApp is wreak­ing hav­oc on Brazil­ian soci­ety: The largest female-orga­nized march in Brazil­ian his­to­ry just took place in oppo­si­tion to the open­ly misog­y­nis­tic far right can­di­da­cy of Jair Bol­sonaro, who hap­pens to be the lead­ing can­di­date in the run-off. He also hap­pens to have open­ly said recent­ly that he would­n’t pay women the same salary as men. Half of female vot­ers have already declared they would nev­er back him. So did the march do any­thing to dam­age Bol­sonaro’s sup­port among women? Nope, the oppo­site hap­pened and his sup­port among women went up:

The Guardian

‘I don’t see any rea­son for fem­i­nism’: the women back­ing Brazil’s Bol­sonaro
The open­ly sex­ist pres­i­den­tial can­di­date has faced an extra­or­di­nary back­lash. So why do many women sup­port him?

Anna Jean Kaiser in São Paulo

Sun 14 Oct 2018 03.01 EDT
Last mod­i­fied on Mon 15 Oct 2018 12.10 EDT

They are not vic­tims, and they don’t need anyone’s sym­pa­thy. They have no time for “whiny fem­i­nists” – and no need for the gov­ern­ment to guar­an­tee equal pay.

They earned what they’ve achieved, often jug­gling a pro­fes­sion­al life with run­ning a home and rais­ing a fam­i­ly. And they want the right to bear arms to pro­tect them­selves and their loved ones.

They are the anti-fem­i­nist women back­ing the far-right, for­mer para­troop­er Jair Bol­sonaro in Brazil’s upcom­ing pres­i­den­tial runoff elec­tion – a man who has been repeat­ed­ly accused of misog­y­ny and racism.

“I real­ly don’t see any rea­son for fem­i­nism today — men and women are equal in Brazil,” said Ana de Moraes, 56, a retired lawyer who intends to vote for Bol­sonaro on 28 Octo­ber. “These fem­i­nist women scream­ing and tak­ing off their clothes – it’s very back­wards. Bol­sonaro isn’t tak­ing any rights away from women.”

Over the course of a 30-year polit­i­cal career, Bol­sonaro has earned noto­ri­ety from his sex­ist remarks, once telling a fel­low law­mak­er she didn’t even “deserve” being raped and more recent­ly say­ing he wouldn’t pay women the same salary as men.

In 2013, he called the sec­re­tary of women’s pol­i­cy a “big dyke”. Dur­ing the impeach­ment of the country’s first female pres­i­dent, he ded­i­cat­ed his vote to the dic­ta­tor­ship colonel who had over­seen her tor­ture.

Such lan­guage made him a hate fig­ure for many, and fuelled a high rejec­tion rate among women: even as Bol­sonaro pulled ahead in the polls, 50% of female vot­ers said they would nev­er back him.

Many poll­sters had pre­sumed that Bolsonaro’s misog­y­ny had cre­at­ed a nat­ur­al lim­it to his share of the women’s vote, but in the final stages of the cam­paign, that expec­ta­tion has shat­tered.

The week­end before the first round on 7 Octo­ber, tens of thou­sands of peo­ple joined march­es across the coun­try under the slo­gan #EleNão (“not him”) in the biggest female-orga­nized street demon­stra­tion in Brazil­ian his­to­ry.

But polling showed that after the #EleNão protests, Bolsonaro’s sup­port among women actu­al­ly rose.

And far from warm­ing up to fem­i­nism, Bol­sonaro and his sup­port­ers dou­bled down with their attacks.

When Bol­sonaro sup­port­ers held their own demon­stra­tions, his son, Eduar­do, pro­nounced: “Rightwing women are pret­ti­er than left­wing women. They don’t show the breasts in the streets, nor do they defe­cate in the streets. Rightwing women are more hygien­ic.”

Memes cir­cu­late on What­sApp and Face­book – where the major­i­ty of Bolsonaro’s cam­paign has played out – jux­ta­pos­ing images of pro- and anti-Bol­sonaro women..

In one, a female Bol­sonaro sup­port­er stands sur­round­ed by Brazil­ian flags, eyes closed and fist in the air, with a sleep­ing child over her shoul­der; the woman from the #EleNão protest is yelling, top­less and daubed with body paint. (The vast major­i­ty of protest par­tic­i­pants were ful­ly clothed.)

Anoth­er wide­ly shared image showed a lit­tle boy wear­ing a shirt that said, “Mum’s a fem­i­nista; I don’t grow up to be machista”, with text writ­ten over it, “Sweet­ie, if your mum’s a fem­i­nist, you wouldn’t even be born, you’d have been abort­ed!”

And such mes­sages are res­onat­ing. Accord­ing to polls before the frag­ment­ed first round of 13 can­di­dates, Bol­sonaro was the most pop­u­lar can­di­date among women, with 27% of the vote. The lat­est poll for the runoff elec­tion says he has rough­ly 42% of the female elec­torate.

“These women who are naked in the streets scream­ing – they don’t rep­re­sent me,” said De Moraes, the retired lawyer.

“A real fem­i­nist is a woman who gets up ear­ly, works hard and fights for her inde­pen­dence, not these women who whine and have bare­ly worked a day in their lives,” said Lin­da Fontes, 23, a real estate admin­is­tra­tor from Rio’s poor periph­ery who describes her­self as a Bol­sonaro “fanat­ic”.

Fontes has been mugged twice, and sup­ports Bolsonaro’s pro­pos­al to loosen gun own­er­ship laws so that “upstand­ing cit­i­zens” can pro­tect them­selves from Brazil’s soar­ing vio­lent crime.

“I need to be able to pro­tect myself in the chaos that is Rio de Janeiro today,” she said.

Female Bol­sonaro vot­ers shrug off his refusal to sup­port leg­is­la­tion to ensure equal pay, despite stud­ies show­ing that women in Brazil earn 22.5% less than men.

“Salaries for both men and women should be based on mer­it and respon­si­bil­i­ties. Women today are well aware of their rights, oblig­a­tions and duties. We don’t need the gov­ern­ment for that,” said Maria Alice do Lago, a seam­stress from rur­al São Paulo state.

Like some vot­ers for the US pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, many female Bol­sonaro vot­ers say they don’t agree with every­thing he says – or like the way he says it – but they still intend to vote for him.

...

Bol­sonaro has no major par­ty behind him, and has had very lit­tle adver­tis­ing time on tele­vi­sion and radio, but his sup­port­ers have dom­i­nat­ed the fight online, flood­ing social net­works with pro-Bol­sonaro memes and tes­ti­monies reject­ing the “fem­i­nist agen­da”.

“I’ve nev­er played the vic­tim card,” says an unnamed black woman sup­port­er in one such clip. “I sup­port the right. I’m fem­i­nine and I love it. I shave my armpits. Yes, I cook for my hus­band, yes, I wash my husband’s clothes – there’s no prob­lem with that.”

Már­cio Moret­to Ribeiro, a Uni­ver­si­ty of São Paulo pro­fes­sor who tracked pro-Bol­sonaro con­tent on Face­book, found that that posts crit­i­ciz­ing fem­i­nism were among the top three most-shared top­ics.

“It was evi­dent that Bol­sonaro would have a prob­lem with women,” he said. “[But] Bol­sonaro and his inter­net base react­ed – they adjust­ed the dis­course to posi­tion him on the side of women but against fem­i­nists.

“It’s a risky strat­e­gy, but it worked.”.

———-

“ ‘I don’t see any rea­son for fem­i­nism’: the women back­ing Brazil’s Bol­sonaro” by Anna Jean Kaiser in São Paulo; The Guardian; 10/14/2018

“Many poll­sters had pre­sumed that Bolsonaro’s misog­y­ny had cre­at­ed a nat­ur­al lim­it to his share of the women’s vote, but in the final stages of the cam­paign, that expec­ta­tion has shat­tered.”

Yep, Bol­sonaro has some­how man­aged to make ground with the female vote. This is a guy who once told a female law­mak­er that she did­n’t ever “deserve” to be raped and recent­ly said he would­n’t pay women the same salary as men. And sure, 50 per­cent of female vot­ers said they would nev­er back him, but that still implies 50 per­cent are open to the idea. And he appears to have made inroad with that lat­ter group:

...
Over the course of a 30-year polit­i­cal career, Bol­sonaro has earned noto­ri­ety from his sex­ist remarks, once telling a fel­low law­mak­er she didn’t even “deserve” being raped and more recent­ly say­ing he wouldn’t pay women the same salary as men.

In 2013, he called the sec­re­tary of women’s pol­i­cy a “big dyke”. Dur­ing the impeach­ment of the country’s first female pres­i­dent, he ded­i­cat­ed his vote to the dic­ta­tor­ship colonel who had over­seen her tor­ture.

Such lan­guage made him a hate fig­ure for many, and fuelled a high rejec­tion rate among women: even as Bol­sonaro pulled ahead in the polls, 50% of female vot­ers said they would nev­er back him.
...

And yet, fol­low­ing the largest female-orga­nized street protest in Brazil­ian his­to­ry, Bol­sonaro’s sup­port for women went up:

...
The week­end before the first round on 7 Octo­ber, tens of thou­sands of peo­ple joined march­es across the coun­try under the slo­gan #EleNão (“not him”) in the biggest female-orga­nized street demon­stra­tion in Brazil­ian his­to­ry.

But polling showed that after the #EleNão protests, Bolsonaro’s sup­port among women actu­al­ly rose.
...

And that rise in female sup­port was­n’t due to Bol­sonaro effec­tive­ly play­ing down his misog­y­ny. Nope, they dou­bled down and framed the pro­test­ers as peo­ple who pub­licly show their breasts and defe­cate in the streets:

...
And far from warm­ing up to fem­i­nism, Bol­sonaro and his sup­port­ers dou­bled down with their attacks.

When Bol­sonaro sup­port­ers held their own demon­stra­tions, his son, Eduar­do, pro­nounced: “Rightwing women are pret­ti­er than left­wing women. They don’t show the breasts in the streets, nor do they defe­cate in the streets. Rightwing women are more hygien­ic.”
...

And, of course, What­sApp and Face­book proved cru­cial to the suc­cess­ful prop­a­ga­tion of these memes. Thanks to these tac­tics, Bol­sonaro man­aged to get the sup­port of over 40 per­cent of the female elec­torate:

...
Memes cir­cu­late on What­sApp and Face­book – where the major­i­ty of Bolsonaro’s cam­paign has played out – jux­ta­pos­ing images of pro- and anti-Bol­sonaro women..

In one, a female Bol­sonaro sup­port­er stands sur­round­ed by Brazil­ian flags, eyes closed and fist in the air, with a sleep­ing child over her shoul­der; the woman from the #EleNão protest is yelling, top­less and daubed with body paint. (The vast major­i­ty of protest par­tic­i­pants were ful­ly clothed.)

Anoth­er wide­ly shared image showed a lit­tle boy wear­ing a shirt that said, “Mum’s a fem­i­nista; I don’t grow up to be machista”, with text writ­ten over it, “Sweet­ie, if your mum’s a fem­i­nist, you wouldn’t even be born, you’d have been abort­ed!”

And such mes­sages are res­onat­ing. Accord­ing to polls before the frag­ment­ed first round of 13 can­di­dates, Bol­sonaro was the most pop­u­lar can­di­date among women, with 27% of the vote. The lat­est poll for the runoff elec­tion says he has rough­ly 42% of the female elec­torate.

“These women who are naked in the streets scream­ing – they don’t rep­re­sent me,” said De Moraes, the retired lawyer.

“A real fem­i­nist is a woman who gets up ear­ly, works hard and fights for her inde­pen­dence, not these women who whine and have bare­ly worked a day in their lives,” said Lin­da Fontes, 23, a real estate admin­is­tra­tor from Rio’s poor periph­ery who describes her­self as a Bol­sonaro “fanat­ic”.
...

The Bol­sonaro cam­paign memes attack­ing fem­i­nism — which implic­it­ly and per­verse­ly frames Bol­sonaro as a defend­er of women — man­aged to become among the top three most shared top­ics on Face­book in Brazil. That’s how effec­tive­ly the Bol­sonaro cam­paign has har­nessed social media plat­forms like Face­book and What­sApp:

...

Bol­sonaro has no major par­ty behind him, and has had very lit­tle adver­tis­ing time on tele­vi­sion and radio, but his sup­port­ers have dom­i­nat­ed the fight online, flood­ing social net­works with pro-Bol­sonaro memes and tes­ti­monies reject­ing the “fem­i­nist agen­da”.

“I’ve nev­er played the vic­tim card,” says an unnamed black woman sup­port­er in one such clip. “I sup­port the right. I’m fem­i­nine and I love it. I shave my armpits. Yes, I cook for my hus­band, yes, I wash my husband’s clothes – there’s no prob­lem with that.”

Már­cio Moret­to Ribeiro, a Uni­ver­si­ty of São Paulo pro­fes­sor who tracked pro-Bol­sonaro con­tent on Face­book, found that that posts crit­i­ciz­ing fem­i­nism were among the top three most-shared top­ics.

“It was evi­dent that Bol­sonaro would have a prob­lem with women,” he said. “[But] Bol­sonaro and his inter­net base react­ed – they adjust­ed the dis­course to posi­tion him on the side of women but against fem­i­nists.

“It’s a risky strat­e­gy, but it worked.”.
...

So did a hand­ful of female pro­tes­tors actu­al­ly man­age to deliv­er the Bol­sonaro cam­paign a polit­i­cal gift by going top­less and defe­cat­ing in the streets dur­ing the big anti-Bol­sonaro protest march? Nope. Instead, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle makes clear, it’s exact­ly what we should expect­ed: The Bol­sonaro forces are sim­ply spread­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion. Specif­i­cal­ly, they’re spread­ing it over Face­book and espe­cial­ly What­sApp. And since Bol­sonaro is the lead­ing can­di­date and has more or less exclu­sive­ly cam­paigned over Face­book and What­sApp — ignor­ing tele­vi­sion and radio — it’s pret­ty clear that Face­book and What­sApp are cru­cial polit­i­cal plat­forms for Brazil these days. Don’t for­get that one of the key sales pitch­es of What­sApp is that no third par­ties can see what’s sent on it. Not gov­ern­ments and not even What­sApp itself or its par­ent com­pa­ny Face­book. In oth­er words, What­sApp is the per­fect plat­form for the dis­sem­i­na­tion of far right dis­in­for­ma­tion and that’s exact­ly what it’s being used for by the Bol­sonaro cam­paign. Very effec­tive­ly:

Brasil­Wire

What­sApp: Bolsonaro’s hate machine

As Mark Zucker­berg jumps through hoops to show he can lim­it the dam­age to democ­ra­cy caused by fake news on Face­book, his What­sApp plat­form has been used to con­vince a large seg­ment of the Brazil­ian elec­torate that out of con­trol gays are about to force homo­sex­u­al­i­ty on their chil­dren unless they elect an actu­al fas­cist. Will Sunday’s first-round pres­i­den­tial elec­tions be the first ever to be won over What­sApp?

by Bri­an Mier
Octo­ber 5, 2018

Brazil has some of the world’s most expen­sive cel­lu­lar phone air­time. There­fore when Facebook’s What­sApp mes­sag­ing app came along, which allows users to make free calls over the inter­net, it caught on fast. Today, over 100 mil­lion Brazil­ians – half the pop­u­la­tion – use it every day. Brazil­ians are the largest con­sumers of What­sApp in the world.

Twit­ter was influ­en­tial in Mid­dle East regime changes in the so-called Arab spring. Face­book helped pro­pel Oba­ma to pow­er in 2008 and 4Chan helped Trump win the US pres­i­den­cy in 2016. The 2018 Brazil­ian pres­i­den­tial elec­tions appear to be the first any­where in which What­sApp will prove to be a decid­ing fac­tor. Lead­ing can­di­date Jair Bol­sonaro has avoid­ed tele­vi­sion appear­ances in favor of the social media plat­form, which allows him and his fol­low­ers to quick­ly reach mil­lions of peo­ple with slan­der­ous mis­in­for­ma­tion that is not chal­lenged or reg­u­lat­ed in any way, and is believed to be fac­tu­al by a large seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion.

Brazil’s cam­paign laws dic­tate that can­di­dates’ tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials are lim­it­ed to a cer­tain amount of free air­time which is allo­cat­ed by the gov­ern­ment accord­ing to how many con­gress­men belong to his and his coalition’s polit­i­cal par­ties. This ensures that, where­as all can­di­dates are guar­an­teed a min­i­mum amount of free air time, the larg­er par­ties and coali­tions get more. In the 2018 elec­tion sea­son PSDB can­di­date Ger­al­do Alck­min, who was ini­tial­ly Wall Street’s favorite due to his sup­port of the Temer government’s deep aus­ter­i­ty cuts and petro­le­um pri­va­ti­za­tions, was allo­cat­ed 5:30 of com­mer­cial air­time in each of the two dai­ly 25 minute polit­i­cal com­mer­cial blocs. PT can­di­date Fer­nan­do Had­dad got 2:22. Fer­nan­do Meire­les from PMDB got 1:50. For the first time since the end of the dic­ta­tor­ship, how­ev­er, the lead­ing can­di­date in a Brazil­ian Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion has been almost invis­i­ble on TV. Jair Bol­sonaro, from the tiny, neo­fas­cist PSL par­ty, has only had 8 sec­onds of air­time per com­mer­cial bloc. Fur­ther­more, he has repeat­ed­ly refused to par­tic­i­pate in tele­vi­sion debates. How has he emerged as elec­toral front-run­ner? The first fac­tor was the arrest, with no mate­r­i­al evi­dence, of lead­ing can­di­date Luiz Iná­cio Lula da Sil­va. Unlike 1400 oth­er cur­rent can­di­dates in the Brazil­ian elec­tions who have sim­i­lar appeals process­es under­way and were allowed to run for office by the elec­toral courts, Lula was removed from the elec­tion in direct defi­ance of Brazil­ian elec­toral law and a legal­ly bind­ing order from the UN Human Rights Com­mit­tee. His arrest has clear­ly led to a rise of fas­cism in Brazil. The sec­ond key fac­tor is Bolsonaro’s cam­paign and sup­port­ers use of the What­sApp mes­sen­ger plat­form which is impos­si­ble to police for Brazil­ian crimes such as hate speech, con­spir­a­cy to incite vio­lence and slan­der, mak­ing it a per­fect plat­form for com­mit­ting char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion against any­one from ex-lovers to pro­fes­sion­al and polit­i­cal rivals.

When 4 mil­lion women joined the #ele­nao (#noth­im) Face­book group in protest against Bol­sonaro and planned one of the largest anti-fas­cist protests in his­to­ry, his cam­paign and his fol­low­ers (it is near­ly impos­si­ble to ascer­tain the dif­fer­ence through What­sApp) imme­di­ate­ly swung into action to dis­cred­it the protest. Work­ing through thou­sands of chat groups of 256 mem­bers each, they cir­cu­lat­ed pho­tos from a recent gay pride parade of top­less les­bian activists and said that they were tak­en at the #ele­nao protests. They worked to specif­i­cal­ly tar­get evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian women, cou­pling the pho­tos with mes­sages like, “This is what [PT can­di­date] Had­dad thinks about fam­i­ly val­ues”. Around one mil­lion peo­ple took to the streets on Sep­tem­ber 30 against Bol­sonaro in 300 cities and 21 coun­tries around the world and celebri­ties like Madon­na pub­licly expressed sup­port for the cam­paign, but when the poll results start­ed com­ing in a few days lat­er, woman’s sup­port for Bol­sonaro had increased, giv­ing him a 5% jump and pro­pelling him into a pro­ject­ed tie with Fer­nan­do Had­dad in the run off.

TV Pro­duc­er Janaina Avi­la recent­ly pub­lished a list of 15 lies that the Bol­sonaro cam­paign has specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians with on What­sApp. These include the fol­low­ing: 1) If PT can­di­date Fer­nan­do Had­dad is elect­ed, chil­dren will become prop­er­ty of the state and have their gen­der declared by gov­ern­ment bureau­crats at age 5; 2) While may­or of São Paulo, Had­dad dis­trib­uted penis shaped baby bot­tles at pub­lic preschools; 3) Vice Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Manuela D’Ávila accord­ing to a pho­to-shopped pic­ture wore a T‑shirt that said, “ Jesus is a Trans­ves­tite”; and 4) One mil­lion Bol­sonaro sup­port­ers took part in a protest on Paulista avenue in São Paulo last week.

...

———-

“What­sApp: Bolsonaro’s hate machine” by Bri­an Mier; Brasil­Wire; 10/05/2018

“Twit­ter was influ­en­tial in Mid­dle East regime changes in the so-called Arab spring. Face­book helped pro­pel Oba­ma to pow­er in 2008 and 4Chan helped Trump win the US pres­i­den­cy in 2016. The 2018 Brazil­ian pres­i­den­tial elec­tions appear to be the first any­where in which What­sApp will prove to be a decid­ing fac­tor. Lead­ing can­di­date Jair Bol­sonaro has avoid­ed tele­vi­sion appear­ances in favor of the social media plat­form, which allows him and his fol­low­ers to quick­ly reach mil­lions of peo­ple with slan­der­ous mis­in­for­ma­tion that is not chal­lenged or reg­u­lat­ed in any way, and is believed to be fac­tu­al by a large seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion.”

That’s right, What­sApp is turn­ing out to the ‘killer app’ of Brazil­ian pol­i­tics. And it just might kill Brazil’s democ­ra­cy in the process. And Bol­sonaro and the far right aren’t sim­ply using What­sApp to spread dis­in­for­ma­tion. They’re almost exclu­sive­ly using What­sApp, thus push­ing Brazil’s polit­i­cal dis­course onto a plat­form where Bol­sonaro’s team can secret­ly pump out­right lies direct­ly to tar­get audi­ences:

...
Brazil’s cam­paign laws dic­tate that can­di­dates’ tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials are lim­it­ed to a cer­tain amount of free air­time which is allo­cat­ed by the gov­ern­ment accord­ing to how many con­gress­men belong to his and his coalition’s polit­i­cal par­ties. This ensures that, where­as all can­di­dates are guar­an­teed a min­i­mum amount of free air time, the larg­er par­ties and coali­tions get more. In the 2018 elec­tion sea­son PSDB can­di­date Ger­al­do Alck­min, who was ini­tial­ly Wall Street’s favorite due to his sup­port of the Temer government’s deep aus­ter­i­ty cuts and petro­le­um pri­va­ti­za­tions, was allo­cat­ed 5:30 of com­mer­cial air­time in each of the two dai­ly 25 minute polit­i­cal com­mer­cial blocs. PT can­di­date Fer­nan­do Had­dad got 2:22. Fer­nan­do Meire­les from PMDB got 1:50. For the first time since the end of the dic­ta­tor­ship, how­ev­er, the lead­ing can­di­date in a Brazil­ian Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion has been almost invis­i­ble on TV. Jair Bol­sonaro, from the tiny, neo­fas­cist PSL par­ty, has only had 8 sec­onds of air­time per com­mer­cial bloc. Fur­ther­more, he has repeat­ed­ly refused to par­tic­i­pate in tele­vi­sion debates. How has he emerged as elec­toral front-run­ner? The first fac­tor was the arrest, with no mate­r­i­al evi­dence, of lead­ing can­di­date Luiz Iná­cio Lula da Sil­va. Unlike 1400 oth­er cur­rent can­di­dates in the Brazil­ian elec­tions who have sim­i­lar appeals process­es under­way and were allowed to run for office by the elec­toral courts, Lula was removed from the elec­tion in direct defi­ance of Brazil­ian elec­toral law and a legal­ly bind­ing order from the UN Human Rights Com­mit­tee. His arrest has clear­ly led to a rise of fas­cism in Brazil. The sec­ond key fac­tor is Bolsonaro’s cam­paign and sup­port­ers use of the What­sApp mes­sen­ger plat­form which is impos­si­ble to police for Brazil­ian crimes such as hate speech, con­spir­a­cy to incite vio­lence and slan­der, mak­ing it a per­fect plat­form for com­mit­ting char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion against any­one from ex-lovers to pro­fes­sion­al and polit­i­cal rivals.
...

And the effec­tive­ness of that dis­in­for­ma­tion tac­tic was on full dis­play with the anti-fem­i­nist memes get­ting pushed fol­low­ing the big anti-Bol­sonaro protests: thou­sands of Bol­sonaro chat groups start cir­cu­lat­ed pho­tos from a recent gay pride parade of top­less les­bian activists and said they were pho­tos from the Bol­sonaro protests. Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian women were the key tar­get of this dis­in­for­ma­tion, and based on Bol­sonaro’s uptick in female sup­port it appears to have worked:

...
When 4 mil­lion women joined the #ele­nao (#noth­im) Face­book group in protest against Bol­sonaro and planned one of the largest anti-fas­cist protests in his­to­ry, his cam­paign and his fol­low­ers (it is near­ly impos­si­ble to ascer­tain the dif­fer­ence through What­sApp) imme­di­ate­ly swung into action to dis­cred­it the protest. Work­ing through thou­sands of chat groups of 256 mem­bers each, they cir­cu­lat­ed pho­tos from a recent gay pride parade of top­less les­bian activists and said that they were tak­en at the #ele­nao protests. They worked to specif­i­cal­ly tar­get evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian women, cou­pling the pho­tos with mes­sages like, “This is what [PT can­di­date] Had­dad thinks about fam­i­ly val­ues”. Around one mil­lion peo­ple took to the streets on Sep­tem­ber 30 against Bol­sonaro in 300 cities and 21 coun­tries around the world and celebri­ties like Madon­na pub­licly expressed sup­port for the cam­paign, but when the poll results start­ed com­ing in a few days lat­er, woman’s sup­port for Bol­sonaro had increased, giv­ing him a 5% jump and pro­pelling him into a pro­ject­ed tie with Fer­nan­do Had­dad in the run off.

TV Pro­duc­er Janaina Avi­la recent­ly pub­lished a list of 15 lies that the Bol­sonaro cam­paign has specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians with on What­sApp. These include the fol­low­ing: 1) If PT can­di­date Fer­nan­do Had­dad is elect­ed, chil­dren will become prop­er­ty of the state and have their gen­der declared by gov­ern­ment bureau­crats at age 5; 2) While may­or of São Paulo, Had­dad dis­trib­uted penis shaped baby bot­tles at pub­lic preschools; 3) Vice Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Manuela D’Ávila accord­ing to a pho­to-shopped pic­ture wore a T‑shirt that said, “ Jesus is a Trans­ves­tite”; and 4) One mil­lion Bol­sonaro sup­port­ers took part in a protest on Paulista avenue in São Paulo last week.
...

Also note that the above Guardian arti­cle por­trayed those pho­tos as actu­al­ly being from the #ele­nao protests, so this Bol­sonaro cam­paign appears to have fooled some reporters too.

And that’s all con­tribut­ing to a sit­u­a­tion where it’s look­ing increas­ing­ly like Brazil is about to enter into a new dark chap­ter by elect­ing a pro-dic­ta­tor­ship, pro-tor­ture, and pro-rape far right lunatic to lead the coun­try. So if it seems like Brazil has gone mad, don’t for­get that What­sApp appears to be play­ing a sig­nif­i­cant role in spread­ing that mad­ness. And no one at What­sApp or Face­book appears to have any mean­ing­ful abil­i­ty or inten­tion of doing any­thing about it.

So remem­ber how the far right was claim­ing that secret videos exist of Hillary Clin­ton eat­ing the face of a child as part of Satan­ic rit­u­al and the risk of ‘deep fake’ AI tech­nol­o­gy will even­tu­al­ly allow for the cre­ation of con­vinc­ing fake videos of this nature? Well, that par­tic­u­lar con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry has a name now: Fraz­zledrip. And as the fol­low­ing Vox arti­cle about YouTube’s prob­lems with sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly pro­mot­ing extrem­ist videos and dis­in­for­ma­tion points out, it turns out YouTube’s algo­rithms have been sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly pro­mot­ing the hell out of Fraz­zledrip. Sur­prise!:

Vox.com

YouTube’s con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry cri­sis, explained
Why a Demo­c­ra­t­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tive asked Google’s CEO about the most bizarre con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry you’ve nev­er heard of.

By Jane Coas­ton
Dec 12, 2018, 4:15pm EST

The three-and-a-half-hour hear­ing with Google CEO Sun­dar Pichai and the House Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee wasn’t exact­ly a show­case of deep knowl­edge of tech­nol­o­gy. One Repub­li­can rep­re­sen­ta­tive com­plained that all of the Google results for the Oba­macare repeal act and the Repub­li­can tax bill were neg­a­tive. Rep. Steve King (R‑IA) had to be told that Google does not make the iPhone. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R‑TX) demand­ed that Google be held liable for Wikipedia’s “polit­i­cal bias.”

But one law­mak­er, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D‑MD), raised an actu­al­ly impor­tant and press­ing issue: the way YouTube’s algo­rithms can be used to push con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

“The point at which it becomes a mat­ter of seri­ous pub­lic inter­est is when your com­mu­ni­ca­tion vehi­cle is being used to pro­mote pro­pa­gan­da that leads to vio­lent events.” He was allud­ing to the Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry which led to an armed gun­man show­ing up at a DC-area pizze­ria in 2016 — a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry spread, in part, on YouTube.

Raskin asked about anoth­er espe­cial­ly strange con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that emerged on YouTube — “Fraz­zledrip,” which has deep ties to the QAnon and Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. He asked Pichai, “Is your basic posi­tion that [Fraz­zledrip] is some­thing you want to try to do some­thing about, but basi­cal­ly there is just an avalanche of such mate­r­i­al and there’s real­ly noth­ing that can be done, and it should be buy­er beware or con­sumer beware when you go on YouTube?” adding, “Are you tak­ing the threats seri­ous­ly?

Raskin’s ques­tions were get­ting at an impor­tant issue: YouTube, which Google pur­chased for $1.65 bil­lion 12 years ago, has a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry prob­lem. It’s baked into the way the ser­vice works. And it appears that nei­ther Con­gress nor YouTube itself is any­where near solv­ing it.

YouTube and con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, explained

One bil­lion hours’ worth of con­tent is viewed on YouTube every sin­gle day. About 70 per­cent of those views come from YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tions, accord­ing to Algo­trans­paren­cy, a web­site that attempts to track “what videos YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithm most often rec­om­mends.”

YouTube’s con­tent algo­rithms are incred­i­bly pow­er­ful — they deter­mine what videos show up in your search results, the sug­gest­ed videos stream, on the home page, the trend­ing stream, and under your sub­scrip­tions. If you go to the YouTube home­page, algo­rithms dic­tate which videos you see, and which ones you don’t. And if you search for some­thing, it’s an algo­rithm that decides which videos you get first.

...

As Zeynep Tufek­ci, an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at the School of Infor­ma­tion and Library Sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na, wrote in the New York Times in March, the YouTube adver­tis­ing mod­el is based on you watch­ing as many videos as they can show you (and the ads that appear before and dur­ing those videos).

Whether the sub­ject of the orig­i­nal video select­ed was right-lean­ing or left-lean­ing, or even non­po­lit­i­cal, the algo­rithm tends to rec­om­mend increas­ing­ly more extreme videos — esca­lat­ing the view­er, Tufek­ci wrote, from videos of Trump ral­lies to videos fea­tur­ing “white suprema­cist rants, Holo­caust denials, and oth­er dis­turb­ing con­tent.”

Watch­ing videos of Hillary Clin­ton and Bernie Sanders, on the oth­er hand, led to videos fea­tur­ing “argu­ments about the exis­tence of secret gov­ern­ment agen­cies and alle­ga­tions that the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment was behind the attacks of Sept. 11,” Tufek­ci wrote.

On Algotransparency’s web­site, which tries to reverse-engi­neer YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithm, I entered two terms to find out what the algo­rithm would rec­om­mend for a user with no search his­to­ry based on those terms. First up was “Trump.” (You can try this your­self.)

The first rec­om­mend­ed video was from MSNBC, detail­ing James Comey’s tes­ti­mo­ny before the House Judi­cia­ry and Over­sight com­mit­tees. The sec­ond rec­om­mend­ed video was a QAnon-themed video — relat­ing to the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry alleg­ing Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and Robert Mueller are work­ing togeth­er to uncov­er a vast pedophile net­work includ­ing many promi­nent Democ­rats (and actor Tom Han­ks). (“D5” refers to Decem­ber 5, which QAnon believ­ers argued would be the day when thou­sands of their polit­i­cal ene­mies would be arrest­ed.)

Next, I tried “Hillary Clin­ton.” The top three rec­om­mend­ed videos based on YouTube’s algo­rithm are all con­spir­a­cy-the­o­ry dri­ven, from a video from an anti-Semit­ic YouTube chan­nel that argues Freema­sons will escape from the Unit­ed States on pri­vate yachts after America’s even­tu­al col­lapse to a user alleg­ing that Hillary Clin­ton has a seizure dis­or­der (she does not) to one alleg­ing that Hillary Clin­ton has had a num­ber of peo­ple mur­dered (also untrue.)

I spend a lot of time con­sum­ing con­tent about con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries — but these results weren’t tai­lored to me. These results were based on a user who had nev­er watched any YouTube videos before.

This isn’t a flaw in YouTube’s sys­tem — this is how YouTube works. Which brings us to Fraz­zledrip.

How YouTube helped spread the weird­est con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry of them all

The con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry behind Fraz­zledrip is this, as “explained” on the fake news web­site, YourNewsWire.com in April: Hillary Clin­ton and for­mer Clin­ton aide Huma Abe­din were filmed rip­ping a child’s face off and wear­ing it as a mask before drink­ing the child’s blood in a Satan­ic rit­u­al sac­ri­fice, and that video was then found on the hard dri­ve of Abedin’s for­mer hus­band, Antho­ny Wein­er, under the code name: “Fraz­zledrip.”

“The #Hill­gra­m­age 2018”. I’m shak­ing tonight with this drop. This would be an appro­pri­ate out­come. From #Epstein to #Comet­Ping­Pong and every­thing in between, We’ve been wait­ing for this. We’re com­ing @HillaryClinton, I’m sharp­en­ing my pitch­fork right now. #FRAZZLEDRIP #Piz­za­gate https://t.co/NFbCc4AZTt— ImMikeR­obert­son ???? (@ImMikeRobertson) April 15, 2018

For the record: This is not true. There is no such video, and no such thing ever hap­pened. But as Snopes has detailed, mul­ti­ple con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries of the Trump era, includ­ing QAnon and Piz­za­gate, over­lap, and all of them hold that Hillary Clin­ton is a secret child pedophile and mur­der­er.

You have prob­a­bly nev­er heard of Fraz­zledrip. Most peo­ple haven’t heard of Fraz­zledrip, or QAnon, or per­haps even Piz­za­gate. But on YouTube, there are hun­dreds of videos, each with thou­sands of views, ded­i­cat­ed to a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry alleg­ing that a for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date ripped a child’s face off and wore it as a mask. And there’s marked­ly lit­tle YouTube, or Google, or even Con­gress, seem able to do about it.

“It’s an area we acknowl­edge there is more work to be done”

Here’s how Pichai answered Raskin’s ques­tion: “We are con­stant­ly under­tak­ing efforts to deal with mis­in­for­ma­tion, but we have clear­ly stat­ed poli­cies, and we have made lots of progress in many of the areas over the past year. ... This is a recent thing but I’m fol­low­ing up on it and mak­ing sure we are eval­u­at­ing these against our poli­cies. It’s an area we acknowl­edge there is more work to be done.”

While explain­ing that YouTube takes prob­lem­at­ic videos on a case by case basis, he added, “It’s our respon­si­bil­i­ty, I think, to make sure YouTube is a plat­form for free­dom of expres­sion, but it needs to be respon­si­ble in our soci­ety.”

But it isn’t easy to bal­ance a plat­form that claims to be for free­dom of expres­sion with soci­etal respon­si­bil­i­ty. It’s not ille­gal to believe in con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, or to think that the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks were an inside job (they weren’t) or that the Sandy Hook shoot­ings nev­er hap­pened (they did) or that Hillary Clin­ton is a child-eat­ing pedophilic can­ni­bal (this, it must be said, I sup­pose, is untrue).

YouTube could rad­i­cal­ly change its terms of ser­vice — in a way that would dra­mat­i­cal­ly lim­it the free­dom of expres­sion Pichai and his col­leagues are attempt­ing to pro­vide. Or it could invest much more heav­i­ly in mod­er­a­tion, or change its algo­rithm.

But all of that would be bad for busi­ness. As long as YouTube is so heav­i­ly reliant on algo­rithms to keep view­ers watch­ing, on a plat­form where hun­dreds of hours of video are uploaded every minute of every day, the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries will remain. Even if YouTube occa­sion­al­ly bans con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists like Alex Jones, users will con­tin­ue to upload videos about Fraz­zledrip, or QAnon, or videos argu­ing that the earth is flat — and YouTube’s algo­rithms, with­out any change, will keep rec­om­mend­ing them, and oth­er users will watch them.

———-

“YouTube’s con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry cri­sis, explained” by Jane Coas­ton; Vox.com; 12/12/2018

“You have prob­a­bly nev­er heard of Fraz­zledrip. Most peo­ple haven’t heard of Fraz­zledrip, or QAnon, or per­haps even Piz­za­gate. But on YouTube, there are hun­dreds of videos, each with thou­sands of views, ded­i­cat­ed to a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry alleg­ing that a for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date ripped a child’s face off and wore it as a mask. And there’s marked­ly lit­tle YouTube, or Google, or even Con­gress, seem able to do about it.”

Hun­dreds of videos ded­i­cat­ed to push­ing the idea that Hillary Clin­ton ripped a child’s face off and wore it as a mask. That’s a thing on YouTube. And YouTube’s algo­rithms appear to love it:

...
How YouTube helped spread the weird­est con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry of them all

The con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry behind Fraz­zledrip is this, as “explained” on the fake news web­site, YourNewsWire.com in April: Hillary Clin­ton and for­mer Clin­ton aide Huma Abe­din were filmed rip­ping a child’s face off and wear­ing it as a mask before drink­ing the child’s blood in a Satan­ic rit­u­al sac­ri­fice, and that video was then found on the hard dri­ve of Abedin’s for­mer hus­band, Antho­ny Wein­er, under the code name: “Fraz­zledrip.”
...

So it should be no sur­prise that when peo­ple with no YouTube search his­to­ry do a search for “Hillary Clin­ton”, the top three results are all anti-Hillary con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries:

...
On Algotransparency’s web­site, which tries to reverse-engi­neer YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithm, I entered two terms to find out what the algo­rithm would rec­om­mend for a user with no search his­to­ry based on those terms. First up was “Trump.” (You can try this your­self.)

The first rec­om­mend­ed video was from MSNBC, detail­ing James Comey’s tes­ti­mo­ny before the House Judi­cia­ry and Over­sight com­mit­tees. The sec­ond rec­om­mend­ed video was a QAnon-themed video — relat­ing to the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry alleg­ing Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and Robert Mueller are work­ing togeth­er to uncov­er a vast pedophile net­work includ­ing many promi­nent Democ­rats (and actor Tom Han­ks). (“D5” refers to Decem­ber 5, which QAnon believ­ers argued would be the day when thou­sands of their polit­i­cal ene­mies would be arrest­ed.)

Next, I tried “Hillary Clin­ton.” The top three rec­om­mend­ed videos based on YouTube’s algo­rithm are all con­spir­a­cy-the­o­ry dri­ven, from a video from an anti-Semit­ic YouTube chan­nel that argues Freema­sons will escape from the Unit­ed States on pri­vate yachts after America’s even­tu­al col­lapse to a user alleg­ing that Hillary Clin­ton has a seizure dis­or­der (she does not) to one alleg­ing that Hillary Clin­ton has had a num­ber of peo­ple mur­dered (also untrue.)

I spend a lot of time con­sum­ing con­tent about con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries — but these results weren’t tai­lored to me. These results were based on a user who had nev­er watched any YouTube videos before.

...

And that’s why Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers were ask­ing Google’s CEO Sundary Pichai about what, if any­thing, YouTube was plan­ning on doing about the fact that its plat­form is aggres­sive­ly push­ing things like Fraz­zledrip. But it does­n’t sound like YouTube has any plans at all oth­er than to explain that “there is more work to be done”:

...
But one law­mak­er, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D‑MD), raised an actu­al­ly impor­tant and press­ing issue: the way YouTube’s algo­rithms can be used to push con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

“The point at which it becomes a mat­ter of seri­ous pub­lic inter­est is when your com­mu­ni­ca­tion vehi­cle is being used to pro­mote pro­pa­gan­da that leads to vio­lent events.” He was allud­ing to the Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry which led to an armed gun­man show­ing up at a DC-area pizze­ria in 2016 — a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry spread, in part, on YouTube.

Raskin asked about anoth­er espe­cial­ly strange con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that emerged on YouTube — “Fraz­zledrip,” which has deep ties to the QAnon and Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. He asked Pichai, “Is your basic posi­tion that [Fraz­zledrip] is some­thing you want to try to do some­thing about, but basi­cal­ly there is just an avalanche of such mate­r­i­al and there’s real­ly noth­ing that can be done, and it should be buy­er beware or con­sumer beware when you go on YouTube?” adding, “Are you tak­ing the threats seri­ous­ly?

Raskin’s ques­tions were get­ting at an impor­tant issue: YouTube, which Google pur­chased for $1.65 bil­lion 12 years ago, has a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry prob­lem. It’s baked into the way the ser­vice works. And it appears that nei­ther Con­gress nor YouTube itself is any­where near solv­ing it.

...

Here’s how Pichai answered Raskin’s ques­tion: “We are con­stant­ly under­tak­ing efforts to deal with mis­in­for­ma­tion, but we have clear­ly stat­ed poli­cies, and we have made lots of progress in many of the areas over the past year. ... This is a recent thing but I’m fol­low­ing up on it and mak­ing sure we are eval­u­at­ing these against our poli­cies. It’s an area we acknowl­edge there is more work to be done.”

While explain­ing that YouTube takes prob­lem­at­ic videos on a case by case basis, he added, “It’s our respon­si­bil­i­ty, I think, to make sure YouTube is a plat­form for free­dom of expres­sion, but it needs to be respon­si­ble in our soci­ety.”

But it isn’t easy to bal­ance a plat­form that claims to be for free­dom of expres­sion with soci­etal respon­si­bil­i­ty. It’s not ille­gal to believe in con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, or to think that the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks were an inside job (they weren’t) or that the Sandy Hook shoot­ings nev­er hap­pened (they did) or that Hillary Clin­ton is a child-eat­ing pedophilic can­ni­bal (this, it must be said, I sup­pose, is untrue).

YouTube could rad­i­cal­ly change its terms of ser­vice — in a way that would dra­mat­i­cal­ly lim­it the free­dom of expres­sion Pichai and his col­leagues are attempt­ing to pro­vide. Or it could invest much more heav­i­ly in mod­er­a­tion, or change its algo­rithm.
...

But as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, the idea that YouTube sim­ply can’t real­is­ti­cal­ly address the flood of far right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry videos get­ting sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly pushed on users is sim­ply bogus. How so? Because when you put in terms like “Hillary Clin­ton” into Google’s video search­es you don’t end up with a flood of far right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry videos. And YouTube is owned by Google. In oth­er words, this algo­rith­mic per­for­mance is clear­ly a choice by YouTube. A choice root­ed in a busi­ness mod­el of feed­ing users more and more extreme con­tent to keep them watch­ing:

Hmm­Dai­ly

YouTube Already Knows How to Stop Serv­ing Tox­ic Videos

Tom Scoc­ca
Pub­lished on Dec 12, 2018 11:49PM EST

Vox has an explain­er today about how YouTube auto­mat­i­cal­ly steers users toward deranged and con­spir­a­to­r­i­al videos, even if the users have start­ed out with per­fect­ly ordi­nary inter­ests. This has been explained before, but it keeps need­ing to be explained because it’s so incom­pre­hen­si­ble in nor­mal human terms: YouTube’s algo­rithms, which are built to keep peo­ple watch­ing as many videos and video ads as pos­si­ble, have appar­ent­ly fol­lowed that instruc­tion to the con­clu­sion, as Zeynep Tufek­ci wrote in the New York Times, “that peo­ple are drawn to con­tent that is more extreme than what they start­ed with—or to incen­di­ary con­tent in gen­er­al.”

The humans who run YouTube (and run its algo­rithms) aren’t exact­ly proud of the fact that their prod­uct show­cas­es misog­y­nist rants or pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic non­sense or apoc­a­lyp­tic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. But their posi­tion is that what hap­pens inside their black box is extreme­ly hard to cor­rect or reg­u­late, and on the scale at which YouTube oper­ates, it’s impos­si­ble to apply human judg­ment to every case. They wish there was a way to serve up video rec­om­men­da­tions with­out poi­son­ing people’s minds till some­one believes it’s nec­es­sary to invade a piz­za par­lor with an assault rifle, but that’s a real tough com­pu­ta­tion­al chal­lenge.

What this line of defense leaves out is a very basic, obvi­ous fact: YouTube already has access to an algo­rithm that can sort through videos with­out pro­mot­ing unhinged fringe mate­r­i­al. It’s called Google. YouTube is part of Google. When and if Google’s search algo­rithms start giv­ing Google users fringe results, Google treats that as a fail­ure and tries to fix the algo­rithms.

In the Vox piece, Jane Coas­ton writes about what hap­pened when she searched “Trump” on a site that tracks YouTube’s video rec­om­men­da­tions:

The first rec­om­mend­ed video was from MSNBC, detail­ing James Comey’s tes­ti­mo­ny before the House Judi­cia­ry and Over­sight com­mit­tees. The sec­ond rec­om­mend­ed video was a QAnon-themed video — relat­ing to the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry alleg­ing Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and Robert Mueller are work­ing togeth­er to uncov­er a vast pedophile net­work includ­ing many promi­nent Democ­rats (and actor Tom Han­ks). (“D5” refers to Decem­ber 5, which QAnon believ­ers argued would be the day when thou­sands of their polit­i­cal ene­mies would be arrest­ed.)

Here is what came up when I tried a search for “Trump” on the “Videos” tab of Google.com:

[see image of Google search results show­ing a lack of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry results]

Search­ing “Hillary Clin­ton” rec­om­men­da­tions from YouTube led Coas­ton straight to con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, includ­ing mur­der. Here’s “Hillary Clin­ton” on a Google video search:

[see image of Google video search results show­ing a lack of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry results]

...

It’s true that Google and YouTube are dif­fer­ent ser­vices, with dif­fer­ent archi­tec­ture. Google was built to index the Web and sort through exist­ing mate­r­i­al; YouTube hosts video con­tent itself. That dis­tinc­tion, though, isn’t as big as it might seem—Google video search points toward video on the web­sites of var­i­ous news orga­ni­za­tions, such as the Wash­ing­ton Post or AP News, and YouTube has to point to YouTube, but the Wash­ing­ton Post and AP News are also YouTube con­tent providers. much every­one is.

And so YouTube doesn’t have to pick out Piz­za­gaters or MRAs or neo-phre­nol­o­gists. It has the pow­er to send view­ers in the oppo­site direc­tion. The peo­ple who run YouTube made the choice to teach its algo­rithms to val­ue trash—even if they thought they were teach­ing the sys­tem to val­ue some­thing more neu­tral, like view­ing time. There was a time, in liv­ing mem­o­ry, when the YouTube rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tem was less aggres­sive and it act­ed like Google: stack­ing up more and more songs by the same band you were lis­ten­ing to, say, or the same sub­ject you were watch­ing a clip about, until you’d had all you want­ed and were done.

There is no way to be done in the fever swamps. What dis­tin­guish­es the peo­ple in charge of YouTube from the peo­ple in charge of Google search is that the goal of Google search is to set­tle on sat­is­fy­ing results. The goal of YouTube is to keep peo­ple unset­tled and unhap­py, so they keep watch­ing and keep see­ing more ads. A less poi­so­nous index would encour­age to peo­ple leave the site after they got what they’d come there for. The algo­rithm the com­pa­ny real­ly doesn’t want to tin­ker with is the one that tells it to make the most mon­ey it pos­si­bly can.

———-

“YouTube Already Knows How to Stop Serv­ing Tox­ic Videos” by Tom Scoc­ca; Hmm­Dai­ly; 12/12/2018

“The humans who run YouTube (and run its algo­rithms) aren’t exact­ly proud of the fact that their prod­uct show­cas­es misog­y­nist rants or pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic non­sense or apoc­a­lyp­tic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. But their posi­tion is that what hap­pens inside their black box is extreme­ly hard to cor­rect or reg­u­late, and on the scale at which YouTube oper­ates, it’s impos­si­ble to apply human judg­ment to every case. They wish there was a way to serve up video rec­om­men­da­tions with­out poi­son­ing people’s minds till some­one believes it’s nec­es­sary to invade a piz­za par­lor with an assault rifle, but that’s a real tough com­pu­ta­tion­al chal­lenge.”

There’s just noth­ing that can be done. the algo­rithms are too com­plex. That’s basi­cal­ly YouTube’s excuse. But as the arti­cle points out, all YouTube would have to do is adopt an algo­rithm clos­er to the Google Video search. That’s pret­ty much it. And that’s how YouTube used to oper­ate. But when the goal of the ser­vice is to max­i­mize eye­balls, an algo­rithm that effec­tive­ly rad­i­cal­izes the audi­ence is what that busi­ness mod­el demands:

...
What this line of defense leaves out is a very basic, obvi­ous fact: YouTube already has access to an algo­rithm that can sort through videos with­out pro­mot­ing unhinged fringe mate­r­i­al. It’s called Google. YouTube is part of Google. When and if Google’s search algo­rithms start giv­ing Google users fringe results, Google treats that as a fail­ure and tries to fix the algo­rithms.

In the Vox piece, Jane Coas­ton writes about what hap­pened when she searched “Trump” on a site that tracks YouTube’s video rec­om­men­da­tions:

The first rec­om­mend­ed video was from MSNBC, detail­ing James Comey’s tes­ti­mo­ny before the House Judi­cia­ry and Over­sight com­mit­tees. The sec­ond rec­om­mend­ed video was a QAnon-themed video — relat­ing to the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry alleg­ing Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and Robert Mueller are work­ing togeth­er to uncov­er a vast pedophile net­work includ­ing many promi­nent Democ­rats (and actor Tom Han­ks). (“D5” refers to Decem­ber 5, which QAnon believ­ers argued would be the day when thou­sands of their polit­i­cal ene­mies would be arrest­ed.)

Here is what came up when I tried a search for “Trump” on the “Videos” tab of Google.com:

[see image of Google search results show­ing a lack of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry results]

Search­ing “Hillary Clin­ton” rec­om­men­da­tions from YouTube led Coas­ton straight to con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, includ­ing mur­der. Here’s “Hillary Clin­ton” on a Google video search:

[see image of Google video search results show­ing a lack of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry results]

...

And so YouTube doesn’t have to pick out Piz­za­gaters or MRAs or neo-phre­nol­o­gists. It has the pow­er to send view­ers in the oppo­site direc­tion. The peo­ple who run YouTube made the choice to teach its algo­rithms to val­ue trash—even if they thought they were teach­ing the sys­tem to val­ue some­thing more neu­tral, like view­ing time. There was a time, in liv­ing mem­o­ry, when the YouTube rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tem was less aggres­sive and it act­ed like Google: stack­ing up more and more songs by the same band you were lis­ten­ing to, say, or the same sub­ject you were watch­ing a clip about, until you’d had all you want­ed and were done.
...

So as we can see, YouTube could address this prob­a­bly fair­ly eas­i­ly. But doing so might reduce eye­balls some­what and cut into the com­pa­ny’s prof­its some­what. It’s all a reminder that the assump­tion that prof­it-max­i­miza­tion is good for soci­ety as a whole is one of those social meta-algo­rithms that real­ly needs to be addressed too. Espe­cial­ly in an era when serv­ing up dis­in­for­ma­tion is a proven method for max­i­miz­ing prof­its. Oth­er­wise get ready for our Fraz­zledrip-on-steroids future.

Here’s a pair of arti­cles about two exam­ples of the same under­ly­ing phe­nom­e­na: The ongo­ing use of major social media plat­forms for the pro­mo­tion of far right memes and ideas and the tol­er­ance of this by these social media giants.

This first arti­cle from last month is about PewDiePie, a.k.a. Felix Kjell­berg, and his pro­mo­tion of the YouTube chan­nel of “E;R”, a noto­ri­ous alt right per­son­al­i­ty. As the arti­cle makes clear, this isn’t the first time Kjell­berg has been called out for pro­mot­ing far right per­son­al­i­ties or mak­ing anti-Semit­ic com­ments of his own. Or the sec­ond time. Or the third time. It’s a well estab­lished pat­tern with Kjell­berg, which he tries to brush off as either acci­dents or jokes. So there’s a dis­tinct *wink wink* nature to his injec­tion of this con­tent into his streams that’s used to deflect crit­i­cism and so far that strat­e­gy appears to have worked for Kjell­berg, which is a pret­ty big deal because PewDiePie is YouTube’s most pop­u­lar per­son­al­i­ty. Yep, the most pop­u­lar per­son­al­i­ty on YouTube just can’t stop flirt­ing with neo-Nazis and when­ev­er he gets caught his mil­lions of most­ly young fol­low­ers view it as unfair per­se­cu­tion:

Vox

YouTube’s most pop­u­lar user ampli­fied anti-Semit­ic rhetoric. Again.
PewDiePie has 76 mil­lion fol­low­ers — and a his­to­ry of flirt­ing with alt-right cul­ture. The poten­tial con­se­quences are grave.

By Aja Romano
Dec 13, 2018, 3:00pm EST

YouTube’s most pop­u­lar user is once again fac­ing back­lash — this time for pro­mot­ing a high­ly anti-Semit­ic chan­nel by rec­om­mend­ing a video fea­tur­ing a racial slur and a white suprema­cist con­spir­a­cy.

With 76 mil­lion sub­scribers, gam­ing vlog­ger PewDiePie, a.k.a. Felix Kjell­berg, is the most pop­u­lar indi­vid­ual on YouTube. In a since-edit­ed video post­ed on Decem­ber 9, he rec­om­mend­ed sev­er­al YouTube chan­nels he said he’d been enjoy­ing recent­ly. One of those chan­nels is called “E;R,” and PewDiePie laud­ed its “great video essays,” includ­ing “one on [the Net­flix movie] Death Note which I real­ly enjoyed.” He also linked to the chan­nel in his video descrip­tion. (The rec­om­men­da­tion has since been edit­ed out of the video.)

To casu­al observers, PewDiePie’s sup­port of E;R may have appeared harm­less — one YouTube user sup­port­ing anoth­er. But a more-than-cur­so­ry dive into the chan­nel would have revealed sev­er­al instances of dis­turb­ing imagery, slurs, and white suprema­cist mes­sag­ing. E;R’s cre­ator even refers to his rep­u­ta­tion as a racist in the channel’s FAQ.

The out­cry against PewDiePie’s rec­om­men­da­tion of the chan­nel was imme­di­ate, with media out­lets and oth­er YouTube users cit­ing it as an exam­ple of PewDiePie flirt­ing with alt-right cul­ture and send­ing a dan­ger­ous mes­sage to his mil­lions of fol­low­ers, many of whom are teenagers.

In response, PewDiePie released a fol­low-up video on Decem­ber 11 in which he described the inci­dent as an “oop­sie” and scoffed at the idea that he was pro­mot­ing anti-Semi­tism by mere­ly “rec­om­mend­ing some­one for their ani­me review.”

“All I said was I like this guy’s ani­me review,” PewDiePie says in the video. “[The chan­nel cre­ator] appar­ent­ly likes to have hid­den and not-so-hid­den Nazi ref­er­ences in his videos and obvi­ous­ly if I noticed that I wouldn’t have ref­er­enced him in the shoutout.”

PewDiePie also referred to sev­er­al past inci­dents that sparked a sim­i­lar out­cry: a video in which he per­formed a Nazi “heil” salute, and one in which he hired a pair of per­form­ers from a free­lancer web­site to hold up a sign read­ing “Death to all Jews.” He said these exam­ples were satir­i­cal, but many observers con­demned them as anti-Semit­ic.

“I said pub­licly a year and a half ago that I was going to dis­tance myself from Nazi jokes and that kind of stuff, because I want noth­ing to do with it,” PewDiePie explained. Gen­er­al­ly, I’ve done that. I don’t real­ly have a rea­son to dip into that again — it’s just stu­pid.”

But each of the three videos that PewDiePie fea­tured in his since-removed shoutout of the E;R chan­nel fea­tured fair­ly obvi­ous exam­ples of the channel’s offen­sive con­tent — in fact, not only did part one of the Death Note review that PewDiePie said he liked direct­ly invoke a racial slur in its video descrip­tion (the descrip­tion has since been edit­ed), but the first 15 sec­onds of part two con­tain a ref­er­ence to a 2017 inci­dent in which PewDiePie him­self dropped a racial slur, strate­gi­cal­ly edit­ed but unmiss­able if you’re famil­iar with the clip in ques­tion — which most of PewDiePie’s fol­low­ers would rea­son­ably be.

Should PewDiePie have known bet­ter? His crit­ics say yes; though he has been dis­mis­sive about the uproar, this is not the first time he has appeared to flirt with alt-right beliefs, and he’s pre­vi­ous­ly faced back­lash for this type of inci­dent many times.

At this point, I’ve stopped giv­ing Pewdiepie the ben­e­fit of the doubt. Pay­ing poor peo­ple to hold up a “Death to all J*ws” sign,saying the n‑word on stream,promoting Ben Shapiro and the Ralph Retort,and his recent crap?How many times does this need to hap­pen for peo­ple to see it?
— The Vio­lent Paci­fist (@Desolate_Dude) Decem­ber 10, 2018

But PewDiePie and his sup­port­ers say his crit­ics are over­re­act­ing to a harm­less mis­take.

How many times can a per­son explain a fuc king joke to mul­ti­ple peo­ple
WHEN WILL PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THAT FELIX IS MAKING SATIRE, HE IS NOT SERIOUS MOST OF THE TIMES AND STOP FUC KING TREATING EVERYTHING HE SAYS SERIOUSLY
I’m god­damn tired of telling peo­ple that @pewdiepie is jok­ing pic.twitter.com/w7Y6eP9A3s
— ???? ??. ?? (@xNataLeax) Decem­ber 10, 2018

Regard­less of PewDiePie’s intent, any anti-Semit­ic com­men­tary — no mat­ter how “jok­ing” — could have a dan­ger­ous effect. PewDiePie’s 76 mil­lion fol­low­ers tend to skew young, with the major­i­ty of his sub­scribers younger than 24 and 11 per­cent of them younger than 17. And they are not pas­sive fans; rather, they known for their aggres­sive loy­al­ty to PewDiePie, to the point that they’ve cre­at­ed a YouTube-wide “sub­scribe to PewDiePie” meme that has pushed his fol­low­er count to near­ly 80 mil­lion.

So what hap­pens if these young, aggres­sive­ly loy­al, high­ly mobi­lized PewDiePie fans begin con­sum­ing extrem­ist strains of YouTube con­tent because they were exposed to it, either direct­ly or indi­rect­ly, through his chan­nel?

As ethno­g­ra­ph­er Crys­tal Abidin has writ­ten, “mil­lions” of young YouTube users have pre­vi­ous­ly been “seduced into join­ing camps and par­tic­i­pat­ing in glob­al dis­cur­sive debates in defence of/in oppo­si­tion to Influ­encers.”

So the idea that PewDiePie is ampli­fy­ing anti-Semit­ic and oth­er extrem­ist con­tent to mil­lions of impres­sion­able young view­ers is alarm­ing.

The chan­nel that PewDiePie linked to is a hotbed of anti-Semi­tism, racism, and alt-right rhetoric dis­guised as pop cul­ture com­men­tary

The E;R YouTube chan­nel has a long his­to­ry of anti-Semit­ic imagery and mes­sag­ing. The channel’s anony­mous cre­ator, who uses the E;R han­dle on sev­er­al online plat­forms, also habit­u­al­ly links to his accounts on social media sites known to attract mem­bers of the alt-right — includ­ing Gab, which, as Jane Coas­ton pre­vi­ous­ly wrote for Vox, “is a focal site for neo-Nazis and oth­ers who want to espouse right-wing forms of anti-Semi­tism.”

The Death Note review that PewDiePie cit­ed uses a racial slur to refer to one of the char­ac­ters in the movie. The video also con­tains a ref­er­ence to a false white nation­al­ist con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that Heather Hey­er, the pro­test­er who was mur­dered at the white suprema­cist Unite the Right ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, in 2017 — and whose killer was recent­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to life in prison — actu­al­ly died of a heart attack.

This indi­rect, dog-whis­tle form of alt-right mes­sag­ing is com­mon for the chan­nel, which delib­er­ate­ly uses pop cul­ture imagery, main­ly drawn from ani­mat­ed series like Death Note and in par­tic­u­lar the Car­toon Net­work TV series Steven Uni­verse, as a tool for spread­ing white suprema­cist pro­pa­gan­da. Some of the many exam­ples lit­ter­ing the channel’s videos include fre­quent ref­er­ences to media cre­ators and oth­er pub­lic fig­ures using the his­tor­i­cal­ly loaded slur “Jews,” and ref­er­ences to anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy phrase­ol­o­gy such as “the Jew­ish ques­tion,” a fre­quent alt-right dog whis­tle that refers to the “Endlö­sung der Juden­frage” — Ger­man for “Final Solu­tion to the Jew­ish Ques­tion” and the offi­cial Nazi code lan­guage for plan­ning and car­ry­ing out the Holo­caust.

The chan­nel also refers to black char­ac­ters from pop cul­ture as “Negroes,” and con­tains men­tions of being “red­pilled,” bla­tant­ly racist imagery and stereo­types, homo­pho­bic slurs, mock­ing ref­er­ences to fem­i­nism and the idea of rape cul­ture, sex­ist slurs, and sex­ist por­tray­als of women.

In the thumb­nail for one video, the channel’s cre­ator dis­torts a black actor’s face to exag­ger­ate their fea­tures in a bla­tant­ly racist fash­ion. In anoth­er video, E;R turns a clip in which Barack Oba­ma repeats the phrase “choose hope” into a deeply anti-Semit­ic slur ref­er­enc­ing a noto­ri­ous­ly hor­rif­ic fact about the Holo­caust.

And through­out many videos focused on Steven Uni­verse, E;R presents the show’s char­ac­ters as ana­logues for Jew­ish peo­ple, cod­ing them with anti-Semit­ic stereo­types. In one such video, he por­trays one char­ac­ter as a decep­tive tool for a glob­al Jew­ish con­spir­a­cy, as indi­cat­ed by a mon­tage of pub­lic fig­ures and busi­ness­men, and then ends the video with an altered ver­sion of a white suprema­cist slo­gan known as the “14 words.”

In oth­er words, there is seri­ous anti-Semit­ic and white suprema­cist pro­pa­gan­da under­ly­ing the “great video essays” that PewDiePie endorsed.

Since PewDiePie’s Decem­ber 9 video drew greater atten­tion to the E;R chan­nel, YouTube has report­ed­ly sus­pend­ed one of the creator’s videos and issued a strike against the account for vio­lat­ing the site’s com­mu­ni­ty guide­lines. The sus­pend­ed video, which accord­ing to E;R had 2 mil­lion views at the time of its removal from YouTube, was osten­si­bly about Steven Uni­verse — but it also con­tained four min­utes of unedit­ed footage of Hitler deliv­er­ing a speech. YouTube did not respond to a request from Vox for com­ment.

This is not the first time that PewDiePie has used his con­sid­er­able influ­ence to ped­dle alt-right mes­sag­ing

To many YouTube users, the con­tent of the E;R chan­nel itself isn’t as con­cern­ing as the fact that PewDiePie — who, again, is YouTube’s most pop­u­lar indi­vid­ual user — has endorsed it, and that PewDiePie has what is by now a well-estab­lished larg­er pat­tern of giv­ing a plat­form to alt-right ideas and per­son­al­i­ties.

That’s alarm­ing for mul­ti­ple rea­sons — start­ing with the fact that the alt-right has been rapid­ly gain­ing ground on YouTube. The move­ment encom­pass­es mul­ti­ple over­lap­ping inter­net sub­cul­tures, but is built atop a foun­da­tion of white suprema­cy, anti-Semi­tism, and anti-fem­i­nist ide­ol­o­gy. It is char­ac­ter­ized by high­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed mes­sag­ing and recruit­ment tac­tics, fre­quent harass­ment cam­paigns, and an empha­sis on irony, plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­i­ty, and memet­ic behav­ior — all of which have grown out of broad­er online cul­ture, and which now work as a seduc­tive veneer for its ide­ol­o­gy across grass­roots inter­net com­mu­ni­ties on sites like YouTube, 4chan, Red­dit, and oth­er com­mu­ni­ties.

As Zack Beauchamp has pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten for Vox, “There’s a tremen­dous library of far-right con­tent on [YouTube], as one might expect on a large­ly unreg­u­lat­ed video upload­ing ser­vice, and ... the videos appear to be effec­tive at rad­i­cal­iz­ing peo­ple. A not-insignif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple exposed to these videos ... finds them per­sua­sive — and end up join­ing the alt-right or oth­er far-right move­ments as a result.”

Which brings us back to PewDiePie shout­ing out a chan­nel full of anti-Semit­ic rhetoric to his 76 mil­lion fol­low­ers.

In the days since PewDiePie first linked to E;R, the chan­nel has gained 35,000 new fol­low­ers, while many crit­ics of PewDiePie, on both YouTube and oth­er social media plat­forms, have spo­ken out against him.

...

“[P]ewdiepie is, once again, doing exact­ly what neo-nazis want,” Kotaku reporter Nathan Grayson com­ment­ed on Twit­ter in response to the inci­dent. “[W]hether he’s just meme­ing or he ascribes to these val­ues, it doesn’t mat­ter. [W]hat mat­ters is that he nor­mal­izes these ideas as jokes on THE plat­form where kids increas­ing­ly get their first expo­sure to the world at large.”

As Grayson notes, PewDiePie’s endorse­ment of the E;R chan­nel con­tin­ues a long trend of the vlog­ger using his influ­ence in a way that helps to nor­mal­ize white suprema­cist alt-right rhetoric to an alarm­ing — and, on YouTube, increas­ing­ly wide­spread — degree. He does this by casu­al­ly incor­po­rat­ing it into his videos under the guise of shock humor, then shrug­ging off any offense as an “oop­sie” when out­cry ensues. In 2016 and 2017, for exam­ple, PewDiePie faced intense back­lash for mul­ti­ple instances in which he pro­mot­ed Nazi sym­bol­ism and anti-Semi­tism, includ­ing a video where he used a racist slur dur­ing a gam­ing live stream.

But despite hav­ing faced con­se­quences for this behav­ior in the past, includ­ing los­ing a lucra­tive Dis­ney spon­sor­ship, PewDiePie has still been able to secure new mar­ket­ing part­ner­ships and grow his fol­low­ing.

Mean­while, his fol­low­ers have con­sis­tent­ly shown sup­port and love for PewDiePie and dis­dain for media out­lets that have report­ed on his con­tro­ver­sies.

“If your frame of ref­er­ence is YouTube,” Max Read recent­ly wrote in the Intel­li­gencer, one might view an attack on PewDiePie as “an attack on your close friend.”

And though the furor around PewDiePie’s repeat­ed antics sub­sided after each new inci­dent, his flirt­ing with alt-right ideas has con­tin­ued. Though he has nev­er open­ly iden­ti­fied him­self as a mem­ber or sup­port­er of the alt-right, he has liked and pro­mote chan­nels run by users with ties to the many over­lap­ping inter­net move­ments, com­mu­ni­ties, and sub­cul­tures that loose­ly define the alt-right.

Ear­li­er this year, he made a video in which he reviewed a con­tro­ver­sial self-help book by Jor­dan Peter­son — a right-wing per­son­al­i­ty who is beloved by many in the alt-right. In the review, PewDiePie endorsed the book, called it a “fun” read, and said he would take some of its advice.

Addi­tion­al­ly, in response to PewDiePie’s rec­om­men­da­tion of the E;R chan­nel, its own­er described PewDiePie as pro­duc­ing “red­pilled con­tent.” (In far-right dis­course, “tak­ing the red pill” or hav­ing been “red­pilled” implies that some­one has “wok­en up” to the alt-right world­view, which includes the belief that fem­i­nism is ruin­ing every­thing and fre­quent­ly involves white suprema­cist dog whistling.)

And it’s easy to see why. Before declar­ing in 2017 that he would stop mak­ing Nazi jokes, PewDiePie made a whole lot of Nazi jokes. Even since then, he’s pro­duced sev­er­al “satir­i­cal” videos and com­men­tary that his alt-right fol­low­ers have praised as exam­ples of his “drop­ping red­pills” on the rest of his fans.

While PewDiePie only fol­lows a few hun­dred peo­ple on Twit­ter, many of them have ties to the afore­men­tioned inter­net move­ments, com­mu­ni­ties, and sub­cul­tures that loose­ly define the alt-right, which include Gamer­gate, Mens’ Rights activism, Pick-Up Artist com­mu­ni­ties, incels, Reddit’s r/The_Donald com­mu­ni­ty, some athe­ists and skep­tics sub­cul­tures, and oth­er online com­mu­ni­ties that fos­ter white suprema­cy and rad­i­cal right-wing extrem­ism.

These include Peter­son, the promi­nent Gamer­gate writer Ian Miles Cheong, Infowars edi­tor Paul Joseph Wat­son, YouTube philoso­pher Ste­fan Molyneux, the Cana­di­an blog­ger Lau­ren South­ern, YouTube sex edu­ca­tion vlog­ger Laci Green (who made head­lines last year after post­ing a con­tro­ver­sial video in which she stat­ed that she “took the red pill a long time ago,” in ref­er­ence to a new wish to begin pub­licly debat­ing mem­bers of the alt-right), and lead­ing fig­ures of YouTube’s reac­tionary right-wing com­mu­ni­ty, like Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro. PewDiePie also fol­lowed noto­ri­ous alt-right YouTu­ber Sar­gon of Akkad until the latter’s sus­pen­sion from Twit­ter last year. (PewDiePie has not respond­ed to a request from Vox for com­ment.)

It might not seem par­tic­u­lar­ly mean­ing­ful that PewDiePie fol­lows this spe­cif­ic group of peo­ple on Twit­ter. But in fact, a recent report from the non­prof­it research group Data & Soci­ety iden­ti­fied sev­en of the fig­ures above (Peter­son, Rubin, Shapiro, Sar­gon, Molyneux, South­ern, and Wat­son) as part of an “alter­na­tive influ­encer” net­work that has devel­oped with­in YouTube — one that allows far-right extrem­ists to spread their mes­sage through fre­quent social inter­ac­tion with more main­stream YouTube users.

“Social net­work­ing between influ­encers makes it easy for audi­ence mem­bers to be incre­men­tal­ly exposed to, and come to trust, ever more extrem­ist polit­i­cal posi­tions,” the report’s author, Rebec­ca Lewis, wrote.

To his defi­ant fol­low­ers, PewDiePie has come to rep­re­sent a larg­er cul­ture clash over YouTube itself. That makes his alt-right flir­ta­tion even more per­ni­cious.

PewDiePie’s mas­sive pop­u­lar­i­ty has giv­en him con­sid­er­able influ­ence over the future of YouTube. In fact, his chan­nel cur­rent­ly sits direct­ly at the cen­ter of what seems to be a grow­ing divide between two very dif­fer­ent direc­tions for an increas­ing­ly polar­ized plat­form.

On one side lies many over­lap­ping sub­cul­tures that make up huge swaths of the YouTube pop­u­la­tion: its tremen­dous gam­ing com­mu­ni­ties, includ­ing Let’s Play-ers, live stream­ers, machin­i­ma-style edi­tors, and vlog­gers; its prank cul­tures and their over­lap with stunt per­son­al­i­ties like Jake and Logan Paul; and its increas­ing­ly insid­i­ous alt-right pres­ence.

On the oth­er side lie many, many YouTube users who vis­it the site for oth­er rea­sons and oth­er forms of enter­tain­ment, and who arguably aren’t inter­est­ed in sup­port­ing the cult of per­son­al­i­ties that might be said to rep­re­sent “old-school” YouTube. Instead, they come to the site for music, memes, nar­ra­tive media, instruc­tion­al videos, and more gen­er­al forms of con­tent con­sump­tion and enter­tain­ment.

These two ends of a vast YouTube spec­trum have clashed recent­ly over two inter­est­ing and arguably relat­ed phe­nom­e­na — both of which direct­ly involve PewDiePie. The first is an ongo­ing bat­tle that PewDiePie’s sup­port­ers have been wag­ing in order to pre­vent his chan­nel from being sur­passed as the most pop­u­lar one on YouTube. To keep this from hap­pen­ing, they’ve done every­thing from take out a Times Square bill­board to report­ed­ly hack­ing into 50,000 print­ers around the world in order to pro­mote their “sub­scribe to PewDiePie” meme.

The sec­ond involves YouTube’s annu­al year-end “Rewind” video. The 2018 video, released on Decem­ber 6 and described by YouTube as “a who’s who of inter­net cul­ture,” omit­ted a num­ber of pop­u­lar YouTu­bers, most notably PewDiePie. (The com­mon the­o­ry about why these major play­ers — par­tic­u­lar­ly PewdiePie, Logan Paul, and Jake Paul — were omit­ted is that they’ve each become less-than-stel­lar exam­ples of YouTube’s com­mu­ni­ty in recent years.) In response, PewDiePie’s fol­low­ers start­ed a cam­paign encour­ag­ing peo­ple to vote down the video, with the result that with­in a mat­ter of days, YouTube’s 2018 Rewind video has rapid­ly over­tak­en an eight-year-old Justin Bieber sin­gle to become the most dis­liked video in YouTube his­to­ry, with more than 10 mil­lion dis­likes.

The tac­tics of mass cam­paign­ing, meme-ing, and brigad­ing that PewDiePie sup­port­ers have deployed dur­ing each of these cam­paigns are hall­marks of clas­sic online troll­ish­ness — the kind that can seem pure­ly jovial and harm­less right up until it becomes some­thing more. The most notable exam­ple of “some­thing more” is Gamer­gate, the misog­y­nis­tic move­ment that began in gam­ing cul­ture in 2014 and has since expand­ed into wider, more overt­ly polit­i­cal harass­ment cam­paigns. The move­ment was born out of the most tox­ic impuls­es of gam­ing cul­ture, and while it is not explic­it­ly linked to PewDiePie or his fol­low­ers, his deep involve­ment in gam­ing cul­ture and Gamergate’s over­lap with YouTube com­mu­ni­ties (includ­ing the gam­ing, Pick-Up Artist, atheist/skeptics, and right-wing polit­i­cal spheres) like­ly exposed many PewDiePie fol­low­ers to both its tac­tics and its alt-right pol­i­tics.

Giv­en PewDiePie’s high lev­el of influ­ence over fol­low­ers who are in turn deeply com­mit­ted to wag­ing meme wars in his name, and giv­en that those fol­low­ers are deploy­ing the same tools of memei­fied, jok­ing harass­ment and brigad­ing that the alt-right is known to deploy, his appear­ance of flirt­ing with alt-right ideas and rhetoric becomes con­cern­ing.

In essence, as Read pro­posed in the Intel­li­gencer, YouTube’s most influ­en­tial per­son­al­i­ty is using his plat­form in ways that could push mil­lions of his already devot­ed fol­low­ers toward online extrem­ism.

“PewDiePie’s sta­tus as the stan­dard-bear­er of True YouTube gives his posi­tion in broad­er polit­i­cal debates an out­size weight,” Read wrote. “And if you start from the posi­tion that PewDiePie is great and his crit­ics unfair (and pos­si­bly disin­gen­u­ous), you may soon find your­self tak­ing on some unfor­tu­nate new polit­i­cal posi­tions.”

As Julia Alexan­der not­ed in The Verge, the pro­gres­sion that Read describes is already vis­i­ble; for exam­ple, some com­menters on the E;R chan­nel have expressed grat­i­tude to the chan­nel for expos­ing them to Nazi ide­ol­o­gy, in some cas­es “thank­ing E;R for bring­ing atten­tion to some of Hitler’s speech­es.”

The frus­trat­ing nature of PewDiePie’s flir­ta­tion with alt-right cul­ture is that by repeat­ed­ly dis­miss­ing crit­i­cism as over­sen­si­tiv­i­ty and insist­ing he’s just being satir­i­cal, he main­tains the plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­i­ty that the alt-right counts on to aid in dis­till­ing its mes­sag­ing through­out main­stream cul­ture.

Mem­bers of var­i­ous alt-right move­ments, includ­ing the own­er of the E;R chan­nel, appear to be ful­ly aware of this. On his Gab account, when anoth­er user asked him, “What is the best way to red pill peo­ple on the (((Jew­ish Ques­tion))),” the own­er of the E;R chan­nel respond­ed, “Pre­tend to joke about it until the punch­line /really/ lands.”

But as the lat­est con­tro­ver­sy around PewDiePie illus­trates, his jokes have failed to land with many, and when exam­in­ing the reach of PewDiePie’s influ­ence along­side his appar­ent drift toward the far right, it’s increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to laugh.

———-

“YouTube’s most pop­u­lar user ampli­fied anti-Semit­ic rhetoric. Again.” by Aja Romano; Vox; 12/13/2018

“The frus­trat­ing nature of PewDiePie’s flir­ta­tion with alt-right cul­ture is that by repeat­ed­ly dis­miss­ing crit­i­cism as over­sen­si­tiv­i­ty and insist­ing he’s just being satir­i­cal, he main­tains the plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­i­ty that the alt-right counts on to aid in dis­till­ing its mes­sag­ing through­out main­stream cul­ture.”

Fre­quent jokes about neo-Nazi memes done in a plau­si­bly deni­able man­ner and dis­miss­ing any crit­i­cisms as over­sen­si­tiv­i­ty over his satire. That’s what YouTube’s most pop­u­lar per­son­al­i­ty reg­u­lar­ly does, which just hap­pens to be exact­ly what the Alt Right does too. Some­times he’s calls it an “oop­sie” and some­times he calls it satire (which are mutu­al­ly exclu­sive excus­es). And this hap­pens over and over, with the lat­est instances in Decem­ber when he promt­ed the YouTube chan­nel of “E;R”, a noto­ri­ous neo-Nazi:

...
With 76 mil­lion sub­scribers, gam­ing vlog­ger PewDiePie, a.k.a. Felix Kjell­berg, is the most pop­u­lar indi­vid­ual on YouTube. In a since-edit­ed video post­ed on Decem­ber 9, he rec­om­mend­ed sev­er­al YouTube chan­nels he said he’d been enjoy­ing recent­ly. One of those chan­nels is called “E;R,” and PewDiePie laud­ed its “great video essays,” includ­ing “one on [the Net­flix movie] Death Note which I real­ly enjoyed.” He also linked to the chan­nel in his video descrip­tion. (The rec­om­men­da­tion has since been edit­ed out of the video.)

...

The out­cry against PewDiePie’s rec­om­men­da­tion of the chan­nel was imme­di­ate, with media out­lets and oth­er YouTube users cit­ing it as an exam­ple of PewDiePie flirt­ing with alt-right cul­ture and send­ing a dan­ger­ous mes­sage to his mil­lions of fol­low­ers, many of whom are teenagers.

In response, PewDiePie released a fol­low-up video on Decem­ber 11 in which he described the inci­dent as an “oop­sie” and scoffed at the idea that he was pro­mot­ing anti-Semi­tism by mere­ly “rec­om­mend­ing some­one for their ani­me review.”

“All I said was I like this guy’s ani­me review,” PewDiePie says in the video. “[The chan­nel cre­ator] appar­ent­ly likes to have hid­den and not-so-hid­den Nazi ref­er­ences in his videos and obvi­ous­ly if I noticed that I wouldn’t have ref­er­enced him in the shoutout.”

PewDiePie also referred to sev­er­al past inci­dents that sparked a sim­i­lar out­cry: a video in which he per­formed a Nazi “heil” salute, and one in which he hired a pair of per­form­ers from a free­lancer web­site to hold up a sign read­ing “Death to all Jews.” He said these exam­ples were satir­i­cal, but many observers con­demned them as anti-Semit­ic.

“I said pub­licly a year and a half ago that I was going to dis­tance myself from Nazi jokes and that kind of stuff, because I want noth­ing to do with it,” PewDiePie explained. Gen­er­al­ly, I’ve done that. I don’t real­ly have a rea­son to dip into that again — it’s just stu­pid.”

But each of the three videos that PewDiePie fea­tured in his since-removed shoutout of the E;R chan­nel fea­tured fair­ly obvi­ous exam­ples of the channel’s offen­sive con­tent — in fact, not only did part one of the Death Note review that PewDiePie said he liked direct­ly invoke a racial slur in its video descrip­tion (the descrip­tion has since been edit­ed), but the first 15 sec­onds of part two con­tain a ref­er­ence to a 2017 inci­dent in which PewDiePie him­self dropped a racial slur, strate­gi­cal­ly edit­ed but unmiss­able if you’re famil­iar with the clip in ques­tion — which most of PewDiePie’s fol­low­ers would rea­son­ably be.

Should PewDiePie have known bet­ter? His crit­ics say yes; though he has been dis­mis­sive about the uproar, this is not the first time he has appeared to flirt with alt-right beliefs, and he’s pre­vi­ous­ly faced back­lash for this type of inci­dent many times.
...

And PewDiePie does­n’t just have the largest audi­ence in YouTube. He also has a rel­a­tive­ly young audi­ence of die hard fans, with a major­i­ty under the age of 24. So these mil­lions of view­ers are basi­cal­ly encour­aged to ‘choose sides’ every time PewDiePie does this:

...
Regard­less of PewDiePie’s intent, any anti-Semit­ic com­men­tary — no mat­ter how “jok­ing” — could have a dan­ger­ous effect. PewDiePie’s 76 mil­lion fol­low­ers tend to skew young, with the major­i­ty of his sub­scribers younger than 24 and 11 per­cent of them younger than 17. And they are not pas­sive fans; rather, they known for their aggres­sive loy­al­ty to PewDiePie, to the point that they’ve cre­at­ed a YouTube-wide “sub­scribe to PewDiePie” meme that has pushed his fol­low­er count to near­ly 80 mil­lion.

So what hap­pens if these young, aggres­sive­ly loy­al, high­ly mobi­lized PewDiePie fans begin con­sum­ing extrem­ist strains of YouTube con­tent because they were exposed to it, either direct­ly or indi­rect­ly, through his chan­nel?

As ethno­g­ra­ph­er Crys­tal Abidin has writ­ten, “mil­lions” of young YouTube users have pre­vi­ous­ly been “seduced into join­ing camps and par­tic­i­pat­ing in glob­al dis­cur­sive debates in defence of/in oppo­si­tion to Influ­encers.”

So the idea that PewDiePie is ampli­fy­ing anti-Semit­ic and oth­er extrem­ist con­tent to mil­lions of impres­sion­able young view­ers is alarm­ing.
...

And “E;R“ ‘s YouTube chan­nel sim­i­lar­ly has a youth-ori­ent­ed approach of incor­po­rate Nazi memes into pop cul­ture imagery large­ly drawn from car­toons. That’s the kind of chan­nel YouTube rec­om­mend­ed to his young view­ers:

...
The chan­nel that PewDiePie linked to is a hotbed of anti-Semi­tism, racism, and alt-right rhetoric dis­guised as pop cul­ture com­men­tary

The E;R YouTube chan­nel has a long his­to­ry of anti-Semit­ic imagery and mes­sag­ing. The channel’s anony­mous cre­ator, who uses the E;R han­dle on sev­er­al online plat­forms, also habit­u­al­ly links to his accounts on social media sites known to attract mem­bers of the alt-right — includ­ing Gab, which, as Jane Coas­ton pre­vi­ous­ly wrote for Vox, “is a focal site for neo-Nazis and oth­ers who want to espouse right-wing forms of anti-Semi­tism.”

The Death Note review that PewDiePie cit­ed uses a racial slur to refer to one of the char­ac­ters in the movie. The video also con­tains a ref­er­ence to a false white nation­al­ist con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that Heather Hey­er, the pro­test­er who was mur­dered at the white suprema­cist Unite the Right ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, in 2017 — and whose killer was recent­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to life in prison — actu­al­ly died of a heart attack.

This indi­rect, dog-whis­tle form of alt-right mes­sag­ing is com­mon for the chan­nel, which delib­er­ate­ly uses pop cul­ture imagery, main­ly drawn from ani­mat­ed series like Death Note and in par­tic­u­lar the Car­toon Net­work TV series Steven Uni­verse, as a tool for spread­ing white suprema­cist pro­pa­gan­da. Some of the many exam­ples lit­ter­ing the channel’s videos include fre­quent ref­er­ences to media cre­ators and oth­er pub­lic fig­ures using the his­tor­i­cal­ly loaded slur “Jews,” and ref­er­ences to anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy phrase­ol­o­gy such as “the Jew­ish ques­tion,” a fre­quent alt-right dog whis­tle that refers to the “Endlö­sung der Juden­frage” — Ger­man for “Final Solu­tion to the Jew­ish Ques­tion” and the offi­cial Nazi code lan­guage for plan­ning and car­ry­ing out the Holo­caust.
...

And despite los­ing spon­sor­ships like Dis­ney’s spon­sor­ship, PewDiePie has man­aged to find new spon­sors and grow his audi­ence. In oth­er words, the most pop­u­lar per­son­al­i­ty on YouTube has fig­ured out how to make a sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­el that fac­tors in the loss of spon­sors over his repeat­ed Alt Right meme­ing:

...
“[P]ewdiepie is, once again, doing exact­ly what neo-nazis want,” Kotaku reporter Nathan Grayson com­ment­ed on Twit­ter in response to the inci­dent. “[W]hether he’s just meme­ing or he ascribes to these val­ues, it doesn’t mat­ter. [W]hat mat­ters is that he nor­mal­izes these ideas as jokes on THE plat­form where kids increas­ing­ly get their first expo­sure to the world at large.”

As Grayson notes, PewDiePie’s endorse­ment of the E;R chan­nel con­tin­ues a long trend of the vlog­ger using his influ­ence in a way that helps to nor­mal­ize white suprema­cist alt-right rhetoric to an alarm­ing — and, on YouTube, increas­ing­ly wide­spread — degree. He does this by casu­al­ly incor­po­rat­ing it into his videos under the guise of shock humor, then shrug­ging off any offense as an “oop­sie” when out­cry ensues. In 2016 and 2017, for exam­ple, PewDiePie faced intense back­lash for mul­ti­ple instances in which he pro­mot­ed Nazi sym­bol­ism and anti-Semi­tism, includ­ing a video where he used a racist slur dur­ing a gam­ing live stream.

But despite hav­ing faced con­se­quences for this behav­ior in the past, includ­ing los­ing a lucra­tive Dis­ney spon­sor­ship, PewDiePie has still been able to secure new mar­ket­ing part­ner­ships and grow his fol­low­ing.

Mean­while, his fol­low­ers have con­sis­tent­ly shown sup­port and love for PewDiePie and dis­dain for media out­lets that have report­ed on his con­tro­ver­sies.
...

And this is all why “E;R” describes PewDiePie as being a pro­duc­er of “red­pilled con­tent” and the Alt Right view him as one of their own. Because he is one of their own:

...
And though the furor around PewDiePie’s repeat­ed antics sub­sided after each new inci­dent, his flirt­ing with alt-right ideas has con­tin­ued. Though he has nev­er open­ly iden­ti­fied him­self as a mem­ber or sup­port­er of the alt-right, he has liked and pro­mote chan­nels run by users with ties to the many over­lap­ping inter­net move­ments, com­mu­ni­ties, and sub­cul­tures that loose­ly define the alt-right.

Ear­li­er this year, he made a video in which he reviewed a con­tro­ver­sial self-help book by Jor­dan Peter­son — a right-wing per­son­al­i­ty who is beloved by many in the alt-right. In the review, PewDiePie endorsed the book, called it a “fun” read, and said he would take some of its advice.

Addi­tion­al­ly, in response to PewDiePie’s rec­om­men­da­tion of the E;R chan­nel, its own­er described PewDiePie as pro­duc­ing “red­pilled con­tent.” (In far-right dis­course, “tak­ing the red pill” or hav­ing been “red­pilled” implies that some­one has “wok­en up” to the alt-right world­view, which includes the belief that fem­i­nism is ruin­ing every­thing and fre­quent­ly involves white suprema­cist dog whistling.)

And it’s easy to see why. Before declar­ing in 2017 that he would stop mak­ing Nazi jokes, PewDiePie made a whole lot of Nazi jokes. Even since then, he’s pro­duced sev­er­al “satir­i­cal” videos and com­men­tary that his alt-right fol­low­ers have praised as exam­ples of his “drop­ping red­pills” on the rest of his fans.

While PewDiePie only fol­lows a few hun­dred peo­ple on Twit­ter, many of them have ties to the afore­men­tioned inter­net move­ments, com­mu­ni­ties, and sub­cul­tures that loose­ly define the alt-right, which include Gamer­gate, Mens’ Rights activism, Pick-Up Artist com­mu­ni­ties, incels, Reddit’s r/The_Donald com­mu­ni­ty, some athe­ists and skep­tics sub­cul­tures, and oth­er online com­mu­ni­ties that fos­ter white suprema­cy and rad­i­cal right-wing extrem­ism.<

These include Peter­son, the promi­nent Gamer­gate writer Ian Miles Cheong, Infowars edi­tor Paul Joseph Wat­son, YouTube philoso­pher Ste­fan Molyneux, the Cana­di­an blog­ger Lau­ren South­ern, YouTube sex edu­ca­tion vlog­ger Laci Green (who made head­lines last year after post­ing a con­tro­ver­sial video in which she stat­ed that she “took the red pill a long time ago,” in ref­er­ence to a new wish to begin pub­licly debat­ing mem­bers of the alt-right), and lead­ing fig­ures of YouTube’s reac­tionary right-wing com­mu­ni­ty, like Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro. PewDiePie also fol­lowed noto­ri­ous alt-right YouTu­ber Sar­gon of Akkad until the latter’s sus­pen­sion from Twit­ter last year. (PewDiePie has not respond­ed to a request from Vox for com­ment.)

...

The frus­trat­ing nature of PewDiePie’s flir­ta­tion with alt-right cul­ture is that by repeat­ed­ly dis­miss­ing crit­i­cism as over­sen­si­tiv­i­ty and insist­ing he’s just being satir­i­cal, he main­tains the plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­i­ty that the alt-right counts on to aid in dis­till­ing its mes­sag­ing through­out main­stream cul­ture.

Mem­bers of var­i­ous alt-right move­ments, includ­ing the own­er of the E;R chan­nel, appear to be ful­ly aware of this. On his Gab account, when anoth­er user asked him, “What is the best way to red pill peo­ple on the (((Jew­ish Ques­tion))),” the own­er of the E;R chan­nel respond­ed, “Pre­tend to joke about it until the punch­line /really/ lands.”

So that’s anoth­er look at the neo-Nazi infes­ta­tion still tak­ing place on YouTube: The most pop­u­lar fig­ure on the plat­form is a cryp­to-Nazi for kids and young adults.

Next, here’s an arti­cle about how Twit­ter mod­er­a­tors just can’t seem to ade­quate­ly keep neo-Nazi con­tent off of the plat­form despite pre­vi­ous pledges to do so. And this is the case even when users report neo-Nazi con­tent direct­ly to the mod­er­a­tors:

Buz­zFeed News

It’s 2019 And Twit­ter’s Mod­er­a­tion Team Is Still Strug­gling With Swasti­ka Pho­to­shops

How is it that mod­er­a­tors tasked with pars­ing abu­sive behav­ior miss a poor­ly pho­to­shopped image of an infant with a bright red swasti­ka on their fore­head?

Char­lie Warzel
Buz­zFeed News Reporter

Post­ed on Jan­u­ary 9, 2019, at 1:57 p.m. ET

It was around 10 a.m. Wednes­day when Tablet mag­a­zine senior writer Yair Rosen­berg noticed the swasti­ka-laden pho­to­shop of a baby. The dis­turb­ing image was part of a Twit­ter account claim­ing to be his infant child (it was not). “Account for my son Yair Jr con­trolled by @yair_rosenberg,” the accoun­t’s bio read, which also includ­ed Rosen­berg’s full name in the han­dle.

No stranger to Twit­ter threats and abuse, Rosen­berg — who has writ­ten exten­sive­ly about neo-Nazis and online trolls — quick­ly report­ed the account, which was in clear vio­la­tion of Twit­ter’s poli­cies on abu­sive behav­ior, hate­ful con­duct, and imper­son­ation. Just 36 min­utes lat­er, Rosen­berg received a famil­iar, dispir­it­ing form email from Twit­ter: “We reviewed your report care­ful­ly and found that there was no vio­la­tion of the Twit­ter rules against abu­sive behav­ior.”

As has become cus­tom when Twit­ter’s mod­er­a­tion team fail to do its job, Rosen­berg tweet­ed about the dis­turb­ing pho­to and added a screen­shot of Twit­ter’s abuse report rejec­tion. The tweet went viral. With­in an hour, Twit­ter reversed its deci­sion and took down the account.

...

Start­ing in 2017, Twit­ter has devot­ed con­sid­er­able resources to try­ing to curb its ram­pant abuse and harass­ment prob­lems. It has writ­ten a slew of new rules, expand­ed its options for report­ing vio­lat­ing behav­ior, and removed vio­lat­ing accounts at a high­er fre­quen­cy. Many peo­ple — includ­ing Rosen­berg — have sug­gest­ed Twit­ter has got­ten a bet­ter han­dle on harass­ment. And still, two years after the site redou­bled its efforts, a con­cern­ing num­ber of reports of clear-cut harass­ment still seem to slip through the cracks.

Despite Twit­ter’s count­less calls to increase trans­paren­cy, its abuse report infra­struc­ture remains opaque and some­times con­found­ing. Online harass­ment can be tricky to parse — there are issues of lan­guage, cul­tur­al norms vary, and mod­er­a­tors who have only a few moments to weigh in on a report may miss more sub­tle exam­ples of harass­ment (which is pre­cise­ly why cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic train­ing remains cru­cial). But Twit­ter’s most pub­li­cized exam­ples of dis­missed reports often aren’t shades of gray, but clear black-and-white issues. And this case’s dis­missal rais­es the ques­tion: In 2019, if a crude­ly pho­to­shopped image of an infant with a bright red swasti­ka plas­tered on their fore­head isn’t an open-and-shut case, what is?

Rosen­berg’s tweet went viral quick­ly not just because it was an egre­gious exam­ple of abuse but because it is such a com­mon occur­rence. On Twit­ter, the dis­missed abuse report has become its own trope — an out­rage meme of sorts that sig­nals the deep frus­tra­tion that some­how, this keeps hap­pen­ing.

Like when these 70 rape threats against a pro­gram­mer were dis­missed.

Or when 2,700 Twit­ter users told Buz­zFeed News about their strug­gles with abuse on the social net­work.

Or when 90% of respon­dents to a Buz­zFeed News sur­vey in 2016 said Twit­ter did­n’t do any­thing when they report­ed abuse.

Or when this ISIS behead­ing pho­to did­n’t qual­i­fy as abuse.

Or when Twit­ter did­n’t ini­tial­ly block attempts to dis­en­fran­chise vot­ers on its ser­vice in 2016.

Or when it only blocked these false vot­ing infor­ma­tion claims after reports from Buz­zFeed News.

Or when it allowed a pro­mot­ed tweet from a Nazi web­site.

Or when Twit­ter sus­pend­ed a wom­an’s account after she tweet­ed the anti-Semit­ic images trolls had sent her.

There were also the con­fus­ing sus­pen­sions and rein­state­ments of white suprema­cists David Duke and Richard Spencer.

Or these 89 instances in 2017 of users alleg­ing that they received at least one improp­er dis­missal of their harass­ment claim.

Or when Twit­ter restrict­ed actor Rose McGowan’s account instead of just delet­ing one tweet.

Or when it had to pause its ver­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem after its deci­sion to ver­i­fy a white suprema­cist who orga­nized the “Unite the Right” ral­ly in Char­lottesville.

And the list goes on...unless you’re a bit­coin scam­mer, then it’s OK!

———-

“It’s 2019 And Twit­ter’s Mod­er­a­tion Team Is Still Strug­gling With Swasti­ka Pho­to­shops” by Char­lie Warzel; Buz­zFeed News; 01/09/2019

“Start­ing in 2017, Twit­ter has devot­ed con­sid­er­able resources to try­ing to curb its ram­pant abuse and harass­ment prob­lems. It has writ­ten a slew of new rules, expand­ed its options for report­ing vio­lat­ing behav­ior, and removed vio­lat­ing accounts at a high­er fre­quen­cy. Many peo­ple — includ­ing Rosen­berg — have sug­gest­ed Twit­ter has got­ten a bet­ter han­dle on harass­ment. And still, two years after the site redou­bled its efforts, a con­cern­ing num­ber of reports of clear-cut harass­ment still seem to slip through the cracks.”

We’re two years into Twit­ter explic­it­ly try­ing to curb the ram­pant abuse and harass­ment prob­lems, and the neo-Nazi harassers appear to still be get­ting a free pass. For exam­ple, when a Twit­ter account was cre­at­ed claim­ing to be the infant child of jour­nal­ist Yair Rosen­berg and tweet­ed a swasti­ka-lan­den pho­to­shop of a baby at Rosen­berg, he report it to Twit­ter only to have Twit­ter’s mod­er­a­tors inform him that the post of a swasti­ka-laden baby sent from a fake account pre­tend­ing to be Rosen­berg’s infant son was­n’t a vio­la­tion of Twit­ter’s rules against harass­ment. But then Rosen­berg tweet­ed out about this, it went viral, and with­in an hour Twit­ter reversed its deci­sion and took down the fake account. So it would appear that Twit­ters rules against abu­sive behav­ior are neb­u­lous enough that it may or may not be a vio­la­tion of the rules for some­one to cre­ate a fake account of a Jew­ish jour­nal­ist’s infant son and then send him swasti­ka-laden baby pic­tures:

...
It was around 10 a.m. Wednes­day when Tablet mag­a­zine senior writer Yair Rosen­berg noticed the swasti­ka-laden pho­to­shop of a baby. The dis­turb­ing image was part of a Twit­ter account claim­ing to be his infant child (it was not). “Account for my son Yair Jr con­trolled by @yair_rosenberg,” the accoun­t’s bio read, which also includ­ed Rosen­berg’s full name in the han­dle.

No stranger to Twit­ter threats and abuse, Rosen­berg — who has writ­ten exten­sive­ly about neo-Nazis and online trolls — quick­ly report­ed the account, which was in clear vio­la­tion of Twit­ter’s poli­cies on abu­sive behav­ior, hate­ful con­duct, and imper­son­ation. Just 36 min­utes lat­er, Rosen­berg received a famil­iar, dispir­it­ing form email from Twit­ter: “We reviewed your report care­ful­ly and found that there was no vio­la­tion of the Twit­ter rules against abu­sive behav­ior.”

As has become cus­tom when Twit­ter’s mod­er­a­tion team fail to do its job, Rosen­berg tweet­ed about the dis­turb­ing pho­to and added a screen­shot of Twit­ter’s abuse report rejec­tion. The tweet went viral. With­in an hour, Twit­ter reversed its deci­sion and took down the account.

...

Rosen­berg’s tweet went viral quick­ly not just because it was an egre­gious exam­ple of abuse but because it is such a com­mon occur­rence. On Twit­ter, the dis­missed abuse report has become its own trope — an out­rage meme of sorts that sig­nals the deep frus­tra­tion that some­how, this keeps hap­pen­ing.
...

And that’s just one of numer­ous pub­li­cized exam­ples of Twit­ter either neglect­ing to address what appear to be pret­ty black and white instances of abuse:

...
Despite Twit­ter’s count­less calls to increase trans­paren­cy, its abuse report infra­struc­ture remains opaque and some­times con­found­ing. Online harass­ment can be tricky to parse — there are issues of lan­guage, cul­tur­al norms vary, and mod­er­a­tors who have only a few moments to weigh in on a report may miss more sub­tle exam­ples of harass­ment (which is pre­cise­ly why cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic train­ing remains cru­cial). But Twit­ter’s most pub­li­cized exam­ples of dis­missed reports often aren’t shades of gray, but clear black-and-white issues. And this case’s dis­missal rais­es the ques­tion: In 2019, if a crude­ly pho­to­shopped image of an infant with a bright red swasti­ka plas­tered on their fore­head isn’t an open-and-shut case, what is?

...

Like when these 70 rape threats against a pro­gram­mer were dis­missed.

Or when 2,700 Twit­ter users told Buz­zFeed News about their strug­gles with abuse on the social net­work.

Or when 90% of respon­dents to a Buz­zFeed News sur­vey in 2016 said Twit­ter did­n’t do any­thing when they report­ed abuse.

Or when this ISIS behead­ing pho­to did­n’t qual­i­fy as abuse.

Or when Twit­ter did­n’t ini­tial­ly block attempts to dis­en­fran­chise vot­ers on its ser­vice in 2016.

Or when it only blocked these false vot­ing infor­ma­tion claims after reports from Buz­zFeed News.

Or when it allowed a pro­mot­ed tweet from a Nazi web­site.

Or when Twit­ter sus­pend­ed a wom­an’s account after she tweet­ed the anti-Semit­ic images trolls had sent her.

There were also the con­fus­ing sus­pen­sions and rein­state­ments of white suprema­cists David Duke and Richard Spencer.

Or these 89 instances in 2017 of users alleg­ing that they received at least one improp­er dis­missal of their harass­ment claim.

Or when Twit­ter restrict­ed actor Rose McGowan’s account instead of just delet­ing one tweet.

Or when it had to pause its ver­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem after its deci­sion to ver­i­fy a white suprema­cist who orga­nized the “Unite the Right” ral­ly in Char­lottesville.

And the list goes on...unless you’re a bit­coin scam­mer, then it’s OK!
...

Yep, at the same time YouTube’s most pop­u­lar per­son­al­i­ty is busy ‘red-pilling’ tens of mil­lions of youths, Twit­ter appears to qui­et­ly tol­er­at­ing Alt Right abuse. So as we can see, when faced with the real­i­ty that their plat­forms have become neo-Nazi ‘red-pilling’ recruit­ment tools and stalk­ing grounds, the social media giants are pre­tend­ing to do some­thing but appar­ent­ly doing noth­ing. Which is a choice. The kind of choice that rais­es the ques­tion of how many of the peo­ple at these com­pa­nies made the choice to ‘take the red pill’ them­selves.

Here’s a rather inter­est­ing, albeit dis­turb­ing, sto­ry that touch­es upon a num­ber of dif­fer­ent top­ics of the day. It’s about
a while nation­al­ist YouTube per­son­al­i­ty, Jean-François Gariepy, who runs a YouTube chan­nel, Neu­roTV, which is osten­si­bly ded­i­cat­ed to con­tent about neu­ro­science but in real­i­ty is ded­i­cat­ed to prov­ing the supe­ri­or­i­ty it whites and fre­quent­ly has fig­ures like Richard Spencer and David Duke on as guests. Gariepy is a for­mer neu­ro­science research at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty before leav­ing in 2015 and start­ing this YouTube chan­nel. And as the fol­low­ing Rightwing Watch post from Decem­ber reveals, it turns out Gariepy got $25,000 to start his Neu­roTV YouTube chan­nel from none oth­er than Jef­frey Epstein, the bil­lion­aire financier at the cen­ter of a under­age pros­ti­tu­tion ring.

The Epstein scan­dal is one of those scan­dals that has the look of a scan­dal that could explode and take down a num­ber of promi­nent indi­vid­u­als but has nev­er quite explod­ed. Two of the promi­nent indi­vid­u­als known to have pre­vi­ous­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Epstein include Bill Clin­ton and Don­ald Trump. And one of the key wit­ness­es in the case, Vir­ginia Roberts, was work­ing at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort at the age of 16 when she was alleged­ly recruit­ed to become part of Epstein’s net­work. The case has also drawn atten­tion to Trump’s Labor Sec­re­tary, Alex Acos­ta, who was the fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor who signed off on a non-pros­e­cu­tion agree­ment that kept most of the details of the inves­ti­ga­tion out of the pub­lic. Epstein was actu­al­ly a heavy donor to Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians in the 90’s and ear­ly 2000’s up until his arrest in 2004. In 2008, he was a key fed­er­al wit­ness in the crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion of two of Bear Stearns’ top exec­u­tives in 2008 (Epstein was a top Bear Stearns’ investor) and that was the year his non-pros­e­cu­tion agree­ment was reached.

And now we’re learn­ing that Epstein, who is Jew­ish, appar­ent­ly gave a white nation­al­ist YouTu­ber $25,000 to set up his Neu­roTV chan­nel. Or rather, his foun­da­tion made the dona­tion. Although, as the arti­cle notes, Neu­roTV had­n’t yet slid into the pro­mo­tion of white suprema­cy at the time of the dona­tion, so it’s pos­si­ble Epstein’s dona­tion was­n’t intend­ed to sup­port the pro­mo­tion of a sleazy Alt Right per­son­al­i­ty but was actu­al­ly sup­posed to be part of some sort of pro-edu­ca­tion move. Either way, it’s quite a twist to the Epstein sto­ry and the sto­ry of the rise of Alt Right on YouTube:

Rightwing Watch

White Nation­al­ist YouTu­ber Says Jef­frey Epstein Once Gave Him $25,000

By Jared Holt | Decem­ber 14, 2018 4:19 pm

Jean-François Gar­iépy, a white nation­al­ist YouTu­ber and pod­cast host who made his name dur­ing the far-right’s “YouTube Blood­sports” phe­nom­e­na ear­li­er this year, said that he received a large sum of finan­cial sup­port from bil­lion­aire Jef­frey Epstein.

The Mia­mi Her­ald report­ed last month about the details of Epstein’s plea deal for his sus­pect­ed orches­tra­tion of a crim­i­nal sex ring involv­ing under­age girls. Dur­ing a moment of the Novem­ber 17 edi­tion of his pod­cast, “The Pub­lic Space,” Gar­iépy says that in the inter­est of being “trans­par­ent” with his audi­ence, he want­ed to dis­close that he had received a large amount of mon­ey from Epstein.

At the time of the Jef­frey Epstein VI Foundation’s fund­ing, Gariépy’s YouTube chan­nel was brand­ed “Neu­roTV” and fea­tured con­tent about neu­ro­science. Before slid­ing into white nation­al­ism, Gar­iépy was a researcher at the Cen­ter for Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty. Now, Gariépy’s chan­nel is fre­quent­ly home to fig­ures like for­mer KKK leader David Duke, alt-right pod­cast host Mike Peinovich, and white nation­al­ists Greg John­son and Richard Spencer.

The men­tion was noticed by a user on Twit­ter, who post­ed a video excerpt:

Well, this explains a lot. pic.twitter.com/dYL40Ik7Ab— ?? Soy Foid ?? (@aterfoddbitch) Decem­ber 14, 2018

“Jeff Epstein, who we’re talk­ing about here, was an orig­i­nal fun­der to my YouTube chan­nel,” Gar­iépy said. “Now, it’s not that I give a sh it about this guy. OK, he got arrest­ed after and the fact that he donat­ed to my chan­nel at the very begin­ning of my YouTube career does not influ­ence me. I’m not try­ing to find Jeff Epstein inno­cent in what he’s been accused of. “

He con­tin­ued, “I may nev­er have talked about it, but Jeff Epstein had giv­en $25,000 to my foun­da­tion in the U.S. when I start­ed my YouTube career. As a Jew­ish mil­lion­aire, I think he didn’t expect my chan­nel to turn the way it did.”

...

———-

“White Nation­al­ist YouTu­ber Says Jef­frey Epstein Once Gave Him $25,000” by Jared Holt; Rightwing Watch; 12/14/2018

“Jean-François Gar­iépy, a white nation­al­ist YouTu­ber and pod­cast host who made his name dur­ing the far-right’s “YouTube Blood­sports” phe­nom­e­na ear­li­er this year, said that he received a large sum of finan­cial sup­port from bil­lion­aire Jef­frey Epstein.”

Yep, Jean-François Gar­iépy’s racist YouTube chan­nel got $25,000 from Epstein. Although it’s impor­tant to note that, at the time of the Jef­frey Epstein VI Foundation’s dona­tion, Neu­roTV actu­al­ly fea­tured con­tent about neu­ro­science. It only lat­er start­ed pro­mot­ing white suprema­cy:

...
At the time of the Jef­frey Epstein VI Foundation’s fund­ing, Gariépy’s YouTube chan­nel was brand­ed “Neu­roTV” and fea­tured con­tent about neu­ro­science. Before slid­ing into white nation­al­ism, Gar­iépy was a researcher at the Cen­ter for Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty. Now, Gariépy’s chan­nel is fre­quent­ly home to fig­ures like for­mer KKK leader David Duke, alt-right pod­cast host Mike Peinovich, and white nation­al­ists Greg John­son and Richard Spencer.

The men­tion was noticed by a user on Twit­ter, who post­ed a video excerpt:

Well, this explains a lot. pic.twitter.com/dYL40Ik7Ab— ?? Soy Foid ?? (@aterfoddbitch) Decem­ber 14, 2018

“Jeff Epstein, who we’re talk­ing about here, was an orig­i­nal fun­der to my YouTube chan­nel,” Gar­iépy said. “Now, it’s not that I give a sh it about this guy. OK, he got arrest­ed after and the fact that he donat­ed to my chan­nel at the very begin­ning of my YouTube career does not influ­ence me. I’m not try­ing to find Jeff Epstein inno­cent in what he’s been accused of. “

He con­tin­ued, “I may nev­er have talked about it, but Jeff Epstein had giv­en $25,000 to my foun­da­tion in the U.S. when I start­ed my YouTube career. As a Jew­ish mil­lion­aire, I think he didn’t expect my chan­nel to turn the way it did.”
...

So that’s an inter­est­ing sto­ry in rela­tion to both the Epstein case and the rise of white nation­al­ism on YouTube.

But there’s anoth­er bizarre chap­ter to this sto­ry that’s note­wor­thy in the con­text of white nation­al­ists like Gariepy using YouTube to pro­mote the kind of pro­pa­gan­da that demo­nizes Lati­no immi­grants as a dan­ger­ous to Amer­i­can soci­ety: It turns out Gariepy, a Can­da­di­an, has a his­to­ry of get­ting into inap­pro­pri­ate rela­tion­ships with Amer­i­can women for the pur­pose of impreg­nat­ing them so he can get US cit­i­zen­ship.

It’s a rather con­fus­ing sto­ry, in part because there are mul­ti­ple women he was doing this with. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, when Gariepy left Duke in Sep­tem­ber 2015, he made a Face­book post that char­ac­ter­ized his deci­sion to leave as a response to aspects of aca­d­e­m­ic cul­ture he did­n’t like. He was mar­ried to his third wife at the time, an Amer­i­can woman, although they had sep­a­rat­ed in July 2015, two months before the Face­book post. She was still preg­nant with his child at the time.

After Gariepy’s Face­book post, a Duke col­league of his con­tact­ed his wife (his third wife) and informed her that Gariepy was actu­al­ly asked not to return to his post­doc­tor­al posi­tion and that he had a sex­u­al­ly inap­pro­pri­ate rela­tion­ship with an under­grad­u­ate lab assis­tant. This rela­tion­ship went from Jan­u­ary 2014 to June 2014, and Gariepy told the woman that he want­ed her to have his child. When she reject­ed his plan the rela­tion­ship end­ed with her “suf­fer­ing from emo­tion­al abuse on the part of” Gariepy.

Gariepy mar­ried his third wife ear­li­er in 2015. She accused him of emo­tion­al abuse through­out the preg­nan­cy, and of threat­en­ing to abduct their child to his native Cana­da. They sep­a­rat­ed 5 months after the mar­riage in July while she was preg­nant with his child and moved out of their shared apart­ment. At that point, she claims, Gariepy began demand­ing that she put his name on the lease for immi­gra­tion pur­pos­es, and help him apply for a green card. She agreed to attend an immi­gra­tion inter­view but only if he would sign sep­a­ra­tion doc­u­ments. Dur­ing the inter­view, an immi­gra­tion offi­cer ques­tioned her sep­a­rate­ly and asked if Gariepy was pres­sur­ing her into a green card, she claimed. She said she told the offi­cer it was impor­tant for Gariepy to remain in the coun­try for their child’s sake. But after the inter­view, Gariepy refused to sign the sep­a­ra­tion doc­u­ments. Gariepy more or less denies all of this and blames all of these accu­sa­tions on lib­er­al women try­ing to smear him for his Alt Right views.

So it sounds like Gariepy tried to get this under­grad­u­ate in a lab to father his child in 2014 and when that did­n’t work out he met this oth­er woman who he mar­ried in ear­ly 2015 and got preg­nant. She end­ed up leav­ing him dur­ing the preg­nan­cy a cou­ple months before Gariepy end­ed up leav­ing Duke.

His third wife gave birth in Decem­ber 2015 and a cus­tody bat­tle ensued. The month before the child was born, a pro­duc­er with the Dr. Phil show con­tact­ed her lawyer twice because Gariepy had alleged­ly asked to be on the Dr. Phil show to “pub­licly address the cam­paign of false alle­ga­tions against him.”

In August or Sep­tem­ber 2015, dur­ing this cus­tody bat­tle with his third wife, Gariepy met a 19 year old His­pan­ic girl who heard him on the Drunk­en Peas­ants pod­cast. This is the same pod­cast where Milo Yiannopou­los infa­mous­ly defend­ed pedophil­ia. The 19 year has an autism spec­trum dis­or­der has “the social and men­tal matu­ri­ty of a 10 or 11-year-old child,” accord­ing to a coun­selor’s assess­ment. Gariepy claims the young woman has a com­mu­nica­tive dis­or­der but that she could con­sent to hav­ing a child because “her intel­li­gence and her capac­i­ty for mak­ing deci­sions, it’s actu­al­ly high­er prob­a­bly than the aver­age 19-year-old woman.” Gariepy also claims the two pledged loy­al­ty to each oth­er with­out hav­ing met.

They did final­ly meet in July of 2016, when the young woman drove to North Car­oli­na to meet Gariepy. She claimed Gariepy want­ed to impreg­nate her and be a “stay-at-home dad.” Her par­ents suc­cess­ful­ly applied for guardian­ship of her. She told her par­ents she was engaged to Gariepy and preg­nant with his child, although blood tests revealed the teenag­er was­n’t preg­nant.

To sum­ma­rize the strange sto­ry of Jean-Fran­cois Gariepy roman­tic adven­tures, he tried to impreg­nate an under­grad­u­ate lab assis­tant at his Duke lab in 2014 while he was still a neu­ro­sci­en­tist. When that did­n’t work out he end­ed up mar­ry­ing and impreg­nat­ing his third wife in ear­ly 2015. She left him in July of 2015 and gave birth in Decem­ber of 2015. Dur­ing the ensu­ing cus­tody bat­tle, Gariepy met a 19 year old His­pan­ic woman while who hear him on a pod­cast. They pledged loy­al­ty to each oth­er before meet­ing. When she final­ly met him in July of 2016 her par­ents man­aged to obtain guardian­ship over her. When she returned to her par­ents she claimed they were engaged and she was preg­nant, although blood tests showed no preg­nan­cy. And the one com­mon theme in all of this is the Gariepy need­ed to find an Amer­i­can to mar­ry so he would­n’t be deport­ed:

The Dai­ly Beast

Alt-Right YouTu­ber Accused of Lur­ing Autis­tic Teen in Preg­nan­cy Plot
A Cana­di­an immi­grant who makes white-nation­al­ist videos with Richard Spencer is accused of try­ing to impreg­nate an autis­tic His­pan­ic teen—while he was mar­ried to anoth­er woman.

Kel­ly Weill
03.15.18 5:26 AM ET

A promi­nent far-right YouTu­ber who calls for a white “eth­nos­tate” and makes videos with Richard Spencer is accused of lur­ing and attempt­ing to impreg­nate a devel­op­men­tal­ly dis­abled His­pan­ic teenag­er while lawyers con­test­ed his U.S. immi­gra­tion sta­tus.

This comes amid a sep­a­rate legal bat­tle with his wife, who accused him of try­ing to kid­nap their infant to Cana­da.

Jean-Fran­cois Gariepy is a fast-ris­ing fix­ture in white-nation­al­ist cir­cles. A for­mer neu­ro­science researcher at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty who left sud­den­ly in 2015, Gariepy now makes videos attempt­ing to prove white supe­ri­or­i­ty, call­ing for all-white sep­a­ratist states and a crack­down on immi­gra­tion. White nation­al­ist Richard Spencer recent­ly appeared with him on a livestream.

Gariepy, a Cana­di­an cit­i­zen, also stands accused in two court cas­es of a pat­tern of bizarre and abu­sive behav­ior toward women—allegations he denied in an inter­view with The Dai­ly Beast.

A child-cus­tody case with his third wife includes alle­ga­tions that Gariepy engaged in mis­con­duct with an under­grad­u­ate he super­vised at Duke. Gariepy’s wife won sole cus­tody of their new­born after pre­sent­ing evi­dence that Gariepy had threat­ened to abduct the baby to Cana­da while his visa was depen­dent on their mar­riage.

While that case was ongo­ing, Gariepy lost a guardian­ship dis­pute over an autis­tic 19-year-old whom a coun­selor assessed as hav­ing “the social and men­tal matu­ri­ty of a 10- or 11-year-old child.” Gariepy, who met the young woman online and entered into a sex­u­al rela­tion­ship with her, claimed in court that the young woman was his preg­nant fiancée, although blood tests revealed that she was not preg­nant.

In an inter­view, Gariepy denied alle­ga­tions that he had act­ed improp­er­ly and that he had attempt­ed to mar­ry or impreg­nate women for U.S. immi­gra­tion pur­pos­es, call­ing the alle­ga­tions a smear cam­paign by “left­ist women.”

But court records in the guardian­ship and cus­tody cas­es sug­gest a long his­to­ry of con­flict with women.

Gariepy, 34, grew up in sub­ur­ban Mon­tre­al, which he described to a court-appoint­ed psy­chol­o­gist as “like par­adise.” He said he spent his child­hood sur­round­ed by rel­a­tives in a vil­lage “dom­i­nat­ed by our fam­i­lies.” “I didn’t know dishar­mo­ny until I met oth­er women at 18–19 [years old],” he said, accord­ing to the psychologist’s report includ­ed in his cus­tody case against his third wife.

He mar­ried his first wife at 18, and divorced at 23. “I want­ed a fam­i­ly and she wasn’t into it,” he told the court-appoint­ed psy­chol­o­gist. “She left—she lost inter­est in me. Also I didn’t know how to sat­is­fy a woman and I was get­ting fat.” A sec­ond mar­riage, which he claimed was to a woman who was French and “need­ed to get into Cana­da,” also failed, he told the psy­chol­o­gist.

He lat­er left Cana­da to take a series of research posi­tions at U.S. col­leges before set­tling into an asso­ciate research role in Duke’s neu­ro­science depart­ment in Sep­tem­ber 2011, as the uni­ver­si­ty con­firmed to The Dai­ly Beast. In a viral Face­book post in Sep­tem­ber 2015, Gariepy announced he’d quit Duke because he’d grown dis­il­lu­sioned with the aca­d­e­m­ic com­mu­ni­ty. The post earned him a write-up in Slate.

But Gariepy’s motives for quit­ting came into ques­tion dur­ing the cus­tody dis­pute. After Gariepy’s viral Face­book post, one of his for­mer Duke col­leagues con­tact­ed his third wife, whom he had mar­ried ear­li­er that year. The for­mer col­league “con­tact­ed her after the Face­book post­ing, [and said] that Dr. Gariepy was not asked to return to his post­doc­tor­al posi­tion and that he had a sex­u­al­ly inap­pro­pri­ate rela­tion­ship with one of the under­grad­u­ate lab assis­tants,” accord­ing to court records filed on Gariepy’s wife’s behalf.

The under­grad­u­ate stu­dent con­firmed the rela­tion­ship to a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor hired by Gariepy’s wife, accord­ing to court doc­u­ments. While they were in a rela­tion­ship, she told the inves­ti­ga­tor, Gariepy was her men­tor or super­vi­sor at their lab. Dur­ing their rela­tion­ship from Jan­u­ary until June 2014, Gariepy want­ed her to have his child, she told the inves­ti­ga­tor, accord­ing to a sworn affi­davit he entered in court. Gariepy “dis­cussed how he would be a stay-at-home father and pro­vide the child all the car­ing needs for the child,” accord­ing to the investigator’s affi­davit.

The under­grad­u­ate lab assis­tant told the inves­ti­ga­tor that she decid­ed against Gariepy’s plan, and that the rela­tion­ship end­ed with her “suf­fer­ing from emo­tion­al abuse on the part of” Gariepy.

Gariepy told The Dai­ly Beast that their rela­tion­ship had been con­sen­su­al, and that the stu­dent had dis­closed it to Duke Uni­ver­si­ty. “There has nev­er been an inves­ti­ga­tion against me at Duke for being in a rela­tion­ship with this woman,” he said.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Duke Uni­ver­si­ty con­firmed that Gariepy had worked at the uni­ver­si­ty until August 2015, the month before he pub­licly announced his depar­ture. The school declined to com­ment on alle­ga­tions that Gariepy had left as a result of sex­u­al mis­con­duct. “As a mat­ter of pol­i­cy, the uni­ver­si­ty does not com­ment on per­son­nel mat­ters beyond con­firm­ing employ­ment sta­tus,” the uni­ver­si­ty rep­re­sen­ta­tive said in an email.

Gariepy’s viral Face­book post cit­ed anoth­er rea­son for quit­ting: “I will soon be a father and want to be spend­ing time with my son at home.”

But that cozy claim was also up for debate. Gariepy and his third wife had sep­a­rat­ed two months ear­li­er, in July, after few­er than six months of mar­riage. In a cus­tody case that began the day after their son’s Decem­ber 2015 birth, Gariepy’s third wife accused him of emo­tion­al abuse through­out the preg­nan­cy, and of threat­en­ing to abduct their child to his native Cana­da.

Both Gariepy’s wife and the court expressed con­cern over Gariepy’s immi­gra­tion sta­tus.

“The defen­dant is a cit­i­zen of Cana­da and cur­rent­ly in the Unit­ed States under a con­di­tion­al visa based upon his mar­riage to the plain­tiff,” his wife claimed in court doc­u­ments. “Said visa is con­di­tion­al and up for review by U.S. Immi­gra­tion in July 2016.” In a find­ing of facts in Novem­ber 2016, the court wrote that the visa was pend­ing review.

Gariepy con­tra­dict­ed the court’s find­ing to The Dai­ly Beast, claim­ing he had a green card through his new mar­riage, but that he’s since aban­doned it to move back to Cana­da. “The real­i­ty is once I mar­ried my ex-wife I was a per­ma­nent res­i­dent,” he said, claim­ing he could have become a cit­i­zen.

A green card, or per­ma­nent res­i­den­cy, is not imme­di­ate­ly con­ferred upon an immi­grant who mar­ries a U.S. cit­i­zen. The process requires an appli­ca­tion, which includes an in-per­son inter­view with both part­ners. If the green card is approved, and the mar­riage is less than two years old, the immi­grant receives a “con­di­tion­al” green card, which expires in two years unless both cou­ples reap­ply, or the cou­ple mar­ried “in good faith” but lat­er divorced.

In a Feb­ru­ary 2016 find­ing of facts, the court specif­i­cal­ly not­ed that Gariepy’s visa was pend­ing review “to assure that his mar­riage isn’t fraud­u­lent.” Gariepy also told The Dai­ly Beast that, pri­or to his mar­riage, he had been on a “J‑1 vis­it­ing schol­ar visa. I did five years on that.” J‑1 visas are short-term and tied to a recipient’s work. After a J‑1 recip­i­ent com­pletes their pro­gram, they must leave the coun­try or obtain anoth­er form of doc­u­men­ta­tion.

In an inter­view with a court-appoint­ed psy­chol­o­gist, Gariepy also claimed to have pur­sued mar­riage and a child for immi­gra­tion pur­pos­es. The rela­tion­ship “was fast because of her age—she’s old­er than me,” Gariepy said, accord­ing to the psychologist’s report includ­ed in court doc­u­ments. “Oth­er pressures—I’m an immi­grant. It was all or nothing—marriage and a baby or I couldn’t stay in the U.S.”

Gariepy claimed the state­ments were tak­en out of con­text. “I explained that to my ex-wife, either you are inter­est­ed in me and hav­ing a fam­i­ly with me or the U.S. will kick me out after my legal five years of res­i­dence,” he told The Dai­ly Beast. “That was mere­ly me explain­ing to my ex-wife this real­i­ty.”

Short­ly into the preg­nan­cy, the rela­tion­ship grew volatile, both par­ties agreed. Gariepy claimed in court records that his wife grew “very aggressive—she wasn’t inter­est­ed in me any­more.” But his wife alleged a pat­tern of increas­ing­ly strange behav­iors. Gariepy start­ed mak­ing audio record­ings of her to “build a case” and post­ing them to a fam­i­ly plan­ning web­site, she said in court doc­u­ments. She claimed Gariepy became con­trol­ling, and refused to talk to a ther­a­pist, alleged­ly telling her, “I am the san­est per­son I know.”

Five months after their mar­riage, Gariepy’s wife moved out of their apart­ment—at which point, she claimed, he began demand­ing that she put his name on the lease for immi­gra­tion pur­pos­es, and help him apply for a green card. She claimed she agreed to attend an inter­view, if he would sign sep­a­ra­tion doc­u­ments. Dur­ing the inter­view, an immi­gra­tions offi­cer ques­tioned her sep­a­rate­ly and asked if Gariepy was pres­sur­ing her into a green card, she claimed. She said she told the offi­cer it was impor­tant for Gariepy to remain in the coun­try for their child’s sake. But after the inter­view, she claimed, Gariepy refused to sign the sep­a­ra­tion doc­u­ments.

After mov­ing out, she claimed a neigh­bor called her to report that police were remov­ing weapons from the couple’s for­mer­ly shared apart­ment. Gariepy lat­er told her in an email that he had asked the sheriff’s depart­ment to remove the weapons because he did not “want any­one to feel unsafe or to make false accu­sa­tions about abuse,” his wife said he wrote. Police were so alarmed by Gariepy’s request to remove the weapons, that an offi­cer with the domes­tic-vio­lence unit called his wife to ask about her safe­ty, she claimed.

But the couple’s biggest fights were over the fate of their unborn child. Gariepy said he could deliv­er the child at home and raise it because of his expe­ri­ence work­ing with mon­keys in research labs, his wife claimed in court doc­u­ments. He also alleged­ly pres­sured his wife to give the child a Cana­di­an pass­port, and threat­ened to take the child away to Cana­da. When the couple’s rela­tion­ship soured fur­ther, Gariepy wrote on med­ical intake forms that he would not com­ply with doc­tors’ orders “that would keep [him] from trans­port­ing my child to my home,” his wife claimed. He then alleged­ly vis­it­ed mul­ti­ple local OBGYN prac­tices and accused them of dis­crim­i­na­tion when they would not treat him, going so far as to threat­en a law­suit against Duke hos­pi­tal.

Gariepy claimed in court doc­u­ments that he was try­ing to meet with an OBGYN for infor­ma­tion on a sleep aid he claimed his wife was using.

The month before the child’s birth, a pro­duc­er with the Dr. Phil show con­tact­ed Gariepy’s wife’s lawyer twice, she claimed. Gariepy had alleged­ly asked to be on the show to “pub­licly address the cam­paign of false alle­ga­tions against him.”

Fol­low­ing the advice of police and hos­pi­tal secu­ri­ty, Gariepy’s wife gave birth under an alias in an undis­closed hos­pi­tal, and filed for cus­tody the day after the child’s birth, she claimed. A judge award­ed her full cus­tody, which Gariepy appealed. In pro­ceed­ing with the appeal, the judge rec­om­mend­ed Gariepy under­go a psy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tion.

The psy­chol­o­gist found Gariepy to be “very bright, intel­lec­tu­al­ly,” but said he showed a lack of insight and impulse con­trol, a “sense of being treat­ed unfair­ly, or vic­tim­ized,” and dis­played dis­tort­ed thoughts sug­gest­ing “overt psy­chosis.”

The appeal is ongo­ing. Since the child’s birth, Gariepy has railed against his wife in YouTube videos, which are now includ­ed in the court record. When some­one dis­liked one of the videos, Gariepy post­ed a link to it, order­ing his fans “to find the per­son who dis­liked the video and make his/her life more bur­den­some by remind­ing him polite­ly how ter­ri­ble of a human being he/she is,” court records note.

Gariepy told The Dai­ly Beast he was jok­ing. “I do dark humor, and, yes, some of that dark humor was brought into the cus­tody tri­al, as if the fact that I do jokes on the pub­lic space about race or rape would make me an unfit father,” he said. In one of his 2017 videos, Gariepy claimed courts should not be able to use a person’s pub­lic state­ments against them in a cus­tody bat­tle and that “that is a prob­lem a white eth­nos­tate could solve.”

But while Gariepy was fight­ing his wife for cus­tody, he was also court­ing a 19-year-old with autism. The teenag­er, who lived in Texas, had “the social and men­tal matu­ri­ty of a 10 or 11-year-old child,” accord­ing to a counselor’s assess­ment includ­ed in court records.

Peo­ple with autism spec­trum dis­or­der might expe­ri­ence dif­fi­cul­ty with com­mu­ni­ca­tion or inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships, although symp­toms vary broad­ly. The young woman had grad­u­at­ed high school and could dri­ve, but could not make finan­cial deci­sions, con­sent to mar­riage, or attend to dai­ly activ­i­ties like bathing or dress­ing with­out sup­port or reminders from her moth­er, accord­ing to a psychologist’s eval­u­a­tion includ­ed in court records.

Gariepy claimed to The Dai­ly Beast the young woman had a com­mu­nica­tive dis­or­der, but that she could con­sent to hav­ing a child. “Her intel­li­gence and her capac­i­ty for mak­ing deci­sions, it’s actu­al­ly high­er prob­a­bly than the aver­age 19-year-old woman,” he said.

She “prefers to be on her own and spends a lot of time on the com­put­er,” the psy­chol­o­gist wrote. She came across Gariepy while lis­ten­ing to his appear­ance on a pod­cast by the Drunk­en Peas­ants, the show where alt-right per­son­al­i­ty Milo Yiannopou­los infa­mous­ly made com­ments appear­ing to defend pedophil­ia. In August or Sep­tem­ber 2015, when Gariepy was fight­ing issues of cus­tody and immi­gra­tion with his then-preg­nant wife, he and the teenag­er began talk­ing online. Gariepy claimed they lat­er pledged loy­al­ty to each oth­er with­out hav­ing met.

“We’ve been promis­ing loy­al­ty to each oth­er since Jan­u­ary 2016,” Gariepy tes­ti­fied in court, accord­ing to tran­scripts.

On July 10, 2016, the teenag­er drove to North Car­oli­na to meet Gariepy, she told the psy­chol­o­gist. She and Gariepy had sex—her first inti­mate expe­ri­ence. She claimed Gariepy want­ed to impreg­nate her and be a “stay-at-home dad.” She told the psy­chol­o­gist that Gariepy was a YouTu­ber, and that, while she did not know if he made any mon­ey, he had promised to give her a cook­ing show.

With­in weeks, the young woman’s par­ents suc­cess­ful­ly applied for guardian­ship of her and brought her home to Texas. When she returned, she told her par­ents she was engaged to Gariepy and preg­nant with his child, even though Gariepy was still mar­ried, and both urine and blood tests revealed the teenag­er was not preg­nant.

Her family’s lawyer described her as afraid of Gariepy, and upset upon her return home.

...

Gariepy filed his own motion to block the family’s guardian­ship, claim­ing the young woman was not inca­pac­i­tat­ed and that they were legit­i­mate domes­tic part­ners. “I’m her fiance and we were try­ing to make a baby. We have been liv­ing togeth­er for three weeks,” he tes­ti­fied in an August 2016 court appear­ance.

...

At that time, Gariepy had not begun divorce pro­ceed­ings with his wife, which the family’s lawyer spec­u­lat­ed in August 2016 might be due to “Mr. Gariepy’s seek­ing sta­tus or the fact that he may or may not be here ille­gal­ly.”

The impli­ca­tion that Gariepy might have been in the coun­try ille­gal­ly appears to con­flict with the views Gariepy cham­pi­ons online, where he calls for white-run states that could bar immi­grants. The teenag­er he attempt­ed to impreg­nate is His­pan­ic and was born in the U.S.

Accord­ing to his wife’s fil­ings in the simul­ta­ne­ous cus­tody case, Gariepy’s visa had been up for review begin­ning July 2016, the month the teenag­er drove to meet him in North Car­oli­na.

An appeals court denied Garipey’s attempt to block the teenager’s family’s guardian­ship.

“The con­cern here with [the teenag­er] is that because of her autism spec­trum dis­or­der, some­one can real­ly take advan­tage of her because she can­not read social cues like most of us can,” a psy­chol­o­gist wrote in her opin­ion that the teenager’s par­ents should assume guardian­ship of her.

“In the short amount of time they have been phys­i­cal­ly togeth­er, this man seems to be obsessed with want­i­ng a child and is look­ing at hav­ing a child with some­one who has dif­fi­cul­ty even tak­ing care of her­self.”

Through­out his inter­view with The Dai­ly Beast, Gariepy char­ac­ter­ized the legal sys­tem as antag­o­nis­tic against him, despite hav­ing been the one to pur­sue the cas­es in appeals courts.

“She got in this sys­tem and she some­how got con­vinced not to con­tact me any­more. Alright. That’s fine, I moved on with my life,” Gariepy said of the 19-year-old, whose guardian­ship he fought for even after she con­sent­ed to her par­ents’ guardian­ship.

He claimed the Duke under­grad­u­ate who described his alleged emo­tion­al abuse only did so after “dis­cov­er­ing that I was a Trump sup­port­er... She knew that by mere­ly mak­ing the false alle­ga­tions in court, the doc­u­ments would get pub­lic, and even­tu­al­ly her false alle­ga­tions against me would get on the inter­net.” (In fact, the under­grad­u­ate made her alle­ga­tions to a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor, and the court doc­u­ments would not have appeared on pub­licly avail­able North Car­oli­na court data­bas­es unless the case went to the state’s appel­late court, which keeps dig­i­tal records. The case only went to the appel­late court because Gariepy appealed his wife’s full cus­tody win.)

Civ­il courts, he claimed, are being used to “harass men, to harass white, het­ero­sex­u­al males. Right now I’m cur­rent­ly being treat­ed as a crim­i­nal by courts that don’t have the pow­er to put me in jail, but they have the pow­er to ruin my life,” he said of the court case which is cur­rent­ly ongo­ing because of his per­sis­tent appeal.

“What you have, real­ly, is a bunch of left­ists who are orga­niz­ing togeth­er, most­ly left­ist women, who are orga­niz­ing togeth­er to smear a right-wing per­son­al­i­ty,” he said of his accusers and inter­net com­menters who point­ed out his court cas­es.

He is still pur­su­ing the cus­tody case, although he has since moved back to Cana­da.

“I decid­ed to aban­don vol­un­tar­i­ly my per­ma­nent res­i­dent card because I cur­rent­ly have a girl­friend in Cana­da,” he said of his alleged per­ma­nent res­i­den­cy. “We’re hav­ing a baby, so this is where my fam­i­ly will be.”

———-

“Alt-Right YouTu­ber Accused of Lur­ing Autis­tic Teen in Preg­nan­cy Plot” by Kel­ly Weill; The Dai­ly Beast; 03/15/2018

“Jean-Fran­cois Gariepy is a fast-ris­ing fix­ture in white-nation­al­ist cir­cles. A for­mer neu­ro­science researcher at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty who left sud­den­ly in 2015, Gariepy now makes videos attempt­ing to prove white supe­ri­or­i­ty, call­ing for all-white sep­a­ratist states and a crack­down on immi­gra­tion. White nation­al­ist Richard Spencer recent­ly appeared with him on a livestream.”

As we can see, Gariepy, an advo­cate for all-white sep­a­ratist states and a crack­down on immi­gra­tion, appeared to be obsessed with impreg­nat­ing an Amer­i­can before his work visa expired. In Sep­tem­ber of 2015, he announces on Face­book that he’s leav­ing Duke because he does­n’t like acad­e­mia, but it turns out he was asked not to return to his post­doc­tor­al posi­tion at Duke in part because of a sex­u­al­ly inap­pro­pri­ate rela­tion­ship with an under­grad­u­ate lab assis­tant that took place in 2014. He was her men­tor and super­vi­sor at the time and want­ed her to have his child. When she refused, he became abu­sive:

...
Gariepy, 34, grew up in sub­ur­ban Mon­tre­al, which he described to a court-appoint­ed psy­chol­o­gist as “like par­adise.” He said he spent his child­hood sur­round­ed by rel­a­tives in a vil­lage “dom­i­nat­ed by our fam­i­lies.” “I didn’t know dishar­mo­ny until I met oth­er women at 18–19 [years old],” he said, accord­ing to the psychologist’s report includ­ed in his cus­tody case against his third wife.

He mar­ried his first wife at 18, and divorced at 23. “I want­ed a fam­i­ly and she wasn’t into it,” he told the court-appoint­ed psy­chol­o­gist. “She left—she lost inter­est in me. Also I didn’t know how to sat­is­fy a woman and I was get­ting fat.” A sec­ond mar­riage, which he claimed was to a woman who was French and “need­ed to get into Cana­da,” also failed, he told the psy­chol­o­gist.

He lat­er left Cana­da to take a series of research posi­tions at U.S. col­leges before set­tling into an asso­ciate research role in Duke’s neu­ro­science depart­ment in Sep­tem­ber 2011, as the uni­ver­si­ty con­firmed to The Dai­ly Beast. In a viral Face­book post in Sep­tem­ber 2015, Gariepy announced he’d quit Duke because he’d grown dis­il­lu­sioned with the aca­d­e­m­ic com­mu­ni­ty. The post earned him a write-up in Slate.

But Gariepy’s motives for quit­ting came into ques­tion dur­ing the cus­tody dis­pute. After Gariepy’s viral Face­book post, one of his for­mer Duke col­leagues con­tact­ed his third wife, whom he had mar­ried ear­li­er that year. The for­mer col­league “con­tact­ed her after the Face­book post­ing, [and said] that Dr. Gariepy was not asked to return to his post­doc­tor­al posi­tion and that he had a sex­u­al­ly inap­pro­pri­ate rela­tion­ship with one of the under­grad­u­ate lab assis­tants,” accord­ing to court records filed on Gariepy’s wife’s behalf.

The under­grad­u­ate stu­dent con­firmed the rela­tion­ship to a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor hired by Gariepy’s wife, accord­ing to court doc­u­ments. While they were in a rela­tion­ship, she told the inves­ti­ga­tor, Gariepy was her men­tor or super­vi­sor at their lab. Dur­ing their rela­tion­ship from Jan­u­ary until June 2014, Gariepy want­ed her to have his child, she told the inves­ti­ga­tor, accord­ing to a sworn affi­davit he entered in court. Gariepy “dis­cussed how he would be a stay-at-home father and pro­vide the child all the car­ing needs for the child,” accord­ing to the investigator’s affi­davit.

The under­grad­u­ate lab assis­tant told the inves­ti­ga­tor that she decid­ed against Gariepy’s plan, and that the rela­tion­ship end­ed with her “suf­fer­ing from emo­tion­al abuse on the part of” Gariepy.

Gariepy told The Dai­ly Beast that their rela­tion­ship had been con­sen­su­al, and that the stu­dent had dis­closed it to Duke Uni­ver­si­ty. “There has nev­er been an inves­ti­ga­tion against me at Duke for being in a rela­tion­ship with this woman,” he said.
...

And then there’s all of the infor­ma­tion about Gariepy’s obses­sion with his immi­gra­tion sta­tus that came out dur­ing the var­i­ous inter­views relat­ed to his third wife. There’s the inter­views with a court-appoint­ed psy­chol­o­gist where Gariepy explained that his rela­tion­ship with his third wife went fast because she was old­er than him and —I’m an immi­grant. It was all or nothing—marriage and a baby or I couldn’t stay in the U.S.”:

...
Gariepy’s viral Face­book post cit­ed anoth­er rea­son for quit­ting: “I will soon be a father and want to be spend­ing time with my son at home.”

But that cozy claim was also up for debate. Gariepy and his third wife had sep­a­rat­ed two months ear­li­er, in July, after few­er than six months of mar­riage. In a cus­tody case that began the day after their son’s Decem­ber 2015 birth, Gariepy’s third wife accused him of emo­tion­al abuse through­out the preg­nan­cy, and of threat­en­ing to abduct their child to his native Cana­da.

Both Gariepy’s wife and the court expressed con­cern over Gariepy’s immi­gra­tion sta­tus.

“The defen­dant is a cit­i­zen of Cana­da and cur­rent­ly in the Unit­ed States under a con­di­tion­al visa based upon his mar­riage to the plain­tiff,” his wife claimed in court doc­u­ments. “Said visa is con­di­tion­al and up for review by U.S. Immi­gra­tion in July 2016.” In a find­ing of facts in Novem­ber 2016, the court wrote that the visa was pend­ing review.

Gariepy con­tra­dict­ed the court’s find­ing to The Dai­ly Beast, claim­ing he had a green card through his new mar­riage, but that he’s since aban­doned it to move back to Cana­da. “The real­i­ty is once I mar­ried my ex-wife I was a per­ma­nent res­i­dent,” he said, claim­ing he could have become a cit­i­zen.

A green card, or per­ma­nent res­i­den­cy, is not imme­di­ate­ly con­ferred upon an immi­grant who mar­ries a U.S. cit­i­zen. The process requires an appli­ca­tion, which includes an in-per­son inter­view with both part­ners. If the green card is approved, and the mar­riage is less than two years old, the immi­grant receives a “con­di­tion­al” green card, which expires in two years unless both cou­ples reap­ply, or the cou­ple mar­ried “in good faith” but lat­er divorced.

In a Feb­ru­ary 2016 find­ing of facts, the court specif­i­cal­ly not­ed that Gariepy’s visa was pend­ing review “to assure that his mar­riage isn’t fraud­u­lent.” Gariepy also told The Dai­ly Beast that, pri­or to his mar­riage, he had been on a “J‑1 vis­it­ing schol­ar visa. I did five years on that.” J‑1 visas are short-term and tied to a recipient’s work. After a J‑1 recip­i­ent com­pletes their pro­gram, they must leave the coun­try or obtain anoth­er form of doc­u­men­ta­tion.

In an inter­view with a court-appoint­ed psy­chol­o­gist, Gariepy also claimed to have pur­sued mar­riage and a child for immi­gra­tion pur­pos­es. The rela­tion­ship “was fast because of her age—she’s old­er than me,” Gariepy said, accord­ing to the psychologist’s report includ­ed in court doc­u­ments. “Oth­er pressures—I’m an immi­grant. It was all or nothing—marriage and a baby or I couldn’t stay in the U.S.”

Gariepy claimed the state­ments were tak­en out of con­text. “I explained that to my ex-wife, either you are inter­est­ed in me and hav­ing a fam­i­ly with me or the U.S. will kick me out after my legal five years of res­i­dence,” he told The Dai­ly Beast. “That was mere­ly me explain­ing to my ex-wife this real­i­ty.”
...

Gariepy’s third wife also claims that when she moved out of their apart­ment in the mid­dle of 2015, five months after their mar­riage, he began demand­ing that she put his name on the lease for immi­gra­tion pur­pos­es and help him apply for a green card. She agreed to attend an immi­gra­tion inter­view for the green card, but only if he would sign sep­a­ra­tion papers. After the inter­view he refused to sign the papers:

...
Short­ly into the preg­nan­cy, the rela­tion­ship grew volatile, both par­ties agreed. Gariepy claimed in court records that his wife grew “very aggressive—she wasn’t inter­est­ed in me any­more.” But his wife alleged a pat­tern of increas­ing­ly strange behav­iors. Gariepy start­ed mak­ing audio record­ings of her to “build a case” and post­ing them to a fam­i­ly plan­ning web­site, she said in court doc­u­ments. She claimed Gariepy became con­trol­ling, and refused to talk to a ther­a­pist, alleged­ly telling her, “I am the san­est per­son I know.”

Five months after their mar­riage, Gariepy’s wife moved out of their apart­ment—at which point, she claimed, he began demand­ing that she put his name on the lease for immi­gra­tion pur­pos­es, and help him apply for a green card. She claimed she agreed to attend an inter­view, if he would sign sep­a­ra­tion doc­u­ments. Dur­ing the inter­view, an immi­gra­tions offi­cer ques­tioned her sep­a­rate­ly and asked if Gariepy was pres­sur­ing her into a green card, she claimed. She said she told the offi­cer it was impor­tant for Gariepy to remain in the coun­try for their child’s sake. But after the inter­view, she claimed, Gariepy refused to sign the sep­a­ra­tion doc­u­ments.

After mov­ing out, she claimed a neigh­bor called her to report that police were remov­ing weapons from the couple’s for­mer­ly shared apart­ment. Gariepy lat­er told her in an email that he had asked the sheriff’s depart­ment to remove the weapons because he did not “want any­one to feel unsafe or to make false accu­sa­tions about abuse,” his wife said he wrote. Police were so alarmed by Gariepy’s request to remove the weapons, that an offi­cer with the domes­tic-vio­lence unit called his wife to ask about her safe­ty, she claimed.
...

Then, months before the child was born in Decem­ber of 2015, Gariepy appar­ent­ly tried to get his wife to go on the Dr. Phil show to “pub­licly address the cam­paign of false alle­ga­tions against him”. Fol­low­ing the birth of the child the wife was award­ed full cus­tody, which Gariepy appealed:

...
But the couple’s biggest fights were over the fate of their unborn child. Gariepy said he could deliv­er the child at home and raise it because of his expe­ri­ence work­ing with mon­keys in research labs, his wife claimed in court doc­u­ments. He also alleged­ly pres­sured his wife to give the child a Cana­di­an pass­port, and threat­ened to take the child away to Cana­da. When the couple’s rela­tion­ship soured fur­ther, Gariepy wrote on med­ical intake forms that he would not com­ply with doc­tors’ orders “that would keep [him] from trans­port­ing my child to my home,” his wife claimed. He then alleged­ly vis­it­ed mul­ti­ple local OBGYN prac­tices and accused them of dis­crim­i­na­tion when they would not treat him, going so far as to threat­en a law­suit against Duke hos­pi­tal.

Gariepy claimed in court doc­u­ments that he was try­ing to meet with an OBGYN for infor­ma­tion on a sleep aid he claimed his wife was using.

The month before the child’s birth, a pro­duc­er with the Dr. Phil show con­tact­ed Gariepy’s wife’s lawyer twice, she claimed. Gariepy had alleged­ly asked to be on the show to “pub­licly address the cam­paign of false alle­ga­tions against him.”

Fol­low­ing the advice of police and hos­pi­tal secu­ri­ty, Gariepy’s wife gave birth under an alias in an undis­closed hos­pi­tal, and filed for cus­tody the day after the child’s birth, she claimed. A judge award­ed her full cus­tody, which Gariepy appealed. In pro­ceed­ing with the appeal, the judge rec­om­mend­ed Gariepy under­go a psy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tion.

The psy­chol­o­gist found Gariepy to be “very bright, intel­lec­tu­al­ly,” but said he showed a lack of insight and impulse con­trol, a “sense of being treat­ed unfair­ly, or vic­tim­ized,” and dis­played dis­tort­ed thoughts sug­gest­ing “overt psy­chosis.”
...

Around this same time, in August or Sep­tem­ber of 2015, Gariepy meets 19 year old autis­tic His­pan­ic woman online after she hears him on the Drunk­en Peas­ants pod­cast. They pledge loy­al­ty to each oth­er by Jan­u­ary of 2016, before ever meet­ing. She dri­ves out to meet him in July of 2016. Her par­ents man­age to get guardian­ship over her. Upon return­ing home, she explains that she and Gariepy are engaged and she’s preg­nant, although she’s not actu­al­ly preg­nant. But get­ting her preg­nant was clear­ly Garipey’s intent:

...
But while Gariepy was fight­ing his wife for cus­tody, he was also court­ing a 19-year-old with autism. The teenag­er, who lived in Texas, had “the social and men­tal matu­ri­ty of a 10 or 11-year-old child,” accord­ing to a counselor’s assess­ment includ­ed in court records.

Peo­ple with autism spec­trum dis­or­der might expe­ri­ence dif­fi­cul­ty with com­mu­ni­ca­tion or inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships, although symp­toms vary broad­ly. The young woman had grad­u­at­ed high school and could dri­ve, but could not make finan­cial deci­sions, con­sent to mar­riage, or attend to dai­ly activ­i­ties like bathing or dress­ing with­out sup­port or reminders from her moth­er, accord­ing to a psychologist’s eval­u­a­tion includ­ed in court records.

Gariepy claimed to The Dai­ly Beast the young woman had a com­mu­nica­tive dis­or­der, but that she could con­sent to hav­ing a child. “Her intel­li­gence and her capac­i­ty for mak­ing deci­sions, it’s actu­al­ly high­er prob­a­bly than the aver­age 19-year-old woman,” he said.

She “prefers to be on her own and spends a lot of time on the com­put­er,” the psy­chol­o­gist wrote. She came across Gariepy while lis­ten­ing to his appear­ance on a pod­cast by the Drunk­en Peas­ants, the show where alt-right per­son­al­i­ty Milo Yiannopou­los infa­mous­ly made com­ments appear­ing to defend pedophil­ia. In August or Sep­tem­ber 2015, when Gariepy was fight­ing issues of cus­tody and immi­gra­tion with his then-preg­nant wife, he and the teenag­er began talk­ing online. Gariepy claimed they lat­er pledged loy­al­ty to each oth­er with­out hav­ing met.

“We’ve been promis­ing loy­al­ty to each oth­er since Jan­u­ary 2016,” Gariepy tes­ti­fied in court, accord­ing to tran­scripts.

On July 10, 2016, the teenag­er drove to North Car­oli­na to meet Gariepy, she told the psy­chol­o­gist. She and Gariepy had sex—her first inti­mate expe­ri­ence. She claimed Gariepy want­ed to impreg­nate her and be a “stay-at-home dad.” She told the psy­chol­o­gist that Gariepy was a YouTu­ber, and that, while she did not know if he made any mon­ey, he had promised to give her a cook­ing show.

With­in weeks, the young woman’s par­ents suc­cess­ful­ly applied for guardian­ship of her and brought her home to Texas. When she returned, she told her par­ents she was engaged to Gariepy and preg­nant with his child, even though Gariepy was still mar­ried, and both urine and blood tests revealed the teenag­er was not preg­nant.

...

Gariepy filed his own motion to block the family’s guardian­ship, claim­ing the young woman was not inca­pac­i­tat­ed and that they were legit­i­mate domes­tic part­ners. “I’m her fiance and we were try­ing to make a baby. We have been liv­ing togeth­er for three weeks,” he tes­ti­fied in an August 2016 court appear­ance.
...

At the same time Gariepy was appeal­ing the guardian­ship rul­ing award­ed to the par­ents of this autis­tic woman, he had still not yet begun divorce pro­ceed­ings with his wife. This led to spec­u­la­tion by his wife’s lawyer that Gariepy might actu­al­ly be in the US ille­gal­ly, mak­ing his need to find an Amer­i­can wife more urgent:

...
At that time, Gariepy had not begun divorce pro­ceed­ings with his wife, which the family’s lawyer spec­u­lat­ed in August 2016 might be due to “Mr. Gariepy’s seek­ing sta­tus or the fact that he may or may not be here ille­gal­ly.”

The impli­ca­tion that Gariepy might have been in the coun­try ille­gal­ly appears to con­flict with the views Gariepy cham­pi­ons online, where he calls for white-run states that could bar immi­grants. The teenag­er he attempt­ed to impreg­nate is His­pan­ic and was born in the U.S.

Accord­ing to his wife’s fil­ings in the simul­ta­ne­ous cus­tody case, Gariepy’s visa had been up for review begin­ning July 2016, the month the teenag­er drove to meet him in North Car­oli­na.

An appeals court denied Garipey’s attempt to block the teenager’s family’s guardian­ship.

“The con­cern here with [the teenag­er] is that because of her autism spec­trum dis­or­der, some­one can real­ly take advan­tage of her because she can­not read social cues like most of us can,” a psy­chol­o­gist wrote in her opin­ion that the teenager’s par­ents should assume guardian­ship of her.

“In the short amount of time they have been phys­i­cal­ly togeth­er, this man seems to be obsessed with want­i­ng a child and is look­ing at hav­ing a child with some­one who has dif­fi­cul­ty even tak­ing care of her­self.”
...

But Gariepy asserts that all of this is part of a smear attempt against him by lib­er­al women because he’s a Trump sup­port­er and the civ­il courts are set up to harass white, het­ero­sex­u­al males:

...
He claimed the Duke under­grad­u­ate who described his alleged emo­tion­al abuse only did so after “dis­cov­er­ing that I was a Trump sup­port­er... She knew that by mere­ly mak­ing the false alle­ga­tions in court, the doc­u­ments would get pub­lic, and even­tu­al­ly her false alle­ga­tions against me would get on the inter­net.” (In fact, the under­grad­u­ate made her alle­ga­tions to a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor, and the court doc­u­ments would not have appeared on pub­licly avail­able North Car­oli­na court data­bas­es unless the case went to the state’s appel­late court, which keeps dig­i­tal records. The case only went to the appel­late court because Gariepy appealed his wife’s full cus­tody win.)

Civ­il courts, he claimed, are being used to “harass men, to harass white, het­ero­sex­u­al males. Right now I’m cur­rent­ly being treat­ed as a crim­i­nal by courts that don’t have the pow­er to put me in jail, but they have the pow­er to ruin my life,” he said of the court case which is cur­rent­ly ongo­ing because of his per­sis­tent appeal.

“What you have, real­ly, is a bunch of left­ists who are orga­niz­ing togeth­er, most­ly left­ist women, who are orga­niz­ing togeth­er to smear a right-wing per­son­al­i­ty,” he said of his accusers and inter­net com­menters who point­ed out his court cas­es.

He is still pur­su­ing the cus­tody case, although he has since moved back to Cana­da.

“I decid­ed to aban­don vol­un­tar­i­ly my per­ma­nent res­i­dent card because I cur­rent­ly have a girl­friend in Cana­da,” he said of his alleged per­ma­nent res­i­den­cy. “We’re hav­ing a baby, so this is where my fam­i­ly will be.”
...

And final­ly, it’s worth not­ing one of the advan­tages Gariepy sees in liv­ing in a white eth­nos­tate: none of your pub­lic state­ments could be used against you in a cus­tody bat­tle:

...
The appeal is ongo­ing. Since the child’s birth, Gariepy has railed against his wife in YouTube videos, which are now includ­ed in the court record. When some­one dis­liked one of the videos, Gariepy post­ed a link to it, order­ing his fans “to find the per­son who dis­liked the video and make his/her life more bur­den­some by remind­ing him polite­ly how ter­ri­ble of a human being he/she is,” court records note.

Gariepy told The Dai­ly Beast he was jok­ing. “I do dark humor, and, yes, some of that dark humor was brought into the cus­tody tri­al, as if the fact that I do jokes on the pub­lic space about race or rape would make me an unfit father,” he said. In one of his 2017 videos, Gariepy claimed courts should not be able to use a person’s pub­lic state­ments against them in a cus­tody bat­tle and that “that is a prob­lem a white eth­nos­tate could solve.”
...

On the plus side, it was kind of nice hear about this white suprema­cist being will­ing to have a child with a His­pan­ic woman. At least, it would have been nice if he was­n’t com­plete­ly tak­ing advan­tage of her in a preda­to­ry man­ner.

And that’s sor­did and sad tale of a Jean-Fran­cois Gariepy, a white suprema­cist immi­grant look­ing to impreg­nate pret­ty much any woman he can find for immi­gra­tion pur­pos­es. So the next time you hear an Alt Right fig­ure recount­ing some sort of anec­dote about dan­ger­ous non-white immi­grants destroy­ing Amer­i­ca keep in mind the immi­gra­tion sto­ry of YouTube white suprema­cist star Jean-Fran­cois Gariepy.

Now that the redact­ed Mueller report is released and we at least have a pret­ty good idea of its con­tents, one of the more grim­ly inter­est­ing ques­tions raised by the release of the report is what on earth is going to hap­pen to the whole “QAnon” con­spir­a­cy move­ment. Recall how QAnon is the far right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry about the Mueller inves­ti­ga­tion that’s bizarre even by the stan­dards of far right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. QAnon fol­low­ers believe that Robert Mueller and Trump were actu­al­ly secret­ly work­ing togeth­er in order to inves­ti­gate an elite glob­al Satan­ic pedophile ring that runs the world, so it’s basi­cal­ly a rehash­ing of ‘Illu­mi­nati’ con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries but with the twist that Trump and Mueller are about to take down the Illu­mi­nati and car­ry out mass arrests of fig­ures like Hillary Clin­ton. All of the elite pedophiles will be sent to Guan­tanamo Bay after the sud­den mass arrests. That’s seri­ous­ly the the­o­ry and it’s become wild­ly pop­u­lar with Pres­i­dent Trump’s base, man­i­fest­ing at Trump ral­lies with audi­ences filled with peo­ple wear­ing “Q” shirts and hold­ing “Q” relat­ed signs. “Q” bill­boards have even popped up in some place. It’s also become a major top­ic of videos on YouTube, in part because YouTube’s algo­rithms were actu­al­ly rec­om­mend­ing QAnon videos to peo­ple.

And while the QAnon cultists have proven remark­ably faith­ful to the the­o­ry, which emerged on an 8Chan troll forum, despite being repeat­ed­ly let down by the pre­dic­tions of “Q”, the anony­mous online per­sona who who claims to be deep in the gov­ern­ment and leak­ing clues to the pub­lic about the secret Trump/Mueller plot, it remains very unclear as to how the move­ment is going to hold togeth­er fol­low­ing the release of a Mueller report that says noth­ing about the “Q” plot.

The ques­tion of what’s going to become of QAnon in the post-Mueller Report era isn’t just an inter­est­ing ques­tion about a bizarre soci­o­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na that’s symp­to­matic of the intel­lec­tu­al decline of the Amer­i­can right. Don’t for­get that QAnon has been like a mag­net for some of the most unhinged and poten­tial­ly vio­lent peo­ple in the US. Recall how For­rest Gor­don Clark, the Sov­er­eign Cit­i­zen accused of inten­tion­al­ly start­ing a mas­sive South­ern Cal­i­for­nia for­eign fire last year, was a QAnon fol­low­er. Liz Crokin, a promi­nent far right YouTube per­son­al­i­ty and QAnon cheer­leader, has been telling her audi­ences that she is 100 per­cent cer­tain that US law enforce­ment is in pos­ses­sion of videos of Hillary Clin­ton sex­u­al­ly abus­ing a child and then cut­ting off and eat­ing their face dur­ing a Satan­ic rit­u­al. And in June of 2018, a man blocked off a bridge at the Hoover Dam with an armored truck while post­ing videos demand­ing that the gov­ern­ment release an Inspec­tor Gen­er­al report about Hillary Clin­ton’s email probe because the man was con­vinced that the report would expose the “deep state” pedophile ring.

So how are these kinds of QAnon sup­port­ers going react to a Mueller report that con­tains noth­ing about “Q” at all? Will they keep the faith? Might they get vio­lent? And how are they going to react giv­en the abun­dant wink­ing & nod­ding the Trump team has been send­ing towards QAnon? Because as the fol­low­ing arti­cle from sev­er­al weeks ago makes clear, the ini­tial 4 page sum­ma­ry of Mueller report that was ini­tial­ly released by Attor­ney Gen­er­al Bill Barr that appeared to exon­er­ate Trump had QAnon fol­low­ers extreme­ly excit­ed to see the full report. A full report that they were now con­vinced would final­ly reveal that QAnon was right all along and the mass arrests are com­ing:

Dai­ly Dot

Trump’s Michi­gan ral­ly breathed new life into the QAnon con­spir­a­cy

Mike Roth­schild—
Mar 29, 2019 at 10:50AM

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s ral­ly in Grand Rapids, Michi­gan last night saw the vocal return of a con­tin­gent of Trump fans who hadn’t had much out­ward pres­ence at recent ral­lies: QAnon believ­ers..

QAnon is the ever-chang­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that sees Trump at the cen­ter of a secret effort to root out deep state sabo­teurs, pedophiles, and anti-Trump ele­ments sup­pos­ed­ly at the heart of the gov­ern­ment. And the only rea­son we’ve been let in on this secret war between good and evil is because of the efforts of a mil­i­tary intel­li­gence insid­er called “Q” who feeds cryp­tic intel­li­gence and hints of things to come to the mes­sage board 8chan.

Like any good sports fan, QAnon believ­ers show their alle­giance through pur­chas­es: T‑shirts, hats, pins, signs, and books. And in August, when they showed up to Trump’s ral­ly in Tam­pa wear­ing their Q gear, the world final­ly took notice of the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that had been steadi­ly grow­ing for a year—and whose rhetoric was get­ting more vio­lent.

The Secret Ser­vice respond­ed by alleged­ly not allow­ing Q gear to be worn into sub­se­quent ral­lies, though in keep­ing with their silence about pres­i­den­tial pro­tec­tion, the agency nev­er made an actu­al announce­ment.

Whether the ban was for­mal or infor­mal (the Secret Ser­vice and Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty didn’t respond to requests for com­ment), it appeared to no longer be in force. QAnon fol­low­ers showed up in full splen­dor, pos­ing in t‑shirts, hats, pins, badges, and with signs.

#DoitQ #Qanon #Q Grand Rapids loves Q!!! @realDonaldTrump @POTUS @TrueEyeTheSpy @SecPompeo @seanhannity @TuckerCarlson @charliekirk11 @Cordicon @StormIsUponUs @beer_parade @qanon76 @ffe3301 @RealCandaceO @GenFlynn @BarbaraRedgate @DonaldJTrumpJr pic.twitter.com/PxvREDzIcB— Don­na ?????? (@truthseekerd) March 28, 2019

Made it to the ral­ly #MAGA #QAnon #WWG1WGA #GrandRapids pic.twitter.com/qVnldJMNH1— North­ern girl (@barch_anne) March 28, 2019

I just walked the entire line hold­ing up this sign, full length uncut video upload late tonight or ear­ly tomor­row. Took over 20 min­utes!!! Lots of noise!!! #WWG1WGA #QAnon #Qarmy #TrumpRal­ly pic.twitter.com/xcCoAtShbm— Quirky (@QuirkyFollowsQ) March 28, 2019

One of the Q poster’s favorite tech­niques to keep the faith­ful hap­py while his pre­dic­tions fail to come true is shout­ing out their tweets in his 8chan drops. With the Grand Rapids ral­ly, Q made a con­cert­ed effort to sin­gle out and applaud the merch-wear­ing of a num­ber of atten­dees.

To Q believ­ers, almost noth­ing means more than being “Q‑ed” on Twit­ter by QAnon. And Q gave dozens of fol­low­ers the ulti­mate sign of his approval, like a dig­i­tal lay­ing on of hands by a guru or a know­ing nod from the Pope.

Start­ing hours before the ral­ly, Q began post­ing ran­dom tweets fea­tur­ing Q believ­ers decked out for the big ral­ly, and thank­ing them for being “VIP patri­ots.” The glo­ri­fy­ing went on for hours, with Q mak­ing over 40 drops spot­light­ing pic­tures of ral­ly atten­dees, ral­ly watch­ers, and even just peo­ple fly­ing Amer­i­can flags.

More shoutouts from QAnon to “VIP’s” at the Trump ral­ly in Grand Rapids tonight. Feels like we could be in for a repeat of the Tam­pa ral­ly where Q went main­stream. Let’s hope not. pic.twitter.com/jqBkkhaH8n— Mike Roth­schild (@rothschildmd) March 28, 2019

Their patri­o­tism was com­pli­ment­ed, and their efforts were seen. Each tweet flagged, in turn, drew hun­dreds or even thou­sands of respons­es from oth­er Q sup­port­ers on Twit­ter, which is almost always the case when Q spot­lights a tweet.

The effect was an unde­ni­able fren­zy of excite­ment both in the are­na and online. Spot­light­ed tweets were get­ting thou­sands of shares, and pro­vok­ing pos­i­tive com­ments all over the Q social media sphere, like a reli­gious revival where most of the atten­dees aren’t actu­al­ly in the room.

It was also appar­ent out­side the ral­ly, where a video popped up of some­one going down the wait­ing line with a sign read­ing “Make Noise 4 Q” and peo­ple shout­ing Q slo­gans.

I’ve been cov­er­ing Qanon for a year, and the amount of pro‑Q peo­ple in this video from yes­ter­day’s Trump ral­ly line in Grand Rapids is absolute­ly shock­ing. This is just a por­tion of it. pic.twitter.com/hTDGEnPsEi— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) March 29, 2019

There was even a bur­geon­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that start­ed dur­ing the run-up to the rally–that a “fake MAGA” had infil­trat­ed the crowd in the guise of a new­ly awak­ened Q believ­er, and was plan­ning to do harm to the pres­i­dent. How did Q fol­low­ers know? He was wear­ing an “antifa but­ton” declar­ing “punch your local Nazi.”

Such con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries with­in con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries are com­mon in QAnon, where believ­ers have con­coct­ed a num­ber of deep state assas­si­na­tion attempts based on thin strands of evi­dence. Like­wise, there’s no evi­dence that this per­son was any­thing oth­er than a per­son who both fol­lows Q and doesn’t like Nazis

. But even just the hint of some­thing amiss was enough to set off alarm bells. After being “Q‑ed” and “exposed,” the nascent patri­ot tweet­ed that he’d com­piled and tak­en off his anti-Nazi but­ton.

Wasn’t aware it was an antifa Brand­ed pin. It has been removed. Horned Hillary hat remains.— Under­cul­ture (@Underculture1) March 28, 2019

With the fren­zy of Q drops and gear, the stage was all set for Trump to make a direct, vocal men­tion of QAnon—a vin­di­ca­tion of the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that would have a dra­mat­ic effect on its tra­jec­to­ry.

That didn’t hap­pen. Trump has nev­er spo­ken of Q before, and none of his allies in the media have ever asked him about it. It’s not even clear if Trump knows what QAnon is, or that it exists. But he did throw out just enough indi­rect men­tions to keep the amped-up faith­ful believ­ing.

For one thing, Trump used the phrase “these peo­ple are sick” to refer to Democ­rats con­tin­u­ing to push for the release of Spe­cial Coun­sel Robert Mueller’s full report. But while Q uses the phrase often, its place in Trump’s lex­i­con dates back to at least 2016, and is a case of Q pick­ing up some­thing Trump already does and claim­ing it’s the oppo­site.

“These peo­ple are sick.” Trump at Ral­lyQ Crowd cheers??????— Ellie Brown ??????The #Say­It Grand­ma (@Real_EllieBrown) March 28, 2019

The pres­i­dent also made a cryp­tic ref­er­ence to “fight­ing for our lives,” which Q researchers took for a ref­er­ence to sup­posed grand plans of the deep state to depop­u­late and cull the earth—a touch­stone of the con­spir­a­cy com­mu­ni­ty for decades. He also made a quip about Democ­rats being on “arti­fi­cial res­pi­ra­tors,” seen as a nod to the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries regard­ing Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg pos­si­bly being kept alive mechan­i­cal­ly.

Sad­ly for the faith­ful, none of these were a direct men­tion or acknowl­edg­ment. The clos­est Trump actu­al­ly came was his tweet fea­tur­ing pic­tures of the ral­ly, the last of which fea­tures a soli­tary “Q” sign.

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! https://t.co/Y6UPREMY7u pic.twitter.com/6r7wdYDf66— Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2019

That nod was enough for some.

...

———-

“Trump’s Michi­gan ral­ly breathed new life into the QAnon con­spir­a­cy” by Mike Roth­schild; Dai­ly Dot; 03/29/2019

“Like any good sports fan, QAnon believ­ers show their alle­giance through pur­chas­es: T‑shirts, hats, pins, signs, and books. And in August, when they showed up to Trump’s ral­ly in Tam­pa wear­ing their Q gear, the world final­ly took notice of the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that had been steadi­ly grow­ing for a year—and whose rhetoric was get­ting more vio­lent.”

Yep, QAnon has become so promi­nent a fea­ture of Trump ral­lies over the least year that it became impos­si­ble for the rest of the world to ignore it. Every time Trump held a ral­ly the crowd was filled with Q shirts and signs. The Secret Ser­vice start­ed ban­ning Q gear at the ral­lies but that ban has appar­ent­ly end­ed:

...
The Secret Ser­vice respond­ed by alleged­ly not allow­ing Q gear to be worn into sub­se­quent ral­lies, though in keep­ing with their silence about pres­i­den­tial pro­tec­tion, the agency nev­er made an actu­al announce­ment.

Whether the ban was for­mal or infor­mal (the Secret Ser­vice and Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty didn’t respond to requests for com­ment), it appeared to no longer be in force. QAnon fol­low­ers showed up in full splen­dor, pos­ing in t‑shirts, hats, pins, badges, and with signs.
...

Recall that Trump’s ral­ly in El Paso, Texas, in Feb­ru­ary also fea­ture Q gear promi­nent­ly so the Secret Ser­vice ban was clear­ly no longer in place by that point.

It’s also rather note­wor­thy that the QAnon fol­low­ers appear to view but­tons with slo­gans like “punch your local Nazi” as a threat towards them and a threat towards Trump:

...
There was even a bur­geon­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that start­ed dur­ing the run-up to the rally–that a “fake MAGA” had infil­trat­ed the crowd in the guise of a new­ly awak­ened Q believ­er, and was plan­ning to do harm to the pres­i­dent. How did Q fol­low­ers know? He was wear­ing an “antifa but­ton” declar­ing “punch your local Nazi.”

Such con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries with­in con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries are com­mon in QAnon, where believ­ers have con­coct­ed a num­ber of deep state assas­si­na­tion attempts based on thin strands of evi­dence. Like­wise, there’s no evi­dence that this per­son was any­thing oth­er than a per­son who both fol­lows Q and doesn’t like Nazis

. But even just the hint of some­thing amiss was enough to set off alarm bells. After being “Q‑ed” and “exposed,” the nascent patri­ot tweet­ed that he’d com­piled and tak­en off his anti-Nazi but­ton.
...

And while Trump did­n’t overt­ly talk about QAnon at the ral­ly like they were no doubt hop­ing he would do, he did man­age to wink & nod at that with var­i­ous Q‑themes turns of phrase. Or at least that’s what the QAnon peo­ple con­vinced them­selves Trump was doing:

...
With the fren­zy of Q drops and gear, the stage was all set for Trump to make a direct, vocal men­tion of QAnon—a vin­di­ca­tion of the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that would have a dra­mat­ic effect on its tra­jec­to­ry.

That didn’t hap­pen. Trump has nev­er spo­ken of Q before, and none of his allies in the media have ever asked him about it. It’s not even clear if Trump knows what QAnon is, or that it exists. But he did throw out just enough indi­rect men­tions to keep the amped-up faith­ful believ­ing.

For one thing, Trump used the phrase “these peo­ple are sick” to refer to Democ­rats con­tin­u­ing to push for the release of Spe­cial Coun­sel Robert Mueller’s full report. But while Q uses the phrase often, its place in Trump’s lex­i­con dates back to at least 2016, and is a case of Q pick­ing up some­thing Trump already does and claim­ing it’s the oppo­site.

...

The pres­i­dent also made a cryp­tic ref­er­ence to “fight­ing for our lives,” which Q researchers took for a ref­er­ence to sup­posed grand plans of the deep state to depop­u­late and cull the earth—a touch­stone of the con­spir­a­cy com­mu­ni­ty for decades. He also made a quip about Democ­rats being on “arti­fi­cial res­pi­ra­tors,” seen as a nod to the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries regard­ing Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg pos­si­bly being kept alive mechan­i­cal­ly.
...

Also keep in mind that it has to be a vir­tu­al cer­tain­ty that Trump is aware of the QAnon move­ment. Not only do they show up at his ral­lies with Q shirts and signs but it’s a cult that lit­er­al­ly wor­ships him. There’s no way Trump isn’t ful­ly aware of this. Of course, giv­en that it’s a cult that also believed he was secret­ly in cahoots with Mueller there was nev­er an easy way to Trump to actu­al­ly acknowl­edge and inter­act with this Trump-wor­ship­ping cult. And that’s part of what so fas­ci­nat­ing about this phe­nom­e­na: it’s a Trump-wor­ship­ping cult that Trump can’t real­ly acknowl­edge because he can’t pos­si­bly live up to their expec­ta­tions. That’s got to be kind of frus­trat­ing for Trump. But not as frus­trat­ing as the even­tu­al release of the Mueller report must have been for all those QAnon sup­port­ers:

The Dai­ly Beast

QAnon Believ­ers Crushed After Mueller Report Fails to Lead to Hillary Clinton’s Arrest
QAnon fans thought spe­cial coun­sel would take down the Democ­rats. Instead, Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka made fun of them.

Will Som­mer
04.18.19 3:30 PM ET

While most of Don­ald Trump’s allies braced for the release on Thurs­day of Spe­cial Coun­sel Robert Mueller’s report, believ­ers in the pro-Trump QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry approached the long-await­ed pub­li­ca­tion with a sense of thrill.

For years, QAnon fans have been mocked for believ­ing that Mueller was secret­ly in league with the pres­i­dent, work­ing hand-in-hand to uncov­er Satan­ic rit­u­als com­mit­ted by top Democ­rats before ship­ping them off to Guan­tanamo Bay. They had been told it was ridicu­lous to base their entire polit­i­cal world­view on a series of anony­mous clues post­ed on inter­net mes­sage boards—including one that claimed Hillary Clin­ton was secret­ly arrest­ed in Octo­ber 2017.

Now, after all the chant­i­ng and wav­ing of “Q” signs at Trump ral­lies, their hour of vin­di­ca­tion was at hand.

Liz Crokin, a lead­ing QAnon pro­mot­er, pre­dict­ed on Wednes­day that Mueller’s report would uncov­er lead­ing Democ­rats com­mit­ting crimes that are “pun­ish­able by death.”

“I think the Mueller Report will reveal some indi­ca­tors that the real crimes that took places were com­mit­ted by Hillary Clin­ton, Oba­ma, and some of their asso­ciates,” Crokin told The Dai­ly Beast.

Crokin wasn’t alone. “Patri­ots’ Soap­box,” a 24-hour YouTube livestream devot­ed to decod­ing QAnon clues, urged view­ers to check back Thurs­day for a “BIG day.” Joe Mase­poes, a QAnon pro­mot­er whose pro-QAnon videos have been shared by celebri­ties like for­mer base­ball star Curt Schilling, urged his fol­low­ers to “be here tomor­row.”

Be Here Tomor­row. The Sto­ry Unfolds. Q— Joe M (@StormIsUponUs) April 17, 2019

But when the Mueller report arrived on Thurs­day morn­ing, it con­tained none of the bomb­shell, glob­al pedophile cabal-destroy­ing rev­e­la­tions QAnon fans had pre­dict­ed. Instead, it detailed a Russ­ian cam­paign of elec­toral sub­terfuge that ben­e­fit­ed Trump’s elec­tion efforts, along with repeat­ed attempts by the pres­i­dent to impede inves­ti­ga­tions into his con­duct.

Unhap­py QAnon believ­ers were left to grap­ple with the let­down. As the report’s lack of QAnon proofs became clear, the Patri­ots’ Soap­box livestream quick­ly moved onto oth­er top­ics like human traf­fick­ing. The channel’s view­ers weren’t fooled, though. The com­ment sec­tion quick­ly filled up with dis­ap­point­ed QAnon fans.

On Voat, a Red­dit-style forum alter­na­tive pop­u­lar with QAnon fans, believ­ers lament­ed the fact that they had been duped again.

“Trump is toast,” said one poster who said he wouldn’t vote in 2020 after the dis­ap­point­ment. “Lied to us to extend his re-elec­tion. Good luck Q peeps. I’m done here.”

This isn’t the first time QAnon loy­al­ists have been promised con­fir­ma­tion of their bizarre ideas, only to be dis­ap­point­ed. In June 2018, “Q”—the anony­mous per­son or group of peo­ple behind the vague clues that have been strung into QAnon—had promised that a Depart­ment of Jus­tice inspec­tor gen­er­al report would bring down Clin­ton.

That report didn’t include the rev­e­la­tions QAnon believ­ers were promised either. One angry, armed QAnon believ­er respond­ed to that let-down by shut­ting down a bridge near the Hoover Dam with an impro­vised armored truck.

...

———-

“QAnon Believ­ers Crushed After Mueller Report Fails to Lead to Hillary Clinton’s Arrest” by Will Som­mer; The Dai­ly Beast; 04/18/2019

“Now, after all the chant­i­ng and wav­ing of “Q” signs at Trump ral­lies, their hour of vin­di­ca­tion was at hand.”

The hour of vin­di­ca­tion was at hand. Final­ly, the true nature of the Mueller report was going to be revealed and the Satan­ic pedophile ring secret­ly run­ning the world would be going down. As Liz Crokin, the same per­son who told her audi­ences that law enforce­ment had videos of Hillary Clin­ton eat­ing a child’s face, pre­dict­ed, the report would uncov­er crimes by the Democ­rats that are “pun­ish­able by death”. And she was just one of the Q‑pushers main­tain­ing this line:

...
Liz Crokin, a lead­ing QAnon pro­mot­er, pre­dict­ed on Wednes­day that Mueller’s report would uncov­er lead­ing Democ­rats com­mit­ting crimes that are “pun­ish­able by death.”

“I think the Mueller Report will reveal some indi­ca­tors that the real crimes that took places were com­mit­ted by Hillary Clin­ton, Oba­ma, and some of their asso­ciates,” Crokin told The Dai­ly Beast.

Crokin wasn’t alone. “Patri­ots’ Soap­box,” a 24-hour YouTube livestream devot­ed to decod­ing QAnon clues, urged view­ers to check back Thurs­day for a “BIG day.” Joe Mase­poes, a QAnon pro­mot­er whose pro-QAnon videos have been shared by celebri­ties like for­mer base­ball star Curt Schilling, urged his fol­low­ers to “be here tomor­row.”
...

And then the big let down arrived, lead­ing to a wave of believ­ers who were sud­den­ly ex-believ­ers who felt deceived and in some cas­es felt anger at Trump:

...
But when the Mueller report arrived on Thurs­day morn­ing, it con­tained none of the bomb­shell, glob­al pedophile cabal-destroy­ing rev­e­la­tions QAnon fans had pre­dict­ed. Instead, it detailed a Russ­ian cam­paign of elec­toral sub­terfuge that ben­e­fit­ed Trump’s elec­tion efforts, along with repeat­ed attempts by the pres­i­dent to impede inves­ti­ga­tions into his con­duct.

Unhap­py QAnon believ­ers were left to grap­ple with the let­down. As the report’s lack of QAnon proofs became clear, the Patri­ots’ Soap­box livestream quick­ly moved onto oth­er top­ics like human traf­fick­ing. The channel’s view­ers weren’t fooled, though. The com­ment sec­tion quick­ly filled up with dis­ap­point­ed QAnon fans.

On Voat, a Red­dit-style forum alter­na­tive pop­u­lar with QAnon fans, believ­ers lament­ed the fact that they had been duped again.

“Trump is toast,” said one poster who said he wouldn’t vote in 2020 after the dis­ap­point­ment. “Lied to us to extend his re-elec­tion. Good luck Q peeps. I’m done here.”
...

Yes, even the QAnon cultists are los­ing the faith, which isn’t sur­pris­ing at this point in the Q hoax. As long as the Mueller report was yet to be released it was always pos­si­ble to assure the true believ­ers that they’ll even­tu­al­ly be vin­di­cat­ed. But that’s not real­ly pos­si­ble any­more. Unlike you’re typ­i­cal dooms­day prophets who con­vince their fol­low­ers that the world will end on giv­en date, only to ‘dis­cov­er’ that the world will actu­al­ly end at a lat­er day, there aren’t going to be any future Mueller reports. This is it.

And that all rais­es ques­tions about what these way­ward ex‑Q fol­low­ers are going to grav­i­tate towards next? Will they remain Trump cultists? Will they become even more rad­i­cal­ized with some­thing new that comes along? And crit­i­cal­ly, will they blame Trump for this giant decep­tion? That’s part of what makes the wink­ing & nod­ding to the QAnon folks that Trump and his admin­is­tra­tion were engaged in this whole time so inter­est­ing: it was­n’t just the “Q” hoax­ers string­ing these peo­ple along. Those Trump ral­lies effec­tive­ly became ‘com­ing out’ par­ties for QAnon sup­port­ers, where peo­ple wear­ing Q gear and signs were giv­en promi­nent loca­tions at Trump ral­lies that guar­an­teed they would show up on TV. They real­ly were toyed with by the Team Trump and that’s got to sting.

Sure, Trump lies and gets caught lying all the time. But most of those are lies about things his sup­ports don’t real­ly care about. But in this case we appear to have stum­bled across one of the few instances where Trump (or Trump prox­ies) are caught in a mas­sive lie direct­ed at their sup­port­ers about some­thing these sup­port­ers care deeply about and now they are forced to con­front it. And these were some of Trump’s most fer­vent sup­port­ers who got behind this whole thing. So this is almost unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry for Trump at this point. Will a loss of faith in “Q” trans­late into a loss of faith in Trump? In some cas­es that will prob­a­bly hap­pen, but as whole QAnon phe­nom­e­na reminds us, when you’re wish­ing for the seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble to hap­pen don’t get your hopes up too much.

Here’s a pair of arti­cles that pro­vide a good exam­ple of how the far right main­streams itself in the US media and pol­i­tics. The first arti­cle is about the dis­cov­ery that an author who has writ­ten a num­ber of opin­ion pieces that appeared in the Wall Street Jour­nal, the Hill, Forbes, US News and World Report, and the Nation­al Review over the past cou­ple of years. The author was secret­ly the well-known white nation­al­ist Mar­cus Epstein writ­ing these piece under the bare­ly veiled pen name of “Mark Epstein”. Epstein, who him­self is part Jew­ish and Asian, was a key white nation­al­ist orga­niz­er activist in the mid-2000’s and 2010s.

In 2006, Epstein was work­ing for the right-wing “Lead­er­ship Insti­tute”, which has a list of alums that includes Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed. He then went on to work for Pat Buchanan’s Amer­i­can Cause group and helped co-found the far right Youth for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion that ded­i­cat­ed itself to “defend­ing the West on cam­pus.” He went on to work for Con­gress­man Tom Tan­cre­do, who was known for his anti-immi­grant posi­tions. Epstein was seen as a ris­ing con­ser­v­a­tive leader at that time despite the fact that he wrote arti­cles for the open­ly white nation­al­ist VDare.com web­site. He also helped found­ed the now-defunct Robert A. Taft Club along­side Richard Spencer and white nation­al­ist Kevin DeAn­na in 2006, which host­ed a 2006 “Con­ser­vatism and Race” con­fer­ence that invit­ed promi­nent racist speak­ers like Jared Tay­lor. Then, in 2009, Epstein’s rep­u­ta­tion and career took a hit after he was sued over 2007 inci­dent when he struck a black women in the face and called her “nig­ger” dur­ing a night of drunk­en bar-hop­ping. So Epstein was basi­cal­ly an open racist for years, but it was­n’t his vio­lent assault because pub­lic that his stand­ing as a ris­ing young con­ser­v­a­tive leader was tar­nished.

Also recall that when DHS employ­ee Ian M. Smith was found to be a secret col­league of lead­ing white nation­al­ist fig­ures like Richard Spencer. In June of 2016, emails show that Epstein reached out to Smith and a num­ber of oth­er white nation­al­ists to invite them to an “Alt-Right Toast­mas­ters” event. So Epstein is still a very active indi­vid­ual in the ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazi scene. And now we’re learn­ing that he’s also been writ­ing opin­ion pieces under a pen names that’s basi­cal­ly his own name. But those opin­ions pieces have lit­tle to do with race immi­gra­tion. Instead, Epstein’s opin­ion pieces have been focused on the poten­tial abus­es of Big Tech. Specif­i­cal­ly, the Big Tech and free speech issues which is, of course, one of the key ral­ly­ing cries issues for the right-wing these days after a num­ber of (large­ly super­fi­cial) purges of ‘Alt Right’ fig­ures from var­i­ous social media plat­forms. It’s been a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for the far right to do what it does best: play­ing the role of vic­tim. So Mar­cus Epstein, a well known white nation­al­ist leader, has been writ­ing opin­ion pieces in numer­ous main­stream pub­li­ca­tions about one of the key right-wing vic­tim­hood issues of the day under the sneaky pen name of “Mark Epstein”:

Buz­zFeed News

A For­mer Repub­li­can Oper­a­tive With Ties To White Nation­al­ists Has Been Pub­lish­ing Opin­ion Pieces In The Wall Street Jour­nal

Mar­cus Epstein, a for­mer asso­ciate of Richard Spencer and a for­mer con­trib­u­tor to white nation­al­ist site VDare, has writ­ten for the Wall Street Jour­nal, the Hill, and Forbes under a thin­ly veiled pen name.

Ryan Mac Buz­zFeed News Reporter
Joseph Bern­stein Buz­zFeed News Reporter

Post­ed on June 18, 2019, at 6:36 p.m. ET

A for­mer Repub­li­can oper­a­tive noto­ri­ous for his con­nec­tions to white nation­al­ists has estab­lished him­self as an opin­ion con­trib­u­tor for sev­er­al nation­al pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing the Wall Street Jour­nal, while writ­ing under a thin­ly veiled pen name, Buz­zFeed News has learned.

Mar­cus Epstein, who worked for for­mer Col­orado con­gress­man Tom Tan­cre­do and found­ed a nativist polit­i­cal club with white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer, has writ­ten more than a dozen opin­ion pieces for the Jour­nal, the Hill, Forbes, US News and World Report, and the Nation­al Review over the past two years. His pieces, which main­ly focus on the reg­u­la­tion of the tech­nol­o­gy indus­try, were pub­lished under the byline “Mark Epstein.”

In six dif­fer­ent pieces for the Jour­nal, Epstein is iden­ti­fied as an “antitrust attor­ney and free­lance writer” and address­es top­ics includ­ing the sup­posed threat to con­ser­v­a­tive speech posed by Google and Face­book, and the ways reg­u­la­tion and antitrust might be used to ensure “view­point neu­tral­i­ty” and con­sumer pro­tec­tion, respec­tive­ly. They make no men­tion of his past, which includes con­tri­bu­tions to the white nation­al­ist site VDare and charges that he assault­ed a black woman, after racial­ly abus­ing her, in 2007. (In 2008 in Dis­trict of Colum­bia Supe­ri­or Court, Epstein entered an Alford plea — a plea in which the defen­dant accepts the con­se­quences of a guilty ver­dict with­out admit­ting guilt — after which the charges were dropped.)

The pub­li­ca­tion of Epstein’s pieces is the lat­est instance of the far-right, hyper-nation­al­ist fringe becom­ing part of the main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment over the last decade. The Jour­nal, which ran a piece from Epstein titled “Antitrust, Free Speech and Google” ear­li­er this month, declined to say if it looked into his his­to­ry before pub­lish­ing his work.

“We know Mark Epstein as we iden­ti­fied him for our read­ers: a free­lance writer and antitrust attor­ney who has writ­ten on antitrust and reg­u­la­tion for a vari­ety of pub­li­ca­tions,” a Jour­nal spokesper­son said to Buz­zFeed News in a state­ment. “We are not aware that he has writ­ten under any oth­er byline.”

In a state­ment pro­vid­ed to Buz­zFeed News, Epstein explained his deci­sion to write under a pen name.

“Dur­ing col­lege and imme­di­ate­ly there­after I strug­gled with alco­hol, which led to — among oth­er prob­lems — a mis­de­meanor assault charge in 2007 which was ulti­mate­ly dis­missed,” he wrote. “I changed my name in an attempt to move past the media-inter­net dri­ven out­rage cul­ture which refus­es to allow peo­ple to move on with their lives. I sub­mit­ted these arti­cles under this name, with an accu­rate bio, and which expressed my hon­est opin­ions.”

In the years since the assault charge, Epstein told Buz­zFeed News he became sober, grad­u­at­ed near the top of his class from Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn Law School, and devel­oped con­cerns about the pow­er wield­ed by big tech com­pa­nies.

But Epstein, who worked for the con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Pat Buchanan, was a key fig­ure in nativist and white nation­al­ist polit­i­cal cir­cles from the mid-2000s to the ear­ly 2010s. In 2006, he found­ed the now-defunct Robert A. Taft Club along­side Spencer and Kevin DeAn­na, anoth­er lead­ing white nation­al­ist. Invit­ed speak­ers to that club includ­ed influ­en­tial white suprema­cist Jared Tay­lor and the jour­nal­ist John Der­byshire, who would even­tu­al­ly be fired from the Nation­al Review in 2012 for a racist col­umn.

Epstein also helped run Youth for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion, a far-right stu­dent group, found­ed by DeAn­na and Tay­lor, whose mem­bers includ­ed white sep­a­ratist and neo-Nazi Matthew Heim­bach. From 2004 to 2009, Epstein, under his full name, wrote for VDare, where his posts came with provoca­tive head­lines like “[Howard] Dean Is Right — GOP Is “The White Par­ty.” So?”; “It Depends On What Your Def­i­n­i­tion Of “Jim Crow” Is”; and “White Refugees And Cul­ture.”

In a state­ment, Epstein denied that he had ever held white nation­al­ist beliefs. “As a proud Amer­i­can of Jew­ish and Asian descent, I obvi­ous­ly have nev­er been white nation­al­ist nor held their beliefs.”

Under the name “Mark Epstein,” the for­mer con­gres­sion­al staffer stays away from the top­ics of race and immi­gra­tion. In his most recent piece for the Jour­nal in June, he wrote that “antitrust law isn’t a panacea” and shouldn’t be used to com­bat per­ceived bias against con­ser­v­a­tive voic­es, as advo­cat­ed by Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump. He made a sim­i­lar argu­ment in a piece for the Hill in 2017.

The Hill, which ran at least two pieces from Epstein in 2017, said that the edi­tor who approved the pieces no longer works at the pub­li­ca­tion so it does “not know what vet­ting he per­formed at the time.”

“We would nev­er know­ing­ly post mate­r­i­al from a racist writer and have no infor­ma­tion iden­ti­fy­ing this writer as such,” a Hill spokesper­son said. “The Hill gen­er­al­ly posts opin­ion sub­mis­sions from well-known writ­ers but we occa­sion­al­ly post columns by less­er known indi­vid­u­als. We make efforts to check their back­grounds, as well as requir­ing them to sign paper­work ver­i­fy­ing their iden­ti­ties, back­grounds and the absence of con­flicts of inter­est.”

Epstein also coau­thored at least four op-eds in the Jour­nal, Forbes, and US News and World Report with Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty law pro­fes­sor Adam Can­deub, who rep­re­sent­ed Tay­lor in a law­suit against Twit­ter. US News did not respond to a request for com­ment, while Forbes said it had tak­en down Can­deub and Epstein’s post for fur­ther review.

“Epstein appeared on our plat­form with­out per­mis­sion as a co-author on one of our contributor’s posts,” a Forbes spokesper­son told Buz­zFeed News, not­ing that he was nev­er an autho­rized con­trib­u­tor. “Forbes guide­lines explic­it­ly pro­hib­it adding co-authors with­out per­mis­sion.”

The edi­tor of Nation­al Review, which pub­lished a piece from Epstein in 2017, did not respond to a request for com­ment.

In an email, Can­deub declined to say if he was aware of Epstein’s past.

...

———-

“A For­mer Repub­li­can Oper­a­tive With Ties To White Nation­al­ists Has Been Pub­lish­ing Opin­ion Pieces In The Wall Street Jour­nal” by Ryan Mac and Joseph Bern­stein; Buz­zFeed News; 06/18/2019

“Mar­cus Epstein, who worked for for­mer Col­orado con­gress­man Tom Tan­cre­do and found­ed a nativist polit­i­cal club with white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer, has writ­ten more than a dozen opin­ion pieces for the Jour­nal, the Hill, Forbes, US News and World Report, and the Nation­al Review over the past two years. His pieces, which main­ly focus on the reg­u­la­tion of the tech­nol­o­gy indus­try, were pub­lished under the byline “Mark Epstein.””

He’s note Mar­cus Epstein the known racist. No, he’s Mark Epstein, a lawyer with an inter­est in anti-trust issues, tech­nol­o­gy, and reg­u­la­tion. He was­n’t exact­ly going under­cov­er. And he was­n’t exact­ly under­cov­er as a white nation­al­ist dur­ing the years when he was ris­ing young con­ser­v­a­tive leader. That’s what makes the fact that he was pub­lished as “Mark Epstein” so scan­dalous. It would be like if David Duke decid­ed to start pub­lish­ing under the pen name “Dave Duke” and all these pub­li­ca­tions act­ed like they were com­plete­ly fooled by this pen name because he was­n’t writ­ing overt­ly racist screeds:

...
In six dif­fer­ent pieces for the Jour­nal, Epstein is iden­ti­fied as an “antitrust attor­ney and free­lance writer” and address­es top­ics includ­ing the sup­posed threat to con­ser­v­a­tive speech posed by Google and Face­book, and the ways reg­u­la­tion and antitrust might be used to ensure “view­point neu­tral­i­ty” and con­sumer pro­tec­tion, respec­tive­ly. They make no men­tion of his past, which includes con­tri­bu­tions to the white nation­al­ist site VDare and charges that he assault­ed a black woman, after racial­ly abus­ing her, in 2007. (In 2008 in Dis­trict of Colum­bia Supe­ri­or Court, Epstein entered an Alford plea — a plea in which the defen­dant accepts the con­se­quences of a guilty ver­dict with­out admit­ting guilt — after which the charges were dropped.)

The pub­li­ca­tion of Epstein’s pieces is the lat­est instance of the far-right, hyper-nation­al­ist fringe becom­ing part of the main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment over the last decade. The Jour­nal, which ran a piece from Epstein titled “Antitrust, Free Speech and Google” ear­li­er this month, declined to say if it looked into his his­to­ry before pub­lish­ing his work.

“We know Mark Epstein as we iden­ti­fied him for our read­ers: a free­lance writer and antitrust attor­ney who has writ­ten on antitrust and reg­u­la­tion for a vari­ety of pub­li­ca­tions,” a Jour­nal spokesper­son said to Buz­zFeed News in a state­ment. “We are not aware that he has writ­ten under any oth­er byline.”

...

Under the name “Mark Epstein,” the for­mer con­gres­sion­al staffer stays away from the top­ics of race and immi­gra­tion. In his most recent piece for the Jour­nal in June, he wrote that “antitrust law isn’t a panacea” and shouldn’t be used to com­bat per­ceived bias against con­ser­v­a­tive voic­es, as advo­cat­ed by Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump. He made a sim­i­lar argu­ment in a piece for the Hill in 2017.
...

And note how Epstein is por­tray­ing his past role as a lead­ing racist as sim­ply in the past and not who he is today. Beyond that, Epstein goes on to deny that he has ever held white nation­al­ist beliefs, cit­ing his Jew­ish and Asian her­itage. Again, don’t for­get the sto­ry about the DHS employ­ee who was invit­ed by Epstein to attend an “Alt-Right Toast­mas­ters” event in 2016. Epstein is unam­bigu­ous­ly still a fel­low trav­el­er of neo-Nazis but it’s clear that the main­stream­ing role he plays requires cov­er­ing up and deny­ing that past:

...
In a state­ment pro­vid­ed to Buz­zFeed News, Epstein explained his deci­sion to write under a pen name.

“Dur­ing col­lege and imme­di­ate­ly there­after I strug­gled with alco­hol, which led to — among oth­er prob­lems — a mis­de­meanor assault charge in 2007 which was ulti­mate­ly dis­missed,” he wrote. “I changed my name in an attempt to move past the media-inter­net dri­ven out­rage cul­ture which refus­es to allow peo­ple to move on with their lives. I sub­mit­ted these arti­cles under this name, with an accu­rate bio, and which expressed my hon­est opin­ions.”

In the years since the assault charge, Epstein told Buz­zFeed News he became sober, grad­u­at­ed near the top of his class from Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn Law School, and devel­oped con­cerns about the pow­er wield­ed by big tech com­pa­nies.

But Epstein, who worked for the con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Pat Buchanan, was a key fig­ure in nativist and white nation­al­ist polit­i­cal cir­cles from the mid-2000s to the ear­ly 2010s. In 2006, he found­ed the now-defunct Robert A. Taft Club along­side Spencer and Kevin DeAn­na, anoth­er lead­ing white nation­al­ist. Invit­ed speak­ers to that club includ­ed influ­en­tial white suprema­cist Jared Tay­lor and the jour­nal­ist John Der­byshire, who would even­tu­al­ly be fired from the Nation­al Review in 2012 for a racist col­umn.

Epstein also helped run Youth for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion, a far-right stu­dent group, found­ed by DeAn­na and Tay­lor, whose mem­bers includ­ed white sep­a­ratist and neo-Nazi Matthew Heim­bach. From 2004 to 2009, Epstein, under his full name, wrote for VDare, where his posts came with provoca­tive head­lines like “[Howard] Dean Is Right — GOP Is “The White Par­ty.” So?”; “It Depends On What Your Def­i­n­i­tion Of “Jim Crow” Is”; and “White Refugees And Cul­ture.”

In a state­ment, Epstein denied that he had ever held white nation­al­ist beliefs. “As a proud Amer­i­can of Jew­ish and Asian descent, I obvi­ous­ly have nev­er been white nation­al­ist nor held their beliefs.”
...

And note how four of the pieces Epstein wrote were co-authored with a lawyer rep­re­sent­ing Jared Tay­lor in a law­suit against Twit­ter over the sus­pen­sion of his account, under­scor­ing the obvi­ous rea­son for Epstein’s inter­est in tech cen­sor­ship:

...
Epstein also coau­thored at least four op-eds in the Jour­nal, Forbes, and US News and World Report with Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty law pro­fes­sor Adam Can­deub, who rep­re­sent­ed Tay­lor in a law­suit against Twit­ter. US News did not respond to a request for com­ment, while Forbes said it had tak­en down Can­deub and Epstein’s post for fur­ther review.

“Epstein appeared on our plat­form with­out per­mis­sion as a co-author on one of our contributor’s posts,” a Forbes spokesper­son told Buz­zFeed News, not­ing that he was nev­er an autho­rized con­trib­u­tor. “Forbes guide­lines explic­it­ly pro­hib­it adding co-authors with­out per­mis­sion.”

The edi­tor of Nation­al Review, which pub­lished a piece from Epstein in 2017, did not respond to a request for com­ment.

In an email, Can­deub declined to say if he was aware of Epstein’s past.
...

So that’s an exam­ple of how we have an open white nation­al­ist who man­aged to some­how go ‘under­cov­er’ by write under a pen name that’s basi­cal­ly his own name so he can advo­cate for poli­cies that will make it hard­er for pri­vate com­pa­nies to kick neo-Nazis off of social media.

Now let’s take a clos­er look at Epstein’s back­ground because there’s anoth­er fig­ure close to Epstein who is also quite emblem­at­ic of the merg­ing of main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive media with neo-Nazis and the far right: James O’Keefe, one of the lead­ing ‘sting video’ far right trolls of the last decade who spe­cial­izes in send­ing in under­cov­er oper­a­tives to left-wing orga­ni­za­tions with the intent of get­ting com­pro­mis­ing video. O’Keefe has since earned a rep­u­ta­tion for released heav­i­ly selec­tive­ly and decep­tive­ly edit­ed videos, but back in 2009, before this was known about O’Keefe’s cred­i­bil­i­ty, he man­aged to gain nation­al noto­ri­ety in 2009 when he got the left-wing com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tion group ACORN, that focused on vot­er reg­is­tra­tion efforts, shut down with a video where he pre­tend­ed to be a pimp with a pros­ti­tute. It turned out even that video was decep­tive­ly edit­ed but ACORN was still shut down. O’Keefe lat­er sued by one of the ACORN employ­ees over the decep­tive video and paid $100,000. Dur­ing the course of that law­suit it was revealed that the Koch-fund­ed ALEC was fund­ing O’Keefe’s work.

So O’Keefe is known liar who is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly cel­e­brat­ed with­in the right-wing media bub­ble as some sort of truth teller. And, sur­prise!, it turns out O’Keefe and Epstein have quite a his­to­ry. A his­to­ry that pre-dates O’Keefe’s time as a right-wing media dar­ling. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, back when O’Keefe was a stu­dent at Rut­gers he got in trou­ble over alleged racism. By his own account, O’Keefe was giv­en a room in an all black dorm when he refused to live with a gay room­mate. But then he got expelled from his dorm for refer­ring to black stu­dents as “nig­gers”. O’Keefe vehe­ment­ly denies he ever used such lan­guage. The next year, O’Keefe got a ‘dream job’ in the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment at the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute. It was there O’Keefe met Epstein. In August of 2006, Epstein planned a “Race and Con­ser­vatism” event that lead­ing racist fig­ures like Jared Tay­lor and John Der­byshire. It was so obvi­ous­ly a con­ven­tion for racists that even Storm­front wrote about the event. O’Keefe manned a lit­er­a­ture table filled with white suprema­cist tracts at the con­fer­ence. These were two ris­ing con­ser­v­a­tive stars work­ing for the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute orga­niz­ing a racist con­fer­ence in 2006, just a few years before O’Keefe’s ACORN video made him a nation­al con­ser­v­a­tive media celebri­ty.

It was one of O’Keefe’s ear­ly prank/stings that lost him his job at the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute in 2007 after he called an Ohio-based Planned Par­ent­hood clin­ic and offered a dona­tion on the con­di­tion that it would be used to pay for abort­ing African-Amer­i­can fetus­es. O’Keefe told the recep­tion­ist that he’s mak­ing the dona­tion, “because there’s def­i­nite­ly way too many black peo­ple in Ohio.” This appar­ent­ly vio­lat­ed the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute’s stan­dards. Upon hear­ing about O’Keefe’s prank and fir­ing, Andrew Bre­it­bart hired O’Keefe to car­ry out the ACORN oper­a­tion that made O’Keefe famous.

And that dis­turb­ing biog­ra­phy is why James O’Keefe isn’t just an exam­ple of what has gone wrong with the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment in Amer­i­can. He’s also an exam­ple how the con­ser­v­a­tive media has been almost com­plete­ly tak­en over by overt racists who con­tin­ue to main­stream white nation­al­ism:

Salon.com

James O’Keefe’s race prob­lem
A pho­to of the righty stunt­man at a white-nation­al­ist con­fab illus­trates a career marked by racial resent­ment

Max Blu­men­thal
Feb­ru­ary 3, 2010 7:04PM (UTC)

Many of the con­ser­v­a­tives who glee­ful­ly pro­mot­ed James O’Keefe’s past polit­i­cal stunts are feign­ing shock at his arrest on charges that he and three asso­ciates planned to tam­per with Louisiana Sen. Mary Lan­drieu’s phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pun­dits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a cre­ative genius and mod­el of jour­nal­is­tic ethics. Andrew Bre­it­bart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him one of the all-time “great jour­nal­ists” and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his under­cov­er ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a “con­gres­sion­al medal.”

His right-wing admir­ers don’t seem to mind that O’Keefe’s short but sto­ried career has been defined by a series of polit­i­cal stunts shot through with racial resent­ment. Now an activist orga­ni­za­tion that mon­i­tors hate groups has pro­duced a pho­to of O’Keefe at a 2006 con­fer­ence on “Race and Con­ser­vatism” that fea­tured lead­ing white nation­al­ists. The pho­to, first pub­lished Jan. 30 on the Web site of the anti-racism group One Peo­ple’s Project, shows O’Keefe at the gath­er­ing, which was so con­tro­ver­sial even the ultra-right Lead­er­ship Insti­tute, which employed O’Keefe at the time, with­drew its back­ing. O’Keefe’s fel­low young con­ser­v­a­tive provo­ca­teur Mar­cus Epstein orga­nized the event, which gave anti-Semi­tes, pro­fes­sion­al racists and pro­po­nents of Aryanism an oppor­tu­ni­ty to share their griev­ances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.

One Peo­ple’s Project cov­ered the event at the time, send­ing a free­lance pho­tog­ra­ph­er to doc­u­ment the gath­er­ing. Project direc­tor Daryle Jenk­ins told O’Keefe manned a lit­er­a­ture table filled with tracts from the white suprema­cist right, includ­ing two pseu­do-aca­d­e­m­ic pub­li­ca­tions that have called blacks and Lati­nos genet­i­cal­ly infe­ri­or to whites: Amer­i­can Renais­sance and the Occi­den­tal Quar­ter­ly. The lead­ing speak­er was Jared Tay­lor, founder of the white nation­al­ist group Amer­i­can Renais­sance. “We can say for cer­tain that James O’Keefe was at the 2006 meet­ing with Jared Tay­lor. He has absolute­ly no way of deny­ing that,” Jenk­ins said. O’Keefe’s attor­ney did not respond to a request for com­ment on his clien­t’s role in the con­fer­ence.

[Sub­se­quent to pub­li­ca­tion, free­lance pho­tog­ra­ph­er Isis told Salon she saw O’Keefe help­ing with the event and believed he staffed the lit­er­a­ture table, but her only pho­to­graph of O’Keefe was cropped so that the lit­er­a­ture table isn’t evi­dent. “He was help­ing Mar­cus Epstein in the exe­cu­tion of the event,” the pho­tog­ra­ph­er recalls. “O’Keefe was involved the same way you would be involved if you went to a par­ty and you put out the cups and stocked the cool­er.”]

...

By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial trou­bles became acute when he entered the mul­ti­cul­tur­al atmos­phere of Rut­gers University’s dor­mi­to­ry sys­tem. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being cap­tured on Dai­ly Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dor­mi­to­ry floor after refus­ing to live with the gay room­mate he was ini­tial­ly assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next room­mate was “an Indi­an midget ... who smelled like shit.” The room­mate left, how­ev­er, and was replaced by “a greek kid.” The new room­mate com­plained to a res­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tor that O’Keefe had called his neigh­bors “nig­gers,” prompt­ing the school to expel him from the dorm. He reject­ed the accu­sa­tion as a “com­plete lie,” writ­ing, “I was lead out of the room cry­ing and scream­ing at him and my sit­u­a­tion, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tol­bert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call any­one any names.”

The fol­low­ing year, despite this record, O’Keefe secured a dream job in the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, employed by the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute, a North­ern Vir­ginia-based out­fit that serves as the movement’s most pro­lif­ic youth train­ing oper­a­tion. There, O’Keefe met Mar­cus Epstein, a fel­low ide­o­logue who as edi­tor of a con­ser­v­a­tive pub­li­ca­tion at the Col­lege of William and Mary assailed Mar­tin Luther King Jr. for “phi­lan­der­ing and pla­gia­rism” and chal­lenged his patri­o­tism and Chris­tian­i­ty.

In August 2006 Epstein planned an event that would wed his extreme views on race with his ambi­tions. Epstein invit­ed white nation­al­ist Jared Tay­lor and homo­pho­bic white-griev­ance ped­dler John Der­byshire of the Nation­al Review to speak at the Lead­er­ship Institute’s North­ern Vir­ginia head­quar­ters, at a mock sym­po­sium called “Race and Con­ser­vatism.”

Accord­ing to a post on the white suprema­cist Web site Storm­front, Tay­lor and Der­byshire debat­ed “the role of race in pol­i­cy deci­sions and the racial future of the Repub­li­can par­ty.”

When the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter denounced Taylor’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the event, spark­ing dam­ag­ing pub­lic­i­ty for the Insti­tute, Epstein shift­ed it across the street, where he played host under the aus­pices of a “tra­di­tion­al­ist” group he found­ed called the Robert A. Taft Club. O’Keefe joined him after the last-minute move. A speak­er from the right-wing black front group Project 21, led by white con­ser­v­a­tive David Almasi, was added at the last minute.

Accord­ing to One Peo­ple’s Project, which dis­patched an under­cov­er reporter to the event, about 40 peo­ple attend­ed the event, includ­ing sev­er­al white suprema­cists. They includ­ed Michael Hart, a Jew­ish astro­physi­cist and advo­cate of racial­ly par­ti­tion­ing the U.S., who once clashed with David Duke at a con­fer­ence over the Ku Klux Klan lead­er’s anti-Semi­tism.

The event’s head­line speak­er, Jared Tay­lor, is the pub­lish­er of one of the white suprema­cist movement’s fore­most jour­nals, Amer­i­can Renais­sance, which seeks to apply an aca­d­e­m­ic gloss to the racial­ist screeds con­tained on its pages. Accord­ing to a report on the con­fer­ence pub­lished in Tay­lor’s mag­a­zine, Tay­lor argued that a taboo against dis­cussing the alleged crim­i­nal behav­ior and low­er intel­li­gence of blacks and Lati­nos twist­ed polit­i­cal dis­course, and he advo­cat­ed a strong white nation­al­ism to counter it. Der­byshire denounced “this whole rick­ety appa­ra­tus of affir­ma­tive action, dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suits, cor­po­rate shake­downs, pro­fil­ing protests and ‘speech codes.’” But the Nation­al Review edi­tor expressed doubt that a suf­fi­cient­ly large white nation­al­ist move­ment could be mus­tered to do much about it.

Epstein and O’Keefe moved on from the “Race and Con­ser­vatism” con­fer­ence to bet­ter things. After grad­u­at­ing from the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute, Epstein held jobs as exec­u­tive direc­tor of both for­mer Repub­li­can Rep. Tom Tancredo’s Team Amer­i­ca PAC and Pat Buchanan’s Amer­i­can Cause. He also start­ed a group called Youth for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion that ded­i­cat­ed itself to “defend­ing the West on cam­pus.” An essay fea­tured on the group’s Web site com­plain­ing that “large­ly Jew­ish intel­lec­tu­al elites have utter­ly trans­formed Amer­i­can social and polit­i­cal dis­course” sug­gest­ed that Epstein’s out­fit was only his lat­est attempt to push white nation­al­ism and anti-Semi­tism into the con­ser­v­a­tive main­stream.

Epstein’s career unrav­eled in June 2009, when a vio­lent racial assault he com­mit­ted two years ear­li­er was dis­closed. Accord­ing to a court affi­davit, Epstein had karate-chopped a ran­dom African-Amer­i­can woman in the face and called her a “nig­ger” dur­ing a drunk­en late-night romp bar-hop­ping on Washington’s M Street in 2007, lead­ing to his arrest by an off-duty Secret Ser­vice agent. He signed a plea bar­gain requir­ing him to attend alco­hol reha­bil­i­ta­tion cours­es and donate $1,000 to the Unit­ed Negro Col­lege Fund as a token of his con­tri­tion.

Mean­while, O’Keefe lost his job at the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute in 2007 after a prank call he made to an Ohio-based Planned Par­ent­hood clin­ic. Dur­ing the call, O’Keefe offered a dona­tion to the clin­ic on the con­di­tion that it would be ear­marked to pay for abort­ing African-Amer­i­can fetus­es. “Because there’s def­i­nite­ly way too many black peo­ple in Ohio,” O’Keefe remarked to the recep­tion­ist. “So, I’m just try­ing to do my part.” Lead­er­ship Insti­tute founder Mor­ton Black­well said O’Keefe’s stunts went beyond the right-wing group’s stan­dards. “He want­ed to do sting oper­a­tions that would affect leg­is­la­tion; he made some calls which have been cov­ered in the news media to Planned Par­ent­hood,” Black­well told the New York Times. “That was beyond the scope of what we had hired him to do. We are an edu­ca­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion. We are not an activist orga­ni­za­tion.” Black­well told O’Keefe he had to choose between his job and his activism, “and he said he was com­mit­ted to the activism,” accord­ing to the Times.

O’Keefe’s ter­mi­na­tion by the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute hard­ly end­ed his career as a con­ser­v­a­tive activist. Right-wing online pub­li­cist Andrew Bre­it­bart, hear­ing of the mer­ry prankster’s exploits, hired him to car­ry out the ACORN oper­a­tion that would make him famous. Since his arrest, how­ev­er, some of O’Keefe’s for­mer asso­ciates are scram­bling to save face. “I am shocked by the reports of this behav­ior,” declared O’Keefe’s col­lab­o­ra­tor on the ACORN oper­a­tion, Han­nah Giles. (Giles had tart­ed up as a pros­ti­tute for the stunt.)

O’Keefe has now hired a defense attor­ney and is wag­ing a high pub­lic­i­ty bat­tle against charges that could land him in prison for near­ly a year. Some of his old allies, like Bre­it­bart, remain in his cor­ner. Fox News’ Sean Han­ni­ty host­ed O’Keefe for a sym­pa­thet­ic sit­down Feb. 1, where the young right-winger played vic­tim, claim­ing he was being per­se­cut­ed by “flat-out slan­der­ing” and “jour­nal­is­tic mal­prac­tice.”

———-

“James O’Keefe’s race prob­lem” by Max Blu­men­thal; Salon.com; 02/03/2010

“O’Keefe has now hired a defense attor­ney and is wag­ing a high pub­lic­i­ty bat­tle against charges that could land him in prison for near­ly a year. Some of his old allies, like Bre­it­bart, remain in his cor­ner. Fox News’ Sean Han­ni­ty host­ed O’Keefe for a sym­pa­thet­ic sit­down Feb. 1, where the young right-winger played vic­tim, claim­ing he was being per­se­cut­ed by “flat-out slan­der­ing” and “jour­nal­is­tic mal­prac­tice.””

That’s right, James O’Keefe was blam­ing oth­er peo­ple of “flat-out slan­der­ing” and “jour­nal­is­tic mal­prac­tice.” How fit­ting. Those com­ments were in response to the poten­tial legal trou­bles he was fac­ing at the time over the attempt­ed wiring of Sen­a­tor Mary Lan­drieu’s office phones (he end­ed up get­ting three years pro­ba­tion). It’s unclear what O’Keefe’s response is to the pho­tos of him man­ning the white suprema­cist lit­er­a­ture table at the “Race and Con­ser­vatism” con­fer­ence orga­nized by Epstein in 2006 but pre­sum­ably he would also call it flat-out slan­der­ing and jour­nal­is­tic mal­prac­tice:

...
His right-wing admir­ers don’t seem to mind that O’Keefe’s short but sto­ried career has been defined by a series of polit­i­cal stunts shot through with racial resent­ment. Now an activist orga­ni­za­tion that mon­i­tors hate groups has pro­duced a pho­to of O’Keefe at a 2006 con­fer­ence on “Race and Con­ser­vatism” that fea­tured lead­ing white nation­al­ists. The pho­to, first pub­lished Jan. 30 on the Web site of the anti-racism group One Peo­ple’s Project, shows O’Keefe at the gath­er­ing, which was so con­tro­ver­sial even the ultra-right Lead­er­ship Insti­tute, which employed O’Keefe at the time, with­drew its back­ing. O’Keefe’s fel­low young con­ser­v­a­tive provo­ca­teur Mar­cus Epstein orga­nized the event, which gave anti-Semi­tes, pro­fes­sion­al racists and pro­po­nents of Aryanism an oppor­tu­ni­ty to share their griev­ances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.

One Peo­ple’s Project cov­ered the event at the time, send­ing a free­lance pho­tog­ra­ph­er to doc­u­ment the gath­er­ing. Project direc­tor Daryle Jenk­ins told O’Keefe manned a lit­er­a­ture table filled with tracts from the white suprema­cist right, includ­ing two pseu­do-aca­d­e­m­ic pub­li­ca­tions that have called blacks and Lati­nos genet­i­cal­ly infe­ri­or to whites: Amer­i­can Renais­sance and the Occi­den­tal Quar­ter­ly. The lead­ing speak­er was Jared Tay­lor, founder of the white nation­al­ist group Amer­i­can Renais­sance. “We can say for cer­tain that James O’Keefe was at the 2006 meet­ing with Jared Tay­lor. He has absolute­ly no way of deny­ing that,” Jenk­ins said. O’Keefe’s attor­ney did not respond to a request for com­ment on his clien­t’s role in the con­fer­ence.
...

And note how the “Race and Con­ser­vatism” con­fer­ence was ini­tial­ly sup­posed to take place at the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute’s head­quar­ters, but got moved to the “tra­di­tion­al­ist” Robert A. Taft Club after the SPLC gave the con­fer­ence bad pub­lic­i­ty. Recall, as we saw about, that the club was found­ed by Epstein, Richard Spencer, and Kevin DeAn­na. Also note that John Der­byshire, one of the invit­ed speak­ers, wrote for the Nation­al Review which is anoth­er exam­ple of how open racists have along found homes in right-wing media. The Nation­al Review was one of the pub­li­ca­tions that’s been run­ning opin­ion pieces by “Mark Epstein”:

...
In August 2006 Epstein planned an event that would wed his extreme views on race with his ambi­tions. Epstein invit­ed white nation­al­ist Jared Tay­lor and homo­pho­bic white-griev­ance ped­dler John Der­byshire of the Nation­al Review to speak at the Lead­er­ship Institute’s North­ern Vir­ginia head­quar­ters, at a mock sym­po­sium called “Race and Con­ser­vatism.”

Accord­ing to a post on the white suprema­cist Web site Storm­front, Tay­lor and Der­byshire debat­ed “the role of race in pol­i­cy deci­sions and the racial future of the Repub­li­can par­ty.”

When the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter denounced Taylor’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the event, spark­ing dam­ag­ing pub­lic­i­ty for the Insti­tute, Epstein shift­ed it across the street, where he played host under the aus­pices of a “tra­di­tion­al­ist” group he found­ed called the Robert A. Taft Club. O’Keefe joined him after the last-minute move. A speak­er from the right-wing black front group Project 21, led by white con­ser­v­a­tive David Almasi, was added at the last minute.

Accord­ing to One Peo­ple’s Project, which dis­patched an under­cov­er reporter to the event, about 40 peo­ple attend­ed the event, includ­ing sev­er­al white suprema­cists. They includ­ed Michael Hart, a Jew­ish astro­physi­cist and advo­cate of racial­ly par­ti­tion­ing the U.S., who once clashed with David Duke at a con­fer­ence over the Ku Klux Klan lead­er’s anti-Semi­tism.
...

But his involve­ment with the “Con­ser­vatism and Race” con­fer­ence was­n’t what got O’Keefe fired from the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute. It was his racial­ly charged prank with Planned Par­ent­hood in 2007 that go him fire, at which point Andrew Bre­it­bart hired O’Keefe to run his ACORN fake sting:

...
Mean­while, O’Keefe lost his job at the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute in 2007 after a prank call he made to an Ohio-based Planned Par­ent­hood clin­ic. Dur­ing the call, O’Keefe offered a dona­tion to the clin­ic on the con­di­tion that it would be ear­marked to pay for abort­ing African-Amer­i­can fetus­es. “Because there’s def­i­nite­ly way too many black peo­ple in Ohio,” O’Keefe remarked to the recep­tion­ist. “So, I’m just try­ing to do my part.” Lead­er­ship Insti­tute founder Mor­ton Black­well said O’Keefe’s stunts went beyond the right-wing group’s stan­dards. “He want­ed to do sting oper­a­tions that would affect leg­is­la­tion; he made some calls which have been cov­ered in the news media to Planned Par­ent­hood,” Black­well told the New York Times. “That was beyond the scope of what we had hired him to do. We are an edu­ca­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion. We are not an activist orga­ni­za­tion.” Black­well told O’Keefe he had to choose between his job and his activism, “and he said he was com­mit­ted to the activism,” accord­ing to the Times.

O’Keefe’s ter­mi­na­tion by the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute hard­ly end­ed his career as a con­ser­v­a­tive activist. Right-wing online pub­li­cist Andrew Bre­it­bart, hear­ing of the mer­ry prankster’s exploits, hired him to car­ry out the ACORN oper­a­tion that would make him famous. Since his arrest, how­ev­er, some of O’Keefe’s for­mer asso­ciates are scram­bling to save face. “I am shocked by the reports of this behav­ior,” declared O’Keefe’s col­lab­o­ra­tor on the ACORN oper­a­tion, Han­nah Giles. (Giles had tart­ed up as a pros­ti­tute for the stunt.)
...

So to sum­ma­rize, in 2006, O’Keefe and Epstein run a racist con­fer­ence under the ban­ner of the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute. Then O’Keefe gets fired in 2007 for a prank phone call with Planned Par­ent­hood. That ends up get­ting him hired by Andrew Bre­it­bart who tasks him with the ACORN hoax sting, mak­ing O’Keefe a right-wing media dar­ling. Mar­cus Epstein’s career implod­ed in 2009 fol­low­ing the expose of his 2007 racist drunk attack on woman, but he’s man­aged to find a new niche as play­ing the role of impar­tial lawyer “Mark Epstein” who writes op-ed piece about Big Tech and free­dom of speech. It’s all part of the con­text for the mod­ern day main­stream­ing of the ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazi world­views. Yes, social media is play­ing a mas­sive role in that process, but as the biogra­phies of Epstein and O’Keefe remind us, peo­ple who embrace neo-Nazi world­views were already pret­ty main­stream with­in con­ser­v­a­tive move­men­t’s lead­er­ship long before social media came along to sell it to the rest of the mass­es. Epstein and O’Keefe were the ‘Alt Right’ pals of peo­ple like Richard Spencer before the term ‘Alt Right’ had been invent­ed. It’s a reminder that when Spencer coined the term ‘Alt Right’ he was­n’t describ­ing a group of far right white nation­al­ists who were going to infil­trate and take over the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. He was describ­ing a group of far right white nation­al­ists who had already infil­trat­ed the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. A group that was heav­i­ly rep­re­sent­ed by a gen­er­a­tion of once-ris­ing right-wing stars like James O’Keefe and Mar­cus Epstein.

Here’s a series of arti­cles that high­lights the absur­di­ty of the grow­ing GOP cam­paign to ‘work the refs’ by push­ing a nar­ra­tive that social media com­pa­nies are biased against con­ser­v­a­tives: First, that nar­ra­tive got anoth­er boost this week when Pres­i­dent Trump whined that Twit­ter, Google, and oth­er tech giants are sup­press­ing his mes­sag­ing and caus­ing him to lose Twit­ter fol­low­ers.

One of the rea­sons con­ser­v­a­tives are claim­ing to be so upset with Twit­ter is the declin­ing num­bers of Twit­ter fol­low­ers. But as the arti­cle notes, these com­plaints about dwin­dling fol­low­ers has been hap­pen­ing at the same time Twit­ter has been imple­ment­ing a pol­i­cy of remov­ing accounts that are sus­pect­ed of being bots and ped­dling hate speech. As the arti­cle also notes, Pres­i­dent Trump actu­al­ly has a his­to­ry of tweets that vio­late Twit­ters poli­cies but he’s allowed to tweet them out any­way because he’s a pub­lic offi­cial. And that’s the con­text of Trump sug­gest­ing the tech com­pa­nies should be sued over bias against con­ser­v­a­tive. He even declared that “These peo­ple are all Democ­rats, it’s total­ly biased toward Democ­rats. If I announced tomor­row that I’m going to become a nice lib­er­al Demo­c­rat, I would pick up five times more fol­low­ers.”:

CNBC

Trump says big tech com­pa­nies like Twit­ter are ‘all Democ­rats’ and pur­pose­ly repress­ing his reach

Thomas Franck
Pub­lished Wed, Jun 26 2019 8:44 AM EDT
Updat­ed Wed, Jun 26 2019 11:58 AM EDT

* “Twit­ter is just ter­ri­ble, what they do. They don’t let you get the word out,” Trump tells Fox Busi­ness Net­work. “I’ll tell you what, they should be sued,” Trump says.
* Twit­ter and Face­book have dou­bled down on efforts to remove com­ments and accounts sus­pect­ed of hate speech as well as those thought to be bots.
* “These peo­ple are all Democ­rats,” Trump says. “If I announced tomor­row that I’m going to become a nice lib­er­al Demo­c­rat, I would pick up five times more fol­low­ers.”

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump lam­bast­ed Twit­ter, Google and oth­er tech­nol­o­gy giants on Wednes­day, claim­ing they are repress­ing his mes­sag­ing and pub­lic com­men­tary.

“Twit­ter is just ter­ri­ble, what they do. They don’t let you get the word out,” Trump told Fox Busi­ness Net­work. “I’ll tell you what, they should be sued because what’s hap­pen­ing with the bias — and now you see it with that exec­u­tive yes­ter­day from Google. The hatred for the Repub­li­cans: It’s not even like ‘Gee! Let’s lean Demo­c­rat.’”

“These peo­ple are all Democ­rats, it’s total­ly biased toward Democ­rats. If I announced tomor­row that I’m going to become a nice lib­er­al Demo­c­rat, I would pick up five times more fol­low­ers,” he said. Twitter’s shares took a tem­po­rary hit in pre­mar­ket trad­ing as the pres­i­dent spoke.

Twit­ter reit­er­at­ed via email on Wednes­day that its focus is on improv­ing the health of its plat­form — includ­ing the removal of fake accounts to pre­vent mali­cious activ­i­ty — and that many promi­nent fig­ures have seen fol­low­er counts drop as a result.

“We build our prod­ucts with extra­or­di­nary care and safe­guards to be a trust­wor­thy source of infor­ma­tion for every­one, with­out any regard for polit­i­cal view­point,” a Google spokesper­son told CNBC in an email. “Our rat­ing guide­lines are pub­licly vis­i­ble for all to see.”

Still, the issue has split the nation’s major polit­i­cal par­ties, with top Democ­rats claim­ing that there’s no evi­dence to sup­port the GOP gripe.

“What they did to me on Twit­ter is incred­i­ble,” Trump added on Wednes­day. “I have mil­lions and mil­lions of fol­low­ers, but I will tell you, they make it very hard for peo­ple to join me in Twit­ter and they make it very much hard­er for me to get out the mes­sage.”

Twit­ter and Face­book have dou­bled down on efforts to remove com­ments and accounts sus­pect­ed of hate speech as well as those thought to be bots since the 2016 elec­tion. That’s drawn ire from Trump and con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans, who claim that social media giants like Face­book and Twit­ter sti­fle con­ser­v­a­tive mes­sag­ing and accounts.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz ear­li­er this year blast­ed Google, Face­book and Twit­ter over alle­ga­tions that they cen­sor con­ser­v­a­tive con­tent, and he threat­ened fed­er­al reg­u­la­tion to over­see that mes­sag­ing is being treat­ed fair­ly.

“If we have tech com­pa­nies using the pow­ers of monop­oly to cen­sor polit­i­cal speech, I think that rais­es real antitrust issues,” Cruz said at a Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry sub­com­mit­tee hear­ing.

Some Democ­rats, such as pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Eliz­a­beth War­ren, said Face­book in March removed ads that her cam­paign placed call­ing for the company’s breakup.

“I want a social media mar­ket­place that isn’t dom­i­nat­ed by a sin­gle cen­sor,” she said.

As for the pres­i­dent, Trump has sev­er­al tweets that vio­late twitter’s poli­cies, but he’s allowed to keep his account because of his sta­tus as a major pub­lic fig­ure. The social media com­pa­ny has debat­ed label­ing tweets from major pub­lic fig­ures that vio­late its rules against bul­ly­ing and harass­ment.

The Jus­tice Depart­ment is report­ed­ly plan­ning an antitrust inves­ti­ga­tion into Alphabet’s Google sub­sidiary. Though Google has faced antitrust head­winds in the past, the reports last month came amid bipar­ti­san con­cern over the pow­er such com­pa­nies have over pub­lic life.

...

———-

“Trump says big tech com­pa­nies like Twit­ter are ‘all Democ­rats’ and pur­pose­ly repress­ing his reach” by Thomas Franck; CNBC; 06/26/2019

““Twit­ter is just ter­ri­ble, what they do. They don’t let you get the word out,” Trump told Fox Busi­ness Net­work. “I’ll tell you what, they should be sued because what’s hap­pen­ing with the bias — and now you see it with that exec­u­tive yes­ter­day from Google. The hatred for the Repub­li­cans: It’s not even like ‘Gee! Let’s lean Demo­c­rat.’””

Trump can’t use Twit­ter to ‘get the word out’. He seri­ous­ly claimed this. Then he com­plained about a drop off in fol­low­ers, prompt­ing Twit­ter to point out that many promi­nent fig­ures have seen the num­ber of their fol­low­ers drop as a result a dri­ve to remove fake accounts and accounts push­ing hate speech. So Trump is basi­cal­ly upset that he’s not allowed to puff up his fol­low­ing with bots and Nazis:

...
Twit­ter reit­er­at­ed via email on Wednes­day that its focus is on improv­ing the health of its plat­form — includ­ing the removal of fake accounts to pre­vent mali­cious activ­i­ty — and that many promi­nent fig­ures have seen fol­low­er counts drop as a result.

...

“What they did to me on Twit­ter is incred­i­ble,” Trump added on Wednes­day. “I have mil­lions and mil­lions of fol­low­ers, but I will tell you, they make it very hard for peo­ple to join me in Twit­ter and they make it very much hard­er for me to get out the mes­sage.”

Twit­ter and Face­book have dou­bled down on efforts to remove com­ments and accounts sus­pect­ed of hate speech as well as those thought to be bots since the 2016 elec­tion. That’s drawn ire from Trump and con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans, who claim that social media giants like Face­book and Twit­ter sti­fle con­ser­v­a­tive mes­sag­ing and accounts.
...

And note how Trump is actu­al­ly allowed to vio­late the rules specif­i­cal­ly because he’s a major pub­lic fig­ure. So Trump is lit­er­al­ly get­ting spe­cial treat­ment that allows him to ‘get the mes­sage out’ even when the ‘mes­sage’ vio­lates Twit­ter’s rules against things like bul­ly­ing and harass­ment:

...
As for the pres­i­dent, Trump has sev­er­al tweets that vio­late twitter’s poli­cies, but he’s allowed to keep his account because of his sta­tus as a major pub­lic fig­ure. The social media com­pa­ny has debat­ed label­ing tweets from major pub­lic fig­ures that vio­late its rules against bul­ly­ing and harass­ment.
...

So that was Trump’s lat­est gaslight­ing ‘work­ing the refs’ stunt on Wednes­day. The next day Twit­ter had an update to its spe­cial rules for pub­lic fig­ures like Trump: Trump is still allowed to break Twit­ter’s rules, but when he does the tweet will get a warn­ing. It’s Twit­ter’s new pol­i­cy for gov­ern­ment offi­cials with at least 100,000 fol­low­ers. They can bul­ly and harass and threat­en vio­lence because their state­ments are deemed news­wor­thy by virtue of their sta­tus as world lead­ers. So Trump and all the oth­er elect­ed Repub­li­cans just got for­mal approval to ‘get the mes­sage out’ even when ‘the mes­sage’ breaks Twit­ters rules like threat­en­ing vio­lence against an indi­vid­ual or group:

Ars Tech­ni­ca

Twit­ter clar­i­fies spe­cial rules for tweets by world lead­ers like Trump
“We’ve allowed cer­tain tweets that vio­lat­ed our rules,” Twit­ter acknowl­edges.

Tim­o­thy B. Lee — 6/27/2019, 4:15 PM

Twit­ter’s rules state that “you may not threat­en vio­lence against an indi­vid­ual or a group of peo­ple.” So when US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump tweet­ed in Jan­u­ary 2018 that he had a “nuclear but­ton” that was “much big­ger & more pow­er­ful” than the nuclear but­ton of North Kore­an dic­ta­tor Kim Jong Un and (a few months ear­li­er) that North Korea “won’t be around much longer” if it con­tin­ued its bel­li­cose rhetoric, crit­ics asked Twit­ter to take the tweets down for vio­lat­ing Twit­ter’s rules.

Twit­ter reject­ed those calls. Instead, the social media giant argued that the words of world lead­ers are news­wor­thy and that such news­wor­thi­ness can trump rules that might oth­er­wise apply. But activists have kept up the pres­sure on Twit­ter. So now the com­pa­ny has rolled out a new pol­i­cy to deal with this kind of sit­u­a­tion.

“In the past, we’ve allowed cer­tain tweets that vio­lat­ed our rules to remain on Twit­ter because they were in the pub­lic’s inter­est, but it was­n’t clear when and how we made those deter­mi­na­tions,” a Thurs­day blog post says. “To fix that, we’re intro­duc­ing a new notice that will pro­vide addi­tion­al clar­i­ty in these sit­u­a­tions.”

...

This won’t just be a tag next to the tweet—users will have to click through the notice before they can see the tweet itself.

The new sys­tem will only apply to gov­ern­ment offi­cials with ver­i­fied accounts and more than 100,000 fol­low­ers. That includes Don­ald Trump and a num­ber of oth­er offi­cials, both in the Unit­ed States and over­seas. Twit­ter will take oth­er steps to lim­it the dis­tri­b­u­tion of tweets that receive this kind of notice. They won’t be fea­tured as top tweets on a user’s Twit­ter time­line, in “safe search” results, or in “rec­om­mend­ed tweet” push noti­fi­ca­tions.

“This notice won’t be applied to any Tweets sent before today and, giv­en the con­di­tions out­lined above, it’s unlike­ly you’ll encounter it often,” Twit­ter says. “We can­not pre­dict the first time it will be used.”

...

———-

“Twit­ter clar­i­fies spe­cial rules for tweets by world lead­ers like Trump” by Tim­o­thy B. Lee; Ars Tech­ni­ca; 06/27/2019

““In the past, we’ve allowed cer­tain tweets that vio­lat­ed our rules to remain on Twit­ter because they were in the pub­lic’s inter­est, but it was­n’t clear when and how we made those deter­mi­na­tions,” a Thurs­day blog post says. “To fix that, we’re intro­duc­ing a new notice that will pro­vide addi­tion­al clar­i­ty in these sit­u­a­tions.””

It’s offi­cial: Trump can bul­ly, harass, and threat­en all the vio­lence he wants on Twit­ter, along with the rest of the GOP gov­ern­ment offi­cials. But there might be note about how the tweet broke the rules. That’s it.

How will Trump and the GOP respond to this rule change? Pre­sum­ably with a bunch of tweets about how Twit­ter is rigged against them. We’ll see.

So gov­ern­ment offi­cials get spe­cial treat­ment on Twit­ter, but let’s not for­get that it’s not just Trump and GOP offi­cials com­plain­ing about their treat­ment on these plat­forms. The ‘Alt Right’ in gen­er­al is con­stant­ly com­plain­ing about their treat­ment on social media. For exam­ple, here’s a pair of arti­cles about anoth­er exam­ple of how right-wing social media posts that vio­late plat­form rules are giv­en spe­cial treat­ment. Fit­ting­ly, it revolves around the Red­dit forum “r/The_Donald”. That’s the Red­dit forum for hard core Trump fans known to be infest­ed with ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazis.

Keep in mind that Red­dit forums are large­ly mod­er­at­ed by vol­un­teers, so r/The_Donald is going to be mod­er­at­ed by Trump fans. Red­dit’s own mod­er­a­tors are large­ly watch­ing to ensure the vol­un­teer mod­er­a­tors are actu­al­ly enforc­ing the rules. And, sur­prise!, it turns out numer­ous users on r/The_Donald forum have been post­ing mes­sages encour­ag­ing vio­lence against law enforce­ment and gov­ern­ment offi­cials in response to the stunt pulled by the Ore­gon GOP state sen­a­tors who recent­ly fled the state in order to block cli­mate change leg­is­la­tion and enlist­ed the help of mili­tia mem­bers.

So what’s Red­dit’s response to the threats of vio­lence? Well, Red­dit has banned sub­red­dits entire­ly for vio­lent post­ings, but in this case it only respond­ed to the vio­lent post­ings fol­low­ing a report by Media Mat­ters high­light­ing the posts and then basi­cal­ly did the same thing Twit­ter did: The r/The_Donald sub­red­dit will be “quar­an­tined”, which means peo­ple will see a warn­ing before enter­ing that forum. That’s pret­ty much it:

The Verge

Red­dit quar­an­tines Trump sub­red­dit r/The_Donald for vio­lent com­ments

By Adi Robert­son
Jun 26, 2019, 2:10pm EDT

Red­dit has placed the con­tro­ver­sial Don­ald Trump-focused sub­red­dit r/The_Donald behind a quar­an­tine screen after “repeat­ed” mis­be­hav­ior that includes incit­ing vio­lence. A mod­er­a­tor post­ed an explana­to­ry mes­sage from Red­dit, which has asked mod­er­a­tors to make it clear that “vio­lent con­tent is unac­cept­able” on the forum. The move comes two days after Media Mat­ters for Amer­i­ca not­ed that r/The_Donald mem­bers were sup­port­ing vio­lent attacks on Ore­gon police and oth­er pub­lic offi­cials.

...

Media Mat­ters for Amer­i­ca point­ed out posts where r/The_Donald mem­bers fan­ta­sized about or encour­aged vio­lence relat­ed to Oregon’s recent cli­mate change vote where Repub­li­can law­mak­ers fled the state Sen­ate to pre­vent a cli­mate change bill from pass­ing, one of them even imply­ing that he would respond to any police action with vio­lence. r/The_Donald mem­bers post­ed com­ments like “none of this gets fixed with­out peo­ple pick­ing up rifles” and “[I have] no prob­lems shoot­ing a cop try­ing to strip rights from Cit­i­zens.” The posts were lat­er removed.

The Red­dit post describes the quar­an­tine as the result of repeat­ed rule-break­ing, call­ing out r/The_Donald’s recent “encour­age­ment of vio­lence” against Ore­gon­ian offi­cials.

Over the last few months we have observed repeat­ed rule-break­ing behav­ior in your com­mu­ni­ty and an over-reliance on Red­dit admins to man­age users and remove posts that vio­late our con­tent pol­i­cy, includ­ing con­tent that encour­ages or incites vio­lence. Most recent­ly, we have observed this behav­ior in the form of encour­age­ment of vio­lence towards police offi­cers and pub­lic offi­cials in Ore­gon. This is not only in vio­la­tion of our site-wide poli­cies, but also your own com­mu­ni­ty rules (rule #9). You can find vio­lat­ing con­tent that we removed in your mod logs.

As we have dis­cussed in the past, and as detailed in our con­tent pol­i­cy and mod­er­a­tor guide­lines, we expect you to enforce against rule-break­ing con­tent. You’ve made progress over the last year, but we con­tin­ue to observe and take action on a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of rule-break­ing behav­ior in this com­mu­ni­ty. We rec­og­nize that you do remove posts that are report­ed, but we are trou­bled that vio­lent con­tent more often goes unre­port­ed, and worse, is upvot­ed.

r/The_Donald has been cen­sured for rule-break­ing in the past. In 2016, Red­dit CEO Steve Huff­man said the site would hide some posts from the sub­red­dit, pre­vent­ing them from mak­ing it to the front page. But its polit­i­cal rel­e­vance and pop­u­lar­i­ty have made it a dif­fi­cult tar­get. Huff­man lat­er called it “a small part of a large prob­lem we face in this coun­try — that a large part of the pop­u­la­tion feels unheard, and the last thing we’re going to do is take their voice away.”

Red­dit long resist­ed ban­ning or quar­an­ti­ning sub­red­dits, even ones explic­it­ly devot­ed to white suprema­cy or oth­er hate con­tent. But it’s changed that pol­i­cy in recent years. It banned forums relat­ed to the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry in 2018, and it’s quar­an­tined or purged oth­er far-right sub­red­dits.

r/The_Donald, for its part, hasn’t been banned. The quar­an­tine is a large­ly sym­bol­ic ges­ture. In Reddit’s words, “vis­i­tors to this com­mu­ni­ty will see a warn­ing that requires users to explic­it­ly opt-in to view­ing it. This mes­sag­ing reminds users of the impor­tance of report­ing rule-break­ing con­tent.” It will be reeval­u­at­ed if the mod­er­a­tors “unam­bigu­ous­ly com­mu­ni­cate to your sub­scribers that vio­lent con­tent is unac­cept­able.”

———-

“Red­dit quar­an­tines Trump sub­red­dit r/The_Donald for vio­lent com­ments” by Adi Robert­son; The Verge; 06/26/2019

“r/The_Donald, for its part, hasn’t been banned. The quar­an­tine is a large­ly sym­bol­ic ges­ture. In Reddit’s words, “vis­i­tors to this com­mu­ni­ty will see a warn­ing that requires users to explic­it­ly opt-in to view­ing it. This mes­sag­ing reminds users of the impor­tance of report­ing rule-break­ing con­tent.” It will be reeval­u­at­ed if the mod­er­a­tors “unam­bigu­ous­ly com­mu­ni­cate to your sub­scribers that vio­lent con­tent is unac­cept­able.””

A large­ly sym­bol­ic ‘quar­an­tine’ that con­sists of a warn­ing mes­sage. And note how Red­dit cit­ed the repeat­ed rule-break­ing behav­ior in the forum, high­light­ing how r/The_Donald appears to get spe­cial treat­ment. It keeps break­ing the rules and only after Media Mat­ters wrote its arti­cle did Red­dit do any­thing. And in Red­dit’s expla­na­tion it points out that it has observed r/The_Donald users not just post­ing vio­lent con­tent in recent months but actu­al­ly up-vot­ing the con­tent. In oth­er words, this recent explo­sion of vio­lent posts in response to the Ore­gon fias­co is mere­ly the lat­est instance of an ongo­ing pat­tern of vio­lat­ing Red­dit’s rules and it was only after Media Mat­ters report­ed on it that Red­dit did any­thing about it:

...
The Red­dit post describes the quar­an­tine as the result of repeat­ed rule-break­ing, call­ing out r/The_Donald’s recent “encour­age­ment of vio­lence” against Ore­gon­ian offi­cials.

Over the last few months we have observed repeat­ed rule-break­ing behav­ior in your com­mu­ni­ty and an over-reliance on Red­dit admins to man­age users and remove posts that vio­late our con­tent pol­i­cy, includ­ing con­tent that encour­ages or incites vio­lence. Most recent­ly, we have observed this behav­ior in the form of encour­age­ment of vio­lence towards police offi­cers and pub­lic offi­cials in Ore­gon. This is not only in vio­la­tion of our site-wide poli­cies, but also your own com­mu­ni­ty rules (rule #9). You can find vio­lat­ing con­tent that we removed in your mod logs.

As we have dis­cussed in the past, and as detailed in our con­tent pol­i­cy and mod­er­a­tor guide­lines, we expect you to enforce against rule-break­ing con­tent. You’ve made progress over the last year, but we con­tin­ue to observe and take action on a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of rule-break­ing behav­ior in this com­mu­ni­ty. We rec­og­nize that you do remove posts that are report­ed, but we are trou­bled that vio­lent con­tent more often goes unre­port­ed, and worse, is upvot­ed.

...

So how explic­it­ly vio­lent were the offend­ing posts? As the Media Mat­ters report makes clear, the posts were open calls for a vio­lent insur­rec­tion and the shoot­ing of law enforce­ment. It was­n’t sub­tle:

Media Mat­ters for Amer­i­ca

A pro-Trump sub­red­dit is full of calls for vio­lence in sup­port of Ore­gon Repub­li­cans

ALEX KAPLAN
June 24, 2019 2:45 PM EDT

Users on “The_Donald,” a promi­nent sub­red­dit for sup­port­ers of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, have repeat­ed­ly issued calls for vio­lence in response to Oregon’s gov­er­nor call­ing for law enforce­ment to bring back Repub­li­can state sen­a­tors who fled the state so the state sen­ate would­n’t have the quo­rum to pass cli­mate change action. Despite Reddit’s pol­i­cy bar­ring con­tent that “encour­ages, glo­ri­fies, incites, or calls for vio­lence or phys­i­cal harm,” users have post­ed mes­sages claim­ing that vio­lence is “the only way we’re going to get any peace in our lives” and that it’s “good” to “threat­en vio­lence,” have urged oth­ers to “stock upon that ammo,” and have writ­ten that they would “help” with “shoot­ing a cop try­ing to strip rights from Cit­i­zens.”

Update (6/26/19): Red­dit has now quar­an­tined “The_Donald” due to “threats of vio­lence against police and pub­lic offi­cials,” mean­ing the sub­red­dit will now “gen­er­ate no rev­enue,” “not appear in non-sub­scrip­tion-based feeds (eg Pop­u­lar),” and won’t be “includ­ed in search or rec­om­men­da­tions.”

Update (6/25/19): All com­ments cit­ed in this piece except for one have been removed since pub­li­ca­tion and most have been replaced with the mes­sage: “Com­ment removed by mod­er­a­tor.”

Red­dit pro­hibits con­tent that “encour­ages,” “incites,” or “calls for vio­lence,” and the site has pre­vi­ous­ly banned sub­red­dits for vio­lat­ing that pol­i­cy

Red­dit: “Do not post con­tent that encour­ages, glo­ri­fies, incites, or calls for vio­lence or phys­i­cal harm.” Reddit’s “account and com­mu­ni­ty restric­tions” include a pro­hi­bi­tion of “con­tent that encour­ages, glo­ri­fies, incites, or calls for vio­lence or phys­i­cal harm against an indi­vid­ual or a group of peo­ple.” From the pol­i­cy:

Do not post con­tent that encour­ages, glo­ri­fies, incites, or calls for vio­lence or phys­i­cal harm against an indi­vid­ual or a group of peo­ple; like­wise, do not post con­tent that glo­ri­fies or encour­ages the abuse of ani­mals. We under­stand there are some­times rea­sons to post vio­lent con­tent (e.g., edu­ca­tion­al, news­wor­thy, artis­tic, satire, doc­u­men­tary, etc.) so if you’re going to post some­thing vio­lent in nature that does not vio­late these terms, ensure you pro­vide con­text to the view­er so the rea­son for post­ing is clear.

If your con­tent is bor­der­line, please use a NSFW tag. Even mild vio­lence can be dif­fi­cult for some­one to explain to oth­ers if they open it unex­pect­ed­ly. [Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

Red­dit has pre­vi­ous­ly banned mul­ti­ple sub­red­dits in vio­la­tion of this pol­i­cy. Red­dit “shut down sev­er­al Nazi and white suprema­cist sub­red­dits” in 2017 after its pol­i­cy came into effect, accord­ing to The Verge. In 2018, the site banned the largest sub­red­dit ded­i­cat­ed to the Qanon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, cit­ing “repeat­ed vio­la­tions of the terms” of its con­tent pol­i­cy, NBC News report­ed, not­ing that the forum was “host to a stream of vio­lent threats.” And on June 20, the plat­form banned the sub­red­dit “r/frenworld,” which “fea­tured racist and anti-Semit­ic Pepe the Frog-style car­toons,” with a spokesper­son say­ing it “vio­lat­ed rules against encour­ag­ing and glo­ri­fy­ing vio­lence,” accord­ing to The Dai­ly Beast reporter Will Som­mer. [The Verge, 10/25/17; NBC News, 9/12/18; Twit­ter, 6/20/19]

Users of the sub­red­dit “The_Donald” have post­ed in sup­port of vio­lent­ly defend­ing Ore­gon GOP state sen­a­tors against law enforce­ment

...

Users on the sub­red­dit “The_Donald” have post­ed calls to vio­lence and sup­port for the armed mili­tias. In response to reports about mili­tias’ pledges to defend GOP leg­is­la­tors from being com­pelled by law enforce­ment to attend leg­isla­tive ses­sions, mul­ti­ple users on the sub­red­dit “The_Donald” issued calls for vio­lence to help the law­mak­ers, along with issu­ing sup­port for the mili­tias.

* A user wrote, “None of this gets fixed with­out peo­ple pick­ing up rifles,” to which anoth­er user respond­ed, “If that’s what it takes for us and our mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ty to be heard I sup­pose it may become nec­es­sary soon­er than we think.”
[see screen­shot]
[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

* A user wrote, “Rifles are the only way we’re going to get any peace in our lives ever again,” adding, “It’s either war and we get rid of these guys or a life­time of lis­ten­ing to this shit over and over again start get­ting your­self ready.”
[see screen­shot]
[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

* A user wrote, “There is only one way to get rid of a dic­ta­tor­ship like this. You don’t want to acknowl­edge it and they made it ille­gal to do so but you have a choice — bite the bul­let or let the col­lapse fall onto your kids instead of you.”
[see screen­shot]
[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

* A user called for “burn[ing] Port­land and Eugene to the ground.”
[see screen­shot]
[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

* Cit­ing the Sec­ond Amend­ment, anoth­er user crit­i­cized the lack of armed action from oth­ers “against gov­ern­ment tyrany,” adding, “Now there is proven gov­ern­ment tyrany and you do noth­ing?”
[see screen­shot]
[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

* A user wrote, “Hope­ful­ly all State Police in Ore­gon refuse, hes seri­ous. No prob­lems shoot­ing a cop try­ing to strip rights from Cit­i­zens. If he calls for help I’d come.”
[see screen­shot]
[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

* A user called for “more mili­tia men in Ore­gon. Michi­gan, Ida­ho, Wash­ing­ton, Neva­da, Utah, Col­orado,” adding, “You know what to do. Flood Ore­gon and take over Port­land. Let’s make this hap­pen.”
[see screen­shot]

[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

* A user wrote, “Every­one needs to start get­ting into shape, sharp­en­ing up your marks­man­ship and learn­ing the ins and outs of all your fire arms. Stock upon that ammo too.”
[see screen­shot]

[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

* Anoth­er user wrote that it was “good” to “threat­en vio­lence … because noth­ing else is work­ing.”
[see screen­shot]
[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

* A user wrote in response to the governor’s order, “Tree of Lib­er­ty seems thirsty,” a ref­er­ence to for­mer Pres­i­dent Thomas Jefferson’s quote that “the tree of lib­er­ty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patri­ots & tyrants.”
[see screen­shot]
[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

* A user wrote that they were “at the point where I hope [vio­lence] hap­pens” as a “cat­a­lyst to purge their ide­ol­o­gy from gov­ern­ment.” Regard­ing the governor’s order, anoth­er user wrote: “The soap box has been for­bid­den to be used. The bal­lot box has been abused. The ammo box is what they then choose.”
[see screen­shot]
[Red­dit, accessed 6/24/19]

———-

“A pro-Trump sub­red­dit is full of calls for vio­lence in sup­port of Ore­gon Repub­li­cans” by ALEX KAPLAN; Media Mat­ters for Amer­i­ca; 06/24/2019

“Red­dit pro­hibits con­tent that “encour­ages,” “incites,” or “calls for vio­lence,” and the site has pre­vi­ous­ly banned sub­red­dits for vio­lat­ing that pol­i­cy”

As we can see, some sub­red­dits (forums) get banned for repeat­ed vio­la­tions of the pol­i­cy against calls for vio­lence. But not r/The_Donald. That forum gets to repeat­ed­ly ignore the rules and it’s only after Media Mat­ters doc­u­ments numer­ous calls for an armed insur­rec­tion that the forum gets punished...with a slap on the wrist in the form of a ‘quar­an­tine’ that is entire­ly sym­bol­ic.

It’s anoth­er exam­ple of how the far right is indeed cor­rect when they com­plain about being treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly by the tech giants. It just hap­pens to be spe­cial def­er­en­tial treat­ment.

In the wake of the deci­sion yes­ter­day by Cloud­flare to remove its denial of ser­vice attack pro­tec­tion ser­vices for 8chan fol­low­ing the neo-Nazi domes­tic ter­ror attack in El Paso, TX, here’s an SPLC Hate­watch report from back in June about anoth­er impor­tant ele­ment of the the online pro­pa­gan­da infra­struc­ture used to rad­i­cal­ized, recruit, and encour­age ‘lone wolf’ neo-Nazi mass mur­der­ers: Telegram, the encrypt­ed mes­sag­ing app.

Telegram has around 200 mil­lion dai­ly users world­wide so this is a very main­stream app. Telegram has both pub­licly avail­able and encrypt­ed modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Hate­watch exam­ined just the pub­licly avail­able mes­sag­ing chan­nels and found that Telegram has mul­ti­ple chan­nels devot­ed to “ter­ror­wave”, the term for inter­net-based pro­pa­gan­da that glo­ri­fies polit­i­cal vio­lence through the use of heav­i­ly styl­ized, cyber­punk aes­thet­ics.

Worse, Hate­watch found that chan­nel mod­er­a­tors them­selves were urg­ing fol­low­ers to “desta­bi­lize the US,” “kill the cops,” “shoot law­mak­ers” and attack syn­a­gogues, mosques and oth­er hous­es of wor­ship. Again, that’s what the mod­er­a­tors were encour­ag­ing on the pub­licly avail­able chan­nels. Past neo-Nazi ter­ror­ists like Dylann Roof are hailed as heros and referred to “Saint Roof”. One chan­nel, oper­at­ed by the pro­duc­ers of the “Bowl­cast” (named after Roof’s bowl hair­cut), posts the per­son­al infor­ma­tion of activists and jour­nal­ists includ­ing address­es and phone num­bers. So they aren’t just gener­i­cal­ly encour­ag­ing mass ter­ror attacks but also pro­vid­ing lists of tar­gets.

Some of the peo­ple who run these chan­nels were pre­vi­ous­ly ‘pro-Trump’ online fig­ures before get­ting kicked off oth­er social media plat­forms. Jared Wyand, a Geor­gia-based white suprema­cist, accu­mu­lat­ing over 100,000 Twit­ter fol­low­ers as a Pro-Trump Twit­ter per­sona before being sus­pend­ed in Decem­ber 2016 for post­ing anti­se­mit­ic com­men­tary. And Paul Nehlen was at one point a Trump-backed ris­ing star in the Repub­li­can Par­ty before he out­ed him­self as a vio­lent neo-Nazi. So these would be exam­ples of peo­ple who would have already had a sub­stan­tial online fol­low­ing before shift­ing to Telegram and open­ly pro­mot­ing domes­tic ter­ror.

Inter­est­ing­ly, regard­ing the ongo­ing ques­tion of whether or not the far right is inten­tion­al­ly attack­ing the US pow­er grid, one of exam­ples Hate­watch found of how the posts on these chan­nels would use sar­casm and humor as a kind of rhetor­i­cal shield for what they were advo­cat­ing, one user post­ed, “Do not do any of these things. Espe­cial­ly do not cov­er your face and destroy the many, and large­ly unpro­tect­ed, pow­er sta­tions and cell tow­ers. Elec­tric­i­ty is a ghost, but one you can catch and kill. Do not do that. Do not become the sort of per­son who is real­ly good at blow­ing up pow­er plants with­out get­ting caught.”

After Hate­watch noti­fied the tech com­pa­nies that dis­trib­ute the Telegram app for their smart­phones (Apple, Microsoft, and Google) about the var­i­ous chan­nels that were open­ly pro­mot­ing ter­ror attacks, a minor­i­ty of the chan­nels were ren­dered inac­ces­si­ble on devices cre­at­ed by Apple and Microsoft, but not Google. So it appears that the tech com­pa­nies have the option to cut off access to spe­cif­ic chan­nels if they want to but most­ly choose not to even when the SPLC hands them a list. In oth­er words, it’s tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble to cut off just the offend­ing chan­nels on Telegram with­out tak­ing down the entire plat­form, which should make the removal of these chan­nels a lot less con­tro­ver­sial. While the issue of how aggres­sive­ly tech com­pa­nies should be polic­ing the free-speech of plat­forms is under­stand­ably a del­i­cate top­ic even in the face of a wild­ly suc­cess­ful online neo-Nazi domes­tic ter­ror pro­pa­gan­da cam­paign, it seems like the Telegram chan­nels where they open­ly call for ter­ror attacks and post lists of assas­si­na­tion tar­gets should be pret­ty uncon­tro­ver­sial tar­gets for cen­sor­ship for com­pa­nies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google. And yet, it sounds like the com­pa­nies were actu­al­ly pret­ty hes­i­tant to block those chan­nels and Google did­n’t block any of them:

South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter
Hate­watch

Far-Right Extrem­ists Are Call­ing for Ter­ror­ism on the Mes­sag­ing App Telegram

Neo-Nazis, white nation­al­ists and antigov­ern­ment extrem­ists are pub­lish­ing vol­umes of pro­pa­gan­da advo­cat­ing ter­ror­ism and mass shoot­ings on Telegram, a Hate­watch review of hun­dreds of chan­nels on that app reveals.

Michael Edi­son Hay­den
June 27, 2019

Hate­watch exam­ined pub­licly vis­i­ble posts on the mes­sag­ing app in which chan­nel mod­er­a­tors urge their fol­low­ers to “desta­bi­lize the US,” “kill the cops,” “shoot law­mak­ers” and attack syn­a­gogues, mosques and oth­er hous­es of wor­ship.

Hate­watch noti­fied tech com­pa­nies that dis­trib­ute Telegram about the con­tent on that plat­form that appears to advo­cate ter­ror­ism. Dur­ing that time, a minor­i­ty of the chan­nels flagged by Hate­watch were ren­dered inac­ces­si­ble on devices cre­at­ed by Apple and Microsoft, but not Google. Hate­watch, as of this writ­ing, was able to view the major­i­ty of chan­nels we found advo­cat­ing ter­ror on all devices that sup­port Telegram.

Peo­ple in the same Telegram chan­nels reviewed by Hate­watch fre­quent­ly post memes glo­ri­fy­ing ter­ror­ists such as Anders Breivik, the man who killed 77 peo­ple in a Nor­we­gian ter­ror attack in 2011, and Dylann Roof, a South Car­oli­na man who mur­dered nine black church­go­ers in 2015.

Telegram users also praise Robert Bow­ers. Bow­ers has been charged with fed­er­al hate crimes after 11 peo­ple were killed in a Pitts­burgh syn­a­gogue shoot­ing in 2018. The same Telegram users also typ­i­cal­ly praise the man who stands accused of killing 51 Mus­lims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. Author­i­ties have asked the media not to use the man’s name, which is why Hate­watch chose not to pub­lish it in this sto­ry.

Telegram has mul­ti­ple chan­nels devot­ed to so-called ter­ror­wave, which refers to inter­net-based pro­pa­gan­da that glo­ri­fies polit­i­cal vio­lence through the use of heav­i­ly styl­ized, cyber­punk aes­thet­ics.

One meme post­ed to a group like this on June 17, the fourth anniver­sary of Roof’s mur­ders, showed a pho­to­graph of the book SIEGE by neo-Nazi James Mason. Mason encour­aged his read­ers to embrace ter­ror­ism in the name of desta­bi­liz­ing West­ern coun­tries, which he believed would give rise to a new coun­try for only white, non-Jews. Words are lay­ered on top of the book that say things like “READ SIEGE” and “HAIL TERROR.”

“One last hail to Saint Roof,” the chan­nel mod­er­a­tor wrote on the anniver­sary of Roof’s mur­ders. “May today and every­day be a pleas­ant one for him. He’s earned it.”

Paul Nehlen, the for­mer GOP can­di­date for Con­gress in Wis­con­sin turned advo­cate of polit­i­cal vio­lence, posts imagery in his chan­nel that glo­ri­fies white ter­ror­ists, alleged or oth­er­wise, as “saints.”

The pro­duc­ers of the pod­cast “Bowl­cast,” named after the style of hair­cut worn by Roof, oper­ate a chan­nel that posts sim­i­lar imagery as well as per­son­al infor­ma­tion of activists and reporters, includ­ing address­es and phone num­bers.

Jared Wyand, a Geor­gia-based white suprema­cist, appeared to advo­cate a race war on a Telegram chan­nel he oper­ates. Wyand amassed over 100,000 fol­low­ers as a Pro-Trump Twit­ter per­sona before being sus­pend­ed from that site in Decem­ber 2016 for post­ing anti­se­mit­ic com­men­tary.

“Men, you have one sim­ple task in the imme­di­ate. Arm your­selves. Train pro­fi­cien­cy with your firearms. Build a stock­pile of ammo,” Wyand wrote to his Telegram fol­low­ers June 7. “If you’ve already done this, push the men you know to do the same. Every­one is ask­ing what can be done. This is step one. You owe it to me and all White men to be capa­ble and ready the day you’re asked to join ranks and take up arms.”

Telegram users in chan­nels that pro­mote ter­ror also dis­cuss weapon­ry, includ­ing the sub­ject of build­ing guns with 3D print­ers and home­made meth­ods. A Telegram chan­nel mod­er­a­tor in a group that men­tions Mason’s book SIEGE in its title post­ed instruc­tions on how to build a “slap gun,” which he described as being a makeshift replace­ment for a shot­gun.

“It’s easy to 3D print a firearm,” the user wrote, before shar­ing an instruc­tion man­u­al for the device and a demon­stra­tion video shot in the Ukraine. “It’s eas­i­er to make a shot­gun using two lengths of pipe, a nail, and a bit of weld­ing.”

Telegram tracks the num­ber of peo­ple who see a par­tic­u­lar post with a small track­er, marked with an eye. Over 2,000 Telegram users viewed the gun-mak­ing instruc­tions with­in 48 hours.

On June 20, a pseu­do­ny­mous Telegram user going by the han­dle “Choke Me Dad­dy” post­ed a pic­ture of a man wear­ing a skull mask, which is asso­ci­at­ed with con­tem­po­rary neo-Nazi cul­ture. The man point­ed to what looked like a series of pow­er lines across a met­al fence. The lan­guage in the post offers an exam­ple of how some white suprema­cists appear to endorse vio­lence and ter­ror­ism while also couch­ing their words in irony and in-jokes based around negat­ing that sen­ti­ment.

“Please note,” Choke Me Dad­dy wrote. “Do not do any of these things. Espe­cial­ly do not cov­er your face and destroy the many, and large­ly unpro­tect­ed, pow­er sta­tions and cell tow­ers. Elec­tric­i­ty is a ghost, but one you can catch and kill. Do not do that. Do not become the sort of per­son who is real­ly good at blow­ing up pow­er plants with­out get­ting caught.”

Bran­don Rus­sell, the founder of Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion, a con­tem­po­rary neo-Nazi group, alleged­ly sought to blow up pow­er lines and places of wor­ship before being con­vict­ed for build­ing explo­sives in Jan­u­ary 2018.

Mod­er­a­tors of neo-Nazi groups shared Choke Me Daddy’s post wide­ly across their chan­nels, and as a result, over 1,000 Telegram users viewed Choke Me Daddy’s post with­in 24 hours of it going live.

Fol­low­ing ISIS’s lead toward a say-any­thing plat­form

Crit­ics have raised alarms about groups like ISIS employ­ing Telegram to orga­nize and spread pro­pa­gan­da for years, but the influx of far-right con­tent advo­cat­ing ter­ror­ism is far more recent, accord­ing to Hatewatch’s analy­sis.

An exten­sive report on ISIS’s Telegram usage pub­lished by George Wash­ing­ton University’s Pro­gram on Extrem­ism in June sug­gests the Islam­ic ter­ror group was using the mes­sag­ing app for sim­i­lar pur­pos­es as far back as 2015.

Fol­low­ing ISIS-led attacks in Paris in Novem­ber 2015, Telegram also shut down hun­dreds of chan­nels linked to the group on the app. ISIS remains active on Telegram, accord­ing to the find­ings of George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty researchers.

Andrew Anglin, the edi­tor of the neo-Nazi web­site Dai­ly Stormer, first made a pub­lic pitch to his audi­ence to embrace Telegram as an alter­na­tive to the gam­ing plat­form Dis­cord in an Aug. 31, 2018, sto­ry called “Please Stop Using Dis­cord. The SPLC is Mon­i­tor­ing You” – three years after ISIS embraced the app. The post appears to be among the first high-pro­file endorse­ments of Telegram with­in the white suprema­cist com­mu­ni­ty, based upon Hatewatch’s analy­sis.

Anglin por­trayed Dis­cord, an app which grew pop­u­lar with the white suprema­cist “alt-right” move­ment in the lead-up to the “Unite the Right” ral­ly in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, as being infil­trat­ed by antifas­cist activists, the media col­lec­tive Uni­corn Riot, South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter and oth­ers. He put forth Telegram as a more trust­wor­thy alter­na­tive to Dis­cord:

[Telegram] does require a phone num­ber, but you can either buy a burn­er phone or get a Google Phone num­ber for free.

Telegram allows you to have large “chan­nels” with lots of options for meme post­ing and the abil­i­ty for cus­tom emoti­cons. It is great soft­ware. You can also keep things pri­vate.

There is a phone app and a desk­top app, both of which are very pol­ished.

It also allows “secret chats” with end-to-end encryp­tion.

They just refused to give their encryp­tion keys to the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment, and got banned in the entire coun­try (using some pret­ty extreme means) for it. So the secret encrypt­ed chats are safe. The chan­nels and non end-to-end chats are not that safe, but they’re hel­la safer than Dis­cord.

Anglin refers in his endorse­ment of Telegram to the company’s con­flict with the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment over its pri­va­cy poli­cies. Rus­sia has attempt­ed with mixed suc­cess to block Telegram and has opposed its usage because Telegram offers to pro­tect the pri­va­cy of its cit­i­zens. The gov­ern­ment of Iran has also made efforts to block the app for sim­i­lar rea­sons.

Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, was born in Rus­sia but lives in Dubai. In response to pres­sure from the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment, he posed shirt­less on Insta­gram in April 2018. He defied Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin with a state­ment in that post that said: “News from the front: Russ­ian author­i­ties have blocked 18 mil­lion IP address­es to ban Telegram, but the app remains acces­si­ble for Rus­sians. Thank you for all the sup­port and love #dig­i­tal­re­sis­tance #putin­shirt­less­chal­lenge.”

Durov, who also cre­at­ed the Russ­ian Face­book clone VKon­tak­te (VK), lists his polit­i­cal beliefs on that web­site as “Lib­er­tar­i­an” and his reli­gion as “Lais­sez-faire,” refer­ring to the atti­tude of let­ting the free mar­ket func­tion with­out gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence. VK, it should be not­ed, also hosts pock­ets of open far-right extrem­ists on its plat­form, includ­ing Andrew “Weev” Auern­heimer of the Dai­ly Stormer, for exam­ple, and neo-Nazi Bil­ly Rop­er.

Durov post­ed a visu­al ad for Telegram on VK in May 2018, which appeared to por­tray his users defeat­ing a fas­cist regime through the help of his app. The ad depicts car­toon bears fir­ing paper air­planes, which Telegram uses as its logo, as flags rem­i­nis­cent of those used by Nazi Ger­many dur­ing WWII burn in blue flames.

The Proud Boys, which South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter lists as a hate group and is also active on Telegram, repost­ed a mes­sage from Durov’s chan­nel on June 25.

“I see 3 mil­lion new users signed up for Telegram with­in the last 24 hours,” Durov wrote in the post shared by the Proud Boys. “Good. We have true pri­va­cy and unlim­it­ed space for every­one.”

The poten­tial dan­gers of Telegram vs. oth­er plat­forms

There are cru­cial dif­fer­ences between Telegram and oth­er plat­forms that pub­lish white suprema­cist pro­pa­gan­da, some of which poten­tial­ly make the app more dan­ger­ous, based upon Hatewatch’s analy­sis.

For exam­ple, Telegram offers both pri­vate and pub­lic group chats. This means extrem­ists can con­nect in chan­nels that post pub­licly fac­ing pro­pa­gan­da and then orga­nize pri­vate­ly on the same app by using its encrypt­ed chat fea­ture, where plans to com­mit acts of ter­ror can go unde­tect­ed by law enforce­ment agen­cies. Although crit­ics have sug­gest­ed Telegram’s promis­es of secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions are overblown, the app is demon­stra­bly slick, func­tion­al and acces­si­ble on mobile devices.

Gab, a small social net­work that has also attract­ed a wide swath of white suprema­cist users in recent years, includ­ing the alleged Tree of Life syn­a­gogue killer Bow­ers, has been plagued with glitch­es since its incep­tion. White suprema­cists have used its direct-mes­sage fea­ture to orga­nize, Hate­watch report­ed in Jan­u­ary, but the con­ver­sa­tions are not encrypt­ed. Gab has also strug­gled to pro­mote its social net­work effec­tive­ly on mobile devices, due to tech com­pa­nies drop­ping its app from their stores.

8chan’s forum “pol” is anony­mous and doesn’t allow peo­ple who post pro­pa­gan­da to the forum to build the kind of per­son­al­i­ty-dri­ven cul­ture found on tra­di­tion­al social net­works like Twit­ter or Face­book. Both the alleged Christchurch ter­ror­ist and John Earnest, the man who accused of killing one in a syn­a­gogue in Poway, Cal­i­for­nia, in April, favored the forum.

Telegram does allow white suprema­cist per­son­al­i­ties who either overt­ly advo­cate ter­ror­ism or appear to tac­it­ly endorse it to build an audi­ence for their dif­fer­ent brands of pro­pa­gan­da, as evi­denced by chan­nels belong­ing to Wyand, the mem­bers of “Bowl­cast” and Nehlen, for exam­ple.

Per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between Telegram and fringe plat­forms like Gab and 8chan, how­ev­er, is the num­ber of peo­ple who use the app on a giv­en day. The com­pa­ny boast­ed in 2018 that it reach­es 200,000,000 active users. Even if the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of those users may like­ly avoid mak­ing con­tact with chan­nels that advo­cate ter­ror­ism, Telegram is demon­stra­bly main­stream and glob­al. It’s also dis­trib­uted through stores oper­at­ed by main­stream tech giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Tech com­pa­nies choose to respond to or ignore Hatewatch’s find­ings

Hate­watch reached out to Telegram for a com­ment on the research con­duct­ed on white suprema­cists appear­ing to use their prod­uct to advo­cate com­mit­ting acts of ter­ror­ism. Hate­watch attempt­ed to make con­tact via text, email and final­ly phone at var­i­ous times over three weeks with­out receiv­ing a response.

Google cur­rent­ly dis­trib­utes Telegram through the Google Play store. Hate­watch reached out to Google by email three times over the same three-week span with­out receiv­ing a response.

Apple dis­trib­utes the Telegram app through its app store. Hate­watch engaged in con­ver­sa­tions with Apple mul­ti­ple times across the same three-week span regard­ing the con­tent we found on the app. Apple request­ed to review chan­nels in which Hate­watch found evi­dence of posts appear­ing to advo­cate ter­ror­ism. Dur­ing the report­ing peri­od, some of the chan­nels Hate­watch flagged, but not all, appeared to be inac­ces­si­ble to white suprema­cists on some Apple-brand­ed devices. Apple elect­ed not to issue a state­ment regard­ing the con­tent on Telegram flagged by Hate­watch.

Microsoft dis­trib­utes Telegram through their Microsoft Store. They respond­ed to a request for com­ment about the con­tent flagged by Hate­watch with a state­ment:

Microsoft Store offers a plat­form for devel­op­ers to pro­vide prod­ucts to cus­tomers world­wide. Con­tent in those prod­ucts and appli­ca­tions is con­trolled and main­tained by the devel­op­ers. Microsoft main­tains our crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant respon­si­bil­i­ty to ensure our Store is not abused by peo­ple or groups facil­i­tat­ing or glam­or­iz­ing extreme or gra­tu­itous vio­lence. If we receive and ver­i­fy a report that an app in Win­dows Store vio­lates our store con­tent poli­cies, we will ask the devel­op­er to remove the vio­lat­ing con­tent. If the devel­op­er fails to take appro­pri­ate action, we reserve the right to sus­pend or ter­mi­nate the developer’s app from the Store. We have informed Telegram of the pub­lic posts that vio­late our Microsoft Store Poli­cies. We have an estab­lished his­to­ry of enforce­ment against sim­i­lar issues.

...

———

“Far-Right Extrem­ists Are Call­ing for Ter­ror­ism on the Mes­sag­ing App Telegram” by Michael Edi­son Hay­den; South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter Hate­watch; 06/27/2019

“Telegram has mul­ti­ple chan­nels devot­ed to so-called ter­ror­wave, which refers to inter­net-based pro­pa­gan­da that glo­ri­fies polit­i­cal vio­lence through the use of heav­i­ly styl­ized, cyber­punk aes­thet­ics.”

Mul­ti­ple chan­nels devot­ed to “ter­ror­wave”. That’s what Hate­watch found. Also keep in mind that Hate­watch was only able to see what was being dis­cussed in the unen­crypt­ed pub­licly avail­able Telegram chan­nels. The encrypt­ed chan­nels which are osten­si­bly inac­ces­si­ble to author­i­ties are pre­sum­ably far more explic­it in advo­cat­ing for ‘lone wolf’ ter­ror attacks. So it’s worth not­ing one of the fun facts about Telegram revealed by Wik­ileaks in March of 2017: the CIA found a way to bypass Telegram’s encryp­tion. It would be inter­est­ing to know if those capa­bil­i­ties are being used at all against these ter­ror­wave chan­nel mem­bers.

Some of these ter­ror­wave chan­nels were head­ed by peo­ple who pre­vi­ous­ly had large online fol­low­ings on oth­er plat­forms, includ­ing for­mer GOP ris­ing star Paul Nehlen:

...
One meme post­ed to a group like this on June 17, the fourth anniver­sary of Roof’s mur­ders, showed a pho­to­graph of the book SIEGE by neo-Nazi James Mason. Mason encour­aged his read­ers to embrace ter­ror­ism in the name of desta­bi­liz­ing West­ern coun­tries, which he believed would give rise to a new coun­try for only white, non-Jews. Words are lay­ered on top of the book that say things like “READ SIEGE” and “HAIL TERROR.”

“One last hail to Saint Roof,” the chan­nel mod­er­a­tor wrote on the anniver­sary of Roof’s mur­ders. “May today and every­day be a pleas­ant one for him. He’s earned it.”

Paul Nehlen, the for­mer GOP can­di­date for Con­gress in Wis­con­sin turned advo­cate of polit­i­cal vio­lence, posts imagery in his chan­nel that glo­ri­fies white ter­ror­ists, alleged or oth­er­wise, as “saints.”

...

Jared Wyand, a Geor­gia-based white suprema­cist, appeared to advo­cate a race war on a Telegram chan­nel he oper­ates. Wyand amassed over 100,000 fol­low­ers as a Pro-Trump Twit­ter per­sona before being sus­pend­ed from that site in Decem­ber 2016 for post­ing anti­se­mit­ic com­men­tary.

“Men, you have one sim­ple task in the imme­di­ate. Arm your­selves. Train pro­fi­cien­cy with your firearms. Build a stock­pile of ammo,” Wyand wrote to his Telegram fol­low­ers June 7. “If you’ve already done this, push the men you know to do the same. Every­one is ask­ing what can be done. This is step one. You owe it to me and all White men to be capa­ble and ready the day you’re asked to join ranks and take up arms.”
...

The names and address­es of activists and reporters are also found on these chan­nels, so there are actu­al hit lists being dis­trib­uted:

...
The pro­duc­ers of the pod­cast “Bowl­cast,” named after the style of hair­cut worn by Roof, oper­ate a chan­nel that posts sim­i­lar imagery as well as per­son­al infor­ma­tion of activists and reporters, includ­ing address­es and phone num­bers.
...

And to get a sense of how many peo­ple are read­ing these chan­nels, Hate­watch found that over 2,000 peo­ple viewed a post describ­ing how to make a makeshift shot­gun with­in 48 hours. So 1,000 views a day for just that post. That’s a lot of neo-Nazis learn­ing how to make guns:

...
Telegram users in chan­nels that pro­mote ter­ror also dis­cuss weapon­ry, includ­ing the sub­ject of build­ing guns with 3D print­ers and home­made meth­ods. A Telegram chan­nel mod­er­a­tor in a group that men­tions Mason’s book SIEGE in its title post­ed instruc­tions on how to build a “slap gun,” which he described as being a makeshift replace­ment for a shot­gun.

“It’s easy to 3D print a firearm,” the user wrote, before shar­ing an instruc­tion man­u­al for the device and a demon­stra­tion video shot in the Ukraine. “It’s eas­i­er to make a shot­gun using two lengths of pipe, a nail, and a bit of weld­ing.”

Telegram tracks the num­ber of peo­ple who see a par­tic­u­lar post with a small track­er, marked with an eye. Over 2,000 Telegram users viewed the gun-mak­ing instruc­tions with­in 48 hours.
...

And then there’s the post jok­ing­ly describ­ing how to attack the pow­er grid:

...
On June 20, a pseu­do­ny­mous Telegram user going by the han­dle “Choke Me Dad­dy” post­ed a pic­ture of a man wear­ing a skull mask, which is asso­ci­at­ed with con­tem­po­rary neo-Nazi cul­ture. The man point­ed to what looked like a series of pow­er lines across a met­al fence. The lan­guage in the post offers an exam­ple of how some white suprema­cists appear to endorse vio­lence and ter­ror­ism while also couch­ing their words in irony and in-jokes based around negat­ing that sen­ti­ment.

“Please note,” Choke Me Dad­dy wrote. “Do not do any of these things. Espe­cial­ly do not cov­er your face and destroy the many, and large­ly unpro­tect­ed, pow­er sta­tions and cell tow­ers. Elec­tric­i­ty is a ghost, but one you can catch and kill. Do not do that. Do not become the sort of per­son who is real­ly good at blow­ing up pow­er plants with­out get­ting caught.”

Bran­don Rus­sell, the founder of Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion, a con­tem­po­rary neo-Nazi group, alleged­ly sought to blow up pow­er lines and places of wor­ship before being con­vict­ed for build­ing explo­sives in Jan­u­ary 2018.

Mod­er­a­tors of neo-Nazi groups shared Choke Me Daddy’s post wide­ly across their chan­nels, and as a result, over 1,000 Telegram users viewed Choke Me Daddy’s post with­in 24 hours of it going live.
...

And recall that Bran­don Rus­sell did­n’t sim­ply talk about blow­ing up pow­er lines. He want­ed to stage a mor­tar attack on a nuclear pow­er plant to cause a melt­down and depop­u­lat­ing South Flori­da for the pur­pose of set­ting up a Fourth Reich there.

And how did the tech giants of Microsoft, Apple and Google respond when Hate­watch gave them a list of these ter­ror­wave Telegram chan­nels? Well, Microsoft issued a state­ment about how it informed Telegram of the offend­ing chan­nels and reserved the right to remove Telegram from its app store if Telegram does­n’t address their con­cerns. So that sounds like Microsoft was basi­cal­ly going to do noth­ing. Apple request­ed to review the ter­ror­wave chan­nels Hate­watch list­ed. Some of those chan­nels were dis­abled on Apple-made devices dur­ing this peri­od but Apple chose not to issue a state­ment to Hate­watch fol­low­ing its review. That seems to indi­cate that it’s pos­si­ble for these device man­u­fac­tur­ers to selec­tive­ly remove spe­cif­ic chan­nels with­out remov­ing the entire app. It’s unclear at this point of this chan­nels are cur­rent­ly avail­able or not on Apple-made devices. And Google ignored Hate­watch and its list of ter­ror­wave chan­nels entire­ly:

...
Tech com­pa­nies choose to respond to or ignore Hatewatch’s find­ings

Hate­watch reached out to Telegram for a com­ment on the research con­duct­ed on white suprema­cists appear­ing to use their prod­uct to advo­cate com­mit­ting acts of ter­ror­ism. Hate­watch attempt­ed to make con­tact via text, email and final­ly phone at var­i­ous times over three weeks with­out receiv­ing a response.

Google cur­rent­ly dis­trib­utes Telegram through the Google Play store. Hate­watch reached out to Google by email three times over the same three-week span with­out receiv­ing a response.

Apple dis­trib­utes the Telegram app through its app store. Hate­watch engaged in con­ver­sa­tions with Apple mul­ti­ple times across the same three-week span regard­ing the con­tent we found on the app. Apple request­ed to review chan­nels in which Hate­watch found evi­dence of posts appear­ing to advo­cate ter­ror­ism. Dur­ing the report­ing peri­od, some of the chan­nels Hate­watch flagged, but not all, appeared to be inac­ces­si­ble to white suprema­cists on some Apple-brand­ed devices. Apple elect­ed not to issue a state­ment regard­ing the con­tent on Telegram flagged by Hate­watch.

Microsoft dis­trib­utes Telegram through their Microsoft Store. They respond­ed to a request for com­ment about the con­tent flagged by Hate­watch with a state­ment:

Microsoft Store offers a plat­form for devel­op­ers to pro­vide prod­ucts to cus­tomers world­wide. Con­tent in those prod­ucts and appli­ca­tions is con­trolled and main­tained by the devel­op­ers. Microsoft main­tains our crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant respon­si­bil­i­ty to ensure our Store is not abused by peo­ple or groups facil­i­tat­ing or glam­or­iz­ing extreme or gra­tu­itous vio­lence. If we receive and ver­i­fy a report that an app in Win­dows Store vio­lates our store con­tent poli­cies, we will ask the devel­op­er to remove the vio­lat­ing con­tent. If the devel­op­er fails to take appro­pri­ate action, we reserve the right to sus­pend or ter­mi­nate the developer’s app from the Store. We have informed Telegram of the pub­lic posts that vio­late our Microsoft Store Poli­cies. We have an estab­lished his­to­ry of enforce­ment against sim­i­lar issues.

...

So it’s going to be quite inter­est­ing to see what, if any­thing these tech giants do in response the El Paso neo-Nazi attack. This Hate­watch report is from bare­ly over a month ago so it’s not like it’s out of date news.

Of course, the fact that a major mes­sag­ing app is run­ning chan­nels that pub­licly pro­mote ter­ror and pro­vide hit lists seems like the kind of issue that more than just device man­u­fac­tur­ers are respon­si­ble for address­ing. And Telegram isn’t the only plat­form where researchers have found neo-Nazis open­ly advo­cat­ing for domes­tic ter­ror attacks. Recall how the Steam gam­ing plat­form forums were found to have numer­ous groups where neo-Nazis cel­e­brat­ed school shoot­ers. It’s part of the ongo­ing debate about who is actu­al­ly respon­si­ble in the Unit­ed States for deal­ing with this. A debate that includes the Trump admin­is­tra­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ensur­ing fed­er­al author­i­ties don’t treat white suprema­cists as a sig­nif­i­cant ter­ror threat and instead focus on alleged left-wing threats and anti-fas­cists. So it’s worth keep­ing in mind that not elect­ing open advo­cates of white nation­al­ism to high office would be one way for the Amer­i­can pub­lic at large to help deal with the issue of the grow­ing num­ber of out­lets open­ly rad­i­cal­iz­ing, recruit­ing, and orga­niz­ing ‘lone wolf’ neo-Nazi domes­tic ter­ror­ists.

Here’s a dis­turb­ing fol­low up on “Soph”, the teenage neo-Nazi YouTube star who has near­ly a mil­lion fol­low­ers that high­lights the con­scious role online far right pro­pa­gan­dist play in turn­ing dis­turbed peo­ple into mass mur­der­ers. Like the recent neo-Nazi attack on El Paso: First, recall how, back in April, Soph uploaded a video to YouTube that was basi­cal­ly a 12 minute long death threat against YouTube CEO Susan Woj­ci­c­ki. This was done in response to YouTube deac­ti­vat­ing com­ments on her videos as part of a YouTube-wide new pol­i­cy of deac­ti­vat­ing com­ments on all videos with chil­dren. YouTube pro­ceed­ed to remove the death threat video, but kept the rest of her ‘Alt Right’ videos up. YouTube also issued a “strike” against Soph’s account over the death threat but that was basi­cal­ly it.

So it looks like Soph’s account has final­ly been ter­mi­nat­ed. What final­ly trig­gered it? Well, in June of this year, YouTube start­ed ban­ning videos that include hate speech or pro­mote suprema­cist views. That made Soph’s typ­i­cal hate-filled videos sub­ject to “strikes” under this new pol­i­cy. Sure enough, Soph made a new anti-LGBTQ video that she uploaded on July 31st, and that gave her account enough “strikes” to get ter­mi­nat­ed. We’ll see how long before she reemerges some­how on the plat­form.

But here’s the part that is par­tic­u­lar­ly notable in the con­text of the wave of ‘lone wolf’ neo-Nazi ter­ror attacks: Dur­ing the 12-minute anti-gay rant video, which she called “Pride and Prej­u­dice,” Soph tells her fol­low­ers to “make sure to blame me in your man­i­festos.”

Also recall how Soph admits that she writes the scripts of her videos with an unnamed col­lab­o­ra­tor. So for all we know, some adult neo-Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors had her throw that line in there. Either way, it’s the kind of ‘joke’ com­ment that reveals how the cre­ators of this kind of con­tent ful­ly expect some mem­bers of their audi­ence to go out and mass mur­der peo­ple. And cel­e­brate and encour­age those future ter­ror attacks. In this case, three days before the El Paso neo-Nazi attack:

Buz­zFeed News

YouTube Ter­mi­nat­ed The Account Of A 14-Year-Old Star Over Her Anti-Gay Video

After her account was removed, Soph tweet­ed an image of her­self with what appeared to be a gun, with the cap­tion, “youtube head­quar­ters here I come.”
Joseph Bern­stein
Buz­zFeed News Reporter

Last updat­ed on August 5, 2019, at 1:00 p.m. ET
Post­ed on August 5, 2019, at 12:13 p.m. ET

YouTube has removed the account of Soph, a 14-year-old girl who accu­mu­lat­ed near­ly a mil­lion fol­low­ers through racist and anti-Mus­lim videos, after she uploaded an anti-LGBTQ video on July 31.

In the video, a 12-minute anti-gay rant titled “Pride and Prej­u­dice,” Soph encour­ages her fol­low­ers to “make sure to blame me in your man­i­festos” — a direct ref­er­ence to the kind of doc­u­ment post­ed to 8chan by the Christchurch shoot­er who killed 51 peo­ple in March. On Sat­ur­day, the El Paso shoot­ing sus­pect would also pub­lish a man­i­festo to 8chan before killing 22 peo­ple.

Accord­ing to YouTube, the chan­nel was removed in accor­dance with its strike sys­tem, under which YouTube ter­mi­nates accounts that vio­late its Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines three times in 90 days, in the case of Soph’s chan­nel, the final strike vio­lat­ed the site’s Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines on hate speech.

...

In June, YouTube faced weeks of blis­ter­ing crit­i­cism for its hate speech poli­cies — includ­ing direct ques­tions from the press about the Soph chan­nel. The same month, YouTube announced new poli­cies aimed at reduc­ing “harm­ful con­tent.”

After her chan­nel was tak­en down, Soph tweet­ed an image of her­self with what appears to be an assault rifle, with the cap­tion “youtube head­quar­ters here I come.” She lat­er removed the tweet. “Gun tweet obviosly a joke,” she wrote in a fol­low-up tweet.

———–

“YouTube Ter­mi­nat­ed The Account Of A 14-Year-Old Star Over Her Anti-Gay Video” by Joseph Bern­stein’ Buz­zFeed News’ 08/05/2019

“In the video, a 12-minute anti-gay rant titled “Pride and Prej­u­dice,” Soph encour­ages her fol­low­ers to “make sure to blame me in your man­i­festos” — a direct ref­er­ence to the kind of doc­u­ment post­ed to 8chan by the Christchurch shoot­er who killed 51 peo­ple in March. On Sat­ur­day, the El Paso shoot­ing sus­pect would also pub­lish a man­i­festo to 8chan before killing 22 peo­ple.”

Just three days before the El Paso neo-Nazi attack that involved a man­i­festo, we had YouTube teen neo-Nazi star Soph encour­ag­ing her audi­ence to attribute their attacks to her in their future man­i­festos.

But at least YouTube is no longer com­plete­ly tol­er­at­ing this kind of con­tent, which result­ed in anoth­er ‘joke’ about shoot­ing up YouTube’s head­quar­ters, this time post­ed to Twit­ter:

...
After her chan­nel was tak­en down, Soph tweet­ed an image of her­self with what appears to be an assault rifle, with the cap­tion “youtube head­quar­ters here I come.” She lat­er removed the tweet. “Gun tweet obviosly a joke,” she wrote in a fol­low-up tweet.

It’s going to be inter­est­ing to see how the neo-Nazi pro­pa­gan­da net­works deal with these new YouTube restric­tions on hate speech. But let’s not for­get that those restric­tions were only put in place in June, 14 years after YouTube was start­ed. Which also hap­pens to be the cur­rent age of Soph. Yes, YouTube has had an ‘any­thing goes’ approach to neo-Nazi pro­pa­gan­da for pret­ty much Soph’s entire life. So while ter­mi­na­tion of her account and oth­er YouTube neo-Nazi pro­pa­gan­da accounts will hope­ful­ly slow the neo-Nazi pro­pa­gan­da momen­tum a bit, keep in mind that the neo-Nazi momen­tum has been build­ing up for years now, espe­cial­ly for the kids who have grown up on this stuff.

Here’s an update on the role social media is play­ing in the rad­i­cal­iza­tion of Brazil. We’ve already seen how Face­book’s What­sApp, a major source of news for Brazil­ians, has become over­whelmed with far right mis­in­for­ma­tion and pro­pa­gan­da that includes push­ing the memes that vac­cines are part of a west­ern plot. Now, the New York Times have inves­ti­gat­ed the role YouTube played in the rise of Jair Bol­sonaro and the Brazil­ian far right and, sur­prise!, it turns out YouTube has been doing the same thing in Brazil that it did every­one else: sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly rad­i­cal­ize the pop­u­lace by push­ing peo­ple towards far right videos. And this was all hap­pen­ing dur­ing the peri­od when Bol­sonaro went from a rel­a­tive­ly unknown or unpop­u­lar fig­ure to the nation’s lead­ing politi­cian. But YouTube has­n’t just been instru­men­tal in the rise of Bol­sonaro. An entire gen­er­a­tion of new far right per­son­al­i­ties have fig­ures out how to use YouTube to pro­pel them­selves into office:

The New York Times

How YouTube Rad­i­cal­ized Brazil

By Max Fish­er and Aman­da Taub
Aug. 11, 2019

NITERÓI, Brazil — When Matheus Dominguez was 16, YouTube rec­om­mend­ed a video that changed his life.

He was in a band in Niterói, a beach-ringed city in Brazil, and prac­ticed gui­tar by watch­ing tuto­ri­als online.

YouTube had recent­ly installed a pow­er­ful new arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tem that learned from user behav­ior and paired videos with rec­om­men­da­tions for oth­ers. One day, it direct­ed him to an ama­teur gui­tar teacher named Nan­do Moura, who had gained a wide fol­low­ing by post­ing videos about heavy met­al, video games and, most of all, pol­i­tics.

In col­or­ful and para­noid far-right rants, Mr. Moura accused fem­i­nists, teach­ers and main­stream politi­cians of wag­ing vast con­spir­a­cies. Mr. Dominguez was hooked.

As his time on the site grew, YouTube rec­om­mend­ed videos from oth­er far-right fig­ures. One was a law­mak­er named Jair Bol­sonaro, then a mar­gin­al fig­ure in nation­al pol­i­tics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right com­mu­ni­ty in Brazil, where the plat­form has become more wide­ly watched than all but one TV chan­nel.

Last year, he became Pres­i­dent Bol­sonaro.

“YouTube became the social media plat­form of the Brazil­ian right,” said Mr. Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek polit­i­cal office.

Mem­bers of the nation’s new­ly empow­ered far right — from grass-roots orga­niz­ers to fed­er­al law­mak­ers — say their move­ment would not have risen so far, so fast, with­out YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion engine.

New research has found they may be cor­rect. YouTube’s search and rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tem appears to have sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly divert­ed users to far-right and con­spir­a­cy chan­nels in Brazil.

A New York Times inves­ti­ga­tion in Brazil found that, time and again, videos pro­mot­ed by the site have upend­ed cen­tral ele­ments of dai­ly life.

Teach­ers describe class­rooms made unruly by stu­dents who quote from YouTube con­spir­a­cy videos or who, encour­aged by right-wing YouTube stars, secret­ly record their instruc­tors.

Some par­ents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dan­ger­ous mis­in­for­ma­tion instead, ham­per­ing the nation’s efforts to fight dis­eases like Zika. Viral videos have incit­ed death threats against pub­lic health advo­cates.

And in pol­i­tics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office along­side Mr. Bol­sonaro, some win­ning by his­toric mar­gins. Most still use the plat­form, gov­ern­ing the world’s fourth-largest democ­ra­cy through inter­net-honed trolling and provo­ca­tion.

YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tem is engi­neered to max­i­mize watchtime, among oth­er fac­tors, the com­pa­ny says, but not to favor any polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. The sys­tem sug­gests what to watch next, often play­ing the videos auto­mat­i­cal­ly, in a nev­er-end­ing quest to keep us glued to our screens.

But the emo­tions that draw peo­ple in — like fear, doubt and anger — are often cen­tral fea­tures of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, and in par­tic­u­lar, experts say, of right-wing extrem­ism.

As the sys­tem sug­gests more provoca­tive videos to keep users watch­ing, it can direct them toward extreme con­tent they might oth­er­wise nev­er find. And it is designed to lead users to new top­ics to pique new inter­est — a boon for chan­nels like Mr. Moura’s that use pop cul­ture as a gate­way to far-right ideas.

The sys­tem now dri­ves 70 per­cent of total time on the plat­form, the com­pa­ny says. As view­er­ship sky­rock­ets glob­al­ly, YouTube is bring­ing in over $1 bil­lion a month, some ana­lysts believe.

Zeynep Tufek­ci, a social media schol­ar, has called it “one of the most pow­er­ful rad­i­cal­iz­ing instru­ments of the 21st cen­tu­ry.”

Com­pa­ny rep­re­sen­ta­tives dis­put­ed the stud­ies’ method­ol­o­gy and said that the platform’s sys­tems do not priv­i­lege any one view­point or direct users toward extrem­ism. How­ev­er, com­pa­ny rep­re­sen­ta­tives con­ced­ed some of the find­ings and promised to make changes.

Far­shad Shad­loo, a spokesman, said that YouTube has “invest­ed heav­i­ly in the poli­cies, resources and prod­ucts” to reduce the spread of harm­ful mis­in­for­ma­tion, adding, “we’ve seen that author­i­ta­tive con­tent is thriv­ing in Brazil and is some of the most rec­om­mend­ed con­tent on the site.”

Danah Boyd, founder of the think tank Data & Soci­ety, attrib­uted the dis­rup­tion in Brazil to YouTube’s unre­lent­ing push for view­er engage­ment, and the rev­enues it gen­er­ates.

Though cor­rup­tion scan­dals and a deep reces­sion had already dev­as­tat­ed Brazil’s polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment and left many Brazil­ians ready for a break with the sta­tus quo, Ms. Boyd called YouTube’s impact a wor­ry­ing indi­ca­tion of the platform’s grow­ing impact on democ­ra­cies world­wide.

“This is hap­pen­ing every­where,” she said.

The Par­ty of YouTube

Mau­rí­cio Mar­tins, the local vice pres­i­dent of Mr. Bolsonaro’s par­ty in Niterói, cred­it­ed “most” of the party’s recruit­ment to YouTube — includ­ing his own.

He was killing time on the site one day, he recalled, when the plat­form showed him a video by a right-wing blog­ger. He watched out of curios­i­ty. It showed him anoth­er, and then anoth­er.

“Before that, I didn’t have an ide­o­log­i­cal polit­i­cal back­ground,” Mr. Mar­tins said. YouTube’s auto-play­ing rec­om­men­da­tions, he declared, were “my polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion.”

“It was like that with every­one,” he said.

The platform’s polit­i­cal influ­ence is increas­ing­ly felt in Brazil­ian schools.

“Some­times I’m watch­ing videos about a game, and all of a sud­den it’s a Bol­sonaro video,” said Inza­ghi D., a 17-year-old high school­er in Niterói.

More and more, his fel­low stu­dents are mak­ing extrem­ist claims, often cit­ing as evi­dence YouTube stars like Mr. Moura, the gui­tarist-turned-con­spir­acist.

“It’s the main source that kids have to get infor­ma­tion,” he said.

Few illus­trate YouTube’s influ­ence bet­ter than Car­los Jordy.

Mus­cle­bound and heav­i­ly tat­tooed — his left hand bears a flam­ing skull with dia­mond eyes — he joined the City Coun­cil in 2017 with few prospects of ris­ing through tra­di­tion­al pol­i­tics. So Mr. Jordy took inspi­ra­tion from blog­gers like Mr. Moura and his polit­i­cal men­tor, Mr. Bol­sonaro, turn­ing his focus to YouTube.

He post­ed videos accus­ing local teach­ers of con­spir­ing to indoc­tri­nate stu­dents into com­mu­nism. The videos won him a “nation­al audi­ence,” he said, and pro­pelled his stun­ning rise, only two years lat­er, to the fed­er­al leg­is­la­ture.

“If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jair Bol­sonaro wouldn’t be pres­i­dent.”

Down The Rab­bit Hole

A few hun­dred miles away from Niterói, a team of researchers led by Vir­gilio Almei­da at the Fed­er­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Minas Gerais hunched over com­put­ers, try­ing under­stand how YouTube shapes its users’ real­i­ty.

The team ana­lyzed tran­scripts from thou­sands of videos, as well as the com­ments beneath them. Right-wing chan­nels in Brazil, they found, had seen their audi­ences expand far faster than oth­ers did, and seemed to be tilt­ing the site’s over­all polit­i­cal con­tent.

In the months after YouTube changed its algo­rithm, pos­i­tive men­tions of Mr. Bol­sonaro bal­looned. So did men­tions of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that he had float­ed. This began as polls still showed him to be deeply unpop­u­lar, sug­gest­ing that the plat­form was doing more than mere­ly reflect­ing polit­i­cal trends.

A team at Harvard’s Berk­man Klein Cen­ter set out to test whether the Brazil­ian far right’s mete­oric rise on the plat­form had been boost­ed by YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion engine.

Jonas Kaiser and Yaso­dara Cór­do­va, with Adri­an Rauch­fleisch of Nation­al Tai­wan Uni­ver­si­ty, pro­grammed a Brazil-based serv­er to enter a pop­u­lar chan­nel or search term, then open YouTube’s top rec­om­men­da­tions, then fol­low the rec­om­men­da­tions on each of those, and so on.

By repeat­ing this thou­sands of times, the researchers tracked how the plat­form moved users from one video to the next. They found that after users watched a video about pol­i­tics or even enter­tain­ment, YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tions often favored right-wing, con­spir­a­cy-filled chan­nels like Mr. Moura’s.

Cru­cial­ly, users who watched one far-right chan­nel would often be shown many more.

The algo­rithm had unit­ed once-mar­gin­al chan­nels — and then built an audi­ence for them, the researchers con­clud­ed.

One of those chan­nels belonged to Mr. Bol­sonaro, who had long used the plat­form to post hoax­es and con­spir­a­cies. Though a YouTube ear­ly adopter, his online fol­low­ing had done lit­tle to expand his polit­i­cal base, which bare­ly exist­ed on a nation­al lev­el.

Then Brazil’s polit­i­cal sys­tem col­lapsed just as YouTube’s pop­u­lar­i­ty there soared. Mr. Bolsonaro’s views had not changed. But YouTube’s far-right, where he was a major fig­ure, saw its audi­ence explode, help­ing to prime large num­bers of Brazil­ians for his mes­sage at a time when the coun­try was ripe for a polit­i­cal shift.

YouTube chal­lenged the researchers’ method­ol­o­gy and said its inter­nal data con­tra­dict­ed their find­ings. But the com­pa­ny declined the Times’ requests for that data, as well as requests for cer­tain sta­tis­tics that would reveal whether or not the researchers’ find­ings were accu­rate.

‘Dr. YouTube’

The con­spir­a­cies were not lim­it­ed to pol­i­tics. Many Brazil­ians search­ing YouTube for health care infor­ma­tion found videos that ter­ri­fied them: some said Zika was being spread by vac­cines, or by the insec­ti­cides meant to curb the spread of the mos­qui­to-borne dis­ease that has rav­aged north­east­ern Brazil.

The videos appeared to rise on the plat­form in much the same way as extrem­ist polit­i­cal con­tent: by mak­ing alarm­ing claims and promis­ing for­bid­den truths that kept users glued to their screens.

Doc­tors, social work­ers and for­mer gov­ern­ment offi­cials said the videos had cre­at­ed the foun­da­tion of a pub­lic health cri­sis as fright­ened patients refused vac­cines and even anti-Zika insec­ti­cides.

The con­se­quences have been pro­nounced in poor­er com­mu­ni­ties like Maceió, a city in Brazil’s north­east that was among the hard­est hit by Zika.

...

When Zika first spread in 2015, health work­ers dis­trib­uted lar­vi­cides that killed the mos­qui­toes that spread the dis­ease.

Not long after YouTube installed its new rec­om­men­da­tion engine, Dr. Santana’s patients began telling him that they’d seen videos blam­ing Zika on vac­cines — and, lat­er, on lar­vi­cides. Many refused both.

Dr. Auriene Oliviera, an infec­tious dis­ease spe­cial­ist at the same hos­pi­tal, said patients increas­ing­ly defied her advice, includ­ing on pro­ce­dures cru­cial to their child’s sur­vival.

“They say, ‘No, I’ve researched it on Google, I’ve seen it on YouTube,” she said.

Med­ical providers, she said, were com­pet­ing “every sin­gle day” against “Dr. Google and Dr. YouTube” — and they were los­ing.

Mard­jane Nunes, a Zika expert who recent­ly left a senior role in the health min­istry, said that health work­ers across Brazil have been report­ing sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences. As more com­mu­ni­ties refuse the anti-Zika lar­vi­cide, she added, the dis­ease is see­ing a small resur­gence.

“Social media is win­ning,” she said.

Brazil’s med­ical com­mu­ni­ty had rea­son to feel out­matched. The Har­vard researchers found that YouTube’s sys­tems fre­quent­ly direct­ed users who searched for infor­ma­tion on Zika, or even those who watched a rep­utable video on health issues, toward con­spir­a­cy chan­nels.

A spokesman for YouTube con­firmed the Times’ find­ings, call­ing them unin­tend­ed, and said the com­pa­ny would change how its search tool sur­faced videos relat­ed to Zika.

An ‘Ecosys­tem of Hate’

As the far right rose, many of its lead­ing voic­es had learned to weaponize the con­spir­a­cy videos, offer­ing their vast audi­ences a tar­get: peo­ple to blame. Even­tu­al­ly, the YouTube con­spir­acists turned their spot­light on Deb­o­ra Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abor­tion advo­ca­cy had long made her a tar­get of the far right.

Bernar­do Küster, a YouTube star whose home­made rants had won him 750,000 sub­scribers and an endorse­ment from Mr. Bol­sonaro, accused her of involve­ment in the sup­posed Zika plots.

The very peo­ple work­ing to help fam­i­lies affect­ed by Zika, their videos implied, were behind the dis­ease. Backed by shad­owy for­eign­ers, their goal was to abol­ish Brazil’s abor­tion ban — or even make abor­tions manda­to­ry.

As far-right and con­spir­a­cy chan­nels began cit­ing one anoth­er, YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tem learned to string their videos togeth­er. How­ev­er implau­si­ble any indi­vid­ual rumor might be on its own, joined togeth­er, they cre­at­ed the impres­sion that dozens of dis­parate sources were reveal­ing the same ter­ri­fy­ing truth.

“It feels like the con­nec­tion is made by the view­er, but the con­nec­tion is made by the sys­tem,” Ms. Diniz said.

Threats of rape and tor­ture filled Ms. Diniz’s phone and email. Some cit­ed her dai­ly rou­tines. Many echoed claims from Mr. Küster’s videos, she said.

Mr. Küster glee­ful­ly men­tioned, though nev­er explic­it­ly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just with­in YouTube’s rules.

When the uni­ver­si­ty where Ms. Diniz taught received a warn­ing that a gun­man would shoot her and her stu­dents, and the police said they could no longer guar­an­tee her safe­ty, she left Brazil.

“The YouTube sys­tem of rec­om­mend­ing the next video and the next video,” she said, had cre­at­ed “an ecosys­tem of hate.”

“‘I heard here that she’s an ene­my of Brazil. I hear in the next one that fem­i­nists are chang­ing fam­i­ly val­ues. And the next one I hear that they receive mon­ey from abroad” she said. “That loop is what leads some­one to say ‘I will do what has to be done.’”

“We need the com­pa­nies to face their role,” Ms. Diniz said. “Eth­i­cal­ly, they are respon­si­ble.”

As con­spir­a­cies spread on YouTube, video mak­ers tar­get­ed aid groups whose work touch­es on con­tro­ver­sial issues like abor­tion. Even some fam­i­lies that had long relied on such groups came to won­der if the videos might be true, and began to avoid them.

In Brazil, this is a grow­ing online prac­tice known as “lin­chamen­to” — lynch­ing. Mr. Bol­sonaro was an ear­ly pio­neer, spread­ing videos in 2012 that false­ly accused left-wing aca­d­e­mics of plot­ting to force schools to dis­trib­ute “gay kits” to con­vert chil­dren to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty.

Mr. Jordy, his tat­tooed Niterói pro­tégé, was untrou­bled to learn that his own YouTube cam­paign, accus­ing teach­ers of spread­ing com­mu­nism, had turned their lives upside down.

One of those teach­ers, Vale­ria Borges, said she and her col­leagues had been over­whelmed with mes­sages of hate, cre­at­ing a cli­mate of fear.

Mr. Jordy, far from dis­put­ing this, said it had been his goal. “I want­ed her to feel fear,” he said.

“It’s a cul­ture war we’re fight­ing,” he explained. “This is what I came into office to do.”

‘The Dic­ta­tor­ship of the Like’

Ground zero for pol­i­tics by YouTube may be the São Paulo head­quar­ters of Movi­men­to Brasil Livre, which formed to agi­tate for the 2016 impeach­ment of the left-wing Pres­i­dent Dil­ma Rouss­eff. Its mem­bers trend young, mid­dle-class, right-wing and extreme­ly online.

Renan San­tos, the group’s nation­al coor­di­na­tor, ges­tured to a door marked “the YouTube Divi­sion” and said, “This is the heart of things.”

Inside, eight young men poked at edit­ing soft­ware. One was styl­iz­ing an image of Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni for a video argu­ing that fas­cism had been wrong­ly blamed on the right.

But even some peo­ple here fear the platform’s impact on democ­ra­cy. Mr. San­tos, for exam­ple, called social media a “weapon,” adding that some peo­ple around Mr. Bol­sonaro “want to use this weapon to pres­sure insti­tu­tions in a way that I don’t see as respon­si­ble.”

The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned for­mer rock gui­tarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have some­thing here that we call the dic­ta­tor­ship of the like.”

Real­i­ty, he said, is shaped by what­ev­er mes­sage goes most viral.

Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was cap­ti­vat­ing the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s mil­i­tary coup, it argued that the takeover had been nec­es­sary to save Brazil from com­mu­nism.

Mr. Dominguez, the teenag­er learn­ing to play gui­tar, said the video per­suad­ed him that his teach­ers had fab­ri­cat­ed the hor­rors of mil­i­tary rule.

Ms. Borges, the his­to­ry teacher vil­i­fied on YouTube, said it brought back mem­o­ries of mil­i­tary cur­fews, dis­ap­peared activists and police beat­ings.

“I don’t think I’ve had my last beat­ing,” she said.
———-

“How YouTube Rad­i­cal­ized Brazil” by Max Fish­er and Aman­da Taub, The New York Times, 08/11/2019

“Mem­bers of the nation’s new­ly empow­ered far right — from grass-roots orga­niz­ers to fed­er­al law­mak­ers — say their move­ment would not have risen so far, so fast, with­out YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion engine.”

Brazil’s far right does­n’t hide it: YouTube was cru­cial to their suc­cess. And they can’t hide it because YouTube remains one of their pri­ma­ry modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

But what makes this research so scan­dalous is that the far right did­n’t sim­ply use YouTube suc­cess­ful­ly to spread their mes­sage. Researchers found that YouTube was sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dri­ving peo­ple to far right videos. 70 per­cent of the time spent on YouTube is dri­ven by these algo­rithms that rec­om­mend more videos and it turns out the heav­i­ly emo­tion-dri­ven pol­i­tics of the far right is great for keep­ing peo­ple watch­ing:

...
YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tem is engi­neered to max­i­mize watchtime, among oth­er fac­tors, the com­pa­ny says, but not to favor any polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. The sys­tem sug­gests what to watch next, often play­ing the videos auto­mat­i­cal­ly, in a nev­er-end­ing quest to keep us glued to our screens.

But the emo­tions that draw peo­ple in — like fear, doubt and anger — are often cen­tral fea­tures of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, and in par­tic­u­lar, experts say, of right-wing extrem­ism.

As the sys­tem sug­gests more provoca­tive videos to keep users watch­ing, it can direct them toward extreme con­tent they might oth­er­wise nev­er find. And it is designed to lead users to new top­ics to pique new inter­est — a boon for chan­nels like Mr. Moura’s that use pop cul­ture as a gate­way to far-right ideas.

The sys­tem now dri­ves 70 per­cent of total time on the plat­form, the com­pa­ny says. As view­er­ship sky­rock­ets glob­al­ly, YouTube is bring­ing in over $1 bil­lion a month, some ana­lysts believe.

Zeynep Tufek­ci, a social media schol­ar, has called it “one of the most pow­er­ful rad­i­cal­iz­ing instru­ments of the 21st cen­tu­ry.”

...

As far-right and con­spir­a­cy chan­nels began cit­ing one anoth­er, YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tem learned to string their videos togeth­er. How­ev­er implau­si­ble any indi­vid­ual rumor might be on its own, joined togeth­er, they cre­at­ed the impres­sion that dozens of dis­parate sources were reveal­ing the same ter­ri­fy­ing truth.

“It feels like the con­nec­tion is made by the view­er, but the con­nec­tion is made by the sys­tem,” Ms. Diniz said.

...

Jonas Kaiser and Yaso­dara Cór­do­va, with Adri­an Rauch­fleisch of Nation­al Tai­wan Uni­ver­si­ty, pro­grammed a Brazil-based serv­er to enter a pop­u­lar chan­nel or search term, then open YouTube’s top rec­om­men­da­tions, then fol­low the rec­om­men­da­tions on each of those, and so on.

By repeat­ing this thou­sands of times, the researchers tracked how the plat­form moved users from one video to the next. They found that after users watched a video about pol­i­tics or even enter­tain­ment, YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tions often favored right-wing, con­spir­a­cy-filled chan­nels like Mr. Moura’s.
...

Yep, even peo­ple who were just watch­ing enter­tain­ment videos were get­ting direct­ed to far right chan­nels. Come for the cat videos. Stay for the Nazis. That’s YouTube.

And if a user watch­es one far right chan­nel, YouTube’s algo­rithm knows to serve up more far right chan­nels. As a result, the YouTube algo­rithm has effec­tive­ly unit­ed all of the pre­vi­ous­ly dis­parate and fringe far right YouTube chan­nels into one big chan­nel. This was crit­i­cal to the rapid growth of Bol­sonaro’s pop­u­lar­i­ty:

...
Cru­cial­ly, users who watched one far-right chan­nel would often be shown many more.

The algo­rithm had unit­ed once-mar­gin­al chan­nels — and then built an audi­ence for them, the researchers con­clud­ed.

One of those chan­nels belonged to Mr. Bol­sonaro, who had long used the plat­form to post hoax­es and con­spir­a­cies. Though a YouTube ear­ly adopter, his online fol­low­ing had done lit­tle to expand his polit­i­cal base, which bare­ly exist­ed on a nation­al lev­el.

Then Brazil’s polit­i­cal sys­tem col­lapsed just as YouTube’s pop­u­lar­i­ty there soared. Mr. Bolsonaro’s views had not changed. But YouTube’s far-right, where he was a major fig­ure, saw its audi­ence explode, help­ing to prime large num­bers of Brazil­ians for his mes­sage at a time when the coun­try was ripe for a polit­i­cal shift.

YouTube chal­lenged the researchers’ method­ol­o­gy and said its inter­nal data con­tra­dict­ed their find­ings. But the com­pa­ny declined the Times’ requests for that data, as well as requests for cer­tain sta­tis­tics that would reveal whether or not the researchers’ find­ings were accu­rate.
...

And note how, when this algo­rith­mic push behind Bol­sonaro by YouTube first start­ed, he was still deeply unpop­u­lar. So YouTube’s push­ing of Bol­sonaro was­n’t mere­ly reflect­ing polls. It was shap­ing them:

...
Down The Rab­bit Hole

A few hun­dred miles away from Niterói, a team of researchers led by Vir­gilio Almei­da at the Fed­er­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Minas Gerais hunched over com­put­ers, try­ing under­stand how YouTube shapes its users’ real­i­ty.

The team ana­lyzed tran­scripts from thou­sands of videos, as well as the com­ments beneath them. Right-wing chan­nels in Brazil, they found, had seen their audi­ences expand far faster than oth­ers did, and seemed to be tilt­ing the site’s over­all polit­i­cal con­tent.

In the months after YouTube changed its algo­rithm, pos­i­tive men­tions of Mr. Bol­sonaro bal­looned. So did men­tions of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that he had float­ed. This began as polls still showed him to be deeply unpop­u­lar, sug­gest­ing that the plat­form was doing more than mere­ly reflect­ing polit­i­cal trends.

A team at Harvard’s Berk­man Klein Cen­ter set out to test whether the Brazil­ian far right’s mete­oric rise on the plat­form had been boost­ed by YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion engine.
...

But Brazil’s far right isn’t sim­ply using YouTube to spread mis­in­for­ma­tion and pro­pa­gan­da. YouTube has also become a plat­form for orches­trat­ing the ter­ror­iza­tion of polit­i­cal oppo­nents:

...
An ‘Ecosys­tem of Hate’

As the far right rose, many of its lead­ing voic­es had learned to weaponize the con­spir­a­cy videos, offer­ing their vast audi­ences a tar­get: peo­ple to blame. Even­tu­al­ly, the YouTube con­spir­acists turned their spot­light on Deb­o­ra Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abor­tion advo­ca­cy had long made her a tar­get of the far right.

Bernar­do Küster, a YouTube star whose home­made rants had won him 750,000 sub­scribers and an endorse­ment from Mr. Bol­sonaro, accused her of involve­ment in the sup­posed Zika plots.

The very peo­ple work­ing to help fam­i­lies affect­ed by Zika, their videos implied, were behind the dis­ease. Backed by shad­owy for­eign­ers, their goal was to abol­ish Brazil’s abor­tion ban — or even make abor­tions manda­to­ry.

...

Threats of rape and tor­ture filled Ms. Diniz’s phone and email. Some cit­ed her dai­ly rou­tines. Many echoed claims from Mr. Küster’s videos, she said.

Mr. Küster glee­ful­ly men­tioned, though nev­er explic­it­ly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just with­in YouTube’s rules.

...

In Brazil, this is a grow­ing online prac­tice known as “lin­chamen­to” — lynch­ing. Mr. Bol­sonaro was an ear­ly pio­neer, spread­ing videos in 2012 that false­ly accused left-wing aca­d­e­mics of plot­ting to force schools to dis­trib­ute “gay kits” to con­vert chil­dren to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty.

...

Few illus­trate YouTube’s influ­ence bet­ter than Car­los Jordy.

Mus­cle­bound and heav­i­ly tat­tooed — his left hand bears a flam­ing skull with dia­mond eyes — he joined the City Coun­cil in 2017 with few prospects of ris­ing through tra­di­tion­al pol­i­tics. So Mr. Jordy took inspi­ra­tion from blog­gers like Mr. Moura and his polit­i­cal men­tor, Mr. Bol­sonaro, turn­ing his focus to YouTube.

He post­ed videos accus­ing local teach­ers of con­spir­ing to indoc­tri­nate stu­dents into com­mu­nism. The videos won him a “nation­al audi­ence,” he said, and pro­pelled his stun­ning rise, only two years lat­er, to the fed­er­al leg­is­la­ture.

“If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jair Bol­sonaro wouldn’t be pres­i­dent.”

...

Mr. Jordy, his tat­tooed Niterói pro­tégé, was untrou­bled to learn that his own YouTube cam­paign, accus­ing teach­ers of spread­ing com­mu­nism, had turned their lives upside down.

One of those teach­ers, Vale­ria Borges, said she and her col­leagues had been over­whelmed with mes­sages of hate, cre­at­ing a cli­mate of fear.

Mr. Jordy, far from dis­put­ing this, said it had been his goal. “I want­ed her to feel fear,” he said.

“It’s a cul­ture war we’re fight­ing,” he explained. “This is what I came into office to do.”
...

Final­ly, note that the Movi­men­to Brasil Livre group that was white­wash­ing Brazil’s mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship, is one of the many groups in Brazil heav­i­ly fund­ed by the Koch Broth­ers. Because of course:

...
‘The Dic­ta­tor­ship of the Like’

Ground zero for pol­i­tics by YouTube may be the São Paulo head­quar­ters of Movi­men­to Brasil Livre, which formed to agi­tate for the 2016 impeach­ment of the left-wing Pres­i­dent Dil­ma Rouss­eff. Its mem­bers trend young, mid­dle-class, right-wing and extreme­ly online.

Renan San­tos, the group’s nation­al coor­di­na­tor, ges­tured to a door marked “the YouTube Divi­sion” and said, “This is the heart of things.”

Inside, eight young men poked at edit­ing soft­ware. One was styl­iz­ing an image of Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni for a video argu­ing that fas­cism had been wrong­ly blamed on the right.

But even some peo­ple here fear the platform’s impact on democ­ra­cy. Mr. San­tos, for exam­ple, called social media a “weapon,” adding that some peo­ple around Mr. Bol­sonaro “want to use this weapon to pres­sure insti­tu­tions in a way that I don’t see as respon­si­ble.”

The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned for­mer rock gui­tarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have some­thing here that we call the dic­ta­tor­ship of the like.”

Real­i­ty, he said, is shaped by what­ev­er mes­sage goes most viral.

Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was cap­ti­vat­ing the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s mil­i­tary coup, it argued that the takeover had been nec­es­sary to save Brazil from com­mu­nism.

Mr. Dominguez, the teenag­er learn­ing to play gui­tar, said the video per­suad­ed him that his teach­ers had fab­ri­cat­ed the hor­rors of mil­i­tary rule.

Ms. Borges, the his­to­ry teacher vil­i­fied on YouTube, said it brought back mem­o­ries of mil­i­tary cur­fews, dis­ap­peared activists and police beat­ings.

“I don’t think I’ve had my last beat­ing,” she said.
...

So we can add the rapid, wild­ly suc­cess­ful, and ongo­ing pro­mo­tion of fas­cism in Brazil as one of YouTube’s many accom­plish­ments in recent years. It’s the kind of track record that would make even Fox News jeal­ous.

In oth­er news, around a quar­ter of Brazil­ians don’t believe the moon land­ing actu­al­ly hap­pened. This is where we are.

Here’s a rather dis­turb­ing sto­ry about the protests in Hong Kong that high­lights abil­i­ty of the online ‘Alt Right’ troll cul­ture to take on a life of its own: the Hong Kong pro­test­ers have adopt­ed Pepe the Frog as a mas­cot. Yep. Graf­fi­ti and stick­ers fea­tur­ing Pepe in all sorts of dif­fer­ent role are show­ing up in Hong Kong. There are even stick­er apps for mes­sag­ing apps like Telegram and What­sApp with stick­ers of Pepe wear­ing the pro­test­ers’ sig­na­ture yel­low hel­met, sur­round­ed by tear gas or hold­ing antigov­ern­ment signs

The good news is that it does­n’t sound like most of the pro­test­ers are at all famil­iar with the fact that Pepe has been turned into a white suprema­cist sym­bol and instead see him as just a fun car­toon char­ac­ter. But it’s still pret­ty dis­turb­ing that, of all the car­toon char­ac­ters the pro­test­ers could have select­ed as a mas­cot, they arrived at Pepe. It seems like a high­ly improb­a­ble event to hap­pen ran­dom­ly, which rais­es the ques­tion of how this trend start­ed. Were ‘Alt Right’ Nazi online trolls cre­at­ing Pepe images for the protests that got picked up by unwit­ting pro­test­ers and it just went viral on its own? Did the pro­test­ers unwit­ting­ly fall for a counter-protest dirty trick designed to taint their image in the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty? Or are some of the pro­test­ers asso­ci­at­ed with the ‘Alt Right’ and know­ing­ly push­ing this? At this point it’s very unclear how exact­ly this hap­pened, but regard­less if the ori­gins of this, it’s hard to see how adopt­ing a white suprema­cist sym­bol is going to help the cause of the Hong Kong pro­test­ers:

The New York Times

Hong Kong Pro­test­ers Love Pepe the Frog. No, They’re Not Alt-Right.
To much of the world, the car­toon frog is a hate sym­bol. To Hong Kong pro­test­ers, he’s some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent: one of them.

By Daniel Vic­tor
Aug 19, 2019

HONG KONG — Ask the Anti-Defama­tion League, and they will tell you Pepe the Frog is a hate sym­bol, a cheer­leader of racism and anti-Semi­tism, a friend of alt-right extrem­ists. The sad, green frog is wide­ly viewed as tox­ic across the world, a sig­nal of a sin­is­ter and dan­ger­ous world­view.

So it can be a bit jar­ring to see Pepe in his new role: a pro-democ­ra­cy free­dom fight­er in the Hong Kong protests, sid­ing with the peo­ple in their strug­gle against an author­i­tar­i­an state. The pro­test­ers here hold signs with his image, use stick­ers of him in mes­sag­ing apps and dis­cus­sion forums, and even spray paint his face on walls.

Pro­tes­tors graf­fi­tied a “Press Pepe” at the Lennon Wall at Hong Kong’s Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment Office tonight. Civ­il ser­vants gonna see this in the morn­ing...#HongKong­Protests#antiELAB #antiELABhk #Pepe#PressPepe pic.twitter.com/xWxQFWLP5p

— Alex Hof­ford (@alexhofford) August 18, 2019

Does that mean that Hong Kong pro­test­ers are alt-right, or that they sup­port the racism he rep­re­sents?

The ques­tion con­fus­es many pro­test­ers, many of whom had no idea about the symbol’s racist con­no­ta­tions else­where in the world. They just like him.

“It has noth­ing to do with the far-right ide­ol­o­gy in the state,” one per­son wrote on LIHKG, an anony­mous forum that has been the cen­ter of dis­cus­sion for pro­test­ers. “It just looks fun­ny and cap­tures the hearts of so many young­sters. It is a sym­bol of youth par­tic­i­pa­tion in this move­ment.”

Mari Law, a 33-year-old pro­test­er, knows how Pepe is per­ceived else­where, but said it did not mat­ter because Pepe did not car­ry the same tox­ic rep­u­ta­tion in Hong Kong. Most of the pro­test­ers don’t know about the alt-right asso­ci­a­tion, he said.

“To me, Pepe is just a Hel­lo Kit­ty-like char­ac­ter,” he said.

Few Hong Kongers have shown aware­ness online about Pepe’s sin­is­ter side. There has been lit­tle dis­cus­sion about what sym­bol­ism he car­ries, and in the few occa­sions it has been point­ed out, it has most­ly been met with a shrug.

To Hong Kongers, he is just one of them. A stick­er pack for mes­sag­ing apps like Telegram and What­sApp depict Pepe wear­ing the pro­test­ers’ sig­na­ture yel­low hel­met, sur­round­ed by tear gas or hold­ing antigov­ern­ment signs. He has also been trans­formed into a first aid work­er and a jour­nal­ist hold­ing an iPhone.

Emi­ly Yueng, 20, said she had no idea about Pepe’s check­ered past. After she learned, she won­dered if maybe she and oth­er pro­test­ers ought to stop hand­ing out posters with his image at the air­port.

“But still, dif­fer­ent coun­tries have very dif­fer­ent cul­tures,” she said. “Sym­bols and col­ors that mean some­thing in one cul­ture can mean some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent in anoth­er cul­ture, so I think if Amer­i­cans are real­ly offend­ed by this, we should explain to them what it means to us.”

Pepe was not always seen as a racist sym­bol. He was cre­at­ed more than a decade ago by Matt Furie, who killed off the char­ac­ter in 2017 after it was adopt­ed by the alt-right.

Mem­bers of the alt-right on forums like 4chan and cer­tain cor­ners of Red­dit had appro­pri­at­ed his image, much to Mr. Furie’s dis­may. He said the frog, per­pet­u­al­ly stoned, was meant to be pos­i­tive, and denounced any link to racist or fringe groups.

...

He added in a 2016 essay for Time mag­a­zine: “I under­stand that it’s out of my con­trol, but in the end, Pepe is what­ev­er you say he is, and I, the cre­ator, say that Pepe is love.”

In Hong Kong, Pepe was nev­er trans­formed from the chill frog-dude Mr. Furie intend­ed him to be. Mr. Law said he thought Pepe would protest along­side Hong Kongers: Pepe is sad just like them.

“I think we can rede­fine Pepe in this move­ment,” he said.
———-

“Hong Kong Pro­test­ers Love Pepe the Frog. No, They’re Not Alt-Right.” by Daniel Vic­tor; The New York Times; 08/19/2019

“So it can be a bit jar­ring to see Pepe in his new role: a pro-democ­ra­cy free­dom fight­er in the Hong Kong protests, sid­ing with the peo­ple in their strug­gle against an author­i­tar­i­an state. The pro­test­ers here hold signs with his image, use stick­ers of him in mes­sag­ing apps and dis­cus­sion forums, and even spray paint his face on walls.”

Pepe for free­dom and democ­ra­cy?! It’s a remark­able odd brand­ing choice for the pro­test­ers, some of whom appear to be aware of the car­toon char­ac­ter’s sta­tus as a white suprema­cist sym­bol in the West but shrug it off as unim­por­tant in the con­text of the Hong Kong protests because the local pop­u­la­tion gen­er­al­ly does­n’t real­ize the his­to­ry of the char­ac­ter. Again, it’s a remark­ably odd brand­ing deci­sion. Isn’t get­ting inter­na­tion­al sup­port an impor­tant com­po­nent of these protests? One of those pro­test­ers who is aware of the white suprema­cist sym­bol­ism went as far as sug­gest­ing that the adop­tion of Pepe by the pro­test­ers could be an act of reap­pro­pri­at­ing the char­ac­ter — much like the Alt Right did to Pepe when they first made him a white suprema­cist icon — and giv­ing him a new pos­i­tive con­no­ta­tion. It’s a nice goal, but, again, is it worth risk­ing the inter­na­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion of the protest move­ment just because peo­ple this a car­toon char­ac­ter looks amus­ing?

...
Mari Law, a 33-year-old pro­test­er, knows how Pepe is per­ceived else­where, but said it did not mat­ter because Pepe did not car­ry the same tox­ic rep­u­ta­tion in Hong Kong. Most of the pro­test­ers don’t know about the alt-right asso­ci­a­tion, he said.

“To me, Pepe is just a Hel­lo Kit­ty-like char­ac­ter,” he said.

Few Hong Kongers have shown aware­ness online about Pepe’s sin­is­ter side. There has been lit­tle dis­cus­sion about what sym­bol­ism he car­ries, and in the few occa­sions it has been point­ed out, it has most­ly been met with a shrug.

To Hong Kongers, he is just one of them. A stick­er pack for mes­sag­ing apps like Telegram and What­sApp depict Pepe wear­ing the pro­test­ers’ sig­na­ture yel­low hel­met, sur­round­ed by tear gas or hold­ing antigov­ern­ment signs. He has also been trans­formed into a first aid work­er and a jour­nal­ist hold­ing an iPhone.

Emi­ly Yueng, 20, said she had no idea about Pepe’s check­ered past. After she learned, she won­dered if maybe she and oth­er pro­test­ers ought to stop hand­ing out posters with his image at the air­port.

“But still, dif­fer­ent coun­tries have very dif­fer­ent cul­tures,” she said. “Sym­bols and col­ors that mean some­thing in one cul­ture can mean some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent in anoth­er cul­ture, so I think if Amer­i­cans are real­ly offend­ed by this, we should explain to them what it means to us.”

...

In Hong Kong, Pepe was nev­er trans­formed from the chill frog-dude Mr. Furie intend­ed him to be. Mr. Law said he thought Pepe would protest along­side Hong Kongers: Pepe is sad just like them.

“I think we can rede­fine Pepe in this move­ment,” he said.
...

“I think we can rede­fine Pepe in this move­ment.” Good luck with that. The prob­lem is that it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble for Pepe to be rede­fined only in one part of the world while he retains his nas­ti­er sym­bol­ism in the rest of the world. And that’s prob­a­bly what’s going to hap­pen: Pepe real­ly will become a sym­bol of free­dom and democracy...but he’ll only be that sym­bol in Hong Kong and Chi­na and remain a Nazi sym­bol every­where else. To the end­less amuse­ment of neo-Nazi trolls every­where.

Kerop­pi weeps for us all.

@Pterrafractyl–

Here is a NY Times arti­cle about Steve Ban­non’s alliance with Falun Gong and oth­er reactionary/fascist and spook ele­ments ally­ing against Chi­na:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/us/politics/china-red-scare-washington.html

Pepe the Frog seems to be “Goose Hop­ping” with the crowd.

A good arti­cle from “Con­sor­tium News” about the desta­bi­liza­tion effort against Chi­na:

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/08/19/us-backs-xenophobia-mob-violence-in-hong-kong/

Pepe the Friend­ly Spook?

Best,

Dave

@Dave: NBC News just came out with a new report that appears to point in exact­ly that direc­tion: It turns out Falun Gong has become a major Don­ald Trump boost­er and view him as a major anti-com­mu­nist ally. And this pro-Trump ori­en­ta­tion has coin­cid­ed with the explo­sive rise in the pop­u­lar­i­ty of Falun Gong-owned media assets. Specif­i­cal­ly, the Epoch Times and the dig­i­tal video out­let New Tang Dynasty, or NTD. The Epoch Times and Falun Gong had a com­bined ~3 bil­lion views on Face­book, YouTube and Twit­ter in April of this year, which made it the 11th most pop­u­lar of all video cre­ators across plat­forms and out­rank­ing every oth­er tra­di­tion­al news pub­lish­er.

Before 2016, the Epoch Times rarely cov­ered US pol­i­tics unless it involved Chi­na. Today, the Epoch Times has spent more than $1.5 bil­lion on ~11,000 pro-Trump ads in the last six months alone, more than any orga­ni­za­tion out­side of the Trump cam­paign itself. And US con­ser­v­a­tives have noticed and wel­comed this new ally. This year, the Epoch times was a main play­er at CPAC for the first time.

How did the Epoch Times and NTD become so pop­u­lar? By ful­ly embrac­ing the world of the right-wing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry dis­in­fo­tain­ment indus­try, includ­ing aggres­sive­ly pro­mot­ing the ‘QAnon’ nar­ra­tive. So you have to won­der if Falun Gong’s media empire played a role in the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of Pepe the Frog because that would be com­plete­ly con­sis­tent with the rest of the con­tent they’re putting out:

NBC News

Trump, QAnon and an impend­ing judg­ment day: Behind the Face­book-fueled rise of The Epoch Times
Start­ed almost two decades ago with a stat­ed mis­sion to “pro­vide infor­ma­tion to Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ties to help immi­grants assim­i­late into Amer­i­can soci­ety,” The Epoch Times now wields one of the biggest social media fol­low­ings of any news out­let.

By Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins
Aug. 20, 2019, 3:12 AM CDT

By the num­bers, there is no big­ger advo­cate of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump on Face­book than The Epoch Times.

The small New York-based non­prof­it news out­let has spent more than $1.5 mil­lion on about 11,000 pro-Trump adver­tise­ments in the last six months, accord­ing to data from Facebook’s adver­tis­ing archive — more than any orga­ni­za­tion out­side of the Trump cam­paign itself, and more than most Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates have spent on their own cam­paigns.

Those video ads — in which uniden­ti­fied spokes­peo­ple thumb through a news­pa­per to praise Trump, ped­dle con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about the “Deep State,” and crit­i­cize “fake news” media — strike a famil­iar tone in the online con­ser­v­a­tive news ecosys­tem. The Epoch Times looks like many of the con­ser­v­a­tive out­lets that have gained fol­low­ings in recent years.

But it isn’t.

Behind the scenes, the media outlet’s own­er­ship and oper­a­tion is close­ly tied to Falun Gong, a Chi­nese spir­i­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty with the stat­ed goal of tak­ing down China’s gov­ern­ment.

It’s that moti­va­tion that helped dri­ve the orga­ni­za­tion toward Trump, accord­ing to inter­views with for­mer Epoch Times staffers, a move that has been both lucra­tive and ben­e­fi­cial for its mes­sage.

For­mer prac­ti­tion­ers of Falun Gong told NBC News that believ­ers think the world is head­ed toward a judg­ment day, where those labeled “com­mu­nists” will be sent to a kind of hell, and those sym­pa­thet­ic to the spir­i­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty will be spared. Trump is viewed as a key ally in the anti-com­mu­nist fight, for­mer Epoch Times employ­ees said.

In part because of that unusu­al back­ground, The Epoch Times has had trou­ble find­ing a foothold in the broad­er con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment.

“It seems like an inter­lop­er — not well inte­grat­ed social­ly with­in the move­ment net­work, and not ter­ri­bly well-cir­cu­lat­ing among right-wingers,” said A.J. Bauer, a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor of media, cul­ture and com­mu­ni­ca­tion at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, who is part of an ongo­ing study in which he and his col­leagues inter­view con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal­ists.

“Even when dis­cussing more fringe‑y sites, con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal­ists tend to ref­er­ence Gate­way Pun­dit or Infowars,” Bauer said. “The Epoch Times doesn’t tend to come up.”

That seems to be chang­ing.

Before 2016, The Epoch Times gen­er­al­ly stayed out of U.S. pol­i­tics, unless they dove­tailed with Chi­nese inter­ests. The publication’s recent ad strat­e­gy, cou­pled with a broad­er cam­paign to embrace social media and con­ser­v­a­tive U.S. pol­i­tics — Trump in par­tic­u­lar — has dou­bled The Epoch Times’ rev­enue, accord­ing to the organization’s tax fil­ings, and pushed it to greater promi­nence in the broad­er con­ser­v­a­tive media world.

Start­ed almost two decades ago as a free news­pa­per and web­site with a stat­ed mis­sion to “pro­vide infor­ma­tion to Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ties to help immi­grants assim­i­late into Amer­i­can soci­ety,” The Epoch Times now wields one of the biggest social media fol­low­ings of any news out­let.

In April, at the height of its ad spend­ing, videos from the Epoch Media Group, which includes The Epoch Times and dig­i­tal video out­let New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, com­bined for around 3 bil­lion views on Face­book, YouTube and Twit­ter, rank­ing 11th among all video cre­ators across plat­forms and out­rank­ing every oth­er tra­di­tion­al news pub­lish­er, accord­ing to data from the social media ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny Tubu­lar.

That engage­ment has made The Epoch Times a favorite of the Trump fam­i­ly and a key com­po­nent of the president’s re-elec­tion cam­paign. The president’s Face­book page has post­ed Epoch Times con­tent at least half a dozen times this year— with sev­er­al arti­cles writ­ten by mem­bers of the Trump cam­paign. Don­ald Trump Jr. has tweet­ed sev­er­al of their sto­ries, too.

In May, Lara Trump, the president’s daugh­ter-in-law, sat down for a 40-minute inter­view in Trump Tow­er with the paper’s senior edi­tor. And for the first time, The Epoch Times was a main play­er at the con­ser­v­a­tive con­fer­ence CPAC this year, where it secured inter­views with mem­bers of Con­gress, Trump Cab­i­net mem­bers and right-wing celebri­ties.

At the same time, its net­work of news sites and YouTube chan­nels has made it a pow­er­ful con­duit for the internet’s fringi­er con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, includ­ing anti-vac­ci­na­tion pro­pa­gan­da and QAnon, to reach the main­stream.

Despite its grow­ing reach and pow­er, lit­tle is pub­licly known about the pre­cise own­er­ship, ori­gins or influ­ences of The Epoch Times.

The outlet’s opac­i­ty makes it dif­fi­cult to deter­mine an over­all struc­ture, but it is loose­ly orga­nized into sev­er­al region­al tax-free non­prof­its. The Epoch Times oper­ates along­side the video pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, NTD, under the umbrel­la of The Epoch Media Group, a pri­vate news and enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny whose own­er exec­u­tives have declined to name, cit­ing con­cerns of “pres­sure” that could fol­low.

The Epoch Media Group, along with Shen Yun, a dance troupe known for its ubiq­ui­tous adver­tis­ing and unset­tling per­for­mances, make up the out­reach effort of Falun Gong, a rel­a­tive­ly new spir­i­tu­al prac­tice that com­bines ancient Chi­nese med­i­ta­tive exer­cis­es, mys­ti­cism and often ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive cul­tur­al world­views. Falun Gong’s founder has referred to Epoch Media Group as “our media,” and the group’s prac­tice heav­i­ly informs The Epoch Times’ cov­er­age, accord­ing to for­mer employ­ees who spoke with NBC News.

Exec­u­tives at The Epoch Times declined to be inter­viewed for this arti­cle, but the pub­lish­er, Stephen Gre­go­ry, wrote an edi­to­r­i­al in response to a list of emailed ques­tions from NBC News, call­ing it “high­ly inap­pro­pri­ate” and part of an effort to “dis­cred­it” the pub­li­ca­tion to ask about the company’s affil­i­a­tion with Falun Gong and its stance on the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

Inter­views with for­mer employ­ees, pub­lic finan­cial records and social media data illus­trate how a secre­tive news­pa­per has been able to lever­age the devot­ed fol­low­ers of a reclu­sive spir­i­tu­al leader, polit­i­cal vit­ri­ol, online con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and the rise of Trump to become a dig­i­tal media pow­er­house that now attracts bil­lions of views each month, all while pub­licly deny­ing or down­play­ing its asso­ci­a­tion with Falun Gong.

Behind the times

In 2009, the founder and leader of Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi, came to speak at The Epoch Times’ offices in Man­hat­tan. Li came with a clear direc­tive for the Falun Gong vol­un­teers who com­prised the company’s staff: “Become reg­u­lar media.”

The pub­li­ca­tion had been found­ed nine years ear­li­er in Geor­gia by John Tang, a Chi­nese Amer­i­can prac­ti­tion­er of Falun Gong and cur­rent pres­i­dent of New Tang Dynasty. But it was falling short of Li’s ambi­tions as stat­ed to his fol­low­ers: to expose the evil of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment and “save all sen­tient beings” in a forth­com­ing divine bat­tle against com­mu­nism.

Rough­ly trans­lat­ed by the group as “law wheel exer­cise,” Falun Gong was start­ed by Li in 1992. The prac­tice, which com­bines bits of Bud­dhism and Tao­ism, involves med­i­ta­tion and gen­tle exer­cis­es and espous­es Li’s con­tro­ver­sial teach­ings.

“Li Hongzhi sim­pli­fied med­i­ta­tion and prac­tices that tra­di­tion­al­ly have many steps and are very con­fus­ing,” said Ming Xia, a pro­fes­sor at the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter of the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York who has stud­ied Falun Gong. “Basi­cal­ly it’s like fast food, a quick­ie.”

Li’s teach­ings quick­ly built a sig­nif­i­cant fol­low­ing — and ran into ten­sion with China’s lead­ers, who viewed his pop­u­lar­i­ty as a threat to the com­mu­nist government’s hold on pow­er.

In 1999, after thou­sands of Li’s fol­low­ers gath­ered in front of Pres­i­dent Jiang Zemin’s com­pound to qui­et­ly protest the arrest of sev­er­al Falun Gong mem­bers, author­i­ties in Chi­na banned Falun Gong, clos­ing teach­ing cen­ters and arrest­ing Falun Gong orga­niz­ers and prac­ti­tion­ers who refused to give up the prac­tice. Human rights groups have report­ed some adher­ents being tor­tured and killed while in cus­tody.

The crack­down elicit­ed con­dem­na­tion from West­ern coun­tries, and attract­ed a new pool of fol­low­ers in the Unit­ed States, for whom Chi­na and com­mu­nism were com­mon adver­saries.

“The per­se­cu­tion itself ele­vat­ed Li’s sta­tus and brought tremen­dous media atten­tion,” Ming said.

It has also invit­ed scruti­ny of the spir­i­tu­al leader’s more uncon­ven­tion­al ideas. Among them, Li has railed against what he called the wicked­ness of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, fem­i­nism and pop­u­lar music while hold­ing that he is a god-like fig­ure who can lev­i­tate and walk through walls.

Li has also taught that sick­ness is a symp­tom of evil that can only be tru­ly cured with med­i­ta­tion and devo­tion, and that aliens from undis­cov­ered dimen­sions have invad­ed the minds and bod­ies of humans, bring­ing cor­rup­tion and inven­tions such as com­put­ers and air­planes. The Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has used these con­tro­ver­sial teach­ings to label Falun Gong a cult. Falun Gong has denied the gov­ern­men­t’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion.

The Epoch Times pro­vid­ed Li with an Eng­lish-lan­guage way to push back against Chi­na — a posi­tion that would even­tu­al­ly dove­tail with Trump’s elec­tion.

In 2005, The Epoch Times released its great­est sal­vo, pub­lish­ing the ”Nine Com­men­taries,” a wide­ly dis­trib­uted book-length series of anony­mous edi­to­ri­als that it claimed exposed the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s “mas­sive crimes” and “attempts to erad­i­cate all tra­di­tion­al moral­i­ty and reli­gious belief.”

The next year, an Epoch Times reporter was removed from a White House event for Chi­nese Pres­i­dent Hu Jin­tao after inter­rupt­ing the cer­e­mo­ny by shout­ing for sev­er­al min­utes that then-Pres­i­dent George W. Bush must stop the leader from “per­se­cut­ing Falun Gong.”

But despite its small army of devot­ed vol­un­teers, The Epoch Times was still oper­at­ing as a fledg­ling start­up.

Ben Hur­ley is a for­mer Falun Gong prac­ti­tion­er who helped cre­ate Australia’s Eng­lish ver­sion of The Epoch Times out of a liv­ing room in Syd­ney in 2005. He has writ­ten about his expe­ri­ence with the paper and described the ear­ly years as “a giant PR cam­paign” to evan­ge­lize about Falun Gong’s belief in an upcom­ing apoc­a­lypse in which those who think bad­ly of the prac­tice, or well of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, will be destroyed.

Hur­ley, who wrote for The Epoch Times until he left in 2013, said he saw prac­ti­tion­ers in lead­er­ship posi­tions begin draw­ing hard­er and hard­er lines about accept­able polit­i­cal posi­tions.

“Their views were always anti-abor­tion and homo­pho­bic, but there was more room for dis­agree­ments in the ear­ly days,” he said.

Hur­ley said Falun Gong prac­ti­tion­ers saw com­mu­nism every­where: for­mer Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton, movie star Jack­ie Chan and for­mer Unit­ed Nations Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al Kofi Annan were all con­sid­ered to have sold them­selves out to the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, Hur­ley said.

This kind of cov­er­age fore­shad­owed the news organization’s embrace of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries like QAnon, the over­ar­ch­ing the­o­ry that there is an evil cabal of “deep state” oper­a­tors and child preda­tors out to take down the pres­i­dent.

“It is so rabid­ly pro-Trump,” Hur­ley said, refer­ring to The Epoch Times. Devout prac­ti­tion­ers of Falun Gong “believe that Trump was sent by heav­en to destroy the Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Li declined an inter­view request. Li lives among hun­dreds of his fol­low­ers near Drag­on Springs, a 400-acre com­pound in upstate New York that hous­es tem­ples, pri­vate schools and quar­ters where per­form­ers for the organization’s dance troupe, Shen Yun, live and rehearse, accord­ing to four for­mer com­pound res­i­dents and for­mer Falun Gong prac­ti­tion­ers who spoke to NBC News.

They said that life in Drag­on Springs is tight­ly con­trolled by Li, that inter­net access is restrict­ed, the use of med­i­cines is dis­cour­aged, and arranged rela­tion­ships are com­mon. Two for­mer res­i­dents on visas said they were offered to be set up with U.S. res­i­dents at the com­pound.

Tiger Huang, a for­mer Drag­on Springs res­i­dent who was on a U.S. stu­dent visa from Tai­wan, said she was set up on three dates on the com­pound, and she believed her abil­i­ty to stay in the U.S. was tied to the arrange­ment.

“The pur­pose of set­ting up the dates was obvi­ous,” Huang said. Her now-hus­band, a for­mer Drag­on Springs res­i­dent, con­firmed the account.

Huang said she was told by Drag­on Springs offi­cials her visa had expired and was told to go back to Tai­wan after months of dat­ing a non­prac­ti­tion­er in the com­pound. She lat­er learned that her visa had not expired when she was told to leave the coun­try.

Cam­paign sea­son

By 2016, The Epoch Times Group appeared to have heed­ed the call from Li to run its oper­a­tion more like a typ­i­cal news orga­ni­za­tion, start­ing with The Epoch Times’ web­site. In March, the com­pa­ny placed job ads on the site Indeed.com and assem­bled a team of sev­en young reporters oth­er­wise uncon­nect­ed to Falun Gong. The aver­age salary for the new recruits was $35,000 a year, paid month­ly, accord­ing to for­mer employ­ees.

Things seemed “strange,” even from the first day, accord­ing to five for­mer reporters who spoke with NBC News — four of whom asked for anonymi­ty over con­cerns that speak­ing neg­a­tive­ly about their expe­ri­ence would affect their rela­tion­ship with cur­rent and future employ­ers.

As part of their ori­en­ta­tion, the new reporters watched a video that laid out the Chi­nese per­se­cu­tion of Falun Gong fol­low­ers. The pub­lish­er, Stephen Gre­go­ry, also spoke to the reporters about his vision for the new dig­i­tal ini­tia­tive. The for­mer employ­ees said Gregory’s talk framed The Epoch Times as an answer to the lib­er­al main­stream media.

Their con­tent was to be crit­i­cal of com­mu­nist Chi­na, clear-eyed about the threat of Islam­ic ter­ror­ism, focused on ille­gal immi­gra­tion and at all times root­ed in “tra­di­tion­al” val­ues, they said. This meant no con­tent about drugs, gay peo­ple or pop­u­lar music.

The reporters said they worked from desks arranged in a U‑shape in a sin­gle-room office that was sep­a­rat­ed by a locked door from the oth­er staff mem­bers who worked on the paper, dozens of Falun Gong vol­un­teers and interns. The new recruits wrote up to five news sto­ries a day in an effort to meet a quo­ta of 100,000 page views, and sub­mit­ted their work to a hand­ful of edi­tors — a team of two Falun Gong-prac­tic­ing mar­ried cou­ples.

“Slave labor may not be the right word, but that’s a lot of arti­cles to write in one day,” one for­mer employ­ee said.

It wasn’t just the amount of writ­ing but also the con­ser­v­a­tive edi­to­r­i­al restric­tions that began to con­cern some of the employ­ees.

“It’s like we were sup­posed to be fight­ing so-called lib­er­al pro­pa­gan­da by mak­ing our own,” said Steve Klett, who cov­ered the Trump cam­paign for The Epoch Times as his first job in jour­nal­ism. Klett likened The Epoch Times to a Russ­ian troll farm and said his arti­cles were edit­ed to remove out­side crit­i­cism of Trump.

“The worst was the Pulse shoot­ing,” Klett said, refer­ring to the 2016 mass shoot­ing in which 50 peo­ple includ­ing the gun­man were killed at a gay night­club in Orlan­do, Flori­da. “We weren’t allowed to cov­er sto­ries involv­ing homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, but that bumps up against them want­i­ng to cov­er Islam­ic ter­ror­ism. So I wrote four arti­cles with­out using the word gay.”

Klett said that the pub­li­ca­tion also began to skew in favor of Trump, who had tar­get­ed Chi­na on the cam­paign trail with talk of a trade war.

“I knew I had to for­get about all the worst parts of Trump,” Klett said.

Klett, how­ev­er, would not end up hav­ing to cov­er the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Eight days before the elec­tion, the team was called togeth­er and fired as a group.

“I guess the exper­i­ment was over,” a for­mer employ­ee said.

The con­tent

The Epoch Times, dig­i­tal pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny NTD and the heav­i­ly adver­tised dance troupe Shen Yun make up the non­prof­it net­work that Li calls “our media.” Finan­cial doc­u­ments paint a com­pli­cat­ed pic­ture of more than a dozen tech­ni­cal­ly sep­a­rate orga­ni­za­tions that appear to share mis­sions, mon­ey and exec­u­tives. Though the source of their rev­enue is unclear, the most recent finan­cial records from each orga­ni­za­tion paint a pic­ture of an over­all busi­ness thriv­ing in the Trump era.

The Epoch Times brought in $8.1 mil­lion in rev­enue in 2017 — dou­ble what it had the pre­vi­ous year — and report­ed spend­ing $7.2 mil­lion on “print­ing news­pa­per and cre­at­ing web and media pro­grams.” Most of its rev­enue comes from adver­tis­ing and “web and media income,” accord­ing to the group’s annu­al tax fil­ings, while indi­vid­ual dona­tions and sub­scrip­tions to the paper make up less than 10 per­cent of its rev­enue.

New Tang Dynasty’s 2017 rev­enue, accord­ing to IRS records, was $18 mil­lion, a 150 per­cent increase over the year before. It spent $16.2 mil­lion.

That expo­nen­tial growth came around the same time The Epoch Times expand­ed its online pres­ence and increased its ad spend­ing, hon­ing its mes­sage on two basic themes: enthu­si­as­tic sup­port for Trump’s agen­da, and the expo­sure of what the pub­li­ca­tion claims is a labyrinthi­an, glob­al con­spir­a­cy led by Clin­ton and for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma to tear down Trump. One such con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, loose­ly called “Spy­gate,” has become a com­mon talk­ing point for Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty and con­ser­v­a­tive news web­sites like Bre­it­bart.

The paper’s “Spy­gate Spe­cial Cov­er­age” sec­tion, which fre­quent­ly sits atop its web­site, the­o­rizes about a grand, years­long plot in which for­mer Oba­ma and Clin­ton staffers, a hand­ful of mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers, pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tors and gov­ern­ment bureau­crats plan to take down the Trump pres­i­den­cy.

In his pub­lished response, pub­lish­er Gre­go­ry said the media outlet’s ads “have no polit­i­cal agen­da.”

While The Epoch Times usu­al­ly strad­dles the line between an ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive news out­let and a con­spir­a­cy ware­house, some pop­u­lar online shows cre­at­ed by Epoch Times employ­ees and pro­duced by NTD cross the line com­plete­ly, and spread far and wide.

One such show is “Edge of Won­der,” a ver­i­fied YouTube chan­nel that releas­es new NTD-pro­duced videos twice every week and now has more than 33 mil­lion views. In addi­tion to claims that alien abduc­tions are real and the drug epi­dem­ic was engi­neered by the “deep state,” the chan­nel push­es the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, which false­ly posits that the same “Spy­gate” cabal is a front for a glob­al pedophile ring being tak­en down by Trump.

One QAnon video, titled “#QANON — 7 facts the MEDIA (MSM) Won’t Admit” has almost 1 mil­lion views on YouTube. Oth­er videos in the channel’s QAnon playlist, which include videos about 9/11 con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and one titled “13 BLOODLINES & their Dia­bol­i­cal End Game,” gained hun­dreds of thou­sands of views each.

Travis View, a researcher and pod­cast­er who stud­ies the QAnon move­ment, said The Epoch Times has san­i­tized the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry by push­ing Spy­gate, which drops the wildest and more pruri­ent details of QAnon while retain­ing its con­spir­a­to­r­i­al ele­ments.

“QAnon is high­ly stig­ma­tized among peo­ple try­ing to push the Spy­gate mes­sage. They know how tox­ic QAnon is,” View said. “Spy­gate leaves out the spir­i­tu­al ele­ments, the child sex traf­fick­ing, but it’s cer­tain­ly inte­gral to the QAnon nar­ra­tive.”

Gre­go­ry denied any con­nec­tion with “Edge of Won­der,” writ­ing in a state­ment that his orga­ni­za­tion was “aware of the enter­tain­ment show,” but “is in no way con­nect­ed with it.”

But The Epoch Times has itself pub­lished sev­er­al cred­u­lous reports on QAnon and for years, the web­series hosts Rob Counts and Ben­jamin Chas­teen were employed as the company’s cre­ative direc­tor and chief pho­to edi­tor, respec­tive­ly. In August 2018, six months after the cre­ation of “Edge of Won­der,” Counts tweet­ed that he still worked for Epoch Times. Counts and Chas­teen did not respond to an email seek­ing clar­i­fi­ca­tion on their roles.

...

———-

“Trump, QAnon and an impend­ing judg­ment day: Behind the Face­book-fueled rise of The Epoch Times” by Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, NBC News, 08/20/2019

“For­mer prac­ti­tion­ers of Falun Gong told NBC News that believ­ers think the world is head­ed toward a judg­ment day, where those labeled “com­mu­nists” will be sent to a kind of hell, and those sym­pa­thet­ic to the spir­i­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty will be spared. Trump is viewed as a key ally in the anti-com­mu­nist fight, for­mer Epoch Times employ­ees said.”

Trump is now a key ally of Falun Gong. He sure has inter­est­ing allies. And this new alliance appears to embraced by the broad­er US con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, as evi­denced by the Epoch Time’s first time as a main play­er at CPAC this year. And with the Epoch Times and NTD get­ting more video views than any tra­di­tion­al news pub­lish­er, it’s no sur­prise:

...
For­mer prac­ti­tion­ers of Falun Gong told NBC News that believ­ers think the world is head­ed toward a judg­ment day, where those labeled “com­mu­nists” will be sent to a kind of hell, and those sym­pa­thet­ic to the spir­i­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty will be spared. Trump is viewed as a key ally in the anti-com­mu­nist fight, for­mer Epoch Times employ­ees said. The publication’s recent ad strat­e­gy, cou­pled with a broad­er cam­paign to embrace social media and con­ser­v­a­tive U.S. pol­i­tics — Trump in par­tic­u­lar — has dou­bled The Epoch Times’ rev­enue, accord­ing to the organization’s tax fil­ings, and pushed it to greater promi­nence in the broad­er con­ser­v­a­tive media world.

Start­ed almost two decades ago as a free news­pa­per and web­site with a stat­ed mis­sion to “pro­vide infor­ma­tion to Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ties to help immi­grants assim­i­late into Amer­i­can soci­ety,” The Epoch Times now wields one of the biggest social media fol­low­ings of any news out­let.

In April, at the height of its ad spend­ing, videos from the Epoch Media Group, which includes The Epoch Times and dig­i­tal video out­let New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, com­bined for around 3 bil­lion views on Face­book, YouTube and Twit­ter, rank­ing 11th among all video cre­ators across plat­forms and out­rank­ing every oth­er tra­di­tion­al news pub­lish­er, accord­ing to data from the social media ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny Tubu­lar.

That engage­ment has made The Epoch Times a favorite of the Trump fam­i­ly and a key com­po­nent of the president’s re-elec­tion cam­paign. The president’s Face­book page has post­ed Epoch Times con­tent at least half a dozen times this year— with sev­er­al arti­cles writ­ten by mem­bers of the Trump cam­paign. Don­ald Trump Jr. has tweet­ed sev­er­al of their sto­ries, too.

In May, Lara Trump, the president’s daugh­ter-in-law, sat down for a 40-minute inter­view in Trump Tow­er with the paper’s senior edi­tor. And for the first time, The Epoch Times was a main play­er at the con­ser­v­a­tive con­fer­ence CPAC this year, where it secured inter­views with mem­bers of Con­gress, Trump Cab­i­net mem­bers and right-wing celebri­ties.
...

Some Falun Gong prac­ti­tion­ers even believe Trump was sent by heav­en to destroy the Com­mu­nist Par­ty. So much like how the the­o­ry that Trump is a god-ordained fig­ured like King Cyrus that’s pop­u­lar with evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, the Falun Gong also view him as a divine­ly dri­ven fig­ure:

...
Ben Hur­ley is a for­mer Falun Gong prac­ti­tion­er who helped cre­ate Australia’s Eng­lish ver­sion of The Epoch Times out of a liv­ing room in Syd­ney in 2005. He has writ­ten about his expe­ri­ence with the paper and described the ear­ly years as “a giant PR cam­paign” to evan­ge­lize about Falun Gong’s belief in an upcom­ing apoc­a­lypse in which those who think bad­ly of the prac­tice, or well of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, will be destroyed.

Hur­ley, who wrote for The Epoch Times until he left in 2013, said he saw prac­ti­tion­ers in lead­er­ship posi­tions begin draw­ing hard­er and hard­er lines about accept­able polit­i­cal posi­tions.

“Their views were always anti-abor­tion and homo­pho­bic, but there was more room for dis­agree­ments in the ear­ly days,” he said.

Hur­ley said Falun Gong prac­ti­tion­ers saw com­mu­nism every­where: for­mer Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton, movie star Jack­ie Chan and for­mer Unit­ed Nations Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al Kofi Annan were all con­sid­ered to have sold them­selves out to the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, Hur­ley said.

This kind of cov­er­age fore­shad­owed the news organization’s embrace of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries like QAnon, the over­ar­ch­ing the­o­ry that there is an evil cabal of “deep state” oper­a­tors and child preda­tors out to take down the pres­i­dent.

“It is so rabid­ly pro-Trump,” Hur­ley said, refer­ring to The Epoch Times. Devout prac­ti­tion­ers of Falun Gong “believe that Trump was sent by heav­en to destroy the Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
...

It’s also notable how recent this trans­for­ma­tion has been for the Falun Gong’s media empire. In 2016, the Epoch Times actu­al­ly hired a team of sev­en young jour­nal­ists who aren’t con­nect­ed to Falun Gong to pro­duce news and be an ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive answer to “the lib­er­al media”. This entire team was fired a week before the elec­tion:

...
Cam­paign sea­son

By 2016, The Epoch Times Group appeared to have heed­ed the call from Li to run its oper­a­tion more like a typ­i­cal news orga­ni­za­tion, start­ing with The Epoch Times’ web­site. In March, the com­pa­ny placed job ads on the site Indeed.com and assem­bled a team of sev­en young reporters oth­er­wise uncon­nect­ed to Falun Gong. The aver­age salary for the new recruits was $35,000 a year, paid month­ly, accord­ing to for­mer employ­ees.

Things seemed “strange,” even from the first day, accord­ing to five for­mer reporters who spoke with NBC News — four of whom asked for anonymi­ty over con­cerns that speak­ing neg­a­tive­ly about their expe­ri­ence would affect their rela­tion­ship with cur­rent and future employ­ers.

As part of their ori­en­ta­tion, the new reporters watched a video that laid out the Chi­nese per­se­cu­tion of Falun Gong fol­low­ers. The pub­lish­er, Stephen Gre­go­ry, also spoke to the reporters about his vision for the new dig­i­tal ini­tia­tive. The for­mer employ­ees said Gregory’s talk framed The Epoch Times as an answer to the lib­er­al main­stream media.

Their con­tent was to be crit­i­cal of com­mu­nist Chi­na, clear-eyed about the threat of Islam­ic ter­ror­ism, focused on ille­gal immi­gra­tion and at all times root­ed in “tra­di­tion­al” val­ues, they said. This meant no con­tent about drugs, gay peo­ple or pop­u­lar music.

The reporters said they worked from desks arranged in a U‑shape in a sin­gle-room office that was sep­a­rat­ed by a locked door from the oth­er staff mem­bers who worked on the paper, dozens of Falun Gong vol­un­teers and interns. The new recruits wrote up to five news sto­ries a day in an effort to meet a quo­ta of 100,000 page views, and sub­mit­ted their work to a hand­ful of edi­tors — a team of two Falun Gong-prac­tic­ing mar­ried cou­ples.

“Slave labor may not be the right word, but that’s a lot of arti­cles to write in one day,” one for­mer employ­ee said.

It wasn’t just the amount of writ­ing but also the con­ser­v­a­tive edi­to­r­i­al restric­tions that began to con­cern some of the employ­ees.

“It’s like we were sup­posed to be fight­ing so-called lib­er­al pro­pa­gan­da by mak­ing our own,” said Steve Klett, who cov­ered the Trump cam­paign for The Epoch Times as his first job in jour­nal­ism. Klett likened The Epoch Times to a Russ­ian troll farm and said his arti­cles were edit­ed to remove out­side crit­i­cism of Trump.

“The worst was the Pulse shoot­ing,” Klett said, refer­ring to the 2016 mass shoot­ing in which 50 peo­ple includ­ing the gun­man were killed at a gay night­club in Orlan­do, Flori­da. “We weren’t allowed to cov­er sto­ries involv­ing homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, but that bumps up against them want­i­ng to cov­er Islam­ic ter­ror­ism. So I wrote four arti­cles with­out using the word gay.”

The for­mer employ­ees said Gregory’s talk framed The Epoch Times as an answer to the lib­er­al main­stream media.The for­mer employ­ees said Gregory’s talk framed The Epoch Times as an answer to the lib­er­al main­stream media.

“I knew I had to for­get about all the worst parts of Trump,” Klett said.

Klett, how­ev­er, would not end up hav­ing to cov­er the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Eight days before the elec­tion, the team was called togeth­er and fired as a group.

“I guess the exper­i­ment was over,” a for­mer employ­ee said.
...

By 2017, the rev­enue for NDT had jumped 150% com­pared to 2016. And the secret to its suc­cess was “enthu­si­as­tic sup­port for Trump’s agen­da, and the expo­sure of what the pub­li­ca­tion claims is a labyrinthi­an, glob­al con­spir­a­cy led by Clin­ton and for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma to tear down Trump”. So it was basi­cal­ly just anoth­er right-wing media out­let but a par­tic­u­lar­ly suc­cess­ful one that clear­ly put out con­tent with a high lev­el of appeal to the US right-wing audi­ence online:

...
The con­tent

The Epoch Times, dig­i­tal pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny NTD and the heav­i­ly adver­tised dance troupe Shen Yun make up the non­prof­it net­work that Li calls “our media.” Finan­cial doc­u­ments paint a com­pli­cat­ed pic­ture of more than a dozen tech­ni­cal­ly sep­a­rate orga­ni­za­tions that appear to share mis­sions, mon­ey and exec­u­tives. Though the source of their rev­enue is unclear, the most recent finan­cial records from each orga­ni­za­tion paint a pic­ture of an over­all busi­ness thriv­ing in the Trump era.

The Epoch Times brought in $8.1 mil­lion in rev­enue in 2017 — dou­ble what it had the pre­vi­ous year — and report­ed spend­ing $7.2 mil­lion on “print­ing news­pa­per and cre­at­ing web and media pro­grams.” Most of its rev­enue comes from adver­tis­ing and “web and media income,” accord­ing to the group’s annu­al tax fil­ings, while indi­vid­ual dona­tions and sub­scrip­tions to the paper make up less than 10 per­cent of its rev­enue.

New Tang Dynasty’s 2017 rev­enue, accord­ing to IRS records, was $18 mil­lion, a 150 per­cent increase over the year before. It spent $16.2 mil­lion.

That expo­nen­tial growth came around the same time The Epoch Times expand­ed its online pres­ence and increased its ad spend­ing, hon­ing its mes­sage on two basic themes: enthu­si­as­tic sup­port for Trump’s agen­da, and the expo­sure of what the pub­li­ca­tion claims is a labyrinthi­an, glob­al con­spir­a­cy led by Clin­ton and for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma to tear down Trump. One such con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, loose­ly called “Spy­gate,” has become a com­mon talk­ing point for Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty and con­ser­v­a­tive news web­sites like Bre­it­bart.

The paper’s “Spy­gate Spe­cial Cov­er­age” sec­tion, which fre­quent­ly sits atop its web­site, the­o­rizes about a grand, years­long plot in which for­mer Oba­ma and Clin­ton staffers, a hand­ful of mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers, pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tors and gov­ern­ment bureau­crats plan to take down the Trump pres­i­den­cy.
...

And in addi­tion to the Epoch Times and NTD, Epoch Times employ­ees also cre­ate the “Edge of Won­der” YouTube chan­nel that released new NTD videos twice a week pro­mot­ing top­ics like QAnon and alien inva­sions:

...
While The Epoch Times usu­al­ly strad­dles the line between an ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive news out­let and a con­spir­a­cy ware­house, some pop­u­lar online shows cre­at­ed by Epoch Times employ­ees and pro­duced by NTD cross the line com­plete­ly, and spread far and wide.

One such show is “Edge of Won­der,” a ver­i­fied YouTube chan­nel that releas­es new NTD-pro­duced videos twice every week and now has more than 33 mil­lion views. In addi­tion to claims that alien abduc­tions are real and the drug epi­dem­ic was engi­neered by the “deep state,” the chan­nel push­es the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, which false­ly posits that the same “Spy­gate” cabal is a front for a glob­al pedophile ring being tak­en down by Trump.

One QAnon video, titled “#QANON — 7 facts the MEDIA (MSM) Won’t Admit” has almost 1 mil­lion views on YouTube. Oth­er videos in the channel’s QAnon playlist, which include videos about 9/11 con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and one titled “13 BLOODLINES & their Dia­bol­i­cal End Game,” gained hun­dreds of thou­sands of views each.

Travis View, a researcher and pod­cast­er who stud­ies the QAnon move­ment, said The Epoch Times has san­i­tized the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry by push­ing Spy­gate, which drops the wildest and more pruri­ent details of QAnon while retain­ing its con­spir­a­to­r­i­al ele­ments.

“QAnon is high­ly stig­ma­tized among peo­ple try­ing to push the Spy­gate mes­sage. They know how tox­ic QAnon is,” View said. “Spy­gate leaves out the spir­i­tu­al ele­ments, the child sex traf­fick­ing, but it’s cer­tain­ly inte­gral to the QAnon nar­ra­tive.”
...

So that full embrace of the West­ern far right con­spir­a­cy hoax world­view and the appar­ent belief that Trump is a heav­en-sent fig­ure who will destroy the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, it seems like a pret­ty safe bet that Falun Gong would be eager to pro­mote the spread of Pepe the Frog to the Hong Kong pro­test­ers.

In relat­ed news, one day after NBC came out with this report, Pres­i­dent Trump looked up to the heav­ens and declared “I am the cho­sen one” in ref­er­ence to his role in US trade dis­pute with Chi­na today‘ dur­ing a press con­fer­ence:

The Week

Trump: ‘I am the cho­sen one’

Kathryn Kraw­czyk
08/21/2019 12:34 p.m.

So that just hap­pened.

Yes, Pres­i­dent Trump, when asked about his ongo­ing trade war with Chi­na, deemed him­self “the cho­sen one” when talk­ing with reporters out­side the White House on Wednes­day. As Trump put it, when it comes to deal­ing with Chi­na’s trade prac­tices, “some­body had to do it.” He then added “I am the cho­sen one” as he looked up to the sky.

Here’s the clip. Speak­ing about his trade war with Chi­na, Trump looks to the heav­ens and says, “I am the Cho­sen One.” pic.twitter.com/mKWA9g7wzQ

— David Mack (@davidmackau) August 21, 2019

The odd com­ment comes just after Trump com­pared him­self to some kind of deity in a Wednes­day morn­ing tweet. He seemed to be watch­ing Wayne Allyn Root’s show on the con­ser­v­a­tive net­work News­max, and tweet­ed a quote from Root say­ing that “the Jew­ish peo­ple in Israel love [Trump] like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the sec­ond com­ing of God.” And the day before, Trump accused “any Jew­ish peo­ple that votes for a Demo­c­rat” of hav­ing “either a total lack of knowl­edge or great dis­loy­al­ty.”

———–

“Trump: ‘I am the cho­sen one’ ” by Kathryn Kraw­czyk, The Week, 08/21/2019

Yes, that just hap­pened. So it looks like we can add Falun Gong to the list of groups that are try­ing and suc­ceed­ing at influ­enc­ing Trump by declar­ing him a gift from god.

It’s also worth not­ing that Falun Gong clear­ly does­n’t want Trump to just work out a trade deal with Chi­na. They want him to some­how destroy the Com­mu­nist Par­ty, or at least back up Falun Gong in some upcom­ing apoc­a­lyp­tic bat­tle. It rais­es the ques­tion of what’s going to hap­pen to that Falun Gong sup­port and the mil­lions of dol­lars they’re spend­ing on pro-Trump ads if Trump does actu­al­ly end up sim­ply work­ing out a trade deal with Chi­na. They pre­sum­ably won’t view him as sent from heav­en any more at that point. So that’s an inter­est­ing com­pli­ca­tion in Trump’s trade wars with Chi­na.

The New York Times had an inter­est­ing recent piece on the increas­ing­ly inter­con­nect­ed nature of glob­al far right pro­pa­gan­da net­works. The focus is on Swe­den, in par­tic­u­lar the pro­pa­gan­da back­ing the far right Swe­den Democ­rats.

As usu­al these days, there’s a dis­pro­por­tion­ate focus on the role Russ­ian media out­lets play in this glob­al net­work. But it’s still an impor­tant piece in terms of lay­ing out increas­ing­ly inter­na­tion­al nature of far right nation­al­ist pro­pa­gan­da efforts. The arti­cle talks about how, while the Swe­den Democ­rats try to frame their brand of far right xeno­pho­bia as a strug­gle over nation­al cul­ture, the par­ty is unde­ni­ably root­ed in Swe­den’s neo-Nazi move­ment and was start­ed in 1988 by open neo-Nazis includ­ing a for­mer Waf­fen SS mem­ber. And ear­ly on the Swe­den Democ­rats sought to coor­di­nate with far right move­ments around the world includ­ing the White Aryan Resis­tance, which was found­ed by a for­mer KKK Grand Drag­on.

The arti­cle cov­ers how the cur­rent head of the Swe­den Democ­rats, Jim­mie Akesson, made the deci­sion to shed the par­ty’s neo-Nazi image back in 2005. He had arrived at the con­clu­sion that Mus­lim refugees posed “the biggest for­eign threat to Swe­den since the Sec­ond World War,” a rather iron­ic con­clu­sion for a neo-Nazi par­ty. Akesson was also con­vinced that the Swe­den Democ­rats need­ed to rebrand shed their skin­head image to increase the par­ty’s pop­u­lar appeal. So they did a purge of all the most overt­ly neo-Nazi-ish ele­ments of the par­ty and tried to adopt a ‘nation­al­ist, but not eth­nona­tion­list’ pub­lic image that focused on issues like the risks to Swe­den’s safe­ty-net posed by immi­grants. And as the recent elec­tion results that got the Swe­den Democ­rats 18% of the vote (which was some­what of a dis­ap­point­ment giv­en the expec­ta­tions) it’s clear that this strat­e­gy large­ly worked.

Beyond that, the arti­cle notes that one of the rea­sons the Swe­den Democ­rats under-per­formed expec­ta­tions in the last elec­tion is that the main­stream par­ties have already heav­i­ly adopt­ed so many of the Swe­den Democ­rats’ posi­tions on issues relat­ed to immi­gra­tion. So the Swe­den Democ­rats have already effec­tive­ly won even when they lose. It’s that his­to­ry of the Swe­den Par­ty suc­cess­ful­ly mak­ing the tran­si­tion from a skin­head Nazi par­ty into a ‘pin­striped’ cryp­to-Nazi par­ty that frames its mes­sage in terms of ‘cul­ture’ and ‘sav­ing the social wel­fare state from immi­grants’ that’s parts of why the New York Times sto­ry about the glob­al far right pro­pa­gan­da net­work coor­di­nat­ing with the Swedish far right is so impor­tant. The Swedish far right has a lot to teach the rest far right else­where.

But anoth­er part of what makes this arti­cle par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant is that Swe­den’s far right has qui­et­ly had an unusu­al­ly impor­tant role in shap­ing glob­al opin­ion in one of the key pro­pa­gan­da areas that has become cen­tral to the rise of the far right glob­al­ly: cyber-lib­er­tar­i­an­ism and the cypher­punk move­ment. This unfor­tu­nate­ly isn’t cov­ered in the arti­cle (it’s too vast a top­ic for a sin­gle arti­cle) but it’s crit­i­cal to keep in mind when ana­lyzes this top­ic.

As we’ve seen, it was none oth­er than Carl Lund­strom, the Swedish neo-Nazi mil­lion­aire busi­ness­man, who pro­vid­ed financ­ing for The Pirate Bay. Lund­strom also own Rix Tele­com, the com­pa­ny that pro­vid­ed inter­net access to PRQ. PRQ was the com­pa­ny pro­vid­ing web-host­ing ser­vices to The Pirate Bay and was co-found­ed by those very same Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij and Got­tfrid Svartholm Warg. PRQ was known to take on any clients, no mat­ter how con­tro­ver­sial, includ­ing NAMBLA.

Anoth­er client of PRQ’s serv­er host­ing ser­vice was Wik­ileaks. This was ini­tial­ly report­ed in 2008. PRQ con­tin­ued host­ing Wik­ileak­s’s servers until August of 2010. Recall that 2010 was the year Wik­ileaks was strug­gling to stay online after it trig­gered the ire of the US gov­ern­ment fol­low­ing the release of the Col­lat­er­al Mur­der video. As Wik­ileaks dis­closed in 2013, Got­tfrid Svartholm Warg was a Wik­ileaks vol­un­teer who worked with Wik­ileaks on the cre­ation of the Col­lat­er­al Mur­der video.

It’s quite a sig­nif­i­cant set of accom­plish­ments for a neo-Nazi mil­lion­aire. Carl Lund­strom was a lead­ing financier of the Swe­den Democ­rats, a crit­i­cal fig­ure for the oper­a­tions of both The Pirate Bay and Wik­ileaks, two orga­ni­za­tions that pop­u­lar­ized the cypher­punk/­cy­ber-lib­er­tar­i­an phi­los­o­phy and hold close ties to the var­i­ous ‘Pirate’ polit­i­cal par­ties around the globe.

Now, it’s true that pol­i­tics of the peo­ple asso­ci­at­ed with The Pirate Bay or Wik­ileaks is by no means exclu­sive­ly far right. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde appears to be pret­ty left-wing based on the plat­form of his 2014 run for EU under the Swedish Pirate Par­ty. And the major­i­ty of the vol­un­teers asso­ci­at­ed with Wik­ileaks appear to be quite left-lean­ing too. But there’s no deny­ing that key fig­ures in these move­ments, includ­ing Julian Assange, have repeat­ed­ly sig­naled far right polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion. Assange’s ‘oop­sie, tech­ni­cal error’ caused his fledg­ling Wik­ileaks Par­ty to pref­er­ence the right-wing Shoot­ers and Fish­ers Par­ty and the extreme-right Aus­tralia First Par­ty when he was run­ning for Sen­ate in 2013 was an ‘oop­sie’ con­sis­tent with his 2013 dec­la­ra­tion that Rand Paul and the Lib­er­tar­i­an Par­ty rep­re­sent the “only hope” for reform in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Or Assange’s mas­sive help for Don­ald Trump in 2016. And then there’s Edward Snow­den’s noto­ri­ous­ly right-wing lib­er­tar­i­an pol­i­tics. Assange’s and Snow­den’s qua­si-hid­den far right polit­i­cal sym­pa­thies are sort of like Lund­strom’s role back­ing The Pirate Bay in that it’s out in the open but rarely noticed.

We also can’t for­get who deeply tied in Bit­coin and the anar­cho-cap­i­tal­ist phi­los­o­phy behind the cryp­tocur­ren­cy move­ment is with the broad­er cyber-lib­er­tar­i­an move­ment advo­cat­ed by these same forces. It’s anoth­er exam­ple of fun­da­men­tal­ly anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic right-wing ‘solu­tions’ get­ting ped­dled as ‘pop­ulist’.

It’s that con­text of Carl Lund­strom, play­ing a lead­ing in financ­ing the Swe­den Democ­rats dur­ing this peri­od when the par­ty tran­si­tioned from neo-Nazi street thugs to a ‘non-racist’ hyper-xeno­pho­bic qua­si-cryp­to-Nazi move­ment that has fun­da­men­tal­ly shift­ed Swe­den’s pol­i­tics to the right at the same time the far right glob­al­ly has been pig­gy-back­ing on the cyber civ­il rights move­ment to pop­u­lar­ize anar­cho-cap­i­tal­ist lib­er­tar­i­an­ism that’s cru­cial to keep in mind when read­ing the fol­low­ing arti­cle about the rise of Swe­den’s far right online pro­pa­gan­da capa­bil­i­ties:

The New York Times

The Glob­al Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nation­al­ism

Swe­den was long seen as a pro­gres­sive utopia. Then came waves of immi­grants — and the forces of pop­ulism at home and abroad.

By Jo Beck­er
Aug 10, 2019

RINKEBY, Swe­den — John­ny Castil­lo, a Peru­vian-born neigh­bor­hood watch­man in this dis­trict of Stock­holm, still puz­zles over the strange events that two years ago turned the cen­tral square of this pre­dom­i­nant­ly immi­grant com­mu­ni­ty into a sym­bol of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism run amok.

First came a now-infa­mous com­ment by Pres­i­dent Trump, sug­gest­ing that Sweden’s his­to­ry of wel­com­ing refugees was at the root of a vio­lent attack in Rinke­by the pre­vi­ous evening, even though noth­ing had actu­al­ly hap­pened.

“You look at what’s hap­pen­ing last night in Swe­den. Swe­den! Who would believe this? Swe­den!” Mr. Trump told sup­port­ers at a ral­ly on Feb. 18, 2017. “They took in large num­bers. They’re hav­ing prob­lems like they nev­er thought pos­si­ble.”

The president’s source: Fox News, which had excerpt­ed a short film pro­mot­ing a dystopi­an view of Swe­den as a vic­tim of its asy­lum poli­cies, with immi­grant neigh­bor­hoods crime-rid­den “no-go zones.”

But two days lat­er, as Swedish offi­cials were heap­ing bemused deri­sion on Mr. Trump, some­thing did in fact hap­pen in Rinke­by: Sev­er­al dozen masked men attacked police offi­cers mak­ing a drug arrest, throw­ing rocks and set­ting cars ablaze.

And it was right around that time, accord­ing to Mr. Castil­lo and four oth­er wit­ness­es, that Russ­ian tele­vi­sion crews showed up, offer­ing to pay immi­grant youths “to make trou­ble” in front of the cam­eras.

“They want­ed to show that Pres­i­dent Trump is right about Swe­den,” Mr. Castil­lo said, “that peo­ple com­ing to Europe are ter­ror­ists and want to dis­turb soci­ety.”

That nativist rhetoric — that immi­grants are invad­ing the home­land — has gained ever-greater trac­tion, and polit­i­cal accep­tance, across the West amid dis­lo­ca­tions wrought by vast waves of migra­tion from the Mid­dle East, Africa and Latin Amer­i­ca. In its most extreme form, it is echoed in the online man­i­festo of the man accused of gun­ning down 22 peo­ple last week­end in El Paso.

In the nation­al­ists’ mes­sage-mak­ing, Swe­den has become a prime cau­tion­ary tale, drip­ping with schaden­freude. What is even more strik­ing is how many peo­ple in Swe­den — pro­gres­sive, egal­i­tar­i­an, wel­com­ing Swe­den — seem to be warm­ing to the nation­al­ists’ view: that immi­gra­tion has brought crime, chaos and a fray­ing of the cher­ished social safe­ty net, not to men­tion a with­er­ing away of nation­al cul­ture and tra­di­tion.

Fueled by an immi­gra­tion back­lash — Swe­den has accept­ed more refugees per capi­ta than any oth­er Euro­pean coun­try — right-wing pop­ulism has tak­en hold, reflect­ed most promi­nent­ly in the steady ascent of a polit­i­cal par­ty with neo-Nazi roots, the Swe­den Democ­rats. In elec­tions last year, they cap­tured near­ly 18 per­cent of the vote.

To dig beneath the sur­face of what is hap­pen­ing in Swe­den, though, is to uncov­er the work­ings of an inter­na­tion­al dis­in­for­ma­tion machine, devot­ed to the cul­ti­va­tion, provo­ca­tion and ampli­fi­ca­tion of far-right, anti-immi­grant pas­sions and polit­i­cal forces. Indeed, that machine, most influ­en­tial­ly root­ed in Vladimir V. Putin’s Rus­sia and the Amer­i­can far right, under­scores a fun­da­men­tal irony of this polit­i­cal moment: the glob­al­iza­tion of nation­al­ism.

The cen­tral tar­get of these manip­u­la­tions from abroad — and the chief instru­ment of the Swedish nation­al­ists’ suc­cess — is the country’s increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar, and vir­u­lent­ly anti-immi­grant, dig­i­tal echo cham­ber.

A New York Times exam­i­na­tion of its con­tent, per­son­nel and traf­fic pat­terns illus­trates how for­eign state and non­state actors have helped to give viral momen­tum to a clutch of Swedish far-right web­sites.

Russ­ian and West­ern enti­ties that traf­fic in dis­in­for­ma­tion, includ­ing an Islama­pho­bic think tank whose for­mer chair­man is now Mr. Trump’s nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, have been cru­cial link­ers to the Swedish sites, help­ing to spread their mes­sage to sus­cep­ti­ble Swedes.

At least six Swedish sites have received finan­cial back­ing through adver­tis­ing rev­enue from a Russ­ian- and Ukrain­ian-owned auto-parts busi­ness based in Berlin, whose online sales net­work odd­ly con­tains buried dig­i­tal links to a range of far-right and oth­er social­ly divi­sive con­tent.

Writ­ers and edi­tors for the Swedish sites have been befriend­ed by the Krem­lin. And in one strange Rube Gold­ber­gian chain of events, a fre­quent Ger­man con­trib­u­tor to one Swedish site has been impli­cat­ed in the financ­ing of a bomb­ing in Ukraine, in a sus­pect­ed Russ­ian false-flag oper­a­tion.

The dis­tort­ed view of Swe­den pumped out by this dis­in­for­ma­tion machine has been used, in turn, by anti-immi­grant par­ties in Britain, Ger­many, Italy and else­where to stir xeno­pho­bia and gin up votes, accord­ing to the Insti­tute for Strate­gic Dia­logue, a Lon­don-based non­prof­it that tracks the online spread of far-right extrem­ism.

“I’d put Swe­den up there with the anti-Soros cam­paign,” said Chloe Col­liv­er, a researcher for the insti­tute, refer­ring to anti-Semit­ic attacks on George Soros, the bil­lion­aire bene­fac­tor of lib­er­al caus­es. “It’s become an endur­ing cen­ter­piece of the far-right con­ver­sa­tion.”

From Mar­gins to Main­stream

Mat­tias Karls­son, the Swe­den Democ­rats’ inter­na­tion­al sec­re­tary and chief ide­ol­o­gist, likes to tell the sto­ry of how he became a sol­dier in what he has described as the “exis­ten­tial bat­tle for our culture’s and our nation’s sur­vival.”

It was the mid-1990s and Mr. Karls­son, now 41, was attend­ing high school in the south­ern city of Vaxjo. Swe­den was accept­ing a record num­ber of refugees from the Balkan War and oth­er con­flicts. In Vaxjo and else­where, young immi­grant men began join­ing brawl­ing “kick­er” gangs, rad­i­cal­iz­ing Mr. Karls­son and draw­ing him toward the local skin­head scene.

He took to wear­ing a leather jack­et with a Swedish flag on the back and was soon intro­duced to Mats Nils­son, a Swedish Nation­al Social­ist leader who gave him a copy of “Mein Kampf.” They began to debate: Mr. Nils­son argued that the goal should be eth­nic puri­ty — the preser­va­tion of “Swedish DNA.” Mr. Karls­son coun­tered that the focus should be on pre­serv­ing nation­al cul­ture and iden­ti­ty. That, he said, was when Mr. Nils­son con­ferred on him an epi­thet of insuf­fi­cient com­mit­ment to the cause — “meat­ball patri­ot,” mean­ing that “I thought that every African or Arab can come to this coun­try as long as they assim­i­late and eat meat­balls.”

It is an account that offers the most benign expla­na­tion for an odi­ous asso­ci­a­tion. What­ev­er the case, in 1999, he joined the Swe­den Democ­rats, a par­ty unde­ni­ably root­ed in Sweden’s neo-Nazi move­ment. Indeed, schol­ars of the far right say that is what sets it apart from most anti-immi­gra­tion par­ties in Europe and makes its rise from mar­gin­al­ized to main­stream so remark­able.

The par­ty was found­ed in 1988 by sev­er­al Nazi ide­o­logues, includ­ing a for­mer mem­ber of the Waf­fen SS. Ear­ly on, it sought inter­na­tion­al alliances with the likes of the White Aryan Resis­tance, a white suprema­cist group found­ed by a for­mer grand drag­on of the Ku Klux Klan. Some Swe­den Democ­rats wore Nazi uni­forms to par­ty func­tions. Its plat­form includ­ed the forced repa­tri­a­tion of all immi­grants since 1970.

That was not, how­ev­er, a win­ning for­mu­la in a coun­try where social democ­rats have dom­i­nat­ed every elec­tion for more than a cen­tu­ry.

While attend­ing uni­ver­si­ty, Mr. Karls­son had met Jim­mie Akesson, who took over the Swe­den Democ­rats’ youth par­ty in 2000 and became par­ty leader in 2005. Mr. Akesson was out­spo­ken in his belief that Mus­lim refugees posed “the biggest for­eign threat to Swe­den since the Sec­ond World War.” But to make that case effec­tive­ly, he and Mr. Karls­son agreed, they need­ed to remake the party’s image.

“We need­ed to real­ly address our past,” Mr. Karls­son said.

They purged neo-Nazis who had been exposed by the press. They announced a “zero tol­er­ance” pol­i­cy toward extreme xeno­pho­bia and racism, empha­sized their youth­ful lead­er­ship and urged mem­bers to dress pre­sentably. And while immi­gra­tion remained at the cen­ter of their plat­form, they mod­er­at­ed the way they talked about it.

No longer was the issue framed in terms of keep­ing cer­tain eth­nic groups out, or deport­ing those already in. Rather it was about how unas­sim­i­lat­ed migrants were evis­cer­at­ing not just the nation’s cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty but also the social-wel­fare heart of the Swedish state.

Under the grand, egal­i­tar­i­an idea of the “folkhem­met,” or people’s home, in which the coun­try is a fam­i­ly and its cit­i­zens take care of one anoth­er, Swedes pay among the world’s high­est effec­tive tax rates, in return for ben­e­fits like child care, health care, free col­lege edu­ca­tion and assis­tance when they grow old.

The safe­ty net has come under strain for a host of eco­nom­ic and demo­graph­ic rea­sons, many of which pre­date the lat­est refugee flood. But in the Swe­den Democ­rats’ telling, the blame lies square­ly at the feet of the for­eign­ers, many of whom lag far behind native Swedes in edu­ca­tion and eco­nom­ic accom­plish­ment. One par­ty adver­tise­ment depict­ed a white woman try­ing to col­lect ben­e­fits while being pur­sued by niqab-wear­ing immi­grants push­ing strollers.

To what extent the party’s makeover is just win­dow dress­ing is an open ques­tion.

The doubts were high­light­ed in what became known as “the Iron Pipe Scan­dal” in 2012. Leaked video showed two Swe­den Demo­c­rat MPs and the party’s can­di­date for attor­ney gen­er­al hurl­ing racist slurs at a come­di­an of Kur­dish descent, then threat­en­ing a drunk­en wit­ness with iron pipes.

High-rank­ing par­ty offi­cials have bounced between Swe­den and Hun­gary, ruled by the author­i­tar­i­an nation­al­ist Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orban. Mr. Karls­son him­self has come under fire for call­ing out an extrem­ist site as neo-fas­cist while using an alias to rec­om­mend posts as “worth read­ing” to par­ty mem­bers.

“There’s a pub­lic face and the face they wear behind closed doors,” said Daniel Poohl, who heads Expo, a Stock­holm-based foun­da­tion that tracks far-right extrem­ism.

Still, even detrac­tors admit that strat­e­gy has worked. In 2010, the Swe­den Democ­rats cap­tured 5.7 per­cent of the vote, enough for the par­ty, and Mr. Karls­son, to enter Par­lia­ment for the first time. That share has steadi­ly increased along with the grow­ing pop­u­la­tion of refugees. (Today, rough­ly 20 per­cent of Sweden’s pop­u­la­tion is for­eign born.)

At its peak in 2015, Swe­den accept­ed 163,000 asy­lum-seek­ers, most­ly from Afghanistan, Soma­lia and Syr­ia. Though bor­der con­trols and tighter rules have eased that flow, Ardalan Shekara­bi, the country’s pub­lic admin­is­tra­tion min­is­ter, acknowl­edged that his gov­ern­ment had been slow to act.

Mr. Shekara­bi, an immi­grant from Iran, said the sheer num­ber of refugees had over­whelmed the government’s efforts to inte­grate them.

“I absolute­ly don’t think that the major­i­ty of Swedes have racist or xeno­pho­bic views, but they had ques­tions about this migra­tion pol­i­cy and the oth­er par­ties didn’t have any answers,” he said. “Which is one of the rea­sons why Swe­den Democ­rats had a case.”

A Right-Wing Echo Cham­ber

As the 2018 elec­tions approached, Swedish coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence was on high alert for for­eign inter­fer­ence. Rus­sia, the hulk­ing neigh­bor to the east, was seen as the main threat. After the Kremlin’s med­dling in the 2016 Amer­i­can elec­tion, Swe­den had rea­son to fear it could be next.

“Russia’s goal is to weak­en West­ern coun­tries by polar­iz­ing the debate,” said Daniel Sten­ling, the Swedish Secu­ri­ty Service’s coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence chief. “For the last five years, we have seen more and more aggres­sive intel­li­gence work against our nation.”

But as it turned out, there was no hack­ing and dump­ing of inter­nal cam­paign doc­u­ments, as in the Unit­ed States. Nor was there an overt effort to swing the elec­tion to the Swe­den Democ­rats, per­haps because the par­ty, in keep­ing with Swedish pop­u­lar opin­ion, has become more crit­i­cal of the Krem­lin than some of its far-right Euro­pean coun­ter­parts.

Instead, secu­ri­ty offi­cials say, the for­eign influ­ence cam­paign took a dif­fer­ent, more sub­tle form: help­ing nur­ture Sweden’s rapid­ly evolv­ing far-right dig­i­tal ecosys­tem.

For years, the Swe­den Democ­rats had strug­gled to make their case to the pub­lic. Many main­stream media out­lets declined their ads. The par­ty even had dif­fi­cul­ty get­ting the postal ser­vice to deliv­er its mail­ers. So it built a net­work of closed Face­book pages whose reach would ulti­mate­ly exceed that of any oth­er par­ty.

But to thrive in the viral sense, that net­work required fresh, allur­ing con­tent. It drew on a clutch of rel­a­tive­ly new web­sites whose pop­u­lar­i­ty was explod­ing.

Mem­bers of the Swe­den Democ­rats helped cre­ate two of them: Samhall­snytt (News in Soci­ety) and Nyheter Idag (News Today). By the 2018 elec­tion year, they, along with a site called Fria Tider (Free Times), were among Sweden’s 10 most shared news sites.

These sites each reached one-tenth of all Swedish inter­net users a week and, accord­ing to an Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty study, account­ed for 85 per­cent of the elec­tion-relat­ed “junk news” — deemed delib­er­ate­ly dis­tort­ed or mis­lead­ing — shared online. There were oth­er sites, too, all inject­ing anti-immi­grant and Islam­o­pho­bic mes­sag­ing into the Swedish polit­i­cal blood­stream.

“Immi­gra­tion Behind Short­age of Drink­ing Water in North­ern Stock­holm,” read one recent head­line. “Refugee Minor Raped Host Family’s Daugh­ter; Thought It Was Legal,” read anoth­er. “Per­formed Female Gen­i­tal Muti­la­tion on Her Chil­dren — Giv­en Asy­lum in Swe­den,” read a third.

Russia’s hand in all of this is large­ly hid­den from view. But fin­ger­prints abound.

For instance, one writer for Samhall­snytt, who pre­vi­ous­ly worked for the Swe­den Democ­rats, was recent­ly declined par­lia­men­tary press accred­i­ta­tion after the secu­ri­ty police deter­mined he had been in con­tact with Russ­ian intel­li­gence.

Fria Tider is con­sid­ered not only one of the most extreme sites, but also among the most Krem­lin-friend­ly. It fre­quent­ly swaps mate­r­i­al with the Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da out­let Sput­nik. The site is linked, via domain own­er­ship records, to Granskn­ing Sverige, called the Swedish “troll fac­to­ry” for its efforts to entrap and embar­rass main­stream jour­nal­ists. Among its fre­quent tar­gets: jour­nal­ists who write neg­a­tive­ly about Rus­sia.

“We’ve had death threats, spam attacks, emails — this year has been total­ly crazy,” said Eva Bur­man, the edi­tor of Eskil­stu­na-Kuriren, a news­pa­per that found itself in the cross hairs after crit­i­ciz­ing the Russ­ian annex­a­tion of Crimea and inves­ti­gat­ing Granskn­ing Sverige itself.

At the mag­a­zine Nya Tider, the edi­tor, Vavra Suk, has trav­eled to Moscow as an elec­tion observ­er and to Syr­ia, where he pro­duced Krem­lin-friend­ly accounts of the civ­il war. Nya Tider has pub­lished work by Alexan­der Dug­in, an ultra­na­tion­al­ist Russ­ian philoso­pher who has been called “Putin’s Rasputin”; Mr. Suk’s writ­ings for Mr. Dugin’s think tank include one titled “Don­ald Trump Can Make Europe Great Again.”

Nya Tider’s con­trib­u­tors include Manuel Ochsen­re­it­er, edi­tor of Zuerst!, a Ger­man far-right news­pa­per. Mr. Ochsen­re­it­er — who has appeared reg­u­lar­ly on RT, the Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da chan­nel — worked until recent­ly for Markus Frohn­maier, a mem­ber of the Ger­man Bun­destag rep­re­sent­ing the far-right Alter­na­tive for Ger­many par­ty. Doc­u­ments leaked to a con­sor­tium of Euro­pean media out­lets — doc­u­ments that Mr. Frohn­maier has called fake — have sug­gest­ed that Moscow aid­ed his elec­tion cam­paign in order to have an “absolute­ly con­trolled MP.”

Mr. Ochsen­re­it­er, for his part, has been impli­cat­ed in Pol­ish court in the financ­ing of a 2018 fire­bomb­ing attack on a Hun­gar­i­an cul­tur­al cen­ter in Ukraine. The plot, accord­ing to tes­ti­mo­ny from a Pol­ish extrem­ist charged with car­ry­ing it out, was designed to pin respon­si­bil­i­ty on Ukrain­ian nation­al­ists and stoke eth­nic ten­sions, to Russia’s ben­e­fit. Mr. Ochsen­re­it­er has not been charged in Poland, but pros­e­cu­tors in Berlin said they had begun a pre­lim­i­nary inves­ti­ga­tion. He has denied involve­ment.

Mr. Suk declined to com­ment.

Then there is Nyheter Idag. Its founder, Chang Frick — a for­mer Swe­den Demo­c­rat offi­cial who takes a maverick’s glee in his defi­ance of ortho­doxy — read­i­ly admits to hav­ing con­tributed to an RT sub­sidiary. At a piz­za shop near his home one after­noon, he point­ed­ly not­ed that his girl­friend was Russ­ian and, with a flour­ish, pulled out a wad of rubles from a recent trip.

“Here is my real boss! It’s Putin!” he laughed.

But Mr. Frick, the son of a Swedish Roma and a Pol­ish Jew, said Nyheter Idag answered to no one, nei­ther the Swe­den Democ­rats nor the Krem­lin, though he added that his relent­less report­ing about the prob­lems posed by immi­grants dove­tailed with both their agen­das.

“Peo­ple can see what’s hap­pen­ing in the streets,” he said, adding, “I’ve been accused of being a racist — I’m being ‘paid by the Swe­den Democ­rats,’ I’m ‘a spy for Rus­sia.’ That just tells me I’m kick­ing where it hurts.”

Still, he said he had rea­son to believe that “there is a lit­tle bit of col­lu­sion between Rus­sia and some Swedish right-wing media.” One of his ear­ly scoops involved expos­ing the drink­ing and wom­an­iz­ing shenani­gans of a Swe­den Demo­c­rat mem­ber of Par­lia­ment who had been invit­ed to Moscow. Dur­ing that report­ing trip, he said, he was invit­ed to serve as an inde­pen­dent observ­er in Russia’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and to meet Mr. Putin.

He declined the invi­ta­tion.

There is anoth­er curi­ous Russ­ian com­mon denom­i­na­tor: Six of Sweden’s alt-right sites have drawn adver­tis­ing rev­enue from a net­work of online auto-parts stores based in Ger­many and owned by four busi­ness­men from Rus­sia and Ukraine, three of whom have adopt­ed Ger­man-sound­ing sur­names.

The ads were first noticed by the Swedish news­pa­per Dagens Nyheter, which dis­cov­ered that while they appeared to be for a vari­ety of out­lets, all traced back to the same Berlin address and were owned by a par­ent com­pa­ny, Autodoc GmbH.

The Times found that the com­pa­ny had also placed ads on anti-Semit­ic and oth­er extrem­ist sites in Ger­many, Hun­gary, Aus­tria and else­where in Europe.

Which raised a ques­tion: Was the auto-parts deal­er sim­ply try­ing to drum up busi­ness, or was it also try­ing to sup­port the far-right cause?

Rikard Lind­holm, co-founder of a data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing firm who has worked with Swedish author­i­ties to com­bat dis­in­for­ma­tion, dug deep­er into the Autodoc net­work.

Hid­den beneath the user-friend­ly inter­face of some of the ear­li­est Autodoc sites lay what Mr. Lind­holm, an expert in the foren­sic analy­sis of online traf­fic, described as “ice­bergs” of blog-like con­tent com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed to auto parts, trans­lat­ed into a vari­ety of lan­guages. A vis­i­tor to one of the car-parts sites could not sim­ply access this con­tent from the home page; instead, one had to know and type in the full URL.

“It’s like they have a back door and it’s open and you can have a look around, but to do that you have to know that the door is there,” Mr. Lind­holm said.

Much of the con­tent was not polit­i­cal. But there were links to posts about a range of divi­sive social issues, some of them trans­lat­ed into oth­er lan­guages. One hid­den link — about female gen­i­tal muti­la­tion in Mus­lim coun­tries — had been trans­lat­ed from Eng­lish to Pol­ish before being post­ed. Yet anoth­er post, from a site called AnsweringIslam.net, con­clud­ed, “Islam hates you.”

Thomas Casper, a spokesman for Autodoc, said the com­pa­ny had no “inter­est at all in sup­port­ing alt-right media,” and added, “We vehe­ment­ly oppose racism and far-right prin­ci­ples.”

He said the company’s dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing team worked with third par­ties to place ads on “trust­ed web­sites with sub­stan­tial traf­fic.” Autodoc, he said, had insti­tut­ed con­trols to try to ensure that it no longer adver­tised on far-right sites.

As for the ice­bergs, after receiv­ing The Times’s inquiry, the com­pa­ny removed what Mr. Casper called the “obvi­ous­ly dubi­ous and out­dat­ed con­tent.” It had orig­i­nal­ly been placed there, he said, to improve search engine opti­miza­tion.

But Mr. Lind­holm said that made no sense. “By link­ing to irrel­e­vant con­tent, it actu­al­ly hurts their busi­ness because Google frowns on that,” he said.

Links Abroad

Anoth­er way to look inside the explo­sive growth of Sweden’s alt-right out­lets is to see who is link­ing to them. The more links, espe­cial­ly from well-traf­ficked out­lets, the more like­ly Google is to rank the sites as author­i­ta­tive. That, in turn, means that Swedes are more like­ly to see them when they search for, say, immi­gra­tion and crime.

The Times ana­lyzed more than 12 mil­lion avail­able links from over 18,000 domains to four promi­nent far-right sites — Nyheter Idag, Samhall­snytt, Fria Tider and Nya Tider. The data was culled by Mr. Lind­holm from two search engine opti­miza­tion tools and rep­re­sents a snap­shot of all known links through July 2.

As expect­ed, giv­en the rel­a­tive pauci­ty of Swedish speak­ers world­wide, most of the links came from Swedish-lan­guage sites.

But the analy­sis turned up a sur­pris­ing num­ber of links from well-traf­ficked for­eign-lan­guage sites — which sug­gests that the Swedish sites’ rapid growth has been dri­ven to a sig­nif­i­cant degree from abroad.

“It has the mak­ings, the char­ac­ter­is­tics, of an oper­a­tion whose pur­pose or goal is to help these sites become rel­e­vant by get­ting them to be seen as wide­ly as pos­si­ble,” Mr. Lind­holm said.

Over all, more than one in five links were from non-Swedish lan­guage sites. Eng­lish-lan­guage sites, along with Nor­we­gian ones, linked the most, near­ly a mil­lion times. But oth­er Euro­pean-lan­guage far-right sites — Russ­ian but also Czech, Dan­ish, Ger­man, Finnish and Pol­ish — were also fre­quent link­ers.

The Times iden­ti­fied 356 domains that linked to all four Swedish sites.

Many are well known in Amer­i­can far-right cir­cles. Among them is the Gate­stone Insti­tute, a think tank whose site reg­u­lar­ly stokes fears about Mus­lims in the Unit­ed States and Europe. Its chair­man until last year was John R. Bolton, now Mr. Trump’s nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, and its fun­ders have includ­ed Rebekah Mer­cer, a promi­nent wealthy Trump sup­port­er.

Oth­er domains that linked to all four Swedish sites includ­ed Storm­front, one of the old­est and largest Amer­i­can white suprema­cist sites; Voice of Europe, a Krem­lin-friend­ly right-wing site; a Russ­ian-lan­guage blog called Sweden4Rus.nu; and FreieWelt.net, a site sup­port­ive of the AfD in Ger­many.

This loose­ly knit glob­al net­work does not just help increase read­er­ship in Swe­den; researchers have tracked how Russ­ian state out­lets like RT and Sput­nik, along with West­ern plat­forms like Infowars and Bre­it­bart, have picked up and ampli­fied Swedish immi­gra­tion-relat­ed sto­ries to gal­va­nize xeno­pho­bia among their audi­ences.

Bjorn Palmertz, a dis­in­for­ma­tion spe­cial­ist at the Swedish Defense Uni­ver­si­ty, said this “infor­ma­tion laun­dry” had result­ed in glob­al­ly viral sto­ries like the one about the Swedish town that allowed a mosque to issue calls to prayer while deny­ing a church’s appli­ca­tion to ring its bells — nev­er mind that the church had not applied.

“Swe­den is por­trayed either as a heav­en or a hell,” said Anni­ka Rem­be, Sweden’s con­sul gen­er­al in New York. “But con­ser­v­a­tive val­ue-based politi­cians in Hun­gary, Poland, the Unit­ed States and else­where would use Swe­den as an exam­ple of a failed state: If you fol­low this path, your soci­ety will look like Sweden’s.”

The ‘Vil­lage of the World’

The audi­to­ri­um at Rinke­byskolan, a mid­dle school across the street from Rinkeby’s town square, filled rapid­ly. Women wear­ing hijabs and burqas spilled in, tak­ing their seats on the left. Men sat to the right. From the speak­ers came the voice of an imam read­ing from the Quran.

Devel­oped as part of a 1960s-era gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tive to build a mil­lion afford­able dwellings, Rinke­by was orig­i­nal­ly home to a mix of Swedes and labor­ers from south­ern Europe. Over time it became known as Sweden’s “Vil­lage of the World,” with peo­ple from more than 100 coun­tries liv­ing in drab, low-slung apart­ment blocks. Today, more than 91 per­cent of Rinkeby’s rough­ly 16,400 res­i­dents are immi­grants and their chil­dren.

At a long table in front of the audi­to­ri­um sat Niclas Ander­s­son, a tow­er­ing man who serves as Rinkeby’s police chief. Once prayers con­clud­ed, the audi­ence began pep­per­ing him with ques­tions.

Some wor­ried about drug traf­fick­ing inside the apart­ment com­plex­es, oth­ers about the preva­lence of guns. Could the police install more cam­eras?

To be sure, Mr. Ander­s­son said in an inter­view after­ward, there were prob­lems in Rinke­by, his post­ing for 18 years. But it is hard­ly the hellscape that nation­al­ists bent on paint­ing Swe­den as a failed state hold it out to be.

Many new­com­ers still strug­gle to get a foothold in the job mar­ket, so unem­ploy­ment is rel­a­tive­ly high, at 8.8 per­cent. And in the larg­er Rinke­by-Kista bor­ough, there were 825 report­ed episodes of vio­lent crime last year, a rate 36 per­cent high­er per capi­ta than Stock­holm as a whole.

But Mr. Ander­s­son does not rec­og­nize the Rinke­by por­trayed in the movie — direct­ed by a film­mak­er who has shot polit­i­cal ads for Repub­li­cans in Con­gress — that led Mr. Trump to make his “last night in Swe­den” remarks. Rinke­by is not a no-go zone, Mr. Ander­s­son said, an asser­tion sup­port­ed by the film’s chief cam­era­man, who has acknowl­edged that offi­cers who seemed to sug­gest oth­er­wise had been edit­ed out of con­text.

In fact, the num­ber of police offi­cers in Rinke­by has more than quadru­pled since 2015. Assaults and rob­beries are down, Mr. Ander­s­son said. Fatal shoot­ings are down, too — of 11 in Stock­holm last year, one was in Rinke­by. Nation­al­ly, the vio­lent crime rate is one-fifth that of the Unit­ed States.

“It was a heav­i­ly slant­ed pic­ture,” Mr. Ander­s­son said. “You zero in on a cou­ple of inci­dents, then use that to describe the whole area.”

By the time Mr. Trump zeroed in on Rinke­by, “the gov­ern­ment was tack­ling the prob­lems,” said Amela Mahovic, a local reporter for Swedish pub­lic tele­vi­sion. When the actu­al clash broke out soon after, she said, com­mu­ni­ty elders spread the word to local youths: “You need to stop this.”

But soon, they said, they found that out­side forces want­ed the world to see a dif­fer­ent pic­ture.

Guleed Mohamed, then a researcher for pub­lic tele­vi­sion, said he had spo­ken to a report­ing team from Rus­sia and Ukraine in Rinke­by Square that week and had tried to ask about Rus­sia.

“They changed the sub­ject to how mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism doesn’t work,” he recalled. “And then they quick­ly con­nect­ed that to the clash — ‘I want to talk about the riot. Don’t you think this is con­nect­ed to the influx of migrants?’”

Hani Al Saleh, a Syr­i­an who came to Swe­den as a teenag­er, was work­ing as a guard in Rinke­by. Tall and mus­cu­lar with a sculpt­ed beard, Mr. Saleh is known as “Amo,” or uncle, by the local youth. He said three young immi­grants he knew told him that Russ­ian jour­nal­ists had tried to bribe them with 400 kro­nor (about $43) apiece.

“Boys, do you want to do some action in front of the cam­era?” they said the Russ­ian jour­nal­ists asked them.

Mr. Saleh lat­er took a Dan­ish jour­nal­ist to meet two of the young men. After search­ing online, they rec­og­nized the logo of the Russ­ian state-owned news chan­nel NTV, along with the Rus­sians who had made the offer.

The jour­nal­ist con­tact­ed NTV, which denied the whole thing. But besides Mr. Castil­lo, the night watch­man, The Times found oth­er wit­ness­es who backed up Mr. Saleh’s account.

Elvir Kazinic and Mustafa Zatara said they were in the square a cou­ple of days after the clash when they over­heard anoth­er group of young men talk­ing about Russ­ian jour­nal­ists and a 400 kro­na bribe to fight.

“To stoop to that lev­el and offer kids mon­ey,” said Mr. Kazinic, a Bosn­ian émi­gré who serves on Rinkeby’s dis­trict coun­cil, “that is low.”

Mr. Zatara, a poet, knows well the con­se­quences of stir­ring up anti-immi­grant racism. His father, Hasan Zatara, a Pales­tin­ian, came to Swe­den in 1969, earned a high school diplo­ma and opened a con­ve­nience store.

Stand­ing behind the cash reg­is­ter on a Jan­u­ary after­noon 27 years ago, he became the final vic­tim of John Auso­nius, a ser­i­al shoot­er who ter­ror­ized immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties, killing one per­son and wound­ing 10 oth­ers. Hasan Zatara was par­a­lyzed.

Mr. Auso­nius lat­er said he was inspired by the anti-immi­grant par­ty of the day, New Democ­ra­cy.

“When my father was shot in 1992, we had New Democ­ra­cy,” Mustafa Zatara said. “Today we have the Swe­den Democ­rats. Then, they wore bomber jack­ets and boots. Today, they wear bow ties and suits. It’s nor­mal­ized now in the Swedish polit­i­cal cor­ri­dor.”

Build­ing a Coali­tion

After the com­mo­tion in Rinke­by died down, Russ­ian news agen­cies kept call­ing the police, fruit­less­ly ask­ing per­mis­sion to ride with offi­cers patrolling the dis­trict.

“This went on week in and week out,” said Varg Gyl­lan­der, the department’s press offi­cer.

Last Sep­tem­ber, right after the Swedish elec­tions, the requests abrupt­ly stopped.

The Swe­den Democ­rats had their best show­ing yet. Their near­ly 18 per­cent share of the vote ham­strung Swedish pol­i­tics, with the main­stream par­ties unable to form a gov­ern­ment for more than four months.

The Social Democ­rats final­ly formed a shaky coali­tion that exclud­ed the Swe­den Democ­rats. But it came at a price: some promi­nent cen­ter-right politi­cians are now express­ing a will­ing­ness to work with the Swe­den Democ­rats, por­tend­ing a new polit­i­cal align­ment.

In Feb­ru­ary, the Swe­den Democ­rats’ Mr. Karls­son strode into a Wash­ing­ton-area hotel where lead­ers of the Amer­i­can and Euro­pean right were gath­er­ing for the annu­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence. As he set­tled in at the lob­by bar, straight­en­ing his navy three-piece suit, he was clear­ly very much at home.

At the con­fer­ence — where polit­i­cal boot-camp train­ing mixed with speech­es by lumi­nar­ies like Mr. Trump and the British pop­ulist leader Nigel Farage — Mr. Karls­son hoped to learn about the infra­struc­ture of the Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly its fund­ing and use of the media and think tanks to broad­en its appeal. But in a mea­sure of how nation­al­ism and con­ser­vatism have merged in Mr. Trump’s Wash­ing­ton, many of the Amer­i­cans with whom he want­ed to net­work were just as eager to net­work with him.

Mr. Karls­son had flown in from Col­orado, where he had giv­en a speech at the Steam­boat Insti­tute, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank. That morn­ing, Tobias Ander­s­son, 23, the Swe­den Democ­rats’ youngest mem­ber of Par­lia­ment and a con­trib­u­tor to Bre­it­bart, had spo­ken to Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform, a bas­tion of tax-cut ortho­doxy.

Now, they found them­selves encir­cled by admir­ers like Matthew Hurtt, the direc­tor for exter­nal rela­tion­ships at Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­i­ty, part of the bil­lion­aire Koch broth­ers’ polit­i­cal oper­a­tion, and Matthew Tyr­mand, a board mem­ber of Project Ver­i­tas, a con­ser­v­a­tive group that uses under­cov­er film­ing to sting its tar­gets.

Mr. Tyr­mand, who is also an advis­er to a sen­a­tor from Poland’s anti-immi­gra­tion rul­ing Law and Jus­tice par­ty, was par­tic­u­lar­ly eager. “You are tak­ing your coun­try back!” he exclaimed.

Mr. Karls­son smiled.

———-

“The Glob­al Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nation­al­ism” by Jo Beck­er; The New York Times; 08/10/2019

“To dig beneath the sur­face of what is hap­pen­ing in Swe­den, though, is to uncov­er the work­ings of an inter­na­tion­al dis­in­for­ma­tion machine, devot­ed to the cul­ti­va­tion, provo­ca­tion and ampli­fi­ca­tion of far-right, anti-immi­grant pas­sions and polit­i­cal forces. Indeed, that machine, most influ­en­tial­ly root­ed in Vladimir V. Putin’s Rus­sia and the Amer­i­can far right, under­scores a fun­da­men­tal irony of this polit­i­cal moment: the glob­al­iza­tion of nation­al­ism.”

The glob­al­iza­tion of far right nation­al­ism fueled by the glob­al­iza­tion of far right dis­in­for­ma­tion that rebrands tra­di­tion­al far right eth­nona­tion­al­ist Nazi-style ide­olo­gies as ‘pop­ulist’ move­ments sim­ply opposed to the dan­gers of immi­gra­tion that threat­en the wel­fare state. It’s one of the biggest polit­i­cal trends of the 21st cen­tu­ry and the Swe­den Democ­rats have been in many respects lead­ing the way on this effort for well over a decade. A par­ty root­ed in Swe­den’s neo-Nazi scene has man­aged main­stream itself:

...
The cen­tral tar­get of these manip­u­la­tions from abroad — and the chief instru­ment of the Swedish nation­al­ists’ suc­cess — is the country’s increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar, and vir­u­lent­ly anti-immi­grant, dig­i­tal echo cham­ber.

...

From Mar­gins to Main­stream

Mat­tias Karls­son, the Swe­den Democ­rats’ inter­na­tion­al sec­re­tary and chief ide­ol­o­gist, likes to tell the sto­ry of how he became a sol­dier in what he has described as the “exis­ten­tial bat­tle for our culture’s and our nation’s sur­vival.”

...

It is an account that offers the most benign expla­na­tion for an odi­ous asso­ci­a­tion. What­ev­er the case, in 1999, he joined the Swe­den Democ­rats, a par­ty unde­ni­ably root­ed in Sweden’s neo-Nazi move­ment. Indeed, schol­ars of the far right say that is what sets it apart from most anti-immi­gra­tion par­ties in Europe and makes its rise from mar­gin­al­ized to main­stream so remark­able.

The par­ty was found­ed in 1988 by sev­er­al Nazi ide­o­logues, includ­ing a for­mer mem­ber of the Waf­fen SS. Ear­ly on, it sought inter­na­tion­al alliances with the likes of the White Aryan Resis­tance, a white suprema­cist group found­ed by a for­mer grand drag­on of the Ku Klux Klan. Some Swe­den Democ­rats wore Nazi uni­forms to par­ty func­tions. Its plat­form includ­ed the forced repa­tri­a­tion of all immi­grants since 1970.

That was not, how­ev­er, a win­ning for­mu­la in a coun­try where social democ­rats have dom­i­nat­ed every elec­tion for more than a cen­tu­ry.

While attend­ing uni­ver­si­ty, Mr. Karls­son had met Jim­mie Akesson, who took over the Swe­den Democ­rats’ youth par­ty in 2000 and became par­ty leader in 2005. Mr. Akesson was out­spo­ken in his belief that Mus­lim refugees posed “the biggest for­eign threat to Swe­den since the Sec­ond World War.” But to make that case effec­tive­ly, he and Mr. Karls­son agreed, they need­ed to remake the party’s image.

“We need­ed to real­ly address our past,” Mr. Karls­son said.

They purged neo-Nazis who had been exposed by the press. They announced a “zero tol­er­ance” pol­i­cy toward extreme xeno­pho­bia and racism, empha­sized their youth­ful lead­er­ship and urged mem­bers to dress pre­sentably. And while immi­gra­tion remained at the cen­ter of their plat­form, they mod­er­at­ed the way they talked about it.

No longer was the issue framed in terms of keep­ing cer­tain eth­nic groups out, or deport­ing those already in. Rather it was about how unas­sim­i­lat­ed migrants were evis­cer­at­ing not just the nation’s cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty but also the social-wel­fare heart of the Swedish state.

Under the grand, egal­i­tar­i­an idea of the “folkhem­met,” or people’s home, in which the coun­try is a fam­i­ly and its cit­i­zens take care of one anoth­er, Swedes pay among the world’s high­est effec­tive tax rates, in return for ben­e­fits like child care, health care, free col­lege edu­ca­tion and assis­tance when they grow old.

The safe­ty net has come under strain for a host of eco­nom­ic and demo­graph­ic rea­sons, many of which pre­date the lat­est refugee flood. But in the Swe­den Democ­rats’ telling, the blame lies square­ly at the feet of the for­eign­ers, many of whom lag far behind native Swedes in edu­ca­tion and eco­nom­ic accom­plish­ment. One par­ty adver­tise­ment depict­ed a white woman try­ing to col­lect ben­e­fits while being pur­sued by niqab-wear­ing immi­grants push­ing strollers.

...

“There’s a pub­lic face and the face they wear behind closed doors,” said Daniel Poohl, who heads Expo, a Stock­holm-based foun­da­tion that tracks far-right extrem­ism.
...

And fol­low­ing last year’s par­lia­men­tary elec­tions where the Swe­den Democ­rats got near­ly 18 per­cent of the vote, the par­ty’s lead­ers were invit­ed to the annu­al CPAC con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton DC. One mem­ber Swe­den Demo­c­rat mem­ber, Tobias Ander­s­son, is also a con­trib­u­tor to Bre­it­bart and spoke to Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform. Recall that Grover Norquist runs Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform so you almost can’t get a more ‘main­stream’ con­ser­v­a­tive US group than Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform. It’s an exam­ple of how the main­stream­ing of the Swe­den Democ­rats has­n’t just been tak­ing place in Swe­den:

...
Build­ing a Coali­tion

...

The Swe­den Democ­rats had their best show­ing yet. Their near­ly 18 per­cent share of the vote ham­strung Swedish pol­i­tics, with the main­stream par­ties unable to form a gov­ern­ment for more than four months.

The Social Democ­rats final­ly formed a shaky coali­tion that exclud­ed the Swe­den Democ­rats. But it came at a price: some promi­nent cen­ter-right politi­cians are now express­ing a will­ing­ness to work with the Swe­den Democ­rats, por­tend­ing a new polit­i­cal align­ment.

In Feb­ru­ary, the Swe­den Democ­rats’ Mr. Karls­son strode into a Wash­ing­ton-area hotel where lead­ers of the Amer­i­can and Euro­pean right were gath­er­ing for the annu­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence. As he set­tled in at the lob­by bar, straight­en­ing his navy three-piece suit, he was clear­ly very much at home.

At the con­fer­ence — where polit­i­cal boot-camp train­ing mixed with speech­es by lumi­nar­ies like Mr. Trump and the British pop­ulist leader Nigel Farage — Mr. Karls­son hoped to learn about the infra­struc­ture of the Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly its fund­ing and use of the media and think tanks to broad­en its appeal. But in a mea­sure of how nation­al­ism and con­ser­vatism have merged in Mr. Trump’s Wash­ing­ton, many of the Amer­i­cans with whom he want­ed to net­work were just as eager to net­work with him.

Mr. Karls­son had flown in from Col­orado, where he had giv­en a speech at the Steam­boat Insti­tute, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank. That morn­ing, Tobias Ander­s­son, 23, the Swe­den Democ­rats’ youngest mem­ber of Par­lia­ment and a con­trib­u­tor to Bre­it­bart, had spo­ken to Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform, a bas­tion of tax-cut ortho­doxy.

Now, they found them­selves encir­cled by admir­ers like Matthew Hurtt, the direc­tor for exter­nal rela­tion­ships at Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­i­ty, part of the bil­lion­aire Koch broth­ers’ polit­i­cal oper­a­tion, and Matthew Tyr­mand, a board mem­ber of Project Ver­i­tas, a con­ser­v­a­tive group that uses under­cov­er film­ing to sting its tar­gets.

Mr. Tyr­mand, who is also an advis­er to a sen­a­tor from Poland’s anti-immi­gra­tion rul­ing Law and Jus­tice par­ty, was par­tic­u­lar­ly eager. “You are tak­ing your coun­try back!” he exclaimed.

Mr. Karls­son smiled.
...

And, of course, social media, in par­tic­u­lar Face­book, has been one of the key medi­ums for the Swe­den Democ­rats’ pro­pa­gan­da. By 2018, three web­sites that gen­er­at­ed far right social media ‘click bait’ con­tent, Samhall­snytt (News in Soci­ety), Nyheter Idag (News Today), and Fria Tider (Free Times), were among Swe­den’s 10 most shared news sites. And these three sites appar­ent­ly account­ed for 85 per­cent of the elec­tion-relat­ed junk-news in Swe­den shared online last year:

...
A Right-Wing Echo Cham­ber

...

For years, the Swe­den Democ­rats had strug­gled to make their case to the pub­lic. Many main­stream media out­lets declined their ads. The par­ty even had dif­fi­cul­ty get­ting the postal ser­vice to deliv­er its mail­ers. So it built a net­work of closed Face­book pages whose reach would ulti­mate­ly exceed that of any oth­er par­ty.

But to thrive in the viral sense, that net­work required fresh, allur­ing con­tent. It drew on a clutch of rel­a­tive­ly new web­sites whose pop­u­lar­i­ty was explod­ing.

Mem­bers of the Swe­den Democ­rats helped cre­ate two of them: Samhall­snytt (News in Soci­ety) and Nyheter Idag (News Today). By the 2018 elec­tion year, they, along with a site called Fria Tider (Free Times), were among Sweden’s 10 most shared news sites.

These sites each reached one-tenth of all Swedish inter­net users a week and, accord­ing to an Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty study, account­ed for 85 per­cent of the elec­tion-relat­ed “junk news” — deemed delib­er­ate­ly dis­tort­ed or mis­lead­ing — shared online. There were oth­er sites, too, all inject­ing anti-immi­grant and Islam­o­pho­bic mes­sag­ing into the Swedish polit­i­cal blood­stream.

“Immi­gra­tion Behind Short­age of Drink­ing Water in North­ern Stock­holm,” read one recent head­line. “Refugee Minor Raped Host Family’s Daugh­ter; Thought It Was Legal,” read anoth­er. “Per­formed Female Gen­i­tal Muti­la­tion on Her Chil­dren — Giv­en Asy­lum in Swe­den,” read a third.
...

This inter­na­tion­al online net­work­ing has also includ­ed for­eign sites link­ing to Swe­den’s far right online con­tent to boost its vis­i­bil­i­ty, includ­ing Infowars and Bre­it­bart. Even the Mer­cer-fund­ed Gate­stone Insti­tute has been link­ing to this con­tent. Gate­stone’s chair­man was John Bolton, Trump’s nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, until last year:

...
Links Abroad

Anoth­er way to look inside the explo­sive growth of Sweden’s alt-right out­lets is to see who is link­ing to them. The more links, espe­cial­ly from well-traf­ficked out­lets, the more like­ly Google is to rank the sites as author­i­ta­tive. That, in turn, means that Swedes are more like­ly to see them when they search for, say, immi­gra­tion and crime.

The Times ana­lyzed more than 12 mil­lion avail­able links from over 18,000 domains to four promi­nent far-right sites — Nyheter Idag, Samhall­snytt, Fria Tider and Nya Tider. The data was culled by Mr. Lind­holm from two search engine opti­miza­tion tools and rep­re­sents a snap­shot of all known links through July 2.

As expect­ed, giv­en the rel­a­tive pauci­ty of Swedish speak­ers world­wide, most of the links came from Swedish-lan­guage sites.

But the analy­sis turned up a sur­pris­ing num­ber of links from well-traf­ficked for­eign-lan­guage sites — which sug­gests that the Swedish sites’ rapid growth has been dri­ven to a sig­nif­i­cant degree from abroad.

“It has the mak­ings, the char­ac­ter­is­tics, of an oper­a­tion whose pur­pose or goal is to help these sites become rel­e­vant by get­ting them to be seen as wide­ly as pos­si­ble,” Mr. Lind­holm said.

Over all, more than one in five links were from non-Swedish lan­guage sites. Eng­lish-lan­guage sites, along with Nor­we­gian ones, linked the most, near­ly a mil­lion times. But oth­er Euro­pean-lan­guage far-right sites — Russ­ian but also Czech, Dan­ish, Ger­man, Finnish and Pol­ish — were also fre­quent link­ers.

The Times iden­ti­fied 356 domains that linked to all four Swedish sites.

Many are well known in Amer­i­can far-right cir­cles. Among them is the Gate­stone Insti­tute, a think tank whose site reg­u­lar­ly stokes fears about Mus­lims in the Unit­ed States and Europe. Its chair­man until last year was John R. Bolton, now Mr. Trump’s nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, and its fun­ders have includ­ed Rebekah Mer­cer, a promi­nent wealthy Trump sup­port­er.

Oth­er domains that linked to all four Swedish sites includ­ed Storm­front, one of the old­est and largest Amer­i­can white suprema­cist sites; Voice of Europe, a Krem­lin-friend­ly right-wing site; a Russ­ian-lan­guage blog called Sweden4Rus.nu; and FreieWelt.net, a site sup­port­ive of the AfD in Ger­many.

This loose­ly knit glob­al net­work does not just help increase read­er­ship in Swe­den; researchers have tracked how Russ­ian state out­lets like RT and Sput­nik, along with West­ern plat­forms like Infowars and Bre­it­bart, have picked up and ampli­fied Swedish immi­gra­tion-relat­ed sto­ries to gal­va­nize xeno­pho­bia among their audi­ences.
...

The arti­cle also details appar­ent Krem­lin fin­ger­prints in this glob­al dis­in­for­ma­tion net­work. And there are no doubt real Krem­lin fin­ger­prints. The Krem­lin and the far right often have over­lap­ping inter­ests when it comes to pro­pa­gan­da and the far right loves high­light­ing the social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Russ­ian soci­ety as a con­trast to pre­vail­ing West­ern lib­er­al social order. But as the arti­cle makes also clear, Russ­ian sources still only appear to account for a rel­a­tive­ly small aspect of this dis­in­for­ma­tion effort. Most of the far right dis­in­for­ma­tion in Swe­den was gen­er­at­ed in Swe­den and the Russ­ian sources were just one of many inter­na­tion­al sources of pro­pa­gan­da. And the Russ­ian con­nec­tions to this net­work were pret­ty indi­rect in the arti­cle. The sto­ry of Manuel Ochsen­re­it­er, the con­trib­u­tor to the far right Nya Tider site, is an exam­ple of this. Ochsen­re­it­er is the edi­tor of a Ger­man far-right news­pa­per and appear reg­u­lar­ly on RT. He also worked for an AfD mem­ber of the Bun­destag. Ochsen­re­it­er’s biggest appar­ent con­nec­tion to Rus­sia is that he was impli­cat­ed in pay­ing a Pol­ish extrem­ist to fire­bomb a Hun­gar­i­an cul­ture cen­ter in Ukraine in 2018. The plot, accord­ing to this Pol­ish extrem­ist, was to pin respon­si­bil­i­ty on Ukrain­ian nation­al­ist for Rus­si­a’s ben­e­fit. That’s the sto­ry of the per­pe­tra­tor and it’s appar­ent­ly being tak­en at face val­ue. But what this expla­na­tion leaves out is the fact that the Hun­gar­i­an Cul­tur­al Cen­tral hap­pened to be in Uzh­horod, the cen­ter of the eth­nic-Hun­gar­i­an part of Ukraine. And that region of Ukraine has long had sep­a­ratist sen­ti­ments which have been stoked by Vik­tor Orban’s far right Hun­gar­i­an gov­ern­ment in recent years. So when you have Ger­man neo-Nazi pay­ing a Pol­ish extrem­ist to fire­bomb a Hun­gar­i­an cul­ture cen­tral in the cap­i­tal of the eth­nic-Hun­gar­i­an part of Ukraine, the idea that this was done on behalf of Rus­sia ignores the obvi­ous real­i­ty that stok­ing eth­nic con­flict and pro­mot­ing eth­nona­tion­al­ist sep­a­ratist move­ments is what neo-Nazis do! It’s their rai­son d’e­tre. It’s an exam­ple of the West sud­den­ly refram­ing tra­di­tion­al neo-Nazi far right activ­i­ty under a ‘Krem­lin-is-behind-it-all’ lense:

...
Russia’s hand in all of this is large­ly hid­den from view. But fin­ger­prints abound.

For instance, one writer for Samhall­snytt, who pre­vi­ous­ly worked for the Swe­den Democ­rats, was recent­ly declined par­lia­men­tary press accred­i­ta­tion after the secu­ri­ty police deter­mined he had been in con­tact with Russ­ian intel­li­gence.

Fria Tider is con­sid­ered not only one of the most extreme sites, but also among the most Krem­lin-friend­ly. It fre­quent­ly swaps mate­r­i­al with the Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da out­let Sput­nik. The site is linked, via domain own­er­ship records, to Granskn­ing Sverige, called the Swedish “troll fac­to­ry” for its efforts to entrap and embar­rass main­stream jour­nal­ists. Among its fre­quent tar­gets: jour­nal­ists who write neg­a­tive­ly about Rus­sia.

“We’ve had death threats, spam attacks, emails — this year has been total­ly crazy,” said Eva Bur­man, the edi­tor of Eskil­stu­na-Kuriren, a news­pa­per that found itself in the cross hairs after crit­i­ciz­ing the Russ­ian annex­a­tion of Crimea and inves­ti­gat­ing Granskn­ing Sverige itself.

At the mag­a­zine Nya Tider, the edi­tor, Vavra Suk, has trav­eled to Moscow as an elec­tion observ­er and to Syr­ia, where he pro­duced Krem­lin-friend­ly accounts of the civ­il war. Nya Tider has pub­lished work by Alexan­der Dug­in, an ultra­na­tion­al­ist Russ­ian philoso­pher who has been called “Putin’s Rasputin”; Mr. Suk’s writ­ings for Mr. Dugin’s think tank include one titled “Don­ald Trump Can Make Europe Great Again.”

Nya Tider’s con­trib­u­tors include Manuel Ochsen­re­it­er, edi­tor of Zuerst!, a Ger­man far-right news­pa­per. Mr. Ochsen­re­it­er — who has appeared reg­u­lar­ly on RT, the Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da chan­nel — worked until recent­ly for Markus Frohn­maier, a mem­ber of the Ger­man Bun­destag rep­re­sent­ing the far-right Alter­na­tive for Ger­many par­ty. Doc­u­ments leaked to a con­sor­tium of Euro­pean media out­lets — doc­u­ments that Mr. Frohn­maier has called fake — have sug­gest­ed that Moscow aid­ed his elec­tion cam­paign in order to have an “absolute­ly con­trolled MP.”

Mr. Ochsen­re­it­er, for his part, has been impli­cat­ed in Pol­ish court in the financ­ing of a 2018 fire­bomb­ing attack on a Hun­gar­i­an cul­tur­al cen­ter in Ukraine. The plot, accord­ing to tes­ti­mo­ny from a Pol­ish extrem­ist charged with car­ry­ing it out, was designed to pin respon­si­bil­i­ty on Ukrain­ian nation­al­ists and stoke eth­nic ten­sions, to Russia’s ben­e­fit. Mr. Ochsen­re­it­er has not been charged in Poland, but pros­e­cu­tors in Berlin said they had begun a pre­lim­i­nary inves­ti­ga­tion. He has denied involve­ment.
...

Then there’s the inter­est­ing sto­ry about Autodoc, the Ger­man-based online auto parts com­pa­ny owned by four busi­ness­men from Rus­sia and Ukraine that was found to be adver­tis­ing on all sorts of far right sites. Fur­ther analy­sis found that the Autodoc web­site had hid­den pages filled with all sorts of strange far right con­tent in a vari­ety of lan­guages. The expla­na­tion giv­en by Autodoc is that this was part of an old attempt to max­i­mize search results, an expla­na­tion dis­missed by one because doing this would be penal­ized by Google. It’s not a very sat­is­fac­to­ry debunk­ing giv­en that search-engine opti­miza­tion strate­gies include all sorts of tech­niques like putting seem­ing­ly irrelevent con­tent on a site for search engine pur­pos­es. Whether or not Google penal­izes this does­n’t stop web­sites from attempt­ing it. Autodoc was clear­ly inter­est­ed in the far right audi­ence giv­en their ad buys so it makes sense they might attempt to opti­mize their search for that audi­ence. Sure, it’s pos­si­ble Autodoc is secret­ly try­ing to finance far right web­sites while mak­ing far right con­tent secret­ly avail­able on these hid­den pages. But it’s also very pos­si­ble the site real­ly was try­ing to tar­get this far right mar­ket for its busi­ness:

...
There is anoth­er curi­ous Russ­ian com­mon denom­i­na­tor: Six of Sweden’s alt-right sites have drawn adver­tis­ing rev­enue from a net­work of online auto-parts stores based in Ger­many and owned by four busi­ness­men from Rus­sia and Ukraine, three of whom have adopt­ed Ger­man-sound­ing sur­names.

The ads were first noticed by the Swedish news­pa­per Dagens Nyheter, which dis­cov­ered that while they appeared to be for a vari­ety of out­lets, all traced back to the same Berlin address and were owned by a par­ent com­pa­ny, Autodoc GmbH.

The Times found that the com­pa­ny had also placed ads on anti-Semit­ic and oth­er extrem­ist sites in Ger­many, Hun­gary, Aus­tria and else­where in Europe.

Which raised a ques­tion: Was the auto-parts deal­er sim­ply try­ing to drum up busi­ness, or was it also try­ing to sup­port the far-right cause?

Rikard Lind­holm, co-founder of a data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing firm who has worked with Swedish author­i­ties to com­bat dis­in­for­ma­tion, dug deep­er into the Autodoc net­work.

Hid­den beneath the user-friend­ly inter­face of some of the ear­li­est Autodoc sites lay what Mr. Lind­holm, an expert in the foren­sic analy­sis of online traf­fic, described as “ice­bergs” of blog-like con­tent com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed to auto parts, trans­lat­ed into a vari­ety of lan­guages. A vis­i­tor to one of the car-parts sites could not sim­ply access this con­tent from the home page; instead, one had to know and type in the full URL.

“It’s like they have a back door and it’s open and you can have a look around, but to do that you have to know that the door is there,” Mr. Lind­holm said.

Much of the con­tent was not polit­i­cal. But there were links to posts about a range of divi­sive social issues, some of them trans­lat­ed into oth­er lan­guages. One hid­den link — about female gen­i­tal muti­la­tion in Mus­lim coun­tries — had been trans­lat­ed from Eng­lish to Pol­ish before being post­ed. Yet anoth­er post, from a site called AnsweringIslam.net, con­clud­ed, “Islam hates you.”

Thomas Casper, a spokesman for Autodoc, said the com­pa­ny had no “inter­est at all in sup­port­ing alt-right media,” and added, “We vehe­ment­ly oppose racism and far-right prin­ci­ples.”

He said the company’s dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing team worked with third par­ties to place ads on “trust­ed web­sites with sub­stan­tial traf­fic.” Autodoc, he said, had insti­tut­ed con­trols to try to ensure that it no longer adver­tised on far-right sites.

As for the ice­bergs, after receiv­ing The Times’s inquiry, the com­pa­ny removed what Mr. Casper called the “obvi­ous­ly dubi­ous and out­dat­ed con­tent.” It had orig­i­nal­ly been placed there, he said, to improve search engine opti­miza­tion.

But Mr. Lind­holm said that made no sense. “By link­ing to irrel­e­vant con­tent, it actu­al­ly hurts their busi­ness because Google frowns on that,” he said.
...

So that’s a look at how the rise of the Swe­den Democ­rats has both been fueled by an inter­na­tion­al far right net­work but has also served as a kind of role mod­el for the inter­na­tion­al far right’s suc­cess in rebrand­ing itself as ‘pop­ulist’ despite the fact that these move­ments are about as unpop­ulist as one can get.

But, again, if we’re going to explore the rise of Swe­den’s far right online pro­pa­gan­da net­works, we can’t ignore Swedish neo-Nazi mil­lion­aire Carl Lund­strom and the role his played in financ­ing and facil­i­tat­ing the far right’s infil­tra­tion of the cyber civ­il lib­er­ties move­ments. So keep in mind that while the Swe­den Democ­rats have clear­ly had a lot of inter­na­tion­al help, the large­ly untold or for­got­ten sto­ry of Carl Lund­strom remains one of those crit­i­cal sto­ries for under­stand­ing how the inter­net became a tool for con­vinc­ing mil­lions of peo­ple around the world that neo-Nazis are look­ing out for their best inter­ests.

Here’s a quick update on YouTube super­star Felix “PewDiePie” Kjell­berg and his his­to­ry of flirt­ing with the far right and pro­mot­ing Nazi memes on his YouTube plat­form while claim­ing he’s just jok­ing to main­tain plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­i­ty: Kjell­berg recent­ly declared that he’s going to try to put this
con­tro­ver­sy behind him once and for all with a $50,000 dona­tion to the Anti-Defama­tion League. And then a bunch of his sup­port­ers howled in protest, assert­ing that the ADL was a bad orga­ni­za­tion con­spir­ing against him. Kjell­berg has now announced that he’s no longer mak­ing the dona­tion. He’s still pledg­ing to make a $50,000 dona­tion, just not to the ADL:

Vice

PewDiePie’s Fans Shamed Him Into Not Donat­ing $50,000 to a Jew­ish Anti-Hate Group
The YouTube star had pre­vi­ous­ly come under fire for get­ting praise from white nation­al­ists and the alt-right.

by Alex Lubben
Sep 13 2019, 9:44am

The viral YouTu­ber and dar­ling of the alt-right, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjell­berg, reneged on his $50,000 pledge to the Anti-Defama­tion League, orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to make up for past alle­ga­tions of anti-Semi­tism.

Kjell­berg — whose chan­nel, with 101 mil­lion sub­scribers, is the sec­ond most fol­lowed on YouTube — had pre­vi­ous­ly come under fire for the praise that he’s gar­nered from white nation­al­ists and the far-right. The dona­tion to the ADL, a Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to coun­ter­ing anti-Semi­tism, was orig­i­nal­ly was meant to clear the air.

But his fans, decry­ing a con­spir­a­cy he’d been pres­sured to make the dona­tion and that ADL could some­how take Kjell­berg off the air, con­vinced the YouTu­ber to do an about-face. He won’t be giv­ing any cash to the orga­ni­za­tion.

“I made the mis­take of pick­ing a char­i­ty that I was advised to, instead of pick­ing a char­i­ty that I’m per­son­al­ly pas­sion­ate about,” Kjell­berg said in the video. “Which is 100% my fault.”

The ADL, for its part, said it had learned about the dona­tion at the same time as every­one else, and gave no addi­tion­al com­ment when asked about the rescind­ed dona­tion.

...

Kjellberg’s come under fire for mak­ing anti-Semit­ic jokes on his chan­nel. In 2017, he paid two men to hold up signs that read “Death to All Jews” — and the Anti-Defama­tion League crit­i­cized him for it.

The shoot­er in Christchurch, New Zealand, live-streamed his killing of 51 peo­ple, and mut­tered “Sub­scribe to PewDiePie” as he car­ried out the mas­sacre.

“I saw it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to put an end to these alt-right claims that have been thrown against me,” Kjell­berg said in the video announc­ing that he wouldn’t be mak­ing the dona­tion. “But I also didn’t know a lot of things that sur­faced through­out this whole thing about the char­i­ty that doesn’t fit at all.”

To his fans, the dona­tion was evi­dence of some sort of grand con­spir­a­cy. Some even claimed that the Anti-Defama­tion League was “defam­ing” PewDiePie, accord­ing to Kotaku.

Kjell­berg says he’ll still make the $50,000 dona­tion he’d promised to make — it just won’t go to the ADL. He hasn’t yet announced which char­i­ty he’ll be giv­ing to.

———–

“PewDiePie’s Fans Shamed Him Into Not Donat­ing $50,000 to a Jew­ish Anti-Hate Group” by Alex Lubben, Vice, 09/13/2019

“Kjell­berg — whose chan­nel, with 101 mil­lion sub­scribers, is the sec­ond most fol­lowed on YouTube — had pre­vi­ous­ly come under fire for the praise that he’s gar­nered from white nation­al­ists and the far-right. The dona­tion to the ADL, a Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to coun­ter­ing anti-Semi­tism, was orig­i­nal­ly was meant to clear the air.”

The sec­ond most fol­lowed per­son­al­i­ty on YouTube. That’s who decid­ed to pledge $50,000 to the ADL in an alleged attempt to put these accu­sa­tions of anti-Semi­tism behind him. Until his fans warned him that it could all be an ADL con­spir­a­cy to take him off YouTube, at which point Kjell­berg appeared to agree with these crit­i­cisms and reversed his pledge

...
But his fans, decry­ing a con­spir­a­cy he’d been pres­sured to make the dona­tion and that ADL could some­how take Kjell­berg off the air, con­vinced the YouTu­ber to do an about-face. He won’t be giv­ing any cash to the orga­ni­za­tion.

“I made the mis­take of pick­ing a char­i­ty that I was advised to, instead of pick­ing a char­i­ty that I’m per­son­al­ly pas­sion­ate about,” Kjell­berg said in the video. “Which is 100% my fault.”

...

“I saw it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to put an end to these alt-right claims that have been thrown against me,” Kjell­berg said in the video announc­ing that he wouldn’t be mak­ing the dona­tion. “But I also didn’t know a lot of things that sur­faced through­out this whole thing about the char­i­ty that doesn’t fit at all.”

To his fans, the dona­tion was evi­dence of some sort of grand con­spir­a­cy. Some even claimed that the Anti-Defama­tion League was “defam­ing” PewDiePie, accord­ing to Kotaku.

Kjell­berg says he’ll still make the $50,000 dona­tion he’d promised to make — it just won’t go to the ADL. He hasn’t yet announced which char­i­ty he’ll be giv­ing to.
...

So he starts off try­ing to put the anti-Semi­tism charges to rest and ends up large­ly agree­ing with the alle­ga­tions from his fans about an ADL con­spir­a­cy against him. That’s some major league trolling right there. By the sec­ond most fol­lowed per­son­al­i­ty on YouTube.

Here’s an arti­cle that starts with what sounds like good news but is actu­al­ly hor­ri­ble news. First, the good news: Fox News’s view­er­ship on YouTube has been declin­ing in the post-elec­tion peri­od, expe­ri­enc­ing a 13 per­cent drop off dur­ing the week of Nov. 5–12. This would nor­mal­ly be good news giv­en Fox News’s role as the dis­in­for­ma­tion-pur­vey­or-in-chief in the US media ecosys­tem.

Now here’s the bad news: It looks like Fox News’s drop in rat­ings is due to Fox News not spread­ing enough elec­tion-relat­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion to sat­is­fy its audi­ence. The over­all view­er­ship of “par­ti­san right” audi­ences has­n’t declined. Instead, peo­ple are leav­ing Fox News’s YouTube chan­nels and head­ing over to even more irre­spon­si­ble out­lets like News­max or OANN. For exam­ple, News­max saw its share of total view among con­ser­v­a­tive Youtube chan­nels to 5 per­cent dur­ing the Nov. 5–12 week, com­pared to 1 per­cent for Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber. The most watched News­max video dur­ing that week was a seg­ment with Rudy Giu­liani, Pres­i­dent Trump’s per­son­al attor­ney, pre­sent­ing what he claimed was evi­dence of vot­er fraud. So there’s a grow­ing com­pe­ti­tion on YouTube for being the most irre­spon­si­ble, and there­fore pop­u­lar, right-wing ‘news’ out­let and Fox News is being ‘out­foxed’ by its com­pe­ti­tion.

But it’s even worse. Because YouTube is defend­ing the ram­pant spread of right-wing elec­tion mis­in­for­ma­tion videos by point­ing out that it’s sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly plac­ing videos from “author­i­ta­tive” sources in its top 10 search results lists while down­play­ing videos from fringe sources. And Fox News is con­sid­ered an “author­i­ta­tive” source by YouTube stan­dards. So anoth­er piece of the bad news here is that Fox News is con­sid­ered an author­i­ta­tive source by YouTube. And the even worse news is that YouTube’s attempts to mit­i­gate gross dis­in­for­ma­tion by direct­ing view­ers towards the sup­pos­ed­ly author­i­ta­tive Fox News isn’t even work­ing:

The New York Times

Fox News’s ‘par­ti­san right’ audi­ence on YouTube is drop­ping, researchers say.

By Daisuke Wak­abayashi
Nov. 16, 2020, 12:45 p.m. ET

Dis­in­for­ma­tion about elec­tion fraud is thriv­ing on YouTube, and right-wing out­lets that most aggres­sive­ly push false infor­ma­tion are gain­ing new, con­ser­v­a­tive view­ers on the video ser­vice, accord­ing to new research.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has not tak­en down videos chal­leng­ing the out­come of the elec­tion, includ­ing con­tent that spreads false alle­ga­tions. Instead, the com­pa­ny has said that it is fight­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion by ele­vat­ing author­i­ta­tive news sources in search results and rec­om­men­da­tions, while slow­ing the spread of so-called bor­der­line con­tent — videos that bump up against its poli­cies but do not vio­late them.

But data from an inde­pen­dent research project called Trans­paren­cy Tube found that fringe, right-wing news chan­nels aggres­sive­ly push­ing unfound­ed claims of wide­spread vot­er fraud are gain­ing a larg­er share of views among con­ser­v­a­tive YouTube chan­nels than before the elec­tion.

At the same time, Fox News, which has been more reserved in pro­mot­ing unsub­stan­ti­at­ed claims of a stolen elec­tion, has seen its share among a con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ence decline on YouTube even though it is one of YouTube’s pro­mot­ed, author­i­ta­tive sources.

“Our data indi­cates that YouTube’s efforts have had a lim­it­ed impact on slow­ing or stop­ping the spread of elec­tion mis­in­for­ma­tion,” said Sam Clark, one of the researchers behind Trans­paren­cy Tube. “Despite YouTube’s efforts, chan­nels post­ing elec­tion mis­in­for­ma­tion have seen an increase in share of traf­fic.”

In Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber, Fox News’s YouTube chan­nel had about a 17 per­cent share of all views on what Trans­paren­cy Tube calls “Par­ti­san Right,” a group­ing of more than 2,000 chan­nels with more than 10,000 sub­scribers focused on pol­i­tics with a high­ly crit­i­cal view of Democ­rats. In the week of Nov. 5–12, that per­cent­age fell to 13 per­cent.

Over­all, Fox News had 67 mil­lion views on YouTube that week, which was less than its aver­age of 77 mil­lion views per week in Octo­ber. A Fox News spokes­woman point­ed to rat­ings from Nielsen indi­cat­ing that its tele­vi­sion rat­ings had grown by more than 60 per­cent in the week after the elec­tion, com­pared to the post­elec­tion week a year ear­li­er.

...

News­max, which has pushed a wide range of elec­tion-relat­ed con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, lift­ed its share of total views among con­ser­v­a­tive chan­nels to 5 per­cent in the week of Nov. 5–12 from less than 1 per­cent for Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber. Its most-viewed video dur­ing the week was a seg­ment with Rudolph W. Giu­liani, Pres­i­dent Trump’s per­son­al lawyer, pre­sent­ing what he claimed to be evi­dence of vot­er fraud.

Sim­i­lar­ly, oth­er chan­nels pro­mot­ing claims of elec­tion rig­ging saw their share grow. The Next News Net­work, which went viral with a video pro­mot­ing a false­hood about the vote in Penn­syl­va­nia, record­ed an increase in share to 2.7 per­cent after the elec­tion from 1.5 per­cent, while One Amer­i­ca News Net­work lift­ed its share to 1.5 per­cent from 0.7 per­cent before the elec­tion.

On the day after the elec­tion, an OANN video com­men­tary claimed that Mr. Trump had already won the elec­tion and that Democ­rats were “toss­ing Repub­li­can bal­lots, har­vest­ing fake bal­lots and delay­ing results” to cause con­fu­sion.

YouTube said an increase in per­cent­age terms for small­er chan­nels is not indica­tive of growth over­all since a chan­nel like Fox News has such a large base of sub­scribers.

In response to crit­i­cism that it had not done enough to stamp out dis­in­for­ma­tion, YouTube said 88 per­cent of the videos in the top 10 results for peo­ple search­ing for elec­tion-relat­ed con­tent come from high-author­i­ty sources. It said that watch times for major news chan­nels like ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News and MSNBC have more than dou­bled this year from last year.

YouTube said News­max, OANN and The Next News Net­work are not con­sid­ered author­i­ta­tive sources and will not be fea­tured high­ly in rec­om­men­da­tions or search results.

YouTube has also said that it is label­ing videos per­tain­ing to elec­tion results with a state­ment that The Asso­ci­at­ed Press has called the pres­i­den­tial race for Joseph R. Biden Jr. with a link to a Google page fea­tur­ing the vote count.

How­ev­er, one YouTube chan­nel false­ly claim­ing proof of wide­spread elec­tion fraud has seen its share of views decline among con­ser­v­a­tive cor­ners of YouTube: Pres­i­dent Trump’s own chan­nel.

Mr. Trump’s YouTube chan­nel saw views quadru­ple in Octo­ber from the pre­vi­ous month as his cam­paign flood­ed the site with ads to push traf­fic there. With Google plac­ing a freeze on polit­i­cal ads after the elec­tion, views on Mr. Trump’s YouTube chan­nel have declined sharply.

———–

“Fox News’s ‘par­ti­san right’ audi­ence on YouTube is drop­ping, researchers say.” by Daisuke Wak­abayashi; The New York Times; 11/16/2020

“But data from an inde­pen­dent research project called Trans­paren­cy Tube found that fringe, right-wing news chan­nels aggres­sive­ly push­ing unfound­ed claims of wide­spread vot­er fraud are gain­ing a larg­er share of views among con­ser­v­a­tive YouTube chan­nels than before the elec­tion.”

The right-wing media found its ral­ly­ing cry. The grander the elec­tion fraud claims the greater the growth in YouTube audi­ences. And this is hap­pen­ing even when YouTube grants Fox News “author­i­ta­tive” sta­tus and inten­tion­al­ly push­es Fox News videos onto these con­ser­v­a­tive view­ers. They’re still flock­ing to even sketch­i­er sites. Fox News is being too respon­si­ble for its audi­ence’s tastes, rel­a­tive­ly speak­ing. It real­ly is a night­mare sce­nario:

...
At the same time, Fox News, which has been more reserved in pro­mot­ing unsub­stan­ti­at­ed claims of a stolen elec­tion, has seen its share among a con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ence decline on YouTube even though it is one of YouTube’s pro­mot­ed, author­i­ta­tive sources.

“Our data indi­cates that YouTube’s efforts have had a lim­it­ed impact on slow­ing or stop­ping the spread of elec­tion mis­in­for­ma­tion,” said Sam Clark, one of the researchers behind Trans­paren­cy Tube. “Despite YouTube’s efforts, chan­nels post­ing elec­tion mis­in­for­ma­tion have seen an increase in share of traf­fic.”
...

And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, it’s not just YouTube where Fox News is los­ing ground. Even its TV rat­ings are get­ting can­ni­bal­ized by the same com­pe­ti­tion for the same rea­sons: not enough undy­ing devo­tion to the glo­ry of Trump. Or at least not as much undy­ing devo­tion as audi­ences will get on Fox’s com­pe­ti­tion:

CNN

Fox News has nev­er seen com­pe­ti­tion like this

By Alex­is Ben­veniste, CNN Busi­ness

Updat­ed 8:58 AM ET, Mon Novem­ber 16, 2020

New York (CNN Business)Trump sup­port­ers are seek­ing alter­na­tives to Fox News after Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump crit­i­cized the net­work that, like main­stream media net­works, called the pres­i­den­tial race for Joe Biden.

News­max and One Amer­i­ca News — which false­ly claim Trump won the 2020 elec­tion — are two of the biggest ben­e­fi­cia­ries of Trump and his sup­port­ers’ ire. The chan­nels’ rat­ings have surged in recent days.

Although Biden won the elec­tion — a fact Trump acknowl­edged Sun­day — Greg Kel­ly, the high­est-rat­ed host on News­max, claims that Trump will pre­vail and that he will be pres­i­dent for anoth­er four years. The net­work has gone from about 100,000 view­ers a day on a good day to about one mil­lion view­ers per night for Kel­ly’s show.

“Fox has nev­er seen com­pe­ti­tion like this,” CNN’s chief media cor­re­spon­dent Bri­an Stel­ter said on “Reli­able Sources” Sun­day. “There is demand for a fic­tion­al uni­verse.... Reli­able news sources are most­ly mov­ing on to cov­er Pres­i­dent-elect Biden. There is an entire con­stel­la­tion of web­sites and talk shows that are in denial just like Trump.”

Help­ing boost the Fox News rivals’ rat­ings, Trump is telling his Twit­ter fol­low­ers to try News­max and One Amer­i­ca News. In a a Sun­day tweet, Trump crit­i­cized Fox and said, “Try @OANN & @newsmax, among oth­ers!”

How­ev­er, this week­end, Trump con­tin­ued to pro­mote Fox News and the hosts he admires, includ­ing Jesse Wat­ters, Jea­nine Fer­ris Pir­ro and Sean Han­ni­ty, all of whom have sown doubt about the elec­tion results. He also tweet­ed that peo­ple should watch his lawyer Rudy Giu­lian­i’s Fox appear­ances.

TV anchors are get­ting pres­sured by view­ers in ways that nev­er hap­pened in the 80s or 90s, Julie Rogin­sky, for­mer Fox News con­trib­u­tor and Demo­c­ra­t­ic strate­gist, not­ed on “Reli­able Sources.”

“That has a tremen­dous influ­ence on the infor­ma­tion that you receive,” she said.

Fox has dom­i­nat­ed right-wing TV for more than a decade, but the net­work’s monop­oly con­trol is start­ing to break apart. Right-wing media view­ers began express­ing their frus­tra­tion with Fox after the net­work called Ari­zona for Biden ear­ly on in the elec­tion.

“Don­ald Trump has actu­al­ly become more impor­tant to these peo­ple than what they’re watch­ing on TV,” Rogin­sky said. “It is a drug,” she said. “They’re lit­er­al­ly giv­ing a drug to their view­ers.”

...

—————

“Fox News has nev­er seen com­pe­ti­tion like this” by Alex­is Ben­veniste; CNN; 11/16/2020

““Fox has nev­er seen com­pe­ti­tion like this,” CNN’s chief media cor­re­spon­dent Bri­an Stel­ter said on “Reli­able Sources” Sun­day. “There is demand for a fic­tion­al uni­verse.... Reli­able news sources are most­ly mov­ing on to cov­er Pres­i­dent-elect Biden. There is an entire con­stel­la­tion of web­sites and talk shows that are in denial just like Trump.””

There is indeed demand for a fic­tion­al uni­verse. Grow­ing demand for a fic­tion­al uni­verse. Grow­ing demand dri­ven large­ly by the exist­ing fic­tion­al uni­verse media land­scape, where any out­lets that aren’t ‘push­ing the enve­lope’ of this fic­tion­al uni­verse are seen by audi­ences as being part of the lying ‘fake news’ media. It’s the kind of media land­scape that leaves a net­work like Fox News in a tricky sit­u­a­tion. The net­work has long ped­dled in fic­tion­al uni­verse nar­ra­tives, but it has­n’t had to deal with the kind of com­pe­ti­tion for fic­tion­al uni­verse nar­ra­tives that exist today. As Fox News is learn­ing, if News­max and OANN are offer­ing more com­pelling fic­tion­al uni­verse’s to their audi­ences Fox News can’t some­how try to com­pete with them by being rel­a­tive­ly more respon­si­ble. The com­pe­ti­tion space is about who can cre­ate the most com­pelling fic­tion­al nar­ra­tive that get audi­ences hooked. And right now right-wing audi­ences are hooked on Trump and any nar­ra­tive that glo­ri­fies him:

...
News­max and One Amer­i­ca News — which false­ly claim Trump won the 2020 elec­tion — are two of the biggest ben­e­fi­cia­ries of Trump and his sup­port­ers’ ire. The chan­nels’ rat­ings have surged in recent days.

Although Biden won the elec­tion — a fact Trump acknowl­edged Sun­day — Greg Kel­ly, the high­est-rat­ed host on News­max, claims that Trump will pre­vail and that he will be pres­i­dent for anoth­er four years. The net­work has gone from about 100,000 view­ers a day on a good day to about one mil­lion view­ers per night for Kel­ly’s show.

...

Help­ing boost the Fox News rivals’ rat­ings, Trump is telling his Twit­ter fol­low­ers to try News­max and One Amer­i­ca News. In a a Sun­day tweet, Trump crit­i­cized Fox and said, “Try @OANN & @newsmax, among oth­ers!”

...

“Don­ald Trump has actu­al­ly become more impor­tant to these peo­ple than what they’re watch­ing on TV,” Rogin­sky said. “It is a drug,” she said. “They’re lit­er­al­ly giv­ing a drug to their view­ers.”
...

So as we can see, while Fox News is still the biggest media drug push­er, it’s no longer the hottest one. View­ers look­ing for a Trump fan­ta­sy fix are increas­ing­ly view­ing Fox News’s com­pe­ti­tion as the real sources for pure Trumpian news rush­es. Fox News is just old ‘lamestream media’. The good news is Fox News is los­ing ground. But bad news is this is hap­pen­ing for the worst pos­si­ble rea­son.

Now that Pres­i­dent Trump’s alle­ga­tions of mass vot­ing fraud have become gospel for the broad­er Repub­li­can Par­ty, set­ting the US on a path of increas­ing rad­i­cal­iza­tion of US con­ser­v­a­tives for the fore­see­able future, here’s a look at one of the new online plat­forms that promis­es to fur­ther that rad­i­cal­iza­tion process: Par­ler. It’s basi­cal­ly Twit­ter but mar­ket­ed direct­ly at con­ser­v­a­tives as a solu­tion to the sup­posed Big Tech cen­sor­ship of con­ser­v­a­tives. Par­ler’s big fea­ture is that it lacks any polic­ing that isn’t explic­it­ly ille­gal. Neo-Nazi memes and blood libel are com­plete­ly accept­able. So Par­ler is basi­cal­ly a new­er ver­sion of Gab. But as the fol­low­ing piece describes, there’s one major dif­fer­ence between Par­ler and Gab: Par­ler has had a much more exten­sive media cam­paign by right-wing media to encour­age main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives to join the plat­form than Gab ever had, with Par­ler mem­ber­ship explod­ing over the last month along. Also, it turns out the Mer­cers are financ­ing Par­ler:

The Con­ver­sa­tion

Par­ler is bring­ing togeth­er main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives, anti-Semi­tes and white suprema­cists as the social media plat­form attracts mil­lions of Trump sup­port­ers

Alex New­house
Research Lead, Cen­ter on Ter­ror­ism, Extrem­ism, and Coun­tert­er­ror­ism, Mid­dle­bury Insti­tute of Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies

Novem­ber 27, 2020 10.50am EST

Since the 2020 U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Par­ler has caught on among right-wing politi­cians and “influ­encers” – peo­ple with large online fol­low­ings – as a social media plat­form where they can share and pro­mote ideas with­out wor­ry­ing about the com­pa­ny block­ing or flag­ging their posts for being dan­ger­ous or mis­lead­ing. How­ev­er, the web­site has become a haven for far-right extrem­ists and con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists who are now inter­act­ing with the main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives flock­ing to the plat­form.

As the three high­est-pro­file social media com­pa­nies – YouTube, Face­book and Twit­ter – con­tin­ue to take action to mit­i­gate the spread of extrem­ism and dis­in­for­ma­tion, Par­ler has wel­comed the ensu­ing exo­dus of right-wing users. It has explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty, dou­bling its mem­bers to 10 mil­lion dur­ing the month of Novem­ber – although it is still dwarfed by Twitter’s rough­ly 330 mil­lion month­ly active users.

With its new­found suc­cess, the site is con­tribut­ing to the widen­ing gap between the dif­fer­ent per­cep­tions of real­i­ty held by the polar­ized pub­lic. On main­stream social media, Joe Biden and Kamala Har­ris won the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, and the­o­ries alleg­ing crimes by the Biden cam­paign and Democ­rats are flagged as mis­in­for­ma­tion. On Par­ler, Don­ald Trump won in a land­slide, only to have his vic­to­ry stolen by a wide-rang­ing alliance of evil­do­ers, includ­ing Democ­rats and the so-called “deep state.”

While it’s too ear­ly to tell if Par­ler is here to stay, it has already achieved a rep­u­ta­tion and lev­el of engage­ment that has over­tak­en oth­er alter­na­tive plat­forms. But along with its suc­cess comes the real­i­ty that extrem­ist move­ments like QAnon and the Booga­loo­ers have thrived in the platform’s unreg­u­lat­ed chaos.

Parler’s ori­gins

Par­ler was launched in 2018 and found its place as anoth­er niche plat­form cater­ing to right-wing users who ran afoul of con­tent mod­er­a­tion on Face­book, Twit­ter and YouTube. Its user base remained small – few­er than 1 mil­lion users – until ear­ly 2020.

Oth­er pri­mar­i­ly right-wing plat­forms, espe­cial­ly Gab, had housed fringe and vio­lent ide­o­logues and groups for much longer than Par­ler. These includ­ed vio­lent far-right mili­tias and the mass shoot­er Robert Bow­ers.

Par­ler, in con­trast, gained a rep­u­ta­tion for cater­ing to main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives thanks to a hand­ful of high-pro­file ear­ly adopters like Brad Parscale, Can­dace Owens and Sen. Mike Lee. As a result, in 2020 when Twit­ter began label­ing mis­lead­ing Trump tweets about pos­si­ble fraud in absen­tee and mail-in vot­ing, politi­cians like Ted Cruz embraced Par­ler as the next bas­tion for con­ser­v­a­tive speech.

The 2020 elec­tion

In the weeks before the Nov. 3 elec­tion, the big social media sites took steps to mit­i­gate elec­tion-relat­ed extrem­ism and dis­in­for­ma­tion. Twit­ter rolled out labels for all mail-in bal­lot mis­in­for­ma­tion and put a prompt on tweet­ed arti­cles to encour­age peo­ple to read them before retweet­ing. Face­book blocked QAnon groups and, lat­er, restrict­ed QAnon-adja­cent accounts push­ing “SaveTheChil­dren” con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. Face­book also began pro­hibit­ing holo­caust denial posts. YouTube labeled and blocked adver­tis­ing for elec­tion-relat­ed fake infor­ma­tion, though it left in place many con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry-pro­mot­ing videos.

These actions con­tin­ued in the wake of the elec­tion, espe­cial­ly as main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians and Trump pushed the false claim that Biden and the Democ­rats com­mit­ted large-scale vot­er fraud to steal the elec­tion. Con­se­quent­ly, mil­lions of users migrat­ed to alter­na­tive plat­forms: Gab, MeWe and, in par­tic­u­lar, Par­ler.

Users flocked there because of the promise of a site that wouldn’t label false infor­ma­tion and wouldn’t ban the cre­ation of extrem­ist com­mu­ni­ties. But they also moved because Repub­li­can politi­cians and well-known elites sig­naled that Par­ler was the new home for con­ser­v­a­tive speech. These include com­men­ta­tor Mark Levin and Fox host Sean Han­ni­ty.

Pro­mot­ing racism, anti-Semi­tism and vio­lence

Par­ler has only two com­mu­ni­ty guide­lines: It does not know­ing­ly allow crim­i­nal activ­i­ty, and it does not allow spam or bots on its plat­form. The lack of guide­lines on hate speech has allowed racism and anti-Semi­tism to flour­ish on Par­ler.

My research cen­ter has spent sev­er­al years build­ing an exten­sive ency­clo­pe­dia of far-right ter­mi­nol­o­gy and slang, cov­er­ing niche top­ics from the spec­trum of white suprema­cist, neo-fas­cist and anti-state move­ments. We have stud­ied the ways that far-right lan­guage evolves along­side con­tent mod­er­a­tion efforts from main­stream plat­forms, and how slang and memes are often used to evade reg­u­la­tions.

We have mon­i­tored far-right com­mu­ni­ties on Par­ler since March and have found fre­quent use of both obvi­ous white suprema­cist terms and more implic­it, eva­sive memes and slang. For exam­ple, among oth­er explic­it white suprema­cist con­tent, Par­ler allows user­names ref­er­enc­ing the Atom­waf­fen Division’s vio­lentl­ty anti-Semit­ic slo­gan, posts spread­ing the the­o­ry that Jews are descend­ed from Satan, and hash­tags such as “Hitler­Was­Right.”

In addi­tion, it is easy to find the the implic­it big­otry and vio­lence that even­tu­al­ly caused Face­book to ban move­ments like QAnon. For exam­ple, QAnon’s ver­sion of the “blood libel” the­o­ry – the cen­turies-old con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry the Jew­ish peo­ple mur­der Chris­tians and use their blood for rit­u­als – has spread wide­ly on the plat­form. Thou­sands of posts also use QAnon hash­tags and pro­mote the false claim that glob­al elites are lit­er­al­ly eat­ing chil­dren.

Among the alter­na­tive plat­forms, Par­ler stands out because white suprema­cists, QAnon adher­ents and main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives exist in close prox­im­i­ty. This results in com­ment threads on politi­cians’ posts that are a melt­ing pot of far-right beliefs, such as a response to Don­ald Trump Jr.’s unfound­ed alle­ga­tions of elec­tion crimes that states, “Civ­il war is the only way to drain the swamp.”

Behind the scenes

Parler’s own­er­ship is still kept large­ly secret. How­ev­er, the few pieces of infor­ma­tion that have come to light make Parler’s spike in pop­u­lar­i­ty even more con­cern­ing.

For exam­ple, Dan Bongi­no, the high­ly pop­u­lar right-wing com­men­ta­tor who pub­lished a book about the “deep state” con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry and fre­quent­ly pub­lish­es unver­i­fied infor­ma­tion, has at least a small own­er­ship stake in the com­pa­ny. CEO John Matze has said that the own­er­ship is com­posed of him­self and “a small group of close friends and employ­ees.”

Notably, con­ser­v­a­tive bil­lion­aire Robert Mer­cer and his daugh­ter, Rebekah, are investors in the plat­form. Rebekah Mer­cer helped co-found it with Matze. The Mer­cers are well known for their invest­ments in oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es, includ­ing Nigel Farage’s Brex­it cam­paign, Bre­it­bart News and Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca. The con­nec­tion to Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca has, in par­tic­u­lar, alarmed experts, who wor­ry that Par­ler may har­vest unnec­es­sary data from unwit­ting users.

Parler’s pri­va­cy pol­i­cy doesn’t put to rest con­cerns about user pri­va­cy, either: The pol­i­cy says that Par­ler has per­mis­sion to col­lect a vast amount of per­son­al infor­ma­tion, and gives its mem­bers much less con­trol than main­stream plat­forms over what that data can be used for.

Parler’s future

Parler’s fate will hinge on what its mem­bers do over the next few months. Will the com­pa­ny be able to cap­i­tal­ize on the influx of new users, or will its mem­bers slow­ly trick­le back to the larg­er plat­forms? A major fac­tor is how Trump him­self reacts, and whether he even­tu­al­ly cre­ates an account on Par­ler.

Hav­ing catered to a right-wing audi­ence and allowed hate speech to thrive on its plat­form, Par­ler is also at the whims of its user base. Parler’s main com­peti­tor, Gab, sim­i­lar­ly attempt­ed to cap­i­tal­ize on con­cerns about unfair mod­er­a­tion against con­ser­v­a­tives. How­ev­er, Gab’s expan­sion came to a halt after Bow­ers’ mass shoot­ing at a syn­a­gogue in Pitts­burgh. Bow­ers had been post­ing anti-Semit­ic and vio­lent con­tent on the plat­form, and the rev­e­la­tion result­ed in Pay­Pal, GoDad­dy and Medi­um ban­ning Gab from their ser­vices.

....

———–

“Par­ler is bring­ing togeth­er main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives, anti-Semi­tes and white suprema­cists as the social media plat­form attracts mil­lions of Trump sup­port­ers” by Alex New­house; The Con­ver­sa­tion; 11/27/2020

“Among the alter­na­tive plat­forms, Par­ler stands out because white suprema­cists, QAnon adher­ents and main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives exist in close prox­im­i­ty. This results in com­ment threads on politi­cians’ posts that are a melt­ing pot of far-right beliefs, such as a response to Don­ald Trump Jr.’s unfound­ed alle­ga­tions of elec­tion crimes that states, “Civ­il war is the only way to drain the swamp.””

White suprema­cists, QAnon adher­ents, and main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives co-exist­ing togeth­er in the online echo-cham­ber. It’s a big tent. A big tent financed by the Mer­cers:

...
Parler’s own­er­ship is still kept large­ly secret. How­ev­er, the few pieces of infor­ma­tion that have come to light make Parler’s spike in pop­u­lar­i­ty even more con­cern­ing.

For exam­ple, Dan Bongi­no, the high­ly pop­u­lar right-wing com­men­ta­tor who pub­lished a book about the “deep state” con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry and fre­quent­ly pub­lish­es unver­i­fied infor­ma­tion, has at least a small own­er­ship stake in the com­pa­ny. CEO John Matze has said that the own­er­ship is com­posed of him­self and “a small group of close friends and employ­ees.”

Notably, con­ser­v­a­tive bil­lion­aire Robert Mer­cer and his daugh­ter, Rebekah, are investors in the plat­form. Rebekah Mer­cer helped co-found it with Matze. The Mer­cers are well known for their invest­ments in oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es, includ­ing Nigel Farage’s Brex­it cam­paign, Bre­it­bart News and Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca. The con­nec­tion to Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca has, in par­tic­u­lar, alarmed experts, who wor­ry that Par­ler may har­vest unnec­es­sary data from unwit­ting users.

Parler’s pri­va­cy pol­i­cy doesn’t put to rest con­cerns about user pri­va­cy, either: The pol­i­cy says that Par­ler has per­mis­sion to col­lect a vast amount of per­son­al infor­ma­tion, and gives its mem­bers much less con­trol than main­stream plat­forms over what that data can be used for.
...

And if the bil­lion­aire Mer­cers are back­ing Par­ler that sug­gests it’s going to have the resources keep itself afloat for an extend­ed peri­od of time while right-wing media con­tin­ues to aggres­sive­ly pro­mote the site. But that does­n’t mean it’s guar­an­teed to be a suc­cess. The same thing that hap­pened to Gab could eas­i­ly hap­pen to Par­ler: one of its mem­bers ends up going on a neo-Nazi mur­der spree:

...
We have mon­i­tored far-right com­mu­ni­ties on Par­ler since March and have found fre­quent use of both obvi­ous white suprema­cist terms and more implic­it, eva­sive memes and slang. For exam­ple, among oth­er explic­it white suprema­cist con­tent, Par­ler allows user­names ref­er­enc­ing the Atom­waf­fen Division’s vio­lentl­ty anti-Semit­ic slo­gan, posts spread­ing the the­o­ry that Jews are descend­ed from Satan, and hash­tags such as “Hitler­Was­Right.”

...

Parler’s fate will hinge on what its mem­bers do over the next few months. Will the com­pa­ny be able to cap­i­tal­ize on the influx of new users, or will its mem­bers slow­ly trick­le back to the larg­er plat­forms? A major fac­tor is how Trump him­self reacts, and whether he even­tu­al­ly cre­ates an account on Par­ler.

Hav­ing catered to a right-wing audi­ence and allowed hate speech to thrive on its plat­form, Par­ler is also at the whims of its user base. Parler’s main com­peti­tor, Gab, sim­i­lar­ly attempt­ed to cap­i­tal­ize on con­cerns about unfair mod­er­a­tion against con­ser­v­a­tives. How­ev­er, Gab’s expan­sion came to a halt after Bow­ers’ mass shoot­ing at a syn­a­gogue in Pitts­burgh. Bow­ers had been post­ing anti-Semit­ic and vio­lent con­tent on the plat­form, and the rev­e­la­tion result­ed in Pay­Pal, GoDad­dy and Medi­um ban­ning Gab from their ser­vices.
...

Will Par­ler be able to main­tain its ‘GOP-approved’ sta­tus after the inevitable right-wing domes­tic ter­ror inci­dent involv­ing a Par­ler user that is inevitably cel­e­brat­ed by oth­er Par­ler users? We’ll see. But for now Par­ler is clear­ly the social media plat­form of choice for the Trump-era QAnon-ized Repub­li­can Par­ty. And Atom­waf­fen.

There was a bit of a earth­quake in the US news media indus­try week. Specif­i­cal­ly the right-wing dis­in­fo­tain­ment por­tion of the US news indus­try: Recall the ear­li­er reports in the weeks after last mon­th’s elec­tion about the grow­ing num­ber of dis­af­fect­ed con­ser­v­a­tive view­ers switch­ing from Fox News to small­er, more rad­i­cal­ized, rivals like News­max TV and OANN, with News­max’s Greg Kel­ly in par­tic­u­lar see­ing a surge in view­er­ship seem­ing­ly fueled by Kel­ly’s assur­ances to audi­ences that Don­ald Trump will even­tu­al­ly be declared the vic­tor. Well, it hap­pened. News­max TV beat Fox News — the giant of cable news — for the first time ever last Mon­day. It was only dur­ing one hour. The 7–8 PM EST time slot, when Fox’s Martha Mac­Cal­lum faces Greg Kel­ly. Kel­ly aver­aged 229,000 view­ers in the key 25–54 age demo­graph­ic while Mac­Cal­lum aver­aged just 203,000, a pre­cip­i­tous col­lapse for Fox News and an unprece­dent­ed surge for News­max. Kel­ly had been aver­ag­ing just 10,000 view­ers in this demo­graph­ic before the elec­tion. A near­ly 23-fold jump.

Now, that vic­to­ry last Mon­day was just a one day vic­to­ry for News­max over Fox. It has­n’t repeat­ed it so far. But it’s still the kind of shock that rais­es the ques­tion of whether or not it was the kind of earth­quake that was more of a rare after­shock from the US 2020 elec­tion that prob­a­bly won’t be repeat­ed in com­ing months? Or was it more of a fore­shock earth­quake that pre­cedes a much larg­er recon­fig­u­ra­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive media in the US? And now that the Decem­ber 14 dead­line has arrived and the elec­toral col­lege has for­mal­ly vot­ed to secure Joe Biden elec­toral col­lege vic­to­ry at the same time Pres­i­dent Trump con­tin­ues to declare the entire elec­tion a fraud and call­ing for jail­ing politi­cians who don’t sup­port his efforts to over­turn the elec­tion results, those ques­tions about the future of the right-wing media land­scape are being put to the test. A test that will last until at least inau­gu­ra­tion day of Jan­u­ary 20, 2021. Because if ever there was an oppor­tu­ni­ty for a ‘news’ net­work to ‘out Fox’ Fox News, and gain audi­ences by sell­ing audi­ences an even more warped fan­ta­sy ver­sion of real­i­ty to con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ences, right now is that oppor­tu­ni­ty:

CNN Busi­ness

News­max TV scores a rat­ings win over Fox News for the first time ever

By Bri­an Stel­ter,
Updat­ed 6:53 PM ET, Tue Decem­ber 8, 2020

New York (CNN Busi­ness)News­max TV has notched a rat­ings win over Fox News Chan­nel for the very first time.

The win, fueled by con­ser­v­a­tive view­ers who are dis­ap­point­ed by the elec­tion results, hap­pened Mon­day evening. In the key 25- to 54-year-old demo­graph­ic prized by adver­tis­ers, “Greg Kel­ly Reports” on News­max out-rat­ed “The Sto­ry with Martha Mac­Cal­lum” on Fox.

The mar­gin was nar­row — Kel­ly aver­aged 229,000 view­ers in the demo and Mac­Cal­lum aver­aged 203,000 — but it is still a mile­stone in the cable news indus­try.

Before the elec­tion, News­max was not regard­ed as a for­mi­da­ble com­peti­tor to Fox; it was most­ly dis­missed as one of a hand­ful of wannabe chal­lengers.

But Pres­i­dent Trump’s loss on Novem­ber 3 changed the cable TV cal­cu­lus. View­ers who were frus­trat­ed when Fox admit­ted the truth of Trump’s loss sought oth­er options. Trump encour­aged them to try News­max.

News­max — and Kel­ly in par­tic­u­lar — offered a safe space in which Biden was not called pres­i­dent-elect and Trump was not yet defeat­ed.

Through the post-elec­tion weeks in Novem­ber, as Trump’s legal team suf­fered dozens of loss­es in court in its attempt to over­turn the results, Kel­ly insist­ed that he believed Trump would still pre­vail.

His 7 p.m. pro­gram con­sists of long, pro-Trump, anti-media com­men­taries of the type typ­i­cal­ly found lat­er in the evening on Fox. And a cer­tain sub­set of view­ers are reward­ing him for it. Kel­ly’s show is usu­al­ly News­max’s high­est-rat­ed show of the day.

“We’re here to stay,” News­max CEO Christo­pher Rud­dy said Tues­day evening. “The rat­ings are show­ing that.”

Fox News is still four times high­er-rat­ed than News­max at any giv­en time of day, accord­ing to Nielsen. Among view­ers of all ages, Fox aver­aged 1.36 mil­lion view­ers around the clock on Mon­day, while News­max aver­aged 316,000 view­ers.

But Fox is down from its pre-elec­tion highs while News­max is way up.

Take Kel­ly’s hour: Before the elec­tion, his show bare­ly had a heart­beat. The 7 p.m. hour had bare­ly 10,000 view­ers in the 25–54 demo and 100,000 view­ers over­all, accord­ing to Nielsen data.

Now the hour has near­ly a mil­lion view­ers on a good night, and Mon­day was good: 949,000 view­ers.

Rud­dy point­ed out that News­max TV is also live-streamed on a vari­ety of plat­forms, so there is an addi­tion­al audi­ence that is not mea­sured by Nielsen.

In the 7 p.m. hour, News­max ranked third over­all, behind CNN’s “Erin Bur­nett Out­Front,” which aver­aged 423,000 view­ers in the demo on Mon­day, and MSNBC’s “The Rei­d­Out,” which had 280,000.

The 25–54 demo is crit­i­cal because most adver­tis­ing on cable news net­works is bought and sold using demo­graph­ic rat­ings.

News­max seems to be cut­ting into Fox’s demo per­for­mance at some oth­er times of day, though it’s hard to say for sure.

At 4 p.m. on Mon­day, for exam­ple, “The Howie Carr Show” on News­max aver­aged 101,000 in the demo, while “Your World with Neil Cavu­to” on Fox aver­aged 148,000 in the demo.

One hour lat­er, the gap between the two chan­nels was much wider: “The Chris Sal­cedo Show” on News­max aver­aged 120,000 while “The Five” on Fox attract­ed 303,000.

What’s the main dif­fer­ence? “The Five” is an intense right-wing talk show while Cavu­to’s 4 p.m. hour is less ide­o­log­i­cal. Fox’s more opin­ion­at­ed shows out­per­form its news­casts, even when the news­casts are stacked with con­ser­v­a­tive guests and sto­ry­lines.

News­max max­es out on talk shows, not news­casts. In the com­ing weeks, Rud­dy said, News­max will con­tin­ue to expand its pro­gram­ming sched­ule, includ­ing a 10 p.m. pro­gram led by Rob Schmitt, a for­mer ear­ly morn­ing host on Fox.

Rud­dy is still brain­storm­ing options for the 9 p.m. hour.

It must be empha­sized that Fox is still far ahead of News­max by almost every con­ceiv­able met­ric.

But Fox is accus­tomed to being No. 1 in the 25–54 demo so los­ing to News­max, even for one hour of one day, is a seri­ous shock.

...

———–

“News­max TV scores a rat­ings win over Fox News for the first time ever” by Bri­an Stel­ter; CNN Busi­ness; 12/08/2020

“The win, fueled by con­ser­v­a­tive view­ers who are dis­ap­point­ed by the elec­tion results, hap­pened Mon­day evening. In the key 25- to 54-year-old demo­graph­ic prized by adver­tis­ers, “Greg Kel­ly Reports” on News­max out-rat­ed “The Sto­ry with Martha Mac­Cal­lum” on Fox.”

News­max did­n’t just beat Fox News. It beat Fox in the key 25–54-year-old demo­graph­ic. It’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­turb­ing win for News­max because that demo­graph­ic isn’t just impor­tant for adver­tis­ers. It’s also implic­it­ly impor­tant for the future of Amer­i­ca because it’s a reflec­tion of the polit­i­cal direc­tion younger con­ser­v­a­tives are head­ing. And right now they’re clear­ly get­ting much more rad­i­cal­ized. Too rad­i­cal for Fox News. It’s a gen­uine­ly ter­ri­fy­ing sign of where we are now and where we’re head­ing
.

Although, as the arti­cle notes, it’s no coin­ci­dence that News­max beat Mac­Cal­lum’s show because Mac­Cal­lum’s show is one of the less opin­ion-inten­sive hours on Fox News and right now con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ences are increas­ing­ly reject­ing the more ‘just the news’ types of out­lets and embrac­ing opin­ion, where fan­tasies of a mas­sive Trump vic­to­ry can dom­i­nate the nar­ra­tive. Fox New’s prime time opin­ion fig­ures, like Tuck­er Carl­son or Lau­ra Ingra­ham, are still scratch­ing that fan­ta­sy itch for their audi­ences:

...
News­max seems to be cut­ting into Fox’s demo per­for­mance at some oth­er times of day, though it’s hard to say for sure.

At 4 p.m. on Mon­day, for exam­ple, “The Howie Carr Show” on News­max aver­aged 101,000 in the demo, while “Your World with Neil Cavu­to” on Fox aver­aged 148,000 in the demo.

One hour lat­er, the gap between the two chan­nels was much wider: “The Chris Sal­cedo Show” on News­max aver­aged 120,000 while “The Five” on Fox attract­ed 303,000.

What’s the main dif­fer­ence? “The Five” is an intense right-wing talk show while Cavu­to’s 4 p.m. hour is less ide­o­log­i­cal. Fox’s more opin­ion­at­ed shows out­per­form its news­casts, even when the news­casts are stacked with con­ser­v­a­tive guests and sto­ry­lines.
...

It points towards how Fox News will like­ly respond to this chal­lenge: by fill­ing its time slots with even more opin­ion news and less tra­di­tion­al news­casts. But as the fol­low­ing Media Mat­ters piece reminds us, it’s not just Fox News that’s going to be respond­ing the chang­ing con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ence tastes. It’s a race to the bot­tom for the entire con­ser­v­a­tive media ecosys­tem. A race to see who can ped­dling the most appeal­ing fan­ta­sy ver­sion of real­i­ty:

Media Mat­ters

Right-wing media’s civ­il war is set­ting off a race to the bot­tom

As News­max and OAN gain view­ers, Fox News is tak­ing note

Writ­ten by Park­er Mol­loy

Pub­lished 12/01/20 10:10 AM EST

At 11:20 p.m. on Novem­ber 3, the Fox News Deci­sion Desk called the state of Ari­zona for Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Joe Biden. This, accord­ing to a New York Times report, sent Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump into a rage ahead of a 2:30 a.m. speech in the White House East Room, where he false­ly claimed vic­to­ry.

That Sat­ur­day, Novem­ber 7, Fox News joined oth­er main­stream nation­al deci­sion desks in call­ing the race for Biden. In doing so, the pro-Trump media orga­ni­za­tion inad­ver­tent­ly kicked off an ide­o­log­i­cal race to the bot­tom among right-wing media. To Trump and his sup­port­ers, Fox’s call was a betray­al; to oth­ers in con­ser­v­a­tive media, it was a call to arms. With Trump vir­tu­al­ly immune to crit­i­cism — if the past few years have proved any­thing, it’s that the pres­i­dent is seen as a sort of demigod among the far right — the sharpest attacks in the wake of his elec­toral defeat were aimed at Fox News.

“If Trump los­es and it’s a close elec­tion, blame Chris Wal­lace and Fox News,” said News­max CEO Chris Rud­dy dur­ing a Novem­ber 3 appear­ance on The Michael Berry Show.

“There’s a lot of peo­ple mad — Fox News view­ers — and those peo­ple are sam­pling oth­er places,” said for­mer Fox News host Bill O’Reilly dur­ing a Novem­ber 17 edi­tion of his No Spin News show. “We have been a tremen­dous ben­e­fi­cia­ry of that. We have tens of thou­sands of peo­ple sign­ing up for mem­ber­ships on BillOReilly.com in the last few weeks.”

The Dai­ly Wire called on its newslet­ter sub­scribers to “cut the cord” on cable news, in part because Fox “down­played any ques­tions about vot­ing irreg­u­lar­i­ties report­ed from the most impor­tant swing states.”

One Amer­i­ca News Net­work host and unof­fi­cial Trump legal advis­er Christi­na Bobb went so far as to call Fox a “Demo­c­rat Par­ty hack” that “was try­ing to breathe life into the Biden cam­paign” by call­ing Ari­zona. On Twit­ter, OAN host Kara McK­in­ney told a view­er, “Don’t wor­ry about me cav­ing like FOX. My morals are more impor­tant to me than any pay­check or rat­ings.”

News­max host Grant Stinch­field tweet­ed that Fox News was “sink­ing” and wel­comed its view­ers to watch his net­work, instead. Ser­i­al pla­gia­rist and News­max host Ben­ny John­son tweet­ed that “Fox News is now indis­tin­guish­able from CNN” and called on con­ser­v­a­tives to stop watch­ing.

A right-wing media civ­il war had bro­ken out in the election’s after­math — the type of con­flict that would prompt dozens of “Democ­rats in dis­ar­ray!” head­lines if the infight­ing were hap­pen­ing on the left. But as with so much of what pass­es for news among con­ser­v­a­tive media out­lets, the claims that Fox now stands against Trump are far from accu­rate.

Fox News is as much of a right-wing dis­in­for­ma­tion vec­tor as ever.

Between Octo­ber 14 and Novem­ber 1, Fox News spent 36 hours and 34 min­utes spread across 596 seg­ments cov­er­ing dubi­ous sto­ries about Biden’s son Hunter. The entire Hunter Biden saga, itself a hard-to-fol­low con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, was pushed by Trump lawyer Rudy Giu­liani with the goal of tor­pe­do­ing the elder Biden’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. Key aspects of the sto­ry were debunked or oth­er­wise unsub­stan­ti­at­ed.

But ques­tion­able or not, Fox couldn’t get enough of the non­scan­dal, spread­ing its cov­er­age across both opin­ion (21 hours, 56 min­utes) and “straight news” (14 hours, 38 min­utes) shows. And this was only one exam­ple in a series of right-wing smears Fox News pro­mot­ed in the run-up to Elec­tion Day.

From the fail­ure of the “unmask­ing” scan­dal to repeat­ed efforts to down­play the dam­age being wrought by COVID-19, Fox con­sis­tent­ly sided with Trump and tried to boost his reelec­tion chances through­out the 2020 cam­paign. Dur­ing one nine-day stretch in Octo­ber, Fox aired more than nine hours of live cov­er­age of Trump ral­lies. The net­work also helped Trump spread base­less alle­ga­tions of wide­spread vot­er fraud before the elec­tion even hap­pened, cel­e­brat­ed a group of Trump sup­port­ers who tried to run a Biden bus off the road, and made a last-ditch attempt to con­coct a “deplorable moment” scan­dal for Biden.

Fox News does not have a “left­ist agen­da” nor is it in any way a lib­er­al news out­let, and the net­work cer­tain­ly did not turn against Trump fol­low­ing Elec­tion Day. In fact, a recent Media Mat­ters study of the first nine days after Fox called the race for Biden found that the chan­nel cast doubt on the elec­tion results 574 times, with 208 of those instances hap­pen­ing dur­ing Fox’s “straight news” shows. Fox host Sean Han­ni­ty called for a “do-over” elec­tion in Penn­syl­va­nia after it became appar­ent that Trump was head­ed for defeat (he has since gone after Repub­li­can offi­cials who allowed elec­tion results to stand in states Trump lost). Prime-time host Lau­ra Ingra­ham pro­mot­ed the idea that per­haps the Supreme Court could sim­ply over­turn the elec­tion in Trump’s favor. And Tuck­er Carl­son false­ly claimed that votes were being cast on behalf of dead peo­ple and made the ridicu­lous argu­ment that “no hon­est per­son” would say the elec­tion was fair.

Since its incep­tion, Fox News has been a cesspool of lies and right-wing pro­pa­gan­da. This remains true today, even as the network’s suc­cess in rad­i­cal­iz­ing con­ser­v­a­tives has left it open to attacks from its own pro-Trump audi­ence.

Right-wing argu­ments that Fox isn’t con­ser­v­a­tive enough have been a hall­mark of the Trump era.

Trump has always had some­thing of a love-hate rela­tion­ship with Fox.

“[Fox News] has been treat­ing me very unfair­ly & I have there­fore decid­ed that I won’t be doing any more Fox shows for the fore­see­able future,” then-can­di­date Trump tweet­ed in Sep­tem­ber 2015. Days ear­li­er, he crit­i­cized the chan­nel for host­ing “Trump haters.”

This marked Trump’s sec­ond clash with Fox, fol­low­ing the August 2015 brouha­ha with then-Fox anchor Meg­yn Kel­ly over a debate ques­tion about some of his past sex­ist remarks.

In Jan­u­ary 2016, Trump called for Kel­ly to be removed as a mod­er­a­tor for anoth­er Fox Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry debate, cit­ing a “con­flict of inter­est and bias” on her part. Trump end­ed up skip­ping that debate entire­ly, decid­ing instead to hold his own event.

On Twit­ter, Trump has tak­en aim at Fox news-side anchors Shan­non Bream, Neil Cavu­to, Shep­ard Smith, and Chris Wal­lace. He’s slammed Fox’s week­end pro­gram­ming, Fox’s polling oper­a­tion, and even Fox’s deci­sion to inter­view Democ­rats. He’s lament­ed that Fox was “doing noth­ing to help Repub­li­cans, and me, get re-elect­ed on Novem­ber 3rd” and writ­ten that the chan­nel “doesn’t deliv­er for US any­more.”

Don’t get why @FoxNews puts losers on like @RepSwalwell (who got ZERO as pres­i­den­tial can­di­date before quit­ting), Prami­la Jaya­pal, David Cicilline and oth­ers who are Rad­i­cal Left Haters? The Dems wouldn’t let @FoxNews get near their bad rat­ings debates, yet Fox pan­ders. Pathet­ic!— Don­ald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Decem­ber 8, 2019

Trump’s view on the net­work seems to be that he likes it when Fox says nice things about him, and he doesn’t like it when any­one on the chan­nel crit­i­cizes him in any way. His attacks on Fox were echoed by dozens of syco­phan­tic con­ser­v­a­tive media per­son­al­i­ties. Right-wing TV net­work The First, Nation­al Pulse Edi­tor-in-Chief and co-host of Steve Bannon’s War Room pod­cast Raheem Kas­sam, TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck, and right-wing radio hosts Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka, Steven Crow­der, Wayne Dupree, and Dar­rell Scott all got in some post-elec­tion digs in at Fox News. The same goes for extreme­ly online right-wing com­men­ta­tors Mike Cer­novich and Ian Miles Cheong.

Fox has become a vic­tim of its own suc­cess, turn­ing its audi­ence on the pro-Trump fringe against the net­work dur­ing the rare times it failed to pro­vide the media safe space he expects — and which News­max and OAN are eager to pro­vide.

News­max and OAN know what Trump and his fol­low­ers want to hear. They’re going to pro­vide it, and Fox will like­ly fol­low.

Fox News and talk radio have served as proof that there’s a big mar­ket for media meant to reas­sure con­ser­v­a­tives that their pre­ex­ist­ing world­view is cor­rect. Hyper­par­ti­san sites like Gate­way Pun­dit, Bre­it­bart, and The Dai­ly Caller have paved the way for an even larg­er right-wing media land­scape built around a ten­u­ous attach­ment to real­i­ty. The frag­men­ta­tion of media has incen­tivized one-upman­ship for bub­ble dwellers, and that’s exact­ly the strat­e­gy new­er right-wing out­lets are try­ing to use to top­ple Fox.

If you want to hear that Trump was the real win­ner of the elec­tion, see sto­ries about why police were jus­ti­fied in attack­ing an elder­ly pro­test­er, or watch an anchor call Democ­rats Nazis, you can tune into OAN. News­max is a one-stop shop for seg­ments that blame the vic­tims of police vio­lence for their own deaths or fea­ture altered videos meant to make Biden appear lost, host­ed by peo­ple who tried to prof­it from pho­ny COVID-19 cures and who sym­pa­thize with white nation­al­ists.

Most of these exam­ples are things you could also see on Fox News, espe­cial­ly in recent years, but News­max and OAN are lean­ing into them hard­er and with less jour­nal­is­tic pre­tense. This is the far-right bub­ble Trump and many of his sup­port­ers have cho­sen in response to a real­i­ty where Trump is less like a Ben Gar­ri­son car­toon and more, well, like Trump.

In a recent inter­view with The New York­er, News­max CEO Chris Rud­dy explained why the media out­let enter­tains fringe, far-right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. “At the end of the day, it’s great for news. The news cycle is red-hot, and News­max is get­ting one mil­lion peo­ple per minute, accord­ing to Nielsen, tun­ing into News­max TV. I think it’s good,” he said. Addi­tion­al­ly, accord­ing to Rud­dy, News­max has an edi­to­r­i­al pol­i­cy of sup­port­ing Trump and his poli­cies, which isn’t exact­ly some­thing any rep­utable media com­pa­ny would do.

But the pro-Trump media civ­il war is forc­ing Fox News to embrace this right-wing chaos spi­ral, and it won’t end well.

After the elec­tion, Fox began run­ning a pro­mo fea­tur­ing pro-Trump opin­ion hosts Han­ni­ty, Carl­son, Steve Doocy, Greg Gut­feld, and Lau­ra Ingra­ham cast­ing doubt on the elec­tion results. Addi­tion­al­ly, Fox has tak­en to includ­ing Carlson’s com­men­tary in the channel’s “straight news” pro­grams. This fol­lows an announce­ment Carl­son made dur­ing the Novem­ber 16 edi­tion of Tuck­er Carl­son Tonight that the net­work was “work­ing on a project to expand the amount of report­ing and analy­sis we do in this hour across oth­er parts of the com­pa­ny.”

...

What oth­er right-wing out­lets are doing to Fox News is what Fox has spent decades doing to legit­i­mate news orga­ni­za­tions.

One of the most con­sis­tent strate­gies in all of con­ser­v­a­tive media has been to accuse main­stream news out­lets of hav­ing a lib­er­al bias and frame con­ser­v­a­tive out­lets as either an unbi­ased alter­na­tive or a nec­es­sary coun­ter­weight to the main­stream. In 1969, then-Vice Pres­i­dent Spiro Agnew deliv­ered a speech attack­ing TV news­cast­ers for sup­posed bias against Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon. In 1996, for­mer Nixon advis­er Roger Ailes became CEO of Fox News at its launch. Under the ban­ner of being “fair and bal­anced,” a slo­gan it used until 2017 when the tagline was ditched as a way to dis­tance the com­pa­ny from Ailes, Fox News was a safe space for con­ser­v­a­tives.

Fox’s jour­ney to becom­ing a cable news pow­er­house has relied on the cul­ti­va­tion of a fierce­ly loy­al audi­ence of peo­ple who have been con­di­tioned to dis­trust oth­er out­lets. Fox spent years pan­der­ing direct­ly to con­ser­v­a­tives, mak­ing it the pri­ma­ry source of polit­i­cal and elec­tion news for 45% of con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans, accord­ing to a 2019 Pew Research sur­vey. The lev­el of dis­trust Fox view­ers have for main­stream media out­lets is remark­able: 65% of Fox view­ers dis­trust MSNBC, 57% dis­trust The New York Times, and 55% dis­trust ABC News. The non-Fox sources of news trust­ed by the network’s view­ers tend to be on the far right, such as The Rush Lim­baugh Show and Bre­it­bart. This may help explain how and why Fox News man­ages to stave off main­stream out­lets like CNN and NPR while leav­ing itself sus­cep­ti­ble to audi­ence poach­ing from the fringe right.

Now, News­max and OAN are try­ing to peel away some of Fox’s view­ers by indulging the elec­tion fan­tasies of Trump sup­port­ers. To counter this, as the increase in Carlson’s con­tent demon­strates, Fox is clear­ly recal­i­brat­ing how it oper­ates as a source of con­ser­v­a­tive pro­pa­gan­da. It’s safe to assume that in the com­ing months we’ll see Fox become more like News­max and OAN, not less, as the rival net­works com­pete for view­ers among the Trump bub­ble dwellers who believe a satan­ic cabal run by Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­ers drinks the blood of babies. The right-wing out­lets vying for that audi­ence are locked in a race to the bot­tom, and we’re all worse off for it.

———–

“Right-wing media’s civ­il war is set­ting off a race to the bot­tom” by Park­er Mol­loy; Media Mat­ters; 12/01/2020

“That Sat­ur­day, Novem­ber 7, Fox News joined oth­er main­stream nation­al deci­sion desks in call­ing the race for Biden. In doing so, the pro-Trump media orga­ni­za­tion inad­ver­tent­ly kicked off an ide­o­log­i­cal race to the bot­tom among right-wing media. To Trump and his sup­port­ers, Fox’s call was a betray­al; to oth­ers in con­ser­v­a­tive media, it was a call to arms. With Trump vir­tu­al­ly immune to crit­i­cism — if the past few years have proved any­thing, it’s that the pres­i­dent is seen as a sort of demigod among the far right — the sharpest attacks in the wake of his elec­toral defeat were aimed at Fox News.”

Yes, the grand media crime com­mit­ted by Fox News that seem­ing­ly kicked off this right-wing race to the bot­tom was Fox’s call of Ari­zona for Biden on Novem­ber 7. From that point for­ward, Fox News joined the ‘lib­er­al media’ cabal. Except not actu­al­ly. The chan­nels still rou­tine­ly spews out a fan­ta­sy ver­sion of the news. But not fan­tas­ti­cal enough to com­plete­ly deny the elec­tion results. That was Fox’s great sin. And now all the rest of the right-wing media can can­ni­bal­ize Fox’s audi­ence by using the exact same play­book Fox has been using against the rest of the media for decades: label­ing Fox a biased untrust­wor­thy out­let that will just give views left-wing spin. It does­n’t mat­ter that this isn’t remote­ly true. Lies don’t have to be true to work. Just ask Fox:

...
Fox News does not have a “left­ist agen­da” nor is it in any way a lib­er­al news out­let, and the net­work cer­tain­ly did not turn against Trump fol­low­ing Elec­tion Day. In fact, a recent Media Mat­ters study of the first nine days after Fox called the race for Biden found that the chan­nel cast doubt on the elec­tion results 574 times, with 208 of those instances hap­pen­ing dur­ing Fox’s “straight news” shows. Fox host Sean Han­ni­ty called for a “do-over” elec­tion in Penn­syl­va­nia after it became appar­ent that Trump was head­ed for defeat (he has since gone after Repub­li­can offi­cials who allowed elec­tion results to stand in states Trump lost). Prime-time host Lau­ra Ingra­ham pro­mot­ed the idea that per­haps the Supreme Court could sim­ply over­turn the elec­tion in Trump’s favor. And Tuck­er Carl­son false­ly claimed that votes were being cast on behalf of dead peo­ple and made the ridicu­lous argu­ment that “no hon­est per­son” would say the elec­tion was fair.

Since its incep­tion, Fox News has been a cesspool of lies and right-wing pro­pa­gan­da. This remains true today, even as the network’s suc­cess in rad­i­cal­iz­ing con­ser­v­a­tives has left it open to attacks from its own pro-Trump audi­ence.

...

Fox has become a vic­tim of its own suc­cess, turn­ing its audi­ence on the pro-Trump fringe against the net­work dur­ing the rare times it failed to pro­vide the media safe space he expects — and which News­max and OAN are eager to pro­vide.

News­max and OAN know what Trump and his fol­low­ers want to hear. They’re going to pro­vide it, and Fox will like­ly fol­low.

Fox News and talk radio have served as proof that there’s a big mar­ket for media meant to reas­sure con­ser­v­a­tives that their pre­ex­ist­ing world­view is cor­rect. Hyper­par­ti­san sites like Gate­way Pun­dit, Bre­it­bart, and The Dai­ly Caller have paved the way for an even larg­er right-wing media land­scape built around a ten­u­ous attach­ment to real­i­ty. The frag­men­ta­tion of media has incen­tivized one-upman­ship for bub­ble dwellers, and that’s exact­ly the strat­e­gy new­er right-wing out­lets are try­ing to use to top­ple Fox.

...

Now, News­max and OAN are try­ing to peel away some of Fox’s view­ers by indulging the elec­tion fan­tasies of Trump sup­port­ers. To counter this, as the increase in Carlson’s con­tent demon­strates, Fox is clear­ly recal­i­brat­ing how it oper­ates as a source of con­ser­v­a­tive pro­pa­gan­da. It’s safe to assume that in the com­ing months we’ll see Fox become more like News­max and OAN, not less, as the rival net­works com­pete for view­ers among the Trump bub­ble dwellers who believe a satan­ic cabal run by Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­ers drinks the blood of babies. The right-wing out­lets vying for that audi­ence are locked in a race to the bot­tom, and we’re all worse off for it.
...

And even Fox’s prime time opin­ion per­son­al­i­ties, who usu­al­ly avoid crit­i­cism from the right by being as crazy as any of their peers, haven’t been able to entire­ly tow the line. For exam­ple, when pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood was mak­ing his calls for Geor­gia vot­ers to skip the upcom­ing runoff elec­tions unless Geor­gia’s Repub­li­can gov­er­nor and sec­re­tary of state expose all of the alleged vot­er fraud and hand the state to Trump, Fox New’s Lau­ra Ingra­ham slammed Wood. And while Ingra­ham was echoed by a num­ber of oth­er fig­ures in the right-wing media in decry­ing Wood’s com­ments, it was the kind of con­tro­ver­sy that cre­at­ed anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty for some ele­ments of the right-wing media ecosys­tem to demon­strate their com­plete loy­al­ty to a Trumpian fan­ta­sy, with with News­max and The Gate­way Pun­dit back­ing Wood, and Steve Ban­non slam­ming Ingra­ham for sug­gest­ing Wood was wrong:

Media Mat­ters

Lin Wood ignites a right-wing media civ­il war over call to boy­cott Sen­ate runoffs

Vot­er fraud con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries catch up with right-wing media in Geor­gia

Writ­ten by Alex Walk­er
Pub­lished 12/07/20 11:25 AM EST

Lin Wood was a right-wing media dar­ling just a few weeks ago, but now some for­mer admir­ers are turn­ing on the Geor­gia-based attor­ney after he sug­gest­ed that Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s sup­port­ers boy­cott the upcom­ing Sen­ate runoffs.

In the weeks fol­low­ing Pres­i­dent-elect Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry, right-wing media have been large­ly unit­ed in push­ing base­less claims of vot­er fraud. Con­ser­v­a­tive media per­son­al­i­ties cheered the work of peo­ple like Wood and attor­ney Sid­ney Pow­ell, who have tried to under­mine con­fi­dence in the elec­tion results with ground­less law­suits.

But then Wood — a defama­tion lawyer whose clients include Sean Han­ni­ty — went too far.

Com­plain­ing that the Repub­li­can Par­ty had failed to ade­quate­ly address imag­i­nary claims of fraud, Wood sug­gest­ed that Trump vot­ers should not turn out in Jan­u­ary to sup­port Geor­gia Repub­li­can sen­a­to­r­i­al can­di­dates David Per­due and Kel­ly Loef­fler in the runoffs. Real­iz­ing that their man­u­fac­tured claims of a stolen elec­tion were now threat­en­ing GOP con­trol of the Sen­ate, many right-wing media fig­ures quick­ly turned on Wood.

With Bre­it­bart lead­ing the charge, estab­lish­ment fig­ures turned on Wood

The open­ing sal­vo came from Bre­it­bart, a right-wing site noto­ri­ous for push­ing mis­lead­ing vot­er fraud sto­ries. In an arti­cle pub­lished on Decem­ber 2, writer Matthew Boyle implied that Wood might secret­ly be a Demo­c­rat giv­en his pre­vi­ous polit­i­cal dona­tions. Fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of the piece, oth­er media fig­ures began pil­ing on.

In Geor­gia, local talk radio host Erick Erick­son sparred with Wood on Twit­ter and wrote, “This man has issues and now he, an Oba­ma donor and vot­er, wants Geor­gia Repub­li­cans to let the Democ­rats take the Sen­ate.”

Dur­ing an inter­view with Per­due on Decem­ber 3, Fox News host Lau­ra Ingra­ham, with­out men­tion­ing Wood by name, com­plained about “peo­ple run­ning around say­ing don’t vote on Jan­u­ary 5 because that would be per­pet­u­at­ing a cor­rupt process. When I heard that the oth­er day I almost fell out of my chair. I’m like, y’all almost don’t deserve to win if you’re that stu­pid, frankly.”

Ear­li­er the same day on The Sto­ry with Martha Mac­Cal­lum, Fox News con­trib­u­tor Guy Ben­son argued, “Lin Wood, that attor­ney who is pre­tend­ing at least to be, or putting him­self out there as, a big Trump sup­port­er, he’s a two-time Barack Oba­ma donor. … He is stok­ing the fires that Democ­rats hope turn into a blaze to burn down the Repub­li­cans’ chances and hand the Sen­ate and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment com­plete­ly over to Democ­rats.”

The Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er pub­lished an opin­ion piece encour­ag­ing Trump to “dis­avow” both Wood and Pow­ell, who appeared along­side Wood at an event and also sug­gest­ed that Repub­li­cans not sup­port Per­due and Loef­fler if their vot­er fraud claims are not addressed.

Fox News con­trib­u­tor Newt Gin­grich issued sharp crit­i­cism on Twit­ter.

Lin Wood and Sid­ney Pow­ell are total­ly destruc­tive. Every Geor­gia con­ser­v­a­tive who cares about Amer­i­ca MUST vote in the runoff. Their dont vote strat­e­gy will crip­ple Amer­i­ca— Newt Gin­grich (@newtgingrich) Decem­ber 3, 2020

The Dai­ly Wire’s Matt Walsh attacked Wood, com­plain­ing, “Con artists in Geor­gia are telling Repub­li­cans not to vote.” Texas radio host Mark Davis argued, “Any­one imped­ing the effort to keep those two #Geor­gia seats Repub­li­can is a trai­tor to con­ser­vatism.” And pun­dit Ann Coul­ter claimed that Wood is a “Dem” who just “just told Geor­gia Repub­li­cans to com­mit sui­cide and take the coun­try with them.”

Far-right per­son­al­i­ties jumped to Wood’s defense and lashed out at his detrac­tors

Though they were few­er in num­ber, Wood did have his defend­ers in right-wing media, par­tic­u­lar­ly among the more extreme MAGA con­tin­gent.

Far-right site The Gate­way Pun­dit respond­ed to Bre­it­bart with the head­line: “WTH? Bre­it­bart Wages War Against Attor­ney Lin Wood — Who Is Defend­ing Pres­i­dent Trump Against Evil Marx­ist Horde — Lin Wood Responds”

Talk radio host John Fred­er­icks, dur­ing an inter­view with Pow­ell the day after the Bre­it­bart sto­ry was pub­lished, referred to the arti­cle as a “hit piece” ordered by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R‑KY). Pow­ell agreed and defend­ed both Wood and her­self, claim­ing, “The pres­i­dent loves him. He loves the pres­i­dent. I mean, that was just absolute­ly ridicu­lous. … I’m well aware of the fact I am going to irri­tate a whole lot of peo­ple, but I think they need irri­tat­ing.”

On Twit­ter, News­max cor­re­spon­dent Emer­ald Robin­son and Stop the Steal orga­niz­er Ali Alexan­der issued state­ments in sup­port of Wood.

Some of Wood’s sup­port­ers fired back direct­ly at his crit­ics. For­mer Trump advis­er Steve Ban­non crit­i­cized Ingra­ham for her com­ments on Decem­ber 3 when she called those threat­en­ing to boy­cott the runoffs “stu­pid.” Ban­non argued, “No, they’re not stu­pid. In fact, they’re very, very, very smart.”

QAnon pro­mot­er “Joe M” also crit­i­cized Ingra­ham on Par­ler, and pun­dit Michelle Malkin lashed out at Rep. Dan Cren­shaw (R‑TX) after he crit­i­cized Wood’s com­ments.

On Decem­ber 3, Wood appeared on radio host Eric Metaxas’ show, where Metaxas asked him to respond to “a strange arti­cle that I read, in Bre­it­bart of all places — I thought I could trust Bre­it­bart.” Wood dou­bled down on pres­sur­ing Per­due and Loef­fler to “fight for Pres­i­dent Trump and for an hon­est elec­tion,” and Metaxas respond­ed by argu­ing, “With a runoff com­ing up, it’s in their self inter­est to say some­thing. So I don’t know what to think.”

...

———-

“Lin Wood ignites a right-wing media civ­il war over call to boy­cott Sen­ate runoffs” by Alex Walk­er; Media Mat­ters; 12/07/2020

“Though they were few­er in num­ber, Wood did have his defend­ers in right-wing media, par­tic­u­lar­ly among the more extreme MAGA con­tin­gent.”

If you aren’t with Trump 110% in this post-elec­tion fight, you are a trai­tor to all of MAG­A­land and just a Deep State estab­lish­ment shill. That’s the emerg­ing zeit­geist on the Right, where even Lau­ra Ingra­ham end up get­ting attacked by fig­ures like Steve Ban­non:

...
Far-right site The Gate­way Pun­dit respond­ed to Bre­it­bart with the head­line: “WTH? Bre­it­bart Wages War Against Attor­ney Lin Wood — Who Is Defend­ing Pres­i­dent Trump Against Evil Marx­ist Horde — Lin Wood Responds”

Talk radio host John Fred­er­icks, dur­ing an inter­view with Pow­ell the day after the Bre­it­bart sto­ry was pub­lished, referred to the arti­cle as a “hit piece” ordered by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R‑KY). Pow­ell agreed and defend­ed both Wood and her­self, claim­ing, “The pres­i­dent loves him. He loves the pres­i­dent. I mean, that was just absolute­ly ridicu­lous. … I’m well aware of the fact I am going to irri­tate a whole lot of peo­ple, but I think they need irri­tat­ing.”

On Twit­ter, News­max cor­re­spon­dent Emer­ald Robin­son and Stop the Steal orga­niz­er Ali Alexan­der issued state­ments in sup­port of Wood.

Some of Wood’s sup­port­ers fired back direct­ly at his crit­ics. For­mer Trump advis­er Steve Ban­non crit­i­cized Ingra­ham for her com­ments on Decem­ber 3 when she called those threat­en­ing to boy­cott the runoffs “stu­pid.” Ban­non argued, “No, they’re not stu­pid. In fact, they’re very, very, very smart.”

QAnon pro­mot­er “Joe M” also crit­i­cized Ingra­ham on Par­ler, and pun­dit Michelle Malkin lashed out at Rep. Dan Cren­shaw (R‑TX) after he crit­i­cized Wood’s com­ments.
...

So if that’s the mind­set the right-wing media is oper­at­ing at these days, how on earth are out­lets like News­max or OANN hand­ing the news of the elec­toral col­lege vote that just for­mal­ly gave Joe Biden a vic­to­ry? Well, it sounds like News­max vac­cilat­ed between tepid­ly acknowl­edg­ing that Biden might indeed become pres­i­dent while con­tin­u­ing to push the idea that Trump still has oth­er paths to vic­to­ry. OANN, on the oth­er hand, just ignored the elec­toral col­lege vote entire­ly:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

‘This is the real­i­ty’: News­max and One Amer­i­ca grap­ple uneasi­ly with Biden’s elec­toral col­lege vic­to­ry

By Jere­my Barr
Dec. 15, 2020 at 3:05 a.m. UTC

For the past six weeks, two upstart cable news chan­nels — News­max and One Amer­i­ca News — have tried to out­flank Fox News from the right by embrac­ing Pres­i­dent Trump’s strat­e­gy of elec­tion denial­ism.

But on Mon­day, as the elec­toral col­lege sealed Demo­c­rat Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry, their paths seemed to diverge slight­ly.

John Bach­man, who anchors an after­noon show on News­max, the larg­er of the two chan­nels, referred to Biden as the pres­i­dent-elect and not­ed that Trump’s legal chal­lenges of the elec­tion results have failed at almost every step.

“What I’m try­ing to do is man­age everyone’s expec­ta­tions,” Bach­man told view­ers. “These judges don’t seem to be tak­ing up these cas­es. This is the real­i­ty. This is the motion set in place.”

Yet OAN, the small­er of the two chan­nels, vir­tu­al­ly ignored the unfold­ing devel­op­ments as elec­tors cast their votes, instead devot­ing about four hours of day­time pro­gram­ming to a live feed of a hear­ing by the Ari­zona Sen­ate to address vot­ing pro­ce­dures. Its 4 p.m. news roundup failed to men­tion the elec­toral col­lege vote at all.

And on Newsmax’s “Amer­i­can Agen­da,” which fol­lowed Bachman’s show, host Bob Sell­ers seemed to treat Biden’s vic­to­ry as an unset­tled issue, say­ing that peo­ple are “wait­ing with bat­ed breath” for the results of the process and assert­ing that “there are still some out­stand­ing cas­es of irreg­u­lar­i­ty.”

James B. Renac­ci, a Repub­li­can for­mer con­gress­man from Ohio, appeared on Sellers’s show and talked up the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a mem­ber of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and U.S. Sen­ate could file a writ­ten objec­tion to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process dur­ing a joint ses­sion on Jan. 6 to final­ize the results.

Around 5:30 p.m., CNN and MSNBC declared in on-screen graph­ics that Biden had reached the 270-vote thresh­old to be con­firmed as pres­i­dent. Around the same time, a guest on News­max talked about alter­na­tive slates of elec­tors meet­ing and said: “I think we’ve still got sev­er­al weeks here for this thing to play out.”

Dur­ing one seg­ment, when Wash­ing­ton Times writer Tim Con­stan­tine crit­i­cized the pres­i­dent and his team for con­tin­u­ing to argue that the elec­tion is fraud­u­lent with­out suf­fi­cient evi­dence in a bid to stay polit­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant, Sell­ers gen­tly chas­tised him: “Tim, it’s kind of strange that you say that.”

...

While oth­er cable chan­nels, includ­ing CNN and MSNBC, kept tabs on the vote as it emerged through the day, occa­sion­al­ly fea­tur­ing video of elec­tors meet­ing in their state cap­i­tals, OAN stuck to the Ari­zona hear­ing. Its 4 p.m. news update led with a ser­vice out­age by Google and YouTube, fol­lowed lat­er by reports about one of Trump’s angry tweets about the elec­tion and the week­end march in Wash­ing­ton by pro-Trump demon­stra­tors.

Con­ser­v­a­tive attor­neys Vic­to­ria Toens­ing and Joseph diGen­o­va, who have rep­re­sent­ed the Trump team in some of their elec­tion chal­lenges, made an appear­ance on News­max. “How can you cer­ti­fy an elec­tion with all this fraud going on?” Toens­ing asked rhetor­i­cal­ly. There have been no sub­stan­ti­at­ed claims of orga­nized fraud on a scale to affect the results in any state.

DiGen­o­va hyped the release of an audit con­duct­ed by a group called Allied Secu­ri­ty Oper­a­tions Group that focused on the per­for­mance of Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tem machines in one par­tic­u­lar coun­ty in Michi­gan and accused the com­pa­ny of fraud. No such claims have been sub­stan­ti­at­ed, and Domin­ion has denied all accu­sa­tions of wrong­do­ing.

“There will be a lot dis­cussed about this over the next 24 hours,” diGen­o­va pre­dict­ed. As a caveat, Toens­ing added, “Maybe only on News­max.”

————

“‘This is the real­i­ty’: News­max and One Amer­i­ca grap­ple uneasi­ly with Biden’s elec­toral col­lege vic­to­ry” by Jere­my Barr; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 12/15/2020

“But on Mon­day, as the elec­toral col­lege sealed Demo­c­rat Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry, their paths seemed to diverge slight­ly.”

A slight diver­gence in fan­ta­sy land: News­max is now only like 98% behind the Trump fan­ta­sy, while OANN is main­tain­ing ts 110% feal­ty:

...
John Bach­man, who anchors an after­noon show on News­max, the larg­er of the two chan­nels, referred to Biden as the pres­i­dent-elect and not­ed that Trump’s legal chal­lenges of the elec­tion results have failed at almost every step.

“What I’m try­ing to do is man­age everyone’s expec­ta­tions,” Bach­man told view­ers. “These judges don’t seem to be tak­ing up these cas­es. This is the real­i­ty. This is the motion set in place.”

Yet OAN, the small­er of the two chan­nels, vir­tu­al­ly ignored the unfold­ing devel­op­ments as elec­tors cast their votes, instead devot­ing about four hours of day­time pro­gram­ming to a live feed of a hear­ing by the Ari­zona Sen­ate to address vot­ing pro­ce­dures. Its 4 p.m. news roundup failed to men­tion the elec­toral col­lege vote at all.

And on Newsmax’s “Amer­i­can Agen­da,” which fol­lowed Bachman’s show, host Bob Sell­ers seemed to treat Biden’s vic­to­ry as an unset­tled issue, say­ing that peo­ple are “wait­ing with bat­ed breath” for the results of the process and assert­ing that “there are still some out­stand­ing cas­es of irreg­u­lar­i­ty.”
...

Yes, News­max anchor John Bach­man just referred to Biden as the pres­i­dent-elect. Will News­max pay a price for this lack of faith? We’ll see, pos­si­bly in the form of surg­ing OANN rat­ings. Well, in the form of surg­ing OANN rat­ings and a con­ser­v­a­tive base of tens of mil­lions of peo­ple who are increas­ing­ly detached from real­i­ty and unable to accept any­thing out­side of the far right fan­ta­sy media ecosys­tem that’s cur­rent­ly telling them the entire world is con­spir­ing against them and Trump is their only hope.

That’s the state of the cur­rent right-wing media race to the bot­tom. Between now and Jan­u­ary 6, 2021 — the date when the Vice Pres­i­dent is sup­posed to for­mal­ly count all the elec­toral col­lege votes and declare a vic­tor — there’s a big oppor­tu­ni­ty for out­lets like OANN and its peers to show audi­ences they’re 110% com­mit­ted to Trump’s glo­ry, unlike lag­gards like News­max. And then, after the Jan­u­ary 6 elec­toral count, there will be anoth­er win­dow of opporuni­ty until Inau­gu­ra­tion Day on Jan­u­ary 20 to demon­strate even more Trump loy­al­ty. And then after Jan­u­ary 20, it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for each out­let to demon­strate just how much it does­n’t view the Biden admin­is­tra­tion as legit­i­mate at all and Trump is the real Pres­i­dent.

It all rais­es the very grim ques­tion: so if Trump con­tin­ues to declare him­self the right­ful win­ner and sets up some sort of shad­ow White House at Mar-a-Lago next year, how many of these out­lets will seri­ous­ly cov­er the fan­ta­sy sec­ond Trump term? Because that seems like a pret­ty effec­tive way to win this race to the bot­tom.

Who was the ulti­mate mas­ter­mind behind the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion? It’s not just a cru­cial legal ques­tion. It’s an increas­ing­ly impor­tant ques­tion for the future of the Repub­li­can Par­ty’s own myth-cre­at­ing infra­struc­ture. With the insur­rec­tion being embraced by the Repub­li­can base as a right­eous and patri­ot­ic rebel­lion against a stolen elec­tion, and a tem­plate for future insur­rec­tions, the ques­tion of who should ulti­mate­ly get cred­it for it is going to become increas­ing­ly impor­tant for the Repub­li­can base itself to answer. Some­one needs to receive all that glo­ry. Was Jan 6 ulti­mate­ly a Don­ald Trump pro­duc­tion or a Steve Ban­non pro­duc­tion?

Yes, it’s a ques­tion no one wants to answer to con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors, but that does­n’t mean they aren’t talk­ing about it. And accord­ing to Trump’s for­mer eco­nom­ic advis­er, Peter Navar­ro, Steve Ban­non is need­ed the hero of Jan­u­ary 6. As Navar­ro put it, “You were the guy who had the ‘Green Bay Pack­ers Sweep’ strat­e­gy to go up to Capi­tol Hill...Pence is the quar­ter­back, we had a hun­dred peo­ple work­ing on the Green Bay team as line­men, half backs and full backs, pulling guards, who were going to make sure we remand­ed the results back to the bat­tle­ground states for a cou­ple of weeks, so we could get to the bot­tom of that.” It was an anal­o­gy Navar­ro used in his book. For the ‘Green Bay Sweep’ to work, Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence would have to “assert his con­sti­tu­tion­al pow­er as Sen­ate pres­i­dent [and] put cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the elec­tion on ice for at least anoth­er sev­er­al weeks while Con­gress and the var­i­ous state leg­is­la­tures involved investigate[d] all of the fraud and elec­tion irreg­u­lar­i­ties that [would] be raised on Capi­tol Hill.” So that’s appar­ent­ly the name for the scheme to have the Vice Pres­i­dent block the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the vote. The Green Bay Sweep.

Now, as we’ve recent­ly learned, Mike Pence had informed Trump on Jan 5 that he was not going to be amenable to any such ‘Green Bay Sweep’, result­ing in a last-minute push by the Trump team to lob­by Repub­li­can law­mak­ers to stage some sort of inter­ven­tion them­selves to block the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Which is why ques­tions about what role Steve Ban­non played in the plan­ning for the events that unfold­ed on Jan 6 have to go beyond just the plans for the ‘Green Bay Sweep’ strat­e­gy that relied on Mike Pence and include plans for a post-‘Green Bay Sweep’ strat­e­gy that could work with­out Pence. In oth­er words, what oth­er plays were in Steve Ban­non’s ‘hero­ic’ play­book? Unfor­tu­nate­ly, those answers are unlike­ly to be deliv­ered to the con­gres­sion­al com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing Jan 6, so hope­ful­ly we’ll get an answer on future War­Room pod­casts:

Newsweek

Steve Ban­non Was ‘The Hero on Jan. 6,’ Says Peter Navar­ro

By Ewan Palmer On 12/17/21 at 5:17 AM EST

Peter Navar­ro, a White House trade advis­er under for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, has described Steve Ban­non as the “hero” of Jan­u­ary 6 because he had a plan to halt the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the 2020 elec­tion results.

Appear­ing on Ban­non’s pod­cast War Room to pro­mote his book In Trump Time, Navar­ro used foot­ball ter­mi­nol­o­gy to claim Ban­non sought to stop the bal­lots in key states such as Ari­zona, Geor­gia, Penn­syl­va­nia and Wis­con­sin being cer­ti­fied by then Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, so they could be inves­ti­gat­ed over false claims of vot­er fraud.

Dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion with Ban­non, Navar­ro also dis­put­ed the work of the House select com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the events of Jan­u­ary 6 and sug­ges­tions that Trump’s actions that day amount­ed to crim­i­nal obstruc­tion of Con­gress.

“Jan­u­ary 6th, this whole notion that lit­tle Jamie Rask­in’s got that, some­how, Pres­i­dent Trump want­ed to do an insur­rec­tion,” Navar­ro said, before point­ing to Ban­non. “You were the hero of Jan­u­ary 6th.

“You were the guy who had the ‘Green Bay Pack­ers Sweep’ strat­e­gy to go up to Capi­tol Hill,” he said.

“Pence is the quar­ter­back, we had a hun­dred peo­ple work­ing on the Green Bay team as line­men, half backs and full backs, pulling guards, who were going to make sure we remand­ed the results back to the bat­tle­ground states for a cou­ple of weeks, so we could get to the bot­tom of that.”

A video of Navar­ro’s com­ments was post­ed on Twit­ter by Ron Fil­ip­kows­ki, a Repub­li­can attor­ney who resigned from a Flori­da state com­mis­sion in protest at a raid at the home of health data sci­en­tist Rebekah Jones in Decem­ber 2020.

The footage—which does not include a response from Bannon—has been watched more than 445,000 times.

Ban­non has been charged with two counts of con­tempt of Con­gress for defy­ing sub­poe­nas and refus­ing to answer ques­tions from the Jan­u­ary 6 com­mit­tee.

Newsweek has asked Ban­non’s lawyer Evan Cor­co­ran for com­ment on Navar­ro’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of that day.

Peter Navar­ro to Ban­non: “You were the hero on J6, Steve. You were the guy who had the .. strat­e­gy to go up to Capi­tol Hill. Pence was the quar­ter­back. We had 100 peo­ple work­ing on the .. team who were going to make sure we remand­ed the results back to the bat­tle­ground states.” pic.twitter.com/Sg6KKXvKP9— Ron Fil­ip­kows­ki (@RonFilipkowski) Decem­ber 16, 2021

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of only two Repub­li­can mem­bers of the House com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing Jan­u­ary 6, shared Fil­ipowski’s post, adding the com­ment: “Peter seems to have gone full Heav­ens Gate both in sub­stance and cloth­ing.”

Tom Nichols, an Atlantic writer, tweet­ed: “I’m nos­tal­gic for the days when Peter Navar­ro was only an embar­rass­ment to the aca­d­e­m­ic pro­fes­sion and not cheer­lead­ing for sedi­tion and vio­lent insur­rec­tion.”

Navar­ro also uses the “Green Bay Sweep” anal­o­gy in his book to suggest—wrongly—that Pence had the pow­er to stop the results being cer­ti­fied dur­ing his pure­ly cer­e­mo­ni­al role as pre­sid­ing offi­cer of the Sen­ate on Jan­u­ary 6.

A press release for the book states: “As Navar­ro details, for the ‘Green Bay Sweep’ to work, Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence would have to ‘assert his con­sti­tu­tion­al pow­er as Sen­ate pres­i­dent [and] put cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the elec­tion on ice for at least anoth­er sev­er­al weeks while Con­gress and the var­i­ous state leg­is­la­tures involved investigate[d] all of the fraud and elec­tion irreg­u­lar­i­ties that [would] be raised on Capi­tol Hill.’ ”

Navar­ro could be fac­ing charges of con­tempt of Con­gress after he refused to attend a sched­uled inter­view on Wednes­day before a House sub­com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­men­t’s response to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. Like Ban­non did before him, Navar­ro cit­ed Trump’s exec­u­tive priv­i­lege in his refusal.

...

———–

“Steve Ban­non Was ‘The Hero on Jan. 6,’ Says Peter Navar­ro” by Ewan Palmer; Newsweek; 12/17/2021

““Jan­u­ary 6th, this whole notion that lit­tle Jamie Rask­in’s got that, some­how, Pres­i­dent Trump want­ed to do an insur­rec­tion,” Navar­ro said, before point­ing to Ban­non. “You were the hero of Jan­u­ary 6th.”

“You were the hero of Jan­u­ary 6th.” That was Peter Navar­ro’s mes­sage to Steve Ban­non. Ban­non was the guy had the ‘Green Bay Pack­ers Sweep’ strat­e­gy to go up to the Capi­tol Hill. From a legal stand­point these are obvi­ous­ly prob­lem­at­ic com­ments. But from the stand­point of right-wing myth-build­ing, it was quite an hon­or Navar­ro bestowed upon Ban­non. Jan­u­ary 6 part of right-wing folk lore by now, and Ban­non is being cast as the mas­ter­mind behind it all:

...
“You were the guy who had the ‘Green Bay Pack­ers Sweep’ strat­e­gy to go up to Capi­tol Hill,” he said.

“Pence is the quar­ter­back, we had a hun­dred peo­ple work­ing on the Green Bay team as line­men, half backs and full backs, pulling guards, who were going to make sure we remand­ed the results back to the bat­tle­ground states for a cou­ple of weeks, so we could get to the bot­tom of that.”

...

Navar­ro also uses the “Green Bay Sweep” anal­o­gy in his book to suggest—wrongly—that Pence had the pow­er to stop the results being cer­ti­fied dur­ing his pure­ly cer­e­mo­ni­al role as pre­sid­ing offi­cer of the Sen­ate on Jan­u­ary 6.

A press release for the book states: “As Navar­ro details, for the ‘Green Bay Sweep’ to work, Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence would have to ‘assert his con­sti­tu­tion­al pow­er as Sen­ate pres­i­dent [and] put cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the elec­tion on ice for at least anoth­er sev­er­al weeks while Con­gress and the var­i­ous state leg­is­la­tures involved investigate[d] all of the fraud and elec­tion irreg­u­lar­i­ties that [would] be raised on Capi­tol Hill.’ ”
...

And while this video clip rais­es are sorts of inter­est­ing legal ques­tions in rela­tion to both Ban­non’s and Navar­ro’s ongo­ing efforts to resist sub­poe­nas from the con­gres­sion­al Jan 6 inves­tiga­tive com­mit­tees, cit­ing exec­u­tive priv­i­lege, there’s an addi­tion­al ques­tion raised about this video going viral: just how much mon­ey does Steve Ban­non make after one of his War­Room pod­cast videos goes viral? Because as the arti­cle notes, this 30 sec­ond clip has already been watched near­ly half a mil­lion times. And with Ban­non’s pod­cast increas­ing­ly tak­ing on the role of the MAGA-land orga­ni­za­tion­al head­quar­ters, the ques­tion of how lucra­tive these pod­casts might be is the kind of ques­tion that’s like­ly to only grow in impor­tance while Ban­non’s influ­ence over the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment con­tin­ues to grow:

...
The footage—which does not include a response from Bannon—has been watched more than 445,000 times.
...

And the brings us to a dis­turb­ing recent inves­ti­ga­tion by ProP­ub­li­ca that helps answer that ques­tion of how much mon­ey is Ban­non mak­ing when­ev­er one of his high­ly con­tro­ver­sial inter­views ends up going viral. Because it turns out that when Google kicked the War­Room pod­cast off of Google-owned Youtube after Ban­non called for the behead­ing of Antho­ny Fau­ci and urged Trump sup­port­ers to come to DC for Jan­u­ary 6, the com­pa­ny left a loop­hole in place that allowed those ads to con­tin­ue. It was a sim­ple loop­hole with an impor­tant addi­tion­al fea­ture: it allowed the adver­tis­ers them­selves to claim igno­rance about where their ad was ulti­mate­ly play­ing.

The loop­hole worked as fol­lows: The War­Room home page auto­mat­i­cal­ly played innocu­ous con­tent — like how to pro­tect your phone against win­ter weath­er — inter­spersed with ads. Those ads were con­trolled by Googles ad net­work. And it turns out the vast major­i­ty of online ads aren’t pur­chased direct­ly. Instead, brands use auto­mat­ed ad exchanges like Google’s that rely on real-time auc­tions that attempt to auto­mat­i­cal­ly place ads in front of inter­est­ed audi­ences. So these ad-exchanges are effec­tive­ly telling these brands to adver­tise on the War­Room pod­cast. So as long as Google keeps the War­Room web­site in its ad net­work, and as long as brands don’t explic­it­ly ban their ads show­ing up on the page, we can expect the War­Room to con­tin­ue col­lect­ing ad rev­enue in this man­ner. Google also gets a cut of each ad sold.

So was the War­Room pod­cast removed from Google’s ad net­work fol­low­ing this report? Nope. The ads are now gone from the home­page but accord­ing to Google it was­n’t the com­pa­ny behind that removal because they don’t vio­late Google’s poli­cies. So while it appears that the War­Room pod­cast has pre­emp­tive­ly pulled this rev­enue source in light of ProP­ub­li­ca’s report, there’s noth­ing stop­ping them for doing it again:

ProP­ub­li­ca

How Steve Ban­non Has Exploit­ed Google Ads to Mon­e­tize Extrem­ism
Google kicked Ban­non off YouTube because of his vio­lent rhetoric but still sent ad dol­lars to his web­site that pro­motes mis­in­for­ma­tion about the elec­tion and the pan­dem­ic.

by Craig Sil­ver­man and Isaac Arns­dorf
Nov. 29, 2021 4:22 p.m. EST

Almost a year ago, Google took a major step to ensure that its ubiq­ui­tous online ad net­work didn’t put mon­ey in the pock­et of Steve Ban­non, the indict­ed for­mer advis­er to Don­ald Trump. The com­pa­ny kicked Ban­non off YouTube, which Google owns, after he called for the behead­ing of Antho­ny Fau­ci and urged Trump sup­port­ers to come to Wash­ing­ton on Jan. 6 to try to over­turn the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results.

Google also con­firmed to ProP­ub­li­ca that it has at times blocked ads from appear­ing on Bannon’s War Room web­site along­side indi­vid­ual arti­cles that vio­late Google’s rules.

But Ban­non found a loop­hole in Google’s poli­cies that let him keep earn­ing ad mon­ey on his site’s home­page.

Until Mon­day, the home page auto­mat­i­cal­ly played innocu­ous stock con­tent, such as tips on how to pro­tect your phone in win­ter weath­er or how to improve the effec­tive­ness of your LinkedIn pro­file.

The con­tent like­ly had no inter­est for War Room vis­i­tors, espe­cial­ly since it was inter­rupt­ed every few sec­onds by ads. But the ads, sup­plied through Google’s net­work, came from such promi­nent brands as Land Rover, Vol­vo, Door­Dash, Sta­ples and even Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.

Right below that video play­er was anoth­er that fea­tured clips from Bannon’s “War Room” pod­cast, which rou­tine­ly por­trays par­tic­i­pants in the Jan. 6 Capi­tol riot as patri­ots and airs false claims about the 2020 elec­tion and the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

The video play­er run­ning Google ads amid innocu­ous clips dis­ap­peared from Bannon’s web­site on Mon­day, after ProP­ub­li­ca inquired with Google, Ban­non and adver­tis­ers. The change was not Google’s doing: Google spokesper­son Michael Aci­man said the play­er did not break the company’s rules. He said Google’s poli­cies were effec­tive in pre­vent­ing ads from end­ing up on sites with “harm­ful con­tent.”

“We have strict poli­cies that explic­it­ly pro­hib­it pub­lish­ers from both pro­mot­ing harm­ful con­tent and pro­vid­ing inac­cu­rate infor­ma­tion about their prop­er­ties, mis­rep­re­sent­ing their iden­ti­ty, or send­ing unau­tho­rized ad requests,” Aci­man said. “These poli­cies exist to pro­tect both users and adver­tis­ers from abuse, fraud or dis­rup­tive ad expe­ri­ences, and we enforce them through a mix of auto­mat­ed tools and human review. When we find pub­lish­ers that vio­late these poli­cies we stop ads from serv­ing on their site.”

...

Zach Edwards, the founder of Vic­to­ry Medi­um, a con­sult­ing firm that advis­es com­pa­nies on online adver­tis­ing, said the dig­i­tal ad indus­try, includ­ing Google, is rife with loop­holes and bad behav­ior, and its com­plex­i­ty pre­vents adver­tis­ers from under­stand­ing what they’re fund­ing. “A lot of times ad buy­ers just shrug their shoul­ders and are like, ‘It’s video ads, what can you do?’” he said.

Of Bannon’s dodge and Google’s acqui­es­cence to it, Edwards added, “Noth­ing about this is above­board.”

The vast major­i­ty of online ads aren’t pur­chased through direct rela­tion­ships with the sites on which they appear. Instead, brands use auto­mat­ed ad exchanges like Google’s that rely on real-time auc­tions to auto­mat­i­cal­ly place ads in front of peo­ple who fit a brand’s tar­get audi­ence. As long as Google keeps the War Room web­site in its net­work, and as long as brands don’t specif­i­cal­ly block it from their ad buys, Bannon’s site can keep col­lect­ing mon­ey. Warroom.org draws between 450,000 and 1 mil­lion vis­its a month, accord­ing to traf­fic track­er Sim­i­lar­Web.

And Google takes a cut of each dol­lar from ads it places on the War Room site.

“For most adver­tis­ers, hav­ing an ad placed on a Steve Ban­non-affil­i­at­ed out­let is the stuff of night­mares,” said Nan­di­ni Jam­mi, the co-founder of Check My Ads, an ad indus­try watch­dog. “The fact that ad exchanges are still serv­ing ads should tell brands that their ven­dors are not vet­ting their inven­to­ry, and I wouldn’t be sur­prised if adver­tis­ers who have found them­selves on War Room request refunds.”

Com­pa­nies con­tact­ed by ProP­ub­li­ca said they didn’t intend to adver­tise on War Room’s site and would take steps to stop their ads from appear­ing there. Land Rover called the ad “an error.” Har­ry Pierre, a spokesper­son for Harvard’s