#Is it over reacting to call him fascist and alt-right?

[100percentshipper]

Oh dear fucking lord New Zealand now has a fascist Trump supporter as the leader of the National Party

This will be a long one, ranty but I gotta lay the land for non Kiwis. You ready?

So New Zealand seems to be doing pretty darn well in international news due to the absolute bae we have as a prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.  Through not just covid (and through her actions that have almost eliminated the virus from NZ) but through a mass shooting at the Mosque in Christchurch last year (which saw sweeping gun control laws instituted within 2 weeks), an earthquake in Wellington and having a baby while in power, Jacinda has proven herself to be a fearless, clear headed, compassionate leader that has, quite honestly, been a revelation.  Finally a person in power who actually cares and it isn’t just a political stance.  Finally someone who can take action and take it in the best interest of the people and not just in the interest of deep pockets .  Finally someone who represents my values of kindness and caring and getting shit done.  While having a baby.  Okay. So I love Jacinda and I’m actually proud to be a kiwi with someone like her at the helm.

Talking to my mum (I don’t live in NZ) and she casually mentions that the leader of the National party changed 3 days ago on May 21st.  Jacinda is Labour (Democrate) and now we have Todd Muller for National (Republican).  He replaced former leader Simon Bridges who became unpopular due - well many things but the final nail in the coffin was due to being unable to read the room - and by that I mean he decided, during Jacinda’s exemplary work with Covid, to nitpick at her leadership when in fact she’s super popular right now because she’s amazing.  I’m biased, sue me, but so is most of NZ.  So a few days ago they replaced him because you can’t win with that tactic against the queen that Jacinda is.  In enters Todd Muller.  At first he seems a possible improvement but the red flags are flying high right now. 

I’d like to preface this by saying his background is in PR (or ‘Relations Manager if you will) which means nothing he is doing in his first days is unplanned or random.  He understands manipulation.  I’d also like to preface this by saying you may have already heard of this guy when, last year he heckled a young Green party member in NZ parliament to which she responded ‘Okay, boomer.’  Oh yeah, he’s the okay boomer guy.

So here are the red flags

First; he makes a point to mention his religion (catholic) saying it won’t impact his politics as it regrads to lgbtq+ (aparently he’s ‘relaxed’ on that point because he’s not a perfect catholic). Hmmm.  Jacinda is a former Mormon and never felt the need to mention that (it was only ever mentioned by others) so that certainly doesn’t bode well.  He’s obviously pretty darn religious to feel the need to address that issue and upon research ... he is.  That then raises all manners of questions around his belief in human rights especially for queer, non-white and women. As if I needed further confirmation, he believes in ‘family values’.  A scan of his wikipedia shows he holds a ‘conservative position’ on abortion, voting no on pro-choice policies in parliment. Oh boy.

Second; he passes a few compliments to Jacinda but the goes on to say that coming out of covid, New Zealand needs to support small businesses that have been affected and then shit on their financial response to covid when an independent reviewer gave them a tripe A rating.  Apparently he disagrees although National has yet to offer an alternative approach.  This might seem like an inocuous point - obvs as the oposition he’ll look to shit on something and sure, of course we should support small business, but he subtly positions it in such a way as to suggest that Jacinda isn’t making that a priority which... um dude, she’s labour.  Meaning she cares more about it than a national govt typically would.  But notice how he’s trying to sow little seeds there? The next years are going to be a bitch economically, not just for New Zealand but the world.  No one will come out unscathed but he’s lining up his ducks to capitalize on the shortfalls that will undoubtedly happen - not because the government (but lets be honest Jacinda will prob do a better job than anyone else could) but because we exist within a system that is maimed and broken and limping along. 

Third; now perhaps neither of these points seem that much of a deal, I mean don’t most conservative, old, rich, white male politicians have ‘family values’ and so what about wanting to support small business and sowing seeds of malcontent, it’s kinda his job.  Well, well, well, let me tell you...

So he is interviewed in his office back in September 2019.  He has some political ‘paraphernalia’ on his shelf.  There is a cap in the photo taken, on his shelf.  This cap comes from America.  It has a certain set of words that sends shivers down my spine.  Can you see it?

“Make America Great Again.”

Oh dear fucking lord.  Are you serious? He’s asked about it and he claims that he also has paraphenalia from Hillary Clinton, a badge which is probably also in the shot but it’s hard to tell.  Asked if the cap will go into his new office he says yes.  He even doubles down, saying that he is comfortable with that decision... he says that he’s long been a fan of the American system (I’m sorry Americans but honestly that is not something I want to hear out of a party leader from NZ where we have MMP which has been a boon to our country) and that’s fine but to display a MAGA cap and then say he will keep it in his office given what that cap represents and what ideologies that represents is not tone deaf, it is dangerous.  It says something about who he is and what he believes.  It is a sign to all the facists of New Zealand to rise up.  When asked if he supports Bernie or Trump ... he hesitates, lightfoots around the question and says that in a debate he watched between Bernie and Trump ‘Bernie gave the better speech’.  That wasn’t the question.  Who do you support?  Reminds me of the tactics my all American boss who carries around guns at all times and I’m 99% sure is a Trump supporter talks.

Now I don’t think he stands a chance to win the elections coming up in October because it’s Jacinda with 60% approval rating and his party has 30%.  But it’s also worrying because hate and fear mixed with covid is a potent brew and the signal he sends out will be seen and received by all the sleeper fascist agents across NZ and the world and like the covid virus itself, will awake and spread like wildfire.  And even if he back tracks and decides not to display it, it’s too late. You’ve shown where you stand and where you stand is fascist.  I hope to god he doesn’t stay the leader long and by the next election may he be a forgotten blip on the political landscape of New Zealand, but man.  I knew the other shoe had to drop in some way with regards to NZ politics and it wasn’t Jacinda dropping the shoe as might be expected because how is this woman even real, it was this Trump inspired alt-right dude.

[umbraja]

2020: Vindication for Losing My Mind in 2016

Have you ever made a prediction that was really a warning but everyone you told just blew you off? They called you paranoid, alarmist, or even crazy. They said it could never happen to us. You’re just over-reacting. It’s not going to change a damn thing. So they went about their normal lives completely oblivious to the absolute disaster you saw coming.

That was me in 2016.

Not in November like a lot of liberals. I went crazy in June. The first ones to dismiss me were the ones that lost it in November. They didn’t think America would elect such a cartoonish bigot. They still had faith left in humanity and didn’t realize just how bad things had already gotten. It only took a few months to prove them wrong. Sadly, a lot of them still missed the point. They found scapegoats and excuses to explain how this anomaly could have happened without taking credit for their part in the deal. Of course they’ve spent the time since doing nothing to fix it.

The people that believed me about the election took longer to prove out. They knew the silent majority was real or at least Clinton was unelectable but they didn’t think Trump would really be that bad. They figured he would be yet another lame duck and maybe send a message to DC that they need to give us better candidates next time. Some of them even voted for him. Some of those still don’t regret it. They’re so wrapped up in their party loyalty and fear mongering conservative narrative that they no longer live in the same world as liberals do.

I am not surprised.

2016 was unprecedented but it wasn’t unpredictable. It was actually inevitable. The logical progression of centuries of elitist politicians all fighting for the rich man’s favor while leaving the people behind. Then the Cold War came along and turned the people against each other creating a polarized climate of us vs them that crippled America’s ability to support social programs while also draining our resources on hapless foreign wars. The 80’s brought us Law and Order politics which allowed racists to criminalize parts of minority culture, exacerbating the already vicious cycle of generational poverty. The 90s saw globalization and automation reduce American jobs which widened the wealth gap and gave racists an excuse to blame immigrants for it. 9/11 scared America into giving up personal freedoms and militarizing the police for a War on Terror which galvanized conservatives under God and Guns while liberals struggled to agree on a direction, let alone a catchy slogan. 2008 gave us a black president and liberals called anyone who criticised him a racist which incensed conservatives into creating a movement of aggressive anti-intellectual propaganda using social media echo chambers to oppose the “liberal bias” of mainstream media. Around the same time the Great Recession of 08 exposed government and corporate corruption that had been eroding the middle class for decades and turned the people against the establishment. So the silent majority elected enough Republicans for Congress in 2012 and 2014 to give them their largest lead since the Great Depression. By 2016 the Republican party had already been taken over by alt-right extremists but Democrats were too out of touch to see them as a credible threat.

It’s no wonder that a narcissistic conman like Trump would take advantage of all this to make himself the most powerful man in the world. Nor is it surprising that foreign powers would use the existing chaos to further divide this nation. Or that bigots would scare reasonable people into supporting their oppressive agendas. History is full of things like this. In America and all over the world, from beginning to end, history repeats itself. History also tells us that you can only sit on a powder keg for so long before someone lights the fuse.

Now it’s 2020 and the world is on fire.

Pretty much everything I was afraid would happen as a result of 2016 has. I tried to warn people about it but no one listened. I lost friends and haven’t seriously spoken to much of my family for years because they refuse to pull their heads out of their echo chambers and listen to reason. Yet I am considered the crazy one. I am the one that had a mental breakdown in 2016. I am the one with depression and anxiety and PTSD. I am the one who saw it coming and had to watch as they waved torches around the bomb.

They said it couldn’t happen but the last four years have seen nearly all my predictions come true:

Racist policies became norm, embolden racists to open bigotry

Mass shootings and domestic terrorism are on the rise

Trump abused the office for personal gain in so many ways

Environmental regulations rolled back, climate change denied

Financial regulations returned to what caused Great Recession

Democrats forgot to listen to the American people - again

Republicans pardoned Trump for everything regardless of facts

Fact and Truth have lost all meaning to “fake news”

Trump's conspiracy theories and lies further divided America

Trump protected his cronies and “fired” anyone that disagrees

Trump appointed two Supreme Court Justices, turn conservative

States proposed abortion bans that make it a capital crime

Tax cuts for the rich did not help the average American

The federal deficit has soared to new heights

American tax dollars were wasted on a big, dumb wall

Immigration policies separate families in camps, children die

Trump’s love of dictators let foreign powers manipulate him

Trump played hardball with Iran and nearly started WWIII

America first policy alienate allies, abdicate global power

China stepped in to the fill the power vacuum left by America

China has reduced human rights enforcement around the world

Trump levied tariffs on foreign goods that hurt the economy

Trump started an unwinnable trade war with China

China used this trade war to gain political allies

Trump yells about China for wrong reasons, hides real threat

Democrats didn’t learn, are running an establishment candidate

Racial and political tensions increased enough to cause riots

Federal officers were sent in to silence peaceful protestors

Political dissidents are being targeted by law enforcement

Trump followed the Fascist Playbook, emulated 1939 Germany

Trump put his own vanity above the safety of American people

Trump unable to handle crisis, thousands of Americans died

The only two things I predicted that haven’t happened yet are: Trump causes a war and Trump doesn’t give up power at the end. The year’s not over yet. We’re sitting on a radioactive powderkeg and the politicians are playing with matches. I’ve been predicting the fall of ‘Murcia for over a decade now but 2016 made me realize it might happen sooner than I thought.

It might happen in 2020

I really hope I’m wrong this time.

[militant-holy-knight]

On a fall day in the early 8th century, somewhere between the French cities of Poitiers and Tours, a Muslim army crashed into the serried ranks of a force led by a powerful Frankish noble: Charles, Mayor of the Palace and son of Pippin of Herstal. In the ensuing battle, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi — governor of the Muslim territories in Al-Andalus (Spain) — was slain, and his troops were routed. This confrontation between two Dark Age warlords echoed through the ages and acquired a potent symbolism, all despite the fact that medievalists know relatively little about the principal protagonists and the respective orders of battle, let alone how the fight actually unfolded.

We do actually know sufficient details about everything in regards to the battle and considering the author used a BBC link (from an outlet infamous for historical revisionism) to prove his point, I really shouldn’t take what he claims seriously. And even if any of these things are true... Should they be dismissed? There are important battles whose details are still obscure like the Battle of the Cataluniuan Fields where the Romans fought Atilla the Hun, but no one knows who won. Yet no one ever complains about it because it isn’t a thorn on the author’s skin. But again this is pointless because we know how the battle played out.

Edward Gibbon famously speculated that, had Abdul Rahman prevailed at Poitiers,

“the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”

The French romantic writer Chateaubriand made the equally dramatic claim that, “if it were not for Charles Martel’s valor, we would all be wearing turbans.”

“Oh yes, how I wish these Islamophobes had just bowed down their heads and let the Arabs walk over them, violate their wives and daughters, destroy and desecrate their churches. Europe would have been so much more tolerant than today.” - Iskander Rehman, the author of this piece of shit.

Perhaps most importantly, Charles Martel has become an enduring icon of fascist and far-right movements, in France and other Western states. The Vichy regime, for example, reveled in its warped reading of Charles Martel and of medieval French history more broadly. The francisca, an early Frankish throwing axe, featured prominently in Vichy iconography and propaganda, and Charles Martel was presented alongside Joan of Arc as an embodiment of pre-revolutionary Catholic virtue. Meanwhile, a notorious division of French volunteers to the Nazi SS was named the Division Charlemagne after the great Carolingian Emperor and grandson of Charles Martel. In the years following France’s bitter war in Algeria, a far-right group — the Cercle Charles Martel — conducted a string of terror attacks against Algerians and citizens of North African descent in France. More recently, the founder of the French Front National party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, reacted to the Charlie Hebdo killings by proudly claiming “Je suis Charlie Martel,” in defiance of the more republican and inclusive slogan “Je suis Charlie.” “Je suis Charlie Martel” has since become one of the rallying cries of French far-right activists.

This sinister historical crush extends far beyond France. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who slaughtered 77 people in 2011, claimed in his online rants to have “identified” with the figure of Charles Martel. In the United States, a group called the Charles Martel Society funds the publication of a pseudo-intellectual and deeply racist journal, The Occidental Quarterly. Charles de Steuben’s famous 19th-century painting of the Battle of Poitiers flashes through one of Richard Spencer’s slickly edited “alt-right” videos, providing a brief and jarring backdrop to a long stream of nativist gobbledygook.

These two paragraphs can be summed up as “Racists, bigots and hate groups love Charles Martel, so you cannot too or else you are one of them”. The irony in all of this is that Adolf Hitler hated Charles Martel for defeating the Arabs because he felt that if they had won, they would have brought Islam to Germans and they would have become unstoppable, since he felt Islam was a more appropriate religion for the Nazis.

Most modern historians are skeptical of the notion that the battle of Poitiers constituted such a watershed moment. While the defeat of the Andalusian army by a Western European force was certainly significant, it was not unprecedented. Only a few years prior, Odo of Aquitaine crushed another Muslim army outside Toulouse, but this battle never acquired the same mythological symbolism of the battle of Poitiers.

The difference is that Odo’s victory was merely temporary while Charles’ stopped any more invasions - that is exactly what makes it decisive. If Arabs had retreated back to Spain after the Battle of Tolouse, you’d be writing this same article except condemning Odo of Tolouse instead of Charles Martel. The Battle of Poitiers happened because Odo asked Charles for his help and in exchange he’d swear his allegiance to him.

The academic consensus now appears to be that Al Ghafiqi’s foray into what was then referred to as Northern Gaul was a long-distance raid or “razzia” motivated not so much by an ambition for conquest as by a desire for plunder. Indeed, we are told that the prime target of this raid was a wealthy religious sanctuary located at Saint Martin de Tours and filled with gold and precious fabrics. Hugh Kennedy has noted that the defeat seems to have had little resonance in the wider Arabo-Muslim world, and he views it as one symptom of many that marked the steady decline of the Syrian-based Umayyad Caliphate. Others have pointed to the Caliphate’s overextension into Spain and to the growing tensions between local Arab and Berber forces as well as rival tribes and clans. 

A lot of Islam apologists use this argument of “plunder” to whitewash it’s militarist expansionism and not name it what it actually was: colonialism. There is no such thing as being there “just” for plunder when Arabs are actively settling the region and governing over it (Septimania was already occupied by this point). The Vikings were motivated solely by plunder and didn’t care about ruling their victims (the Danelaw over England being the exception). I love how he uses “academic consensus” because that is dogwhistle for “what me and my SJW friends agree with”, as well as “Arab Muslim world didn’t care for this battle, but I am so mad about it I am going to write everything I can to discredit it”

Although the destruction of Al Ghafiqi’s field army depleted the Ummayads’ local reservoir of military strength, Moorish troops lingered in some southern French cities such as Narbonnes for two and a half more decades. Meanwhile, Muslim raiders continued their “ghazawat” across the Pyrenees for at least another a century, long after the fall of the Ummayads.

Minor skirmishes don’t mean a whole lot if they can’t even launch another full-scale invasion again.

It would be reductive to present the battle of Poitiers as the military manifestation of some age-old existential struggle between Christendom and Islam. Charles Martel’s Europe was a continent of many faiths and philosophies, not a religiously bipolar system. 

OMFG. You actually went there, you son of a bitch.

Religious differences could cut across tribes, kingdoms, and ethnicities. For example, along the Pyrenees resided the fiercely independent Basques, some of whom were Muslim, some of whom were Christian, and a portion of whom practiced more ancient forms of belief. The “Song of Roland,” a medieval ballad familiar to all products of French middle schools, recounts the cowardly ambush of one of Emperor Charlemagne’s retainers, the noble Roland, by enemy forces in a narrow mountain pass. For centuries, schoolchildren were told that the Carolingian knight had been killed by “Saracens” — Muslim forces based in Spain. It is now believed that Roland — whose prolonged death scene famously inspired Boromir’s in Lord of the Rings — was actually killed by Basques, rather than by Arabs or Berbers. This historical gaffe provides yet another indication of our tendency to overlook the rich tapestry of political and religious actors in early medieval Europe in favor of more binary models.

Admittedly, the Song of Roland is very historically inaccurate - this is obvious to anyone who reads it since Muslims worship Muhammad the same way Christians do with Jesus - but this is explained due to an unfamiliarity the people at the time had with other religions. Rehman expect us to believe that Europe was like this bastion of religious tolerance when the authors of the Song of Roland can even get other people’s religions right.

I am honestly done, this guy is beyond retarded and I feel like genocided more braincells than I should have trying to refute his bullshit. I strongly mulled on whether or not to post this, but I feel like it would have been a waste of time to not expose this shit. Iskander Rehman is the kind of guy who would criminalize celebrating the Battle of Poitiers, the Siege of Vienna or any “triumph of the cross over the crescent” battle (even an obscure one, like the Battle of Vaslui) if he had the power to do so.

[nightcoremoon]

there's lots of tiny brained bad takes of the far left branding things as Bad™ based solely on their association to other things or certain aspects of part of their fanbase.

this isn't to discredit the shit idiot brain fungus plaguing everyone from centrists, the moderate right, the far right, and the alt right, and even some of the moderate left, where they label everything that isn't about a Cishet White Male American Capitalist Bootlicker who's stateist, ambiguously christian/atheist, neurotypical, able-bodied, has "aryan" facial attributes, is an insufferable asshole, and the like, as "SJW garbage".

but see, prejudice and judgment is bad even if it's not motivated by minority demographic. being a rude dismissive asshole is, you know, bad. maybe making fun of a furry or whatever isn't as bad as being a racist, but you're still a fucking dickhead either way. fuck both of you but fuck the racist more. I'll punch both of you but punch the racist twice (maybe a third time for good measure). do y'all understand what I'm trying to get at here with the tiers of badness? the shades of grey? the steps down the path of evil from "kind of rude" to "literally hitler"?

bigotry is not the only bad thing in the world. yeah it's one of the worst, but you can talk about other bad things without discrediting that, which I know is next to impossible for teenagers (or people who never bothered to mentally progress from such) to comprehend.

anyway what sparked this is all the fuckin joker memes. now I went into it expecting, you know, literally taxi driver 2 followed by a silly horror movie about a clown murdering people. which is what the joker of the comics is all about. if I never watched the movie and only saw, what, the killing murray scene, the stairway dancing scene, the trailers, and joaquin phoenix sitting in a padded room and laughing, that's exactly what I'd had gotten.

but like. I fucking watched it because my dad wanted to watch it with me and he fucking loves all things batman (except Ben Affleck). and wolverine but mostly batman. he's a comic nerd. so yeah I went to watch it with him.

and it was legitimately terrifying from a purely psychological perspective. it's LITERALLY the best scary movie I've ever seen without being horror in the slightest. the acting, the writing, the score, the pacing, the cinematography, it was well put together without being a moffat level overproduced mess. it was a good movie. you're allowed to not care for it or not like it but to objectively call it a bad movie is not only a logical fallacy (eye of the beholder) but it also discredits the opinion of every single person who didn't hate it and makes you come off as a pompous fucking asshole rather than having different tastes.

it's about a guy with severe mental trauma in a bad situation trying to make the best of it and care for his family and hold down a job but he gets fucked over from literally every angle and eventually he snaps and makes a mistake and kills the misogynist rich asshats on the train. oh fuck. he could have gone to the police and said self defense and go through the court system but wait, society in gotham doesn't allow for a clean system of justice when you aren't rich. so instead he proceeds to be a major creepazoid turned murdering lunatic blaming everyone else for his own bad situation instead of the whole deal where he did stupid shit like taking a gun into a fucking children's hospital and stuck his fingers inside a child's mouth and stealing shit and falling further down the rabbit hole. until finally, he says fuck it and seeks revenge. the whole bloody mess that follows is his own fault. he chose to kill people. he chose to murder for petty reasons. he made his decisions and he suffered the consequences for it. all of the festering rotten crime in the city spawned by waynecorp's supreme negligence heralded him as a hero and so begins batman's story.

arthur fleck is not a fucking hero. he is a villain through and through. his circumstances were unfortunate but he made the wrong decisions. the world fucked him over and he said okay and retaliated. joker is exactly the fucking same as breaking bad. arthur and walter white are both evil people through their own decisions. but they were once normal people. and that's the point. the scariest monsters in the world are usually the white men angry at the world for their own shortcomings. oswald. ruby. dahmer. bundy. gein. manson. klebold and harris. white. fleck. they're all the filth stuck in the gutter of society that, if left unchecked, has deadly results.

I'm not kidding at all when I say joker was an important movie for myself personally to see exactly when I saw it. because that first half, I'm not gonna lie, it got me. the therapy didn't work and then it was taken away. he didn't eat most days because he had to support his mother. the people he worked with were dickheads, the people he commuted with were dickheads, his boss was a dickhead, people treated him like garbage on the streets. he couldn't remember the trauma inflicted on him when he was a baby but it still warped every aspect of his life. he had aspirations but lacked the skills. he was sad. alone. empty. he was suicidal. he was me.

then he started killing people and using the neighbor girl as a tulpa and I realized oh no oh god oh shit OH FUCK I need to change from this. and I did.

joker is a perfect template of how not to react to the world when it kicks in your teeth. it's a perfect template of a dark movie. just enough to sympathize with the bad guy but not enough to excuse his actions. the opposite of star wars with kylo ren. a good movie. a good character. an amazing actor. a terrible person.

if you watched joker thinking you're watching the story of the protagonist, you're right, but if you conflate protagonist with the good guy, yeah you won't like the fucking movie because it'll leave a sour taste in your mouth. you'll feel slimy. disgusting. unless you're a megadouche shitlord piece of human fucking garbage who wants to cosplay arthur fleck because he's so damn cool like walter white and eric cartman and rick sanchez and bojack horseman and tyler durden and all those FUCKING HORRIBLE LOATHESOME HUMANS TO NEVER EVER TRY TO EMULATE OR YOU ARE AN UNEMPHATIC ASSHOLE AND A MORON TO BOOT.

if you hated the movie, that's fine. you're kinda supposed to hate it. and if you loved the movie, that's fine so long as you understand what the message was. but if it's one of your favorite movies of all time ever made holy shit please go to therapy jesus christ.

still the point of this post is, discrediting the movie as a steaming pile of shit is incredibly ignorant. and as for the "good movies made by white men are only liked by other white men and are therefore bad movies" thing... if y'all can thirst over eddie brock in the trainwreck of venom and admit that the standards of good movie vs bad movie are all subjective, you're a goddamn idiot if you can't apply the same logic and reason to every movie just because some white boys like edgy clowns (even tho joker is way less edgy than pennywise but go off) in abusive relationships with harlequins. oh and assflash newshole, I'm not a white man.

I swear this bandwagoning bullshit is exactly the same mentality as "hurr durr nickelback worst band ever" even though nickelback is ripe with musical talent underneath a few pop songs that they wrote for the record label as part of their career so they can make a fuckin living BECAUSE CAPITALISM IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL and also because of all the misogyny that bled its way into the music industry in the 2000s but that's a topic for another day. 'joker bad' and 'nickelback bad' are products of the same mental decay that social media wrought upon us all, inflicting mass mob mentality and incapacity for individualistic rational thought. which is exactly why there's a war between camp 'joker is bad' and 'joker is amazing' and nobody acknowledges the group in the middle that's like 'joker was good objectively but also terrible subjectively and content-wise'. polar. I could make a political statement and also say how the neoliberals and the fascists are at war while the people in the middle are caught in the crossfire and forced to fight like pawns on a chessboard, but the moderate right, dumbass centrists, pastel commies, and pockets of the moderate left, but that just throws everything into chaos.

tl;dr learn to think for yourselves omg

[rabtownsend]

CW for some slurs, and general small-town casual prejudices

sub-tumbling (is that a thing?) this post I just saw claiming that shows like Family Guy and South Park are directly responsible for eroding empathy and instilling alt-right belief structures in young people.

Here’s what I think about that. I’m a leftist. Definitely a socialist. Would not necessarily describe myself as radical. Am a feminist. Am anti-fascist. Am anti-capitalist. Hate libertarianism. Do support trans rights. Do support sex-workers’ rights. And I do have complicated, sometimes contradictory feelings about a lot of things in between any one of those subjects and belief structures.

I can attribute a lot of that to my upbringing, sure. My parents were both Canadian Liberals. Both teachers.

Maybe my mistake - before I even begin - is that when I was young, and I saw the other kids in my small, conservative town calling other kids “stupid jews” and “faggot” - I never had the sense that they actually hated jews or homosexuals. Rather, they had just found some new way to call someone (who, statistically speaking, was probably not jewish or gay) an idiot, in a non-sincere way.

I didn’t see them as being truly hateful toward anyone, just ignorant. And certainly I was bothered that they were so ignorant about the meaning and connotations of those terms. And I was bothered because when I’d asked my father what words like those meant, he had explained how they were used to hurt other people.

So, that was already the context I had before South Park premiered in 1996, when I was 10 years old.

I was not allowed to watch it until I was 12, and only then because my friend Leo watched it (presumably, his dad had watched it, and told my mother it was okay).

But very specifically, the thing about South Park is that the show was always punching up. And here, I have to make a distinction between the show and its characters. The characters you are supposed to identify with, are Stan and Kyle. They are the straight men. So when a character like Eric Cartman - who represents all of the kids I grew up with who called other kids “faggot” or made fun of them for superficial reasons, without truly knowing or understanding the origin or consequence of their words - calls Kyle a stupid jew, you are supposed to be outraged with Kyle, not thinking “this Cartman character is hilarious, and I should behave like him.”

And obviously, a lot of kids I knew, as I went on to high school, had taken Cartman as the role model, rather than the bad example.

Let’s talk about Family Guy for a minute. I have thought episodes of Family Guy were funny. But as it came out a bit later, when I was a bit older, I was more able to see it for what it was (and is still) - a platform for Seth MacFarlane to shit-disturb, and champion what my friends over on Mastodon have amusingly rephrased as “freeze peach,” free speech without consequences.

In Family Guy, Peter Griffin is supposed to be the Cartman character.

Wait, let’s scoot back a second. Both characters are supposed to be the Archie Bunker character. The character you love to hate. The character who says inappropriate things, while the good, but less developed characters react with outrage. You’re not supposed to sympathize with them, but some people - people who still believe what a character portrayed as an idiot/out-of-touch curmudgeon seems to believe - will think they are being catered to.

So, Peter is supposed to be that. Only there are no straight-men on Family Guy - except Lois and Meg. The two women on the show who are physically beaten on screen or constantly verbally abused by the male characters on the show. Punishing them for being straight-man characters, on the rare occasion that they are that. Not to mention that the humour in Family Guy is almost never situational. It is almost always a cut-away joke - a thing which South Park rightly criticizes it for, in the Cartoon Wars episodes.

And knowing that South Park’s use of Cartman as an Archie Bunker type has been misinterpreted, for whatever reason, why have I stuck with it for so long?

At the heart of South Park is satire. Like, real satire, not the “satire” that alt-righters claim to use.

The parents on the show are shown as largely incompetent and driven by impulse/fear. The boys are, by contrast, progressive and wise. Cartman’s offensive behaviour has consequences for him, in ways that Family Guy characters never face consequences. For every scheme he enacts, he is thwarted, either by one of the other boys, or his own folly (in a Seinfeld-esque kind of way). Characters he offends on the show are quick to make him face consequences.

And, unlike Family Guy, South Park’s political leanings are more anarchist than libertarian. While Family Guy’s creators would champion free speech in the name of a racist joke, South Park only champions free speech in the name of valid criticism or in the service of making a moral point.

The underlying theme of many South Park episodes is to think for yourself, or that blindly following authority or acting out of fear is foolish, and has negative consequences.

Stereotypes are used and sometimes stretched to ridiculous proportions on South Park, as a means of demonstrating how stupid and ridiculous it is that we believe or rely on those stereotypes in media.

I won’t say that South Park hasn’t made missteps, but I find it hard to believe that it could train anyone to be anything but a critical thinker with anticapitalist, leftist leanings.

As always, a great deal of media is made with one intention, and misappropriated by ignorant people, who don’t fully comprehend that they are seeing something critical of a certain way of thinking, because comprehending that requires the capacity for abstract thought, which the ignorant, typically, lack.

I could see how Family Guy might encourage alt-right beliefs in young people, because it is edge-lordy, and it champions free speech over good conscience. I don’t know that I’d place the onus on the show so much as on the viewers for failing to make a more discerning choice. After all, one of the most popular shows on television: The Big Bang Theory, routinely mocks higher education, interest in niche subjects, makes a joke out of sexual harassment, and plays with misogyny. And it was propped up by a laugh track it didn’t deserve. The majority of Americans decided it was their favourite show. Far more so than Family Guy or South Park, and definitely since at least the mid 2000s.

I dunno, guys. This just feels like another “video games cause violence” argument, from people who don’t play videogames.

You know what I don’t think? I don’t think eating squid causes peritonitis. I’ve never eaten it. I have no reason to believe that it would cause peritonitis. But I sure don’t like the idea of eating squid, so it sure would be helpful to pretend that I don’t eat it because it might cause peritonitis. If only I were willing to live that kind of lie...

[richmeganews]

How the Christchurch shooter used memes to spread hate

Learning from years of online right-wing extremism, the shooter made his manifesto a weaponized shitpost.

The man who allegedly shot and killed 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand framed the attack as a real-life escalation of meme-based internet culture.

Police are currently investigating a sprawling 74-page manifesto that the 28-year-old suspect allegedly wrote and posted on social media shortly before the attack. The document rails against Muslims and immigrants and includes several references to memes and video games.

The alleged shooter posted the manifesto, along with a link to the forthcoming live stream of the promised attack, on 8chan, one of the main online homes of meme-loving right-wing extremists. In the post, he wrote that it was “time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort” — meaning, essentially, that it was time to stop fooling around on the internet and turn his extremist views into real-world action.

Then, right before the starting the attack — which he live-streamed to Facebook as if it were a first-person shooter video game — the alleged shooter referenced the “subscribe to PewDiePie” meme. Additionally, the guns used in the attack were decorated with memes, mostly insider white nationalist references.

The shooter appears to have been extremely familiar with extremist corners of the internet. The choices he made — to post a manifesto to a known radical community, and to carry out the attack as if he was doing it “for the lulz” — are unlikely to have been made at random.

Instead, they were most likely designed to entertain his fellow extremists, and above all, to help them see him as someone to admire and even copy. The memetic elements of the manifesto were also most likely designed to provoke the media and the public into sharing it and debating the shooter’s actions — thereby increasing the amount of attention, virality, and public debate surrounding the attack, and further spreading the manifesto within the mainstream.

All of this is important to understand, not only to keep public attention focused on the shooter’s unthinkable actions instead of memes, but because using memes to normalize unconscionable beliefs and behavior has become an established messaging tool for the far right.

Memes within the manifesto serve to draw attention and pique readers’ curiosity

The shooter’s alleged manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” repeats false propaganda about immigrants as “invaders” and references a number of radicalizing ideological influences. It also follows a standard method for spreading extremist ideology online, by framing its hateful rhetoric as a joke in an attempt to normalize it and make it appear more acceptable.

It mixes references to memes, shitposts — an internet term for pointless posts intended to derail or distract readers, the baffling nature of which can often approach Dadaist nonsense art — and other bits of benign internet culture with serious ideological dogma. For instance, it randomly includes a well-known piece of copypasta (large blocks of text that get passed around in meme form), for what appears to be satire’s sake.

Journalist Robert Evans wrote a blog post shortly after the shooting in which he convincingly argues that the entire manifesto is an example of what it’s imitating — that is, it’s a giant shitpost meant to simultaneously draw attention to and distract from the white nationalist rationale that motivated the shooter.

“The entire manifesto is dotted, liberally, with references to memes and Internet in-jokes that only the extremely online would get,” Evans notes. “They are meant to distract attention from his more honest points, and to draw the attention of his real intended audience.” In other words, the shooter wanted to keep the general public guessing about which parts of the manifesto are serious, while he catered to and essentially directly addressed his core audience of fellow white supremacists.

How does this work? There are three main parts to this process, and they each function toward obscuring reality with the intention of spreading the extremist rhetoric contained within.

Using memes to trick people into dismissing a message as “just a joke” and not serious.

Relying on members of the public to spend time dissecting, responding to, and being distracted by the memetic format of the message.

Concealing the “actual” message within the “joke” of the meme, so that it spreads in all seriousness while the meme gets amplified and discussed.

One of the most significant and pernicious ways that right-wing extremists use trolling, shitposting, and memes is to distort what their actual message is, so they can claim plausible deniability that their message is harmful or bad. That way, even when their extremism is clearly shown to be sincere, the irony surrounding the message clouds the truth. The shooter’s alleged manifesto is a textbook example of this.

And to break down why, we have to briefly pay as much attention to the memes, and the artifice around them, as we do to the abhorrent racism they’re meant to spread.

The manifesto’s meme use is strategically designed to obfuscate its racism

Consider that copypasta I mentioned above. It appears in the middle of a lengthy “FAQ” section in the manifesto:

This is “the Navy Seal” meme, a well-known shitpost in which an internet forum user rants in exaggerated, overblown fashion. It’s been around online for years, but it still frequently gets taken seriously when it’s used.

Many memes don’t always register as memes, especially as they spread further away from their point of origin — so the way that people respond to them becomes a barometer for how internet-savvy and knowledgeable they are about internet culture.

As a bonus, if you recognize a meme when someone else doesn’t, you get to feel superior to that other person. So the inclusion of the Navy Seal meme in the manifesto simultaneously becomes about wink-wink-nodding to anyone who gets it, while jarring and discombobulating people who don’t.

In the context of the larger manifesto, it’s a giant distraction, because anyone who doesn’t recognize it has to waste time sorting out what’s true and what’s false — some early media reports were duped into reporting that the shooter had military experience. Plus, the overall amount of time spend identifying and explaining the memes detracts from the amount of time we could be using to trace the shooter’s extremist views back to their roots, as well as to their counterparts in global politics.

Meanwhile, the average person reading the document might be drawn to the copypasta, the giant wall of shouty text, and become distracted by the question of whether that text is sincere or legitimate — distracted from the fact that it comes in an “FAQ” section immediately after the alleged shooter has written, “You are a bigot,racist,xenophobe,islamophobe,nazi,fascist” [sic] about himself.

The manifesto does express the views of a bigoted, racist, Islamophobe who states his abhorrent, white nationalist views throughout the document in great detail. A primary goal of including the meme seems to be to make the public focus less on that fact, and more on the novelty of the memes, thereby ensuring that the manifesto draws attention.

But the ultimate goal of including the memes seems to be a show of solidarity with the manifesto’s primary audience: the “insiders” who understand that, while the copypasta is a joke, nothing about the extremist ideology is. The memes inserted into the manifesto serve to bolster fellow extremists’ enthusiasm, making them feel even more unified as people who “get” the references and subscribe to the racist views. Ultimately, the memes help turn the manifesto itself into a radicalizing force.

The manifesto is a textbook example of the way that right-wing extremists manipulate the media and internet culture

The manifesto also, in classic shitpost form, anticipates the mass media and public’s reaction: that is, the entire document is intended to be a signal to the true audience, to the people who “get it,” while confusing and distracting thoes who don’t.

It is intended to predict and spoof how the writer expects progressives and members of the media will react — with shock, outrage, and confusion over the various distractions placed in their path, which in this case are the memes themselves.

And, as the existence of this very explainer proves, it is correct in its prediction. Journalists — who are ethically obligated to not spread misinformation — must dispel the parts of the manifesto that are meant to confuse the public, like the Navy Seal meme. But that also serves to distract from its real message of hate.

It may not be intuitive to discuss how trying to demystify memetic messages instead works to amplify them, but that’s precisely what couching the manifesto in memes allows it to do. That is also why the alt-right has strategically and openly been using memes to spread its ideology for years.

In December 2018, I spoke to Whitney Phillips, a well-known expert in online trolling and media literacy, about the rise of online extremism on YouTube. We discussed several issues that Phillips had written about recently, in a guide to help journalists avoid spreading toxic ideologies while reporting on them.

Phillips explained to me how journalists and other members of the public frequently fall into the same kind of trap that the New Zealand shooter’s alleged manifesto set.

“A lot of journalists have a kind of perspective that the only way to deal with the pervasive real problems on the internet is if we call attention to them, so that we can begin to kind of uncouple negative influence or hate speech,” Phillips said. “Light disinfects — that’s the adage.”

She went on to explain that a lot of times, that approach is exactly right: “For a certain subset of the audience, light does disinfect,” Phillips said. “That’s absolutely the appropriate tack you should take: that you explain what’s happening, and that once those audience members have that information, then they can go forward and be better informed citizens. Right? Participating in a democracy.”

However, she also warned of the dangers of writing extensively about topics that are used to spread extremist ideology: “But that doesn’t account for all the other audience members for whom light doesn’t just not disinfect, it only serves to illuminate. And in the case of conspiracy theorizing, even if you are fact-checking or trying to debunk, in order to, you know, shed light on a particular problem, or to just make it clear that this one thing that people thought happened didn’t actually happen — by doing that, in this weird, upside-down kind of way, you run the risk of confirming and further entrenching exactly that conspiratorial thinking. Because that’s exactly the kind of thing that ‘They’ would want you to think. Right?”

As Phillips indicates, all of this gets really hairy, really fast, because journalists often need to stop and talk about what does and doesn’t matter, in order to keep from perpetuating even more harm. But in an age where ironic memetic rhetoric frequently distorts reality in ways that then become reality, that’s extremely hard to do.

Which brings us to the New Zealand shooter’s call to “subscribe to PewDiePie” right before the attack.

The call to “subscribe to PewDiePie” was the shooter’s most revealing meme of all

At the most basic level, the words “subscribe to PewDiePie” are a meme. The phrase first spread as a harmless and sincere push by fans of PewDiePie, a.k.a. YouTube creator Felix Kjellberg, to get him more subscribers on the platform, specifically in response to the over-corporatization of the site. Many of those fans were so enthusiastic, however, that the campaign has since spread far beyond YouTube and far beyond his fans.

In some corners of the internet, the phrase “subscribe to PewDiePie” is used so frequently that has essentially become meaningless, a one-line shitpost that represents a general kind of reactionary stance. Or, as the New York Times put it, “a kind of all-purpose cultural bat signal for the young and internet-absorbed.” Saying “subscribe to PewDiePie” has become a way of proving that you’re internet-savvy, that you’re not a passive consumer of a sanitized and corporatized internet. It’s a shorthand, in essence, for “Us versus Them.”

There is currently no indication that the New Zealand shooter actually is a PewDiePie fan. And as legions of PewDiePie fans have been quick to point out in the wake of the shooting, the meme at this point has nothing to do with PewDiePie himself.

For his part, Kjellberg was quick to repudiate the attack, stating, “I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person.” But for a certain audience, the statement is meant to make the shooting — which, again, was live-streamed on Facebook, with the link posted to 8chan in advance — feel normalized, as if it were just an average video game demo by the average meme-happy gamer.

And even though “subscribe to PewDiePie” is just a meme, it’s not just a meme, because Kjellberg has a history of amplifying white nationalist rhetoric that is both serious and violent, and the shooter has now both drawn attention to him and used him as a messenger. “By forcing Kjellberg to acknowledge the attack,” Taylor Lorenz wrote in the Atlantic, “the shooter succeeded in further spreading the word about the crime to Kjellberg’s tens of millions of followers.”

By drawing on meme culture, and naming a polarizing central figure within meme culture, the alleged shooter ensured that debate would arise around those details, rather than uniting people in standing against hateful rhetoric and violent acts.

This cycle is already beginning to take effect, with many lining up to dismiss the role that memes have played in advancing far right ideology, even though the New Zealand shooter literally described his horrific actions as an escalation of online shitposting.

The whole point of these types of memes is that they are not meant to be taken seriously, right up until the moment where they become very serious. Take it from the anonymous owner of an established anti-Semitic YouTube channel, who described his own strategy of spreading his hateful rhetoric as follows: “Pretend to joke about it until the punchline /really/ lands.”

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[thechaosdragoness]

I honestly can’t explain how disappointed I am with JonTron, especially because I’ve been watching him since I was a teenager when my ex first showed me his channel. What he’s said lately is just...inexcusable. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt for the longest time after I had heard about that debacle with Sargon, but now after seeing what’s happened I have no choice but to leave this fandom and the white nationalist followers/apologizers he has behind. I mean seriously? Saying all black people are inherently violent because of the color of their skin, and then keeping that thought even when shown evidence in a study saying black people are treated unfairly in court saying to everyone “I just don’t subscribe to that”? No. BAD JON.

You know what's the most difficult thing about this whole shit show? Is that Jon chose to do this. This isn't a case of some behind the scenes recording or old live stream that revealed to everyone what his views really were. He went on a stream with the express purpose of outlining the things he believes. And he knows what most of his fanbase think of that stuff. He must have seen how we reacted just to his twitter. So either he figured he could say all of that shit, and we wouldn't care, or that it wouldn't matter, because anyone who disagrees with him mustn't be a real fan.

Now he has, wittingly or unwittingly, courted the support of the alt right and white supremacists. Fascists and Nazis will now be parading JonTron around as another courageous internet personality, brave enough to red pill themselves and fight against the oppression of PC culture, and that fucking disgusts me. People will subscribe to his channel and watch his videos, not in spite of his views but because of them. This goes far beyond crossing the line, he has jumped over it and is shouting down anyone on the other side. This is not me being overly sensitive like someone like Boogie or TotalBiscuit have been trying to argue. This is not a PewDiePie level thing, he has not been taken out of context, he has genuinely horrible views and I’ve unsubbed and unfollowed him everywhere I possibly could.

I wouldn't call him a Nazi or some sort of scumbag though, he's no Richard Spencer. But he's okay with a guy like Richard Spencer, and that's not okay with me. Jon has essentially decided that ranting about his half baked and racist opinions matters more than his friends, his fans, or his career depending on how this goes, and I cannot excuse that. Maybe if he was really passionate, and always wanted to talk about politics but felt stifled, maybe. But he said already he didn't want to get into politics (Gotta love how he says that every time he gets in hot shit for his terrible beliefs) Then again, casual racism is not a political stance, so maybe he was telling us what he truly feels

[fiftycucks-blog]

Fifty Grand & Distance Decay Discuss Antifa and Freedom of Speech

DISTANCE DECAY ok let's un pack this -

FIFTY GRAND It’s easy. I don’t support what antifa is doing Especially last night Gross and embarrassing Bunch of privileged college students breaking shit Then going back to the privacy of their homes And chillin maybe play some video games Nothing revolutionary Sorry Not fixing anything Not helping anyone Protesting milo yiannapoulous of all people It's a sad time for the left If this was coming from the right you damn well know you’d condemn it DISTANCE DECAY other people have opinions too - u can be anti violence urself but to not understand why people would oppose fascism with violence is what i'm not understanding - i believe u said on ur own facebook something about those complicit in the holocaust FIFTY GRAND But dude Milo isn't a fascist Come on This is bad If you can prove to me That milo is a fascist I’ll fall back Forever

DISTANCE DECAY ummm are you speaking for me now? u don't kno my politics - so let's not assume and ask eachother questions the tweet u quoted wasn't about milo it was about anti fascism FIFTY GRAND Right But who destroyed property and hurt people last night Innocent people Antifa So I'm trying to understand Why you think that's ok We aren't talking about literal Nazis

DISTANCE DECAY 1. i believe there's reports of yianopolos supporters and antifa 2. i'm personally not for violence where in do i say i'm okay with what happened last night again the tweet was about anti fascism FIFTY GRAND I'm talking about Milo tho Not his supporters DISTANCE DECAY and i thought we agreed not to assume? i'm all for talking here, ur feelings are valid i don't want u to feel as if they're not FIFTY GRAND I'm just responding to you DISTANCE DECAY i could just as easily say i'm speaking of anti fascism as an ideology not those who carry it out FIFTY GRAND You and I both know what the original tweet refers to Antifa The org And to go back to your original question I'm not neutral or pro DISTANCE DECAY are you pulling tribalism on me? FIFTY GRAND The fuck lmao ?? DISTANCE DECAY i just woke up - i mean this sincerely the "you and i both" confused me to the tweet earlier - i saw the police language tweet - i don't want u to feel that censoring u, just showing how i feel, but i don't want u to feel unvalidated in ur feelings either FIFTY GRAND No I get that. But like. If I wanna say the word cuck I can I'm not politically correct I don't feel the need to be Besides you keep bringing that up, did you not even see who I was responding to that day? Someone who was attacking my character and music as a comeback Yea I shut them down And I don't care It wasn't discourse DISTANCE DECAY yeah u can,  and i've seen u use it other times also on facebook but still i'm not gonna tell u what u can or can not say just so i can understand this we agree people can say what they want - correct? but i don't think that means freedom of consequences from that speech i.e. someone responding to u - which is very different from censorship FIFTY GRAND Let me ask you something What do you think was accomplished last night DISTANCE DECAY honestly - i just woke up so i don't kno the full extent of what happened, outside of the quick search i made when milo kept being brought up so i think that brings us to our earlier point - antifa destruction of property caused harm to innocent people, milos followers emboldened by his speeches brought harm intentionally to those whose identities they feel have no place FIFTY GRAND Ok I see where we disagree I don't believe that speech is oppressive I used to But I don't anymore He has the right to his speech Which is just about feminism and men's rights , sometimes Islam If you listened to his speeches you'd see it's pretty clear he's just a gay Jew supporting free speech on college campuses DISTANCE DECAY i don't think i said the speech was oppressive however i think that to say it's unequivocally not would be against a very common definition of the word - mental stress or despair - as well as not taking into account the way it can spread and be internalized thru socially learned behaviors - and that humans are creatures of socialization - i think u like psychology so think genie, victor FIFTY GRAND Ok true, I think words can be used as violence, psychologically But I think oppression is more systematic DISTANCE DECAY i think defining our terms is always helpful - i do believe systemic oppression is real and bad - so i think ignoring the psychological aspect would be a disservice to how social organization is formed - given that humans run these systems, learn and reproduce these oppressive values from other humans falls chimed in a lil here -milo and his supporters can arguably represent a cultural shift that has happened in the us in the right-wing (i.e. altright). it's fair to say that this shift is also part of the reason trump was elected, as he was championed by the altright. basically: at what point does this ideology and rhetoric stop being systemic when the elected president is  espousing the same type of rhetoric? isn't that the definition of systemic?

i also believe language plays a huge role in shaping culture tho i am a descriptivist at heart �� FIFTY GRAND Not everyone who supports trump is alt-right tho. In fact it's majority rust belt people, poor people who hate the establishment. The alt right is a fringe movement and you're only seeing that because the media is blasting it everywhere And I see you co-signing tweets about me being a victim but you've totally ignored the fact that hella people ARE coming at me And bet you wouldn't even publically denounce me being called a Nazi Ur totally silent there And I find that incredibly problematic If you believe language can shape culture why are you okay with throwing the labels fascist and Nazis round so freely? Because now it just means anyone who disagrees with you Trump was not elected by the alt right Half of America is not the alt right Trust me You're a very smart person, how can you not see the irony in what Antifa is doing? How is it you can bend over backwards to justify it all You know it's only going to get worse People will be harmed Innocent people Every time I tweet on my own platform you see how people react. It is not unfair to assume that I might be subject to violence in the near future But this is the climate you support DISTANCE DECAY 1. i think falls said part of 2. wouldn't that be antithetical to ur argument in free speech ? 3. how far does free speech absolutism go for you? in so far as it hurts your feelings? 4. i think it is a problem when people going throwing these things leading to witch hunts etc, as it is to make generalizations about islam, referring to this as an isolated incident etc. 5. no where do i define it as anyone who disagrees with me - i believe the examples i gave lend itself more to those who are white nationalists 6. half of america may not be alt right but that doesn't change that they champion him nor that bannon is in the white house

i don't believe you are actually a nazi or a fascist, however as much as this might make u go "language police!" i think the language u use is irresponsible - as u have people in ur mentions coming at u i had people in mine from our last convo about islam telling me how muslims do not have a right to exist coming at me - i care about u and i'm sorry i hurt ur feelings - i think maybe there's a lack of linear thinking going on here and i'm having an issue proving my point without indulging in ur methods - which ultimately is antithetical to my own but i'm at a loss for getting it across with my words so i'm trying ur method FIFTY GRAND What language of mine is irresponsible? And what are my methods Lol All I have done is talked Used my words And I'm not understanding the free speech absolutism thing. It's actually your belief that if feelings are hurt we should silence Not mine. It seems very shallow to think that changing language will do anything to rectify deep seated beliefs DISTANCE DECAY ur method of saying and doing whatever u want because "i'm not PC" - whatever that means as i find this is another statement that requires careful unpacking FIFTY GRAND Like, do you think telling people to stop saying faggot on the playground is going to stop homophobia? It will not These are deep rooted issues Speech doesn't even begin to cover And I don't say and do whatever I want to defy all that is PC I simply don't think PC culture is conducive to learning and our democratic way of life DISTANCE DECAY not cover - i don't have all the answers here but again i think language has a huge role in shaping culture - so it is a factor FIFTY GRAND Would you police me for calling myself a tranny? Cuz I do I like that word and I reclaim it DISTANCE DECAY no - again you can say what you want i thought we agreed on this earlier? FIFTY GRAND Did we? Ok DISTANCE DECAY but that doesn't mean that others won't say and do stuff as well maybe not that's why i said thought - are you arguing just to argue at this point? we can stop here maybe have a phone call sometime or go to a library FIFTY GRAND No of course I'm not haha I know it's hard to interpret And yea I'm passionate and a little worked up But I don't feel like I'm tryna argue Just lay down my fundamental beliefs DISTANCE DECAY that's ok - i feel broken honestly FIFTY GRAND Me too, and we both feel very strongly that our way is the right one So there is only so much we can say to one another We will have to agree to disagree and I'm always ok with that I think I should say-- I've been very critical of the left recently which you've noticed, and it's because it's my party and I'm seeing so much division I feel like I'm watching it all fall apart And I want to critique it in hopes that people will hear me out Because I've spent most of my time critiquing the right in the past I feel I need to turn to my own party and say what's going on guys??? Sadly I'm not sure how much I can keep doing it, people want to silence me. And I'm not trying to play victim I'm being as honest as I can be, I really do feel ostracized And sure maybe I am getting in my feels, we all are tho DISTANCE DECAY i think where i myself maybe am confused/take issue is when u publicly tweet these beliefs- there is an objective tone taken, doubled by the calling out others for bias - then you  go back editing/rewording them to something at the end after

example : take the "islam is bad argument" which is how ur words read to me and many others at first- i had a lot of people in ny mentions saying muslims should not exist - after hours u reposted ur thoughts saying using religion to justify horrific acts on people is wrong - which i think better portrays what u we're trying to say and i agree with but was not clearly articulated by the first string of tweets - and after so many with hateful thoughts found their confirmation bias already- and felt empowered and yes i think a lot of this stems from us getting emotional - which is fine we are human which i why i don't understand the triggered thing *in general * not with you and i think it's great to critique the left ! but i think your thoughts don't come clearly out at first - like so personally when u tweeted how is no one critiquing obama on immigration? - my twitter is full of leftist who criticized obama and personally i know of and know those who were deeply affected by ICE etc - again i think it's just the words we use maybe confuse us

FIFTY GRAND Yeah that's totally a fair critique of my tweets, I concede I need to do better DISTANCE DECAY we all do sorry that was so scatter brained the immigration policy under him really hit close to home - and it hit a weird thing bc getting rid of these binary thoughts/looking at life as grey - sad/anxious DT is coming to office but still not wanting to silence those who really suffered as a result under him - i couldn't find the words FIFTY GRAND I tweet my beliefs and I try to engage w those who disagree to a degree but  also I don't wanna reinforce stuff I don't agree with, so I shouldn't act like I'm so diplomatic lol cuz I'm not DISTANCE DECAY yes i feel u - and finding the perfect words in 140 characters or less is very difficult - but given the current climate is so important FIFTY GRAND Right. But at the same time Usually something will upset me so I tweet about it, ppl inevitably disagree and then it helps me, by the end of the "rant" usually my stance changes a little or at least opens itself to others But I start out hella strong And that's probably not the best way Something that upsets me tho is that the narrative seems to be that bc I don't support the violence, that I'm automatically the opposition And thats a rough one to me DISTANCE DECAY i don't have the answers :/ personally vulnerability has been the strongest key for me learning FIFTY GRAND It does make me angry but I think before that it makes me a bit sad and fearful. Anger is just my cover up DISTANCE DECAY i think it reads that way bc you haven't spoken on other issues in a long time - which can lead to confusion or assumption - and granted left is your party this is twitter and people don't kno that

simple explicit statements grounded in reflectivity and reflexivity - subjectivity of language taken in account - is very hard for me :/ FIFTY GRAND Very true This might sound weird but is there any way I can like, transcribe this convo and maybe share it? Cool if not , it definitely sounds odd to ask DISTANCE DECAY and yeah that's fine thank you for asking FIFTY GRAND I won't alter it in any way unless there's something you'd want me to omit. DISTANCE DECAY umm i think it's good to go idk throw me 2 the lions *joke* ^^ FIFTY GRAND 😂

[lorajackson]

Understanding the American Political Left and Right – Fact

Understanding the American Political Left and Right – Fact / Myth

Posted by Thomas DeMichele on November 11, 2016

The American Left-Wing and the American Right-Wing Explained and Compared

We explain the American political left-wing and right-wing by looking at the different factions that make up American liberalism and American conservatism.

TIP: For more insight, see: What is liberalism?, The history of the Democratic and Republican parties, The basic types of political parties, the political left-right, and liberalism and conservatism. See also, left and right as naturally occurring systems.

TIP: See an essay on terms and labels and the problems with identity politics. Try to avoid reacting emotionally to a term without fully appreciating the definitions we are trying to provide. We are seeking to define complex terms that mean different things to different people to help us all better understand modern American politics, thus there are lots of emotional traps to fall into.

Understanding the American Left-wing – American Liberalism

The American Left-wing – Modern American Liberalism: The social justice ideology of collective liberty, social equality, and necessary government. They tend to favor inclusive big groups and use big government to ensure social liberty and equality, much to the dissatisfaction of the political right. It is dominated by social liberal values of justice, and traditionally conservative values on government (as one can’t have social justice without big government, authority, and a power structure). It sometimes embraces classical liberalism in terms of individual liberties, and almost always stands against social conservatism. They tend to increase both social spending and taxes. This can lead to a chain of events in which the country is locked into overspending and lacking additional revenue sources. This group is typically dominant in the North and cities, and is typically favored by [roughly speaking] “young people, non-whites, non-Protestants, the highly educated, and businesses and investors that rely on international business.”[1][2]

Social Liberals: The general term for the American left (generally what we can call “the New Left” globally). When used in comparison to classical liberalism, it indicates a progressive form of liberalism focused on social equality.

Progressive Populists (“Progressives”): A populist movement focused on progressivism with which a large portion of the left identifies. It shares classist stances with the progressive right populists (such as aspects of trade protectionism).

Unions and Left-leaning Workers: The left in the employment sector. A bridge between progressives and neoliberals. Not all Unions are left, but Unions are historically favored by the left-leaning factions of American history.

Left-leaning traditional conservatives: Those who are socially or fiscally inclined to the left, but conservative in their views on authority and power structure.

Left-leaning capitalists: The CEO’s, supervisors, and investors of the left.

Hollywood liberals: The left as portrayed by the Media, especially news outlets and celebrities. Most of the media is left, so this includes most of “Hollywood.”

Elite liberals: The influential elite left who aren’t on TV, but are at the fundraisers.

Neoliberals: A term that describes a mixed-market economically minded “establishment” globalist liberal. Like the Clinton family. Learn more about neoliberalism and globalization.

The Religious Left: Those who see religion as calling for social justice. Can be puritanical at an extreme, like Prohibition, or can be more centered like the global phenomena “the Christian Left” (like Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany).

Human Rights advocates (Humanists): Those who advocate for women or minorities. This includes the more radical progressives on the left who fight for figures like Snowden and the left-leaning Hacktivists. A humanist might embrace true Utilitarianism as a first principle, opting for a moral view of politics.

Green Environmentalists: Those who advocate for the environment. The environment is a big issue for most of the left, although reasons for this vary.

The Libertarian left: Those who are left on social issues but don’t want a big government solution.

Socialists: Those whose beliefs favor Marx rather than social liberalism. Marx’s big government can be very conservative… but it is still “left”. Communism isn’t a plank of most left-groups, but more-so, it certainly isn’t a plank of the right-wing. It is properly placed in this group, at the bottom of the list, for a reason (similar to how fascism will be placed in the right-wing group below… at the bottom of the list).

TIP: Other ideologies related to the American left include humanists, utilitarians, and more. Did we miss something? Comment below.

Understanding the American Right-wing – American Conservatism

The American Right-wing – Modern American Conservatism: The traditional values ideology of individualism, classical American values, and a limited safety net. They may use government, but it will often be to deregulate, to ensure law and order and religious values, and to roll-back spending social justice programs. Is dominated by social conservative values on justice and classically liberal values on government (as it constantly has to fight back against the social justice programs of the left, thus constantly needs to deregulate). It often embraces classical conservatism to ensure against things like ACORN or Planned Parenthood or to up military spending and almost always stands against social liberalism (that is its main thing). They tend to decrease social spending and decrease taxes, but they offset this by increasing other types of spending (thus their net effect on the bottom line is no different than a Democrat theoretically, but in practice has sometimes been worse). This group is typically dominant in the South, rural areas, and has an older white Protestant base.[3][4]

Social Conservatives: The general term for the American right.

Nativist Populists: A populist movement focused on protectionism and nativism which tends to attract right-wing thinkers.

Paleoconservatives: A Paleocon is a social conservative and nativist populist who stands against neoconservatism. The portion of the Republican base which identifies as right-wing but strongly favored Trump over Bush in the primary is in this category.

Right-leaning workers: Workers who are anti-union and anti-left.

Right-leaning Traditional conservatives: Those who are socially or fiscally right, but otherwise have conservative views of authority and power structure.

Right-leaning capitalists and employers: The CEO’s, supervisors, and investors of the right.

Hollywood Conservatives: Reagan, the Duke, Trump, right-wing radio, and Fox News.

Elite Conservatives: The posh elite right who aren’t on TV, but always at the fundraiser.

Neoconservatives: A term that describes a mixed-market economically minded “establishment” globalist liberal. Like the Bush family.

The Religious Right: Those who see religion as calling for enforcing restrictions.

The Anti-Communists: Those who are first and foremost against Communism. Was more popular in the era of the Duke, but this is still a thing.

Libertarian Conservatives: Those who are right on social issues, but don’t want a big government solution.

Constitutionalists: Those who are strict constitutionalists, but with a mind that that allows for militias and deregulation. In this respect, they tend to cherry pick the founding documents.

The Far-right “fascists”: The far-right groups like the KKK, tend to be male-dominated nationalist fraternities in any country.

The Alt-right: The new young hybrid of far-right radicals, fascists, Constitutionalists, and Libertarians. This group might be seen as a left-wing version of right-wing since it relies on a liberal environment to be right-wing. Arguably includes right-leaning Hacktivists and other such alternative right-wing groups. It is a mistake to think these Breitbartians are just the old run of the mill blonde hair blue eyed racist nativist. They are no more racist than Barry Goldwater as they don’t see themselves as racists. Even when they say things like “thugs” and “law and order,” they are the progressives of the right. They are not statists, and they specifically do not see themselves as being the same as the far-right fascists even if the American left sees this through a different lens.

TIP: There are also some neutral political entities like “big banks” and “big business,” where there is political interest, but not partisan interest. That is its own essay but is related certainly to the concept of the general will and cronyism.

How Two Big Tents and a Need for a Majority Create the Two Major Parties: The Democratic and Republican Parties

Each liberal and conservative political type can be thought of as a “big tent” that houses different factions and political ideologies. This is true even though the right has elements of liberalism, especially radical classical liberalism, and the left has elements of conservatism, especially pro-government classical conservatism.

Typically factions have enough in common to form a coalition. In America, those coalitions are the Democratic Party and Republican Party.

The Democratic Party includes left-leaning groups except for left-libertarians, green, and socialists factions who often form their own parties.[5]

Meanwhile, the Republican party typically includes right-wing groups except for right-libertarians, constitutionalists, and the far and alt-right who often form their own parties.[6]

Both big tents have a “base” and a rotating cast of citizens who will identify with or vote with the party. In Trump vs. Clinton, Trump attracted part of the working left and part of their fringe right, helping to push him to victory. Meanwhile, some of the progressive left failed to rally behind Clinton. The opposite occurred in Romney vs. Obama. In both cases, one could argue populists carried the vote.

See our page on How to Understand the Left-Right Political Spectrum for a broader view on the political left and right including the history of the terms and how to understand them outside of American politics.

“Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, Liberals and Serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last one of Aristocrats [Republicans] and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.” — Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, 1824. ME 16:73

TIP: I agree with Thomas Jefferson in feeling that these two tents are aspects of the human condition manifesting as political parties. Jefferson talked about the ideological class divide in the passage above, but other aspects of general left-right ideology can be said to apply as well. In America, a majority is needed to win elections so people coalesce into two big groups as a two-party system. The other party is not the enemy (although radical fringe groups can sometimes break this rule, even they should be understood with a clear head, as they are likely arising as a reaction to something that needs to be addressed by the Center). They are a political opponent, but on a deeper level, they are a necessary part of what keeps us a superpower. We need varied opinions on many levels, including on a military/economic level. It is vital we find common ground and compromise. We can’t get rid of one of the two groups as it will just pop back up again.

Citations

Modern liberalism in the United States

Liberalism in the United States

Conservatism in the United States

Timeline of modern American conservatism

History of the United States Democratic Party

History of the United States Republican Party

“Understanding the American Political Left and Right” is tagged with: American Politics, Left–right Politics, United States of America

Source

The post Understanding the American Political Left and Right – Fact appeared first on Land of Fathers.

Understanding the American Political Left and Right – Fact published first on http://landofourfathers.com/

[kuuderekun]

Tolkien and Wagner?

https://jaredmithrandirolorin.blogspot.com/2019/09/tolkien-and-wagner.html

First I want to say that I haven't seen the recent Tolkien biopic and so am not at all influenced by it's contribution to this controversy.

The question of whether or not Tolkien was influenced by Richard Wagner, a famous  19th Century German Composer, has long been a matter of controversy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien%27s_influences#Wagnerian_influences

 Some critics have suggested that The Lord of the Rings was directly and heavily derived from Richard Wagner's opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, whose plot also centres on a powerful ring.[54] Others have argued that any similarity is due to the common influence of the Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied on both authors.[55][56]

Tolkien sought to dismiss critics' direct comparisons to Wagner, telling his publisher, "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases." According to Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien, the author claimed to hold Wagner's interpretation of the relevant Germanic myths in contempt, even as a young man before reaching university.[57]Some researchers take an intermediate position: that both the authors used the same sources, but that Tolkien was influenced by Wagner's development of the mythology,[58][59] especially the "concept of the Ring as giving the owner mastery of the world that was Wagner's own contribution to the myth of the Ring".[60] Wagner probably developed this element by combining the ring with a magical wand mentioned in the Nibelungenlied that could give to its wearer the control "over the race of men".[61][62] In addition, the corrupting power of Tolkien's One Ring has a central role in Wagner's operas but was not present in the mythical sources.[63][64]

Some argue that Tolkien's denial of a Wagnerian influence was an over-reaction to the statements of Åke Ohlmarks, Tolkien's Swedish translator, who in the introduction to his much-criticized translation of The Lord of the Rings "mixed material from various legends, some which mention no ring and one which concerns a totally different 

ring".[65][66][67] Furthermore, critics believe that Tolkien was reacting against the links between Wagner's work and Nazism.[68][69]

The character who Wagner (And Fate/) fans usually know as Siegfried is who Tolkien fans usually know as Sigurd.Most of this debate is about the Ring Cycle/Volsunga Saga.  However I made a post nearly 4 years ago called The Holy Grail and The Silmarills, in which I argued the Silmarills, particularly the one Beren and Luthian obtain that winds up in the possession of Earendil and Elwing, was inspired by a Germanic alternative Grail tradition that began with Wolfram Von Eschenbach's Parzival.  However it's not fully developed in Parzival alone.Richard Wagner composed an Opera adaptation of Parzival called Parsifal.  I have never watched this Opera, but from my googling it seems it does include the Grail being a Jewel of Lucifer's Crown detail.  Once I again I site Jason Colavito.http://www.jasoncolavito.com/the-holy-grail-as-lucifers-crown-jewel.htmlSo I do think Wagner was an influence, but nothing in Tolkien is a one for one allegory of what he was inspired by, it all changes and blends together.But what I'm most interested in is the main reason Tolkien may have wanted to distance himself from Wagner by the 30s and 40s.  Hitler and other leading Nazis as well as their spiritual fore-bearer Houston Steward Chamberlain were huge Wagner fanboys.  Tolkien in-spite of his own reactionary tendencies absolutely hated the Nazis.I don't think Wagner would have approved of the Nazis either, even Chamberlain never actually met him (he only married his daughter).Wagner was guilty of some casual Antisemitism, debates about characters in his Operas being coded negative Jewish stereotypes are not settled, but we know he was mainly because of a piece of non-Fiction he wrote that was mostly just him saying Jews can't make good Music.  Which is mostly just proof he never saw Fiddler On The Roof.  Conspiratorial Antisemitism began emerging after the Dreyfus affair that started in 1894 over a decade after he died.  I don't think Wagner would have supported the Holocaust.Some have even argued for a Marxist reading of Wagner.https://www.marxists.org/archive/montefiore/1902/07/wagner.htmSo the Nazis and other Right-Wing German Nationalists were into the Aesthetics of Wagner, not the Substance.In the modern context of comparing early 20th Century Fascism to the modern Alt-Right, what happened to poor Wagner I view as parallel to the Alt-Right's appropriation of Anime.  Too many normies are now assuming an Anime Avatar on Twitter always means being a Trump supporter.  But a lot of Anime is inherently Counter Culture, there is no way to form a Fascist reading of Ikuhara, YuriKuma Arashi is both pro-Gay and pro-Immigration, Penguindrum and Sarazanmai are heavily anti-Capitalist and Utena is absolutely anti-Patriarchy.  For examples of Leftist Anitubers just look at Pedantic Romanic and Zeria (both Lesbian Trans Women) as well as Shonen Ronin and Posadist Pacman.Fitting then that Anime is the one of the few places modern Media references Richard Wagner without intending it to be a Nazi reference, most recently in the new Boogiepop and Others (Digi thought the Wagner references were removed because he didn't make it far enough).In Hollywood Rise of the Valkyries is always used as a musical Godwin's Law.Sadly the Anime Abandon episode on Harlock Saga states the Tolkien and Wagner connection as fact without acknowledging that there is dispute about it.

[republicstandard]

Slipping Up The Slope

Life is hard, and death and taxes are inevitable. Or so I am told. Every day, the working American gets up. Maybe he mobilizes too early for his taste. He gets into his truck and drives to work. On the road, he is greeted by a cacophony of unskilled and inattentive, angry drivers who cut him off, flip him the bird, and generally, act like tantrum ridden children. If the man has his wits about him he shall stay his course and not react in kind. However, after years of insult upon injury, perhaps being the victim of accident or road-rage, he may well join the march of the man-children. Or more likely, years of seeing his lawful behavior met with childish antics will gradually erode his lawfulness.

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They tell me that the road was not always this bad. My wife, who grew up in Nova Scotia, tells me that the roads are not that bad there as of 2012. Maybe Canada’s world really did end then and nothing ever got worse. What I do know is that where I live, drivers become exponentially worse by the year. Statistically, and observable. I can scarcely make a commute these days without pulling over for an Ambulance, Firetruck or Copcar. The principal issue is that people are stressed, and a windshield gives drivers a delusion of anonymity. It might not always be road-rage: stress upholds escapist fantasy; texting while driving is a response to stress, in addition to stupidity. However, it is the road rage, the transgressively antisocial behavior exhibited on the road which concerns this piece. When encased in your shell of sheet metal and glass, it is easy to forget that the driver holding you up is human, too. You don’t see the man, just the bumper stickers, things to annoy you.

This anonymity is human nature in action. Call it beer muscles, if you will, but people show their true colors when they think nobody is looking. Better yet: when they think they won’t be caught. In the years I have been driving, the human condition encased in automobilia has only worsened and depreciated. What are some corollaries? Workingmen are spread thin. Money is short and fast. Time is precious. Workers are underappreciated, underpaid, uncared for by their society. For a society that is disintegrating and refuses to supply citizens with upright emotional education and security, it is no wonder people are hostile. An issue we will discuss soon is that added to this cacophony of error is the unmitigated fact that the police force is ill-equipped to deal with what the American census is morphing, devolving, mutating into.    

Another example of anonymity in action is the internet. You see it all the time, online, people write things they would never dream of saying to a man’s face. Men’s faces have been bruised for far less. This less than wholesome component of the internet has led to a number of social maladies. I have discussed them at length in a book I have written, but seeing as it is unpublished it hurts nothing to discuss them here.

The internet has fostered an age of cowards. The Aryan concepts of honor once sublimated into every stratum of Europid society has been relegated to convenience methods. For instance, it was once held in common that you simply do not say something behind a man’s back you would lack the courage to say to his face. The internet seems to have destroyed this ideal. Although, one may glean from the net that, of course, every keyboard commando would say exactly whatever bloviating nonsense he has typed, out loud to your face – no doubt while polishing his rifle, smoking a cigar and massaging his three Russian brides. On the internet, every man is a myth and a legend.

Here is another point to ponder. Entire generations are being raised without ignorance of the internet. Men of my age remember exactly when SkyNet entered their house. Men younger than me take it for granted. They might not even be able to imagine life without it. Hell, some men in my bracket might be that dull that they cannot conceive of life outside the interwebz. This component of society has changed the social norm. People now intermingle online and IRL conducts. The result has been, at least for me, profoundly ironic. When I was young and so was the internet, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Today? Every Normie I worked with in school could have passed for dysfunctional childhood me.

Symptoms? Conversations remain unfinished. People have committal problems. Eye contact is becoming a rarity. People struggle with informal and informal speech. Having the supposed freedom to write anything online with hardly any real consequences has given people the illusion that their opinions are wanted, or that they must, in fact, be heard. It has damaged the sense of appropriate place, and the idea of sensitive topics is gradually eroding and topical conversation has become a free for all and stream of consciousness. In large part, that is. There are examples to these notations. However, the decline is real. I am dating myself, sounding like the Coastal Elites’ version of Harold Covington; however, these are issues that warrant exploration.

The desocialization of the younger generation will impact future generations. Boomers complain about lazy youth. And men my age will replace them and be hated by the younger generation, for we will worry about the communication, organization and completion skills and coping mechanisms of the younger. More than that, we will worry because nothing tends to get better with time unassisted. Kind of like that supposed second law of thermodynamics I read about when I was younger.      This brings me to the crux of my article here. The Slippery Slope. As it goes, drivers on the road are becoming more brazen and antagonistic. The rules of the road are a joke. Who hasn’t heard a variation of this story why am I going to follow the road rules when I just watched a cop pass a guy doing an illegal turn? Or why should I be a sucker when the guy in front of me is doing 20 over and he hasn’t been pulled over? Or, I just watched a guy blow through a 4 way stop and I get pulled over for a headlight being out?  Or as time goes on you will hear: I probably won’t get pulled over anyway. I do this all the time.

Pretty soon the rules are a joke, a laughing stock, and everyone knows it. Every day I am cut off at least once per intersection because some entitled dingbat felt he could bumrush the fresh red light. He cuts through, and most often, the rightful green light traffic knows to wait a new two seconds to accommodate the moron who will aggressively run the obvious red. I’ve considered ramming them multiple times, because, if I am not mistaken, my insurance would cover it and my truck is getting long in the tooth. All this happens because the drivers who had accustomed themselves to taking advantage of the legal precedence that allows you to pass a yellow light to avoid being stuck in the intersection have come to justify ignoring when yellow becomes red. It was a slippery slope. Whatever. This message spreads. Every dirtbag that runs a red, passes illegally and gets away with it causes two subdividing problems: A. he is emboldened to continue breaking the law and taking bigger risks and, B. others will see him and in their annoyance, follow suit vis a vis me vs. them mentality. The issue with problem A. is that chickens always come home to roost – unless eaten by fox and hawk. The arrogant driver will increase his market value in stupidity until he gets himself, or more likely, somebody innocent of his idiocy that doesn’t deserve it, killed. Now the issue with Problem B is that it multiplies the instance of Problem A and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of thoroughly unenjoyable driving.

This slippery slope is worthy of investigation because it is no longer just the road rules. The internet and driving are symptomatic of a larger problem, which we know, and shall discuss. There have always been crimes, there have always been misdemeanors. However, reports of crime dominate the news. One can hardly pass a day without hearing about rape or theft or murder. How long until all laws are treated like road rules? Say what you will of Police, but they are spread thin. The civilian populace smells blood on the water. Police on the road have to select what offenders they will punish selectively. There will come a time, and that time has come, when police begin selectively choosing which domestic crimes and which rampant crimes to deal with. There will come a time when the civilian populace is no longer satisfied with bread and circus and we shall see the true nature of the post-White America’s American.

Now, I write for the Right. This is no secret and it is no lie. To that end, it should come as no surprise that the commute and web diatribe leads us to the daunting future that may well like at stake. When the civilian populace is unhampered when laws are increasingly selectively followed and considered negotiable… and when we know the law is often selectively applied, it creates a potential for a dramatically erratic and unstable future. Why now? I presume we can be agreed that the present is, at present, rather unwell?      Anyone in the Alt-Right proper or Dissident Right abroad will be acquainted with the disaster of Charlottesville. Anyone of a significantly Right of Centre leaning will be familiar with the selective way, say, crimes against sensitivity and political correctness are punished. Anyone who has been called a Fascist or a Nazi will be familiar with the exploits of the degenerate cadre known as Anti-Fa. You will know they are on George Soros’ payroll, and that this merry band of nonconformists who all dress, look and smell the same is on the corporate dole – toeing the line they’ve been fed.

These Anti-Fa have committed assault, which I believe is still according to United States law a felony. The cases are countless. When Charlottesville happened and Anti-Fa attacked at an otherwise peaceful protest, the Police were ordered to stand down. Or so I am told. A very poor legal precedent that emboldened further Leftist violence. But. According to the Portland Phoenix and the Bollard, the Anti-Fa have never killed anyone where Nazis killed all kinds of people. So, naturally, it is okay to punch a Nazi, mace him, throw bottles of your own urine at him. It is okay to insult him, deride him. Anti-Fa have stalked the family members of Right Wing Dissidents. Anti-Fa has threatened the mothers of Fascist Sons. They have ruined lives and gloated of their deeds. They have acted shamelessly and without reproach. Are they condemned? Not very strongly. They are occasionally applauded. As to the Anti-Fa themselves? I suspect they rationalize their poor behavior, if they are intelligent enough, by claiming they are anticipating violence from their enemy. They are preventing the next inevitable Holocaust, I suppose.

So heroic.

Yet it goes that despite their wanton ignorance of the law, the popular mind transfers their guilt to men like myself. Anti-Fa is on the loose and the popular mind wants to kvetch til She’ol about the horrors of something someone said somewhere on something on the internet… somehow… it’s all so… asinine. They selectively cherrypick the real crimes committed by immigrants, coloreds, legitimate terroristic organizations, gangs… the actual government… homosexuals and liberals… and ignore them. Then, whenever a self-aware White goes off the rails, or whether some ill-advised fool or bad-faith criminal uses our politick as a springboard to vent his savagery… it is by default what the news shall discuss. Yet it follows that for every act of White on Protected Minority Class violence, you can find equal or greater systemic acts of violence or oppression committed against Whites because they are White, and, with increasing brazenness those crimes committed simply because it is in the nature of the subgroup named to do so. Spend time researching statistics, which yes can be manipulated (in either direction) and you shall eventually see that the way the question is presented leans heavily to one direction, and that direction is not Right.

I follow the road rules – begrudgingly. I have never seen the inside of a jail, nor done anything to warrant seeing one. I pay my taxes like a good Goy. I’m married. As far as anyone knows, I am a well-balanced member of society who is generous, if brusque. I love my wife and go to great lengths to help those I care for. My biggest sin is I oppose multiculturalism. I point out discrepancies which make polite ladies cringe. Even this would have been forgiven if I made those polite ladies cringe in the service of uplifting Negroes. But I don’t. I am an Identitarian, who happens to be White. You can, therefore, call me a White Nationalist. According to the recent government hearing, this means I am a Domestic Terrorist. A law abiding, generous terrorist. Indeed.

Recently to the writing of this article, there was Government appointed meetings to discuss Right-Wing extremism as the ‘biggest threat’ facing this country. It was intimated that White Supremacists commit the majority of crime in the US. I suppose it was Richard Spencer who did 9/11 then? How many people were reported dead, there at 9/11? What “White Supremacist” attack made such a death toll? Or has Al Qaeda been forgotten, did the Government extract the oil it wanted and conveniently forget the wars that followed and the freely encouraged “Islamophobia” because they readily contravene the Planet Kumbayah narrative of MultiKulti? Was it the oh-so-radical Jared Taylor who shot up that tart Arianna Grande’s concert? How many dull-eyed teenage drug addicts died there? Shall I presume Mike Enoch orchestrated the bombing of the Pentagon that followed 9/11? And it must be none other than David Duke who jumps across the Mexican Border every day, drunk, and runs down random civilians in whatever State he escapes to? White Supremacy indeed. Or did they fail to list the documented cases in which Immigrants, both legal and illegal, who murder, rape, steal, fraud and overall stink up the joint? Yes. Immigrants. I am singling out a category of people I don’t want here with WORDS. Lawfully (as of publishing this piece) written words. This Country, which could have been a Nation, is theoretically a Republic based upon Anglo-Roman Law. Laws are words, you know. These were words written by White men for other Whites. We are told, of course, that Jews played a pivotal role in defining that law but I shall elect to keep my faith in men like Thomas Jefferson, wicked Anglo-supremacists that we are. Then again, you have your Barbara Lerner Spectre’s whose hubris is burned into the minds of Nationalists for all time. If you are a self-aware White you are at risk, period. Cowardice won’t save you now. You might as well cast your die. You can’t fake Clown World, White Man and Woman. The Media, Clown World, will continue to expand the perimeter of how Supremacist is defined until everything that doesn’t fit their broadly degenerate programme is encapsulated there. White Supremacists make a special case because it is an unpopular trope. Nevermind the fact that the White Supremacist as defined by an idiot (((media))) does not exist. So. If you are someone outside the Nationalist sphere reading this, if you have a dram of honesty in you, you will consider my point.

Consider also, the popular media cherry picks and presents the worst elements of Nationalism found online and in history. It ignores the fact that the overwhelming majority of us are struggling individuals. Or, when the Media is bold, they mock and kick us when we are down. Because surely, this will increase our emotional stability. To be fair, many of our younger lads take this cherry-picking as a challenge and troll you online because they think of you collectively as an idiot. If you believe their online rants… then they would be correct. The truth is that the extreme majority of us would have settled for Freedom of Association, an end to forced diversity and not being made to kneel at the altar of MLK and the ever-increasing liberties regarding how our history is defined by those who are not us. I personally do not want an Ethnostate or to go live in a ridiculous compound in the Northwest and milk Aryan super cows until I am dead. I don’t own guns and on the one instance, my very good friend convinced me to go shooting… I hit five targets out of the fifty-five rounds I shot. I am a Mainer who wants Maine to keep on Dirigoing. Revolutionary, I am sure.

You know who else was (not) a Mainer who wanted Maine to keep on Dirigoing? Tom Kaczynski. What did he do? He said STUFF. Had a project, wrote a couple books. Did he deserve to be unanimously vilified by the apparently cowardly town of Jackman? He did if you honk your nose and have rainbow colored hair. The slope is slippery. The definition of White Supremacist is ever expanding. It is amorphous and convenience driven, now. Someday, you will fall under that umbrage. Don’t you think you won’t. You will have to whore yourself increasingly to uncomfortable depths to maintain your illusion of purity in the eyes of MultiKulti. MultiKulti makes demands on your conscience now. Today you have to pretend to support the LTBBQ-XYZ agenda. You have to bow at the knee to MLK. Tomorrow you will have to marry someone you do not love, to prove you are not a bigot. You pay mere lip service to Blacks today, you think they will be satisfied tomorrow? The day after, you will see your children robbed from your home by government agents because you were not open and inclusive enough.

Do you think your complacency will save you? Did it save the Boomers? At home and abroad the Boomers, the Government’s single greatest financial achievement, are now starting to be bled by the Fed to feed diversity. They like to point the finger at their younger generations while the immigrants they hosted run amuck. They haven’t the courage to deal with the problem they created. It is our problem now. There is hope for you. You can always admit that you were wrong. You painted us with a broad brush. Some of our guys will never forgive you. Most of us understand. You can start advocating for yourself, for your people, your race. You don’t even have to listen to Renegade Broadcasting or The Right Stuff to do this. All it takes is a whisper of testicular fortitude. You could point out at your dinner parties and barbecues that there is an unfair double standard. You could refuse to let your friend’s wife off the hook when she says something patently false to upholster her pet narrative. You could turn off the Sportsball. You could refuse to clap enthusiastically the next time your workplace hosts some pompous celebration of diversity. Keep calling Columbus Day what it is – suggest the “indigenous” make their own holiday if it pleases them. You can open your eyes and see the entitled monster that White egalitarianism has created, and you can start asking yourself if your money wouldn’t be better spent elsewhere – for you pay for that monster’s very expensive pet food.      Or silence.

Cowardice has prompted many to sell us under the bus, it is a race to condemn us the hardest. Many have done this Judas deed for their thirty pieces. (Yes, I did just make a Christ reference – it is fitting. We have our people’s interest in mind and are constantly betrayed by short-sighted buffoons.) Many have done this to increase their social capital. They think it will ease their passage through life if they think at all. Others are moved like polarities in a gravitational current – dead objects floating through space. The youngsters call them NPCs. NPCs are programmed to seek gratification by regurgitating society approved virtue signals, they think this will increase their social capital because they know bigots get fired. They do not consider the slippery slope.

However, it changes nothing. Your moment in the sun that you gained from virtue signaling? It will end. You too will become unfashionable. You will be asked to sacrifice a virtue, and you will be asked one day to give up one thing too precious. Then, my friend, you shall be a Nazi too. And it will no longer matter if you believed what I believe (and you do NOT know what I believe unless you have taken the time to ask) or if you simply did not want to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple that defiled your religious beliefs. To your future enemy, it is the same. You may be content to remain silent when a strange looking, sexually ambiguous human with gauges and tattoos you don’t understand condemns the Christian Religion to Secular Hell… even though you yourself are Christian. Tomorrow, Christian, they will ask you to show your support for homosexuality. If you are a Conservative American who secretly understands it is the White parts of America that he loves, you already know the slippery slope.

So. Shall you sell out? Or shall you eventually say to this strange new god of Political Correctness “non-serviam?”

These are important questions to ask because someday, inevitably, things are going to get worse. The beatings will continue until morale improves. And you, my friends, are on the wrong side of history. And I should wager that you know this, too. You are there because you do not understand us.

Speaking of the slippery slope… you know, many men in my bracket would not be where we are, in the Dissident Right, were the double standard not so glaringly obvious. Ten years ago I was still lying to myself, telling myself how awful I was for having a racist thought and that maybe I didn’t actually love negroes and gays as much as the LGBT committee at my college said I should. And eventually, it hit me: everybody got a pass but me, the straight White male. I was told I had privilege, though.

A bald-faced lie. And you know it is a lie if you pay taxes. But it won’t get better. If you won’t join us and help, you can help by doing something else. Keep your mouth shut. When Nazi and Right Wing things come up in conversation? Ignore them. Don’t condemn. Don’t disavow. Don’t pretend to agree with something unless you actually do. Take away the Left’s monopoly on free speech by starving them with silence.

I know many who claim to hate the Right to not actually oppose us and our ideas so much as they do not understand, or feel we are too extreme. If the situation was not so dire, I would agree. I dislike extremity, but it shall become increasingly warranted as the government strangles the life out of her civilians moving forward. The McCarthy Era never ended. It is now fashionable to support or refuse to condemn anti-White violence, especially when Nationalists are targeted. You know the famous Holocaust maxim. First, they came for my gold teeth, and then they came for my lampshades, then they came for my showers and they stayed for my pedal powered skull bashing brain machines. They come for the Nazis today, but when they run out of ‘us,’ you will fit the bill. I want you to remember this: the word Nazi has no meaning. You can keep using it if you want, but fairly soon, you will be calling yourself a Nazi when you do. Christians are Nazis, you understand – White Supremacists. That argument is already underway. The Christian confectioner that wouldn’t make the sodomy cake? Nazi, now. Christian protests against revolting displays of public sodomy? You guessed it. The group Patriot Prayer who regularly hosts Blacks? Nazi. Proud Boys (a joke and mess)? Nazi. These groups all share this in common: to them White and Black are interchangeable, they may not be color blind but they are not racist. Yet somehow, in the retarded logic of the MultiKulti ambassadorial mind, they are equally “Nazi.”

That’s right. Someday you and I and Tom Kaczynski can all have brunch at a Thai restaurant and be accused of sedition someday because we want our mutual children to have a future that doesn’t look like Kenya. Then the Bollard will write a comically dramatic puff piece about how they infiltrated our lunch by wearing a Groucho Marx costume and spying on us. Admittedly, after that, a bunch of people are going to think we’re idiots, but they’re going to wonder why three people that aren’t all Nazis are all of a sudden being labeled such. And here’s another thing, before I run out of ambition with this piece. You’ll notice I’ve provided approximately zero proposals for some kind of solution outside of social advice. The NSA and other alphabet soup agencies can quote me if they ever read this, but the words put in our mouths by others are invalid. I have no solutions. The problem I was handed is too big for me. I know what I want. I want children. I want those children to grow up in a clean, safe, White America. Even if that means they just live in a small town in Maine and visit diversity when they’re of age and no longer bound by the rules of my house. I want it acknowledged that the standard is double and that the lie we’ve been sold about mass immigration is just that – a lie. We do not need third world immigrants. Why should my future posterity sacrifice wellbeing to suit a narrative that nobody ever asked me if I wanted?

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Something to keep in mind before we part: extremists on both sides already think the Law is a joke. Their behavior is going to increase in volition and hostility as well as scope. Why? Same with road rules. Blood is on the water, government agencies cannot or will not keep up. So when they come for you, how bold will they be by then? This law abiding Nationalist here will not seem so bad then when you have experienced Liberal Tolerance in an enriched and diverse future. All we wanted was a White American niche. But short-sighted fools decided to turn a molehill of opinion into a mountain of opposition. They will control every aspect of your life, and if they cannot shame you into submission, eventually they will resort to trickery and then force. And we? We would have left you well enough alone in your Clown World. They will force you to sit; it will make Clockwork Orange look like a Baptism Party at Catholic Charities.

You can mark my words.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine http://bit.ly/2IUnx4f via IFTTT

[paradoxspaces]

actually here are more 3 am meat feelings

my prevailing thought about meat, which will probably sustain throughout candy and probably the rest of this week if not my life, is that john egbert died and none of his friends (beyond terezi) know about it. none of them know. he fucking died and his last words were a love confession to a girl who he doesnt even really know. john egbert died. he is probably not coming back and, even if there was a ‘’chance’’, he has been summarily dismissed from the narrative. 

john egbert died trying to be a hero even after we were told he wasnt special and he is dead!! he died and he didnt get to reconnect with the betas or the alphas even, didnt really work through any of his depression. he fucked terezi (suRe?) and tried to tell her loved her and fucking died. i am, literally, never going to be over it. 

hgshss aside from that i actually liked the ending more than I thought? The middle was extremely touch and go for me--there were moments I liked and then something would happen that I’d get upset about and the cycle continued-- but I thought the last few chapters were interesting and genuinely enjoyable. basically i love kanaya maryam so fucking much and i was so glad to see her be herself again ashjsj i lovE her.

Seeing the characters get motivated to work together and stop Dirk was a surprisingly optimistic conclusion for an ending that was clearly obsessed with misery. I didn’t expect that kind of ‘call to action’ that occurred, but I was glad to see it. Despite that and despite the post-scripts, I don’t think theres going to be anything after this. Alt-Calliopes last words in meat made it seem, to me, that any kind of additional work was to fall into the reader’s hands, in fanwork or w/e. or, at least, I supremely doubt hussie will be involved in anything going forward. there are still things left open, and new questions wrt dirk and the bots and the new session, but I feel like this was all meant to stir up investment in hs as a property, as a place to think about and create work for and pay attention to (and buy friendsims), but not as a piece of ongoing media. we have been compelled to think about homestuck for a while longer, but I’m not sure we will be reading new content again--or at least not for a while. (maybe candy will change my mind, though? so many ppl seem SO sure that there will be more and I dont know why besides wishful thinking)

not even sure if id really want more, unless it was like a 10 chap sequence about a secret middle route where john doesnt die, vrisrezi 4 real, and a normal dirk receives therapy and like chains ultidirk to the ocean floor or something. all the betas hang out regularly, but specifically rose and jade have one fucking conversation at least. 

(actually the concept of a like theatre of coolty-esque all-dirk showdown is. good. ultidirk/teen dirk/hal/brain ghost try to out-monologue each other and then fight) 

(actually actually jake kills ultidirk with his bare fucking hands to get some retribution for the bullshit that happened to him)

obviously obviously obviously I still have big issues with stuff. i hate that jakes main character trait is being sexualised and manipulated and the narrative still just makes him out to be the fucking dumbest shallowest idiot. why cant jake get like.....any depth at all....why cant there be an acknowledgment of how fully traumatized he must be at this point?? also i cant get behind johnrezi, tbh, tho i think theyre written well. beyond my full devotion to scourge sisters, they didn’t even talk that much, and most of their convo was tz dictating her plan to john to get the love of her live back. it isnt like they hung out all that often???? before that, their most notable interaction was when terezi tricked john into dying for a joke. why is john obsessed with these two girls he barely spoke to, who are both in love with other people?? (might be worth thinking about further) i dont like that 99% of the time roxys transness was brought up only to have someone near by be a fucking dick about it. Jane: become fascist is still really bizarre to me. i still think some of the HEAVY focus on meta commentary is a bit of a drag. 

overall i think this whole ‘exploration of the ugly bad awful shit’ was certainly that. we got meat, we got high plot/action/drama. bad things happened and everyone was miserable and disconnected and awful to each other. narrative relevance through trauma/pain/violence. I really thought it was going to end with some kind of tpk, so this kind of vaguely optimistic pseudo-cliffhanger was better than I really expected it to be. I’m holding off on like sweeping estimations until after candy, but I still am not sure what the point of having everything be THIS open ended is if not for a sequel and im not sure what the focus on ‘releasing narrative responsibility from the singular author/interpretation’ is doing if not directly precluding a sequel. so idk. onto candy, i guess. we’ll see how this all goes. 

(I hate ultidirk as much as the next girl ESPECIALLY for what he did to kan and for being just like....the worst during johns death but like. im dumb im dumb and bad and part of me wants dirk redemption in some form, ideally in another splinter obvi. i was extremely horrified and resistant to big villain dirk but after reading his later thoughts i get it more than I thought I would and its all very interesting. I also, like a lot of others, am entertained by the image of him cavorting around like a sailor moon villain or something) 

(i don’t love the weird convo that was kind of trying to excuse/react to the Incest Commentary Drama and I would have paid to have it removed but w/e)

(ALSO THE FUCKING ‘COSMIC LOVE’ VRISREZI BIT I. I !!?! TEREZI LOVES VRISKA SO MUCH. SHE LOVES HER S MUCH GUYS. SHE LOOKED FOR HER FOR FUCKING YEARS IN HER POV AND ALMOST DIED BC SHE DIDN’T WANT TO GIVE UP HDSHA LET THESE GIRLS KISS IM SO FUCKING SAD. 

HOMESTUCK IS ABOUT VRISREZI RIGHTS ONLY. I ONLY CARE ABOUT TWO GIRLS AND HOW MUCH THEY LOVE EACH OTHER. GOD IM IN HELL GOD GOD GOD THEYRE IN LOVE!!!!! )

[theconservativebrief]

On September 13, danah boyd took the stage at the Online News Association’s annual conference in Austin. She is the founder and president of Data and Society, a research institute dedicated to “the thorny issues at the intersection of technology and society.” The topic she had come to address, and the audience before which she had chosen to address it, was among the thorniest. boyd was in Austin to tell the media they were getting played.

“I’m hoping that you can hear what I’m saying,” she told the assembled journalists. “Because our democracy depends on you recognizing that you are being manipulated.”

The manipulators boyd was talking about were mostly alt-right and alt-light trolls, conspiracy theorists, and provocateurs. They would do or say something offensive or outrageous, bathe in the flood of negative publicity, and use the media’s coverage — particularly its storm of outraged, fact-checking, oppositional coverage — to whip up their base, generate interest in their ideas, and stoke the belief that the MSM was against them.

boyd was warning the journalists that the strategies of modern media manipulators were different — they had learned to thrive on negative coverage, and had discovered they could popularize ideas and recruit sympathizers by provoking the media into trying to discredit their noxious ideas.

“Their goal is to get the news media to negate [their] frame  —  and negate the conspirators who are propagating that frame,” she warned. For some people, having the media turn en masse to say something is vicious and untrue makes them think: Huh, I wonder if that’s true. I wonder what they’re trying to hide?

The approach had become predictable, but the media seemed unable or unwilling to stop falling for it, boyd said. She even laid it out in a clean, bulleted list:

Media manipulators have developed a strategy with three parts that rely on how the current media ecosystem is structured:

1. Create spectacle, using social media to get news media coverage.

2. Frame the spectacle through phrases that drive new audiences to find your frames through search engines.

3. Become a “digital martyr” to help radicalize others.

boyd suggested there was a simple way to shut down the manipulations of these trolls. “Ignore their attention games and focus your reporting on the wide range of non-hateful political views in this country that aren’t screaming loudly to get your attention,” she advised.

I’ve been thinking a lot about boyd’s speech lately, but the particular media manipulator who has me thinking about it presents unique problems, and the dynamics surrounding him defy her solutions.

I’m talking, of course, about the president of the United States.

Last week, law enforcement apprehended a pro-Trump obsessive who was mailing bombs to the president’s political opponents. Over the weekend, an anti-Semite entered a synagogue in Philadelphia and murdered 11 Jewish worshippers on the grounds that Jews were behind the caravan of migrants that Trump keeps hyping as an existential threat to American safety.

On Monday morning, Trump logged on to Twitter to change the subject:

There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2018

It’s easy to read Trump’s tweets, with their quasi-random capitalization, and miss the care with which they’re crafted. But there’s a phrase in this one that Trump knows elicits more media outrage than any other: “the true Enemy of the People.” The media doesn’t much care when the president calls them fake news anymore. But calling them the enemy of the people mere days after a mentally imbalanced MAGA obsessive sent them bombs in the mail? The media isn’t going to ignore that. And Trump knew it.

But this wasn’t just a morning missive from Trump. This was a coordinated message from his White House.

On Monday afternoon, press secretary Sarah Sanders held her first press briefing since September 10 to reiterate Trump’s sentiments. The rare briefing was held for one reason, and one reason only: Sanders wanted an on-camera confrontation with the media, and she got it.

JIM ACOSTA: Can you state for the record which outlets that you and the president regard as the enemy of the people?

SANDERS: I’m not going to walk through a list, but I think those individuals probably know who they are.

As the briefing wrapped up, Sanders delivered the message she wanted the country to hear. “You guys have a huge responsibility to play in the divisive nature of this country, when 90 percent of the coverage of everything this president does is negative, despite the fact that the country is doing extremely well, despite the fact that the president is delivering on exactly what he said he was going to do if elected,” she said. “And he got elected by an overwhelming majority of 63 million Americans who came out and supported him, and wanted to see his policies enacted.”

It was a perfect statement. It combined an outrageously timed attack on the media with a complaint that Trump just can’t get fair coverage and wrapped it in the kind of easily proven lie the press can’t resist covering (far from being elected by an “overwhelming majority,” Trump lost the popular vote).

Hours later, this was the Fox News homepage:

Days after Trump’s inauguration, then-chief strategist Steve Bannon gave an interview to the New York Times.

“I want you to quote this,” Bannon said. “The media here is the opposition party.”

Just in case his point was missed, he said it again. “You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party.”

Trump has always treated his presidency as a reality show, and every good reality show needs a villain. From day one, Trump wanted his villain to be the media. With Democrats basically powerless, the media was the only force powerful enough to make continuing sense of Trump’s aggrieved, oppositional political style.

The problem was the media didn’t want to be Trump’s opposition party. The media wanted to cover his presidency. Early on, the media wanted more than anything else to normalize his presidency, and their coverage of it; there was a constant hunt for the moments when Trump appeared presidential or seemed to be changing his behavior to better match the burdens of his office.

Trump’s solution to that problem has been to provoke the media into looking like his opposition by lying in more absurd ways and directly attacking them in more outrageous ways at more and more outrageous times. Remember, for instance, “The FAKE NEWS awards,” which Trump hyped on Twitter for weeks?

Trump leverages the trollish formulas boyd outlined to perfection: He uses Twitter to create spectacle on social media, deploys catchy and unusual frames (“FAKE NEWS!” “the true Enemy of the People”) that sympathizers can search for to find supporting evidence or fellow loyalists, and then uses the media’s aggrieved or simply truth-telling reaction to paints himself as a victim of endless media bias (“90 percent of the coverage of everything this president does is negative”).

The media then reacts in the only way that makes any sense given the situation: We cover Trump’s statements as outrageous and aberrant; we make clear where he’s lied or given succor to violent paranoiacs; we fret over the future of the free press. And then Trump and his loyalists point to our overwhelmingly negative coverage and say, “See? Told you they were the opposition party.”

Trump, in other words, manipulates the media using the same tactics as a run-of-the-mill alt-right troll, and for much the same reason: He wants the media to fight with him so he gets more coverage and shows how biased they are against him. He wants the media to fight him because that drives attention to the things he’s saying, to the conspiracies he’s popularizing, and to himself. Going to war with the media nets Trump much more coverage than giving a speech on manufacturing policy or tax cuts.

The problem is Donald Trump isn’t your run-of-the-mill troll. He’s the president of the United States of America.

In her important report on the way trolls manipulate the media into amplifying their messages, communications scholar Whitney Phillips summed up the media’s lose-lose choice well. “It is problematic enough when everyday citizens help spread false, malicious, or manipulative information across social media,” she writes. “It is infinitely more problematic when journalists, whose work can reach millions, do the same. At least, it can be infinitely more problematic. It can also be a critical contribution to public discourse.”

Phillips was talking about the difficult questions involved in covering online neo-Nazis and alt-right provocateurs, but the bind applies with vastly more force to Trump himself. Constantly covering Trump’s endless attacks on the press, his lies, his violations of basic decency and norms, crowds out coverage of arguably more consequential questions, like his baldfaced lying about the GOP’s health care plan or the specifics of Democrats’ agenda if they retake Congress.

But covering a US president’s proto-fascist language about the free press is also a critical contribution to public discourse. The term “newsworthy” may be abused and opaque, but that’s newsworthy under any definition.

What do you do, though, when coverage of that proto-fascist language is actually the point of the language in the first place? Trump wants to bait the media into looking like his opposition. He wants us to make the dominant and constant topic of political conversation his war with, well, us.

As press critic Jay Rosen put it, the media has no idea what to cover when “the erosion of democratic institutions — not just the press, but all of them — is part of how the political movement [the president] leads is powered.”

The media used to have a stick here: negative coverage. Sure, you could get us to cover you by being outrageous or offensive, but you wouldn’t want that kind of coverage. That kind of coverage could destroy your career.

But Trump does want that kind of coverage. That kind of coverage is how he built his political career. That kind of coverage is how he shows that we’re his opposition, that he’s an underdog at war with the Washington “deep state.” Even better, that kind of coverage lets him crowd out the kind of coverage he really doesn’t want — coverage of his actual agenda, which trends toward plutocracy rather than populism; of other politicians, who have ideas and messages that could threaten Trump’s presidency if only they could get heard.

“Journalists have become more savvy in how they deal with lower-level trolls,” Phillips told me by phone. “They figured out how to not engage with them on Twitter. But no one has quite figured out what to do when the president is engaging in similar behaviors. You can’t just ignore him, can you?” Then I heard her tone change. “That’s a genuine question. Can we ignore him? Does it make sense? Is it ethical to look at something the president of the United States says and decide we won’t report that?”

Nor is it obvious that if the mainstream media ignored Trump’s provocations, stunts, and obsessions in favor of focusing on more substantive parts of his agenda, it would much matter. Trump has his own communication channels. This is a point Sanders has made defending her decision to rarely hold press briefings (a decision she defended, naturally, on Fox News). “The day that the briefing was initially created, the atmosphere was incredibly different and you didn’t have the same access and ways to communicate with the American public,” she said.

Social media and propagandistic outlets like Fox News let Trump drive the story before any independent editorial judgment comes into play. Mainstream publications that ignore the controversies he creates would make themselves look like the opposition in a totally different way, and would likely lose market share to outlets that swarmed around Trump’s provocations and reaped the social and search traffic that came with it.

Trump often winks at this relationship he has with the media, the way his attacks are good politics for him and good business for us. In December, he told the New York Times:

Another reason that I’m going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes. Without me, the New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times. So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, “Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.

This is the part of the piece where I’m supposed to offer solutions, I think. But I don’t have good ones. I think media outlets need to develop a clearer rubric for newsworthiness as a way of making coverage decisions less reactive to Trump tweets. At Vox, for instance, we weight policy stories more heavily, which gives a different mix to our news, but of course, we cover Trump’s tweets and provocations as well — hell, this whole piece is, in a sense, me covering Trump’s tweets and provocations.

“You can starve lower-level manipulators of oxygen,” says Phillips. “How do you starve the president of oxygen? He creates his own oxygen.”

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. And we have one. Trump has shown you can build a whole presidency around provocation. He has shown that you can always manipulate the media into swarming you with negative coverage and looking like your enemy, and then you can run against the media at the same time you’re discrediting it to your followers. He has shown that you can shut down your competitors, challengers, and opponents by being so outrageous that you simply deny them the oxygen of media coverage.

This strategy is dangerous for the country, but it’s worked for Trump, and it could work for others if nothing changes. “He has established a coherent behavioral template for others to borrow from,” says Phillips. “When something is done and it succeeds, it sends a message to anyone who might want to take a similar behavior down the road that they should press those exact same buttons.”

Original Source -> “Enemy of the People”: how Trump makes the media into the opposition

via The Conservative Brief

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Required Reading

The renderings of the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences designed by Renzo Piano and Gensler are here. See more at Curbed. (photos courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences via Curbed)

Some adjunct professors are turning to sex work and sleeping in their cars to make ends meet. Welcome to the USA in 2017:

Sex work is one of the more unusual ways that adjuncts have avoided living in poverty, and perhaps even homelessness. A quarter of part-time college academics (many of whom are adjuncts, though it’s not uncommon for adjuncts to work 40 hours a week or more) are said to be enrolled in public assistance programs such as Medicaid.

They resort to food banks and Goodwill, and there is even an adjuncts’ cookbook that shows how to turn items like beef scraps, chicken bones and orange peel into meals. And then there are those who are either on the streets or teetering on the edge of losing stable housing. The Guardian has spoken to several such academics, including an adjunct living in a “shack” north of Miami, and another sleeping in her car in Silicon Valley.

The adjunct who turned to sex work makes several thousand dollars per course, and teaches about six per semester. She estimates that she puts in 60 hours a week. But she struggles to make ends meet after paying $1,500 in monthly rent and with student loans that, including interest, amount to a few hundred thousand dollars. Her income from teaching comes to $40,000 a year. That’s significantly more than most adjuncts: a 2014 survey found that the median income for adjuncts is only $22,041 a year, whereas for full-time faculty it is $47,500.

Barâa Arar writes about the portrayal of Algerian women in 19th-century Western art:

In the French Algerian context, the French colonial agenda purposefully and forcibly removed the experience of the collective attachment of the physical space. The unifying aspects of Algerian communities were removed such as expressions of culture, the Arabic language, and visual and musical vocabulary. Those born into a colonial context are born into a milieu void of attachment to Algerian land, culture, and people. The removal of cultural authenticity is in itself a violent colonial act.

A discussion about Cornell University’s architectural plans for Roosevelt Island in New York City:

On a macro scale, Bloomberg’s vision was to have this be a catalyst for change, spawning companies in an applied research kind of way. It has its limits of growth, physically speaking. The catalyst will happen in a silo at first but then it will spread into Manhattan and Queens and spread out like Silicon Valley.

Mashable shows us some beautiful “foldable” homes:

The Stranger points out that Neo-Nazi artist Charles Krafft is back in the news again, and they spotted him in that big undercover report by a Swedish grad student that infiltrated alt-right circles in the US:

The day before the forum I’m invited to an exclusive barbecue in a suburb of Seattle at the house of Charles Krafft, the infamous Nazi ceramicist. His home is a temple to National Socialism. Swastikas cover the walls and Mein Kampf sits on the bookshelf, alongside works by Mussolini, Evola and WW2 paraphernalia.

Most of the people there are men between 17 and 25 and most carry guns. “We’re all about the 14 words” a guy called Kato tells me when I ask about Cascadia, referencing the infamous white supremacist slogan (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”). “Whites are going to be a minority in this country by 2040,” he adds before telling me about the impending “race war.”

Writer, curator, and founder of ARTS.BLACK Taylor Renee Aldridge reflects on “success“:

Between sessions, I found myself in a brief conversation with artist Beverly McIver. I shared with her my hesitation in celebrating my recent achievements because I struggle with imposter syndrome. I also shared that receiving large unrestricted sums of money for my creative talents has left me some anxiety—simply because I’m not used to having money.

In so many words, she assured me that I am worthy and that I deserve even more. She waxed on about the relationship between artists and money, and the anxieties that come along with receiving large sums of money for work you enjoy doing or plan to do. We exchanged ideas on how to learn how to have money when you’re not used to having it. Knowing that her upbringing was also modest, and also a Black woman artist like myself, her seemingly simple advice created a deep sense of relief, and I felt heard in ways that I had not  felt before. I realized the feeling of unworthiness could be a big hindrance in the success of an artist.

The story of Christian monks who saved Jewish history:

Some of the most popular Jewish documents that were highly circulated among Jews in the ancient world were preserved in monasteries that thrive to this day: St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai Desert, and the twenty monasteries on the Greek peninsula of Mount Athos. Both St. Catherine’s and Mount Athos were settled by Orthodox Christians in the early medieval period, and both are geographically isolated: St. Catherine’s is surrounded by desert, and Mount Athos’s rugged mountainous terrain, with its sharp cliffs that give way to the sea, is difficult to access.

…  Two of the oldest surviving copies of the Bible were discovered at St. Catherine’s monastery in the 1800s. One is the Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth century CE codex comprising the books of the Old Testament, the books of the Apocrypha, the New Testament, and some other Christian documents called the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, all written in Greek. This codex was first discovered in 1844 by the German scholar Constantin Tischendorf, but it was only in 1859, upon one of his return visits to St. Catherine’s, that Tischendorf discovered the bulk of the manuscripts. Tischendorf would later claim that he discovered the codex as it was about the be consigned to be burned for fuel, but this claim is dubious.

Enjoy these gorgeous images:

This is a fascinating interview about how Nazism almost found fertile soil in LA:

And so they called together the secret meeting of 40 of the most powerful figures in Hollywood at the Hillcrest Country Club. They walk into a private dining room not knowing why the hell they’d been called. And in front of every seat were copies of the “Silver Legion,” which is the American fascist magazine, with articles about the Jews in Hollywood and how they’re seducing women and perverting America.

Then he proceeds to tell them two things: that in fact Nazis have penetrated your studios, none of you are paying attention to your below-the-line employees, and that [Nazis] have been firing Jews for the last nine months. And in some studios, including yours, [MGM’s] Louis B. Mayer, there are almost no Jews at all working in craftsman positions.

Then he tells them about German consul Georg Gyssling, who had been sent by [Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph] Goebbels to stop Hollywood from making any film attacking or mocking Hitler.

Originally, Gyssling comes over in June 1933 and immediately goes to both Columbia Pictures and to Warner Bros.thers and demands changes. And the reason the moguls agree — Columbia is the first one to agree — is because the studios have more theaters in Germany than anywhere else on the Continent. And they didn’t want to lose that market. They thought Hitler would be out of office in a short time, so they played along.

No comment:

Justice Department Demands Names of Thousands Who Liked Anti-Trump Facebook Page

  The Department of Justice (DOJ) served Facebook the warrants in February, along with a gag order that prevented the company from telling the activists they were being targeted for searches. But the department dropped the order earlier this month.

One of the warrants was issued for the disruptj20 Facebook page, which was used as a forum for planning Inauguration Day protests. If Facebook complies with the DOJ, then the company would likely have to give lawyers the names of the thousands of people who “simply liked, followed, reacted to, commented on, or otherwise engaged with the content on the Facebook page,” according to the ACLU. The news was first reported by Law Newz and confirmed by CNN, which obtained court documents.

Wow:

A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the POTUS motorcade passes him in Indianapolis. (Photo: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst) http://pic.twitter.com/KrBlzhauai

— Colin Campbell (@colincampbell) September 28, 2017

Some people are mourning the passing of Hugh Hefner and this thread is good:

RIP Hugh Hefner, a figure of liberation and enslavement, patron of the arts and mainstreamer of smut. Problematic for 60+ years.

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) September 28, 2017

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[photomaniacs]

Photographers: Beware Violent Antifa Protestors http://ift.tt/2wQ2YAf

This past Sunday, I photographed the “Rally against Hate” protests in Berkeley, California, which was organized to oppose a “Say No To Marxism” rally that had been planned. There was very little representation of the so-called alt-right at the park on Sunday. However, there were 100 to 200 Antifa (or anarchists, or whatever they are called) who showed up dressed in all black to the protest.

Warning: This post contains images of violence and strong language.

The vast majority of the people protesting were anti-hate, peaceful protesters. But this group of black clad masked protesters assaulted several photographers at the event. I personally witnessed photographers having their cameras stolen and smashed and damaged.

A protester smashing a photographer’s camera onto the ground.

Protesters smashing and stomping on a photographer’s camera.

I also personally witnessed photographers being physically assaulted.

Clip is from live chopper feed by @kcranews in #Berkeley. No cops seen, this is #Antifa. https://t.co/vQHUculNTX http://pic.twitter.com/AJvowKzbev

— Nick Short (@PoliticalShort) August 27, 2017

“Take his camera, take his phone,” they are shouting at a journalist. #berkeley http://pic.twitter.com/hvsQ5eXalE

— Lizzie Johnson (@lizziejohnsonnn) August 27, 2017

Anarchy in Berkeley: A hundred black-clad antifascists with ‘no hate’ signs storm rallyhttps://t.co/h1u7a9kzS0

— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) August 29, 2017

At one point, while a photographer was being assaulted the Berkeley Police Department had to rush into the black bloc crowd to fish a guy out who was being beaten on. That is the guy whose face is bloodied and the photo I took where the police are escorting him.

Another photographer who was there had black paint thrown on him while he was photographing.

Frank Sommerville from KTVU also has a post up on Facebook which got a lot of attention about his experience feeling threatened while taking photos of these people.

It seemed pretty evident to me that these people did not want to be photographed at this event. While I can understand people not wanting to be photographed, generally speaking, I think if you show up at a rally in the middle of a free speech park where there is media and hundreds of cameras, there really should be no expectation of privacy.

To react violently towards photographers, destroy people’s property, and assault people physically is wrong. To me, these people seemed like a mob of bullies who delighted in violence and just wanted to crack skulls. I think these people over-reacted to the photographers at the event and think more people need to come out and condemn this sort of violent behavior.

Nevertheless, photographers should be warned: when photographing protests to be aware of the propensity for violence towards photographers by members of this group. It is sad that in a progressive place like Berkeley, no less, that photographers should have to encounter such hatefulness and violence at an anti-hate rally.

In my opinion, these people, the so-called anti-fascists, are every bit as bad as those on the right committing similar acts of violence.

About the author: Thomas Hawk is a photographer and blogger based in San Francisco. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Visit his website here and his Flickr photostream here.

Image credits: Photographs by Thomas Hawk. You can find the complete album here.

Go to Source Author: Thomas Hawk If you’d like us to remove any content please send us a message here CHECK OUT THE TOP SELLING CAMERAS!

The post Photographers: Beware Violent Antifa Protestors appeared first on CameraFreaks.

August 29, 2017 at 08:02PM

[trendingnewsb]

Is there a neo-Nazi storm brewing in Trump country?

Can national socialism, repackaged as white identity politics, earn votes in rural counties that voted for Trump?

When the men in black walked into her restaurant one Friday morning and sat at the round table in the corner, Brittany Porter knew exactly what they were.

Pale, skittish, aggressively tattooed, they wore black T-shirts with a cryptic white logo over their hearts. One had a razor inked along his left jaw and two SS lightning bolts dripping next to his eye like a double set of tears. One wore a handgun on his hip.

Porter went to the table, smiled and asked what they wanted. It was just after 8am. Two of the neo-Nazis ordered chicken nuggets.

On Facebook the night before, Porter read about the group of racists who were coming to eastern Kentucky to hold a rally. They had chosen an economically struggling stretch of coal country with a population that was 98% white and that had voted 80% for Trump. In their propaganda videos, the neo-Nazi leaders had talked about the scourge of drug addiction in Pike County.

At 30, Porter knew Pike Countys problems. She herself was a recovered addict, as was her friend Chrissy Wooton, another waitress at the restaurant. Neither of them trusted either political party. Wooton, whose husband is a coal miner, had voted for Trump. Porter had not.

Together, they discussed whether they should start the day by accidentally pouring coffee into the neo-Nazis laps.

The neo-Nazis were on their way to Whitesburg, Kentucky, where they had secured a private piece of land in the woods to hold a weekend summit with a coalition of other white nationalist groups. At the table, there were several members of the Traditionalist Workers party, including Jason, a sallow musician in a black-metal punk band who left New York City to move to a mostly white community in Indiana; Scott, who had recently been kicked out of an Irish pub in Kentucky for celebrating Hitlers birthday; and Gabe, diffident and a little shy, with long eyelashes and the white power tattoos on his cheek.

Porter and Wooton watched from distance, swooping in now and then to refill the coffee cups. But they were too curious to stay quiet. Porter said people on Facebook were talking a bunch of crap. They were saying that the group was the Ku Klux Klan.

Wooton asked again more bluntly: Are you guys KKK?

The event the men were attending did, in fact, have KKK members on the list of potential guests. But the men at the table laughed and grinned. They were a political party, Matthew Heimbach, the groups 26-year-old leader, explained gently. Our motto is faith, family and folk, he said. Heimbach was the most famous man at the table: the one who was being sued for shoving and shouting at a young black protester at a Donald Trump campaign rally last March, and who had recently filed legal papers saying that Trump, who had reacted to the protesters by shouting Get em out of here!, should be held responsible for his behavior.

Heimbach was wearing the same black T-shirt, with his partys logo, as the other men, but he had a big cross around his neck and the cheerful bearing of a youth pastor: burly, bearded, bouncy with enthusiasm. One Kentucky local who watched a propaganda video Heimbach made had been perplexed that he looked like a teddy bear.

Their political party had been misrepresented, Heimbach explained to the waitresses. Theyre not the KKK. Theyre focused on family and faith and local control, on fighting the international corporations who came into Appalachia and took all the profits from Kentuckys coal. Heimbach did not try to sell the waitresses on his plan for a white ethno-state, his conviction that the Holocaust did not happen, his belief in thousands of years of Jewish conspiracy. He just talked about family struggles and immigrants taking jobs and hurting workers and how white Americans needed more representation.

Wooton, who had voted for Trump, was responding enthusiastically. She was furious at the lack of government response to the opioid addiction crisis and skeptical of establishment politicians. Her husband, a coal miner, had lost his job under Obama and been hired again three days after Trumps inauguration. Wooton came back to the table repeatedly to press Heimbach for more answers, explaining her manager was still calling him a racist. She asked if Heimbach was willing to work with people of other races. He said of course he was. He talked about the importance of black communities making decisions for themselves, about how black policemen might be better at policing black neighborhoods. Wooton agreed and agreed again.

Talking to Wooton, Heimbach acted like a local politician: polite, a little longwinded, but genuinely passionate. He was not Richard Spencer, the clean-cut, rich-boy racist who got punched in the face at Trumps inauguration. He was not a ranting internet troll. He was a small-town kid who put himself through college selling custom wardrobe tidying systems, and now he was using those skills trying to sell fascism to the American people.

Heimbachs Pike County trip was part of his broader preparation for 2018, when the party was planning to field six candidates in local elections for school board, county council and other positions in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Dakota and Texas. All the candidates will be under 30, all open white nationalists, though they plan to focus their campaigns on more local issues.

Wooton kept coming back with more questions, but it was clear that she liked much of what she she was hearing. When she left the table, Heimbach grinned triumphantly at his group; it seemed he was attracting some local support.

Stepping from the shadows

White supremacists and neo-Nazis complain endlessly about media lies, and yet no one is more eager to pick up the phone than Heimbach and other extremist leaders. Getting attention even negative attention helps them recruit and inch toward the mainstream.

Analysts from the Data & Society Research Institute concluded the far right has risen to new prominence this past year in part by attention hacking, manipulating the conventions of mainstream news. Members of the alt-right, a mixed group of racists, nationalists, antisemites and misogynists, understand that many news stories are built on a framework of conflict and outrage, fueled by the power of a shocking image or the lure of a supposedly telling contrast. The medias dependence on social media, analytics and metrics, sensationalism, novelty over newsworthiness, and clickbait makes them vulnerable, its report said.

People who have had personal run-ins with Heimbach who have experienced him in action say the media should not simply ignore his activities. Instead of glamorizing them or portraying them as cartoonish monsters, scrutiny should attempt to reveal their impact.

However, one anti-fascist observed, it doesnt matter if the news coverage attempts to be negative neo-Nazis will still try to recruit people in the comments section underneath.

Measured in numbers, white nationalists and neo-Nazis remain the fringe of the fringe. Last years BronyCon, the annual conference of grown men who take an ironic fascination in the cartoon My Little Pony, attracted 7,600 people. Anthrocon, a convention of furries who like to do fun things while wearing fuzzy, full-body animal costumes, attracted more than 7,000. The Kentucky neo-Nazi summit in April attracted about 150 people, about 75 of them members of the Traditionalist Worker party. Heimbach claims that his party has 600 dues-paying members nationwide. They do not call themselves Nazis. Heimbach said the term Nazi is a slur, and that he draws inspiration from many fascist and national socialist regimes, not just Germanys.

Heimbach said being labeled a Nazi would undermine his attempt to educate the American people about what national socialism truly is, claiming it invokes every lie and every over-the-top media creation of the last 72 years [since 1945].

Ryan Lenz, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks American hate groups, sees no justification for his argument. It is fair to label Heimbach a Nazi because he is an avowed national socialist, Holocaust denier and antisemite.

In this context, Nazi is not a slur. Its not an attack. Its an accurate description, he said.

Neo-Nazi activism in America has been undermined for decades by what both extremist leaders and hate group monitors describe as incredibly childish infighting. Neo-Nazis have squabbled over their religious differences (some are Christian; others are pagans, some worshipping the Norse god Odin; one or two, a Neo-Nazi leader claimed, are even Buddhist), over their uniform and symbol choices, over which neo-Nazi stole which other neo-Nazis girlfriend.

Most of these people are malignant contrarians who have a lot of loyalty and trust issues, said Lenz.

But Trumps rise to power has encouraged the extremists to try to bridge their divides. Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan leaders were jubilant over an openly xenophobic, politically incorrect presidential candidate who promised to stop illegal immigration and enact a Muslim ban and they have pursued news coverage, attracting headlines and staging dramatic photos. In May, a number of different groups met in front of a threatened Confederate monument and set garden torches on fire. In the photos, shared around the world, a mass of shadowy figures and flames made for a startling image.

Campus provocateur

Matthew Heimbach. His Pike County trip was part of broader preparation for 2018, when his party was planning to field six candidates in local elections in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Dakota and Texas. Photograph: Pat Jarrett for the Guardian

Heimbach has been perfecting the provocative art since he first made national headlines in 2012 by founding a White Student Union at his university, the perfectly logical complement to the campus Black Student Union, he said. Towson University, where he graduated in 2013, was majority white. It was one of the safest public universities in Maryland, but Heimbach would lead journalists around campus at night as he and his friends patrolled with flashlights in search of black crime.

When students and faculty protested this behavior, Heimbach claimed the rallies against him were proof of anti-white bias. The outrage brought in television cameras and left his classmates of color deeply anxious.

People were afraid of Matthew, said Ignacio Evans, a former classmate and the vice-president of the Black Student Union at the time.

At a campus town hall meeting, Evans recalled, Heimbach had said: I am going to bleed this university white.

It sent shockwaves through the campus, Evans said. As a result of Heimbachs activism, he thought attendance at campus events dropped. People didnt want to leave their rooms.

Everyone knew Heimbach had a gun. It wouldnt be uncommon to see him in a video shooting things, he said.

Evans countered Heimbachs views publicly and, as a result, he was featured on white supremacist websites, one of which dubbed him a black supremacist.

Evans said he had received a death threat at his college graduation, and walked across the stage fearing that he would be shot in front of his mother and his girlfriend.

Jonathan Munshaw, who covered Heimbachs early tactics for the Towson student newspaper, said he only ever verified one Towson student who was part of the White Student Union: Heimbach himself. But students on campus truly believed that the group was much bigger, Munshaw said and they were terrified.

To the national media, the campus conflict was irresistible. Matt was so accessible, Munshaw said. The national media outlets could come in and it was fairly easy for them to get a story because he was always very willing and ready.

It was the perfect recipe for a television segment: the white supremacist, the black students arguing against him. It was an easy story, Munshaw said.

Trump: the gateway drug to white nationalism

The Aryan Terror Brigade. The National Socialist Movement. The neo-Confederate League of the South. After he graduated from college, Heimbach met and formed alliances with so many different extremists groups that Lenz, the SPLC analyst, said he once thought Heimbach might be an informant of the federal government.

Heimbach serves as a lynchpin between the scattered groups of the radical right the one who can build connections with the working-class skinhead movement and the upper-class academic racists, said Lenz, who has been interviewing Heimbach periodically since he graduated from college.

His argument, Lenz said, is: were all compatriots in nationalism, and therefore we should stand together, whether we believe in the Holocaust or not.

Heimbach had only been a white nationalist in college. But supporters of his White Student Union responded by sending him books in the mail that helped shift his views about the Holocaust. At the end of the day, he said, you end up at national socialism.

Lenz said he does not know how Heimbach, who says he is forced to work low-paying jobs, can afford to travel constantly across the country and fly to Europe every year to meet with far-right groups. He said Heimbach had denied having a wealthy patron who funded the trips. Heimbach said he paid for the trips himself, with some contribution from his party, and that he kept costs low by staying with other far-right activists.

Ive been waiting for my rubles to show up. It hasnt happened yet, he said, chuckling, referencing more than a few media outlets that have claimed Im secretly working for the FSB.

By the month before Trumps election, Heimbach had shifted gears and developed a new message discipline capable of spinning answers to questions like someone who had spent years in a spin room, Lenz said.

Trump was Heimbachs dream come true. In early 2016, Heimbach had described the presidential candidate as the gateway drug to outright white nationalism.

Hes not one of us and everyone needs to know that, Heimbach told the site Vocativ last year, describing the president. But hes opening political space. Hes definitely opening up political space for people like ourselves.

On 1 March 2016, Heimbach and some of his party members attended a Trump campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky. Heimbach was wearing a red Make America Great Again hat. Almost immediately, he and his group caught the attention of a Trump protester in the crowd.

For a second, I thought they were counter-protesters [against Trump]. They looked like punk rock kids, the protester said. Then she realized: No, those are skinheads.

The protester asked not to be named to avoid attacks from far-right trolls. She described watching Heimbach move through the crowd before the speech, handing out literature, trying to recruit Trump supporters for his Traditionalist Worker movement. He was circumspect, as usual, talking about workers losing jobs.

I dont think I ever even heard him say the word white, she said. Instead, it was: People are coming in, close the border, and theyre taking our jobs and our communities it was very dog whistle-y.

Nobody gave him any flak about it, the protester said. He wasnt getting any pushback.

In retrospect, she thought, Heimbach helped in revving up the crowd, priming it for what came later.

When the protesters group finally raised their banners toward the end of Trumps speech, Heimbachs group immediately rushed them, not just to tear down their anti-Trump banner but also to punch them, several protesters alleged in a lawsuit. The onslaught was so intense and violent that the protester, who was in the back, said she was overwhelmed.

The protester said Heimbach and his group had insinuated their way into the middle of the crowd, and when a moment of tension arrived they suddenly turned violent, and other men around them mirrored their behavior, shouting, pushing, furious.

Trump, from the stage, had called: Get em out!

A video from the rally shows Heimbach, in his hat, repeatedly laying hands on a young black protester, Kashiya Nwanguma, and shouting in her face. Next, an older man in a Korean war veterans uniform shoves her, follows her for a few steps and shoves her again.

Three protesters are now suing Heimbach and a Korean war veteran over this violence and suing Trump for inciting the violence.

A federal judge recently ruled that the case could move forward, writing: It is plausible that Trumps direction to Get em out of here advocated the use of force.

In a letter to the head of a Korean war veterans chapter, the veteran, Alvin Bamberger, apologized and said he was ashamed of his behavior, according to a copy of the letter obtained by a local news outlet. He blamed his behavior on being caught between black protesters and white supremacists, though he acknowledged that was no excuse.

In a blogpost afterward, cited in court filings, Heimbach wrote: Theres some viral footage of several heated moments in Louisville. One features yours truly helping the crowd drive out one of the women who had been pushing, shoving, barking, and screaming at the attendees for the better part of an hour. ( In court filings, Nwanguma denied she had done this.)

It wont be me next time, but White Americans are getting fed up and theyre learning that they must either push back or be pushed down, Heimbach wrote.

In court filings, he had denied that he behave improperly, but also argued that Trump should be held responsible for his behavior.

Heimbach was charged with harassment, a misdemeanor, and was recently served a summons to appear in court.

#EnglandYoureDrunk

For decades, American neo-Nazis have been trying to break into the mainstream by running for local political office, as Heimbach is now hoping his supporters can do. George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi party, told a journalist in 1966 that he expected he would be elected president by 1972 on a national socialist ticket, pushed to victory by a dramatic economic collapse. Instead, he was murdered by one of his own supporters outside a laundromat in 1967.

Far-right parties in Europe have had more political success. Amid the Greek debt crisis in 2015, Golden Dawn, a violent neo-Nazi party known for beating attacks on immigrants and people suspected of being gay or on the left, captured the third largest number of seats in the Greek parliament.

American neo-Nazis look at Golden Dawns rise and take hope. Heimbach has met with far-right nationalists across Europe, he said, including three visits with Golden Dawn over the past three years.

There will come a point where the people begin to awaken. [Golden Dawn] had to go through many years as a dedicated small group of men and women to carry the flame, Heimbach said.

He has also met with nationalist activists in the Czech Republic and spoke last year at the annual conference of Germanys National Democratic party. He calls himself a friend of the British neo-Nazi group National Action, which was banned in December after the home secretary dubbed it a terrorist organization.

Heimbach has also been banned from entering the UK on the grounds that your presence here would not be conducive to the public good. In response, he tweeted it was outrageous that he was denied while radical Muslims were let in. #EnglandYoureDrunk, he wrote.

Heimbach can put on a show of moderation. He doesnt think everyone should have to live in a white ethno-state. Thats just his preference. He doesnt hate other races. He just thinks that black Americans have, on average, a lower future time orientation.

In interviews and speeches to other neo-Nazis, Heimbach is less circumspect, quoting Goebbels and speaking fondly of Mussolini.

He is a Holocaust denier, believing that the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews by the Nazi regime did not happen, that its all a Bolshevik conspiracy. He has expressed sympathy for the racist killer Dylann Roof and praised white supremacist Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

Real Christianity, he said, is patriarchal, homophobic, racist and antisemitic. He laughed. I see that as a good thing.

Heimbach lives in Paoli, Indiana, with his wife and son; his fellow party leader, Matt Parrott; and Jason, the young white nationalist who moved from New York City to join him and who now edits his video projects and produces white nationalist music. Three other white families who support their views have moved to Paoli to join them, Heimbach said two from northern Indiana, one from Virginia. They try to get together weekly for board game nights and home-brewed mead. They play Risk of course, the battle of world domination and Cards Against Humanity.

We played Monopoly, but then we decided that was too capitalist, Heimbach said.

Almost none of the consequences he has faced for his activism seem to faze him. Heimbach says he was excommunicated by his Eastern Orthodox church for his racist beliefs. His family cut him off after he became famous for founding the White Student Union. By his count he has been fired from seven jobs, including a position as a trainee case worker at the Indiana department of child services. He claimed this was a punishment for his political convictions.

A spokeswoman for the department wrote in an e-mail Heimbach was dismissed for his behavior at work after less than three weeks as a trainee. His behavior in training was disruptive of the workplace, incompatible with public service, and not protected speech, she wrote. For example, what Ive been told is that, while in training, his response to a question suggested violence against a client.

Since college, Heimbach has been able to draw other racists around him, forming a likeminded group that acknowledges him as a leader. Throughout hours of interviews he has a politicians confidence, but when he talked about his family, he sounded sad.

My parents didnt exactly know what I was thinking or up to. I think in modern America, [there are] a tremendous amount of parents who would be horrified and scandalized with what their young sons and daughters are reading on white nationalist forums or reading on the Daily Stormer, he said.

After the coverage of his White Student Union, his family who did not respond to requests for an interview for this article confronted him in a phone conversation.

My folks said that they didnt raise me like this, that they didnt approve of this and that I had to make a choice, if I was going to do this or choose my family. And I said to them, this is choosing my family, because I want my siblings and their grandchildren to have a future. They didnt understand.

The rise of Nazi thought in America could change that, he said. Hopefully, as politics changes, as our ideas continue to grow, hopefully well be the new mainstream before too long.

Im not bitter and resentful, he said later. It hurts like, its not easy but its the safest thing for them to do.

On maneuvers

The night before their rally in downtown Pikeville, the neo-Nazis gathered on a scruffy patch of private land to eat picnic food and listen to each other give speeches about the future of the white race.

That evening, a convoy of about 20 cars had wound from the parking lot of a Walmart through narrow Kentucky back roads, past small houses flying the Confederate flag. White residents stood at their front doors or on their porches, watching silently as the cars passed.

Members of the KKK, the Traditionalist Worker party and the National Socialist Movement gathered for a weekend of speeches, demonstration and fellowship at a private campground in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Photograph: Pat Jarrett for the Guardian

The road turned from pavement to dusty gravel to dirt. In the field at the top of a hill, there was a white rental tent, rows of cars, a portable toilet. Young men in paramilitary-style black outfits strode around the tent, armed with rifles and walkie-talkies.

The dress code for the white supremacist unity summit in April was strict: men were supposed to wear a black work shirt, black pants, and black boots; with an organizational patch on the left arm. Women are requested to dress modestly and in black as well.

Heimbach had allowed a small group of journalists to attend the Whitesburg neo-Nazi summit, including the Guardian and a French television crew, to attend part of the weekends private speeches. He claimed that he had turned down other larger American outlets, disliking their coverage.

In the tent, decorated with a White Lives Matter banner, the neo-Nazis slammed Trump for claiming he was both a nationalist and a globalist, and for keeping so many Jewish people as advisers. But they said they still hoped that the movement he had started would give them a political opportunity.

Reform is impossible, Heimbach declared in his speech. Heimbach assailed the removal of Confederate monuments, comparing politicians who permitted monuments to white supremacy being taken down to Isis destroying temples in Syria.

How long is it before the statues to Union soldiers are torn down, because, well, they werent multicultural enough they werent as accepting of transgender rights for children … they werent progressive enough?

How long before not just the south but every symbol of our people is wiped clean from this Earth like we never existed?

Heimbachs speech was well received. But as the night went on, the divide between the traditional neo-Nazi groups and the new, internet-savvy alt-right began to show. The speeches grew so dull, despite the periodic Nazi salutes and chants of white power, that most of the younger extremists melted away into the dark, leaving a smaller and smaller audience to listen to old Nazis drone on.

On Saturday morning, they conducted a series of military marching exercises at their retreat. The man leading the exercises advised the group that perception is reality. Coming across as disciplined and tough and organized were crucial to their mission. But the drilling went poorly. One young man, obeying the order to turn, stepped boldly the wrong way.

That afternoon, the neo-Nazis managed to be an hour late to their own protest in downtown Pikeville. More than 100 anti-fascists in bandanas had arrived by 2pm, when the rally was supposed to start. There was no sign of Heimbach and his crew.

When the larger group of more than 100 people marched in, they were in good spirits, waving flags and carrying hand-painted wooden shields with fascist symbols and, in one case, a real axe, bundled with sticks, a home-made symbol of fascism. Heimbach bounced through the scrum in his sensible shoes, helping to organize his followers into neat lines. Despite the howls of the plastic trumpets and the chants of the anti-fascists and the long lines of state police on the other side of the barricades, he moved with no sense of drama, as if he were a high school coach organizing his kids at an away game.

Gabe, the one with the razor tattooed on his jaw, was in the front row, holding a shield and clearly excited. Fuck you! he bellowed at the protesters.

Scott, wearing a rifle and aviators, was standing nearby. Gabe! he hissed in a warning tone. Gabe subsided.

Take a bath! Take a bath! the fascists chanted at the anti-fascists.

The attendees were trained on marching in formation by the handful of military veterans in the group. Photograph: Pat Jarrett for the Guardian

Heimbachs public speech was heavy on the socialism and light on conspiracy theories, denouncing corporate interests and environmental degradation, endorsing worker unions and nationalization of key industries.

The Republicans and the Democrats support Wall Street, they support more wars, they support your blood being spilled for their sake, he said, over the sounds of shouts and jeers and horns.

We are here to tell you: you dont have to choose the lesser of two evils. You can choose people that are actually on your side. Because we are you. We are the people you go to church with, you see in the grocery story, you work with.

At one point, the men gave the Nazi salute and chanted for at least a minute: Heil Heimbach! Heil Heimbach! Heil Heimbach!

Heimbach, who was standing near the front of the crowd, faced them and grinned. Im going to remember that the rest of my life, he said, with just the right amount of irony.

The men laughed, a low rumble of approval lost beneath the screams of the crowd.

He thinks were stupid

Pikeville was true Trump country, a rural area with permissive gun laws and strong conservative values.

In the political analysis of Trump voters, neo-Nazi advocates like Heimbach and some on the left tend to agree: Trump voters are a white identity movement, motivated to vote for him at least in part by outright racism, a claim Trump supporters vehemently reject.

The locals in Pikeville greeted the influx with outrage and shock. Outside a Pikeville tattoo parlor the day before the neo-Nazis were coming to town, a group of local men expressed disgust at the agenda and concern that the event would discourage students of different races from coming to the local university.

After their shift was over that Friday before the rally, Porter and Wooton were not finished talking about Heimbachs breakfast visit to their diner. They went to a nearby Taco Bell to discuss him more. Wooton had loved what he was saying, loved his passion. But hearing that Heimbach supported a white ethno-state immediately ended her interest. Wooton has brothers who are mixed-race.

If theyre saying they want an all-white community, where would my brother go? she said. She was appalled by the idea of segregation: she did want more representation for white Americans, just like the representation she sees people who are black or Mexican receive. At the same time, she ultimately wanted political leaders for different racial groups to work together for the common good.

Thats taking us a hundred years back, Porter said. She had told the group that she was gay, and they had said nothing in response. The Traditionalist Worker party, with its endorsement of traditional marriage, its rhetoric about deviants, was not going to earn the vote of this white Kentucky woman. Porters girlfriend worked for a local prosecutor. She knew that the people charged with crimes in their area were overwhelmingly white.

Wooton was incredulous that Heimbach could be a Holocaust denier. Hes so smart. He has to know better than that. Theres television footage of piles of bodies, she said.

They have a lot of really good ideas. Its really sad that they just bring this racism, she said.

She looked depressed. She had been hopeful that Heimbach was a politician who could actually bring help to their area. He seems really really smart. He seems like he knows what hes talking about on a lot of things. And this stupid racism thats going to hold him back from so many things he could do so many positive things.

She was distressed. She could not understand it. Maybe hes a little mental, she said. It was the only immediate explanation, that he had a little mental problem that he cant get past this racist thing.

Both women were increasingly angry that Heimbach had chosen to come to Kentucky to spread his message.

Hes targeting us, Wooton said, because he thinks that were stupid.

And hes wrong about that, Porter said.

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