#Trumpism=KKK

[tzifron]

In Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2023), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered experts to survey the history of fascism in the United States. Although the US established a staunch anti-fascist reputation by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, the unsettling truth is that fascist ideas have long been present within American society. Since the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, scholars have debated whether Trumpism should be seen as an outgrowth of American conservatism or of a darker – and potentially fascist – tradition. Fascism in America contributes to this debate by examining the activities of interwar right-wing groups like the Silver Shirts, the KKK, and the America First movement, as well as the post-war rise of Black antifascism and white vigilantism, the representation of American Nazis in popular culture, and policy options for combating right-wing extremism.

[lecataste]

George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty-Four | 1949

[moonwalkertrance]

YouTube Trumpkin and Former Milo Intern Kills His Own Dad for Calling Him a Nazi

Lane Davis was a prolific poster on the Donald Trump subreddit, a former intern for Milo, and an editor for a prominent GamerGater’s conspiracy site. Then, one day, he snapped.

Something had set Lane Davis off, but that wasn’t unusual.

It was a clear summer afternoon on July 14, on Samish Island—a small, idyllic community off the northwest coast of Washington state—where Lane, a balding, bearded, Donald Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist and prolific YouTuber and Redditor, known online as Seattle4Truth, lived with his parents.

Lane had spent that Friday morning as he did most mornings, on the internet. This day, like the others, Lane read and retweeted posts celebrating the Second Amendment, bemoaning diversity, and spreading conspiracy theories that alleged Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta was involved in a child sex ring and DNC staffer Seth Rich had been murdered for leaking sensitive emails to WikiLeaks. It was the end of a busy week during which he contributed to the Donald Trump subreddit, and over on The Ralph Retort, a fringe blog where he worked as a political editor, (unpaid, according to the site’s owner), he had celebrated the idea of a Kid Rock Senate run, claimed America was under threat of Sharia law, and wondered whether CNN was “literally ISIS.”

Lane’s parents, Catherine and Charles Davis—Charles was known as Chuck to his friends—were used to their 33-year-old son’s outbursts. They had become so frequent that Charles had started recording the tirades on his phone. But that afternoon, they were tired of Lane’s screaming, wanted him to leave, and told him as much. Instead, Lane chased his parents around their home, spitting in his father’s face while screaming that he wasn’t threatening to kill them, but “pedophiles who were taking over the country.”

Catherine Davis called 911. The tape of her call was acquired by The Daily Beast.

“He’s not physically threatening us or anything,” Catherine told the dispatcher. “He just gets out of control and he’s ranting about stuff from the internet.”

Was Lane drunk, the dispatcher asked? On drugs? Was there any history of a mental disorder?

“No, not reported, but he’s not working and he gets on these rampages and he just needs to move on,” Catherine replied.  

The dispatcher suggested Catherine and Charles stay away from Lane until the police arrived.

“He just gets out of control and he’s ranting about stuff from the internet.”

“We’re trying to but he’s chasing us around the house,” she replied. “He’s mad about something on the internet about leftist pedophiles and he thinks we’re leftist and he’s calling us pedophiles. And I don’t know what all.”

Catherine laughed. “He just lives on the internet and he gets really worked up about everything that’s going on. He needs an intervention of some kind here.”

Police were on their way, the dispatcher told Catherine, and she hung up. But Charles’s phone kept recording.

On the 12-minute audio file later recovered by Skagit County Detective Kevin Sigman, a manic Lane, enraged by his mother’s 911 call, says, “OK well, so here’s the deal. If I am going to go to prison for threatening to kill somebody, I mean...”

“Leave the knife alone,” Charles says while his mother tries to reassure him: No one wants to send him to prison, they just want some help.

Lane doesn’t seem to hear or believe his mother. “So, you are going to send me to prison?” he asks. “My life is over.”

Minutes later, Catherine called 911 again. The audio recording is hard to hear. In it, Catherine is running and the portable phone she’s using breaks up. Catherine screams “He stabbed him!” before the connection is lost.

As the 73-year-old maritime lawyer and grandfather of two lay bleeding on the back deck, stabbed by his son in the chest and the back with a chef’s knife, Lane walked outside, dropped his weapon and stood with his hands in the air, waiting for police to arrive.

Catherine called 911 once more. “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.”

In a seeming confession, Lane Davis told detectives that the fight had started over “whether toddlers could consent to sex or not,” and his father had called him a Nazi and a racist. Held on $1 million bail and represented by a public defender, Lane has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. His trial is slated for January.

Besides the alleged murder of his father, we know little about Lane in the real world. He graduated from high school in 2002 and by August 2003 had enrolled at Washington State University, according to a university spokesman. Lane hadn’t chosen a major when he dropped out in 2004. Over the next few years, Lane racked up a few misdemeanors—traffic violations and a DUI—but generally stayed out of trouble, preferring to rabble rouse online.

“Catherine called 911 once more. “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.””

In 2010, Lane published a very long paper, “Quantum Cold-Case Mysteries Revisited,” in The General Science Journal, a non-peer-reviewed electronic journal that allows literally anyone to contribute and includes a warningagainst assuming claims made therein are true or fit “for any purpose or use.” A Google Scholar search shows that no one has ever cited Lane’s paper, which in place of usual citations includes a note: “In honor of the late, great, Albert Einstein and his celebrated paper which announced the famous equation E = mc2 to the world, this dissertation does not include any references.”

On his YouTube channel—which still after seven years has just around 11,000 subscribers—Lane peddled the conspiracy theorist's greatest hits (vaccines and Sept. 11 inside jobs among them), posted original pro-Trump rapsalongside cooking tutorials, and most notably, released a three-hour long documentary on GamerGate. Curiously, Lane suggested the campaign of online harassment (doxing, and rape and death threats were favored practices) targeting female video-game developers in 2014 was linked to the education standards known as Common Core.

Lane’s position in the GamerGate controversy is puzzling. Though initially a supporter of the movement, internal fighting over credit for his research led Lane to disavow his former colleagues. By the summer of 2015, he had defected to an anti-GamerGate group. The change in loyalty didn’t seem to affect his tactics, however. In addition to his behind-the-scenes “digging” for the cause, Lane would call the employers of women game developers and their allies, in an attempt to get them fired.

London musician Joshua Idehen was one of his targets. Idehen said Lane sent an email to his manager, his agent, and to a charity he worked with, and alleged he was involved with pedophilia.

“Lane found the opportunity for bylines not on Brietbart but on a website even further to the right.”

“Basically, for a week made it his mission to email everyone I had ever been in contact with,” Idehen told The Daily Beast. “It didn’t cause me that much trouble, except having to explain over and over again what GamerGate was.”

Around this time, Lane had hooked up with Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right provocateur who shared a similar interest in GamerGate, or the clicks that came with their army. Lane signed on as researcher and ghostwriter, one of 44 in Yiannopoulos’s mostly unpaid employ. (Lane later leaked the details of Yiannopoulos’s intern horde to BuzzFeed.)

A 2016 article titled “MacArthur’s Thought Police,” arguing the MacArthur charity promotes censorship on social media, was originally credited to both Lane and Yiannopoulos, but is currently posted on Capital Research Center’s website under Yiannopoulos’s sole byline.

Through a spokesperson, Yiannopoulos’s responded to an interview request from The Daily Beast with a statement:

“Mr. Davis was a volunteer for me for a brief period of time prior to my founding MILO Inc. I was unhappy with his work and discontinued the relationship. I then experienced his anger firsthand as he threatened me and later went to BuzzFeed making false and inaccurate accusations."

Yiannopoulos did not return a request for elaboration.

Lane found the opportunity for bylines not on Breitbart, but on a website even further to the right, TheRalphRetort.com. Headed by prominent GamerGate leader, Ethan Ralph—currently serving an eight-month sentence in a Loudon County, Virginia, jail for assaulting a police officer—the site published Lane’s content almost daily. Since the news of Lane’s crime, the site has, in colorful language, distanced itself from Lane, and rejected the notion that the alt-right could have either indoctrinated Lane or given safe haven for his violent ideas.

In a statement made from jail and tweeted by his wife, Nora, who also runs the site, Ralph said, “The rush to score points against me, while completely expected, is also completely ridiculous. I’m only responsible for my own actions...I also lack the ability to predict future murders. This isn’t Minority Report.”

Last week, Lane’s posts were scrubbed from the blog with a note from Nora that read in part, “As for Seattle4Truth, we’ll be working to erase him from this website in the coming days. I don’t care how big his contribution was. A guy that would murder his own father in cold blood doesn’t deserve to be read. No matter how accurate he was in the past, he ended his usefulness to this world when he ended his dad’s life.”

Deleting Lane’s contributions from the alt-right groups to which he once belonged doesn’t quite answer the concern that these sites may have enabled or inspired him to commit violence, a feeling that has grown on the heels of several high-profile crimes by followers of the same alt-right conspiracy theories in which Lane dabbled. A man who fired a rifle inside a pizzeria, in an attempt to free what he believed to be child sex slaves hidden in the restaurant’s back room, was sentenced to four years in prison in June. That same month, Sandy Hook truther Lucy Richards was sentenced to five months in prison for threatening a 6-year-old victim’s parent via voicemail: “Death is coming to you real soon.” As part of her sentence, Richards is barred from accessing conspiracy-theory websites.

While Lane waits for his day in court, others in his orbit are cautioning against the dangers associated with conspiracy theories.

In a podcast about the murder, Jack “FoxDie” Pierce warned his listeners: “Some people out there that are looking into this deep-level conspiracy level thing, PizzaGate or whatever. You may be on to something What I can tell you from experience is don’t let it consume you.”

He continued:

“But when you spend so much time trying to dig into information and trying to understand things around you, you do get enveloped by it, it does bother you and you do change... You do get too deep and some people go crazy from it, temporarily or forever, but that’s just a risk of going into these dangerous sort of fields.”

[hasufin]

On attacking a minor

Let’s talk about what happened here in VA last weekend.

As some of you may know, but many may not, republicans in Virginia eked out a very narrow victory, sweeping the executive against the Democratic favorite Terry McAuliffe.

Of course, with a narrow victory, Democrats tend be conciliatory; republicans tend to take it as a MANDATE FROM GOD. In this case, though, the republican winner, Youngkin, has been trying to put a veneer of respectability over his previous Trumpism. This seems to be a facade he can maintain, in public at least, for about three months.

And so, this weekend.

Now, a 17-year-old intern tweeted this:

What he’s referring to is detailed in this article.

Now, since then Youngkin office has claimed they totally weren’t turning the classroom into a family room, no, they’re just thinking about the layout of the mansion.

Which, if you’ve any experience with this sort of thing... they got caught. They assumed they’d be able to sweep all that pesky “education” and “history” stuff aside, and not have any backlash.

After all, teaching about Virginia’s history with slavery is entirely against what Youngkin wants.

But, anyway. This is where Youngkin decided to dig deeper.

So, let’s think about this train of “logic” for a moment.

A 17-year-old tweets a factually accurate piece of information about Youngkin.

And Youngkin decides to dig up a picture of that 17-year-old posing for a picture with Governor Northam.

(Northam did appear in that picture, which was a costume and he caught a lot of flack for it, even though it happened decades ago (i.e., well before Ethan was even alive)

And based on that, Youngkin tried to imply that Ethan, a high school student, is a KKK member. Because he posed for a picture with the governor of VA, who many decades ago wore a costume which was in very bad taste. Which, reasonably, Ethan didn’t even know about at the time he took a picture with Northam. Youngkin also doxxed the kid, putting out his personal information including the high school he attends. In other words, Glenn Youungkin abused the powers of his office to attack a minor.

The hypocrisy is astounding. Of course, there are plenty of pictures of Youngkin with Northam, so there’s that.

But there’s also this wonderful bit:

No, that’s about a different 17-year-old: Glenn Yougkin’s 17-year-old son, who twice tried to vote illegally, a crime which yields significant jail time when black people do it by accident. But a white republican’s son who does it on purpose? Oh, that’s just a smear.

According to Youngkin, his 17-year-old son is above reproach even when doing what Youngkin himself has characterized as an important crime. But a liberal 17-year-old? Should be attacked, should be put at risk of his life.

This is what republicans want to do to their political opposition. They desire a land where laws have no meaning  and the powers of the state are merely tools to crush those who would stand against them.

They have shown us who they are. Believe them.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Trumpism is terrorism

It's 1950s KKK terrorism on a large scale. Thats what MAGA is now. They aim to destabilize American elections through terrorism. They are bullies, and bullies are cowards. Just stand up to them. There are 10 times as many thoughtful, decent Americans or there as there are MAGA terrorists.

[thefortressofsqualitude]

I HAVE HAD IT!

If I see one more person trying to blame the Insurrection on the 6th on mental illness I will lose it.  

You do not have to be mentally ill to believe stupid things or follow a bad leader.  You just have to be willing to believe false narratives without evidence, or accept false evidence.  You have to be willing to have someone tell you what you want to hear, what appeals to your taught prejudices or personal biases.  You have to be willing to ignore the facts and believe what you are told by an authority figure that appeals to you.

That's not mental illness, that's being manipulated and ANYONE Can be manipulated.  Not ever German who joined the Nazi party or believed their bullshit was mentally ill.  The KKK is not composed of mentally ill people.  Terrorists are not mentally ill.  Fanaticism is not mental illness.  It's a driving belief in an ideology that can drive you to act in irrational, violent ways

.As someone who spent part of his life in a Mental Hospital, this idea that the mentally ill travel in gangs looking to cause problems, that we are dangerous and violent or more prone to fringe ideologies than others or that we have to fix things by dealing with the mentally ill is ableist scapegoating of the worst kind.

Oh, no one I know would ever do that, we're sane and reasonable.  We'd never buy into those ideas and act in that way.  They have to have something wrong with them.

EVIL ISN'T A MENTAL ILLNESS!  FANTACISM IS NOT IN THE DSM-5! TRUMPISM IS NOT TREATABLE WITH MEDICATION! 

 Stop blaming the mentally ill when the behavior of large groups of ignorant fanatics challenges your faith in human nature!

[shihtzuman]

Trumpism And The Ku Klux Klan Nativist Tradition - The 1924 KKK Statement On…

Aris Teon originally shared:

---

Global perspectives, with a special focus on China, Hong Kong, Taiwan

http://www.aristeon.net/2018/08/trumpism-and-ku-klux-klan-nativist-tradition-1924-immigration-statement-republican-party-anti-immigration-rhetoric.html

[tgtcooktown]

Remember .. The KKK was made up of God-Fearing Christians .. And, yes .. The KKK still exists .. Still wear white robes .. I've seen them .. In daylight .. They are ready to take over .. Just waiting for us to be stupid enough to let them get a hold .. Again .. And they are emboldened more than ever with Trumpism being a real thing .. Same with Nazis .. Vote AGAINST Republikkkanazis until the GOP ousts them from their ranks .. Make murdering racist assholes afraid again .. TgT

[sachwlang]

US gets vaccine against Corona but not Trumpism

US gets vaccine against Corona but not Trumpism

If 2020 will be remembered as the year of Corona, 2021 will be etched in history as the year when Donald Trump supporters finally exposed the Ugly American before the world. The US of A has been touted as the great melting pot of cultures. Immigrants from across the world throng its shores hoping their “American Dream” will come true. For centuries WASPs, KKK and their ilk kept up the charade of…

[surly01]

The Avatar of American Apartheid

The Trump years have revealed new truths about our relatives, neighbors, and friends. Or former friends. They have embraced the Avatar of American Apartheid.

We’ve had to open our eyes to the fact that some with whom we’ve happily shared parts of our lives stand revealed as racist to the core. Just fine with kidnapping and incarceration of immigrant children, forced family separations, and compulsory hysterectomies for some refugee women. OK with cancellation of decades of environmental regulation and climate change denial. OK with the negligent homicide that comprises the administration’s Covid-19 response. Enthused about deploying anonymized companies of military-style shock troops into the streets to “black bag” protesters and gas peaceful demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights. Fully embracing the author of 20,000-plus lies, the serial sexual assaults, the mind-bending attacks on institutions great and small.

Enough. I am not fine with any of the above, nor am I fine with those who are.

Some reading this might protest, “But I’m not a racist. I have a black friend/co-worker/neighbor, etc.” The election of the first Black President led many believe that we had entered a “post-racial society.” In arguments elsewhere about structural racism in the US, my opponents have cited Obama’s election as proof that race issues were now over.  Would that it were so. Trump’s election has revealed American Apartheid as it really is. Howard Zinn and others have brought the receipts to show American history is a procession of mass murder and colonial appropriation, an uncomfortable truth we remain unwilling to hear. And the resurgence of the hard edge of neo-confederate militia rage and racist taunts from Charlottesville to Michigan highlight the dark stain on America’s soul.

America is as divided as it was in the 1850s, in that tense time of conflict before the Civil War. The windfall of territories gained in the wake of the War with Mexico led to arguments about how those territories would be apportioned between slave states and free states. This led to the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills abolishing slavery in Washington DC, admission to the Union of California as a free state, and enhancement of the Fugitive Slave Act. This last required northern magistrates to act as agents and slavecatchers for southern slave-owners. The Compromise also provided for existing territories to be admitted as “slave” or “free” depending on the inhabitants’ electoral will. This led to “Bleeding Kansas,” those battles waged between roving bands of abolitionists and slaveholders, and where abolitionist John Brown made his bones.  A period of widespread domestic terror.

Much has been made of the rural-urban divide, which is actually the 21st-century code for racism. In a recent National Review column, Rich Lowry observed that Trump is

“the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between,” including “the 1619 Project.”

Those who live in Trump country, where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence, care little for what he does as long as it gives them license to hate liberals. The bigger the outrage, the louder the applause. Thus when Trump said, “he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue...,” he was correct. Non-Trump-cult members who wonder “how can they still back Trump after this scandal or the next” fail to understand the underlying motivating factor of his support. It’s “fuck liberals.” Since according minorities their constitutionally-guaranteed rights would require an acknowledgement of America’s actual history of racism, it is vigorously opposed by change-resistant conservatives determined to preserve the prerogatives of white entitlement.

Attempts to have a logical, rational conversation with Trumpists invariably reveals a person who believes their well-being depends upon avoiding things they’d rather not know. Or who will replace evidence with an alternative set of facts, generally created of whole cloth and breathed into life like a golem through repetition in right-wing media.

Consider QAnon, that hatchery of right-wing fucknuttery. Scratch their “Save the Children” marketing disguise and find revealed a narrative similar to that in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. Central to the mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays.

Consider the current package of accusations:

A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.

Thus are “The Protocols” repackaged by QAnon for Americans largely ignorant of history. Some have even suggested that QAnon is a Nazi cult, rebranded. What is appalling is that so many of our neighbors, relatives, and “friends” are so credulous.

As David Pollard has observed,

Trump’s support among white males remains basically unchanged over the past four years. This, not Republicans, is his real base — a clear majority of white males continue to support Trump, and it hasn’t been that long since they were the only people allowed to vote. Whites, and male whites moreso, have voted against every Democratic presidential candidate since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. And let’s be clear — I didn’t say, old white males. Young white males of all voting-age groups remain committed, almost as much as their older counterparts, to support Trump. Their entrance into the voting age cohorts has barely caused a ripple in the plurality of white males supporting Trump. That may surprise you until you consider that a disproportionate number (about half) of young voters are nonwhite (only a quarter of boomers are nonwhite), so looking at the entire youth cohort’s seemingly progressive attitudes obscures the reality that most young whites hew to the same extreme right-wing politics that the majority of old whites subscribe to; there’s just fewer of them.

We’ll leave it for you to consider that it means that a majority of white males of all ages are knowingly prepared to vote again for a blatantly corrupt candidate, a pathological liar, mentally deranged, uninformed, racist, sexist, utterly without principle, and increasingly untethered to reality. One whose “White House Science Office” takes credit for ‘ending’ the pandemic as infections mount to all-time highs.

But after 20,000 lies, who’s left to quibble?

“I love the poorly educated.” Donald J. Trump 

Trump may lose the election, but white American males (and some true-believing females) aren’t going anywhere. They are the product of our systemically racist, sexist, patriarchal culture, born to preserve the prerogatives of white men of property while denying justice to the nonwhite, the native, the immigrant, the female, the “weak.” While they also control the courts, the banks, the legal system, and law enforcement, created in their likeness to support and preserve white male power, they are quick to snap into a well-practiced victim pose whenever challenged.

This past summer, members of the ShutDownDC movement protested at Chad Wolf’s home. They said,

“We know there are no career consequences for these men and women. We know there are no financial consequences for these men and women. We know there are no legal consequences for these men and women. We must make social consequences for these men and women. We must make it uncomfortable for them. We will not be good Germans. We will not be the people who sat by and watched our neighbors commit these atrocities and said nothing because their kids were home.”

The differences between both sides of a culture war are as strong as the conflict between “slave” and “free” in the 1850s, and are likewise framed in moral absolutes. No matter what happens on or after November 3, Trumpism remains with or without Trump. How will we live with its followers?. And whether or not there are “consequences” for their actions, the stink of Trump will never wash away, and what has been seen can’t be unseen. Nor will it be forgotten.

[peterpanandwendy]

I thought this post would pertain to the issues at hand. I am reading, The New Jim Crow, which was written by Michelle Alexander, including a new forward where she wrote, The politics of “Trumpism” and “fake news” are not new; they are old as the nation itself. The very same playbook has been used over and over in this country by those who seek to preserve racial hierarchy, or to exploit racial resentments and anxieties for political gain, each time with similar results (21).

I consider myself to dwell on equality; however the other day when in a supermarket they was a young lady purchasing an overflowing grocery cart and she paid with food stamps, and her cart was filled with fresh food, veggies, and fresh meat. I wish I could have complimented how wisely she used her budget. Why did I have the expectation, because she was AA that her cart should filled with ready made food, and why did I have this opinion? She had a cellphone and because she had one, why can I decide she does not deserve a cell phone; this be her only connection her family; most people do not own a landline.

I had a disagreement with a person on social media; this person cut and paste an image concerning the kkk and being Democrat, which I later learn were not a part of any particular political party I was mostly interested, since this has come up on social media and I consider myself into a researcher.

My pet peeve is that folk post the images without first researching the image or quote without fully understand the implications. A platform, such as Tumblr, seems to a part of a group of learned people, thus an opinion is just that, a well thought out, opinion.

[goldingoldout8]

Four Kinds of Fake News

Dave: It's pretty obvious to me that over the course of the election we saw fake news. We saw real fake news, constantly being slammed at us, from leaks that were going from the Clinton campaign that were run with by CNN and with the Donna Brazile s- Y'know, all of this stuff that was obviously fake.

Then the election happens. But no one said the word- the phrase 'fake news', nobody was coming up with that. Then the election happens and three days later everybody. Everybody. Every outlet, every cable channel, everybody everywhere is running with this idea of fake news. Eric: Not authentic. Dave: Not authentic. Eric: But that synchronized effect. Dave: Yes! That's what I want to talk about. So tell me about that. What is that? Eric: We don't know. Dave: Suddenly everybody across the board starts doing the same thing. Eric: So this is a skill that we have to get very good at. What conspiracy theorists do that gives them a bad name is they fill in the details. We don't know what caused this inauthentic thing. We don't know if it was a decision inside of the deep state, if it was the newspapers getting together, that the party is saying we have a credibility crisis. But there was some decision somewhere that mushroomed out as if suddenly fake news had always been the issue. Dave: Suddenly everyone's talking about the exact same thing. Eric: Right. Dave: We don't know what- or we don't know where it came from. But you think it had to have coordinatedly come from something? Eric: I don't believe that it had an authentic source. I believe that it could mushroom and that people started reacting to it. But I do believe that it was an inauthentic, sudden anomaly. It wasn't that nobody had brought up fake news. I think if you do a search you can find fake news as an issue before this. But I believe that what happened was that there was a huge credibility crisis. I don't believe that Donald Trump ever had a seven or sub-ten percent chance of being elected. [Referring to polls presented on news.] So this is one of the things that I was talking to Peter [Thiel] about. That I'm a huge fan of this Turkish economist named Tumur Kuran whose theory of preference falsification tries to understand when you're gonna get a revolution when you're not expecting it. And so when you tell everybody 'You know the only people who support Donald Trump are backwards, misogynistic, bigoted, troglodyte KKK members. And who are you voting for?' Right? So when you do that, of course you're gonna skew the polls. Of course nobody wants to admit- because the social cost, the look-ahead function, again, is very extreme. So I knew that the election was gonna be close, but I don't think anybody could have actually called- you know. It was close. That was the best that you could do. The media was wildly off. Even Sam [Harris] said this thing about 'Well I'm gonna go back to the polls and the data because what else can you do?' Well there are a very small number of people who are able to do a bit better. And I think that we shouldn't fault ourselves if we weren't among that group. But after the fact the pressure is to divert attention away from the obvious cheer leading for Hillary Clinton, that this was a foregone conclusion. The narrative- and I think the narrative driven news- I have this tweet about the four kinds of fake news. So there was narrative driven, algorithmic, institutional and false news. Dave: Okay so let's break all those down. So narrative is just- They're all pumping out just this i[dea]- 'Hillary is gonna win.' That's the narrative and we're going- Eric: 'Hillary is inevitable.' Dave: Okay so that's one version. Now the algorithmic? Eric: Algorithmic means that I no longer have my news in the same form that you do because we're both getting it off of Twitter, off of Facebook, and those things are pointing us maybe to the traditional articles. But it's being curated and rearranged algorithmically. Dave: Just by how we've clicked in the past, and what we've liked and all of that. So now we're getting our news literally catered to us. Eric: Right. But how does Facebook figure out, for example, what should go above the fold? The analog of the first story you see when you log in. Well usually that's: somebody is getting married, or the birth of a child. Facebook is very good at recognizing what should be in that position. But when it comes to news stories, the key question is 'What does their algorithm tell them to put in front of our eyeballs?' And so you can fake the world, if you'd like, by de-emphasizing. It's the analog of what we would have previously been called "burying the lead." So it's twelve stories deep in your feed, when you're already starting to feel a little fatigued and you're just scrolling through. Dave: Right. So- Wait let's go to the other two and then follow up on the algorithm. Eric: Sure. [There's] narrative driven news, we've done algorithmic. Then there's institutional. It's where, if you happen to be Harvard or the Institute for Advanced Study, or the Brookings Institution, you can sort of release what you claim to be objective fact. And you're given this extremely courteous reception. And very often that news isn't really news, it's just some construct that, somebody has decided that they're going to suppress some findings and accentuate others and filter reality. And then do it from some perspective where it's very difficult to disagree with MIT, you know, on a topic of some technical basis. Dave: Right. Eric: And then you have fake news of the type that all of these other institutions would like us to synonymize- Dave: With everything else. Eric: Right. So that is just, somebody is making something up. And it could be in the Kremlin, it could be some teenager yucking it up, coming up with a hoax. But they can't actu- They're not gonna be able to keep fake news to just things that don't fact-check. Dave: Yeah. Well that's the interesting thing is that... So wherever this started- because, you know, as I quote Carl Sagan every week on this show, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." So I don't go to the conspiracy part. We don't know where it started. Eric: Right. Dave: I'm with you on that. But something happened where everyone starts talking about this thing. And what I thought was interesting was how they were pinning it- so much of it on Breitbart.

Now, Breitbart, I don't actually click Breitbart that often. Every now and again someone sends me something or I see it on my Twitter feed. I don't even follow Breitbart. But what I thought, really, was: What they were upset [about] is that they lost control. And all Breitbart is doing is the same thing that they've all been doing. Breitbart's just skewing things a little more either to the right or to Trump, really is the... it's not really to the right. It's Trumpism. Versus what you've all been doing to the left. You've all been doing this for so long. Now you see something coming along and getting clicks and now, of course, you have to say it's fake. But it really- They weren't even doing anything different. Eric: Well this is- The issue is do you want monopoly power over fake news. Dave: Right. 'We're okay with fake news as long as it's the w- Eric: 'It's our fake news! We're faking it the fact-checked way!' Dave: Yeah. Eric: 'You're faking it by doing something that we don't know how to control.' And I also think it's quite possible that we were being readied for a change in the algorithms. That, in essence, Google and Facebook- and again I'm here speaking as myself, not as a representative of my company. But I don't know what the relationship is between intelligence services and these giant tech companies. They obviously have to have a relationship. Now the question is: Is there any agreement that we're going to bury certain kinds of news sources, using the algorithms, so that you can't actually understand how your world is presented? Is the algorithm open? Or is the algorithm effectively 'We'll tell you- Don't call us, we'll call you.' Dave: Right. And I'm pretty sure it's the latter in almost every ca- I mean is there anyone, any of these big companies, as far as you know, have an open algorithm that are telling us the changes as they make them? Eric: I think we're not there yet. I think the idea is that this is a future battle, which is: How much are we allowed to know about the algorithms that construct our world for us?

---Eric Weinstein and Dave Rubin @ Rubin Report Jan 5, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofDXJsKsA30

[moonwalkertrance]

“These people feel emboldened. They see this as a culture war — and they believe they’re winning.”

That’s what Patrik Hermansson, a Swedish graduate student who spent twelve months undercover in the European alt-right movement, told me. Hermansson was part of Hope Not Hate, a UK-based organization established in 2004. The group is known for combating racist and fascist organizations with unorthodox methods like infiltration.

With the help of Hope Not Hate, Hermansson fabricated an identity — replete with an elaborate backstory and a host of social media accounts — and penetrated one of Europe’s most influential white supremacist “think tanks,” the London Forum.

Over the course of twelve months, he developed relationships with some of Europe’s and America’s most prominent alt-right figures. He attended their events, gave speeches at their conferences, and documented their leadership structure, organizational network, and plans for future events. He even spent much of last summer in the United States, hobnobbing with alt-right leaders and eventually marching at the Charlottesville rally in August.

I called up Hermansson via Skype to talk about what he discovered during his time undercover with the European alt-right. How serious is this movement? How quickly is it expanding? What do these people believe and how far are they willing to go in pursuit of their aims?

What he told me was disturbing.

“A lot of people underestimate how serious this is. They think national socialism is a relic of the ‘30s,” he said. “I can tell you that it definitely isn’t. These people are committed, and racism and anti-Semitism are absolutely at the core of what they believe and do.”

Hermansson also explained that the alt-right is best understood “as a cultural movement above all else.”

“Their goal is to change the culture, and that means making their ideas mainstream,” he told me. “They want it to be okay to hold their opinions in public. They want to be able to express their racist ideas in the public square so that they can be openly talked about.”

Our full conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

Sean Illing

How did you get involved with this project?

Patrik Hermansson

Well, I’ve been engaged in anti-fascism work for a long while and in a lot of different ways, mostly in Sweden. But then I moved to the UK and wanted to continue what I was doing, which was writing, reporting, doing research. Things are different in the UK — they have a longer history of anti-fascist activism, and infiltration is not a new thing. They’ve been doing it for a hundred years.

Sean Illing

So what happened when you got the UK?

Patrik Hermansson

When I got to the UK, I asked what I could do and hooked up with the organization Hope Not Hate. What they needed was someone to help them understand this specific UK-based hate group called the London Forum, which is an odd ideological group that manages to bring in a lot of different far-right types. The far-right has tended to be fractured, but the London Forum was part of a broader movement to consolidate all of these alt-right racist groups under a single umbrella organization.

So we wanted to know how this happened. We wanted to know specific details about their organization — how they’re funded, how they recruit, where they’re going next. And the best way to do that is to get inside the organization, so that’s what I did.

“I THINK YOU’RE GOING TO SEE MORE AND MORE OF THESE PEOPLE COME OUT OF THE SHADOWS. WE SHOULD BE PREPARED FOR THAT.”

Sean Illing

How did you go about doing that?

Patrik Hermansson

It’s easier than you’d think. I set up an elaborate backstory, a social media account, and just educated myself on the movement so that I could converse with these people and answer questions they might ask. I developed a whole personal history — where I came from, what I believed, why I became political. I made it as close to the truth as possible but obviously had to invent most of it. But I told everyone, for example, that I was from Sweden so I could talk convincingly about the place I grew up.

Once my story and online life was in place, I just engaged with these people. I became active on their forums and websites. I asked questions. They’re always hunting for new recruits, so it’s not that hard. They come to you. They pitch you. I’d play the part of a naïve but committed follower, and slowly I built up trust and relationships. Eventually, I was getting invited to drinks and gatherings and events.

Sean Illing

How long did it take you to get your foot in the door?

Patrik Hermansson

That depends on where you think the door is, because there are so many levels. It doesn't take long. I mean, the backstory and stuff, that takes a bit of time to build, so that's a couple of weeks, a month maybe. And honestly, it didn’t take long to get my first sit-down meeting. Basically, these groups want to grow, they want to attract more people, they’re eager to bring new people in.

Ultimately, it took about two months to get invited to my first meeting at the London Forum. Once that happened, I was getting invited to all kinds of social functions outside the actual forum. I was meeting with various leaders for drinks or coffee, picking up speakers at the airport — that kind of thing.

(Patrik checks his recording equipment, hidden in one of the buttons of his shirt, before walking into a London Forum gathering. )

Sean Illing

Once you were on the inside, what did you learn about this movement? How big is it? How serious?

Patrik Hermansson

I learned a lot of little things about how they’re organized and what they’re doing, which is helpful to us but not super interesting to the broader public. I’ll say this, however: A lot of people underestimate how serious this is. They think national socialism is a relic of the ‘30s. I can tell you that it definitely isn’t. These people are committed and racism and anti-Semitism are absolutely at the core of what they believe and do.

They really believe in their Aryanism, in their “master race” theories. They believe in racial purity. They believe in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. They think everything in society is wrong, and that the Nazis had it right. I didn’t quite understand how central these core beliefs were, but they absolutely inform everything that they do.

Sean Illing

At what point does this move from theory to practice? At what point does violence become a central tool in this movement?

Patrik Hermansson

I can tell you this: They really believe in the need to use violence to set the world right. They believe that we’re in a degenerative cycle where everything is getting worse and worse because the people who are in charge are not people who are meant to be in charge. It's not white men in charge anymore, they believe, and that's a problem because white men are the only people with the constitution to be able to lead. That's how they think, so they believe that everything is just tumbling down into destruction and they believe that we need strong white men and violence to set that right. That's quite scary.

Sean Illing

How many of the people you encountered started in this direction with legitimate political or economic grievances and, over time, embraced the racism and anti-Semitism as the centerpiece of their worldview?

Patrik Hermansson

Some might actually start with grievances over actual issues, but hanging out in these groups and online forms pushes you towards these fundamental explanations and conspiracy theories. After a while, you start to see the world through that prism, and it all suddenly falls into place.

Sean Illing

How sprawling is this movement? You’ve written about how hard these groups are working to globalize this movement, to go beyond a European alt-right or an American alt-right and make this a truly organized international effort.

Patrik Hermansson

I would say they’ve already accomplished this. It’s hard to say, and no doubt they still have particular concerns about particular countries, but what social media has allowed them and us and everybody to do is connect internationally. The internet has really changed everything in that sense. They see themselves more and more as an international movement, and they actively engage with people across the globe.

Again, this is why the racist and anti-Semitic ideology is so central: It’s the universal narrative that connects all of these grievances. It’s their organizing philosophy.

(In this picture, taken with Hermansson’s hidden camera, Stead Steadman, one of the leading figures behind the London Forum, partakes in a Nordic drinking ritual. )

Sean Illing

There’s a lot of debate right now, certainly in the US, about how marginal or mainstream the alt-right is. White supremacy isn’t new; fascism isn’t new; but these groups do seem to be elbowing their way more and more into the mainstream.

Patrik Hermansson

You have to see this as a cultural movement above all else. Their goal is to change the culture, and that means making their ideas mainstream. They want it to be okay to hold their opinions in public. They want to be able to express their racist ideas in the public square so that they can be openly talked about.

This is why they focus so much on the media, because media is how we change culture. That’s why they’re so active and so savvy on the internet, on social media, on all these alternative sites. That’s why they’re starting their own book publishing companies. They want to spread these ideas like a virus, and they’re succeeding at it.

What we saw in Charlottesville (and I was on the ground there) was young people, many of them university age — meaning they have their whole lives in front of them — and they weren’t afraid to openly associate with Nazis and the KKK. That says something significant about where we are, about where they think they are.

These people feel emboldened; I know that because they told me countless times. They see this as a culture war — and they believe they’re winning.

Sean Illing

A cultural revolution inevitably becomes a political revolution. They want to change the culture because they want to change the power structure. There are a couple ways to do that: You can work within the system or you can throw off the system altogether.

Patrik Hermansson

I agree completely. Those are the two ways. It’s basically revolution or evolution — one is radical and immediate and the other is gradual and delayed. I’d say the alt-right is more radical in their orientation. They want a revolution. They don’t believe in liberal democracy. They’d prefer a racial dictatorship.

There is the so-called “alt-light,” people who share some of these goals but aren’t quite as radical. I’m thinking of [President Donald] Trump, [Stephen] Bannon, and sites like Breitbart. These elements have a lot of overlap with the truly radical groups, but there are distinctions in terms of beliefs and tactics. I’d say the alt-light wants to change things more peacefully or gradually.

Still, for all these divisions on the far-right, they share a common fundamental agenda.

“THEY WANT TO SPREAD THESE IDEAS LIKE A VIRUS, AND THEY’RE SUCCEEDING AT IT”

Sean Illing

You mentioned that you were at Charlottesville a minute ago. Did you spend a lot of time in the US undercover as well?

Patrik Hermansson

Yeah, I spent a lot of time here during the summer, but during the rest of the year I was in London. I went to a lot of demonstrations in the US. I was in Washington, DC, in June when Richard Spencer held an event. I opened a white nationalist conference in Seattle with a speech. I was able to meet a lot of the behind-the-scenes people involved in these groups here in the states.

Sean Illing

Did the people you met here believe that this is a moment for them? That they’ve got real political and cultural traction?

Patrik Hermansson

Yes, they have that feeling. They see what we see. They see that Trump got elected, that there’s an audience for this stuff. They know that their platforms are expanding, that their numbers are growing, that the traffic on their websites is growing.

They look at Trump’s victory and conclude that the winds are on their side. They feel like they can be more open with their ideas now, and that there won’t be as much pushback as before. I think you’re going to see more and more of these people come out of the shadows.

We should be prepared for that.

[evilelitest2]

So trumpism and maga are basically a race cult. Would you compare their influence on par with the kkk or neo-nazi’s? Is this going to be yet another unfortunate horrible group formed to push back against progress that we’ll deal with decades later?

I mean...MAGA has absorbed the KKK and Neo Nazis at this point, their isn’t much of a distinction.  in US history though, Trumpism is certainly more successful on a national level than those groups.  The KKK was largely a regional movement, confined to the South and the Midwest, but it relied mostly on local power.  The Neo Nazi were never really that power in the US beyond very regional power and gangs.  MAGA actually took over the goverment. 

 For that reason, Trumpkins are going to be much worse in the following decades, this is going to stick around as various hate groups for a long long time.  

[him-e]

I feel like that cavalier attitude of 'don't ask questions about my beliefs' is one of the reasons we got Trump. It's ignorant, and running away from something challenging your beliefs is a prime tactic of the KKK & other like minds. Being ignorant isn't cool.

If we’re talking about political beliefs, then sure. You should always do your research and look deeper into the ideology that’s at the root of the political party you chose, even if (especially if) it claims it doesn’t follow any traditional political ideology or is “neither” right nor left leaning (that’s where modern day populism usually lurks). You should always ask yourself the most uncomfortable, hardest questions, even before other people ask you.

But I have the feeling you’re responding to this post, which was evidently not about socio-political beliefs but about completely mundane stuff like “why do I prefer ship (x) over ship (y)” or “why do I like this actor or dislike that musician” or “why do I spend my money buying tickets for (x) movie rather than (y)”. If that’s the case, I’m afraid you’re derailing the conversation and turning it into something it absolutely wasn’t.

The message of that post was not that you should entrench yourself in your blind hatred for (x) thing and accept no dissenting opinion, but that it’s OKAY to dislike things just because you do, and you don’t have to ruin it for other people or aggressively guilt trip people to dislike it as much as you do by coming up with a laundry list of “why X is bad”. Similarly, it’s okay to like things for superficial reasons, without coming up with all sorts of surreal and often deceptive or plain false arguments to explain why Y is Good and Progressive. 

If this isn’t clear, this is about FANDOM STUFF.

I’m not comfortable with attaching arbitrary moral absolutes to things that belong to the realm of subjectivity (like fandom things, to which we’re supposed to respond empathetically rather than rationally). I don’t appreciate the idea that in order to prove your “goodness” (or perfect performance of feminism, social activism etc.) you need to like the “right” things and hate the “wrong” things. It leads to laughable but also really toxic extremes, like people glorifying some new tv show for being sooooo feminist and good with representation when it doesn’t deserve to only to justify the fact that they love it, or doing the opposite and berating (x) narrative or ship for perpetuating “bad” tropes or whatever to justify their visceral hatred of it. 

Not everything is or should be turned into a topic of discourse. Some things have moral implications that are worth being examined, but other things don’t. And fandom things often don’t (I’m constantly baffled by this site’s inability to discern what is important from what isn’t, tbh). Most fandom things aren’t that deep; even when they are, fiction and art are supposed to be free spaces in which you’re allowed to experiment and get in touch with concepts and ideas for no reason other than because it’s FUN. It should be okay to engage with fictional stuff that isn’t perfectly aligned with your rl beliefs, or be passionate about things without feeling the urge to defend their alleged moral integrity, or dislike things without the moral imperative to label them as pernicious for humanity as a whole. I think that’s what that post is about, and it’s the entire opposite of “running away from something challenging your beliefs”. Allowing yourself to like diverse things for diverse reasons keeps your mind active, open and functional, less pliable to the sort of dealing-in-absolutes, group-thinking, black and white logic that is the biggest weapon in the hands of the various populisms and trumpisms of the world.

[phroyd]

When Donald Trump failed to single out and denounce Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and their allies Sunday, even after they marched by torchlight through an American city, where one among them ran down an anti-racist protester, I noted the historic failure of presidential leadership—a failure underscored by the praise that white supremacist leaders heaped on his approach—and called on Congress to step into the breach, reasserting the nation’s conscience by censuring the president.

In the days that followed, Trump buckled to widespread pressure to single out the white-supremacist groups, naming them in a statement that he read from a teleprompter. But he subsequently declared, in a combative, unscripted press conference Tuesday, that there were some good people on both sides of the Charlottesville protest, implying that good people marched alongside swastikas and KKK members.

A formal censure became even more necessary.

An overwhelming vote by the House to censure Trump would help to mitigate his inadequate leadership by sending the message he failed to send to white supremacists: that the people are overwhelmingly opposed to their bigotry; that even the most populist branch of government is so adamantly anti-KKK and anti-Nazi that members will censure a president of their own party for delivering anything short of moral clarity. The country would benefit greatly.

This isn’t a perfect resolution; there are likely tweaks that would increase the chance of Republican votes without undercutting the benefits to America. It is, however, a good starting point. The GOP can suggest changes or write its own resolution, bearing in mind that the resolution at hand is far better than nothing at all.

As yet, House Republicans have been willing to ally with Trump despite his cozying up to the alt-right, denigrating Mexicans and Muslims, and stoking ethnic anxieties. If they are to redeem themselves in the least, censure or impeachment is necessary. Should they do nothing, history should record that they were complicit in Trumpism.

Continue Reading ... 

Phroyd