Neo-Nazi Media Darling and accused domestic abuser Richard Spencer had a meltdown on Twitter after Iranian authorities launched a missile attack against a US base in Iraq.

Siri, show me the definition of "Schadenfreude" pic.twitter.com/B6sTKbeWX4

— This Is Not A Thom Dunn T-Shirt (@thomdunn) January 8, 2020

Spencer went on to post and retweet some other criticisms of the "American Empire" and pinned a tweet saying, "To the people of Iran, There are millions of Americans who do not want war, who do not hate you, and who respect your nation and its history. After our traitorous elite is brought to justice, we hope to achieve peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness."

Spencer also led a protest against airstrikes in Syria in 2017. Granted, his anti-interventionist stance is largely based in anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic beliefs. (See also: Ecofascism.) So this is less of a "My enemy's enemy is my friend," and more of a "My enemy's enemy is still my enemy even though we kind-of agree on a single action despite coming to those views for completely opposing reasons, which is why we are enemies." But still. Broken clocks, et cetera et cetera.

Image via Wikimedia Commons Read the rest

In a New York Times story titled "I Worked for Alex Jones. I Regret It," Josh Owens recounts his time working as a video producer for InfoWars. He says was a passenger in Jones' car and that Jones drank vodka from a cup while driving, that Jones would challenge people to punching contests and broke a video editor's ribs, and that Jones once fired an AR-15 in his direction, missing him by 10 feet (Jones "claimed he had intentionally fired the gun as a joke," write Owens.) He also describes the time Jones tried to kill an American Bison with a pistol:

One weekend, a few people from the office went hunting at a game reserve. On the following Monday, I was handed a hard drive full of video files and told to edit them for Jones to air on his show later in the week. “There are clips in here that are pretty bad, things we don’t want to get out, so let me take a look at this before we upload it,” one of my managers said.

The first video I clicked on came from a cellphone. The camera pans across a blood-covered floor in what looked like a garage. Dead animals were scattered about: eyes lifeless, tongues hanging from their mouths, crimson streaks splashed on their fur.

In another video, a bison grazed quietly in the shade of a large tree; it reminded me of a tableau at the American Museum of Natural History. Then the camera panned over to Jones, maybe 20 yards away, holding what looked like a handgun.

If you haven't watched Ian Danskin's Alt-Right Playbook explainer video series, I highly recommend them. Ian recently posted a video of a talk he gave called " How the alt-right is like an abusive relationship." Read the rest

Richard Spencer sought to cast his brand of clean-cut ethnic nationalism as a respectable conservative alternative to nazism, coining the term "alt-right" to refer to it and successfully attracting mainstream media interest. In this audio recording, posted Sunday by provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous and claimed to be of Spencer, a man is heard ranting about Jews and black people in a more traditionally far-right mode. The recording is NSFW and contains terms of racial abuse.

“My ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit,” Spencer is heard shouting on the recording. “They don’t do this to fucking me. We’re going to fucking ritualistically humiliate them.”

“Little fucking kikes,” Spencer is heard screaming in a terrifying minute-long rant. “They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octaroons.”.

Yiannopoulous claims the recording was made in the immediate aftermath of counterprotestor Heather Heyer's murder at the 2017 Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally.

Mother Jones was the first to indulge Spencer's media plan ("Meet the dapper white nationalist who wins even if Trump loses") but even those appalled by the cosy coverage were unable to avoid the term "alt-right" for long.

Spencer's fame and media sympathy peaked after he was punched on video in 2017 by a protestor, an event that led to much sanctimonious punditry at the dangerous incivility of "punching Nazis". Heyer's killing by another white nationalist sobered up the poseurs and Spencer's media star quickly fell. Now no-one can be in any doubt about how low it always should have been. Read the rest

The "Straight Pride" Parade that was held in Boston in the end of August was just another example of thinly-veiled alt-right trolling. Unfortunately, it also worked. A hateful parade of a hundred-or-so people managed to divert hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars into overtime police coverage and shutdown streets during the busiest weekend in the city (Labor Day + college move-ins = hell).

Thanks to WBUR, we now know that that cost included 9,000 hours of overtime work for local police officers—the equivalent of 4 years of full-time policing service. And none of it was officially caught on film, despite the police aggressions caught on social media and the 3 dozen counter-protestors who were arrested during the parade.

Shameful Display by the @bostonpolice at #StraightPride

Charging into protestors who were protesting peacefully on the sidewalk, beating, arresting, and pepper spraying.

Make no mistake straight pride is hate pride and cops are here to protect and uphold white supremacy. pic.twitter.com/ey2Rc4uneA

— Ian🎃Gobblins👻 (@deluxian54) August 31, 2019

Boston Police Department spraying pepper spray into the crowd of protestors of the Straight Pride Parade #boston #straightpride #cityhall #pepperspray #protests #policebrutality pic.twitter.com/TLTIbdcu2A

— Lizzie Heintz (@lizzieheintz) August 31, 2019

(Coincidentally, the Massachusetts State Police Union was also embroiled in an overtime scandal in the months leading up to this parade.)

There are plenty of pros and cons to debate around the use of body cameras for police officers. In this case, it means that the public only has access to choppy, not-necessarily-reliable videos that arguably paint a picture of excessive police aggression against protestors. Read the rest

In spring 2014, barely weeks before GamerGate, 4chan trolls began masquerading as feminist women of color online. The targets were not fooled, obviously, and Shafiqah Hudson and others launched an education campaign against it. But conservative pundits were eager to play along, out of stupidity or malice, laundering the lies into their version of reality and engaging a supply chain of far-right bullshit that would soon be exploited at scale.

Shafiqah Hudson remembers the moment she realized something was off. She saw a tweet from an account she had never seen before: “#EndFathersDay because I’m tired of all these white women stealing our good black mens.” Something about the grammar—not to mention the idea that black women wanted to abolish Father’s Day because of interracial dating—just felt too cartoonish to be real.... Hudson found herself horrified by how easily people on social media could be lured into believing a stereotype of black women. While she watched a credulous rage build online, not just against these fake Twitter accounts but against the black feminists she called friends, her own anger grew as well: “No one is going to come into my house and start breaking shit,” she said.

The mockery #EndFathersDay made of an increasingly influential online feminist movement became predictable catnip to conservatives. Tucker Carlson devoted a segment to it. Ashe Schow in the Washington Examiner called it the latest “drivel” “from the feminist outrage machine.” Dan McLaughlin tweeted that the hashtag was “a neat illustration of the cultural trajectory of progressivism.”

The Innuendo Studios YouTube channel has been producing a video series on the culture of the alt-right. The latest video is called "Always a Bigger Fish" and it's about the way conservatives believe in a social hierarchy, and how liberals' efforts to achieve a more equitable society is a threat to the natural order of things.

It's also worth reading the research list used to produce the videos.

Below, the entire series in chronological order:

Read the rest

Palmer Luckey (previously) the alt-right financier who was made a billionaire by Mark Zuckerberg's decision to acquire his VR startup Oculus, is now running a Peter-Thiel-backed surveillance startup called Anduril Industries, which has won a contract to contribute to Project Maven, the Pentagon's controversial AI-for-drones system (Google's involvement in Project Maven sparked an employee uprising that ended with the relevant executives leaving the company and the contract being allowed to lapse). Read the rest

The National Socialist Movement is one of America's oldest and most influential Holocaust denial/neo-Nazi movements, proprietors of one of the world's most prominent Holocaust denial websites and defendants in a case over members who participated in racist violence at the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally. Read the rest

Faith Goldy is the white supremacist who failed in her bid for mayor of Toronto (despite an endorsement from US white supremacist Congressman Steve King); during her campaign, she unsuccessfully sued Canadian media monopolist Bell Media for refusing to run her ads, saddling her with an order to pay $43,117.90 in Bell's legal fees. Read the rest

Social network Gab was the online sanctuary of Robert Bowers, the antisemitic killer of 11 Jewish people in Pittsburgh. Gab lost its payment processors Paypal and Stripe over the weekend. On Tuesday, it loses its webhost, Joyent. Godaddy, its domain name registrar, gave it the boot on Sunday. Gab co-founder Ekrem Büyükkaya, who once wrote that he'd be the first to leave if the site was seen to be right-wing, left Sunday.

The Washington Post reports on the origins of white supremacy's online hangout.

Gab is more than a platform. It’s also positioned itself as a key figure in the right-wing response to online crackdowns of extremist views, and has benefited directly from the white supremacists who flocked to Gab on the promise that their views would not be censored, according to Joan Donovan, the media manipulation and platform accountability research lead at Data and Society, who has followed the site’s growth.

Torba has become a charismatic leader of the “alt-tech” movement which, among other things, dedicates itself to protecting and building tech to house “free speech” — including extremist ideologies that are increasingly unwelcome on mainstream sites. When James Damore was fired from Google in 2017 for writing a viral memo about women in tech, Torba capitalized on the case’s media attention to promote an “alt-tech revolution,” where conservative tech workers would rise up and topple Silicon Valley giants. Gab, of course, would be there to take their place.

Gab complains:

Gab.com is under attack.

Iowa Republican Steve King is graduating from retweeting white supremacists and earsplitting dogwhistles to openly endorsing the matter of their movement.

Faith Goldy, an excellent candidate for Toronto mayor, pro Rule of Law, pro Make Canada Safe Again, pro balanced budget, &...BEST of all, Pro Western Civilization and a fighter for our values. @FaithGoldy will not be silenced.

Here's some quotes from Faith Goldy, the Toronto mayoral candidate he endorsed yesterday.

Goldy believes the white race is in the later stages of ‘ethnocide,’ in which non-white cabals are purposefully and systematically snuffing out those of the Caucasian persuasion. ... “Canada’s southern border is in a state of absolute crisis,” Goldy breathlessly intoned in a dispatch entitled “Canada’s illegal invasion”– just as the number of migrants from the U.S. began decreasing, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Goldy has also appeared on a podcast hosted by one of the most notorious white supremacists in the U.S.; she recited (on camera, while giggling) the white supremacist ‘14 words’ trope about securing a future for the white race; she believes the 2016 shooting in a Quebec City mosque was a Muslim conspiracy; and she favourably quoted the work of a Romanian fascist who called for the elimination of the Jewish race.

Daniel Dale: "This is arguably the most explicit King has been in his support for white nationalism, though he’s been unsubtle for a while. He continues to be treated by Ryan, Trump and the rest of the party as a member in good standing." Read the rest

We must secure the existence of white people and a future for white ... comics?

Theodore "Vox Day" Beale, the Nazi-quoting nationalist most famous for gaming the Hugo Awards with bloc voting campaigns, has appropriated the "ComicsGate" name for a new comics publishing company. But adherents of the ComicsGate movement, though sharing his distate for diversity, are far from pleased.

Richard Meyer, who runs the "Diversity & Comics" YouTube channel, offered a one-word response: "NOPE."

"VOX DAY tried to steal #ComicsGate," wrote pro-ComicsGate artist Ethan Van Sciver. "ComicsGate destroyed him tonight, live."

ComicsGate's followers are notorious for online harassment, from abuse aimed at women Marvel employees to recent attacks on Marsha Cooke, who had debunked the movement's attempt to claim her late husband Darwyn as an adherent. In recent weeks, major comics industry figures denounced it as a hate group.

ComicsGate's leading lights have now drawn a line in the sand at overt affiliation with white supremacists. It's Beale's commercial grab at the word, though, that really threatens to upset the apple cart.

Meyer recently raised nearly $400,000 crowdfunding a graphic novel marketed explicitly as a ComicsGate response to "SJWs", but it's an open question as to whether it amounted to a media stunt or a sustainable market for reactionary comics.

Beale plans to answer it first, beating Meyer and co. to the market as a fully-fledged, operating imprint. Asked by an interviewer if he planned to launch a crowdfunding campaign, Beale replied "I expect we will do so, yes." Read the rest

YouTube pulled four Alex Jones' Infowars videos because they contained hate speech and other content that violated its policies. Infowars was also temporarily prevented from live streaming its content on YouTube. The violation constitutes a "strike." If Infowars gets two more strikes during its 90-day probationary period, YouTube could kick Jones off it platform. It's unlikely that this will happen, though. Jones has almost 2.4 million followers and is therefore an advertising cash cow for YouTube's parent company, Google.

From Yahoo

In two of the Infowars videos deleted by YouTube, Jones railed against Muslims and asserted that they were taking over control of European countries. Another video, titled “How To Prevent Liberalism,” depicted a man shoving a young boy to the ground, while in the fourth video Jones compared the creators of a show featuring animated drag queens to Satanists.

“We have long-standing policies against child endangerment and hate speech,” YouTube said in a statement. “We apply our policies consistently according to the content in the videos, regardless of the speaker or the channel.”

...

On Wednesday, Facebook execs were grilled at the Television Critics Association summer tour about why Infowars was included in the Facebook Watch section. In response, Facebook VP of product Fidji Simo said, “I find Infowars absolutely atrocious. That being said, we have the hard job of trying to find a sense of balance between freedom of expression and safety.”

In videos posted Tuesday on YouTube and Facebook, Jones called Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, a pedophile and threatened to shoot him.

Jordan Peterson is really easy to make fun of -- what with the mystical nonsense and the pseudoscientific evolutionary biology -- but there are millions of (largely white, largely young, largely male) readers who've found his "12 Rules for Life" to be a balm for their souls and a rallying cry for a movement that has legitimized the most murderous strains of toxic masculinity. Read the rest

Right now, the eugenics-happy alt-right are also climate deniers; but climate denial has a short half-life -- its undeniability will only grow, as the world gets hotter, more dangerous, drier, wetter, colder, stormier, more becalmed -- more uninhabitable. Read the rest