Today, Alberta is having one of its bitterest, hardest-fought elections, with far-right/xenophobic elements on the upswing through the United Conservative Party, led by Jason Kenney, who has been awfully cavalier about the white nationalists in his party. Read the rest
Just as pretty much everyone predicted, one week after Facebook made a big deal of banning white nationalist and white separatist content on its platform.... Facebook now says a viral video on its site which is obviously and explicitly white supremacist and toxic does not break Facebook's new policy. 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
The nonprofit organization to which I belong recently put the personal data of around 410,000 people on the internet, connected to interactive street maps of where they lived. The data includes their full names, date and place of birth, known residential address, and often includes their professions and arrest records, sometimes even information about mental or physical handicaps. It also lists whether any of their grandparents were Jewish. Read the rest
Two high school students from Minnetonka, Minnesota, photographed themselves performing Nazi salutes and holding a dance invitation full of Hitler-themed puns.
“While I do not know whether it was an intentionally hateful message or was created out of ignorance, be assured the students will be disciplined for their actions,” Superintendent Dennis Peterson wrote in an e-mail Friday denouncing the post.
“The larger issue is that we, as a community, must do an even better job of educating students about Hitler and the Holocaust,” he wrote. “While we do units on this in middle school, and we have had several Holocaust survivors speak at MHS, it has apparently not been enough to prevent yesterday’s incident.”
I don't think it's the school's place to discipline students for political speech1 but it's good that they've recognized this sort of "j/k but yeah" giggling Nazism for what it is. In November, the "comedy" Nazi salutes of a high school class in Baraboo, Wi., three hours up the road, were initiallly laughed off as dumb teens not knowing what they were doing, but quickly exposed a school culture tolerant of racism and sexism where students shouted white power slogans in the halls.
1. Instead, school administrators should explain why they never teach children anything about the holocaust or fascism, and start doing it, and then lets see who complains about that. Read the rest
After Property of the People (previously) used clever Freedom of Information Act requests to learn that the FBI classed the Proud Boys as 'an Extremist Group with Ties to White Nationalism', the organization's founder, Gavin McInnis (the Canadian who co-founded Vice Magazine) resigned from the organization he founded. Read the rest
Baraboo High School's class of 2019 threw Nazi salutes for a staged photo at their junior prom this year. Read the rest
The Nazis never got close to building the bomb, but they understood the science and knew what was coming. A top-secret raid led by Norwegian resistance fighter Joachim Rønneberg destroyed a heavy water-producing plant in Rjukan, Telemark in 1943—a key victory that put Nazi nuke research to bed. Ronneberg died this week at 99.
The following year, Ronneberg chose a team of five other commandos in an Allied operation codenamed Gunnerside.
"We were a gang of friends doing a job together," he told the BBC during the 70th anniversary of the mission.
The men parachuted on to a plateau, skied across country, descended into a ravine and crossed an icy river before using the railway line to get into the plant and set their explosives.
"We very often thought that this was a one way trip," he said.
After the explosion, the men escaped into neighbouring Sweden by skiing 320km (200 miles) across Telemark - despite being chased by some 3,000 German soldiers.
With a wry smile, Ronneberg described it as "the best skiing weekend I ever had".
Rønneberg told a BBC interviewer that he only realised the importance of the mission after the bomb on Hiroshima. When reading elaborate counterfactual histories concerning different outcomes to World War II, remember that in all of them Germany gets nukes for Christmas in 1945. Read the rest
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
“I can still picture him sitting in my classroom.”
Stephen Miller's former teacher, who told reporters how President Donald Trump's senior aide once ate glue as a third-grader, may be losing her job. Read the rest
SS runes were found carved on the service flashlight of a cop fired after repeatedly punching a handcuffed black man, and everyone is scrambling to solve the mystery of how it got there.
After Leroy Hair was fired, a police-issued flashlight carved with a racist Nazi symbol and the words “The Wig Splitter” was found in his car, but he denies owning it.
Hair eventually was arrested and accused of using excessive force against the man in 2016, but a judge acquitted him at a trial that bore no mention of the flashlight. He was never accused of using the flashlight, though another officer had used one to hit the unruly man earlier in the confrontation.
Hair is suing his former employers, claiming that the beating of James Terry was a group effort and the flashlight was a device used to blame him exclusively. Magistrate Amy Mikell's acquitting him shows it, his lawyers claim. Terry won a $250,000 settlement over the injuries he received.
The city has not determined who was responsible for the Nazi insignia, she said. A police spokesman declined to comment, referring questions to attorneys. “We didn’t try to hide it,” Cleveland said of the flashlight. “We don’t condone it."
Good to hear that the city of North Charleston doesn't expressly condone beating handcuffed black men with metal flashlights inscribed with Nazi runes. Read the rest
Hans-Georg Maaßen was Germany's top spy, in charge of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (a domestic surveillance agency with 3,100 employees and an annual budget of €350m), and he was widely understood to have used his position to aid crypt-fascist, far-right groups like the notorious Alternative For Germany (AfD). Read the rest
September 15th marks Battle of Britain Day.
On September 15th, 1940, after six weeks of constant aerial battling over the United Kingdom, the Battle of Britain came to a head. The Hitler's luftwaffe launched an all out bombing raid against London.
Vastly outnumbered the remaining Hurricanes and Spitfires of the RAF, with their allies from Poland, New Zealand, Canada, Czechoslovakia, and many other countries, held off the attacking Germans.
Disappointed in the results of his grand attack, Hitler held off on his invasion of Britain.
Clip from Battle of Britain (1969) Read the rest
Jeffrey Winder appealed his guilty verdict after punching "Unite the Right" organizer Jason Kessler in Charlottesville the day after protester Heather Heyer died. A jury determined Winder should serve no jail time and pay the lowest fine possible. Read the rest
This guy worked for DHS. This is really bad stuff:
“Smith responded to a group dinner invitation whose host said his home would be 'judenfrei,' a German word used by the Nazis (...) to describe territory that had been 'cleansed' of Jews. Smith replied, 'They don’t call it Freitag for nothing.” Read the rest
Idaho Nazis. I hate Idaho Nazis.
These assholes used a mocking dialect and jungle noises while impersonating the Florida democratic candidate for governor, Andrew Gillum, in robocalls made to voters in Tallahassee.
Entire thing claims to be funded by some Nazis in Idaho.
Read the restRobocalls against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum that say they were paid for by a neo-Nazi group in Idaho are going out to voters in Tallahassee.
The automated calls are narrated by someone pretending to be Gillum and using an exaggerated minstrel dialect with jungle noises in the background. The calls end with a disclaimer that they were funded by The Road to Power, an anti-Semitic, white supremacist website and podcast linked to Scott Rhodes of Sandpoint, Idaho.
According to the Des Moines Register, a sister paper of the Tallahassee Democrat, the group has been linked to other robocall campaigns in Charlottesville, Virginia, Oregon and California.
Terry Kant-Rauch, a Tallahassee realtor, received one of the robocalls this morning in the voice mail of her cell phone. Kant-Rauch, a Democrat who happens to have a biracial daughter, became emotional after hearing it, she said.
“Campaign on the merits,” she said, “not on the color of his skin.”
Geoff Burgan, communications director for Gillum's campaign, responded by saying, "This is reprehensible — and could only have come from someone with intentions to fuel hatred and seek publicity. Please don’t give it undeserved attention."
The Democrat chose not to publish the audio because of its blatantly racist and offensive content.
