The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gladio

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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Sat Mar 24, 2018 7:20 am

I couldn't have said it better myself:



Lipstick On A Pig: White Anxiety, Anti-Blackness, and Gun Violence



“IT’S NOT JUST FEAR THAT MASS ANXIETY PRODUCES, OR THE CONSTANT DESIRE TO FIND THESE ENEMIES WHICH ARE PROMOTED AS SUPPOSEDLY OMNIPRESENT, BUT MOREOVER IT IS THE ANXIETY OF NOT BEING CALLED ON BY THE STATE TO ENGAGE IN ITS DEFENSE.”


In the United States we are witnessing the creation of a ‘martyr culture,’ as young men with seemingly nothing to live for, are deciding to end their lives after leaving a trail of death and destruction. In return, these young men are seen as martyrs, and for examples of this, we need only look to the Alt-Right cult of personality built around Dylann Roof, to Nikolas Cruz quoting Elliot Rodgers positively, to Devin Kelley’s desire to copy Roof’s massacre.

For a small group of almost entirely young white men, they see their only chance at transcending their current conditions through mass amounts of violence aimed at wider society; and almost always against those as seen as beneath them: women, former partners, younger children, and people of color.

The editor of The Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin, summed up this philosophy firmly in the lead up to Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville:

Many of us are out of shape.
We feel emasculated.
Many of us feel we have never had power.
We crave power.
We lust after power. We want to be part of a group, which will give us power. A group that will confirm our worth as men.
We do not have identities.
We want identities.
We want to be productive. All men want to be productive. We want to build, we want to create, we want to be needed.
We have problems with women. All of us do. We lie to each other and claim that we do not. But we all do.
We are a generation of throwaways, which (((those who write history before it happens))) have slated to be the last generation of Heterosexual White Men.
We are angry.
There is a atavistic rage in us, deep in us, that is ready to boil over.
There is a craving to return to an age of violence.
We want a war.


In return, the message boards of Alt-Right, reddit feeds of Men’s Rights Activists, and /pol/ boards all sing and meme the praises of their martyrs as if they were revolutionary combatants facing down an occupation government – a reality that some of them would argue, is actually true.


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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Wed Apr 18, 2018 8:55 pm

Conspiracy culture has no cause to support this sort of shit:


Bissonnette was a far-right internet junkie whose addiction turned him into a killer

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Bissonnette’s motives, clearly outlined during his confession and the 45-page report on the contents of his laptop, show a young man under the steady influence of far-right and anti-immigrant voices; a man clearly alarmed by Muslims, fearful of 'others,' and ultimately radicalized.

One day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that he was ready to welcome immigrants fleeing persecution, terror and war, and two days after Trump ordered his anti-Muslim travel ban, Bissonnette went to the Quebec City mosque to commit a heinous crime.

“I was watching TV and learned that the Canadian government was going to take more refugees, you know, who couldn’t go to the United States, and they were coming here," he told Sûreté du Québec Sergeant Steve Girard in an interrogation clip that played at his sentencing hearing on Friday. "I saw that and lost my mind. I don’t want us to become like Europe. I don’t want them to kill my parents, my family.”

Bissonnette pleaded guilty last month to six counts of first-degree murder and six of attempted murder.

He was an extreme-right Internet junkie, and his addiction helped turn him into a monster.

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Aymen Derbali, a survivor of last year's horrific mosque shooting, is learning to adapt to his new life in a wheelchair.
File photo by The Canadian Press


Assigning blame in the midst of tragedy

There’s no question that a complex variety of factors played into Bissonnette's decision to murder those innocent people. Some will point to his vulnerable mental health, his anti-anxiety medication, his suicidal tendencies, and his tenuous grip on reality, and urge caution in assigning motivation and blame.

Indeed, there is often no way to positively link – beyond a shadow of a doubt – any possible set of influences on a person’s life and the straw (or straws) that broke the camel's back. This exercise has been performed time and time again south of the border on many (predominantly male, predominantly white) mass shooters, whose compulsion to kill innocents appears a mystery.

It’s human nature to try and understand what so often cannot be explained, to untangle that thread of confusion and chaos and somehow reach a foolproof conclusion that can protect us all. Because it’s horrifying to realize that sometimes we can’t make sense of the senseless, and that the human element is so unpredictable and so volatile that we have no tangible way of preventing the monsters among us from surfacing and doing their damage.

Other times, it makes perfect sense.

It’s almost impossible to look at the string of anti-immigrant hate emanating from the extensive list of Islamophobic far-right personalities Bissonnette routinely consulted online, and not conclude that they influenced his world view, encouraged his obsessions, and fed his fears.

The sites he consulted the most? Those tied to former Breitbart editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones of Infowars, white nationalist Richard Spencer, conspiracy theorists Mike Cernovich and Paul Joseph Watson, former KKK leader David Duke, Steve Bannon, Fox News personalities, Gavin McInnes (formerly of Rebel Media), and more...

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No surprises here

For those unfamiliar with these pundits and their angry online rants, Ben Shapiro is the man who once claimed there are currently 800 million radicalized Muslims among the global Muslim population of 1.6 billion. Fact-checking website Politifact called this statement “completely false,” although the people consulting these sites don't tend to be the sort who fact-check. When Alex Jones isn’t busy having meltdowns on YouTube, he spreads deeply damaging conspiracy theories that accuse the U.S. government of being involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 attacks, and fake moon landings through his conspiracy website, Infowars. A staunch opponent of gun control, he claims the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting never happened.

All the far-right pundits Bissonnette followed are responsible for spreading anti-Muslim hate. Is it really such a surprise that when you feed a troubled mind a steady diet of far-right media junk food, the end-result will be a fearful, angry, suspicious person who looks to violence as a solution?

It’s deeply troubling to realize that the final straw, the piece of information that propelled Bissonnette over the edge, was seeing Canada’s welcoming and inclusive response to Trump’s travel ban. Even if we don’t quite know – step by step – how the perfect storm was created, the combination of right-wing fear-mongering, racism and blatant Islamophobia (often fuelled by politicians trumpeting this fear for self-serving reasons), eventually contributed to this tragedy.

This idea that he had to protect what was his from an outside threat, which often results in anti-immigrant sentiments, is referred to as “othering.” It’s a hate, demonization and distrust of anyone coming from elsewhere.

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Longtime conspirator and propagandist Alex Jones has issued a public apology for his coverage of the 'Pizzagate' hoax on his program InfoWars. Pizzagate was a fake news sham that falsely claimed Hillary Clinton was linked to a child sex-trafficking ring hidden within Comet Ping Pong. Screenshot of Jones courtesy of Infowars on YouTube, with emphasis and quotes added by Mac Boucher

More: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/0 ... him-killer
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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Thu Apr 19, 2018 7:59 pm

I definitely don't think we should shame people who are struggling but we should also be realistic about what makes for vulnerability to radical right propaganda and the tendency to go violent:


What About Mental Illness?

The combination of apocalyptic thinking and demonization of opponents can lead some people to see violence as a legitimate moral choice. Not all mentally ill people turn to violence, and some violence is carried out by people not mentally ill.

It is possible that some people who are suffering from some forms of mental illness become caught up in political or religious subcultures where apocalyptic thinking and demonization are commonplace. They then lack the psychological restraints that keep other similarly situated people from acting out on their beliefs in a violent manner.

At the same time, relatively sane people in political or religious subcultures where apocalyptic thinking and demonization are commonplace can become so angry and frustrated that the barriers to violence are simply breeched by arguments that the violence prevents a greater moral harm.

We can see examples of both types of dynamics in anti-abortion violence and violence against Blacks, Jews, Asians, and government workers by persons in various race hate movements.

For example, in the case of John C. Salvi III, who shot abortion providers in the Boston. Salvi came out of an apocalyptic Catholic Right subculture. Salvi was someone who was arguably mentally ill, but who picked his targets based on a recognizable political/theological outlook. The same may be true with Buford Furrow, Jr. who shot up a Jewish day care center in California, then killed a Filipino-American postal worker. Furrow came out of an apocalyptic neonazi subculture that demonized Jews, people of color, and the government. The political/theological outlook sets the stage, but it is the mental illness that writes the script where someone pulls the trigger or commits other acts of violence.

Salvi’s psychological condition was not demonstrated by his claims about a banking conspiracy, which were commonplace in the Catholic apocalyptic Right, but at the same time his choice of targets was not random. Certainly a person like Salvi did not represent the mainstream of Catholicism, the antiabortion movement, or the U.S. political Right, but he expressed the views of a durable subculture with conspiracist views that consciously resorts to scapegoating.

This dynamic of rhetoric triggering violence functions more easily among some who are mentally ill. But those who are scapegoated can be injured or killed by people—whatever their mental state—who act out their conspiracist beliefs in a zealous manner. The failure of political and religious leaders to take strong public stands against groups and individuals that demagogically spread conspiracist scapegoating theories encourages this dangerous dynamic.

When someone engages in terrorism it is not fair to automatically blame the entire political or religious subculture in which they are embedded. At the same time, it is naive to ignore the possible influence of demonization, scapegoating, and conspiracism on persons who choose to engage in violence.


http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/third_position.html
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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Tue May 08, 2018 9:37 am

The whole article is very much important:


All-American Nazis
How a senseless double murder in Florida exposed the rise of an organized fascist youth movement in the United States

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Many of the right's most popular memes grew out of 4chan, the Internet's notoriously anarchic image board, that, during the Aughts, helped launch the left-leaning hacktivists of Anonymous. By early 2012, 4chan's tone had shifted drastically to the right. The site's "politically incorrect" board, /pol/, home to nihilistic trolls and thrill seekers known as "edgelords," helped spawn what cultural critic Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies, calls a "leaderless, digital counter-revolution." Some lurkers sniffed opportunity. On Stormfront, then the most prominent white-supremacist website, several discussion threads considered how /pol/ might be used to help young people become "racially aware," as one user noted. "People seem a lot more open there in some ways," another observed, "probably because it is a completely anonymous board so they are not afraid of saying things that are racist."

By the fall of 2012, a 4chan user called "Stormpheus" began circulating what he called a "Redpill instruction pamphlet," which advised others to "sweet talk [users on other 4chan boards] about things that are on topic." Many 4chan users – on both /pol/ and other boards – pushed back against the "stormfags," as they called these interlopers. "It was mostly because they'd show up on /pol/ and start expressing very sincere white-nationalist beliefs without the ironic-humor component," says Matt Goerzen, of the research institute Data and Society. Which is not to say that those posting ironically might not also have had those beliefs, he adds. "You are playing with such a sophisticated irony in this anonymous culture, even people who understand how multilayered it all is can't necessarily see through it. You are whoever you pretend to be."


Capitalizing on this ambiguity, two longtime denizens of 4chan saw a chance to bring fascism to the masses, positioning it as both radical and cool: a new counter-culture. One was Andrew Auernheimer, 32, an infamous troll and former hacktivist known as "weev," who in many ways embodies the ambiguous nature of online extremism. Until recently, Auernheimer was a favorite of tech journalists and digital-rights advocates (Forbes once likened him to Shakespeare's Puck). In 2013, Auernheimer went to prison for hacking AT&T's website. Thirteen months later, after his conviction was overturned on a technicality, he emerged from the pen sporting a swastika tattoo, and committed himself to spreading the message of "global white supremacy," as he put it. "I converted a Bernie Sanders supporter into a race warrior in nine tweets," he boasted in 2016.

Auernheimer found an ideological soulmate in Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, one of the most influential far-right websites on the Internet. Anglin, 33, is a former vegan from an upper-middle-class suburb of Columbus, Ohio, who "got into Hitler," as he said, by hanging out on 4chan. In 2013, he decided to create a new platform for these views, launching Daily Stormer as a news site mixing the clickbait style of Gawker with 4chan's trolling sensibility. Jews were "kikes." Blacks were "nignogs" or "chimps." Women were "sluts," "whores," "bitches," "harlots," "slags" and "skags." Mainstream culture was "shitlib." Anti-Semitism was funny – so funny that the site was awash with swastikas.

The Daily Stormer's target audience, as revealed in a leaked style guide for potential contributors, was the "ADHD demographic" (including those as young as 11, Anglin said recently). Writers were instructed to avoid "college words" and stick to an eighth-grade vocabulary. "When I'm trying to change the way people think about things," Anglin said in an April 2016 podcast, "it doesn't make sense to target anyone but young people."

The larger goal of Daily Stormer – like a host of somewhat less-extreme websites and podcasts, not to mention alt-right leaders like Richard Spencer – was to shift the so-called Overton Window, a wonky poli-sci concept describing the process of changing public opinion to accept ideas that might have previously been radioactive. The feminist movement, which mainstreamed once-unthinkable concepts like a female Supreme Court justice, was an example of an Overton shift to the left. From the perspective of white nationalists like Auernheimer (who recently floated the idea of murdering Jewish children in the name of free speech), outrageous anti-Semitism might shift the window far enough to the right that a goal of an immigrant-free, white ethnostate would look almost palatable.

The shift also served a more radical agenda. One Daily Stormer contributor, the Canadian fascist known as "Charles Zeiger," would later wax victorious in an online essay over the "unforeseen radicalization of the younger generation Z," who had come to see that "the mainstream media is deceptive and evil, [social-justice warriors] are stupid and annoying, and liberalism is boring and square." This turn of events, he noted, presented modern-day fascists with a unique opportunity. "[W]e can lead the youth in a rebellious cultural upheaval against the previous generations of stuck-up boring adults," he said. "If we can help mold a social movement like the hippies did, that should give us a huge source of radicalized and militant recruits to bolster our ranks in the next five years."

One of Devon Arthurs' gaming friends has seen the strategy work, firsthand. "I have personally watched a few teens go from having general, conservative or libertarian viewpoints to becoming fascist sympathizers," he says. "It happens very dynamically."

"The goal," an analyst says, "is to destabilize people's worldviews and fill them with your own. If you make racism funny, you can subvert the cultural taboo."

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A photoshopped image thought to be of Devon and Brandon, in 2016. Ironmarch.org


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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Thu May 24, 2018 6:15 pm

The Terrifying Trend of White Men Radicalized Online Becoming IRL Terrorists

It's no accident that young white guys with a fondness for the darkest part of the internet are descending into far-right violence.

David Neiwert
May 17 2018


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The surge of radical-right organizing by the mostly online alt right in recent years has, in fact, been consciously directed at precisely that demographic: white men between about 14 and 30, underemployed and frustrated with their lives. This radicalization, in and of itself, is not breaking news. What does seem novel to me, as a longtime observer of far-right organizing, is that the violence that always lurked under the surface of such rhetoric is now increasingly manifesting itself in extreme acts of lone-wolf aggression.

The details of some of the motivations involved in recent incidents have not been entirely settled. 29-year-old Travis Reinking, the man accused in the Waffle House case, claimed a background of at least marginal involvement in the far-right sovereign-citizens' movement. But it's not at all clear that ideology inspired him to act out murderously, even if the fact that the dead were all black or Hispanic raises the distinct likelihood of a racial motivation in that crime. Reinking awaits trial in Tennessee.

It’s also not clear what it means that Rex Whitmire Harbour, the 26-year-old accused of opening fire on passing cars on a Georgia freeway, venerated Parkland suspect Nikolas Cruz and left-behind a "hate-filled" message. Still, latching onto a notorious alleged mass shooter who reportedly had swastikas engraved on his ammo clips fits the general pattern here, as does Harbour's apparent fascination with historical figures from Nazi Germany.

Meanwhile, because of social-media messages and other evidence, it’s fairly clear that accused Toronto van attacker Alek Minassian, 25, was enraged by his lack of romantic success with women. He posted sympathetically about incels like himself, and wrote warmly of Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in May 2014 carried out a mass shooting in Isla Vista, California, that left seven dead (including himself) and more wounded after expressing similarly deranged ideas about sex. Then there's 19-year-old Jakub Zak of Illinois, who stands accused of stockpiling weapons illegally as part of his fascist ideology—he was reportedly an active member of Patriot Front, an online hate group—and may have been involved in a number of other crimes as well.

Again, the behavioral pattern we’ve seen intensify in recent weeks is not a brand new one. The modern archetype may have been set back in 2015 by Dylann Roof, the then-21-year-old South Carolina white man who walked into a black church in Charleston and murdered nine congregants. The rootless Roof, officially unaffiliated with any hate or extremist groups but a participant in their online activity, seems to have been driven to seemingly random violence at least in part by his absorption in conspiracy and online forums and chat rooms dedicated to hateful ideologies.

Since then, at least 27 people were murdered and 52 more injured in attacks by mostly young men linked to the alt right and its online radicalization process before the incidents of the past month. They included a conspiracy theorist who allegedly stabbed his father to death at the height of an argument that appears to have been about Pizzagate, a Maryland student who allegedly stabbed a black man to death after he refused to move out of his way, and a Portland drifter accused of stabbing two commuters to death when they attempted to shut down his anti-Muslim tirade.

Some incidents, including the Parkland shooting itself, remain fuzzy. On social media, Cruz was seemingly obsessed with violence, guns, and race, once posting on Instagram that "I hate Jews, niggers and immigrants." It remains unclear to what extent that hatred fueled the shooting rampage. Likewise, the motives and intentions of a young white man who accidentally blew himself up while making bombs at his Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, home, remain under official wraps for now.
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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 04, 2018 9:04 am

Soldiers of Fortune

BY
KYLE BURKE

In the 1970s American mercenaries traveled to Angola and Rhodesia, seized by racist, anticommunist dreams and delusions of grandeur.

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The War at Home

While American mercenaries had little effect on the wars in southern Africa, they left an imprint on the US as they returned home and brought their combat experiences into a burgeoning right-wing paramilitary movement. For those who had fought in southern Africa — or more often fantasized about it — the dissolution of Rhodesia after 1978 foretold a frightening future that might befall the United States. Many believed that communists, liberals, African Americans, Jews, and foreigners — or some combination of those groups — were trying to establish a totalitarian state in which guns would be illegal, religion outlawed, and racial mixing compulsory.

Those ideas circulated throughout an underground press and formed the plot of the hugely popular right-wing novel The Turner Diaries. Published in 1978 as Rhodesia collapsed, the book tells the story of white American “patriots” who launch a guerrilla war against a totalitarian state known as the System, which had allowed African Americans and Jews to take over the country. Advertised alongside articles about Rhodesia and Angola in Soldier of Fortune and other paramilitary periodicals, The Turner Diaries refracted the wars in southern Africa into a tale of revanchist domestic terrorism.

Galvanized by that narrative, a growing number of Americans joined armed right-wing groups in Michigan, Montana, Missouri, and elsewhere in the late 1970s and 1980s. They hoarded supplies, shot their weapons, and talked of the apocalyptic struggle to come. Although most just played war in the woods, a few enacted their martial fantasies, mostly with dismal results. By the early 1990s, a dispersed yet coherent movement uniting Klansmen, tax protesters, white separatists, and others spanned the country. Many were plotting or engaged in violent actions.

In this world, stories about Rhodesia and the armed Americans who tried to save it lived on. They served as paramilitary parables, urging Americans to take up arms against domestic enemies — above all, African Americans. One recent example highlights the continuing pull of Rhodesia on the far-right imagination. On June 17, 2016, Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church. His aim was to start a race war. Before launching his assault, he published his white supremacist manifesto on a website. Its title? “The Last Rhodesian.”

Privatizing War

Americans’ mercenary sojourns in southern Africa didn’t just register at home. They also shaped US military interventions in the Reagan era and afterwards. In the 1980s, veterans of the Rhodesian and Angolan conflicts joined paramilitary campaigns to support the Reagan administration’s proxy wars on three continents.

Sometimes, as in El Salvador, they trained with and fought alongside state security forces battling leftist guerrillas. More often, they cast their lot with anticommunist guerrillas in Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan. The administration encouraged these missions, at times allowing American civilians to set up shop on US military bases and brief US officials about their activities. Despite that collaboration those who organized paramilitary campaigns in the Reagan era resisted the mercenary label, much as they had in Rhodesia and Angola. “Don’t call us mercenaries,” insisted one. They were “simply private citizens who wanted to fight communism.”

Although the Iran-Contra scandal curtailed most of these paramilitary efforts, the notion that private citizens could and should wage war in lieu of the state propelled the rise of private military firms (PMFs) in the 1990s and 2000s. In many ways, PMFs harnessed the strain of martial manhood that had guided the mercenary schemes of the late 1970s — hard men fighting covert wars with little or no government involvement — and directed it towards more profitable ends.

But whereas mercenary campaigns in Rhodesia and Angola had been haphazard affairs, managed by a loose network of like-minded individuals and undertaken without clear profit motives, PMFs grew into sizable corporations with hundreds of employees serving lucrative contracts in several countries at the same time. They raked in billions of dollars, often with little oversight or accountability. Once mercenaries had decamped to fulfill quixotic dreams. Now they fueled a hyper-efficient, privatized war machine.


More: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/amer ... e-movement
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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 15, 2018 11:13 am

Neo-Nazi leader from Tampa, now behind bars, stars in new video extolling Hitler

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Federal prosecutors introduced pages from an online neo-Nazi website as evidence against Brandon Russell of Tampa. Video posted in May, after Russell began serving a five-year prison sentence, features Russell's image and threats against former "comrades."

The video extols Adolf Hitler and the neo-Nazi cause and features images of uniformed men with semi-automatic rifles on maneuvers in the desert. It makes menacing references to former members.

"To all my loyal comrades who’ve stuck around, through thick and thin, I thank you for your ... courage and loyalty," the narrator says. "To all of those who have abandoned ship ... Adolf Hitler once said, ‘There is no room in this world for cowardly people,’ so there is certainly no room for you in the Atomwaffen Division."

"The sword has been drawn," the narrator says. "There is no turning back."

The register beneath the video recorded 4,710 page views as of Wednesday.

First reported by Rolling Stone magazine, the 138-second video ends with images of three men described as former group members along with type listing their names and, in one case, community of residence.

Officials at the Atlanta federal prison where Russell is serving his sentence declined to comment. So did the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa.

The video and its content would only become a legal issue for Russell if he were subject to restrictions on his actions as a condition of release, said Tampa criminal defense attorney Patrick Courtney. The video may even be protected as free speech under the First Amendment, said Stetson University College of Law professor Charlie Rose.

Russell’s involvement with Atomwaffen Division came to light as Tampa police investigated the May 19, 2017, shooting deaths of his roommates Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jeremy Himmelman, 22. A third roommate, Devon Arthurs, 19, is awaiting trial in the slayings. Investigators say Arthurs told them he fired the fatal shots to keep the other young men from committing domestic terrorism.

Russell was not charged in the deaths, but in searching his belongings, investigators found bomb-making materials as well as icons of white supremacy — Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the apocalyptic novel The Turner Diaries and a framed photo of Timothy McVeigh, the former soldier and white supremacist executed for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Atomwaffen Division is connected to five murders, including the two in Tampa, said Keegan Hankes, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. And the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is looking into allegations that another group member, Marine Lance Cpl. Vasillios Pistolis, took part in a violent attack during an August 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

Given the group’s history of violence, Hankes said the three former Atomwaffen group members mentioned in the Russell video could be in danger.

"These groups are organized as decentralized terror cells," Hankes said. "It would be my assessment of the group, given what we know about their ideology and what they have already done, that they are a danger."


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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 20, 2018 8:33 am

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Atomwaffen, an American Neo-Nazi Terror Group, Is in Canada

“It is very likely that Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization of sorts, is operating in Canada,” Scrivens said. “Most of these types of groups tend to have some level of local or national support, and I suspect that he too has support from other adherents in Canada and is not operating alone. At the very least, I suspect that he’s in the process of or attempting to mobilize an Atomwaffen cell in Canada.”

A recent and extensive ProPublica investigation into the American terror group, which venerates white supremacist ideologies and celebrates homegrown American extremists like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, says its members are “scattered across 23 states and Canada.” Some of those members are active servicemen in the US military.


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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3a8 ... -in-canada
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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 28, 2018 3:40 pm

Far-right voices are frothing about a looming civil war

They apparently don't remember how well it went for them last time.

CASEY MICHEL
JUN 27, 2018, 6:06 PM


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FAR-RIGHT VOICES ARE GETTING EXCITED ABOUT PROSPECTS OF A CIVIL WAR.

The backlash to the Trump administration caging immigrant children has led to store owners asking White House officials to not eat in their restaurants and to protesters publicly confronting those supporting Trump’s policies. Now, voices on the far-right are increasingly unified in their only solution to the matter: civil war.

While several far-right figures have been speculating about a looming U.S. break-up for some time, recent rhetoric is a marked escalation from even a few months ago, when certain historical illiterates were only calling for an “amicable divorce.”

Now, according to increasingly shrill analysts — and even certain members of Congress — a fratricidal war is the only potential fix for the United States’ domestic tensions.

Glenn Reynolds, known colloquially as “Instapundit,” led the charge with a piece in USA Today earlier this week. Pointing to White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders being denied service in Virginia and protesters identifying Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant, Reynolds claimed that the administration officials’ inability to eat at certain restaurants was a sign that civil war was well underway.

“Is America headed toward a civil war? Sanders, Nielsen incidents show it has already begun,” his headline claimed. Added Reynolds, Sanders’ incident “seems like a small thing, but it would have been largely unthinkable a generation ago.”

Of course, a generation ago — the late 1960s and early 1970s — was marked by domestic unrest that outpaces what the U.S. is currently seeing by multiple magnitudes. Protesters gunned down at Kent State University, White House officials discussing fire-bombing think tanks in Washington, explosions across New York every other day — the level of domestic strife a generation ago significantly outpaces what we’ve seen recently, even with a humanitarian crisis unfurling along the U.S.’s southern border.

And the notion that the inability for Nielsen to get a burrito is somehow comparable to brutal antebellum beatings on the Senate floor, or that Sanders being politely asked to leave could spark a reprise of the “Bleeding Kansas” debacle that preceded the Civil War — or that it could lead to spiraling cases of outright secession — is laughable.

Little matter, though. Chatter of civil war has spiked over the past two weeks, from Trump rallies to pro-Trump conspiracy fonts like Alex Jones.

Conspiracy site Zero Hedge recently published a piece claiming that “The Modern Civil War Is Being Fought Without Guns… So Far!” Gab, a social media platform infested with fascists and white supremacists, even got in on the action. In a since-deleted Tweet, Gab wrote that “Civil War 2.0 is going to be lit.”


Continues: https://thinkprogress.org/far-right-voi ... 08b834538/
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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Tue Jul 03, 2018 9:18 am

The Daily Stormer TOTALLY doesn’t want anyone to shoot journalists, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more

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Know what I mean, know what I mean, nudge nudge, say no more?

By David Futrelle


“Stochastic terrorism,” as many of you know, is a way to terrify your enemies without getting your hands dirty, or even bothering to learn how to make a bomb or fire a gun.

It’s when someone says or publishes something nasty about someone they hate (or a group of such someones), knowing full well that there is a very good chance that their words will incite some unbalanced fanatic to physically assault or even kill the intended target.

Sometimes stochastic terrorists mention violence explicitly; other times it’s implicit. But the whole point of stochastic terrorism is to bring violence down on an enemy without having to do this violence oneself. It is, as one anonymous blogger has noted, a sort of “remote-control murder by lone wolf.”

Those who engage in stochastic terrorism generally do it with a wink and a nod, sometimes pretending it’s all a big joke, sometimes using dogwhistle language that gives them a certain degree of deniability when the gun or the bomb goes off for real.


Continues: http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2018/ ... y-no-more/
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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 11, 2018 9:01 am

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An American Neo-Nazi Group Has Dark Plans for Canada

Northern Order, once described as a “phantom group,” is an Atomwaffen-affiliated neo-Nazi cell.

In leaked chats, a key member going by the name “Alba” (who was at one point based somewhere in the Windsor, Nova Scotia area) who acts as an in-between for Atomwaffen and Northern Order, says he’s optimistic about “building a self-sufficient IRL community in rural British Columbia homes, agriculture, basic businesses etc. to be a life raft when it all goes down. Similar to what Craig Cobb tried to do without all the retarded fanfare.”

Craig Cobb is an American Canadian white nationalist and neo-Nazi leader who infamously attempted to create a white supremacist settlement in Leith, North Dakota in 2012. He failed in his efforts and was arrested on terrorism charges, but was released on a plea agreement in 2014. John Cameron Denton, the leader of Atomwaffen who goes by “Rape” in secret networks, advocates for a similar white supremacist stronghold.

Alba claims to be a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, while other members of the neo-Nazi movement in Canada, speaking on various forums, seek out the same military training as a way to learn insurgency tactics. VICE has tracked his online activities on various white supremacist chat logs.

Within the far-right ecosystem, Atomwaffen’s operational security differentiates itself from other more public groups. It tends to favor the shadows, unlike the rallies or publicity stunts of far-right groups like the Soldiers of Odin—instead, preparing and planning violent actions using encrypted apps and restricted chat rooms without publicly identifying themselves. Members use codenames, never personally identifying themselves and frequently take preventative measures to avoid being doxxed.

They operate more closely to Islamist extremist groups. Members undergo secretive paramilitary training and aggressively use social media and memes as a recruitment tool to propagate its mission.

And, much like al Qaeda or ISIS, which it oddly venerates in various postings, the group openly discusses targeting and killing journalists who they consider enemies to their white supremacist agenda.

In addition to the objectives of the Northern Order, VICE has found several parallel movements across various social media accounts of Canadian patriot groups with a strong white supremacist ideology, also advocating for an ethnostate in British Columbia. Some of the members of these groups unmistakably play with the imagery and ideology of Atomwaffen.

Expansion into Canada falls in line with Atomwaffen’s global goal of spreading its far-right terror mandate to cells across the world. And its Canadian ally is already carrying out activities.

In Ottawa, Northern Order posters were found on a local mosque on the anniversary of the Quebec mosque shooting, where a far-right terrorist open fired on worshippers, killing six. The group committed a hate crime by defacing the Ottawa mosque with violent neo-Nazi posters. The group’s name has also shown up in Toronto and Montreal on stickers that say “join the white jihad.”


https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ev84 ... for-canada
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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Sat Jul 21, 2018 9:07 am

In extremis

As Hannah Arendt argued, there is one common thread which connects individuals drawn to all kinds of extremist ideologies


Nabeelah Jaffer
is a former associate editor at Aeon. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Oxford, and her work has been published in The New Statesman, The Guardian, FT Weekend and The Times Literary Supplement.



A few years ago I discovered that my friend Tom was a white supremacist. This put me in a strange position: I am a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants. I am a member of one of the so-called invading groups that Tom fears and resents. He broadcasts his views from his social media accounts, which are a catalogue of aggrieved far-Right anger. One post warns ‘the Muslim invaders to keep their filthy hands off our women’. Another features a montage of black faces above the headline: ‘This is the white race after “diversity”.’ Underpinning this is a desperate resentment of ‘liberal Leftie attempts to control free speech’.

Tom has never mentioned any of these ideas to me; on the contrary, in person he is consistently warm and friendly. He vents his convictions only online, and it seems unlikely that he would ever translate them into violent actions. And yet much the same was once said of Thomas Mair, the 52-year-old from Birstall, a village in northern England, who spent time helping elderly neighbours tend to their gardens, and who in 2016 murdered the pro-immigration MP Jo Cox, while shouting: ‘This is for Britain!’ His actions were found to have been inspired by white supremacist ideology.

James Baldwin was right to say that ideas are dangerous. Ideas force people to confront the gap between their ideals and their manifestation in the world, prompting action. Ideas can prompt change for better or for worse – and often both at the same time. But attempts to create change are always charged with danger: to act in new ways is to erode old limits on our behaviour. In the forging of new territory – and the sense of danger that accompanies it – actions that might once have been deemed excessive can come to seem not merely necessary but normal.

But to understand what has led someone to extremism it is not enough to point to ideology. Ideas alone did not bring Mair to leave his home that morning with a sawn-off shotgun and a seven-inch knife. The accounts that emerged in the weeks after Cox’s murder dwelt on many details of Mair’s previously blameless life. But more than anything else, they repeatedly echoed the words of a woman who runs a meditation centre in Mair’s local area, which he visited the evening before he killed Jo Cox: ‘He just seemed a really lonely guy who wanted someone to talk to.’

It is worth knowing that my friend Tom finds little satisfaction in his daily life. He does not enjoy his work and has never had a romantic relationship. His part of Oxford is thick with cultural diversity but he has few friends there. A mutual friend once described Tom as seeming spiritually wounded. Like Mair, he exudes an aura of biting loneliness.

‘Loneliness is the common ground of terror’ – and not just the terror of totalitarian governments, of which Hannah Arendt was thinking when she wrote those words in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It also generates the sort of psychic terror that can creep up on a perfectly ordinary individual, cloaking everything in a mist of urgent fear and uncertainty.

By ‘loneliness’ Arendt did not simply mean solitude, in which – as she points out – you have your own self for consolation. In the solitude of our minds, we engage in an internal dialogue. We speak in two voices. It is this internal dialogue that allows us to achieve independent and creative thought – to weigh strong competing imperatives against each other. You engage in it every time you grapple with a moral dilemma. Every clash of interests, every instance of human difference evokes it. True thought, for Arendt, involved the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. True loneliness, therefore, was the opposite. It involved the abrupt halting of this internal dialogue: ‘the loss of one’s own self’ – or rather, the loss of trust in oneself as the partner of one’s thoughts. True loneliness means being cut off from a sense of human commonality and therefore conscience. You are left adrift in a sea of insecurity and ambiguity, with no way of navigating the storms.

Adolf Eichmann was a senior SS officer who was involved first in the voluntary emigration of Jews, then in their forced deportation, and finally in their extermination. According to Arendt, Eichmann exhibited just such loneliness. He had an ‘almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view’ – to empathise in a way that would have meant stepping outside his own Nazi worldview. When questioned about his past by a Jewish policeman in Israel, he defaulted to self-pitying explanations about why he had not been promoted to a higher rank in the SS: ‘Whatever I prepared and planned, everything went wrong … whatever I desired and wanted and planned to do, fate prevented it somehow.’ As Arendt drily notes, it didn’t occur to Eichmann that his interviewer was unlikely to value a rapid rise through the ranks of the SS in the same way that Eichmann himself did.

It was loneliness, Arendt argued, that helped Eichmann and countless others – who might otherwise be models of amiability, kind to their subordinates and inferiors (as Eichmann was reported to be) – to give themselves over to totalitarian ideologies and charismatic strongmen. These totalitarian ideologies are designed to appeal to those who struggle with the internal moral dialogue that Arendt valued as the highest form of thought
.


Continues: https://aeon.co/essays/loneliness-is-th ... -extremism
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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 25, 2018 6:36 am

Harold Covington, ROT IN HELL!

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This guy lived 64 years too long.

Harold Covington, a longtime neo-Nazi activist with a history spanning four decades and has been seen as both a leader and a pariah within those circles, died July 21 at the age of 64.

“It is with a heavy heart I must inform you all that Harold Armstead Covington, founder of the Northwest Front, passed away last week in his apartment in Bremerton, WA,” a post read on the website of the group he founded to facilitate the “Northwest Imperative” an attempt to make the Pacific Northwest a Whites-Only homeland. “Thankfully, preparations were made and the Party continues to operate in service of the Northwest Imperative.”

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Harold Covington, far right stands with Frank Colin and other members of the National Socialist Party of America in a documentary video still.

Born in Burlington, North Carolina, Covington served in the U.S. Army and in 1972 while still enlisted, joined the National Socialist White People’s Party. He eventually moved to apartheid South Africa, and later to Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), where he became a founding member of the Rhodesian White People’s Party, only to be deported in 1976 after threatening a Jewish congregation. Upon his return, he joined the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA), a Chicago-based organization founded by Frank Collin that is best known for their 1977 legal battle stemming from their plans to march in the Chicago suburb of Skokie. Covington, served as Colin’s second-in-command and would routinely deflect attention away from Colin’s Jewish ancestry, but Colin would eventually be ousted after being convicted for molesting two 10-year-old boys. Frazier Glenn Miller, who is currently on death row for the 2014 murder of three persons in the Overland Park Jewish Community Center and the Village Shalom retirement home, both in Overland Park, Kansas, was a member of Covington’s North Carolina unit of the NSPA. Covington became president of the NSPA and in 1980 lost a Republican primary run for attorney general of North Carolina. He resigned his presidency in 1981 and eventually moved to the United Kingdom, helping to organize the neo-Nazi terrorist organization Combat-18. Returning to the United States, he started the National Socialist White People’s Party, but had to stop using the name when he was sued for copyright infringement by the George Lincoln Rockwell Foundation, Inc.

By this time Covington had begun to be seen by others within neo-Nazi circles as a government informant and secretly Jewish. Some blowback came because of unsubstantiated claims by him such as saying he served in the Rhodesian Army and how he had a connection with John Hinckley, the attempted assassin of President Ronald Reagan, but especially because of his penchant to attack other leaders within those circles, particularly those who attacked him.

Still, Covington managed to influence those like mass shooter Dylann Roof, who cited him as such in an online manifesto found after he shot and killed nine Black church goers at Emanuel African Methodist Church. Covington, in turn, referred to the shooting as “a preview of coming attractions”.

The Northwest Front blog had not been updated since Thanksgiving until today, when the announcement of Covington’s death was announced.


http://idavox.com/index.php/2018/07/24/ ... t-in-hell/








American Dream » Sun Jun 28, 2015 5:54 pm wrote:The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL and Operation Gladio --Update 6/28/15: The Plot Thickens

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UPDATE 6/28/15:

It would seem that Dylann Storm Roof name checked the writings of yet another individual closely linked to the old Posse Comitatus/Aryan Brotherhood network noted above in his manifesto. Raw Story reports:

"Dylann Roof refers to Harold Covington’s white separatist group, the Northwest Front, in his alleged manifesto. The rightwing sci-fi writer distances himself from the shooting, but his followers speculate if his work influenced Roof’s actions..

"The racist manifesto and photos apparently posted by Roof makes mention of the Northwest Front, created by Covington, a former member of the American Nazi party who traveled to South Africa and Rhodesia in order to agitate for white power. In the accompanying photos, Roof wore patches with Rhodesian and apartheid-era South African flags on them...

"The Roof killings are not the first time Covington’s name has come up in connection with an allegedly racist murder. Covington was part of a group of white supremacists in the 1970s who massacred black people at a rally in Greensboro (Covington didn’t kill anyone and wasn’t in attendance on the day of the violence). He was also at one time close with Frazier Glenn Miller, who is charged with killing a one woman, a 69-year-old Jewish man and that man’s 14-year-old grandson in front of their temple last year..."


The American Nazi Party has been linked to deep intrigues, as I noted before here.

Covington's one time close friend Frazier Glenn Miller was also enlisted as an FBI informant for a time. Covington, who like many of the white supremacists considered in this article, is a former military man. During the mid-1970s he turned up in South Africa and later Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he claimed to have worked as a mercenary. There is no evidence for this claim but he did indeed play a role in creating the Rhodesian White People's Party as well as a group called South African Friends of the Movement. The above-mentioned World Anti-Communist League (WACL) and American Security Council (ASC) had extensive dealings with the governments of Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia during this time, but I have been unable to link either of Covington's groups to either international lobby group. But certainly they would be in keeping with the types of groups the WACL and ASC aligned themselves with in that part of the world.

Its also interesting to note that several of Covington's former allies in the white supremacist underground accused Covington of being a CIA asset shortly after the Greensboro massacre (which he was present for, along with Frazier Glenn Miller). Despite being sought by the FBI for questioning for his role in the massacre he was able to return to North Carolina unfettered. Much more on Covington and these allegations can be found here.

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an image from the aftermath of Greensboro

Again, I would like to emphasize that there is no evidence at all indicating that Roof made contact with Covington, August Kreis or the Council of Conservative Citizens. But it certainly seems to stretch coincidence that Roof's interests would intersect with some many groups and individuals with possible deep backgrounds.

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Covington



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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 30, 2018 4:46 pm

How White Nationalism Courts Internet Nerd Culture

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White supremacists often pass off pseudo-science as absolute fact in a gambit for legitimacy in pushing their ideas and agendas. IQ is a pseudo-science that white supremacists have clung to for decades and is re-emerging in commonly shared memes. The IQ pseudo-science “facts” most of those memes and youtube videos cite is from one particular book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray that collected much of the bad bogus science on biological determinism and racist prejudice and compiled it into one text. The Bell Curve at the time of publication was lauded as scientific and unbiased. New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan defended devoting an entire magazine issue to promoting the book saying that, “The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief.”¹ Other critics at the time as well promoted the book as sound science. However, since then the research and data has been debunked. Adolph Reed described The Bell Curve thusly: “What really drives this book, and reflects the diabolism of the Murray/Herrnstein combination, is its claim to demonstrate black intellectual inferiority. They use I.Q. to support a ‘twofer’: opposition to affirmative action, which overplaces incompetent blacks, and the contention that black poverty derives from the existence of an innately inferior black underclass. … The Bell Curve is embedded in the intellectual apparatus of the crypto-fascist right.”²

The claims with in The Bell Curve had already been thoroughly debunked more than a decade prior by Steven Jay Gould’s classic work on the pseudo-science behind eugenics, The Mismeasure of Man. But the 1994 public enthrallment with The Bell Curve and its garbage science remains, especially in white supremacist circles where sections are readily used as fact to persuade others. The research data that Murray and Herrnstein relied on for their central claims about the connection between race and intelligence was funded by the Pioneer Fund, described by the London Sunday Telegraph as a “neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far right in American politics.”³ The Pioneer Fund’s mission is to promote eugenics, a philosophy that maintains that genetically unfit individuals or races are a threat to society. The cited research that was used in the book is just as questionable as its funding. Richard Lynn the source of much the books claims on Asian IQs is described by Murray and Herrnstein as “a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences.”⁴ Lynn has stated, “What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples…. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”⁵ Which is a thinly veiled promotion of ethnic cleansing. If there was any doubt, Lynn makes clear which “incompetent cultures” need “phasing out” when he in 1994 clarified in an interview “Who can doubt that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contributions to civilization?”⁶

Murray and Herrnstein also relied heavily on the research of J. Philippe Rushton, who is once again funded by the same Pioneer Fund. Rushton’s work continued the Victorian pseudo-science of cranial measurement as measure of intelligence, but Rushton’s measurements of intelligence do not stop at measuring skulls branching into the size of breasts, buttocks and genitals as measurements of intelligence. Rushton told Rolling Stone that “It’s a trade-off: More brain or more penis. You can’t have everything.”⁶ Sexual deviancy aside, in an 1986 article Rushton claimed that the Nazi war machine owed its success and strength to racial purity, and stated that shifting demographics were endangering our “Northern European” western civilization. Rushton co-authored another paper that argued that blacks have a genetic propensity to contract AIDS because of their “reproductive strategy” of promiscuous sex, the debunked pseudo-science that different races of humans use r and K selection reproductive strategies.⁷ Rushton was also removed from public spaces like shopping malls on multiple occasions for yelling at people about their penis size and asking to know the distance that they could ejaculate, so much so that his university had to reprimand him for the continued behavior.The point being that the data The Bell Curve and other racial IQ pseudo-science is based on has massive credibility gaps.


Neo-Nazi groups often use statistics in order to pose as a legitimate political stance. These statistics are more often than not complete fabrications. The above image was heavily cited by those on the right, even to the now current POTUS, and it can be traced back the other above tweet posted by an account that’s avatar (the one that looks like a modified swastika) is actually the symbol of the neo-Nazi German Faith Movement.⁷ From the crime statistics that are blatantly false⁸ to the cited source of the “Crime Statistics Bureau” being something that does not even exist⁹, statistics like this are made up and shared online all the time to bolster a false sense of scientific legitimacy to what is only irrational racism. These lies should be seen for what they are and denounced, neo-Nazis pretend that falsified information can lend them scientific authority and legitimacy and it is dangerous because to the uninformed such lies may be taken as fact and open the door for further radicalization by the neo-Nazi recruiter or rhetoric. The people neo-Nazis target long for feeling intelligent, informed, rational, and scientific- and neo-Nazi groups are more than happy to manufacture falsehoods to feed those desires.

We are a visual species, images catch out attention far more than text and simple ideas by image spread far faster and wider than written ideas that take more time to digest and read. Memes are used by white supremacist groups as propaganda materials, created for viral spread and normalizing white nationalism. To many in the white supremacist groups memes are even cited during debate as one would normally cite a peer reviewed research paper. Similar to image macros and memes, youtube videos and channels promoting alternative facts have arisen. These videos, often unsourced or poorly sourced, are pushed as educational. This isn’t a new tactic, it’s similar in how VHS tapes like the 1993 “Waco: The Big Lie” which promoted the conspiracy idea that law enforcement murdered the Branch Davidians and along with Ruby Ridge was proof to the Aryan Nations that the Government was targeting white people. These tapes used to be passed around, spread, and mailed within neo-Nazi communities. Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, Daily Stormer, and Twitter in part are host to a modern resurgence of those neo-Nazi videos and articles. The modern versions are faster and more dangerous than the old mail-order tapes that they replaced due to the accessibility, ease of content creation, and that the target audiences teenage children or deeply isolated and emotionally insecure young men are often the most vulnerable for these manipulation tactics and lies especially when such propaganda videos come packaged with other appealing things like video games and anime. Youtube pundits will entertain and feed their viewers exactly what they want to hear. Especially among young people Youtube is often viewed as a primary news source.¹⁰ The audiences and fans trust and defend their favorite Youtube personalities and the videos made are seen as alternative news sources for current events. Many videos are baited as revealing the truth that has been suppressed only to their intelligent followers, with channels standing as single points of information and misinformation. The videos are quick to watch, easy to share and spread, and require low effort on the part of the person using them as educational material. A three minute Youtube video about Hitler loving animals is far more accessible to young people than accurate historical books that can seem long, boring, and tedious.


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Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 02, 2018 3:12 pm

The Fight Against the Far Right Requires Tackling White Nationalist Institutions

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Police search a protester at the entrance to a designated protest area outside the 2018 American Renaissance conference in Burns, Tennessee.

BY
Elizabeth KingAaron CynicTruthout
PUBLISHED
May 18, 2018


The dissolution of the Traditionalist Worker Party that occurred after its leader, Matthew Heimbach, was arrested for domestic violence charges in March has created a perception that the influence of the movement as a whole is waning. Because Heimbach had been a central figure among young white nationalists for years, his legal troubles, in particular, have led to a lot of declarations that the so-called “alt-right” is spiraling down the drain.

Yet recent writings on the state of the “alt-right” have not included much conversation about white nationalist institutions: publications, nonprofit organizations and “think tanks.” According to Isaacson, the broad nature of the “alt-right” has enabled far-right operators to spread their reactionary ideas — particularly their support for eugenics. This has occurred due to the influence of white nationalist institutions, which exist precisely to facilitate the spread of bigoted ideas.

How White Nationalist Institutions Spread Hate
White nationalist institutions have played a pivotal role over the decades for a movement that has always had to re-strategize its activism and optics after major scandals. In the 1970s and ’80s, members of various white nationalist groups were apprehended and brought up on charges in connection with committing violent crimes. Isaacson points to the murder of the Jewish radio host Alan Berg by the white separatist group The Order in 1984. “Because of the actions of coordinated forms of militancy, a lot of white nationalist leadership ended up getting trapped by the FBI even if they weren’t directly involved in these [crimes],” he told Truthout.

“As a result,” Isaacson says, “white nationalism through the ’90s moved away from formally organized forms of militancy, where instead there were one-man-show media outlets, such as White Aryan Resistance … and advocacy toward leaderless resistance or what they coined the ‘lone-wolf’ strategy.” Essentially, leaders within the white nationalist movement began advocating for “lone-wolf” activism to make it more difficult for people within the movement to get caught up in conspiracy charges. It was also during this period that Taylor founded the New Century Foundation, which publishes American Renaissance, and began holding biennial conferences.

In essence, magazines such as American Renaissance and “think tanks” such as Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute serve to help legitimize white supremacist and nationalist ideologies and make it easier for white nationalists to share their messages with a broader audience. By dressing up right-wing extremism and bigotry in the trappings of traditional academic disciplines, dangerous ideas such as eugenics can gain footholds closer to the mainstream.

While white nationalism has generally remained on the fringes of the right wing, many prominent members of the movement gained national notoriety in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. Far-right ideas though, go back much further than the Trump era. While the far right has created its own platforms (from Breitbart to the Daily Stormer to American Renaissance), it has also been given a voice in the mainstream.

“Bear in mind that when you talk about American Renaissance and you talk about even the [white supremacist] Council of Conservative Citizens … these were mainstream organizations at one point,” says Daryle Lamont Jenkins, executive director of One People’s Project, an organization that researches and monitors the far right. “You used to see them on C-SPAN all the time, the [American Renaissance] conference was broadcast on C-SPAN,” he recalled.

Jenkins pointed out the connections between some of the more extreme but less well-known names on the far right and more familiar far-right personalities. According to Jenkins, Peter Brimelow, editor of the far-right, anti-immigrant website VDARE, served as a mentor to Ann Coulter. Meanwhile Michelle Malkin, another conservative media star, was a contributor at the site. VDARE, which was founded in 1999, contributed $34,591 to help Spencer start up the alternative-right.com in 2010, according to tax documents. VDARE itself received $35,000 from the Pioneer Fund that same year.

“For years, I have been trying to tell people, look out for the Jared Taylors, look out for the Richard Spencers,” Jenkins says. “They weren’t going out there with the sieg heil-ing and the burning crosses; they were in your boardrooms and your schools and your congressional offices. That was their world. And we kept on saying, ‘Look these are the folks who want you to ignore them because they have a vested interest in being a part of today’s society.'”

Most people, unfortunately, did not heed these warnings until the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last summer, Jenkins says. At the convergence of white nationalists and supremacists ranging from neo-fascist cells to David Duke and Richard Spencer, counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed by James Fields, who marched with the fascist group Vanguard America at the rally before driving his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters.

How “Alt-Right” Institutions Get Embedded at Universities
Furthermore, demonstrations by groups such as these had been taking place across the country, many on college campuses, after Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos used lawsuits to force universities to host their events. Spencer is, of course, part of the far-right institution machine as president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist self-styled think tank. Spencer announced a hiatus from his months-long campus speaking tour in mid-March, citing “antifa” as his reason for stepping back. Since the announcement, reports have also revealed that he’s going broke.

Yet far-right extremists are not always just visitors to universities. As tax records from various white nationalist nonprofits show, some of these organizations have given large sums of money to various colleges and universities in the US and abroad, including Arizona State University, Drexel University, and the University of Western Ontario. The University of Western Ontario received $301,326 between 2002 and 2006, all of which went to the Canadian race scientist and former Pioneer Fund president J. Philippe Rushton, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (Rushton died in 2012). In other words, extremist nonprofits give money to ensure that their bigoted ideas are being “researched,” published and taught to students.

The nonprofit foundation called the Pioneer Fund, which was founded in 1937 by a eugenicist named Wickliffe Preston Draper, has given large amounts of money to university professors, and even had some professors head up the organization. Pioneer Fund gave startup funds to the National Policy Institute and the New Century Foundation. Pioneer Fund gave more than $2.1 million to nearly two-dozen universities or institutions connected to them between 2001 and 2015, in the US and abroad.

Obtaining outside grants for their scholars “is something that universities love,” says Isaacson, “because it means they don’t have to pay them that much, and also gives them the kind of prestige for having received grants for their research.” By pushing academic arguments for white nationalism, he adds, these organizations are able to steer the larger conversation away from politics into pseudo-science.

The Pioneer Fund’s giving is not the only way by which white nationalists insinuate themselves on college campuses via charitable donations. Another major player in funneling white nationalist ideas to universities is William Regnery, who founded the National Policy Institute and the Charles Martel Society, which publishes the Occidental Quarterly, and claims its purpose is to “defend the cultural, ethnic, and racial interests of Western European peoples.” Regnery inherited a multimillion-dollar fortune and has a long history of backing both open white nationalist organizations, as well as more establishment conservative ones. Regnery’s family has had ties to mainstream conservatism for decades and began its influence in US politics in 1940 when his grandfather founded the America First Committee, a group dedicated to stopping the United States from entering World War II. The organization attracted Nazis but disbanded after Pearl Harbor. Regnery was affiliated with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a mainstream nonprofit conservative organization that recruits Republicans on college campuses. While he was ostracized from the GOP due to his views on race, his family helped endow the institute.

“Alt-Right” Institutions Help White Supremacists Hold On
Jenkins says that because of shifting demographics in the US, far-right extremists need think tanks and publications like American Renaissance to try to maintain even a limited acceptance of white supremacist ideology within the broader public. “The truth is, they’re basically trying to keep what it is that they had all along that we’ve just simply taken away from them,” he says. White nationalists “feel the need to reclaim that which has been lost to the rest of society;” and their institutions “make advancement more accessible” to them, he says.

As for what’s happening with the “alt-right” now, Isaacson says: “Anti-fascists have definitely made it difficult and have increased the pressure, but I would say that ultimately, these groups have been falling apart because they’ve been in-fighting and fracturing amongst themselves. But I don’t think that they would have done so if not for public opposition to them.”

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Activists don masks in response to police escorting a demonstrator out of the protest area for allegedly wearing a mask at a protest of the 2018 American Renaissance conference in Burns, Tennessee.

Jenkins adds that he believes anti-fascist activists are stronger than the white nationalists and that, as a result, the only way the white nationalists “have any kind of strength is when we simply do nothing about them when they come around.”

Researcher Isaacson says white nationalist institutions can be effectively de-platformed by targeting the people and venues that opt to host them. Protesters can’t expect to appeal to would-be hosts’ sense of morality, he says, because “they’ve already chosen to host these people in the first place.” Instead, anti-fascist activists “have to think about things in terms of cost-benefit analysis” for potential hosts. For example, American Renaissance was forced to cancel its 2010 and 2011 conferences after anti-racist activists protested against the hotels American Renaissance had booked.

Isaacson also points to anti-fascist protesters who used militant direct action tactics when Yiannopoulos, who was at that time still a writer for far-right website Breitbart, spoke at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017. Some protesters set small fires and broke windows of the building where Yiannopoulos was speaking, leading the school to cancel the remainder of his events scheduled for that week. “But it doesn’t have to look that militant,” he says. “There are a number of ways that this can be done.”


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