The Little Führer

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The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 14, 2015 10:39 pm

The Little Führer

A day in the life of the newest leader of white nationalists

Late at night on June 17, after he and his wife had gone to bed, Matthew Heimbach’s phone rang on his nightstand. On the other end of the line was a man from the South Carolina field office of the FBI. The man asked Heimbach if he knew a man called Dylann Roof and, if so, if he knew where Roof was. Heimbach told the officer that he had never heard of Roof and wondered what the call was about. Without explaining further, the officer thanked him and hung up.

“That’s when things got weird,” Heimbach says. Soon calls were coming in from associates who had all gotten similar calls from the FBI, and they were all now wondering the same thing: Who was Dylann Roof, and why hadn’t any of them heard of him until tonight?

“None of us had ever even heard the name Dylann Roof before,” Heimbach says. “Now he was all anyone was talking about.”

Heimbach is the leader and founder of the Traditionalist Youth Network, a nationalist high school and college organization that, according to its website, aims to speak against “the united voices of decadence, individualism, Marxism and modernity.” While the group claims to accept members from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, he and his comrades have been called Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists. The Southern Poverty Law Center once labeled him the Little Fuhrer, a charge he found ridiculous because he is not a National Socialist. This, presumably, was why, when a white supremacist gunned down nine congregants in a historically black church in Charleston, the FBI called him.

In the days after the massacre, everyone was trying to figure out why no one had heard of Roof before. The incident sent shockwaves through American far right communities, in which everyone seemed completely baffled as to who Roof was. To many, that fact alone was proof enough of a false flag operation: an operation orchestrated by the federal government to either — depending on whom you ask — malign and break the far right movement in America or provide an excuse to disarm American patriots in order to bring about a Barack Obama–led socialist Islamic police state. Heimbach wondered how he could have missed Roof’s online presence and, had he known about him, if there was something he could have done to channel his violent impulses into political action.

“We need to use the tools that we have,” he says from behind the wheel of his silver 2001 Toyota Corolla, which he named Serenity after the spaceship in the sci-fi TV show “Firefly.” It was mid-July, a couple of weeks after he returned from Charleston, where he laid down flowers at the site of the massacre. “We live in a political system, and if you want to effect change, the way to go about that needs to be political. Violence is never right.”

Image
Mathew Heimbach, left, is something of an iconoclast in white nationalist circles. He believes the United States should be divided into ethnically and culturally homogenous states. "I support white power, black power, brown power and yellow power,'' he says.

Nationalism is the belief that nationality and ethnicity is or should be one and the same. White nationalists espouse white separatism and often, but far from always, the superiority of the white race over others. In that context, Heimbach is somewhat of an iconoclast on the American nationalist scene, at times seeming to identify more with the black power ideology of the Black Panthers or the political savvy of Hamas and Hezbollah than with neo-Nazis, Klansmen and skinheads.

He became known in 2012 when he founded the White Student Union, a white pride organization that patrolled the Towson University campus in Maryland to protect students from a perceived wave of black-on-white crime. Since then, he has proved adept at angering anti-racists and racists equally. At an annual conference for Stormfront, one of the world’s largest white nationalist online forums, in November last year, he managed to get himself barred from all future Stormfront events by giving a speech titled “Death to America,” in which he called for nothing short of the complete dismantling of the United States.

“I support white power, black power, brown power and yellow power,” Heimbach says. “All races should be the dominant political force in their region. That is why America needs to be divided into smaller, ethnically and culturally homogenous states. In countries where races are mixed, one race will always dominate the others. That is why we need separation. Not because the white race is better than the black race. We need to stop the hate and separate.”

Still, for all his talk about respect for other races, his politics, like most others on the far right, has a prominent streak of anti-Semitism. He firmly believes that the Jews are working diligently behind the scenes to eradicate the white race, faith and culture. “We can’t win against them by arguing,” he said at the Stormfront conference. “You can’t out-Jew the Jew. It’s like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are at chess, eventually someone’s going to knock the board over and poop on it. Let’s stop worrying about out-Jewing them or outsmarting them. Let’s just stand for what we believe in, which is faith, family and folk — the three things that make us a nation.”


Continues at: http://projects.aljazeera.com/2015/07/hate-groups/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby Nordic » Thu Oct 15, 2015 1:00 am

Weird. The photographer seemed to have a mandate to make these guys look as good as possible. And the photos the editors chose as well.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby coffin_dodger » Mon Oct 19, 2015 5:44 pm

^^Yep, there's a new game in town, but really, it's a very old game - one that gets rolled out after it's been forgotten from one generation to the next, or in desperate times.

The Western System is under inordinate pressure. The momentum has been building relentlessly since the facade fell from the banking system in 2008. The Western System functions most effectively when it's own passive, coersed general population is, in the main, more content than not.

Each new revelation since 2008 has brought the tipping point between content and malcontent perilously closer. The System must react. But The System is incapable of offering an alternative to itself, for obvious reasons. Power in the hands that control it.

In the event that there is no alternative acceptable to The System (there never is as far as The System is concerned) and with increasing calls for change, The System has little choice but to point backwards (always backwards!) towards hateful ideaologies - ideas that are repellent, especially when viewed through the lens of now.

Ideas that make The System look acceptable, by comparison.

The technologically-advanced West has been locked in this non-event horizon since the late 40's. Historically, war between advanced Western nations (not proxies) was sufficient to make the general population at home thankful and indulgent of The System at the cease of hostilities. This is no longer an option to pacify and distract. And for an increasingly sophisticated population, other, more subtle measures, have been required.

The constantly present demon of Fascism has been kept alive and well, serving as a fear-inducing, stomach churning possibilty, whilst The System itself indulges in a little of what it decries - abroad.

Intermingling real-life lunatics with System-shills - ratcheting up the rhetoric when required - has become a fine art.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby 8bitagent » Mon Oct 19, 2015 10:17 pm

For those keeping tabs on American racist groups, there's a newer strain that's emerged in recent years on youtube and elsewhere of racist networks and speakers trying to rebrand themselves.
They often call themselves "Race Realists", and try and distance themselves from what they say is the "buffoonery" of skinheads and the Klan. I sat through some of the David Duke guest rant on Alex Jones to try and understand this new line of re-dressed racism. Which lead to some links to other new far right websites and youtube channels. In essence what they've done is to now play this "all lives matter" notion. That all races and cultures are at risk of being homogenized and broken up. They often talk about the evils of war, how all races and cultures deserve preservation, etc. However the one unifying theme of this new white racialist movement is an obsession of a secret Jewish hand behind everything. While rebranded European neo Nazi groups and people now vocally support Israel, this new American far right movement seems to be hedging all its focus on an anti Israel/Jewish position.

All the reports keep coming back: radicalized white fringe males are the leading cause of terrorism in America, not radicalized Muslims. Essentially it's the same 90's era militia/nazi sort of fringe threat, just without the media wanting to acknowledge it in a post 9/11 time period. No doubt crocodile tears when groups like the one mentioned in the article or S---f---t says they feel sorrow for the Charleston massacre.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby 8bitagent » Mon Oct 19, 2015 10:21 pm

coffin_dodger » Mon Oct 19, 2015 4:44 pm wrote:^^Yep, there's a new game in town, but really, it's a very old game - one that gets rolled out after it's been forgotten from one generation to the next, or in desperate times.


The constantly present demon of Fascism has been kept alive and well, serving as a fear-inducing, stomach churning possibilty, whilst The System itself indulges in a little of what it decries - abroad.

Intermingling real-life lunatics with System-shills - ratcheting up the rhetoric when required - has become a fine art.


It's why the ever looming specter of a Trump presidency seems less and less jokey, and all the more horrifying as each month and poll passes. Rebranding fascism as anti-war and 'bucking the system' was kind of genius.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 20, 2015 8:20 pm

The Fearful and the Frustrated

Donald Trump’s nationalist coalition takes shape—for now.

BY EVAN OSNOS

When the Trump storm broke this summer, it touched off smaller tempests that stirred up American politics in ways that were easy to miss from afar. At the time, I happened to be reporting on extremist white-rights groups, and observed at first hand their reactions to his candidacy. Trump was advancing a dire portrait of immigration that partly overlapped with their own. On June 28th, twelve days after Trump’s announcement, the Daily Stormer, America’s most popular neo-Nazi news site, endorsed him for President: “Trump is willing to say what most Americans think: it’s time to deport these people.” The Daily Stormer urged white men to “vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.”

Ever since the Tea Party’s peak, in 2010, and its fade, citizens on the American far right—Patriot militias, border vigilantes, white supremacists—have searched for a standard-bearer, and now they’d found him. In the past, “white nationalists,” as they call themselves, had described Trump as a “Jew-lover,” but the new tone of his campaign was a revelation. Richard Spencer is a self-described “identitarian” who lives in Whitefish, Montana, and promotes “white racial consciousness.” At thirty-six, Spencer is trim and preppy, with degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago. He is the president and director of the National Policy Institute, a think tank, co-founded by William Regnery, a member of the conservative publishing family, that is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the United States and around the world.” The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Spencer “a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old.” Spencer told me that he had expected the Presidential campaign to be an “amusing freak show,” but that Trump was “refreshing.” He went on, “Trump, on a gut level, kind of senses that this is about demographics, ultimately. We’re moving into a new America.” He said, “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” but he did believe that Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have—that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon. I think he is the one person who can tap into it.”

Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance, a white-nationalist magazine and Web site based in Oakton, Virginia, told me, in regard to Trump, “I’m sure he would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.”

From the beginning of the current race, the conservative establishment has been desperate for Trump to be finished. After he disparaged the war record of Senator John McCain, the New York Post gave him a front-page farewell—“DON VOYAGE”—and a Wall Street Journal editorial declared him a “catastrophe.” But Trump carried on—in part because he had activated segments of the electorate that other candidates could not, or would not. On July 20th, three days before his trip to Texas, Ann Coulter, whose most recent book is “¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole,” appeared on Sean Hannity’s show and urged fellow-Republicans to see Trump’s summer as a harbinger. “The new litmus test for real conservatives is immigration,” she said. “They used to say the same thing about the pro-life Republicans and the pro-gun Republicans, and, ‘Oh, they’re fringe and they’re tacky, and we’re so embarrassed to be associated with them.’ Now every one of them comes along and pretends they’d be Reagan.”

From the pantheon of great demagogues, Trump has plucked some best practices—William Jennings Bryan’s bombast, Huey Long’s wit, Father Charles Coughlin’s mastery of the airwaves—but historians are at pains to find the perfect analogue, because so much of Trump’s recipe is specific to the present. Celebrities had little place in American politics until the 1920 Presidential election, when Al Jolson and other stars from the fledgling film industry endorsed Warren Harding. Two decades ago, Americans were less focussed on paid-for politicians, so Ross Perot, a self-funded billionaire candidate, did not derive the same benefit as Trump from the perception of independence.

Trump’s signature lines—“The American dream is dead” and “We don’t have victories anymore”—constitute a bitter mantra in tune with a moment when the share of Americans who tell Gallup pollsters that there is “plenty of opportunity” has dropped to an unprecedented fifty-two per cent; when trust in government has reached its lowest level on record, and Americans’ approval of both major parties has sunk, for the first time, below forty per cent. Matthew Heimbach, who is twenty-four, and a prominent white-nationalist activist in Cincinnati, told me that Trump has energized disaffected young men like him. “He is bringing people back out of their slumber,” he said.

Ordinarily, the white-nationalist Web sites mock Republicans as Zionist stooges and corporate puppets who have opened the borders in order to keep wages low. But, on July 9th, VDARE, an opinion site founded to “push back the plans of pro-Amnesty/Immigration Surge politicians, ethnic activists and corrupt Big Business,” hailed Trump as “the first figure with the financial, cultural, and economic resources to openly defy elite consensus. If he can mobilize Republicans behind him and make a credible run for the Presidency, he can create a whole new media environment for patriots to openly speak their mind without fear of losing their jobs.” The piece was headlined “WE ARE ALL DONALD TRUMP NOW.”

Trump’s admirers hear in his words multiple appeals. Michael Hill heads the Alabama-based League of the South, a secessionist group that envisions an independent Southern republic with an “Anglo-Celtic” leadership. In 1981, Hill began teaching history at Stillman College, a historically black college in Tuscaloosa. He applied for jobs at other schools, and was turned down, which he attributes to affirmative action. In 1994, he co-founded the League, which put him at odds, he said, with “civil-rights-age, older black faculty and administrators, looking down their nose at this uppity white boy coming out here, talking about the Confederate flag and all that kind of stuff.” In 1999, he left Stillman. He told me, “If academia is not for me, because of who I am—a white Southern male, Christian, straight, whatever—then I’m going to find something that is. I’m going to fight this battle for my people.” Hill was moved by Trump’s frequent references to Kathryn Steinle, a thirty-two-year-old woman who, on July 1st, was walking with her father on a pier in San Francisco when she was fatally wounded in what police described as a random shooting. When police arrested Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a repeat felon who had been deported from the United States five times, Trump adopted the story of “that beautiful woman” as “another example of why we must secure our border immediately.” Hill told me, “That struck such a nerve with people, because a lot of this political stuff is abstract, but, as a father, I’ve got a daughter as well, and I could just see myself holding my daughter, and her looking up at me and saying, ‘Help me, Daddy.’ ” Hill, who condemns immigration and interracial marriage and warns of the influence of “Jewry,” said, “I love to see somebody like Donald Trump come along. Not that I believe anything that he says. But he is stirring up chaos in the G.O.P., and for us that is good.”

I joined Hill at a League of the South meeting one afternoon in July, at its newly built headquarters, on a couple of verdant acres outside Montgomery, Alabama. It was the League’s annual conference, and there were about a hundred men and women; the older men were in courtly suits or jackets, and the younger set favored jeans, with handguns holstered in the waistband. The venders’ tables had books (“The True Selma Story,” “Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan”), stickers (“The Federal Empire Is Killing the American Dream”), and raffle tickets. The prize: a .45-calibre Sig Sauer pistol.

After years of decline, the League has recently acquired a number of younger members, including Brad Griffin, a thirty-four-year-old who writes an influential blog under the name Hunter Wallace. Short and genial, he wore Top-Siders, khaki shorts, and a polo shirt. As we talked, Griffin’s eyes wandered to his two-year-old son, who was roaming nearby. Griffin told me that he embraced white nationalism after reading Patrick Buchanan’s “Death of the West,” which argued, in Griffin’s words, that “all of the European peoples were dying out, their birthrates were low, and you had mass immigration and multiculturalism.” Griffin once had high hopes for the Tea Party. “They channelled all that rage into electing an impressive number of Republicans in the South, but then all they did was try to cut rich Republicans’ taxes and make life easier for billionaires!” he said. “It was all hijacked, and a classic example of how these right-wing movements emerge, and they’re misdirected into supporting the status quo.”

Griffin had recently told his readers that his opinion of Donald Trump was “soaring.” He sees Trump’s surge as a “hostile takeover of the Republican Party. He’s blowing up their stage-managed dog-and-pony show.” Griffin is repelled by big-money politics, so I asked why he spoke highly of Trump. “He’s a billionaire, but all of these other little candidates are owned by their own little billionaires.” He mentioned Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. “So I think Trump is independent.”

The longer I stayed, the more I sensed that my fellow-attendees occupied a parallel universe in which white Americans face imminent demise, the South is preparing to depart the United States, and Donald Trump is going to be President. When Hill took the stage, he told his compatriots that the recent lowering of the Confederate flag was just the beginning. Soon, he warned, adopting the unspecified “they,” they will come for the “monuments, battlefields, parks, cemeteries, street names, even the dead themselves.” The crowd was on its feet, cheering him on. “This, my friends, is cultural genocide,” he said, adding, “Often, as history has shown, cultural genocide is merely a prelude to physical genocide.” I ducked out to catch a flight to Des Moines: Trump was speaking the next day in Iowa.


Trump has always weaved in and out of racially charged controversies. In 2000, he secretly ran ads opposing a Catskills casino backed by the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, because it would rival his businesses in Atlantic City. Beneath a picture of drug paraphernalia, the ad asked, “Are these the new neighbors we want?” Tribal leaders denounced the message as “racist and inflammatory,” and Trump and his associates were fined by New York State for concealing the true source of the ads. In March, 2011, Trump, who was considering a Presidential run, resurrected the crackpot theory that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, declaring, “I want him to show his birth certificate.” (It had already been publicly available for more than three years.) Trump’s declaration gave the issue new prominence. At the time, Trump’s on-again, off-again political adviser, the former Nixon aide Roger Stone, said that the decision to become a birther was “a brilliant base-building move.”

Trump’s phantasmagorical visions of marauding immigrants are part of a genre in which immigration and race are intermingled. In recent years, hoaxes and theories that were once confined to the margins have been laundered through mainstream media outlets. In 2013, Fox News repeatedly broadcast warnings about the “knockout game,” based on a self-published book by the white nationalist Colin Flaherty, which described black men randomly attacking white pedestrians. In a study published in the journal Race & Class, Mike King, a sociologist at SUNY-Oneonta, searched for a single actual case of the knockout game and found none. The news reports were largely patched together from unrelated viral videos of street violence. Bureau of Justice statistics show, King wrote, a “marked decrease in random assaults, including black assaults on white strangers.”

When Trump started emphasizing the mortal threat posed by undocumented immigration, America’s white nationalists rejoiced. “Why are whites supposed to be happy about being reduced to a minority?” Jared Taylor, of American Renaissance, asked me. “It’s clear why Hispanics celebrate diversity: ‘More of us! More Spanish! More cucaracha!’ ”

Taylor, who calls himself a “racial dissident,” was slim and decorous in gray trousers and a button-down when we met. For years, he and others have sensed an opportunity on the horizon to expand their ranks. When Obama was elected in 2008, Stormfront, the leading white-supremacist Web forum, crashed from heavy traffic. The Klan, weakened by lawsuits and infighting, barely exists anymore, but the Internet draws in young racists like Dylann Roof, who is accused of the June 17th massacre of nine people at a church in Charleston. The attack inspired a broad effort to remove the Confederate flag—from the state capitol and from the shelves of Amazon and of Walmart and a host of other retail stores. Defenders of the flag were galvanized, and they organized more than a hundred rallies around the South, interpreting the moment, months after racial unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore, as a sign of a backlash against political correctness and multiculturalism. Trump’s language landed just as American hate groups were more energized than at any time in years. Griffin, the blogger for the League of the South, told me that the removal of the flag had crystallized “fears that people have about what happens when we become a minority. What happens when we have no control over things? You’re seeing it play out right now.”

Over sandwiches in the dining room of Taylor’s brick Colonial, with views of a spacious back yard, a half-hour from downtown Washington, D.C., five of his readers and friends shared their views on race and politics, on the condition that I not use their full names. They were white men, in white-collar jobs, and each had a story of radicalization: Chris, who wore a pink oxford shirt and a tie, and introduced himself as an employee of “Conservativism, Inc.,” the Republican establishment, said that he had graduated from a public high school where there were frequent shootings, but he felt he was supposed to “ignore the fact that we were not safe on a day-to-day basis because of all of these blacks and the other immigrants in our schools.”

Jason, a muscle-bound commercial-real-estate broker in a polo shirt, said, “I’ve had personnel—in strict, frightened confidence—just tell me, ‘Hey, look, we’re just hiring minorities, so don’t appeal, don’t come back.’ ” This sense of “persecution,” as he called it, is widely held. In a study published in 2011, Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Samuel Sommers, a professor of psychology at Tufts, found that more than half of white Americans believe that whites have replaced blacks as “the primary victims of discrimination” today, even though, as Norton and Sommers write, “by nearly any metric—from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education—statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for Black than White Americans.”

The men around the table, unlike previous generations of white nationalists, were inspired not by nostalgia for slavery but by their dread of a time when non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the largest demographic group in America. They uniformly predicted a violent future. Erick, who wore a Captain America T-shirt and unwittingly invoked one of Trump’s signature phrases, told me, “The American dream is dead, and the American nightmare is just beginning. I believe it’s that way. I think that whites don’t know the terror that’s upon us.”

All the men wanted to roll back anti-discrimination laws in order to restore restrictive covenants and allow them to carve out all-white enclaves. Henry, a twenty-six-year-old with cropped blond hair, said, “We all see some hope in Donald Trump, because it’s conceivable that he could benefit the country in a way that we feel would be helpful.”

In early August, the Republican candidates convened in Cleveland for their first debate. I watched it on television with Matthew Heimbach, the young white nationalist in Cincinnati, and some of his friends. Heimbach, whom anti-racist activists call “the Little Fuhrer,” for his tirades against “rampant multiculturalism,” founded the Traditionalist Youth Network, a far-right group that caters to high-school and college students and pushes for the separation of blacks and whites. Stocky and bearded, Heimbach is ambitious. He graduated, in 2013, from Towson University, in Maryland, where he attracted controversy for forming a “white student union.” He has met with European Fascists, including members of the Golden Dawn, in Greece.

Heimbach rents part of a house on a placid side street and works as a landscaper. He and his wife recently had their first child, a boy named Nicholas. When I asked Heimbach how he got involved with Fascist politics, he laughed. “I was not raised like this,” he said. “I was raised to be a normal small-town Republican.” The son of teachers in Poolesville, Maryland, an hour from Washington, he, like Brad Griffin, credited Buchanan’s book “Death of the West” for seeding his conception of a desolate future. “Even if you play the game, even if you do everything right, then the future, when it comes to your income, when it comes to benefits, when it comes to everything, we are going to be the first generation in American history to be living worse than our parents.” He went on, “My own parents tell me, ‘Well, you should just shut up, you should go get a normal job, and get a two-car garage, and then you’ll be happy.’ ”

On the economics, Heimbach’s narrative is not wrong. During a half-century of change in the American labor market—the rise of technology and trade, the decline of manual labor—nobody has been hit harder than low-skilled, poorly educated men. Between 1979 and 2013, pay for men without a college degree fell by twenty-one per cent in real terms; for women with similar credentials, pay rose by three per cent, thanks partly to job opportunities in health care and education. Like many ultraconservatives, Heimbach had largely given up on the Republican Party. He said, “We need to get the white community to actually start speaking for the white community, instead of letting a bunch of Republicans that hate us anyway, and don’t speak for our values, be the unofficial spokespeople.”

During the debate, Mike Huckabee was asked how he might attract enough support from independents and Democrats to get elected, and Heimbach shouted at the TV, “You don’t need to! All you need to do is get the Republican base to get out and vote.”

On a couch across from the television, Tony Hovater, who used to be a drummer in a band and now works as a welder, said that, from what he has heard from Trump, he suspects that Trump shares his fears about immigration but can’t say so openly. Hovater told me, “I think he’s, like, dog-whistling,” adding, “He’s saying we should probably favor more European immigration, or maybe more of just a meritocracy sort of system, but he’s not coming out and saying it, because people will literally stamp him: ‘Oh, you just hate Mexicans.’ ” Hovater hopes that Trump will find a way to be more forthright: “Why not just say it?”

For his part, Hovater hopes to get into politics. This fall, he’s running for City Council in New Carlisle, Ohio, representing what he and Heimbach have named the Traditional Workers Party. He is taking inspiration from Trump’s populist success. “Just like we’re seeing with Trump, if the people honestly feel like you’re fighting for them, they’ll rally behind you,” he said. He knows that his views are “extreme,” but Trump’s success tells him that people support tone over substance. “People will be, like, ‘Well, I’ll take the fighter, even though I might disagree with him on some things,’ ” he said.

As the debate wound down, Trump, in his final statement, recited his mantra of despair. “Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t win anymore,” he said. “We can’t do anything right.” Matthew Parrott, a Web developer who was sipping coffee from a cup adorned with a swastika, said, “He was sassy without being comical. He struck exactly the tone he needed to give the people supporting him exactly what they want more of.” He went on, “The political system hasn’t been providing an outlet for social-conservative populism. You had this Ron Paul revolution, and all the stuff about cutting taxes, small government, and that’s just not the electrifying issue that they were expecting it to be. Simple folks, they want the border secure. They want what Donald Trump is mirroring at them. I think he’s an intelligent businessman who identified what the people want to hear. He’s made a living finding these sorts of opportunities.”


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/ ... rustrated/
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Oct 26, 2015 8:16 am

On Trump, Fascism, and Stale Social Science

By Matthew N Lyons | Sunday, October 25, 2015

Donald Trump's rise as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination set off a flurry of articles labeling him a fascist. These pieces -- which have appeared on sites as varied as Newsweek, Common Dreams, and CounterPunch -- are misguided. Calling Trump a fascist promotes a distorted understanding of fascism and obscures the fact that Trump's demagogic hate-mongering is deeply rooted in mainstream U.S. politics.

I was planning to blog about this until Chip Berlet, my friend and former co-author, made a lot of the points I wanted to, in a piece entitled "Corporate Press Fails to Trump Bigotry," for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Chip's article (I'll call it "Trump Bigotry") emphasizes the need for historical context and clear analysis, an approach that I strongly support. At the same time, I disagree with some of the specific ideas about the far right that the article presents. These ideas are drawn from recent scholarship about right-wing movements, but I think they make it harder for us to understand -- and effectively combat -- what many rightists are saying and doing today. This response to Chip's article is offered in the spirit of friendly, constructive criticism and moving the discussion forward.

"Trump Bigotry" debunks claims that Donald Trump is a fascist or that he represents "a new force in American politics." The article rightly places him in right-wing populist traditions that go back to Andrew Jackson in the 1820s, traditions that blend scapegoating, repression, and mass violence with distorted anti-elitism. Chip's article also outlines some of the historical dynamics of the past few decades -- ranging from the erosion of traditional social privileges to increased infusions of cash -- that have contributed to the rightist upsurge we see today. As Chip argues, there are dangerous synergies between Trump-style nativism and the fascism of, say, accused Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, but there are also vital differences between those rightists who work within the existing political system and those who seek to overthrow it.

This delineation isn't just an intellectual exercise -- it's about recognizing qualitatively different opponents so we can respond to them intelligently. As I wrote in the 2007 article "Is the Bush administration fascist?":

"militaristic repression -- even full-scale dictatorship [or racist populism, in Trump's case] -- doesn't necessarily equal fascism, and the distinction matters. Some forms of right-wing authoritarianism grow out of established political institutions while others reject those institutions; some are creatures of big business while others are independent of, or even hostile to, big business. Some just suppress liberatory movements while others use twisted versions of radical politics in a bid to 'take the game away from the left.' These are different kinds of threats. If we want to develop effective strategies for fighting them, we need a political vocabulary that recognizes their differences."


Continues at: http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/ ... ocial.html
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby 8bitagent » Tue Oct 27, 2015 4:53 am

Great articles American Dream. Though, right when I thought Donald Trump couldn't get any more wtf extremist; the very close GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson has been saying things that breaks the needle off the crazy chart. It's a sad surreal day in America when you almost consider Jeb Bush a moderate and wish he got the nomination. Not since Pat Buchanan in 1992 have I seen such unhinged extremist rhetoric. And Pat Buchanan wasnt a leading candidate by any measure. I'd like to think Bernie, or, begrudgingly Clinton, could easily defeat Trump or Carson next year. I just worry about the deep chasm of millennial's voter apathy to turn out like they did in 2008.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby jakell » Tue Oct 27, 2015 7:34 am

8bitagent » Tue Oct 20, 2015 2:17 am wrote:For those keeping tabs on American racist groups, there's a newer strain that's emerged in recent years on youtube and elsewhere of racist networks and speakers trying to rebrand themselves.
They often call themselves "Race Realists", and try and distance themselves from what they say is the "buffoonery" of skinheads and the Klan. I sat through some of the David Duke guest rant on Alex Jones to try and understand this new line of re-dressed racism. Which lead to some links to other new far right websites and youtube channels. In essence what they've done is to now play this "all lives matter" notion. That all races and cultures are at risk of being homogenized and broken up. They often talk about the evils of war, how all races and cultures deserve preservation, etc. However the one unifying theme of this new white racialist movement is an obsession of a secret Jewish hand behind everything. While rebranded European neo Nazi groups and people now vocally support Israel, this new American far right movement seems to be hedging all its focus on an anti Israel/Jewish position.

All the reports keep coming back: radicalized white fringe males are the leading cause of terrorism in America, not radicalized Muslims. Essentially it's the same 90's era militia/nazi sort of fringe threat, just without the media wanting to acknowledge it in a post 9/11 time period. No doubt crocodile tears when groups like the one mentioned in the article or S---f---t says they feel sorrow for the Charleston massacre.


It's often there, but some white nationalists play this down and even think it is irrelevent, ie, not a generally held obsession.
To those white nationalists who hold white exceptionalism as a central tenet, a 'hidden hand' is needed to explain the failure of this, hence the need to fall back on the usual Jewish malevolence theme, however, not all WN's are supremacists.

Maybe one day The Left will gets over it's usual shrug over these matters; that these people are still basically the same old knuckledraggers with a clever disguise, are simply playing tricks but without any fresh content. I suspect that may take a little while yet though, and a steady stream of longwinded copypasta will help with that.
Last edited by jakell on Tue Oct 27, 2015 9:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby 82_28 » Tue Oct 27, 2015 8:34 am

Here's the thing that I have come to some understanding about fascism is that it is universal unless you reject it straight away from youth. It is very easy to slip into its path because it is an ideology. Like most of us here, if not all, we see it. It is about control over what you find to be stupid and re framing through social engineering to make you /us idiots to show us where we are wrong. This is the crux. Humans are not idiots and there is much to learn in the sense of experience not the maxim of "I'm never going to do that again". It is that, yes, you do it again.

But it will never go away. Nothing to lament. Just do what you can in the moment that presents itself. Use the organization we have on hand at any given moment and apply it to all. Even fucking fascists. Help everything. I've saved fascists' lives just because of their fear when they were overwhelmed by an angry mob. I trust that they soon thereafter quit the gig.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Nov 02, 2015 12:45 pm

Donald Trump’s Violent, Criminal White Supremacist Base and His Public Sanction

Donald Trump's presidential run stopped being funny the minute someone decided to beat up a homeless Hispanic man in the name of it. And it is only getting worse. Let's call it out before someone gets killed.

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Idavox

Image

Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Miami on Friday saw protest by activists angry about his attacks on Hispanics, resulting in acts of violence that included one Trump supporter that was shown on video dragging and kicking one protester. It marks a trend in the Presidential campaign of the billionaire real estate developer, that unlike any of the other campaigns has seen his campaign punctuated with acts of violence as well as some individuals publicly declaring “White Power!” at his events.

The Florida Immigrant Coalition organized the protest where several persons disrupted Trump as he spoke. They were met with chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” and “USA! USA! USA!” before some Trump supporters took matters into their own hands. In one video, an unidentified White man wearing a red polo shirt is seen pulling protester Ariel Rojas by the back of his shirt, and when Rojas, a senior at Florida International University, falls to the ground, the man in the polo shirt then drags him along the floor towards the room’s exit and kicking him as he was still lying on the ground. Other Trump supporters also attacked protesters, one group grabbing their signs and tearing them up, and another reporting hitting a protester with a sign reading “The Silent Majority Supports Trump.” Trump did little to help deescalate the situation, shouting from the podium, “Don’t hurt them, don’t hurt them, don’t hurt them. You can get them out, but don’t hurt them. We don’t want anyone getting hurt. That’s what freedom of speech – it’s all freedom of speech.” Eventually police escorted protesters off the premises, although it is not known if action had been taken against the Trump supporters that assaulted them.

There has been at least four separate incidents of aggressive action to violence related to Trump’s campaign for president since he announced his run in June. In August, Scott and Steve Leader, two brothers from South Boston urinated on and beat a homeless Hispanic man as he slept outside a bus stop, one of the brothers telling police, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.” In September, one of Trump’s security detail took a sign from protesters outside Trump Tower in New York that read “Make America Racist Again!” – a play on Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” – and when one of them attempted to retrieve it, he was punched in the face by that security guard. A rally in Richmond, VA this month saw a number of scuffles between protesters and Trump supporters, one spitting in the face of a supporter, and another a well-known neo-Nazi from the Carytown section of Richmond named Caitlin Goode being captured on video shouting “White Power, you cunt!” to another supporter. Posting on Facebook under the name “Kaozz Veidt”, Goode said that the video was taken out of context. “She was yelling black power and I yelled white power back, to prove a point,” she posted on the ActiveRVA Facebook page. “Just goes to show you, context is important.”

This was the second time someone has been captured on video shouting White Power at a Trump rally, the first being at one held in Alabama, but Goode has a number of racist posts to various websites, including the Grio, where in 2012 she wrote in particular about her disdain for Black people. “Stealing land is what you Blacks are doing today,” she posted. “Race riots, yeah, that too. Robbing, murdering, gangs, senseless violence…all Blacks! In fact, these are things your ‘culture’ praises! Why don’t we study that during Black History Month? Oh wait, that’s right, the truth is ‘racist’ in you people’s eyes. It doesn’t sound good, so it’s racist.”


Continues at: http://idavox.com/index.php/2015/10/25/ ... -sanction/



American Dream » Tue Oct 20, 2015 7:20 pm wrote:The Fearful and the Frustrated

Donald Trump’s nationalist coalition takes shape—for now.

BY EVAN OSNOS


Trump has always weaved in and out of racially charged controversies. In 2000, he secretly ran ads opposing a Catskills casino backed by the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, because it would rival his businesses in Atlantic City. Beneath a picture of drug paraphernalia, the ad asked, “Are these the new neighbors we want?” Tribal leaders denounced the message as “racist and inflammatory,” and Trump and his associates were fined by New York State for concealing the true source of the ads. In March, 2011, Trump, who was considering a Presidential run, resurrected the crackpot theory that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, declaring, “I want him to show his birth certificate.” (It had already been publicly available for more than three years.) Trump’s declaration gave the issue new prominence. At the time, Trump’s on-again, off-again political adviser, the former Nixon aide Roger Stone, said that the decision to become a birther was “a brilliant base-building move.”

Trump’s phantasmagorical visions of marauding immigrants are part of a genre in which immigration and race are intermingled. In recent years, hoaxes and theories that were once confined to the margins have been laundered through mainstream media outlets. In 2013, Fox News repeatedly broadcast warnings about the “knockout game,” based on a self-published book by the white nationalist Colin Flaherty, which described black men randomly attacking white pedestrians. In a study published in the journal Race & Class, Mike King, a sociologist at SUNY-Oneonta, searched for a single actual case of the knockout game and found none. The news reports were largely patched together from unrelated viral videos of street violence. Bureau of Justice statistics show, King wrote, a “marked decrease in random assaults, including black assaults on white strangers.”

When Trump started emphasizing the mortal threat posed by undocumented immigration, America’s white nationalists rejoiced. “Why are whites supposed to be happy about being reduced to a minority?” Jared Taylor, of American Renaissance, asked me. “It’s clear why Hispanics celebrate diversity: ‘More of us! More Spanish! More cucaracha!’ ”

Taylor, who calls himself a “racial dissident,” was slim and decorous in gray trousers and a button-down when we met. For years, he and others have sensed an opportunity on the horizon to expand their ranks. When Obama was elected in 2008, Stormfront, the leading white-supremacist Web forum, crashed from heavy traffic. The Klan, weakened by lawsuits and infighting, barely exists anymore, but the Internet draws in young racists like Dylann Roof, who is accused of the June 17th massacre of nine people at a church in Charleston. The attack inspired a broad effort to remove the Confederate flag—from the state capitol and from the shelves of Amazon and of Walmart and a host of other retail stores. Defenders of the flag were galvanized, and they organized more than a hundred rallies around the South, interpreting the moment, months after racial unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore, as a sign of a backlash against political correctness and multiculturalism. Trump’s language landed just as American hate groups were more energized than at any time in years. Griffin, the blogger for the League of the South, told me that the removal of the flag had crystallized “fears that people have about what happens when we become a minority. What happens when we have no control over things? You’re seeing it play out right now.”

Over sandwiches in the dining room of Taylor’s brick Colonial, with views of a spacious back yard, a half-hour from downtown Washington, D.C., five of his readers and friends shared their views on race and politics, on the condition that I not use their full names. They were white men, in white-collar jobs, and each had a story of radicalization: Chris, who wore a pink oxford shirt and a tie, and introduced himself as an employee of “Conservativism, Inc.,” the Republican establishment, said that he had graduated from a public high school where there were frequent shootings, but he felt he was supposed to “ignore the fact that we were not safe on a day-to-day basis because of all of these blacks and the other immigrants in our schools.”

Jason, a muscle-bound commercial-real-estate broker in a polo shirt, said, “I’ve had personnel—in strict, frightened confidence—just tell me, ‘Hey, look, we’re just hiring minorities, so don’t appeal, don’t come back.’ ” This sense of “persecution,” as he called it, is widely held. In a study published in 2011, Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Samuel Sommers, a professor of psychology at Tufts, found that more than half of white Americans believe that whites have replaced blacks as “the primary victims of discrimination” today, even though, as Norton and Sommers write, “by nearly any metric—from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education—statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for Black than White Americans.”

The men around the table, unlike previous generations of white nationalists, were inspired not by nostalgia for slavery but by their dread of a time when non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the largest demographic group in America. They uniformly predicted a violent future. Erick, who wore a Captain America T-shirt and unwittingly invoked one of Trump’s signature phrases, told me, “The American dream is dead, and the American nightmare is just beginning. I believe it’s that way. I think that whites don’t know the terror that’s upon us.”

All the men wanted to roll back anti-discrimination laws in order to restore restrictive covenants and allow them to carve out all-white enclaves. Henry, a twenty-six-year-old with cropped blond hair, said, “We all see some hope in Donald Trump, because it’s conceivable that he could benefit the country in a way that we feel would be helpful.”

In early August, the Republican candidates convened in Cleveland for their first debate. I watched it on television with Matthew Heimbach, the young white nationalist in Cincinnati, and some of his friends. Heimbach, whom anti-racist activists call “the Little Fuhrer,” for his tirades against “rampant multiculturalism,” founded the Traditionalist Youth Network, a far-right group that caters to high-school and college students and pushes for the separation of blacks and whites. Stocky and bearded, Heimbach is ambitious. He graduated, in 2013, from Towson University, in Maryland, where he attracted controversy for forming a “white student union.” He has met with European Fascists, including members of the Golden Dawn, in Greece.

Heimbach rents part of a house on a placid side street and works as a landscaper. He and his wife recently had their first child, a boy named Nicholas. When I asked Heimbach how he got involved with Fascist politics, he laughed. “I was not raised like this,” he said. “I was raised to be a normal small-town Republican.” The son of teachers in Poolesville, Maryland, an hour from Washington, he, like Brad Griffin, credited Buchanan’s book “Death of the West” for seeding his conception of a desolate future. “Even if you play the game, even if you do everything right, then the future, when it comes to your income, when it comes to benefits, when it comes to everything, we are going to be the first generation in American history to be living worse than our parents.” He went on, “My own parents tell me, ‘Well, you should just shut up, you should go get a normal job, and get a two-car garage, and then you’ll be happy.’ ”

On the economics, Heimbach’s narrative is not wrong. During a half-century of change in the American labor market—the rise of technology and trade, the decline of manual labor—nobody has been hit harder than low-skilled, poorly educated men. Between 1979 and 2013, pay for men without a college degree fell by twenty-one per cent in real terms; for women with similar credentials, pay rose by three per cent, thanks partly to job opportunities in health care and education. Like many ultraconservatives, Heimbach had largely given up on the Republican Party. He said, “We need to get the white community to actually start speaking for the white community, instead of letting a bunch of Republicans that hate us anyway, and don’t speak for our values, be the unofficial spokespeople.”

During the debate, Mike Huckabee was asked how he might attract enough support from independents and Democrats to get elected, and Heimbach shouted at the TV, “You don’t need to! All you need to do is get the Republican base to get out and vote.”

On a couch across from the television, Tony Hovater, who used to be a drummer in a band and now works as a welder, said that, from what he has heard from Trump, he suspects that Trump shares his fears about immigration but can’t say so openly. Hovater told me, “I think he’s, like, dog-whistling,” adding, “He’s saying we should probably favor more European immigration, or maybe more of just a meritocracy sort of system, but he’s not coming out and saying it, because people will literally stamp him: ‘Oh, you just hate Mexicans.’ ” Hovater hopes that Trump will find a way to be more forthright: “Why not just say it?”

For his part, Hovater hopes to get into politics. This fall, he’s running for City Council in New Carlisle, Ohio, representing what he and Heimbach have named the Traditional Workers Party. He is taking inspiration from Trump’s populist success. “Just like we’re seeing with Trump, if the people honestly feel like you’re fighting for them, they’ll rally behind you,” he said. He knows that his views are “extreme,” but Trump’s success tells him that people support tone over substance. “People will be, like, ‘Well, I’ll take the fighter, even though I might disagree with him on some things,’ ” he said.

As the debate wound down, Trump, in his final statement, recited his mantra of despair. “Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t win anymore,” he said. “We can’t do anything right.” Matthew Parrott, a Web developer who was sipping coffee from a cup adorned with a swastika, said, “He was sassy without being comical. He struck exactly the tone he needed to give the people supporting him exactly what they want more of.” He went on, “The political system hasn’t been providing an outlet for social-conservative populism. You had this Ron Paul revolution, and all the stuff about cutting taxes, small government, and that’s just not the electrifying issue that they were expecting it to be. Simple folks, they want the border secure. They want what Donald Trump is mirroring at them. I think he’s an intelligent businessman who identified what the people want to hear. He’s made a living finding these sorts of opportunities.”


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/ ... rustrated/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Nov 02, 2015 12:54 pm

Let's call it out before someone gets killed.


Religious faith is such a mind-warping thing. Surely, if there's anything that can reverse social trends, it's a strongly worded essay calling out the bad behavior of others.

Behavior speaks louder than buzzwords, as ever: this call out is not even addressed to the offending party. Nay, it is a performance of concern to be circulated among the in-group. The author has no interest in changing minds or, indeed, even engaging with them.

And, thus do you win at losing!
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby coffin_dodger » Mon Nov 02, 2015 1:13 pm

The NewYorker is in no way biased. It is in no way mainstream. It speaks only the truth. :blankstare
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Nov 09, 2015 8:43 pm

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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 10, 2015 3:43 pm

"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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