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On the campus of Baylor University in Waco, Texas Thursday, bestselling author and editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire Ben Shapiro explained why the Left, which portrays itself as the great promoter and defender of science, frequently rejects it, discarding scientific evidence whenever it conflicts with progressive ideology.

Tonight Im talking about why the Left hates science, Shapiro began (video below). Now to a lot of folks on the Left, this sounds ridiculous. After all, its right-wingers who are climate deniers, science deniers, and they believe in that book, the Bible, and theyre all wild and crazy they dont believe in anything like the scientific method.But the truth is, right now many of the attacks on science are coming from the political Left.

Shapiro first zeroed in on the significant difference in the Left and Rights diverging views of human nature, the former pushing the idea of infinite human malleability, which posits that human beings can be altered from anything to anything, particularly by government coercion thus providing the impetus for top-down governmental control.

If you can remove the remediating institutions of society, human beings can be remade from the top down, Shapiro explained in summary of the Lefts view of an infinitely malleable human nature.The problem, Shapiro argued, is that this view is undermined by reality. Infinite engineering of humankind, unfortunately, tends to be undermined by the facts of human nature, he stated.

Conservatives view human beings in a more scientific way, Shapiro suggested, believing that we operate in part by a fixed human nature and accept the premise that human beings are happiest when they exercise reason in accordance with that nature.

While the Left likes to pretend that it loves science, Shapiro argued, much of what it terms science is not in fact science. As examples, Shapiro pointed to the Lefts embrace of political science and the social sciences, which often do not meet the rigorous standards of science.

What the Left actually means by science, Shapiro underscored, is anything that is not religion.

Thats because people on the secular Left see religion as an obstacle to progress all progress, the bestselling author explained. Theyre not merely concerned with Galileo who, by the way, was an ardent believer in the Divine. Theyre concerned that religion acts as a retrograde check on their ambitions to rewrite society, including the rewriting of fundamental societal truths, like distinctions between the sexes and the value of the family unit.

This animus for religion, said Shapiro, is why so many on the Left will routinely characterize science-based conservative positions as religious in nature.

As an example, he pointed to the Lefts criticism of pro-lifers, which focuses mainly on the fact that many pro-lifers believe in the Bible as a definitive authoritative source. While it may be true that pro-lifers are often people of faith, that point is simply a convenient strawman for the political Left, said Shapiro.

The distinction the Left attempts to impose between religion and science, Shapiro maintained, is ultimately false, resting on an utter misunderstanding of both science and religion.

Watch Shapiros speech below:

Shapiros speech at Baylor is part of the Young Americas Foundations Fred Allen Lecture Series. Last week, Shapiro visited the campus of Boston University to address the Lefts Claim that America was built on slavery, a view Shapiro argued is based on reductive presuppositions that result in a grim and flawed vision of what defines the country. (Watch the speech here.)

A week earlier, Shapiro spoke at Stanford University, focusing on the dangerous game being played by the Alt-Right, whose leaders he condemned as espousing racist and anti-Semitic views diametrically opposed to conservatism, and their counterparts on the radical Left, who attempt to brand conservatives as Alt-Right despite their glaringly diverging views. (Watch the speech here.)

Related: WATCH: Hecklers Attempt To Trap Ben Shapiro, Fail Miserably

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WATCH: Ben Shapiro: How The Left Pretends To Love Science But Actually Hates It - The Daily Wire

Mia Levine, Scarlet StaffNovember 22, 2019

Most people in todays world love social media. Popular social media apps include Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Each of these platforms has differing user factors and offer different types of content. Facebook is or supposedly is a way to connect with close friends and family. When I open Facebook, I tend to see photos posted by awkwardly-friended estranged relatives and baby pictures of my friends posted by their Great Aunt whom I do not know. Personally, Facebook feels like a more professional or family-friendly social media source, while other platforms such as Twitter feel completely different.

While Facebook is more image-based, Twitter is usually full of text chains posted within the 280- character limit. Twitter is a place where people ranging from Jojo Siwa to our own commander in chief Donald J. Trump to the average millennial can post whatever comes to mind at any given moment. Opening Twitter usually results in spending 30 minutes going through my personalized feed liking tweets I find funny or keeping up with angsty politicians and other political opinions. Most of my generation tend to pay attention to and listen to politics through various tweets rather than through people one knows on Facebook.

Starting this past fall, Facebook has come under a lot of fire in terms of its policies relating to political ads. Facebook had announced that it would not be fact-checking political speeches including various campaign financed ads. Essentially, they said that they would not remove any political advertisements.

Twitter responded to this by removing all political ads beginning soon after Facebooks announcement. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, said: This will be the broadest possible ban and will specifically cover ads regarding individual candidates and issues. Within Twitters terms and conditions they write anyone who is affiliated with a group either on- or offline that is found to engage in and/or promote violence against civilians to advance a political, religious and/or social cause is in violation of Twitter policy. However, Twitter still has thousands of users that spread lies and promote violence within their tweets. So then, if these new guidelines regarding political ad bans are to be implemented, how can users trust that Twitter will follow through when they have not clearly been able to complete their mission regarding average users?

Earlier this month, audio of Richard Spencer, an American Neo-Nazi and white supremacist, was leaked on twitter. The clip, allegedly recorded during the Summer of 2017, hears Spencer hurling racial and ethnic slurs in reference to the Unite the Right rally, an alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Within the clip, Spencer says my ancestors enslaved those pieces of f*!^%&g s&!t. While many see this phrase as Spencer clearly affirming and voicing his stance as both a racist and a white nationalist, Twitter does not feel that the audio bite violates their aforementioned policy. In a statement from the company, Twitter said that we have not received reports of content that would result in [Spencer being] suspended and that Spencer did not have any known affiliations to hate groups, though, in my opinion, both this specific clip and many other statements Spencer has made prove the contrary.

If Twitter is worried about advertising being able to target communities and ambush them with false information, then I do not understand why they are allowing the founder of a modern Neo-Nazi movement to maintain space on their platform. If Twitter wont allow prominent political figures to post ads and expand on their ideologies but allows Neo-Nazis to express their opinions, what does that say about the morality behind Twitters leaders and their future policies? Twitter bans political ads concerned with abortion and gun control but allows white-supremacists to boast their bigoted opinions on their platform. Jack Dorsey has a lot of explaining to do.

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Political Ads, Twitter, and Neo-Nazis - The Scarlet

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In September, the former darling of the alt-right, Milo Yiannopoulos, used the messaging app Telegram to complain to his followers that he was talking to the same 1,000 people, none of whom buy books, tickets or anything or donate and that he cant put food on the table that way. A case can be made that Yiannopoulos complaints display a bitterness at his shrinking audience and a diminished reach, following a period of relative fame as the alt-rights charismatic bad boy.

The main complaint Yiannopoulos is making, however, is that he is not creating enough revenue to financially keep afloat. Like other alt-right figureheads, he apparently relies on donations. Requests for donations are common across the far-right web. And while far-right personalities are not the only people asking for donations online, the constant, public referral to ones financial troubles is recurring.

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Within the far-right, requests for money include crowdfunding via donations through sites like Patreon, the constant reiterations by InfoWars host Alex Jones to buy his products and lengthy, emotional YouTube videos made by far-right activists and media personalities.

Begging for money is a well-known device of far-right agitators, and it by far exceeds the simple request to donate a few dollars every once in a while. Constant begging is not an indicator of mere grifting but has a number of different functions and benefits. For one, if people pay money for something instead of getting it for free, they tend to ascribe a higher value to it. So, besides the obvious benefit of generating revenue, the increased commitment of followers to figureheads alone could justify the permanent request for donations.

It stands to reason, however, that repeated and personal requests for money transcends this aim. To shine a light on todays far-right media personalities strategies, it helps to look at their ideological ancestors.

In the late 1930s, Theodor Adorno wrote in The Psychological Technique of Thomas Radio Addresses about the Christian fundamentalist Martin Luther Thomas. Adorno described the psychological tricks Thomas employed for his political, personal and financial gains. While a few of the devices seem like common rhetoric, such as referencing the good old times, some of them are rather unusual. One of these is what Adorno calls the great little man device.

The great little man is both weak and strong: weak insofar as each member of the crowd is convinced as being capable of identifying himself with the leader who, therefore, must not be superior to the follower; strong insofar as he represents the powerful collectivity which is achieved through the unification of those whom he addresses.

Requesting money, or begging, as Adorno puts it, is an important tool to construct this image: Financial worries are relatable to most people. Raising the issue of financial struggles in Yiannopoulos case that he allegedly cannot put food on the table is part of this great little man strategy. Adorno writes about Thomas: the way in which he discusses money with them is rather unusual. No consideration of dignity inhibits him from asking for money again and again All his speeches are interspersed with whining and pointedly shameless appeals for funds; one may say that he plays the beggar.

This, of course, contradicts the usual image as a leader that far-right figureheads often seek to convey. Yiannopoulos combines this begging attitude with personal disappointment in his followers who dont buy books and tickets and have thus failed him.

Yiannopoulos is by far not the only alt-right personality to use this strategy in his social media appearances. Richard Spencer, the most prominent figure of the alt-right, published a video requesting money for a legal fund for himself. These donations would help fund the lawsuit resulting from the deadly Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.

Likewise, Christopher Cantwell, depicted in a Vice documentary about the rally, begged for money in the aftermath of the event. Cantwell, often mockingly referred to as the crying Nazi, embodies the great little man in the performance which brought about his nickname. His crying is not a break in the performance, but a crucial part of it.

Adorno describes several other strategies that are tied in with the great little man device. For example, there is the indefatigability device, or claiming that the great little man works tirelessly for the cause, and that the opposition never stops, or the prosecuted innocence device claiming to have done no harm and yet being prosecuted by foes regardless.

What all of these methods have in common, and which make the great little man device quite effective, is the mixture of pettiness and grandeur, a combination commonly found throughout the far-right, where a sense of superiority (or supremacy) goes hand in hand with victim narratives. With these great little men making prominent comebacks, being aware of its implications and effectiveness is crucial for understanding far-right online culture.

*[The Centre for Analysis of the Radical Rightis a partner institution ofFair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorsown and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observers editorial policy.

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Great Little Men: Why the Alt-Right Begs for Money - Fair Observer

In an incredible twist of irony, Donald Trump Jr. was heckled off stage last week during a talk about his new book Triggered after he couldnt handle the onslaught of right-wing trolling at his event.

Trumps son being harassed from the right seemed surprising, but the heckling represented a new height for a growing movement thats been seeded by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist upstart whos been taking advantage of major tech platforms to gain prominence. The increasingly prominent racist had been feuding with Charlie Kirk, Don Jr.s friend and the founder of Turning Point USA, an organization for young conservatives with chapters at colleges nationwide.

After a Turning Point USA event last month in which Kirk defended the US relationship with Israel, Fuentes decided to sic his followers on Kirk and his organization, advising them to show up at his and other conservative events and manipulate the question and answer portions into confrontations designed to spread alt-right ideasin effect, make them real-life internet red-pilling sessions designed to win converts to the racist, far-right. Fuentes followers flooded the mics with questions about Israel, littering their queries with suggestions for the crowd and people watching the events livestream to Google far-right conspiracies, including anti-semitic ones.

Fuentes has harnessed tech platforms to help fuel his rise and to spread white nationalism, using at least one YouTube account and a verified Twitter handle, which hes deployed to rally his followers to turn out for Turning Points events.

Its unclear why Fuentes still has a presence on the platforms. On YouTube, where he hosts his show, hes repeatedly denied the holocaust and said demeaning things about gay people including slurs like faggot, both of which should be considered violations of YouTubes hate speech policy, which bans promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on attributes including Sex/Gender.

While Twitter has banned some white supremacists and stripped others of their verified badge, nether has happened with Fuentes. Instead the platform has emerged as a pivotal tool in his push to spread white nationalism. In 2017, he had barely 2,000 Twitter followers. He now has over 70,000, gaining 20,000 since he started targeting Turning Point USA events at the end of October, according to SocialBlade, a social media analytics website.

Its also possible that Fuentes actions violate both Twitter and YouTubes policies against coordinated abuse and harassment. Both companies have vague rules governing such violations, but in the past, Twitter has taken against users who took part in a coordinated harassment campaign telling journalists to learn to code in the wake of a large wave of media industry layoffs. The companies declined to answer questions for this piece, including whether Fuentes encouraging his followers to engage in a harassment campaign in which they spread antisemitic hoaxes would break their polices.

There is some precedent among tech companies for banning him. Reddit removed a subreddit in support of Fuentes earlier this month, according to The Daily Dot, but hasnt explained why it took down the group. The Daily Dot reported that it had been used to organize targeted harassment on Fuentess critics; Reddit did not respond to a Mother Jonesrequest for comment.

Joshua Citarella, an artist who researches and has written about fringe internet political trends, pointed out at least one instance where a Fuentes follower told viewers of a TPUSA event to Google an obscure antisemitic conspiracy prompting the most Google traffic its ever generated, according to the sites own search trends tool.

In the past, tech companies have been hesitant to act on problematic accounts on the right out of fear of sparking conservative outrage. While anti-immigration writer Michelle Malkin has supported Fuentes in his recent confrontations, many other conservatives have disavowed him, even saying that his ideas are Nazi ideas. Former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka even questioned why Fuentes has maintained his Twitter verification.

Actual Nazis seem to think that Fuentes is one of them, or at least on their side. Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has excitedly chronicled Fuentes campaign against Kirk and written guides educating budding, young neo-Nazi, Fuentes fanboys on how they can successfully troll Turning Points events and redpill new followers. One Stormer post urged Fuentes followers to shout suggestions for those watching in the crowd and on the livestream to Google specific terms about far-right, fringe conspiracies, either during the Q&A or, if they were removed from the event, as security escorted them out .

Another reason tech platforms might be slow to react to Fuentes, despite his explicit bigotry and harassment campaigns, is that hes taken steps to shield his racism. As opposed to figures like Richard Spencer, Fuentes avoids giving voice to outright white nationalism. If pressed, hell deny it while putting forward more palatable seeming positions that can be but arent always necessarily racist.

In his own presentation, Fuentes isnt an antisemite, hes just posing reasonable questionable questions about Israel. Fuentes doesnt believe in outlandish conspiracies about the extermination of white people, hes just worried about birthrates. Fuentes doesnt hate people of color and want an ethnostate, he just believes that its fine to raise the question because of how valuable free speech is.

But no matter how careful he is, Fuentes ends up breaking character a lot, revealing who he and his followers actually are. In a livestream offering realtime commentary on a Turning Point USA event, he repeatedly called one of the speakers, who is gay, a faggot. In a debate against progressive streamers, Steve Bonnell, who streams under the name Destiny, and the Young Turks Hasan Piker, Fuentes says that he disagrees with interracial marriage.

Right Wing Watchs Jared Holt has documented other recurring slips by Fuentes seemingly outing himself as a white nationalist, including one instance where he explained that he doesnt publicly label himself as a white nationalist because its not politically expedientnot because, in his own words, he doesnt see the necessity for white people to have a homeland and for white people to have a country.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), who is closely aligned with Turning Point USA and has appeared at its events, broke Fuentes doublespeak after dealing with it first-hand after his followers mobbed a Q&A session at Arizona State University where the congressmember spoke.

The basic nature of their questions was to ask a question that at first seems like a legitimate policy difference, perfectly debatable, Crenshaw wrote inan email exchange with Voxs Jane Coaston. But what then becomes clearand there are hints along the waythe motivations are deeper and darker than their original question indicated.

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How Twitter and YouTube are Helping a White Nationalist Build a Community Fueled by Hate - Mother Jones

On 7 November, Lana Lokteff, an American white nationalist, introduced a thought criminal and political prisoner and friend as a featured guest on her internet talk show, Red Ice TV.

For about 90 minutes, Lokteff and her guest Greg Johnson, a prominent white nationalist and editor-in-chief of the white nationalist publisher Counter-Currents discussed Johnsons recent arrest in Norway amid authorities concerns about his past expression of respect for the far-right mass murderer Anders Breivik. In 2012, Johnson wrote that he was angered by Breiviks crimes because he feared they would harm the cause of white nationalism but had discovered a strange new respect for him during his trial; Breiviks murder of 77 people has been cited as an inspiration by the suspected Christchurch killer, the man who murdered the British MP Jo Cox, and a US coast guard officer accused of plotting a white nationalist terror attack.

Just a few weeks earlier, Red Ice TV had suffered a serious setback when it was permanently banned from YouTube for repeated violations of its policy against hate speech. But Red Ice TV still had a home on Facebook, allowing the channels 90,000 followers to stream the discussion on Facebook Watch the platform Mark Zuckerberg launched as a place to share an experience and bring people together who care about the same things.

The conversation wasnt a unique occurrence. Facebook promised to ban white nationalist content from its platform in March 2019, reversing a years-long policy to tolerate the ideology. But Red Ice TV is just one of several white nationalist outlets that remain active on the platform today.

A Guardian analysis found longstanding Facebook pages for VDare, a white nationalist website focused on opposition to immigration; the Affirmative Right, a rebranding of Richard Spencers blog Alternative Right, which helped launch the alt-right movement; and American Free Press, a newsletter founded by the white supremacist Willis Carto, in addition to multiple pages associated with Red Ice TV. Also operating openly on the platform are two Holocaust denial organizations, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust and the Institute for Historical Review.

Theres no question that every single one of these groups is a white nationalist group, said Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Centers (SPLC) Intelligence Project, after reviewing the Guardians findings. Its not even up for debate. Theres really no excuse for not removing this material.

White nationalists support the establishment of whites-only nation states, both by excluding new non-white immigrants and, in some cases, by expelling or killing non-white citizens and residents. Many contemporary proponents of white nationalism fixate on conspiracy theories about demographic change and consider racial or ethnic diversity to be acts of genocide against the white race.

Facebook declined to take action against any of the pages identified by the Guardian. A company spokesperson said: We are investigating to determine whether any of these groups violate our policies against organized hate. We regularly review organizations against our policy and any that violate will be banned permanently.

The spokesperson also said that Facebook does not ban Holocaust denial, but does work to reduce the spread of such content by limiting the distribution of posts and preventing Holocaust-denying groups and pages from appearing in algorithmic recommendations. Such limitations are being applied to the two Holocaust denial groups identified by the Guardian, the spokesperson said.

The Guardian undertook a review of white nationalist outlets on Facebook amid a debate over the companys decision to include Breitbart News in Facebook News, a new section of its mobile app dedicated to high quality journalism. Facebook has faced significant pressure to reduce the distribution of misinformation on its platform. Critics of Breitbart News object to its inclusion in what Zuckerberg has described as a trusted source of information on two fronts: its repeated publication of partisan misinformation and conspiracy theories and its promotion of extreme rightwing views.

A growing body of evidence shows the influence of white nationalism on Breitbarts politics. Breitbarts former executive chairman Steve Bannon called the site the platform for the alt-right in 2016. In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported on emails and documents showing how a former Breitbart editor had worked directly with a white nationalist and a neo-Nazi to write and edit an article about the alt-right movement.

This month, the SPLC and numerous news organizations have reported on a cache of emails between the senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and the former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh showing how Miller pushed for coverage and inclusion of white nationalist ideas in the publication. The emails show Miller directing McHugh to read links from VDare and another white nationalist publication, American Renaissance, among other sources. In one case, reported by NBC News, Breitbart ran an anti-immigration op-ed submitted by Miller under the byline Breitbart News.

A Breitbart spokeswoman, Elizabeth Moore, said that the outlet is not now nor has it ever been a platform for the alt-right. Moore also said McHugh was a troubled individual who had been fired for a number of reasons including lying.

Breitbart is the funnel through which VDares ideas get out to the public, said Beirich. Its basically a conduit of conspiracy theory and racism into the conservative movement We dont list them as a hate group, but to consider them a trusted news source is pandering at best.

Facebook executives have responded defensively to criticism of Breitbart Newss inclusion in the Facebook News tab, arguing that the company should not pick ideological sides.

Part of having this be a trusted source is that it needs to have a diversity of views in there, Zuckerberg said at an event in New York in response to a question about Breitbarts inclusion. Campbell Brown, Facebooks head of news partnerships, wrote in a lengthy Facebook post that she believed Facebook should include content from ideological publishers on both the left and the right. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and a longtime Facebook executive, questioned on Twitter whether the companys critics really want a platform of our scale to make decisions to exclude news organizations based on their ideology. In response to a question from the Guardian, Mosseri acknowledged that Facebook does ban the ideology of white nationalism, then added: The tricky bit is, and this is always the case, where exactly to draw the line.

One of the challenges for Facebook is that white nationalist and white supremacist groups adopt the trappings of news outlets or publications to disseminate their views, said Joan Donovan, the director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard and an expert on media manipulation.

Red Ice TV is a group that styles themselves as a news organization when they are primarily a political organization, and the politics are staunchly white supremacist, Donovan said. We have seen this happen in the past where organizations like the KKK have produced their own newspapers It doesnt mean that it qualifies as news.

Many people argue that Breitbart is more of a political front than a news operation, she added. When Steve Bannon left Breitbart in order to work much more concretely with campaigns, you could see that Breitbart was a political organ before anything else. Really what they were trying to do was give white supremacist politics a veneer of objectivity.

Donovan said she expects platform companies will reassess their treatment of Breitbart following the release of the Miller emails. She also called for Facebook to take a more holistic approach to combating US domestic terrorism, as it does with foreign terrorist groups.

A Facebook spokesperson noted that Facebook News is still in a test phase and that Facebook is not paying Breitbart News for its inclusion in the program. The spokesperson said the company would continue to listen to feedback from news publishers.

Facebook has long asserted that hate speech has no space on Facebook, whether it comes from a news outlet or not.

But the $566bn company has consistently allowed a variety of hate groups to use its platform to spread their message, even when alerted to their presence by the media or advocacy groups. In July 2017, in response to queries from the Guardian, Facebook said that more than 160 pages and groups identified as hate groups by SPLC did not violate its community standards. Those groups included:

American Renaissance, a white supremacist website and magazine;

The Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist organization referenced in the manifesto written by Dylann Roof before he murdered nine people in a black church;

The Occidental Observer, an online publication described by the Anti-Defamation League as the primary voice for antisemitism from far-right intellectuals;

the Traditionalist Worker party, a neo-Nazi group that had already been involved in multiple violent incidents; and

Counter-Currents, the white nationalist publishing imprint run by the white nationalist Greg Johnson, the recent guest on Red Ice TV.

Three weeks later, following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Facebook announced a crackdown on violent threats and removed pages associated with the the Traditionalist Worker party, Counter-Currents, and the neo-Nazi organization Gallows Tree Wotansvolk. Many of the rest remained.

A year later, a Guardian review found that many of the groups and individuals involved in the Charlottesville event were back on Facebook, including the neo-Confederate League of the South, Patriot Front and Jason Kessler, who organized Unite the Right. Facebook took those pages down following inquiries from the Guardian, but declined to take action against the page of David Duke, the notorious white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

In May 2018, Vice Newss Motherboard reported on internal Facebook training documents that showed the company was distinguishing between white supremacy and white nationalism and explicitly allowing white nationalism.

In July 2018, Zuckerberg defended the motivations of people who engage in Holocaust denial during an interview, saying that he did not think that theyre intentionally getting it wrong. Following widespread criticism, he retracted his remarks.

It was not until March 2019 that Facebook acknowledged that white nationalism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups and banned it.

Beirich expressed deep frustration with Facebooks track record.

We have consulted with Facebook many, many times, Beirich added. We have sent them our list of hate groups. Its not like theyre not aware, and I always get the sense that there is good faith desire [to take action], and yet over and over again [hate groups] keep popping up. Its just not possible for civil rights groups like SPLC to play the role of flagging this stuff for Facebook. Its a company that makes $42bn a year and I have a staff of 45.

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Facebook banned white nationalists months ago. But prominent groups are still on the platform - The Guardian