Common Dreams | The Alt-Right and the 1% Common Dreams Mercer, the Co-CEO of the $50 billion Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, is also one of three owners of Breitbart News, the outlet Trump strategist (and former Breitbart editor) Steve Bannon has described as a platform for the alt-right. With ... |
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The Alt-Right and the 1% - Common Dreams
The Associated Press warned this week that the media outlets should avoid using the term "alt-right" because "it is meant as a euphemism to disguise racist aims."
The term was coined several years ago by white supremacist leader Richard Spencer, and now "encompasses a range of people on the extreme right who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of forms of conservatism that embrace implicit or explicit racism or white supremacy," according to the Anti-Defamation League.
While members of the "alt-right" insist they're not racist, from a practical standpoint it's beentricky, if not impossible, to find any daylight between the views they espouse and plain old white supremacy.And now, anew working paper from researchers at the University of Arkansas and Northwestern University sharply underscores the extent to which people who identify as "alt-right" harbor prejudicial views towardnon-white people.
In the paper, "A Psychological Profile of the Alt-Right,"Patrick Forscher and Nour Kteily attempt to asses the beliefs of the "alt-right" using an extensive online survey. It was conducted via Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which social science researchers have increasingly used in recent years to explore otherwise difficult-to-answer research questions. They recruited 447 "alt-right" adherents and 382 non-adherents and asked them a battery of questions on topics ranging from race to economics to the proper role of government.
The main caveat to note here is that Forscher and Kteily did not set out to create a nationally representative survey. The people they identified as "alt-right" adherents cannot be said to represent all such individuals across the nation.
Still, their study is useful as a qualitative exploration of the beliefs of a small political subgroup about which national polling is virtually non-existent -- in a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, for instance, only 17 percent of Americans said they'd heard "a lot" about the group. And given that the "alt-right" has been primarily associated with young, internet-savvy men, an online poll may beuniquely suited to measuring what motivates many of them.
The most striking result of Forscher and Kteily's polling came via the responses to questions asking survey-takersto rate how 'evolved' various groups were, using a series of silhouettes ranging from apes to modern humans as markers, below:
They explain how it works:
This scale asks people to rate how evolved they perceive people or groups to be using a diagram [that]depicts the purported biological and cultural evolution of humans from quadrupedal human ancestors. People use a 0-100 slider to decide where a person or group falls along the continuum established by the silhouettes in the image, with a score of 0 corresponding to the quadrupedal human ancestor and a score of 100 corresponding to a modern human. Higher scores therefore indicate humanization, lower scores dehumanization.
On average, "alt-right" adherentsrated whites (92 points), men (88 points) and Europeans (87 points) the highest of all. They rated women lower, at 83 points. They rated Jews slightly below the figure of a spear-wielding Neanderthal figure, at 73 points. Mexicans came in at 67 points, while blacks came in at 65.
Arabs, Nigerians, and feminists all came in at sub-60 points, close to the half-simian human ancestor in the middle of the chart. Muslims were the group ranked dead last, with 55 points.
In the eyes of the members of the "alt-right" participating in the study, in other words, Muslims are just 59 percent as "evolved" as white people.
The ratings done by people who did not identify with the "alt-right"were not anywhere near as segregated. They actually rated women (93 points) just a hair higher than men (92 points). Non-adherents rated Muslims at 83, or 9 points behind their rating for white people. That's still indicative of prejudice, of course, but not anywhere near as much as the 37-point gap between "alt-right" adherents' ratings of Muslims and white people would suggest.
People not identifying with the "alt-right" reserved their harshest judgment for Republicans, who they assessed at 78 points. By contrast, the "alt-right" felt that Democrats rated just 60 points.
"We found abundant support for portrayals of the alt-right that emphasize their perception that certain historically advantaged groups are superior to other groups and need their interests protected," Forscher and Kteily write. "Alt-right adherents also expressed hostility that could be considered extremist: they were quite willing to blatantly dehumanize both religious/national outgroups and political opposition groups."
People in the alt-right believe in a hierarchy of people that puts white people at the top and everyone else behindthem -- the essential tenet of white supremacy clouded only by an opaque name.
Whatever you call it, at the white nationalistrally in Charlottesville, Virginia this past weekend, that dehumanization -- and its consequences-- was on full display.
Excerpt from:
The alt-right is just another word for white supremacy, study finds - Washington Post
The alt-right grew up on the Internet. Now, after Charlottesville, some of the far-right movement's most infamous personalities are getting kicked off.
Off Uber, Google and PayPal in one case, kicked off theWeb entirely as tech companies rush to condemnlast weekend's violent white nationalist marches and penalizethosewho condoned them.
I haven't seen them take this much action on all these platforms, ever, said Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long accused tech companies of tolerating hate speech.
I think the shocking images people saw have created enough attention that these companies are taking action, he said. It looks bad if they don't.
Here's our tally of which right-wingpersonalities have been blocked by whichtech giants, and why.
The Daily Stormer, an infamous white-supremacistwebsite, has endured server-related humiliations from its online landlords in the past few days.
The site'sWeb host, GoDaddy,evicted itlast weekend, after the sitepublished an article disparaginga womanwho was killed while protestingthe Unite the Right rally.
GoDaddy, which had long withstood calls to ban the Stormer, accused the siteof violating its terms of service. The Stormerquickly moved its servers to Google, which promptly evicted it, too.
[Why GoDaddys decision to delist a neo-Nazi site is such a big deal]
By Monday, the Verge reported, the site had retreated to the dark Web forced to publish its white-supremacist screeds through anonymous platforms that most people never see. It's also online in Russia, apparently.
Another white supremacist group, Vanguard America, was yanked offline by WordPress after its members rallied inCharlottesville.
[Vanguard America, a white supremacist group, denies Charlottesville ramming suspect was a member]
Uber executives personally thanked and honoreda driverwho kicked three far-right celebrities out of hervehicle before the rally, accusing them of racist comments, someone with the companytold The Washington Post.
The three men Baked Alaska,James Allsup and Millennial Matt caught an Uber ride in Washington a day before the rally.
Millennial Matt whose recently deleted Twitter feed wasfull of Holocaust revisionist material said they were kicked to the curb after hecalled the National Museum of African American History and Culture ugly.
But the driver accused them of worse. In curbsidevideo, the men argue with her about whether they made racist comments in the car.
The companypermanently banned Allsup, invited the driver to givea speech to thousands of otheremployees this week, and defendedher in statement to The Post.
The events surrounding the white supremacist rally in the City of Charlottesville are deeply disturbing and tragic, the companywrote. We stand against this hate, violence, and discrimination. Ubers community guidelines require riders and drivers to treat each other with respect. When a rider or driver doesnt follow these guidelines, we take swift and decisive action, as we did in this instance.
That statement alignsUber with its sedentary counterpart, Airbnb, which cracked down on people suspected of using its service to rent rooms for white supremacist parties during the rally, according to Gizmodo.
Discord, whichis supposed to bea voice chat programfor online gamers, had by 2017 become the alt-right's favorite chat app,as the New York Times put it.
A Times reporter monitoreda far-right Discord serveras it organized for the Charlottesville rally and sawswastikas and praise for Hitler in the chat rooms.
Discord executives knew aboutsuch hate groups before the rally, the Times reported, but cracked down only after the marchesdevolved into violence.
Now the Daily Stormer's Discord server no longer works, among unspecified others.
The most prominent site to be muted may beAltRight.com, which told the gaming site Kotakuthat people in our movement will simply find other alternatives to express their views.
One of the largest crowdfunding sites, GoFundMe,told Reuters that itshut down several campaigns to raise money for the man accused of driving a car into a crowd of counterprotesters at the rally, killing one and injuring many.
Those campaigns did not raise any money and they were immediately removed, a spokesman told the outlet.
Kickstarter, meanwhile,said it hadn't seen any fundraisers for the suspect but had similar policies banning hate speech and the promotion of violence.
[PayPal escalates the tech industrys war on white supremacy]
The online payment giantPayPalwasaccused by the SPLC of allowing hate groups to raise funds for the rally andannounced late Tuesday that it would bar users from taking donations.
The events in Charlottesville are yet another disturbing example of the many forms that racism and hatred manifest, the company wrote. Prejudice, however, does not always march in the street.
The social media behemothsTwitter and Facebookhave beenless active in the backlash against the alt-right, a movement that seeks a whites-only state.
Twitter didn't respond to questions from The Post about its stance on Charlottesville. Earlier this year, the sitecracked down on users accused of hateful conduct, including an avowed white nationalist.
The Twitter account for @Millennial_Matt, one ofrallygoersaccused of racism, was taken offline this week, though it's unclear why.
A tweet from Millennial Matt, whose account was recently deleted. (Twitter)
Although Facebook hasn'treleased a statement on Charlottesville, a company representativetold ThePost that it took down anevent page for the rally over the weekend, after threats of violence and links to hate groups became clear.
Since then, the representative said, Facebook has blocked people from sharing aDaily Stormer article attacking the dead protester, unless the person who shares it explicitly condemns it in the same post.
Limited as thatmove was, it seemedremarkable to some.
The Verge is unaware of any previous moderation effort in which individual employees have assessed every shared caption for a given URL, the tech outlet wrote.
Read more:
A Twitter campaign is outing people who marched with white nationalists in Charlottesville
A live stream of Shia LaBeouf chanting was disrupted by Nazi-themed dancing. Then things got weird.
The only true winners of this election are trolls
J.K. Rowling and Piers Morgan embody the extremes of online celebrity, in one fight
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How the alt-right got kicked offline after Charlottesville from Uber to Google - Washington Post
An alt-right provocateur and known conspiracy theorist has called off a planned protest of Google in the wake of the search giants firing of James Damore, the former employee who attributed the absence of women in tech to biological factors.
Initially, Jack Posobiec sought to target Googles headquarters in California and eight other company campuses around the country, part of a campaign to oppose the tech giant as an anti free speech monopoly, he has said.
After announcing the protest, however, alt-right supporters faced new criticism for their involvement in another incident: The white supremacist and neo-Nazi demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. Dozens were injured and one counter-protester was killed, leading Posobiec in recent days to stress his effort is in no way associated with any group who organized there.
By early Wednesday, Posobiec canceled the march entirely at least for now.
Some of the event pages set up on Facebook appear to suggest that Posobiecs plans to rally alt-right supporters at Googles offices never really seemed to resonate.
For his part, Damore has sidestepped questions about his involvement in the effort. I support Google, and I really do want Google to improve, so I dont support efforts to try to hurt Google directly, he told CNBC when asked about his views on the alt-right movement.
Pressed again as to whether hes involved in protest planning, though, Damore merely replied: No, not really.
Posobiec himself is a controversial figure: Hes one of the drivers of the so-called PizzaGate conspiracy theory and he perpetuated the falsehood that Democrats killed one of their own aides during the 2016 presidential election.
The movements self-professed goal is the creation of a white state and the destruction of leftism, which it calls an ideology of death. Richard B. Spencer, a leader in the movement, has described the movement as identity politics for white people.
It is also anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and opposed to homosexuality and gay and transgender rights. It is highly decentralized but has a wide online presence, where its ideology is spread via racist or sexist memes with a satirical edge.
It believes that higher education is only appropriate for a cognitive elite and that most citizens should be educated in trade schools or apprenticeships.
Researchers who study extremist groups in the United States say there is no such thing as the alt-left. Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, said the word had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and anything vaguely left-seeming that they didnt like.
Some centrist liberals have taken to using this term.
It did not arise organically, and it refers to no actual group or movement or network, Mr. Pitcavage said in an email. Its just a made-up epithet, similar to certain people calling any news they dont like fake news.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said the alt-left was partly to blame for the Charlottesville violence, during which a counterprotester, Heather D. Heyer, was killed.
The alt-light comprises members of the far right who once fell under the alt-right umbrella but have since split from the group because, by and large, racism and anti-Semitism are not central to its far-right nationalist views, according to Ryan Lenz, the editor of Hatewatch, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Members of the alt-right mocked these dissidents as the alt-light.
The alt-light is the alt-right without the racist overtones, but it is hard to differentiate it sometimes because youre looking at people who sometimes dance between both camps, he said.
The two groups often feud online over the Jewish Question, or whether Jews profit by secretly manipulating the government and the news media.
Antifa is a contraction of the word anti-fascist. It was coined in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s by a network of groups that spread across Europe to confront right-wing extremists, according to Mr. Pitcavage. A similar movement emerged in the 1980s in the United States and has grown as the alt-right has risen to prominence.
For some so-called antifa members, the goal is to physically confront white supremacists. If they can get at them, to assault them and engage in street fighting, Mr. Pitcavage said. Mr. Lenz, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, called the group an old left-wing extremist movement.
Members of the alt-right broadly portray protesters who oppose them as antifa, or the alt-left, and say they bear some responsibility for any violence that ensues a claim made by Mr. Trump on Tuesday.
But analysts said comparing antifa with neo-Nazi or white supremacist protesters was a false equivalence.
Cuck is an insult used by the alt-right to attack the masculinity of an opponent, originally other conservatives, whom the movement deemed insufficiently committed to racism and anti-Semitism.
It is short for cuckold, a word dating back to the Middle Ages that describes a man who knows his wife is sleeping with other men and does not object. Mr. Lenz said the use of the word by the alt-right often had racial overtones.
S.J.W. is short for social justice warrior and is used by the right as an epithet for someone who advocates liberal causes like feminism, racial justice or gay and transgender rights. It is also sometimes used to imply that a persons online advocacy of a cause is insincere or done for appearances. It became widely used during GamerGate, a controversy that began in 2014 over sexism in video game subcultures.
Mr. Lenz, whose organization has specific criteria for which groups it classifies as Nazi organizations, said the right used the phrase to rhetorically address the fact that the left sometimes calls anyone who disagrees with it Nazis. He said the alt-right had created the term so its followers had a similar blanket term to deride the left.
Video taken at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville on Saturday showed marchers chanting blood and soil. The phrase is a 19th-century German nationalist term that connotes a mystical bond between the blood of an ethnic group and the soil of their country.
It was used as a Nazi slogan in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s and since then has been transported to neo-Nazi groups and other white supremacists around the world, Mr. Pitcavage said. It is one of several Nazi symbols that have been adopted as a slogan by some members of the alt-right.
Globalism is sometimes used as a synonym for globalization, the network of economic interconnection that became the dominant international system after the Cold War. The word has become more commonly used since Mr. Trump railed against globalism frequently on the campaign trail.
For the far right, globalism has long had distinct xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic overtones. It refers to a conspiratorial worldview: a cabal that likes open borders, diversity and weak nation states, and that dislikes white people, Christianity and the traditional culture of their own country.
White genocide is a white nationalist belief that white people, as a race, are endangered and face extinction as a result of nonwhite immigration and marriage between the races, a process being manipulated by Jews, according to Mr. Lenz. It is the underlying concept behind far-right, anti-immigration arguments, especially those aimed at immigrants who are not white Christians.
The concept was popularized by Bob Whitaker, a former economics professor and Reagan appointee to the Office of Personnel Management, who wrote a 221-word mantra on the subject that ended with the rallying cry: Anti-racist is code word for anti-white.
Mr. Pitcavage said the concept of white genocide was often communicated online through a white supremacist saying called the Fourteen Words: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.
The saying was created by David Lane, a white supremacist sentenced to 190 years in prison in connection with the 1984 murder of the Jewish radio host Alan Berg.
A version of this article appears in print on August 16, 2017, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa, Cuck: A Brief Glossary of Extremist Terminology.
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Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist Language - New York Times