Mediaboss Marketing

Weeks before violent protests in Charlottesville turned to tragedy, Brendan Novak wrote acolumn in the University of Virginia student newspaperarguing that the city should let the alt-right rally occur.

In the column, Novak, an opinion editor at the Cavalier Daily, defended the constitutional rights of the whitesupremacist groups to assemble and expresstheir views. Hewrote that the city andBlack Lives Matter should allow the alt-right to protest openly, and watch as the rotting ideological foundation collapses under its own weight.

After all, he thought, how could a universally loathed group with downright repulsive views thrive in the face of an inclusive and tolerant society?

But then, on Friday night, Novak, an incoming sophomore at U-Va., watched from his familys home in Arlington videos of white nationalists marching through his campus with flaming torches, shouting racist taunts.

He realized in that moment that Saturday mornings rally was a disaster waiting to happen. He stayed up late into the night, coming to terms with the scale and severity of the event, which would conclude with threepeople dead by the end of the weekend, a woman struck by a car that plowed through a crowd and two state police officers who died in a helicopter crash.

It was naive of me to not take their threats seriously, Novak told The Post. You could see it coming it wasnt hard to predict.

On Monday, Novak decided to write a second column reversing his opinion.

I was wrong about the alt-right, the headline read.

Its safe to say that the words and actions of the agitators in town over the weekend have proven how foolish I was, Novak wrote.

Novak wrote that the violence displayed by the white nationalist groups no longer, and perhaps never did, qualify as protected speech.

The alt-right is a domestic terrorist organization, Novak wrote.They have no interest in engaging in reasoned, mature discourse within the bounds of civil society, and would rather rely on brute force and terrorism to achieve their goals.

Novaks reversal has attracted national attention and was published in the New York Times. He told The Post he hopes his piece will show students on campus, and readers beyond, that its okay to allow new information and circumstances to shape or alterexisting beliefs.

Novak is one of thousands of U-Va. students trying to make sense ofthe weekends events just as fall classes are about to begin. Meanwhile, his short-staffed student newspaper has been tasked with covering one of thebiggest stories in America this week.

Its definitely going to feel different being in Charlottesville after this whole firestorm, Novak said. Theres going to be this shadow hanging over the grounds.

The Cavalier Daily, founded in 1890, usually relies on arobust staff of more than 200 students to cover campus and regional news. Butas white supremacists descended on Charlottesville Friday, the newspaper wasessentially a staff of four, since the rest of the staff had not yet returned for thefall semester, thenewspapers editor in chiefMike Reingold told The Post.

Three Cavalier Daily editors wovethrough the streets they knew better than many of the national reporters who had swooped in. They documentedtheprotests led by local white nationalists, having already become accustomed to seeing them in town. Managing editorTim Dodson choked on chemical irritants in the air as he tried to live-stream the scene.

Meanwhile, Reingold was alone back in the newsroom, sharing updates, videosand photos from his teamon social media. He recalled reflecting on the weekend with Dodson a couple of days later, thinking to himself, Wow, this actually happened?

[Charlottesville might be changed for me forever: Students contemplate return to school after deadly rally]

People are still trying to understand why this happened in Charlottesville, Reingold, a senior, said.

But this isnt the first time the Cavalier Daily has been faced with national news in itsback yard. In fact, Reingold said, almost every year at U-Va. theres some kind of national story.

During Reingoldsfirst year on campus, the disappearance of sophomore Hannah Graham captured national news. Her body was found five weeks later, and her death was ultimately ruled a homicidein November 2014.

Around that time, a blistering account of rape allegations at U-Va. was published in a Rolling Stone magazine piece, which detailed a brutal gang rape hazing ritual. The allegations were ultimately debunked and led to multiple defamation lawsuits against the magazine.

Reingold recalled how professors would pause lectures to discuss the magazine piece, and the issues surrounding it. The national news became ingrained in conversations in classrooms and across campus.

The managing board of the Cavalier Daily: from left, Grant Parker, Carlos Lopez, Mike Reingold, Tim Dodsonand Danielle Dacanay

A lot of students are kind of tired that theres always this spotlight, Reingold said.

Each time such news breaks,national reporters swarm the campus, placing the student body and newspaper undera microscope. And in the days that follow, the campus community is left picking up the pieces.

The same will likely happen this time around, Dodson, the managing editor, said.

Because we live in Charlottesville, we have to live with the consequences of what happened this last weekend, Dodson said.

The pressing question for the newspaper staff is, will this happen again? Reingold said. What do we do next?

I think it will, Reingold said. He recalled previous instances in which the white nationalist leaders from the weekend events have come into their newsroom seeking information. Charlottesville has already been the site of two Ku Klux Klan rallies this summer, and Reingold worries they will be faced with another gathering.

These people just dont stop, Reingold said. I really do think theyll come back, perhaps in fuller force.

But, he said, I hope they dont.

White nationalists staged a torchlit march on the campus of the University of Virginia on Aug. 11 ahead of a planned far-right rally. (Tim Dodson/ The Cavalier Daily)

Read the original post:
'I was wrong': U-Va. newspaper editor says he was 'naive' about alt-right - Washington Post

The neo-Nazis at the Daily Stormer have nothing nice to say about Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal who was killed by a white supremacist protester in Charlottesville last weekend.

Andrew Anglin, the editor of the Daily Stormer, wasted no time in defaming Heyer, writing an editorial shortly after her death in which he excoriated her appearance and called her drain on society. Anglin also noted Heyers marital and parental status, calling her a fat, childless, 32-year-old slut, claiming that her failure to marry and have children meant that she had no value.

Anglins vile rant is a window into the far rights position on the place of white women in their envisioned America: as fertile wives. While few white women were visible at the Unite The Right march in Charlottesville, the self-proclaimed alt-right does have a place where womens presence is valued and encouraged at home, raising as many white babies as possible.

Had she not died yesterday, hundreds of thousands of dollars would have been spent on propping-up this gross creature who had failed to do her most basic duty her only real duty, in fact and reproduce, Anglin wrote. Having no children at that age, it can be assumed that she had multiple abortions.

Justin Ide / Reuters

The fear of being outnumbered by racial and ethnic minorities is the driving force of the so-called alt-right, and in this regard, they are no different from many nationalist movements abroad, or from previous white nationalist movements in American history.

Kelly J. Baker, a religious history scholar and the author of Gospel According to the Klan: The KKKs Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930, says that the need to ensure that more white women were having white babies was a key part of the Ku Klux Klans platform during its resurgence in the 1920s and 1930s.

One of their planks was a defense of white womanhood, Baker told HuffPost. Theyre very explicit that they have to protect white women from Black men, but also from immigrant men and Jewish men.

The resurgent Klan was also fixated on the home and the family and on womens roles in it. The Klans position was that the best role that a woman can have is as a wife and mother whos going to instill in her children patriotism and white supremacy, Baker said.

Nearly a century later, the self-proclaimed alt-right has similar fears, and, when it comes to the rightful place of white women, similar goals. The movement seeks the restoration of what some leaders call natural relations between men and women that is, men leading in public life and women confined to the domestic sphere, with marriage and procreation for all. To this end, the so-called alt-right sets itself against feminism and the feminist insistence that women and men have a right to an equal footing in public life and that encourages men to contribute more labor in the domestic sphere.

But theres one core feminist issue where the white nationalist right and feminism are in accord, and thats abortion. Unlike the traditional conservatives and Republicans they disdain and deride, white nationalists are content to permit abortion in some cases. And those cases, unsurprisingly, are distinguished by the race or ethnicity of the woman seeking the abortion. While traditional conservatives oppose abortion in almost all cases, the alt-right is in favor of abortion rights for those they deem unworthy of existence: African Americans, Latinas, and other racial and ethnic minorities.

When Tomi Lahren described herself as pro-choice earlier this year in an appearance on The View (Im for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well), white nationalist leader Richard Spencer responded with a long video in which he explained his position on abortion. Hes not in favor of outlawing abortion or contraception altogether, he says, but he wants white women to have more accidental pregnancies.

Contraception has been a great detriment because precisely the people who shouldnt be using it are using it, he said, after claiming that smart people that is, white people use contraception reliably and are less likely to need abortion. We want smart people to have more children. I sometimes want smart people to be a little more reckless. Dont plan. Dont use a condom.

At RadixJournal, the Spencer-founded website that began as AlternativeRight.com, a 2016 post written under a pseudonym explains the need to keep abortion legal. Abortion must be legal not because women should be in control of their bodies, but because, while a blanket ban on abortion would probably increase the White population in there numbers [sic], it would, no doubt, decrease the overall quality, as well and leave all races stupider, more criminally prone, and more diseased.

Both Spencer and the anonymous blogger acknowledge that abortion restrictions hit Black and Latina women the hardest, making them more likely to have children. Spencer and his ilk view this as an undesirable policy outcome, not because they care about bodily autonomy for Black and Latina women, but because they believe those women to be inherently unfit to reproduce. The Republican agenda of restricting abortion access, the latter writes, will result in more babies born to the least intelligent and responsible members of society: women who are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and poor. The alt-right agenda, Spencer says, is eugenic in the deepest sense of the word.

Assessing the place of white women in the alt-right movement is a complicated task: though some women have emerged as movement leaders, and while white supremacy advantages white women over all other women, the stated goal of the movement is to roll back the advances of feminism for all women and to restrict white women to their natural role as wives and mothers.

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

Baker said that the 1920s Klan was nervous about the possibility of widespread birth control for white women. Abortion doesnt appear openly in the stuff theyre writing, which isnt especially surprising for the time but there is nervousness about birth control and the notion that women could control their reproduction.

To push back against the rising availability of effective birth control, the Klan told white women that having as many white children as possible is your job and it matters for your family and your race and for America. The so-called alt-right, Baker says, is advocating a similar move to traditional gender norms, animated by fears of higher birth rates among immigrants and racial minority groups.

Heather Heyers family and friends, in their remembrances, have emphasized her commitment to social justice. At her memorial service on Wednesday, her father, Mark Heyer, remembered his daughters commitment to justice and love. She wanted equality, Heyer said.

Its little wonder, then, that the Daily Stormer rushed to defame a woman who had just been murdered at a white nationalist rally. She was a feminist, and a white activist against racial inequity. And above all, she wasnt married, she didnt have children, and she had a place in public life. Heather Heyer was the alt-rights worst nightmare.

Originally posted here:
Heather Heyer Was The Alt-Right's Worst Nightmare - HuffPost

In one of his several press appearances addressing last weekends events in Charlottesville, President Trump asked, What about the alt-left? a question that a few on the right have taken up, along with the label. A quick thought.

Obviously, alt-left is intended to suggest the existence of a faction on the left that mirrors the alt-right. But the comparison doesnt hold up, and the reasons why not are important.

The alt-right the white nationalists, neo-Nazis, 4chan trolls, etc. christened itself the alt-right, because it envisioned itself as a political alternative to traditional, mainstream conservatism. That is to say, the alt-right thought of itself ultimately as a political movement that would get people elected, move legislation, and do broadly the things one expects of politics, and they had an affirmative agenda of sorts albeit a repulsive, illiberal one.

By alt-left, Trump and others seem to be referring primarily to Antifa, the black-clad anti-fascists who rioted on Inauguration Day in D.C., at Berkeley shortly after (to forestall an appearance by alt-right icon Milo Yiannopoulos), and have made appearances elsewhere (most recently in Seattle). But Antifa has never cast itself as a political alternative to the Democratic party as currently constituted, and it has no positive agenda (anti-fascism). No one is running on the Antifa platform.

Thats in part because they dont need to. Antifa (in its anti-WTO days, in its outbursts during the Occupy movement, and in its current form) has been largely tolerated by the Democratic party. Without coming to its express defense, the mainstream Left has nevertheless effectively accepted Antifa as a tool in its political toolbox. (The same can broadly be said of the violent fringe of the Black Lives Matter movement whose membership overlaps more than a little with that of Antifa).

By contrast, neo-Nazis and the core constituencies of what became the alt-right have been around for a while but they were largely anathema to mainstream politicians on the right. (The alt-right, in any organized fashion, was nonexistent before Donald Trump entered the Republican primary.) Because of Trump, of course, that has changed, and now Steve Bannon (who made Breitbart.com the platform for the alt-right) works just outside the Oval Office, alt-right leader Mike Cernovich has access to White House officials, and the president himself calls crowds making the Hitlergru very fine people.

Which is all to say: alt-right and alt-left as labels may not be particularly helpful. There was never anything alt- about the so-called alt-left. And theres not much alt- to the alt-right, either, now.

See more here:
On the Alt-Right and the 'Alt-Left' - National Review

The alt-right, as the loose constellation of far-right political groups that includes white nationalists and neo-Nazis is known, uses many mainstream tech platforms to distribute its message: Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for recruiting and public broadcasting, Reddit and 4Chan for lighthearted memes and trolling, and, until Monday, Discord for private group communication. Many of these companies resisted efforts to cut off the activists, arguing that as long as their activities werent illegal, they were simply using the tools as any others would.

But that dynamic has taken a sharp turn in recent weeks. The industry has been clashing with the alt-right over free speech, and companies now appear further galvanized by the violence in Charlottesville, perhaps realizing that remaining neutral on hateful movements is no longer a viable option. In recent days, large tech companies like GoDaddy, Google and Airbnb have taken action to remove white nationalists and neo-Nazis from their services. Others, like Twitter and Facebook, have banned individual users who have threatened violence or contributed to hate movements.

Partly, these are self-preservation instincts kicking in no company wants to end up like Reddit, which has struggled to shake its reputation as a den of toxicity but it is also indicative of an emerging consensus around the moral responsibilities of tech platforms.

Like most platforms, Discord never meant to become a virtual home of the alt-right. It started in 2015 as a chat app for video gamers, where fans of games like World of Warcraft could form teams and talk about strategy. Over the next several years, as gamers invited their friends to the app, it became one of the hottest start-ups in Silicon Valley, growing to more than 45 million members and raising nearly $100 million from top tech investors.

But Discord also attracted far-right political groups, whose members were drawn to the apps privacy and anonymity features. Discord allows users to form private, invitation-only chat groups invisible to those outside the app, and it allows a high degree of anonymity, making it an ideal choice for people looking to avoid detection or surveillance. Perhaps most importantly, it is largely self-policed administrators of servers, as Discords group chat rooms are known, set their own rules and are responsible for keeping their members in line.

Leaders like Richard Spencer, who is credited with coining the term alt-right, and Andrew Anglin, the editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, used Discord to discuss current events and debate movement strategy. These discussions were not always harmonious, and often featured infighting and disagreement over tactics and cooperation with older and less internet-savvy groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Vanguard America. But Discord became a private sounding board for the movement, and over time, Discord groups devoted to far-right politics including one where newcomers were required to show proof of Caucasian skin before being given posting privileges swelled to thousands of members.

In the days leading up to the Unite the Right rally, Discord proved that it could be an indispensable organizing tool. White nationalists used alt-right Discord servers to form car pools to Charlottesville and arrange local lodging. On the eve of the protest, one Discord user posted a poem written to commemorate the gathering, titled The Fire Rises. (Sample stanza: A brotherhood of white mans will / against Jews and their disguises. / And we will march on Charlottesville / as the fire rises.) And on Saturday, after the protest had ended with three people dead and more injured, the moderator of one Discord server declared the rally a success, posting: Hail victory! Hail our people!

Its become a central communication interface for the white nationalist and neo-Nazi movements, said Keegan Hankes, an analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that studies right-wing extremist groups. Its pretty unavoidable to be a leader in this movement without participating in Discord.

For months, Discords executives and board members debated what to do about the alt-rights presence on its platform. Some favored stricter controls and banning hateful speech entirely. Others took the view that since these rooms were private, Discords responsibility extended only as far as removing illegal content when it was flagged to them. Discords community guidelines prohibit sharing content that is directly threatening someones physical or financial state, but the company also takes pains to reassure users that their messages will stay private, saying that we do not actively monitor and arent responsible for any activity or content that is posted.

Josh Elman, a Discord board member and investor with Greylock Partners, told me before the Charlottesville rally that Discord was analogous to a chat app like Skype or iMessage, and said that it had fewer responsibilities to patrol for hateful content than a public-facing social network.

Its basically a private email group, he said.

Reached after Discords decision to ban alt-right groups, Mr. Elman said, I believe every communication channel public or private has a responsibility to investigate and take action on any reports of misuse including harassment, inciting violence or hate, and other abuse.

Discord wouldnt say how many groups it banned in total, but users told me that dozens of alt-right-affiliated servers seemed to have vanished, or closed themselves to new members. The company said on Twitter that it would not actively search through messages for evidence of abuse in the future, but would respond to reports of content that violated its terms of service.

Some white nationalists see Discords actions as part of a greater no-platform movement, in which tech companies systematically take away the digital tools that activists use to generate attention and organize their activities. In response to being kicked off services like PayPal and Patreon, a crowdfunding site, several far-right groups have begun creating alternative platforms, where extreme views will be tolerated.

One moderator of an alt-right Discord server that was banned on Monday, Nathan Gate, who goes by the username TheBigKK, told me that Discord users were leaving in droves in search of a more hospitable platform.

Discord started out as a great service but unfortunately it looks as though we will have to move, he said.

Another right-wing Discord moderator, who goes by Based, said that his server, a large pro-Trump group called Centipede Central that is still active, would have to be more careful to police its users going forward.

Were a little on pins and needles, he said, because Discord has shown theyre willing to nuke servers.

Moderation on the internet is an endless cat-and-mouse game, and its a near-certainty that without Discord as a safe haven, white nationalists will organize themselves somewhere else. Just hours after Discord shut down their servers, several alt-right users were already attempting to form new rooms, and others were suggesting alternative chat apps that might be friendlier to their views.

The pathetic nerd cucks at Discord have caved and joined the war against free speech, said a post on AltRight.com, using one of the movements favorite slurs. But we will simply adapt.

Follow Kevin Roose on Twitter @kevinroose.

A version of this article appears in print on August 16, 2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Digital Home For Alt-Right Pulls Away Welcome Mat.

Link:
This Was the Alt-Right's Favorite Chat App. Then Came Charlottesville. - New York Times

Last year around this time (and the year before that), I was arguing with some of my fellow conservatives about the insanity of finding any common cause whatsoever with the so-called alt-right. The issue wasnt that every avowed nationalist who claimed membership in the alt-right was a Nazi or Klansman. It was that the alt-right was open to Nazis and Klansmen. And why wouldnt these newly-minted white supremacists welcome such pioneering organizations to their cause?

Right-wing cynics, hucksters and opportunists deliberately blurred these distinctions in the name of a right-wing popular front. Steve Bannon, now a White House consigliere, is by most accounts not a bigot in his personal dealings. But when he ran Breitbart.com he had no problem making it a platform for the alt-right. Internet entertainer Milo Yiannopoulos was a Breitbart star for his defenses of the alt-right and its supposedly hilarious Holocaust jokes. He was only let go (and disinvited from the Conservative Political Action Conference) when it was revealed he was equally broadminded about some expressions of pedophilia as he was about some expressions of Nazism.

In Bannons case, and in the case of so many on the right who pulled their oars to the beat of Bannons drum, their motivation wasnt racism or anti-Semitism; it was the need to win at all costs (or to make a profit).

Win what? Well, that varied. At first it was the war on the establishment, including Fox News. Then one alleged civil war on the right or another. And, ultimately, the fight to get Donald Trump the nomination and the presidency.

Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images

As the primaries wound down, the imperative for unity intensified. Why look under rocks when you can use them as steppingstones to victory? Besides Trump was making it as clear as possible that he welcomed support and praise from any quarter.

The rights game of footsie with the alt-right ostensibly ended when Trump won. Bannon disavowed them once he made it to the White House. Like France after the liberation, it seemed everyone was suddenly a member of the resistance and nobody was a collaborator. At least, that is, until Saturday, when the president invited speculation that the old popular front is still operational.

Whatever its status at the White House, the alt-right thinks it will replace the traditional right. It wont, for the simple reason that the vast, overwhelming, majority of conservatives are patriotic and decent, just like Americans generally. They dont want anything to do with people who want to overthrow the Constitution and set up racial Bantustans.

No, the real threat to traditional conservatism is the mind-set that made it possible to form even a theoretical alliance with the alt-right in the first place: the idea that winning and fighting are self-justifying.

Over the last decade, many on the right have convinced themselves that the real problem with conservatism is a lack of will. They quote left-wing activist Saul Alinsky admiringly and claim that we have to be like them by doing whatever is necessary to win.

During the campaign, when Trump attacked the ethnicity of an American judge or the parents of a fallen Muslim U.S. soldier, the response from his defenders on the right was usually at least he fights!

Such amorality was warranted, many explained, because if Clinton had won, America would be over. The national security official Michael Anton, then writing from the safety of anonymity, dubbed it a Flight 93 election and argued that conservatives must do anything for victory or accept certain death. In an interview with New York magazine, he went further. If we must have Caesar, said Anton, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?

The election is over. Yet that spirit not only endures, it has intensified. Trumps conservative critics, or apostates as Conrad Black calls us, face the same ultimatum. The choice, for sane conservatives, Black writes, is Trump or national disaster. Black is hardly alone in making this or similar cases. The upshot of them all is that the test for sane (or real or good or true conservatives) is loyalty to the president, not to any coherent body of ideas, ideals or party. Even truth takes a backseat

Id point out that such thinking could invite the worst and most opportunistic creatures to infiltrate the movement. Except they already have.

jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook

MORE FROM OPINION:

Vaccination rates are up in California, but pockets of resistance still threaten everyone

A win at all costs strategy explains the prominence of the alt-right

Sacramento's plan to expand the L.A. County Board of Supervisors has nothing to do with diversity

Follow this link:
The alt-right has gained ground, thanks to a win-at-all-costs strategy - Los Angeles Times