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The voice and text chat app Discord has shut down its notorious alt-right server after the events in Charlottesville, Virginia that left one person dead.

Announced via its official Twitter account, Discord revealed it had not only shut down the server, but also a number of accounts "associate with the events in Charlottesville." The server was one of the larger on the app, and had become infamous for its level of hate speech, racist content and calls to violence. This behavior is against the sites Terms and Service, Discord CMO Eros Resmini pointed out to Polygon.

"We unequivocally condemn white supremacy, Neo-Nazism or any other group, term, ideology that is based on these beliefs. They are not welcome on Discord," Resmini said to the outlet. "When hatred like this violates our community standards we act swiftly to take servers down and ban individual users. The public server linked to AltRight.com that violated those terms was shut down along with several other public groups and accounts fostering bad actors on Discord. We will continue to be aggressive to ensure that Discord exists for the community we set out to support gamers."

According to the app's terms of service, those who "defame, libel, ridicule, mock, stalk, threaten, harass or abuse anyone" are in violation. Furthermore, its community guidelines caution that any users distributing intentionally harmful material to someone's "physical or financial state" are in violation of the site's Terms and subject to immediate account deletion.

"We will continue to take action against white supremacy, nazi ideology and all forms of hate," the company said. It is expected to continue to shut down other servers associated with the alt-right in the coming months.

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Discord Shuts Down Its Alt-Right Server After Charlottesville Protests - RollingStone.com

America has cancer.

On Saturday, a crowd of alt-right white supremacists, neo-confederates, and Nazi sympathizers marched in Charlottesville, Va.; they were confronted by a large group of protesters including members of the Marxist Antifa a group that has time and again plunged volatile situations into violence, from Sacramento to Berkeley. Theres still no certain knowledge of who began the violence, but before long, the sides had broken into the sort of brutal scrum that used to characterize Weimer-era Germany. The two sides then carried the red banner and the swastika; so did the combatants on Saturday.

Then a Nazi-sympathizing alt-right 20-year-old Ohioan plowed his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring 19. The president of the United States promptly failed egregiously to condemn alt-right racism; instead, he opted for a milquetoast statement condemning hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.

The Left leapt into action, declaring Trumps statement utterly insufficient which, of course, it was. But they then went further, declaring that Antifa was entirely innocent, despite Antifas launching into violence against pro-Trump marchers in Seattle over the weekend, as they have in Sacramento and Berkeley; berating New York Times journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg for having the temerity to report that the hard left seemed as hate-filled as the alt-right; and suggesting that all conservatives were, at root, sympathizers with the Nazi-friendly alt-right.

And so here we stand: On the one side, a racist, identity-politics Left dedicated to the proposition that white people are innate beneficiaries of privilege and therefore must be excised from political power; on the other side, a reactionary, racist, identity-politics alt-right dedicated to the proposition that white people are innate victims of the social-justice class and therefore must regain political power through race-group solidarity.

None of this is new, of course. The Left has engaged in identity politics since the 1960s and engaged in heavy violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The white-supremacist movement has been with us since the founding of the republic. But both movements had been steadily shrinking until the last few years.

Now theyre growing. And theyre largely growing in opposition to one another. In fact, the growth of each side reinforces the growth of the other: The mainstream Left, convinced that the enemies of social-justice warriors are all alt-right Nazis, winks and nods at left-wing violence; the right, convinced that its SJW enemies are focused on racial polarization, embraces the alt-right as a form of resistance. Antifa becomes merely a radical adjunct to traditional Democratic-party politics; the alt-right becomes merely a useful tool for scurrilous Republican politicians and media figures.

Three factors led to this self-reinforcing growth loop.

First, increasing political polarization.

President Obama allowed the politics of racial fragmentation to fester on his watch; he repeatedly trafficked in broad generalities about American racism. Obama focused incessantly on the specter of white bigotry: the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, embedded in our collective DNA. In response, an identity politics began creepily infusing the Right, with some white people embracing the mold cast upon them by the Left, creating a soft racial solidarity in backlash. This, of course, only strengthened the Lefts views of white privilege, which in turn strengthened the Rights views of white victimhood.

The second factor was media malfeasance.

Left-wing media and objective media saw an advantage in highlighting the antics of racists such as Richard Spencer and David Duke. Focusing on the racist alt-right allowed the media to draw the convenient conclusion that the alt-right was a growing force in Republican politics that had to be fought through support for Democrats. Meanwhile, the media cast a blind eye toward Antifas violent Weimer-style rioting in Sacramento and Berkeley.

In response, right-wing media began tut-tutting the alt-right as victims of Antifa and focused exclusively on Antifa as a nefarious force; they also responded to the Lefts disgusting attempts to lump in the Right with the alt-right by accepting a broader, false definition of the alt-right that could include traditional conservatism. They even bought into the shameful rebranding of the alt-right as defenders of Western civilization by shills such as Milo Yiannopoulos. That rebranding provided a convenient way of fighting the Left: If the Left is calling us alt-right, thats just because they hate that we stand for Western civilization!

Finally, theres political convenience.

Obamas repeated references to American racism werent his only sin. He repeatedly shunned opportunities to tamp down leftist racial radicalism. He made excuses for riots in Ferguson and Baltimore. He used the shooting of Dallas police officers by a radical black activist as an opportunity to lecture Americans about the evils of racist policing. He knew that his political support came in large measure from SJWs, and he cultivated them.

Meanwhile, on the right, Trump did the same. During the campaign, he ignored opportunity after opportunity to break with the alt-right. He refused to condemn the KKK on national television; he refused to condemn his supporters sending anti-Semitic messages to journalists; he hired as his campaign strategist Steve Bannon, a man who openly celebrated turning Breitbart into a platform for the alt-right. Trump saw the alt-right as convenient allies, his meme-making deplorable friends on the Internet. They reveled in both his unwillingness to condemn them and his willingness to share their work.

And so here we are. The mainstream Left has been increasingly suckered into walking hand-in-hand with the SJWs while ignoring the most egregious activities of Antifa; the mainstream Right has been increasingly seduced into footsie with alt-right associates while feigning ignorance at the alt-right itself.

Thats why Charlottesville matters: not only because we saw destruction and terror, but because if all Americans of good conscience wont do some soul-searching and move to excise the evil in their midst, that evil will metastasize. There is a cancer in the body politic. We must cut it out, or be destroyed.

READ MORE: Two Blocks from the Culture War The Roots of Left-Wing Violence Gangs of Berkeley: The Pathetic Delusions of the Antifa

Ben Shapiro is the editor in chief of the Daily Wire.

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Antifa and the Alt-Right, Growing in Opposition to One Another - National Review

The organizers of an alt-right rally in Boston this weekend have vowed to move ahead with the event in the wake of violence at a similar event in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday.

The demonstration is just one of several so-called free speech rallies planned across the United States this week, with right-wing events planned later in the summer.

The rally on Saturday IS NOT CANCELED. Not sure where this rumor came from, the Boston Free Speech rallys organizers wrote on Facebook late Monday.

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Members of white nationalist protesters hold shields as they clash against a group of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12. Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Information about the potential shutdown was posted Monday on 4Chan, an anonymous internet forum that has become a home for hard-right ideologues. The same day Bostons mayor Martin Walsh said, I dont want them here. We dont need them here.

The group wrote online that the Boston Police Department and the city are ignoring their calls but that their permit for the rally remains.

Walsh said Monday that he is exploring ways to shut down the rally over fears of similar bloodshed to that in Charlottesville, where one counterprotester died and dozens were seriously injured after a car that police believewas driven by an alt-right member plowed into a group of pedestrians.

We are not in any way associated with the organizers of the Charlottesville rally, the Boston events organizers wrote on Facebook. But the event shares speakers in common with the violent Virginia rally.

Speakers at the event include alt-right figures such as Tim Baked Alaska Gionet, who was a speaker in Charlottesville. Kyle Based Stick Man Chapman and Joe Biggs, a former contributor to the conspiracy theory website InfoWars, will also be there.

Related: Trump retweets alt-right leader who has praised white supremacist Richard Spencer

The so-called alt-right movement is a loose-knit group of racist white nationalists, nationalists, conspiracy theoristsand misogynists.

Some of the speakers began to pull out of the Boston event Monday, including alt-right figure Gavin McInnes, who has written for racist websites, including Vdare, and is a contributor at The Rebel, an alt-right online media outlet.

In addition to Boston, rallies are also being planned for Saturday, August 19, in Mountain View, California; Los Angeles; New York City;Washington, D.C.;Austin, Texas; Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Seattle. These events are being organized by alt-right figure Jack Posobiec in opposition to Google and in solidarity with former Google engineer James Damore. Posobiec has said specifically said that the event is not an alt-right event but is open to anyone who values free speech.

Damore was fired as an engineer with the internet search giant last week after he wrote a memo criticizing the companys diversity policies. Damore said Tuesday that he does not want the alt-rights support. I do not support the alt-right, he told CNN Tech. Just because someone supports me doesnt mean I support them.

The neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, which has been promoting these events as part of what it branded the Summer of Hate, was shut down Monday following the Charlottesville rally after it mocked counterprotester Heather Heyer, who was killed when a car plowed into the crowd. We are going to start doing this nonstop. Across the country, the site said after the Charlottesville rally.

These rallies arent about popularizing white nationalism, readan anonymous post on 4Chan on Sunday, but about normalizing white nationalism.

We need more of these in the future, it said, hopefully with an even larger turnout.

Another rally is being planned for September 16 in Richmond, Virginia, around a monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee to protest the removal of similar statues from public spaces in Civil Warera Southern states. White supremacist Richard Spencer is also seeking permission to speak next month at the University of Florida.

Counterprotests are being planned in response to the rally in Boston as well, with the Black Lives Matter civil rights group saying they will march against the alt-right.

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Where Are the Next Alt-Right, White Nationalist Rallies Planned? - Newsweek

One day after being pushed to condemn white supremacy and hate groups, President Donald Trump turned back to spreading the alt-right message including retweeting, then deleting, a cartoon of a person superimposed with the CNN logo being run over by a train.

The White House has since told NBCs Kristen Welker that the retweet of the train-CNN meme was "inadvertently posted," and immediately removed when noticed.

On Saturday, a Nazi sympathizer at a white supremacist rally whose mother identified as a Trump supporter rammed his car into a crowd of anti-racism counter-protesters, killing one and injuring more than a dozen. In the immediate aftermath, Trump refused to condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists specifically.

Then, after making a statement specifically denouncing racism, Trump retweeted another alt-right activist in a post that hit the media for focusing too much on Charlottesville instead of a recent spate of homicides in Chicago. Jack Posobiec was known for amplifying Pizzagate, the Hillary Clinton conspiracy theory that eventually led a gunman into a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant.

The tweet was both a nod to Trumps law and order narrative and to his contempt for the media, after a spate of unfavorable stories censured his response to the recent violent white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Posobiec, the alt-right social media voice who Trump retweeted, had also shared and eventually deleted a fake news story falsely framing an anti-Trump demonstrator as the driver of the car.

Trump was clearly upset about the negative media attention he has been receiving in recent days. After making amended and stronger remarks about the terror attack in Charlottesville, Trump tweeted that the #Fake News Media will never be satisfied.

Trumps frustration with the media has resulted in alternate messages between attempts to appease the admonishing members of the Republican Party, while also currying the favor of a white nationalist base.

It appears he has settled on the latter.

More here:
Trump is back to tweeting alt-right memes - Vox

Members of the alt-right like to depict their movement as an irreverent response to political correctness.

On Saturday, in Charlottesville, Virginia, James Alex Fields Jr. drove a car through that faade, in a terrorist attack that killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others who had gathered in opposition to the white-nationalist movement.

It was a defining moment, but not a moment for a pause. More alt-right rallies are scheduled for the coming Saturday, in at least nine cities. These events will provide an important barometer for the future of this movement, depending on how many people turn out, who those people are, and how they conduct themselves. For the alt-right, the coming weekend represents a critical testwhich may reveal it gathering force, dissipating, or changing in significant ways. By Saturday night, it may be clear where its headed.

Take the Statues Down

The alt-right has become an umbrella community for the American far-right, a loosely defined movement with a strong center of gravity online and which encompasses a large number of subnetworks.

Some of these subgroups identify primarily as the alt-right, but many are affiliated with more specific strains of white-nationalist ideologyincluding the Ku Klux Klan, Odinists, Neo-Nazis, and more, many in full regalia lest anyone miss the point.

The prevalence of white nationalism within the alt-right has led to a deep internal split between its overtly racist wing and its less overtly racist wing. Members of the latter faction might be charitably described as less racist or as non-racist, but most are pretty open about the fact that their primary concern is the specter of bad publicity. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville graphically illustrated a couple of important points regarding this internal division.

First, the overtly racist wing of the alt-right is clearly ascendant. White supremacist protests in early 2016 were embarrassingly small. An estimated 500 white nationalists turned out for the rally Saturday. While this is still a small number in the absolute sense, the trend is disturbing.

Second, Charlottesville put to rest the idea that the alt-right can be primarily defined as fun-loving transgressive hipsters or an elaborate practical joke (if anyone still really believed that). Even before the culminating act of terrorism, the rally in Charlottesville illustrated that the umbrella of the alt-right is an effective means to mobilize a highly visible mix of old-school white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Offline, at least, this isnt the new white nationalism; its the old white nationalism as the primary beneficiary of the activity generated by a looser collection of people online.

Third, the composition of the crowd in Charlottesville shows that there are more potential fracture lines in the alt-right than the optics of white supremacy. Since the 1970s, white nationalism in the United States has been a sectarian affair. White nationalists all generally agree white people should be in charge, but they have many different competing beliefs about why that is the case, and how white rule should be implemented. These differences are not trivial, and for decades they have prevented a broadly concerted campaign of action by white nationalists in America. Charlottesville was an example of how the alt-right umbrella community can muster numbers that Odinists or the KKK alone cannot.

The events scheduled for this coming Saturdaya free speech rally in Boston and marches scheduled in nine cities to protest Googles firing of an employee who wrote a screed against diversitywill help clarify where all the chaotic elements that comprise the alt-right are headed in the near-term future. (The anti-Google protests are slated for Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Seattle, New York, Washington, Austin, Boston, and Mountain View, California. On Sunday, organizers released a statement condemning violence and insisting that they are in no way associated with any group who organized in Charlottesville.)

Prior to Fieldss attack, Charlottesville was on track to be a clear victory for the alt-right. While attendance of 500 people is a pittance compared to most mainstream political events, it represents a marked upswing from 2016. Simply turning out that many people in one place was an unqualified win.

The fact that few participants sought to conceal their identities was a bold statement about the mainstreaming of white nationalism, which did not go unnoticed during an ominous torch-wielding event the night before the formal rally. Even after the Unite the Right rally itself was shut down by authorities as an unlawful assembly in the face of escalating violence, the event was seen as a show of strength.

But the terrorist attack by Fields, who attended the rally alongside a neo-Nazi group known as Vanguard America, was a game-changer. Videos posted online depicted his car accelerating down a street to target a group of pedestrians with devastating effect. The horrifying attack, recorded in graphic detail, sparked a massive national outpouring of outrage and condemnation. When Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler attempted to hold a press conference on Sunday in Charlottesville, he was chased away by a crowd of people shouting murderer and shame.

The question now is how the alt-right will process the backlash, and an early indicator will be seen in Saturdays marches and rallies.

Terrorism is a double-edged sword. While it can help mobilize the most radical segments of an extremist movement, it simultaneously alienates the least radical, including people who are loosely supportive of an extremist movement, or tolerant or dismissive of its rhetorical excesses.

The risk that terrorism entails for extremists was clear after the Oklahoma City bombing, when the anti-government Patriot movement rapidly went from boom to bust, as adherents melted awaysome due to fear of a government crackdown, others in genuine moral dismay over the attack, which killed 19 children and injured many more. The Patriot movement has since recovered from these setbacks, but the process took years, and McVeigh is still a controversial figure for many adherents.

The attack in Charlottesville, while horrific, was not on the scale of Oklahoma City, and it is unclear how those within the alt-right will process its meaning. In the first 24 hours, online adherents responded predictably, with a mix of denialism, whataboutism, victim-blaming, disavowals of Fields, and the advancement of conspiracy theories to explain the problem away. Some glorified the rally while pointedly ignoring the car attack. Others dismissed it as a road-rage incident unrelated to ideology. And somerelatively fewcriticized the attack for portraying white nationalism in a negative light.

Thats the context for Saturdays scheduled events, whose organizers have denied any connection to the Unite the Right organizers, although at least one personality from Charlottesville (Tim Gionet, aka Baked Alaska) is scheduled to appear at the Boston event. Turnout for these events will help illustrate exactly what kind of moment this nation has come to. Heres what to look for:

How each of these questions plays out will reveal something about the future of the alt-right. If attendance is very low, for instance, it may signal that Charlottesville was a sobering moment for the movement, perhaps with some adherents reconsidering their tactics, and with other people reconsidering their involvement altogether.

If attendance is very high, on the other hand, it likely means that the Charlottesville rally was an energizing event for the alt-right, even with its culmination in a terrorist attack, and that would be cause for serious concern. If attendance is high and the participants include more of the same Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other white supremacists in garish costumes and armed to the teeth, it would be hard to interpret that as anything less than extremely alarming.

If attendance is low, on the other hand, while met with very large and peaceful counter-protests, that would be an extremely encouraging turn of events, highlighting the marginal nature of the movement and helping to reinforce a strong social center standing in opposition to the latest wave of racist extremism to rock America.

And of course, there are many possible outcomes in between these two poles, which will require unpacking. A large turnout from the alt-right but an even larger presence of peaceful counter-protesters might bode well for the overall mood of the country but reinforce the idea that the alt-right is here to stay. A small turnout from both sides would be more difficult to assess. An aggressive showing by antifa groups looking to meet violence with violence could lead to further escalation.

There is one more wild card to consider: the president of the United States, who is scheduled to hold a press conference on Monday. Based on his past failures to repudiate white nationalism, theres a good chance he will continue to hedge his language with weak equivocations. But the political pressure to say more is rapidly mounting, and the president may find himself backed into a corner.

If President Trump somehow manages to issue a convincing and unequivocal condemnation of Unite the Right specifically and white nationalism more broadly, and if he can do it without visibly seething about the necessity, the reaction from the alt-right should be fascinating and informative. Given his history, its a very long shot that the president will be able to successfully check all of those boxes, but its not impossible.

If the president successfully repudiates the alt-right, its anyones guess what happens next. Some portion of the alt-right is more enamored of Trumpism than of white nationalism. These are not mutually exclusive categories at the moment, but if Trump manages to change that dynamic, its unclear where the chips may fall.

Would the alt-right turn against the president en masse, or in part? And if so, what impact would that have on his already flagging poll numbers? Would some be enraged and adopt an even more violent posture? Would they be discouraged? Would they shrug it off? Or would they splinter into yet more factions, stealing their momentum and forcing a massive retrenchment?

The last outcome is probably the most likely, in the unlikely event that the president can muster the moral courage to take and maintain a strong stand without simultaneously undermining it in some way.

The only certainty is that the week ahead is bound to be interesting and consequential. By the time we reach the other side, Americans will likely have a much clearer picture of the shape and direction of white-nationalist extremism in America. I wish I felt more optimistic about what we will see.

Originally posted here:
What the Next Round of Alt-Right Rallies Will Reveal - The Atlantic