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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.

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An 'alt-right' leader called off a planned protest of Google over the firing of James Damore - Recode

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.

Read more from the original source:
Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist Language - New York Times

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)

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'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