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Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

Defend Europe, an anti-immigrant group that attempts to disrupt humanitarian search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean Sea, recently chartered a boat that was stopped in a Cyprus port, where several members were arrested for forging documents and engaging in potential human trafficking. Since then, pro-Trump media trolls associated with the campaign have been conspicuously silent.

The members were stopped in anddeportedfrom a sea port in the self-declared Turkish state of Northern Cyprus Thursday after spending two days in detention for document forgery and potential human trafficking of 20 Sri Lankan nationals who were aboard the C-Star, the campaigns ship. Turkish Cypriot authorities deported nine crew members, including the ships captain and a German second captainbelieved to beneo-Nazi Alexander Schleyer. The authorities also transferred the director of the company that owns the ship,Sven Tomas Egerstrom, to Greek-controlled Cyprus for further questioning.

Refugee Rights Association advocate Faika Pasha toldThe Associated Pressthat some of the Sri Lankans on board reported having paid a trafficker to be taken to Italy and confirmed that five Sri Lankans remained in Cyprus to claim asylum. (Defend Europe claims the Sri Lankans were actually bribed by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to claim they were seeking asylum.)

Defend Europe is a campaign by anti-immigrant, alt-right activists todisrupthumanitarian search and rescue missions of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. The effortis the brainchild ofGeneration Identity, a pan-European Identitarian movement known for its members high-profile political stunts.

Since the arrest and deportation of the C-Stars crew members, Defend Europe has been doing some damage control on Twitter,claimingthe ship was released and that lies and #fakenews from NGOs have been exposed once again. The next day, the account pinned an image of the groups alleged goals on its feed, one of which was to save migrants in danger of drowning and making sure they get to the nearest non-European safe port.

However, Generation Identitys Austrian co-founder, Martin Sellner, has repeatedly claimed that Defend Europes goal is to take migrants from North Africa back to Libya aviolationof the non-refoulement principle of the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention against sending refugees back to their county if they would be in harms way. In June, Sellnersaid, We want to face those human trafficking ships on the sea. We want to disrupt their doings. And, of course, if you meet an account of people in distress on the sea, save them but bring them back to where they started from. Hereiteratedhis stance a month later, saying that Defend Europe will do everything in our power to make sure that they go back to Africa, where they belong.

Since the detainment of Defend Europe members and their subsequent expulsion from Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus, the movements right-wing media allies and pro-Trump trolls have been noticeably mum. As of this pieces publication, Brittany Pettibone, who has actively been reporting in support of Defend Europe from Catania, Sicily,had tweetedonlytwiceon the subject since the incident, both times promoting Defend Europes conspiratorial narrative that NGOs are propagating fake news and hiding something about theiralleged collusionwith international human trafficking rings.

Even more notably,Lauren Southern, a Canadian media troll who made a name for herself denying the existence of rape culture and demonizing minorities and who has been actively involved in the Defend Europe campaign, has not tweeted a single time about the recent incident (though she has retweeted in support of Defend Europe). Online payment service Patreon recentlysuspendedSoutherns account for violating the crowdfunding platforms terms by soliciting donations for the Defend Europe campaign; Southern has sinceresortedto using PayPal. PayPal previouslyfrozeDefend Europes account,sayingin a statement, Our policy is to prevent our services being used by companies whose activities promote hatred, violence or racial intolerance.

Peter Sweden, a previously vocal Holocaust denier who reversed himself inmid-July, has been similarly silent on the recent controversy surrounding Defend Europe. Sweden hasbraggedaboutdisruptingsearch and rescue missions in the Mediterranean and has also beeninterviewedby conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, taking the opportunity tofearmongeraboutcrime in Sweden.

Katie Hopkins, a columnist for British news site MailOnline who regularly appears on Fox News to voice her Islamophobic, anti-immigrant views, has also been silent on Twitter about the C-Stars deportation from Cyprus. Hopkins recentlytweeteda photo of herself with Sweden, which she later deleted. Her involvement with the Defend Europe campaign has beendocumentedby the anti-extremism research and education group HOPE Not Hate.

Tara McCarthy, who hosts a YouTube show alongside Pettibone and who has said, in asince-deletedtweet, that she hopes zero migrants crossing the sea to Europe make it alive, has also not commented on the C-Stars seizure.

According toHOPE Not Hate, pro-Trump propaganda outlet Breitbart, white nationalist site AltRight.com, racial nationalist organization American Renaissance, Nazi website The Daily Stormer, and former Ku Klux Klan leaderDavid Dukehave alsovoiced supportfor Defend Europes mission. As of noon on July 28, none of these outlets or individuals had responded to the latest developments.

The silence of these pro-Trump trolls exposes their opportunism and cowardice. They engage inhigh-profilestuntsto profit and promote themselves and then back away when the going gets tough, as prominent troll Mike Cernovich did when heattempted todenyinvolvement in the Pizzagate conspiracy. The pro-Trump trolls subscribed to the Defend Europe campaign for donations and foreign Twitter followers, but now theyre stuck in a sordid relationship with a movement that is endangering innocent lives and potentially violating international law. It remains to be seen how they willmemetheir way out of this one.

Header image bySarah Wasko / Media Matters

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"Alt-Right" Ship Detained In Mediterranean For Apparent Human ... - The National Memo (blog)

Charlottesville, Va., established a commission last year to deal with questions about its history on racial issues, and how that past is memorialized in its public spaces. One of the panel's recommendations, which was endorsed by a 3-to-2 vote of the City Council, called for the removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Confederate leader. Many critics saw that monument, which was installed in a city park during the Jim Crow era, as marking the space for white people only.

The planned removal of the statue is now tied up in court. Meanwhile, Charlottesville has become a battleground: As the University of Virginia and its home city hold difficult discussions about how to come to terms with their histories, extremist groups see opportunity. People associated with the so-called alt-right, a loose movement known for promoting white supremacist, anti-immigrant, and misogynistic views, plan to March on Charlottesville on August 12.

The city and the university are inextricably linked, and activists on UVa's campus are bracing for the march. In the following interview with The Chronicle, UVa's president, Teresa A. Sullivan, who announced in January that she planned to step down, discussed the institution's history and its role in the debates that have recently taken place in Charlottesville. The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Q. Charlottesville has been in the national spotlight for deciding to remove the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, as well as a recent Ku Klux Klan rally in which protesters were tear-gassed. It got national attention. So what's going on in Charlottesville right now?

A. Well, Charlottesville is interesting, I think, because there's certainly a troubled racial history in this part of Virginia. Obviously, there was slavery. Then there was the Civil War. After that, there was Reconstruction, and in the Jim Crow era, massive resistance. So there have been a lot of things in the troubled history of this part of Virginia, and indeed much of the South.

But we have a progressive City Council that studied the issue of removing two statues the one of Robert E. Lee and the one of Stonewall Jackson that sit downtown. This was also happening in New Orleans, but in New Orleans they were just removed bang. There was no time for protest and conversation and discussion. It's been more than a yearlong discussion in Charlottesville. And the decision of the City Council, 3 to 2, to remove the statues was immediately enjoined by a judge for six months. So that gives us six months of time to hash over the issues again and talk about it.

I think that there are a lot of issues that don't always get reported in the press. One of these is the sense of African-American citizens in the community that glorifying these Confederate heroes glosses over the cause of slavery that they were fighting for. It was clear in the Klan rally that they saw the removal of the statues as something symbolic of a far larger and, to them, more threatening issue, which was the removal of white history. I don't agree with that view, but I thought it was useful to understand that's where they were coming from.

Q. Some of the folks I've talked to in town have said that today's problems go back to Thomas Jefferson and his idea of white superiority and democracy, and that it's not a coincidence that Charlottesville continues to make national news. Is Charlottesville a microcosm of what's going on in the United States, and if it is, what does it mean to the university?

A. I don't know that Charlottesville is a microcosm. But I do think that here you see a clash of red and blue cultures in a way that you don't in a lot of places. And I think that makes a difference.

Contrast Richmond, which is 70 miles away. Richmond also has a lot of Confederate statues. But Richmond began some years ago by also commemorating its African-American history. They put a statue of Arthur Ashe on Monument Avenue. Last week they unveiled a statue of Maggie Walker. So Richmond has approached this a little differently. It's not just a matter of subtracting. It's a matter of adding.

Charlottesville took a different approach, and I think that's where a lot of the problem lies. I would not make this into something bigger than it is.

Q. So some critics might say that the university has taken a while to own up to its past. And other universities have been tackling this as well. What are the dynamics in play? And what is the most valuable work moving forward?

A. So in 2013 I appointed the President's Commission on Slavery and the University precisely to look at the part of our history we didn't know. And they've done some remarkable things in just four years. They've uncovered several slave sites that we weren't aware of. We've had the opportunity to curate those, contextualize them, and provide information for the public about it. We've redone the curation inside the Rotunda to talk about how slaves helped to build that. We have a walking trail of African-American history. We've named two buildings for enslaved families that were here at the university, Gibbons Hall and Skipwith Hall.

And I think maybe most interesting, at the last board meeting, the board approved the conceptual design for a memorial to enslaved laborers, which would be located at the part of the university most closely, just geographically closest, to the Charlottesville community, a kind of symbolic link between the community and the university. And so we're fund raising right now for that memorial.

Q. One narrative I've heard in town is that there were people who did not want the statue removed because they wanted the resources directed more toward contemporary issues not focusing on history. Such as living wages. Many universities have been attempting to deal with their histories, but they're less likely to get involved in social-justice issues. What do you think are universities' roles and responsibilities in their communities?

A. Well, as the Charlottesville case shows, there isn't just one point of view in a community. There are many points of view. And I'm sympathetic to the issue that the city, which is relatively small and landlocked, has a limited tax base, is now going to spend, not just the money to remove the statues, but there's going to be a lot of money for police overtime. And there are going to be court costs and so on.

I can understand why people are frustrated with that. There are certainly issues in the city. Affordable housing is an important one. And I see university experts involved in almost every aspect of city life. There is not a commission or a committee or a board of a nonprofit that typically does not have university people engaged on it. I think that it's more important for us to encourage the members of the university community to engage with Charlottesville than to tell them how to do it. And I've made a real effort not to tell them how to do it.

Just to give you one example, our students provide 3,500 volunteer hours a week in the city of Charlottesville. And they do all sorts of things from Habitat for Humanity to tutoring children having trouble with math.

Q. What is the role of the university as a central player in the free-speech debate? How does the university fit into the picture?

A. Well, our first responsibility is educational. Some current studies that have come out indicate that this generation of college students doesn't really understand or agree with free speech as it's been interpreted by the Supreme Court. And so making it clear what free speech is and is not, I think, is part of what our job is.

And that also applies to things like the Klan rally. The Klan has the right to rally. We might not agree with what they say. We can publicly disagree with what they have to say. But they do have the right to be there and to say it. By the same point of view, I think our students have the right to hear different viewpoints. And they don't have to agree with those viewpoints. But they have the right to hear about it.

I think our educational role here is really primary, and supersedes everything else. We have had our own free-speech issues here in the past. And I've tried to see to it every time that the university comes down on the side of free speech. We do have a green-light rating from FIRE, which is still pretty rare among American universities.

Q. So this decision on the statues is getting a lot of attention from outside groups. With the demonstrations and upcoming rallies, is Charlottesville becoming some version of Berkeley? And, in the midst of that, do you see yourself as a national leader? And what answers might you have for other leaders?

A. Well, I'm not sure that we're like Berkeley. I mentioned we're a city of 50,000. Our nearest major metropolitan area is Richmond, which is not nearly as large as San Francisco. So there's a lot of ways in which I think we are not similar.

In other ways, we are. We're an active research university. A lot of this community is affected by the fact that this fall we'll be bringing 23,000 students here together. That really changes the size and the focus of the city. So, yes, I think those things are important.

And whether I see myself as a leader is not really so important as whether I'm seen that way by others. And I think that, because of our heritage, because of the stance we've taken on free speech, I do think people will look at us to see how we act. And, to me, what is most important is that these 23,000 students have an opportunity to hear and engage the central civic issues.

One of the things we believe we do is that we produce students for lives of civic responsibility. And it's very easy, in the current political turmoil, just to go hide and say, I'm not going to have nothing to do with this. We like to encourage our students instead to be willing to engage engage intellectually, at least even if they don't become engaged otherwise.

Q. Do you have any other thoughts on this alt-right "Unite the Right" rally that's happening in August here?

A. Well, that is a very different kind of thing. It appears that it will be a coalition of, I would say, politically right-leaning groups who probably have different agendas and don't all have the same platform more difficult to deal with than, say, the Klan, which has a long and discredited history, I might mention, and which today is not seen, I think, as a particularly vibrant organization. I think it's worth noting that the Klan members came from North Carolina. They weren't even from Virginia.

With the alt-right, it's a different kind of situation. I think that they exist in part to be provocative. I think they exist in part to have people take the bait. I think that there is, at some level, a desire for violence. And that is what I think we have to be on our guard about. One thing that's important to me is that our students, in expressing their civic engagement, remain safe. And that will be my principal concern about this upcoming rally. For my own part, I would just prefer these people not get a bigger audience.

Q. Is that becoming a harder space to navigate, balancing free speech and safety with these groups?

A. Well, what's difficult here is the position of police because they have to form a line to protect the speakers that's a free-speech obligation. But then the protesters are facing a line of police, and they feel angry about that. They want to get at the people who are conducting the rally and speaking. And so then you get the issues about the police and how they control the crowds and so on. So, yeah, that's a difficult space to navigate. It's one of the reasons I think the counterprotests are better done in ways other than coming and confronting the original rally.

So when the Klan was here there were three or four events around the city, all very well attended, not covered by the press, which gave people an alternative venue to express their opinions.

Julia Schmalz is a senior multimedia producer. She tells stories with photos, audio, and video. Follow her on Twitter @jschmalz09, or email her at julia.schmalz@chronicle.com

See the rest here:
In Charlottesville, UVa Grapples With Its History and the Alt-Right - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Wolfenstein II, a video game set in an alternate, Nazi-ruled 1960s America, has severely pissed off the white nationalist alt-right, and its not even out yet. After seeing the trailer, racists have decried the game as anti-Whitepropaganda with Black Lives Matter overtones. Well, wait until they get a load of this scene, shared on Twitter by Polygons Nick Robinson:

Robinson describes the conversation, which the player can overhear before stealthily executing two Nazi guards, as a so much for the tolerant left convo. Hes referring to a meme where various flavors of bigots, when called out on their bigotry, accuse critics of being intolerant. The Nazis in this scene deliver a blatant parody of this ubiquitous part of 2017sinternetpolitical discourse.

How can they promote violence toward us just because we have a different point of view? wonders one of the characters, an actualNazi. In a societywhere many people believe calling someone racist is worse than actuallybeing racist, this is trenchant stuff.

Robinson calls it my favorite video game thing Ive seen in a long time.

The replies to him, from people who didnt find the dialogue particularly funny, add another layer of entertainment. Theres some irony being missed, here.

This might be the mostdivisive scene in the game, though. Its developers told The Verge it was meant to be timeless, not a commentary on current U.S. politics. Still, said creative director Jens Matthies, Every once in a while, you cant resist slipping a joke or two about the state of the world.

Continue reading here:
The alt-right is upset about a conversation between Nazis in 'Wolfenstein 2' - The Daily Dot

The alt-rights presence seemingly pervades every corner of the Donald Trump administration, so perhaps its no surprise that key players in the extremist white nationalist movement are turning out to be involved in the presidents scandals as well namely, the ongoing investigation into potential collusion between Russian intelligence and members of the Trump campaign.

Charles C. Johnson/Twitter

Two major alt-right figures Charles C. Johnson, the white nationalist Trumps Troll who reportedly acted as an adviser to the administrations transition team, and notorious neo-Nazi hacker Andrew weev Auernheimer have been implicated in the Russia investigation, according to a recent piece by Ben Schreckinger in Politico.

Their role became public whena Republican activist named Peter Smith, 81, committed suicide shortly after detailing for the Wall Street Journal his attempts to track down hackers he believed might possess the 33,000emails Hillary Clinton deleted from her private servers, the controversy over which wasa major campaign issue raised by Trump during the election. Smiths involvement could be a key to the investigation if evidence can be found that he acted as a conduit between Russian intelligence operatives seeking to affect the 2016 election outcome and Trump adviser Michael Flynn, Sr., the onetime National Security Adviser who resigned over his meetings with key Russian officials.

Johnson, a onetime Breitbart News writer who told Schreckinger he met Smith in 2013 while conducting opposition research on President Obama, had been in touch with Smith throughout the 2016 campaign, discussing tactics and research, including Smiths efforts in tracking down Clintons emails.

He wanted me to introduce him to [Trumps chief adviser, Stephen] Bannon, to a few others, and I sort of demurred on some of that, Johnson said. I didnt think his operation was as sophisticated as it needed to be, and I thought it was good to keep the campaign as insulated as possible.

Schreckinger reported that Johnson instead contacted a hidden oppo network of alt-right researchers (who he declined to identify) and urged them to back Smiths efforts. Moreover, he suggested to Smith that he get in touch with Auernheimer.

Andrew Auernheimer/Daily Stormer

Auernheimer, claiming he is contractually prohibited from speaking to reporters, would not confirm to Schreckinger that Smith had contacted him.

Smiths confession to the Journal corroborated other aspects of the Russia investigation that have been uncovered by reporters. It explained: The operation Mr. Smith described is consistent with information that has been examined by U.S. investigators probing Russian interference in the elections. Those investigators have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clintons server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence.

Smith killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room on May 14, days after talking to the Journal reporters. He left behind a carefully arranged stack of documents explaining his suicide and a note exclaiming, NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER.

Johnson rose to notoriety in 2014 as an alt-right troll who led social-media harassment campaigns against people who were involved in mainstream news stories, including journalists, publishing their home and private information online and leading to threats at their residences. He also was notorious for using overtly racist language on his Twitter account, though he was permanently exiled from Twitter in 2015 for using threatening language.

In July 2016, Johnson was a guest on the racist radio show Fash the Nation, in which he claimed that he got interested in race realism a phrase white nationalists use to refer to their racist ideology at a young age. On the show, he maintained that ethnic and racial stereotypes are largely true and he admitted to factoring them into hiring practices, predicated on the principle that blacks are dumber than whites.

And at a certain point you If were all the same, you would have statistically expected that if blacks are 15% of the population, they would make up, you know, 15%of honors winners, you know, honor students or whatever. And yet thats never the case. And so you have to sit You have to believe that every single school on the planet, and in every single environment thats run by white people that theyre systematically discriminating against blacks for some reason. Or you have to believe the more obvious thing which is that theyre dumber. And enough experience with them kind of persuades you that the dumber thing is probably true.

He claimed in December that he had been doing a lot of the vetting for the administration, and the Trump transition. Forbes reported that Johnson didnt have an official position, but was working behind the scenes with members of the transition teams executive committee.

Auernheimer, who became famous in 2010 for exposing a hole in AT&Ts security system and wound up serving prison time for it beforeconverting to outright neo-Nazi ideology, has been closely involved in the activities of the overtly racist 1488 segment of the alt-right. He helped Andrew Anglin set up his bulletin-board system for the neo-Nazi outlet Daily Stormer, and has been involved in sending threatening fliers out to Jewish community centers and colleges.

Johnson and Auernheimer had previously teamed up in 2015 in an effort to release hours of covertly filmed interviews with Planned Parenthood officials.

Read more:
Two Notorious 'Alt-Right' Figures May Play Key Roles in Russia Investigation - Southern Poverty Law Center

Mashable

A Congressional resolution was written with the help of an alt-right ... Mashable A recent congressional resolution was apparently sourced from an alt-right conspiracy subreddit called r/The_Donald. and more »

Original post:
A Congressional resolution was written with the help of an alt-right ... - Mashable