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Lock and load... Bruce Willis in Death Wish. Photograph: MGM

There is a long and fine tradition of pointing out that Eli Roths new films dont look very good. The cocksure writer, director, producer and sometime actor has spent the last 15 years serving up reliably polarising product from the gloomy, insidious torture-porn of Hostel to the garish sexpot thriller Knock Knock. Roths latest and most high-profile project a long-in-the-works resurrection of the Death Wish franchise with Bruce Willis as the trigger-happy lead has attracted even sharper criticism than usual. The launch trailer has sustained heavy fire on social media, called out for being nakedly fascist and being compared to alt-right fan fiction.

To mix animal metaphors, the trailer does make the rebooted Death Wish look like a depressing frog chorus of alt-right dog whistles. The setting has been shifted from New York to Chicago, a city currently struggling in real life to cope with a resurgent murder rate while being attacked by Donald Trump on a weekly basis. The alt-right like to paint the USs third largest city as an urban hellscape overrun by predominantly black gangs fighting for turf. Purists might point to the fact that the new films location is paying tribute to Michael Winners 1974 original, which ends with Charles Bronson arriving at Chicagos Union Station to continue his vigilante campaign. By fully setting their remake in Chicago, however, Roth and his producers are wading into real-life racial tensions (while filming mostly in Montreal).

The remake appears to stick to the man-on-the-edge premise of the original. Willis plays an affluent, middle-aged surgeon whose wife and daughter are victims of a savage home invasion. With the cops and courts seemingly incapable of punishing the perpetrators, Willis swaps scrubs for a hoodie to enforce his own brand of guerrilla justice, torturing low-life criminals in pursuit of information, gunning down a black drug dealer in broad daylight and, it is implied, becoming a folk hero in the process.

You might suppose that a film about a medical professional so psychologically upended by anger and grief that they become a murderer could be the basis for a thought-provoking meditation on how we construct our own morality in a volatile world. Roths film, judging by its trailer, chooses to go in a rather different direction, with Willis quipping his way through a montage of violent kills over an AC/DC soundtrack. The strutting Back in Black is prominent on the soundtrack of Iron Man, and the suggestion seems to be that, like libertarian billionaire Tony Stark, Willis Paul Kersey is a maverick hero with no time for liberal hand-wringers. Roth initially seemed happy to stoke the flames, promoting the trailer with some macho lock and load talk and the social justice warrior baiting #triggerwarning hashtag.

Could Roth deliberately be courting the alt-right dollar? His 2015 jungle cannibal movie The Green Inferno received some unexpectedly admiring notices from pro-Trump publisher Breitbart, who seemed tickled that the gnawed-on victims were students whose conservation activism was a pose. But despite his crass creative impulses and glib comments, Roth is an unlikely cheerleader for the alt-right. He makes a searing screen appearance in Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds as Donny Donowitz, a second world war soldier who goes a little further than just punching Nazis. The formidable Bear Jew specialises in clubbing them to death with a baseball bat.

In truth, Roth seems more of an equal opportunities controversialist who views himself as a gonzo cinematic provocateur rather than propagandist. When recently confronted about the Death Wish reaction, he claimed to be proud of the final product. When people see the movie in context I think this [controversy] is all going to evaporate, he said. Like the Rambo franchise, the original Death Wish series began with downbeat, thorny, unsettling films before rapidly becoming exaggerated cartoons. Judging by the way Willis jokes and smirks in the trailer, Roth seems to have internalised the spirit of the 1980s sequels, citing Death Wish 3 as a key inspiration. That was the one where lethal architect Charles Bronson returned to New York City which looked suspiciously like London and ended up taking out punks with silly Home Alone-style booby traps.

Irrespective of Roths intentions, Death Wish still seems likely to be embraced by right-wing activists in the run-up to its November release, if only because it has already enraged so many liberal commentators. In the alt-rights culture war, opportunistic points-scoring is more useful than cogent debate, and anything that draws fire from snowflakes is seen as good. That this latest ammunition has come from Hollywood itself traditionally a liberal stronghold will make it all the more appealing to dudes who fantasise about white men taking charge through violence.

Still, at least Roth can claim to have honoured the original Death Wish in his own weird way. The Michael Winner original was also greeted as dangerously right-wing agitprop in 1974, which the New York Times called a bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far-right wing.

Link:
Death Wish: is the Bruce Willis remake an alt-right fantasy? | Film ... - The Guardian (blog)

Avoiding politics online is nearly impossible. But what happens when your quest to remain neutral draws you deep into a firestorm between two of the most aggressive political factions of the Trump era?

Late last month, fundraising platform Patreon found out.

Patreon markets itself as the prime way for independent creators to come get paid, as its website reads. Its users span the full gamut of disciplines, from video makers to educators to podcasters and everyone in between. If you like a certain writer, for example, Patreon enables you to kick her a few bucks for her efforts. For some successful Patreon users, the platform provides a substantial income.

The concept of Patreon is noncontroversial in the era of crowdfunding. But that all changes when you mix money and take-no-prisoners politics.

The company found itself in the middle of a hyperpartisan showdown between warring entities in thealt-right and the far left anti-fascist movement known as Antifa. However, it wasPatreons efforts to remain outside the fray of politics that brought the fighting to a head.

The events that followed serve as either a warning to any company that attempts to navigate the murky, shark-filled waters of internet politicsor a model for how to use transparency as a weapon.

On July 20, without explanation, the company banned conservative provocateur Lauren Southern from the platform, cutting off valuable monthly donations from supporters and sparking a fierce backlash from mainly right-wing circles and alternative media outlets.

Hundreds of patrons and several creators abandoned the platform as a result, including scientist and podcaster Sam Harris, one of the most popular creators on the service.

One week later, on July 28, the company abruptly shut down the account offar-left news website Its Going Down (IGD). The outlet, which has become loosely associated with the re-emergent Antifa movement since PresidentDonald Trumps inauguration, had publishedarticlescovering Southerns activities amid its usual content, which is regularly re-posted anonymously from a range of anarchist and anti-capitalist groups.

In a 10-minute long video, published just hours after IGD was notified of its ban, Patreons chief executive defended Southerns account shutdownover which there had already been considerable falloutand explained the companys evaluation method called manifest observable behavior.

The purpose of using manifest observable behavior is to remove personal values and beliefs when the team is reviewing content. Its a review method thats based entirely on observable facts, Jack Conte, Patreons CEO, said.

Southerns ban, Conte said, came through her involvement with right-wing youth organization Gnration Identitaires Defend Europe project. Defend Europe was a crowdfunded mission to intercept boats filled with migrants journeying across the Mediterranean to Europe and to transport migrants back to their home countries in North Africa.

We removed [Southern and Defend Europes] pages because they directly obstructed a search-and-rescue ship in the Mediterranean, and they made a variety of statements and outlined plans to obstruct similar rescue ships in the future, Conte said, reasoning that this could endanger the lives.

Following the ban, Southern denied she was personally involved in the mission. In his response video above, Conte listed the observable facts that his evaluation team had cited. These included using some of Southerns own footage, in which she can be heard directing the Defend Europe boat operator to block the NGO rescue ship, and quoted statements Southern made in which she appears to speak and identify as part of the Defend Europe team.

None of these details were apparent in Southerns original response to Patreon banning her. Conte, in other words, decided to call her out.

You cant use manifest observable behavior to say who someone is you can use manifest observable behavior to say what someone did or didnt do and whether or not those things are or are not against your content policy, Conte concluded, reiterating that it was Southerns observable actions, not her politics, that had landed her in trouble with the platform.

Conte then broke the news that, hours earlier, Patreon had taken the same action against IGD, an organization at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Southernone that has also been actively critical of her work and politics.

Again, Conte pointed to observable and available content as violations of the companys content policy. The evidence against IGD consisted of two articles that were reposted on the leftist website, which unapologetically states its mission is the promotion of both revolutionary theory and action. One article featured an instance of doxxingthe publishing of an individuals personally identifiable informationand another instructed readers on how to sabotage a railway line.

Likely anticipating accusations of cutting off IGD as a way to appear politically neutral, Conte said the website had been flagged for review before Patreon banned Southern.

We dont batch pages together and take down opposing pages at exactly the same time to proactively seem like were being fair, Conte said. He added: When we removed Southerns page, IGDs page had already come to our attention from a number of inbound reports and was already in our queue.

Contes attempts to pull Patreon out of the snake pit of politics failed. After IGDs ban, some on the far left, who cheered at Southerns banning, accused Patreon of pandering to and working with the alt-right.

IGD was banned as an act of appeasement to the alt-right, IGDs editors asserted in a comprehensive post, which points to a sustained and coordinated call by alt-right media outlets and personalities to have its funding cut off. Behind the gimmicks and wonky terms about manifest observable behavior, the entirety of Contes video is an attempt to pacify the trolls.

On the right, disgruntled Southern supporters had taken to calling out Patreon on social media and blogs for what they believed to be a politically biased judgment.

To Southerns supporters, Patreon had stifled free speech in the name of the left; to IGD supporters, the company had sought to placate angry alt-right trolls in banning their outlet.

Although motivated by transparency over its decisions and ethical boundaries, the company had become a villain to both the extreme left and right. In fact, parties on both sides made Patreon a political battleground for its attempts to remain politically neutral.

Both Southern and IGD came to Patreons attention because of a number of inbound reports, according to Conte, which activists on both left and right utilized as a way of attacking one another. While left-wing activists ran a#DefundDefendEuropecampaign targeting Southern, alt-right activists were pushing a #DefundAntifa campaign aimed at IGD.

Self-described Antifa organization Hope Not Hate celebrated the closure of Southerns account as its own victory. In ablog articleonits websitedated July 21, theorganization states that it lobbied forSoutherns account to be removed from the platform.

The banning, it said, came after several weeks of lobbying by Hope Not Hate, which contacted Patreon to raise concerns about far-right activists making money via the service. Hope Not Hate also claimed that the sustained and effective#DefundDefendEuropecampaign resulted in the shutdown of Defend Europes bank and PayPal accounts.

Southerna 22-year-old Canadian who regularlycovers or discusses issues like the nightmare of mass immigration and condemns liberal versions of feminismseems an obvious target for her political opponents on the left.When Conte was asked on a recent episode of theRubin Reportabout Hope Not Hate taking creditfor Southern beingkicked out, however, heexplained that the only lobbying process was via the reporting system.

We dont actively policethecommunity, Conte said. The reason that a page gets taken down is becausewe get reports through an official reporting system If they sent in a report, then we evaluated that report.

Hate Not Hope did not respond to the Daily Dots request to clarify whether it used this reporting process tobring Southern to Patreons attention.

Just as Hate Not Hope was gunning for Southern, however, an undergroundalt-rightcampaign to have IGDs account shutdown began in earnest.

The anti-IGD effort appears to have started back in June, onemonth afterthe outletjoined the platform.

Alt-right activists on social aggregator Voat, a Reddit alternative offering no moderation and unbridled free speech, were called upon to bombard Patreonin a coordinated mass reporting of the IGD profile page.

Amysterious Voat user, a87d7sasa97h9, laid out in detail the plan in Voats Antifa subverse.

Explain that Its Going Down is an Antifa website, the instigating userwrote at the time. Include evidence of Antifas violent crimes to convince Patreon that Antifa is a terrorist organization. If enough people report this page, Patreon may shut it down and cut off some of Antifas funding. Every bit helps.

An email template that would-be participants could simply copy and submit to Patreon pitsIGD content against specific creator obligations stipulated in the Patreon content policy. Their most substantial weapon against IGD wasFox News negative coverage of IGD, which it said calls for violence against Trump supporters.

Fox News has exposed Its Going Down, a87d7sasa97h9 wrote in an update, use this as your primary evidence when reporting the Patreon page.

The account behind the effort, which was used exclusively to push other users to participate, has since fallen inactive. Its impossible to tell who was behind the seemingly random string of letters and numbers, whose mostimpassioned and lengthy postis suitably on the topic of maintaining online anonymity and security.

As the narrative consolidated in the Voat post was parroted byalt-right media outlets, alt-right activists were hard at work stacking up complaints and reports against IGD with Patreon when Contes video went live on July 28.

On discovery of the campaign, the Daily Dot contacted Patreon to request data relating to how and when the company was made aware of the IGD content, but a spokesperson refused to share the information.

The team at Patreon strongly believes in building a platform that prioritizes free speech and celebrates diverse viewpoints, a spokesperson told the Daily Dot. We do not take the possibility of removing creators lightly. We have a thorough content policy and evaluation process, and removing a creator is something we only consider after very careful review.

In the end, Patreon stands by its assessment in both cases, judging that the content of each creator had clearly fallen outside its boundary of mainstream acceptability. So, while its unclear just how much impact the spamming had, the subversive tactics employed by each group to quell the other ended in both being banished back to the fringes.

More:
How Patreon stepped into a war between Antifa and the alt-right - The Daily Dot

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

Go here to see the original:
"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