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President Donald Trumps chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has called white nationalists and alt-right groups losers in a phone call with the editor of a progressive magazine.

In an interview with The American Prospect,published late Wednesday, Bannon also detailed how hes working to influence change in Secretary of State Rex Tillersons State Department, as well as U.S. policy on China. His comments emerged alongside another report that says Trump is afraid of firing him.

These guys are a collection of clowns, Bannon said of hard-right groups that marched in Charlottesville, Virginia,last weekend to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which leftdozens injured and a 32-year-old woman who was protesting the march dead.

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White House chief strategist Steve Bannon called white nationalists "losers" in an interview with a progressive magazine Wednesday. Carlos Barria/Reuters

Ethno-nationalismits losers. Its a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush ityou know, help crush it more, Bannon said. His comments are at odds with his role leading Breitbart, a hard-right online news outlet, which he called the platform for the alt-right during the 2016 campaign.

In a press conference at Manhattans Trump Tower Tuesday, the president defended the alt-right, a loose-knit group of white supremacists, white nationalists, conspiracy theoristsand populists, which has become increasingly visible since his election victory.

But the president also said well see what happens with Mr. Bannon when asked about the White House aides status within the administration following bipartisan calls for him to be fired for his past support for the alt-right.

The president obviously is very nervous and afraid of firing him, a source close to the White House told Reuters Wednesday. The source said the concern is that Bannon could turn into a harsh critic of the administration if hes forced out.

Related: Trump is scared of Steve Bannon and that's why he hasn't been fired: Report

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has recently blamed Bannon for a sustained campaign of stories on Breitbart attacking his character after he worked to fire Bannons allies on the National Security Council.

In the interview, Bannon also contradicted Trumps threats of military action against North Korea over its continuing intercontinental ballistic missile tests and development of nuclear weapons.

Theres no military solution [to North Koreas nuclear threats]. Forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul dont die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I dont know what youre talking about. Theres no military solution here. They got us.

In the interview, Bannon had his sights set on a larger issue. Were at economic war with China, he said. Weve come to the conclusion that theyre in an economic war and theyre crushing us.

Bannon said that to him the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, were five years away, I think, 10 years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which well never be able to recover.

He said he plans to challenge China and its trade imbalance by lodging complaints against its steel and aluminum export practices and use the 1974 Trade Act to block Chinas practice of extracting technology from American companies.

These strategies, he said, are riling his opponents in the State, Defense andTreasury departments and the National Economic Council. But he has plans to marginalize Trump administration members.

Im changing out people at East Asian Defense; Im getting hawks in. Im getting Susan Thornton [acting head of the East Asian and Pacific Affairs Bureau] out at State, Bannon said.

His comment about Thornton shows Bannon believes he has strong influence over Tillerson, who has tried to make Thornton permanent in the role but has been blocked by the White House.

Theyre wetting themselves, Bannon saidof his government rivals and opponents on tougher trade policies against China. The presidents default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy.

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Steve Bannon Calls Alt-Right 'Losers' And Says His Government Rivals Are 'Wetting Themselves' - Newsweek

Common Dreams

The Alt-Right and the 1% Common Dreams Mercer, the Co-CEO of the $50 billion Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, is also one of three owners of Breitbart News, the outlet Trump strategist (and former Breitbart editor) Steve Bannon has described as a platform for the alt-right. With ...

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The Alt-Right and the 1% - Common Dreams

The Associated Press warned this week that the media outlets should avoid using the term "alt-right" because "it is meant as a euphemism to disguise racist aims."

The term was coined several years ago by white supremacist leader Richard Spencer, and now "encompasses a range of people on the extreme right who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of forms of conservatism that embrace implicit or explicit racism or white supremacy," according to the Anti-Defamation League.

While members of the "alt-right" insist they're not racist, from a practical standpoint it's beentricky, if not impossible, to find any daylight between the views they espouse and plain old white supremacy.And now, anew working paper from researchers at the University of Arkansas and Northwestern University sharply underscores the extent to which people who identify as "alt-right" harbor prejudicial views towardnon-white people.

In the paper, "A Psychological Profile of the Alt-Right,"Patrick Forscher and Nour Kteily attempt to asses the beliefs of the "alt-right" using an extensive online survey. It was conducted via Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which social science researchers have increasingly used in recent years to explore otherwise difficult-to-answer research questions. They recruited 447 "alt-right" adherents and 382 non-adherents and asked them a battery of questions on topics ranging from race to economics to the proper role of government.

The main caveat to note here is that Forscher and Kteily did not set out to create a nationally representative survey. The people they identified as "alt-right" adherents cannot be said to represent all such individuals across the nation.

Still, their study is useful as a qualitative exploration of the beliefs of a small political subgroup about which national polling is virtually non-existent -- in a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, for instance, only 17 percent of Americans said they'd heard "a lot" about the group. And given that the "alt-right" has been primarily associated with young, internet-savvy men, an online poll may beuniquely suited to measuring what motivates many of them.

The most striking result of Forscher and Kteily's polling came via the responses to questions asking survey-takersto rate how 'evolved' various groups were, using a series of silhouettes ranging from apes to modern humans as markers, below:

They explain how it works:

This scale asks people to rate how evolved they perceive people or groups to be using a diagram [that]depicts the purported biological and cultural evolution of humans from quadrupedal human ancestors. People use a 0-100 slider to decide where a person or group falls along the continuum established by the silhouettes in the image, with a score of 0 corresponding to the quadrupedal human ancestor and a score of 100 corresponding to a modern human. Higher scores therefore indicate humanization, lower scores dehumanization.

On average, "alt-right" adherentsrated whites (92 points), men (88 points) and Europeans (87 points) the highest of all. They rated women lower, at 83 points. They rated Jews slightly below the figure of a spear-wielding Neanderthal figure, at 73 points. Mexicans came in at 67 points, while blacks came in at 65.

Arabs, Nigerians, and feminists all came in at sub-60 points, close to the half-simian human ancestor in the middle of the chart. Muslims were the group ranked dead last, with 55 points.

In the eyes of the members of the "alt-right" participating in the study, in other words, Muslims are just 59 percent as "evolved" as white people.

The ratings done by people who did not identify with the "alt-right"were not anywhere near as segregated. They actually rated women (93 points) just a hair higher than men (92 points). Non-adherents rated Muslims at 83, or 9 points behind their rating for white people. That's still indicative of prejudice, of course, but not anywhere near as much as the 37-point gap between "alt-right" adherents' ratings of Muslims and white people would suggest.

People not identifying with the "alt-right" reserved their harshest judgment for Republicans, who they assessed at 78 points. By contrast, the "alt-right" felt that Democrats rated just 60 points.

"We found abundant support for portrayals of the alt-right that emphasize their perception that certain historically advantaged groups are superior to other groups and need their interests protected," Forscher and Kteily write. "Alt-right adherents also expressed hostility that could be considered extremist: they were quite willing to blatantly dehumanize both religious/national outgroups and political opposition groups."

People in the alt-right believe in a hierarchy of people that puts white people at the top and everyone else behindthem -- the essential tenet of white supremacy clouded only by an opaque name.

Whatever you call it, at the white nationalistrally in Charlottesville, Virginia this past weekend, that dehumanization -- and its consequences-- was on full display.

Excerpt from:
The alt-right is just another word for white supremacy, study finds - Washington Post

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.

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

The alt-right grew up on the Internet. Now, after Charlottesville, some of the far-right movement's most infamous personalities are getting kicked off.

Off Uber, Google and PayPal in one case, kicked off theWeb entirely as tech companies rush to condemnlast weekend's violent white nationalist marches and penalizethosewho condoned them.

I haven't seen them take this much action on all these platforms, ever, said Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long accused tech companies of tolerating hate speech.

I think the shocking images people saw have created enough attention that these companies are taking action, he said. It looks bad if they don't.

Here's our tally of which right-wingpersonalities have been blocked by whichtech giants, and why.

The Daily Stormer, an infamous white-supremacistwebsite, has endured server-related humiliations from its online landlords in the past few days.

The site'sWeb host, GoDaddy,evicted itlast weekend, after the sitepublished an article disparaginga womanwho was killed while protestingthe Unite the Right rally.

GoDaddy, which had long withstood calls to ban the Stormer, accused the siteof violating its terms of service. The Stormerquickly moved its servers to Google, which promptly evicted it, too.

[Why GoDaddys decision to delist a neo-Nazi site is such a big deal]

By Monday, the Verge reported, the site had retreated to the dark Web forced to publish its white-supremacist screeds through anonymous platforms that most people never see. It's also online in Russia, apparently.

Another white supremacist group, Vanguard America, was yanked offline by WordPress after its members rallied inCharlottesville.

[Vanguard America, a white supremacist group, denies Charlottesville ramming suspect was a member]

Uber executives personally thanked and honoreda driverwho kicked three far-right celebrities out of hervehicle before the rally, accusing them of racist comments, someone with the companytold The Washington Post.

The three men Baked Alaska,James Allsup and Millennial Matt caught an Uber ride in Washington a day before the rally.

Millennial Matt whose recently deleted Twitter feed wasfull of Holocaust revisionist material said they were kicked to the curb after hecalled the National Museum of African American History and Culture ugly.

But the driver accused them of worse. In curbsidevideo, the men argue with her about whether they made racist comments in the car.

The companypermanently banned Allsup, invited the driver to givea speech to thousands of otheremployees this week, and defendedher in statement to The Post.

The events surrounding the white supremacist rally in the City of Charlottesville are deeply disturbing and tragic, the companywrote. We stand against this hate, violence, and discrimination. Ubers community guidelines require riders and drivers to treat each other with respect. When a rider or driver doesnt follow these guidelines, we take swift and decisive action, as we did in this instance.

That statement alignsUber with its sedentary counterpart, Airbnb, which cracked down on people suspected of using its service to rent rooms for white supremacist parties during the rally, according to Gizmodo.

Discord, whichis supposed to bea voice chat programfor online gamers, had by 2017 become the alt-right's favorite chat app,as the New York Times put it.

A Times reporter monitoreda far-right Discord serveras it organized for the Charlottesville rally and sawswastikas and praise for Hitler in the chat rooms.

Discord executives knew aboutsuch hate groups before the rally, the Times reported, but cracked down only after the marchesdevolved into violence.

Now the Daily Stormer's Discord server no longer works, among unspecified others.

The most prominent site to be muted may beAltRight.com, which told the gaming site Kotakuthat people in our movement will simply find other alternatives to express their views.

One of the largest crowdfunding sites, GoFundMe,told Reuters that itshut down several campaigns to raise money for the man accused of driving a car into a crowd of counterprotesters at the rally, killing one and injuring many.

Those campaigns did not raise any money and they were immediately removed, a spokesman told the outlet.

Kickstarter, meanwhile,said it hadn't seen any fundraisers for the suspect but had similar policies banning hate speech and the promotion of violence.

[PayPal escalates the tech industrys war on white supremacy]

The online payment giantPayPalwasaccused by the SPLC of allowing hate groups to raise funds for the rally andannounced late Tuesday that it would bar users from taking donations.

The events in Charlottesville are yet another disturbing example of the many forms that racism and hatred manifest, the company wrote. Prejudice, however, does not always march in the street.

The social media behemothsTwitter and Facebookhave beenless active in the backlash against the alt-right, a movement that seeks a whites-only state.

Twitter didn't respond to questions from The Post about its stance on Charlottesville. Earlier this year, the sitecracked down on users accused of hateful conduct, including an avowed white nationalist.

The Twitter account for @Millennial_Matt, one ofrallygoersaccused of racism, was taken offline this week, though it's unclear why.

A tweet from Millennial Matt, whose account was recently deleted. (Twitter)

Although Facebook hasn'treleased a statement on Charlottesville, a company representativetold ThePost that it took down anevent page for the rally over the weekend, after threats of violence and links to hate groups became clear.

Since then, the representative said, Facebook has blocked people from sharing aDaily Stormer article attacking the dead protester, unless the person who shares it explicitly condemns it in the same post.

Limited as thatmove was, it seemedremarkable to some.

The Verge is unaware of any previous moderation effort in which individual employees have assessed every shared caption for a given URL, the tech outlet wrote.

Read more:

A Twitter campaign is outing people who marched with white nationalists in Charlottesville

A live stream of Shia LaBeouf chanting was disrupted by Nazi-themed dancing. Then things got weird.

The only true winners of this election are trolls

J.K. Rowling and Piers Morgan embody the extremes of online celebrity, in one fight

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How the alt-right got kicked offline after Charlottesville from Uber to Google - Washington Post