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Were it not for the 2016 presidential election, I would have thought alt-right was a computer keyboard command. Thanks to the current political climate, I have become acquainted with a group, an ideology, a way of viewing the world that send chills down my spine.

The term alt-right was coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, who achieved media prominence after Trump was elected when he held a national conference during which he claimed that Trumps presidency created an opening for greater acceptance of alt-right ideologies.

As with much that I find highly distasteful, I would like to ignore the alt-right. But I do so at my countrys peril. Not long after the 2016 election, I received an email from a Catholic college student who had read my column expressing concern over Steve Bannons appointment as a special adviser to the president. Since then, weve exchanged email regularly, and I attribute my growing concern about the alt-right movement to this young mans heightened awareness of it, especially as it has infiltrated social media, college campuses, and as it has been given a degree of acceptance by some people in power.

If youre like me and newly aware of the alt-right, I provide you this short description of this movement:

The Alternative Right, commonly known as the Alt-Right, is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that white identity is under attack by multicultural forces using political correctness and social justice to undermine white people and their civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew establishment conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value. (Excerpted from the Southern Poverty Law Centers website.)

Of interest to Catholics, some who describe themselves as alt-right support Catholic traditionalism, defined as a return to Catholicism before the reforms of Vatican II. But even more important for all Christians is to be aware of the racism, nationalism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism expressed by many who identify as part of this movement. Their anti-immigrant stance is also in direct opposition to our Catholic emphasis on welcoming and supporting immigrants.

While many readers of this column are not likely to be exposed to the despicable actions of Internet trolls, we cannot bury our heads in the sand. People are being victimized and divisions are growing more pronounced as a result of the undercurrent of hatred, racism, xenophobia, and bigotry which has grown more intenseand seemingly more acceptableover the last two years.

President Trumps recent controversial re-tweet of a doctored video of him beating up CNN was revealed to be originally created by a Reddit user who had posted many racist, anti-Semitic, and white nationalist sentiments. This Trump tweet not only suggests violence against the media, but gives a level of respectability to those who traffic in despicable slurs.

Many who voted for President Trump are quick to refute the suggestion that they are racists, nationalists, or xenophobes. And I take them at their word. They had other reasons to choose this candidate. However, its incumbent on those who supported a Trump presidency for pro-life and other reasons to unite and renounce the racism, hate crimes, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, and anti-immigrant rhetoric that has found its way into the American lexicon.

This is not about politics. Our Catholic faith is not aligned with any one political party. Indeed, the teachings of the Catholic Church transcend political affiliation. I do not presume to argue that Catholic teaching is more fully represented on one or the other side of the aisle. I believe, however, that our common beliefs will help us transcend our political differences. And we can best find common ground when we agree to the basic principle that all people are created in Gods image and have intrinsic value.

The universal Church is founded upon multi-culturalism and our respect for all races, genders, and creeds. We must resist white nationalism, whether it is generated from the underworld of the Internet, within speeches by prominent leaders, or through government policies directed at vulnerable populations. The Alt-right will not go away unless all of us stand up against hatred that is based upon race, religion, and gender. We must defend our country against those who espouse ideologies contrary to our most deeply held beliefs as Christians and Americans.

Special to Patheos fromMary Hood Hart.

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What Should Catholics Think of the Alt-Right? - Patheos (blog)

Not surprisingly, the paper found that "Computational propaganda flourished during the 2016 US Presidential Election." Tell us Americans that and we'll remind you that bears make fecal deposits in the woods. We know, we knew, we saw it coming a mile away (but had no idea how to stop it). The same was true during the 2016 UK Brexit referendum, where political bots played a strategic role in shaping Twitter conversations and keeping pro-Brexit hashtags dominant.

The paper noted these incidents, and a few more. It found that automated posting accounts, combined with fake news and troll armies and harassment campaigns, have re-imagined the art and practice of authoritarian soft power in the 21st century.

The researchers wrote that Facebook plays a critical role in grooming young minds with political ideology because companies "such as Facebook, are effectively monopoly platforms for public life."

Add Facebook advertising to the computational propaganda mix, and you've got a mind-blowing toolset for emotionally manipulating people -- without their knowledge -- into believing, saying, and fighting for whatever you want.

The Oxford paper concluded that "Computational propaganda is now one of the most powerful tools against democracy."

One thing we've learned in the past few years is that the core messages of political propaganda on social media are driven by humans. Their job is to cover up for people in power, motivate and empower harassment, and make us too discouraged to do anything about their wrongdoings. In case you're wondering, the people at the bottom of the propaganda chain know exactly what they're doing.

Some love their jobs, others do not. In 2015, one of Russia's professional trolls went to press detailing her role in making people think the murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was at the hands of his own friends, rather than by government hitmen, as is widely suspected. "I was so upset that I almost gave myself away," Lyudmila Savchuk said to press.

The paid pro-government trolls work in rooms of 20; it was reported in 2015 that their numbers are in the thousands, making posts and comments all day, every day. Upon leaving, Savchuk said her goal of going to press with documentation, including video, was to get it closed down," she told The Telegraph. "These people are using propaganda to destroy objectivity and make people doubt the motives of any civil protest. Worst of all, they're doing it by pretending to be us, the citizens of Russia."

Another ex-propaganda troll, Marat Burkkhard, was assigned to spreading racist memes about public figures like President Obama. It's enough to make one wonder more about America's rise in open racism online. "The most unpleasant was when we had to humiliate Obama, comparing him with a monkey, using words like darkie, insulting the president of a big country," he said.

"I wrote it, I had to." Saying he quit for his own sanity, he added, "if every day you are feeding on hate, it eats away at your soul." He also noted that in his particular propaganda factory, his office seemed split 50-50 in how everyone felt about what they were doing: half were racist patriots, and the rest were just in it for the money.

That was all before the US election, and what became known as Trump team's super-obvious social media influence campaigns.

The new golden age of propaganda began much earlier than Brexit or 2016's American presidential disaster. Last year, Leo Benedictus revealed that troll political armies could be had for the right price in a range of countries that included Russia, Israel, Ukraine, UK, North Korea, South Korea, and Turkey. He wrote, "Long before Donald Trump met Twitter, Russia was famous for its troll factories outside Russia, anyway." He explained:

Okay, so we get that troll armies and their bots do propaganda stuff to make politicians look bad. But what happens when they go after regular people? Or, like in the US now, end up with an entire resistance movement?

We get a clear picture by looking at what Russia's government did to its resistance during the country's 2011-2012 elections for president and Duma (its lower house of parliament). Just a couple of months before this week's Oxford paper came out, a more instructive study on social media propaganda was published, called Communication power struggles on social media: A case study of the 201112 Russian protests.

When people started to mobilize and place calls to action on social media and blogs, Putin's patriotic hackers DDoS'd every site possible, including LiveJournal, where the government was already running its posting and commenting campaigns. Those they couldn't disable with traffic overload, like Twitter, they attacked with other means.

How? By manipulating people's perceptions and emotions about the resistance, according to the paper. "Our analysis suggests that, in particular, the Russian government successfully used Twitter to affect perceptions of the oppositional movement's success and legitimacy," the researchers wrote.

This included "diminishing and discrediting the resistance," (like insisting on low turnout numbers for protests) but also by "exaggerating, enthusing, and claiming broad public support" for pro-government ... well, everything. They also elevated -- through creating an appearance of popularity -- certain players to be spokespeople for the propaganda topics of the day.

Finally, they created a culture of fear that encouraged people to self-censor.

The researchers noted how support began on Twitter for anti-corruption and anti-Putin resistance in December 2011, but that widespread delegitimization for the movement (as well as belittling), and visibility of pro-Putin messages shifted that conversation by January 2012. In addition, "Critical voices were discredited and political elites were represented as legitimate."

The Russian regime's anti-resistance messaging made it seem "indisputable that Putin enjoyed broad support among Russians," and so "the protest movement began to dissolve quickly." The paper said:

Our analysis highlights that the growing feeling of futility and disillusionment affecting the oppositional movement more broadly was clearly reflected on Twitter in the weeks leading up to the presidential election. With the political discourse on Twitter beginning to noticeably shift in favor of the Putin supporters, oppositionally minded people on Twitter may have started to slide into a so-called "spiral of silence".

They perceived their political view to be in a shrinking minority, finding insufficient resonance in the discourse on Twitter, and gradually stopped to speak up, turning rather inward in growing self-doubts and disillusion.

They also distributed their messages well, reaching tons of people -- which is social media advertising's core promise, we should note. I think now we're starting to see exactly why Facebook's emotional manipulation activities are a threat to democracy in line with the Oxford study's conclusion about computational propaganda.

In the 2011 example, the Russian government, with all its resources, was far more effective at influencing people on Twitter than those who dared question the people in power.

In conclusion, the researchers wrote:

In the end, no matter how much "real" support Putin had, our analysis of the political discourse suggests that the perceived support had a real effect on the opposition and general public on Twitter. This shows that regardless of the promises that new digital technologies hold in terms of empowerment of marginalized or weaker (political) actors, these technologies are still part of the overall system of powerin particular, uneven resource distributionsand may therefore still be utilized by governments in their favor.

In other words, our study empirically confirms that indeed "whoever has enough money, including political leaders, will have a better chance of operating the switch in its favour.

It looks like a blueprint for what's happening on American Twitter day and night right now. Though compared to Russia's successful 2011 resistance suppression, Trump's trolls and botmasters are pretty bad at winning hearts and minds. Maybe that's partly why social media propaganda is looking likely to get folded into the Mueller probe.

In any case, the new golden age of propaganda is here. The companies whose structures it thrives on, in all its hideousness and viciousness, are loath to change their business models to stop it. The illness is not our fault, though that's what they hope to convince us of, in this, our new futuristic system of oppression.

Just don't let the fact that it looks like Idiocracy make you take it any less seriously.

Image: OLGA MALTSEVA/AFP/Getty Images (Lyudmila Savchuk)

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How hateful alt-right trolls hijacked your timeline - Engadget - Engadget

John McCains brain cancerdiagnosis has been described as"Godly justice"by members of the alt-right, angry at the senator'scriticism ofDonald Trump.

Messages of support flooded in for the veteran Republicanfollowing news he was suffering from an aggressive form of the disease.

But among the positive messages sent from former presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clintonand George WBush, was an outpouring of anger and hate.

The far-right message board 4chan was awash with toxic comments, with Newsweek quoting one post saying: The last president for McCain will be Trump.

Theres some godly justice right there.

Another wrote: Im pretty sure that God is punishing him.God made it pretty clear that he supports New Right now.

Others social media sites were also filled with messages for Mr McCain, with one twitter user posting: Finally cancer has helped our society.

Anothertweeted: Hey John !! Hows The Headache??

A thirdwrote: An unfortunate tumour found itself inside the skull of a malignant John McCain.

The senator for Arizona has been vocal of his disdain for Mr Trump, criticising the presidents stance against the media earlier this year.

The former presidential candidate said Mr Trump labelling the media as the enemy was how dictators get started".

In an interview given in February, The Washington Postquoted MrMcCain as saying: When you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press.

And I'm not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I'm just saying we need to learn the lessons of history.

Mr Trump has also lashed out at the former Navy pilot, saying in 2015:Hes not a war hero.

He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who werent captured.

Just hours after his diagnosis, MrMcCain took another swipe at Mr Trump and the decision to end a CIA backed programme for Syrian rebels fighting Bashar Al-Assads regime.

He issued a statement saying: "If these reports are true, the administration is playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin.

"Making any concession to Russia, absent a broader strategy for Syria, is irresponsible and short-sighted."

After news of Mr McCains diagnosis Mr Trump sent a message of support to him and his wife, Cindy.

It said: Senator John MCain has always been a fighter, Melania and I send our thoughts and prayers to Senator McCain, Cindy, and their entire family.

Get well soon."

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John McCain's cancer diagnosis is 'God's punishment' for Trump criticism, claim alt-right members - The Independent

So says the wealthy fringe Republican bankrolling white nationalist Richard Spencer.

Lance Williams, RevealJul. 21, 2017 6:00 AM

A white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in May.Allison Wrabel/The Daily Progress/AP

This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Long before Donald Trumps election ushered in an era of resurgent white nationalism, a disaffected Republican named William H. Regnery II was brooding about the demographic plight of white people and plotting their rescue. Like Trump more than 20 years later, Regnery, the wealthy scion of a famous GOP family, had an increasingly dark view of a changing America: As he wrote, the United States had become a crime-ridden society with bad schools, high taxes, an intrusive government, and a penchant for political correctness that was morphing into an intellectual tyranny.

Worse, a flood of immigrants were changing the look of America from a palette (sic) of prime colors to a third-world monochrome, he wrote in a rant that would be at home on the bookshelf of Trumps chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Instead of a lingua franca, the country clanged with many foreign tongues.

By 1999, Regnery had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States.He began consorting with Ku Klux Klan apologists, Holocaust deniers, eugenics boosters, and immigration foes. He set up two white nationalist nonprofits and steered money into them. He published fringe-right journals and books. Through his familys famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.

Now, hes back. Working behind the scenes, the retired Chicago business executive has played an important role in making his ultra-right views a part of Americas political conversation in the era of Trump. In what he has described as his crowning political achievement, Regnery discovered Richard Spencer, the mediagenic agitator who invented the term alt-right. In 2011, Regnery made him the frontman for his white nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute, providing Spencer the platform to launch the alt-right movement.

Fast-forward to 2016. As the Trump campaign gained momentum, Spencer, with Regnerys support, emerged as the omnipresent face of the American far right: a glib talking head whose views on issues of immigration and race at times seemed only slightly more extreme than what you could read onBreitbart Newsor hear from Trump himself.

Turn on the TV or go online, and there was Spencer: holding forth on white identity politics on yet another talk show; crying, Hail Trump! in a fiery post-election speech; getting sucker-punched by a leftist demonstrator at Trumps inauguration; and, most recently, leading a torchlight march to protest the planned removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Regnery speaking at an NPI event after Trumps election.

Screen shot

Regnery has played a vitally important and indispensable role in building the alt-right movement, Spencer said in an interview. He has provided substantial donations and big-picture advice, Spencer said. They talk every week, sometimes every day. I dont think I would do a big thing without consulting him, Spencer said.

Regnery, 76, declined to be interviewed. But in public, he has expressed delight with Spencer for leveraging Trumps election to obtain a flood of media attention for his extremist views. As Regnery told white nationalists at the Washington, DC, conference he hosted in the days after Trumps election, he believes his place in history has been secured by the simple decision to put Spencer in charge.

I am now persuaded that with your courage,he said,the alt-right side of history will prevail.

Just one year beforeTrump began running for president, Spencer and Regnery were struggling to jump-start their political movement. In 2014, they planned to convene what they called a European Congress of the white nationalist movement. When they descended on Budapest, Hungary, the result was chaos and humiliation.

According to their plan, the grand imperial facades of the Hungarian capital would be the backdrop for an international conference of white racial realists in a Europe roiled by waves of refugees fleeing the Middle East. Regnery, Spencer, and Jared Taylor, the self-described racialist editor of a white nationalist website, were scheduled to speak. Joining the Americans on the podium would be a Russian fascist known as Putins brainAlexander Dugin, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

No heat was anticipated from the government: Hungarian voters had just handed another supermajority to the European Unions most right-wing leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbn, a Putin ally. But it all unraveled. The Hungarian Interior Ministry banned the event, declaring it openly racist. Regnery was intercepted at Budapests Ferenc Liszt Airport, held overnight and deported. Dugin was denied an entry visa. Spencer entered the country by train, then was picked up in a police raid and handed over to immigration authorities.

The government thought that it was a CIA plot, a source with inside knowledge of Hungarian counterintelligence said in an interview. They are completely paranoid, and when this conference was announced, they were convinced that this was an American action, the source said. They guessed that US intelligence services set up this conference so they can say Hungary is a home for right-wing extremist activists and then blackmail them in the international media.

It was a preposterous suspicion, given Regnerys own profound alienation from his homelands political establishment. The Regnery familys political story starts with his grandfather and namesake, William H. Regnery, a Chicago textile magnate. He was a New Deal Democrat, but in 1940 he helped found the right-wing America First Committee, which sought to stop the United States from going to war against Nazi Germany. The committee, which attracted Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites, disbanded when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

The America First name, meanwhile, has experienced a renaissance as one of Trumps leading mottos for his presidency.

After World War II, Regnerys uncle, Henry Regnery, made the family a power in GOP politics through his publishing house, which was subsidized by inherited wealth. He printed the works of writers whom he called giants of American conservatism: William F. Buckley Jr. (God and Man at Yale), Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind), and Robert Welch, co-founder of the John Birch Society. Regnery booksanti-communist, anti-big-government and pro-businesshelped define what it meant to be a Republican in postwar America. Upon his death in 1996, he was eulogized as the godfather of modern conservatism.

William Regnery IIs cousin, Alfred Regnery, was an official in the Reagan administrations Justice Department and then became president of Regnery Publishing. The imprint still exists, under new ownership: Among its recent best-selling authors are Ann Coulter (Adios, America!) and Trump (Time to Get Tough). Regnery himself plunged into conservative politics at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. As he wrote in his 2015 memoir, Left Behind, he joined the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonprofit set up to recruit Republican activists on college campuses. His family helped endow the institute, and Regnery remained involved for more than 40 years. On the institutes board, he associated with GOP stalwarts, including former US Attorney General Edwin Meese, Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, and Buckley, founder of the National Review.

After college, Regnery worked in the family textile business. Court records show he was forced to resign as president in 1981 when the firm ran into financial trouble. After that, he grew disenchanted with the GOP, running for Illinois secretary of state in 1994 on the ticket of the fringe Term Limits & Tax Limits Party.

In his memoir, Regnery dated his alienation to a 1993 meeting of the conservative Philadelphia Society. Speakers were celebrating the collapse of world communism and the rise of free-market economies worldwidetriumphs of American conservatism in the age of Ronald Reagan, as they saw it. For Regnery, there was little to celebrate: He feared that the wave of nonwhite immigration that was swamping America would surely doom white people to minority status and impotence.

In a 1999 speech at a right-wing conference in St. Pete Beach, Florida, Regnery went public with his racial fears. White couples werent having enough babies, he declared, and the government was allowing in hordes of nonwhite immigrants as if to hasten our demise. His solution: a reconfigured continent broken up into separate racial and religious enclaves.

Soon after that, Regnery founded a nonprofit dedicated to providing a cultural home for our childrens children, as he wrote in a founders statement. It was called the Charles Martel Society, commemorating an 8th-century Frankish king who turned back an Arab invasionand thus, in the view of white supremacists, saved European civilization almost before it began. Regnery packed the societys board with men who shared his racial concerns. They included the late Sam Francis, a former Washington Times columnist who suggested that white people could solve racial problems by imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites.

Feel confident identifying as white became the motto of the Martel Societys magazine, the Occidental Quarterly. Its editor, Kevin MacDonald, has written that American Jews are allied with African Americans and Latinos to promote a suicidal wave of non-White immigration into the United States.

Last year, the Occidental Observer website published a book review asserting that the Treblinka concentration camp was anything but an efficient apparatus for killing Jews. (The review was taken down.) Recent articles in the Occidental Quarterly have titles such as The Case for Eugenics in a Nutshell, and Donald Trumps Candidacy Is a Game ChangerPeople Are Waking Up.

The society spends about $190,000 per year, tax returns show. Nonprofits are not required to identify donors, so money from Regnery isnt noted. But Regnery also served on the board of a charity associated with the familys textile business, and over the years that nonprofit has donated about $85,000 to the Martel Society, records show.

In 2004, perhaps looking to expand the Martel Societys reach, Regnery told Occidental Quarterly subscribers that, for the survival of our race, he was setting up a dating website for heterosexual whites of Christian cultural heritage.

But he didnt follow through. The following year, using $380,000 from the Martel Society, Regnery established the think tank that would eventually bring a notorious white nationalist to prominence alongside the rise of Trump.

Spencer and Regnery in 2016

Courtesy of Daniel Lombroso/The Atlantic

In 2005, the National Policy Institutepromised in a press release to research how white people were being harmed by affirmative action, illegal immigration, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights nonprofit that has called both the Martel Society and the institute active hate groups. The institute publishes books and reports, some of them touted as academic studies. Regnery himself co-wrote a study predicting that in the 21st century, the worlds population of blacks or sub-Saharan Africans would explode, while the percentage of white people would drop to single digits. Like the Martel Society, the institute was a low-budget operation, spending about $170,000 per year, according to tax documents. In addition to the cash from the Martel Society, it obtained about $90,000 from Regnerys family foundation. The Pioneer Fund, a nonprofit founded in the 1930s by promoters of the eugenics movement, has donated about $30,000, records show.

Even as his politics drifted to the edge, Regnery still had ties to mainstream conservatism through his work on the board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the organization he joined in college. The final break came in 2006, after he gave yet another racially charged talk about immigration and demographics, this time in Chicago.

The white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity, he warned the audience. Later he remarked, Whites are unique in welcoming racial aliens into their midst.

As Regnery recounted in his memoir, an anonymous letter alerted the institute that Regnery was promoting people and ideas of the most vile nature. Fearing scandal, the institute asked Regnery to resign. When he refused, he was voted off the board, with such GOP luminaries as former attorney general Meese and the Heritage Foundations Feulner supporting his ouster. His cousin, the former Reagan official, abstained.

Aggrieved, Regnery blamed the velvet tyranny of political correctness for his expulsion. It was all the more painful because he had known the people who voted against him for decades.

Until 2010, Regnery relied on Louis Andrews to run his National Policy Institute. A retired mortgage broker, Andrews believed public school for most black children should end after eighth grade because they couldnt benefit from it. When Andrews became gravely ill with cancer, Regnery turned to a young right-winger he had met at a private event the previous year: Richard Spencer.

Like Regnery, Spencer was a child of privilege. His father was a wealthy physician in Dallas, and, as Reveal has reported, through inheritance Spencer is part owner of Louisiana cotton fields worth millions of dollars.

Spencer had received an expensive liberal arts education. His last academic stop was Duke University, where he pursued a Ph.D. in European intellectual historyand where,as he told Mother Jones, he was radicalized by reading white nationalist literature. In 2007, Spencer dropped out of Duke to pursue a life of thought-crime, as he put it. He worked briefly at the American Conservative, a journal co-founded by former Richard Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, and then was managing editor of a libertarian website published by a jet-setting heir to a Greek shipping fortune. Later, he set up his own site, AlternativeRight.com.

Spencer said he told Regnery that he hoped to use the National Policy Institute to make a dramatic break from the conservative movement by emphasizing white identity politics. After Spencer took over, he moved the think tanks headquarters to his mothers luxury home near a ski resort in Whitefish, Montana. Spencer drew no salary from the institute for his first two years. In 2014, the year of the abortive Budapest conference, his annual pay was $7,900.

Especially after the disappointment of Budapest, there was little reason to believe that alt-right ideology as pushed by the National Policy Institute would break out into the mainstream. But as Spencer recognized, Trumps emergence as a presidential candidate prefigured a paradigmatic shift in American politics.

Trumps views on immigrationcalling Mexican immigrants killers and rapists, vowing a ban on Muslimstracked with alt-right rhetoric. He even retweeted posts by a white supremacist with the handle WhiteGenocideTM. His campaign director was Bannon, the Breitbart executive who had declared that his news service was the platform for the alt-right.

When political reporters, seeking to understand this new phenomenon, reached out for comment from the alt-right, Spencer was happy to help. In his writing and public statements, Spencer has seemed in perfect sync with Regnerys nightmare vision of an endangered white minorityand with Regnerys dream of creating a white North American homeland.

By 2042if nothing else changeswhite people will become a minority, Spencer told Reveal last year. Also, the majority of births right now are actually to non-white people. So there is a dramatic transformation taking place.

As to the white homeland, he said, What the ethnostate is, is an ideala new type of society that would actually be a homeland for all white people.

Freelance reporter Dan Nolan contributed to this story from Budapest. It was edited by Andrew Donohue.

Lance Williams is a reporter with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Email him at lwilliams@revealnews.org.

Mother Jones is a nonprofit, and stories like this are made possible by readers like you. Donate or subscribe to help fund independent journalism.

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The Alt-Right Side of History Will Prevail Mother Jones - Mother Jones

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Friday, July 21, 2017, 5:00 AM

The bombshell emails exposing Donald Trump Jr.s meetings with Russian officials are proving Hillary Clinton's campaign right about the extent of foreign meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Yet the Russians werent the only bad actors whose support for Trump sparked a prophetic warning from Clinton last year.

Clinton also sounded an alarm about a threat whose origins were wholly domestic: right-wing, nationalist groups that were emboldened by Trumps rise. In August, she devoted an entire speech to outlining how Trumps campaign was luring this so-called alt-right movement out from the darkened corners of the internet.

At the time, alt-right was not a household term, and Clintons attention to this fringe elicited head-scratching from some. But six months into Trump's presidency, the groups comprising this movement are becoming dangerously mainstream.

The latest worrisome incident occurred just this weekend. For years, a remote Muslim settlement in the Catskills, known as Islamberg, has been the subject of unfounded rumors fanned by the right wing that the village of a few dozen families is a terrorist training camp. State and local police have openly refuted these allegations and asserted that the village, founded in 1980 by African-American Muslims seeking to escape crime and crowding in New York City, is peaceful and cooperative with authorities.

But right-wing activists, clad in militia-style uniforms, descended on the town Saturday anyway and staged a rally intimidating the Muslim community there.

This followed protests last month across dozens of U.S. cities that were nominally devoted to protesting sharia law, but seemed mainly designed to scare Muslims.

Among the ringleaders of these types of demonstrations is a group called the Proud Boys. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, has called the Proud Boys a new fight-club fraternity of young white, pro-Trump men. The Proud Boys controversial founder, Gavin McInnes, is a frequent contributor to the pro-Trump, alt-right site known as InfoWars.

Among McInnes more offensive social media postings is a YouTube rant entitled Ten Things I Hate About Jews. In the video, he calls the Hebrew language spit talk and bemoans Israelis whiny, paranoid fear of Nazis. Others of his videos have been criticized for comments on women, Native Americans and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Much as InfoWars founder Alex Jones lawyer recently claimed in Jones divorce case that his work is satire, McInnes commentaries contain just enough ironic detachment for him to claim his purpose is not to actually promote bigotry.

But the Proud Boys embrace of violence is far less subtle or coy. Its initiation rituals include violent hazing. One ally, Kyle Chapman, has branched out to form an armor-clad, vigilante organization called the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights. Its goal is to provide security for right-wing activists at street demonstrations, but critics say the Alt Knights show up spoiling for a fight.

This is a war, McInnes has written in one of his online columns.

As a candidate, Trump courted this movement. As President, he mostly condones it. But the rest of us shouldnt just accept it as a new normal.

In the aftermath of the shooting at a baseball practice involving several members of Congress last month, there were widespread calls for return of civility to our public dialogue. Political differences among Republicans and Democrats are unlikely to subside anytime soon, but we should at least be able to mutually condemn groups that sow division and plainly glorify violence.

Elected leaders besides Trump should be confronted about whether they will disavow these groups activities. Advertisers that provide revenue to these right-wing figures propagandistic media companies should be boycotted. And social media platforms like Twitter should be pressed about continuing to allow them to post incendiary content and attract followings.

The rise of these groups is one of the more insidious trends in Donald Trumps America. Clintons early warning about these groups was treated as just another political swipe at Trump last summer, but it deserves heed now.

Fallon, a Democratic strategist, was press secretary for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

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Hillary Clinton's alt-right warnings prove apt - New York Daily News