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PORTLAND, Ore. For days, Portland has served as ground zero for American hate, heroism and healing. Today, it served as Americas battleground.

What started Sunday as two counterdemonstrations outside City Hall between anti-fascist protesters and members of the alt-right during a Trump Free Speech Rally evolved into an impromptu march and standoff with police.

As police began closing off Chapman Square, where the anti-fascists had staged their protest, at around 3:45 p.m., officers lobbed loud explosives in the protestors direction. Its unclear whether they were concussion or tear gas grenades, but there was a yellow smoke emanating from some of them. At least five explosions were heard as police pushed people back from that square.

Portland police said the explosives were in response to projectiles thrown at its officers.

Following the release of the explosives, hundreds of the anti-fascist protesters and others started an impromptu march, heading northbound from City Hall and pouring into major roadways open to traffic.

The protesters were held up by police at Fourth Ave. and Morrison Street in Downtown Portland, where officers arrested some and pushed others with batons.

Police fired non-lethal rounds at protesters hiding in a parking garage near the intersection. Shortly after, a chemical substance was released from the spot police fired, burning and stinging marcherslungs and noses. It wasnt immediately clear whether police fired chemical rounds, but the department tweeted that coughing in the crowd was caused by an unknown substance,possibly from parking garage, and not released by police.

Anti-fascist protestors and others storm the streets north of City Hall. (Andy Campbell)

Earlier,HuffPost reporters witnessed several scattered arrests made for disorderly conduct.

As early as 10:30 a.m., the self-proclaimed anti-fascist and alt-right groups had occupied the parks surrounding City Hall. Shoving and screaming ensued until police showed up, including local and state officers, riot police and Department of Homeland Security officers. After that, each side hurled insults at the other.

A third crowd the largest of local liberals protesting the Trump supporters sat outside City Hall.

On each side, demonstrators braced for the moment when police would leave and barriers would fall.

It was a battle theyd been preparing for all week; longstanding tensions between anti-fascists and the alt-right were compounded by the hate-fueled slashing on May 26 that left two dead and a nation in uproar.

In the Trump camp, which had planned its rally days before the recent attack, celebrity alt-righters like Pat Based Spartan Washington stood among people with Nazi symbolism tattooed on their arms and civilian peacekeepers in military gear.

The loudest demonstrators on each side were often the last to identify themselves.

Were surrounded, one woman in a Make America Great Again hat said. Thats Portland for ya.

The Trump rally was already expected to attract alt-right figures from out of state some of whom are straight up neo-Nazis but rumors that that demonstrators would beexercising their right to carry gunsprompted local activists to reconsider and had all sides preparing for war. Mayor Ted Wheelers attempt to revoke a permit for the rally was declined by the federal government.

Joey Gibson, who organized todays Trump rally as well as the one on April 29 at which last weeks stabbing suspect Jeremy Joseph Christian was seen throwing up Nazi salutes, spoke after 2 p.m. to hundreds.

Portland I mean no disrespect, but you have gotten crazy out here, he screamed into a mic. Youre sitting here in a bubble and weve been on the outside looking in, but no more.

He said he wanted to stop focusing on racism as anti-fascists audibly condemned him from across the street.

Anti-fascists in Portland had planned to hold a self-defense and group tactics seminar Saturday, but organizers told HuffPost that it was canceled after white nationalists and neo-Nazis mobilized against them.

The Trump rallys co-organizer, Kyle Based Stickman Chapman, has engaged anti-fascist protesters in battle before. His group of mostly white men called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights was labeled a fight club by The New York Times and issued a call to arms to his followers for Sunday.

Fights in Portland, just a week after known white supremacist Joseph Christian allegedly slashed two men to deathwhile screaming anti-Islamic hate at two teenaged women on a train, feel surprising and excessive to outsiders. But locals saw this coming a mile away this is a city with a white terror crisisand a storied history of racist confrontation. Sunday was a flashpoint in a decades-old fight.

Lydia OConnor contributed reporting.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

See original here:
Violence Erupts In Portland Amid Alt-Right, Anti-Fascist ...

If Pepe the Frogs creator has anything to say about it, his creation will shake off the cloak of bigotry which has been thrown around its shoulders by members of the alt right.

Cartoonist Matt Furie told the Associated Press that he plans on reviving Pepe after killing him off last month, according to a report by ABC News.

To achieve this goal, he and his brother Jason have started a crowdfunding campaign to raise $10,000 for the publication of a Pepe comic book. In addition, Furie has hired attorney Kimberly Motley to explore legal options against alt right-ists who have used Pepes image to promote their cause without the creators permission.

According to Furie, once we get the money together, were going to do it [the comic book] from scratch even as he fights togain some entrepreneurial control over Pepefor the future.

In the comic in which Furie killed off Pepe, the titular frog was seen deceased in an open casket at a wake. It was an emotional end for a character devised by Furie in his 2005 comic book Boys Club, which initially had very littleto do with politics. Furie himself identifies as a progressive and was reported to be horrified at the use of Pepes image to promote racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and other hateful ideas.

In a press statement explaining their decision to label Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol, the Anti-Defamation League argued that Pepe the Frog did not originally have anti-Semitic connotations.

It added, But as the meme proliferated in online venues such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit, a subset of memes came into existence promoting anti-Jewish, bigoted and offensive ideas. And those have spread virally on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere.

Read more here:
Pepe the Frog rises from grave to seek vengeance against alt-right - Salon

While the rally was originally conceived to include Alt-Right personalities like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, anti-Semitic harassment against Rebel Medias Laura Loomer and other online feuding led to the staging of a rival event Rally Against Political Violence outside the White House.

At the Lincoln Memorial, however, around 100 people gathered to hear a slate of speakers that included Augustus Sol Invictus, the self-described leader of the so-called Alt-Knights, Jason Kessler, a proud neo-Confederate and contributor to VDARE and the Daily Caller, Nathan Damigo, the founder of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa, and assorted other far-right YouTubers and Podcasters.

White Nationalist and Alt-Right figurehead Richard Spencer at the Lincoln Memorial.

Members of white nationalist groups Identity Evropa, Vanguard America, and the Traditionalist Workers Party were in attendance wearing uniforms andcarrying flags. Theycheered along as speakers inveighed against illegals, white genocide and cultural Marxism.

In a call for uniting the right,Invictus used the setting to recall that President Abraham Lincoln pardoned prominent Confederates following the Civil War, though other speakers couldnt resist taking swings at the so-called Alt-Lite and Posobiec and Loomer in particular.

These people on the Alt-Lite, the Jack Posobiecs, they will never criticize Donald Trump. These people are not serious political thinkers. They are not to be listened to. Theyre nothing but shills, said YouTube personality James Allsup, with some of the biggest boos of the day coming after Posobiecs name.

Later, Allsup announced that their rally was twice as big as the one outside the White House and was greeted with cheers ofHail Victory.

But what separated the two rallies besides the overt white identity politics of the likes of Spencer and Damigo was the topic of the Jews.

Kessler, who had a Confederate battle flag held up behind him during his speech and said that the entire country would be better off if the South had won the Civil War, was the first to defend anti-Semitism by being, well, anti-Semitic:

[The Laura Loomers and Jack Posobiecs of the world] say they wont do the rally because somebody is anti-Semitic? So theres a group you cant criticize? Im not going to go overboard on anybodybut I will just say this: they are a powerful group! They have AIPAC, the Israel lobby. Theyre two percent of the population and they pretty much run Hollywood and brag about it. And they are the ones putting out this filthy propaganda. CNN. All you guys out here tell me who is in charge of the global conglomerates that own you, that own CBS and NBC?

Baked Alaska, who was suspended by Twitter for a week in part for circulating a meme depicting a cartoon of President Trump in a Nazi uniform and Loomer in a gas chamber, also spoke. I thought it was funny, personally. Mike Enoch thought it was funny, he said, referencing another speaker who runs the anti-Semitic podcast The Right Stuff.

I have to really follow the truth in my heart and what I believe, Alaska said. And Ive seen an awakening, lately. Have you guys seen it? Generation Zyklon? I mean Generation Z?

Flags for the Tradtionalist Workers Party, Identity Evropa, Vanguard America raised high alongside the Confederate battle flag outside the Lincoln Memorial.

Enoch, whose real name is Mike Peinovich, would later speak and also railed against Jews.

So, freedom, the constitution and liberty, its all good stuff but lets be honest whats really facing our country today is the systematic elimination of white people. The genocide of the white race, Peinovich said to cheers.

In a rant that began with a discussion about an article in the Jewish magazine Forward, Peinovich said:

When you talk about Jewish privilege, which is objectively provable, we can prove it. Whos in control of the Federal Reserve Bank? Whos in control of the media? Whos in control of our foreign policy? Jews. We know that its Jews. Why do we have a war in the Middle East against our countrys interest? Against the interest of our race? Because of Jewish control. Ok. Lets not fucking beat around the bush. Im using my freedom of speech rights here.

Christopher Cantwell of the website Radical Agenda also attacked Jewish influence and referenced Loomers disruption of Shakespeares Julius Caesar in Central Park:

If the answer is not now then we might as well throw in the towel and forfeit to the Communists today. We are losing massive ground each moment. Nonwhite immigration and breeding alone are rapidly diminishing what electoral majorities we have remaining. Jewish influence disarms us in the onslaught of identity politics. Our universities teach no more than the propaganda of our enemies to our children and we are compelled to subsidize it all with our own earnings under penalty of imprisonment or death for refusal. Disrupting a play is the most civil thing we should do to these vermin.

Damigo, whose Identity Evropa members wearing white polo shirts and khakis made up a significant portion of the crowd, also spoke:

I think it would be an injustice to come to a Free speech rally and simply talk about Free Speech. So Im going to say some radical shit. Say some radical things here. America was founded by white people. It was founded for white people. America was not founded to be a multiracial, multicultural society. The founders were well aware of the importance that identity played in the make-up of a nation. And how fundamental it was to the future progress and success of that people.

The reason why our nation is where it is today, is because of anti-dialogical forces. Individuals who were haters of truth. And what they did, they used tactics, they used tactics weve seen over the last year to shut us down, this is nothing new. This has been going on decade after decade after decade.The cultural Marxism that permeates every orifice of our society today is a result of this tyranny.

A Spencer supporter at the Lincoln Memorial rally.

Damigo left the stage after chanting Moldylocks! Moldylocks! with the crowd referencing the woman who he sucker-punched in Berkeley, California back in April.

On the other side of town, at the White House, the Rally Against Political Violence organized by Cernovich and Posobiec attracted about 50. The event was relatively tame though an African American man wearing an Info Wars t-shirt railed against CNN before shouting, Its time to put George Soros in a gas chamber!

Half a dozen or so speakers took turns addressing the crowd from a small makeshift stage, where the overarching theme was blaming the left and Antifa for the political violence taking place in America.

Lucian Wintrich, the White House correspondent for the Gateway Pundit read out a list of hate incidents that had either turned out to be fake or the perpetrators were left leaning.

Corey Stewart, Confederate flag supporting politician who recently ran and lost in a Virginia gubernatorial race told the crowd to get behind president Trump and also support his crackdown on illegal immigration.

Stewart Rhodes, head of the anti-government group Oath Keepers was also in attendance with some of his crew providing security for the event.

Rhodes also took the stage and decried Antifa, stating, They now realize that if they order the cops to stand down and if those cops actually do stand down its going to be worse for Antifa. Antifa will get their asses handed to them by the American patriots.

Spencer, Kessler, and others plan to rally again in Charlottesville, Va., on August 12. The theme of that rally? Unite the right.

Go here to see the original:
Dueling Alt-Right Rallies, Separated by Anti-Semitism, Face Off in DC Despite Calls to "Unite the Right" - Southern Poverty Law Center

June 26, 2017 By Ferrell Foster / Christian Life Commission

Alt-right racism is both like and unlike the old racism. Like: It sees the white race as superior and in need of protection. Unlike: It is generally educated, secular and young.

Ferrell Foster

The Southern Baptist Convention brought the alt-right to center stage in mid-June, when it initially failed to consider a resolution condemning racist aspects of the alt-right.Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and SBC messengers approved a revised resolution, which decried every form of racism, including alt-right white supremacy, as antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Messengers also said, We denounce and repudiate white supremacy and every form of racial and ethnic hatred as of the devil.

Alt-right is a loosely defined term. It dates back to 2008 in one form but has been reappropriated more recently.

Last year, a University of Alabama political scientist, George Hawley, told The Washington Post the alt-right is predominantly an online phenomenon, and amorphous and somewhat diverse in terms of what the people who associate with the movement want, but really the core of the alt-right is white nationalismor, at least, white identity politics.

AltRight.com is led by Richard Spencer, probably the most visible white supremacist in the United States today.

In their own words

A Primer Text on the site says: The United States is being overrun by hordes of non-white immigrants, legal and illegal, fundamentally altering its demographic landscape in key cities and driving a stake through the heart of its culture. The whole of Northern and Western Europe is similarly being flooded with Muslim immigrants who are gaining more influence as their numbers grow and the elected leaders refuse to do anything about it. The Great Replacement is well underway.

The primer cites the scientific theory of evolution and natural selection to defend its position regarding racial differences. It also affirms the importance of white identity and says genocide of the white race is ongoing: Mass immigration of non-whites into white countries, forced assimilation by traitorous governments, media and entertainment industries that encourage miscegenation, and liberal egalitarian professors that demonize Whiteness and Western Civilization are just a few examples of the program of genocide against all people of European descent. The federal governments refusal to enforce immigration laws, its refusal to curtail illegal immigration, and as forced assimilation is all anti-Whites need in order to eventually exterminate or subsume us as a race since it leaves no homeland for (sic) exclusive to Whites.

Nation under attack

The alt-right is painting a picture of the United States as a white nation under attack from non-whites. It does not recognize that from our earliest days, the United States has been a place where all types of diverse people have come together.

Initially, the insiders were narrowly defined as English-speakers who dissented from the Church of England. But quickly, other English-speakers and Catholics joined the mix. Texas has distinctive German and Czech communities that reflect the non-English-speaking Europeans who crossed the Atlantic, and annexation of Texas brought in a Hispanic population that predated the English-speakers on the land. Asians became another important part of the national fabric. And, of course, a huge population of Africans was forced into slavery in the United States

The United States has been a mixing place for centuries, even though white males held power. And the alt-right is pushing for a return of white male dominance. Their propaganda is not just against non-whites; it is against womenand what they consider to be weak or emasculated men.

Loosely related

That said, I must come back to stress the alt-right is not some easily defined and identified movement. It is a label for loosely related people.

It is sometimes even hard to know if some of these people are being serious. Hawley, the Alabama professor, says: The alt-right has been able to successfully brand itself as an edgy and fun and ironic movement that takes pleasure in needling both liberals and conservatives, and its tongue-in-cheek and rebellious as opposed to just being motivated by (the) genocidal hatred that you would see from people like William Pierce.

But he adds: A lot of the people who are sharing alt-right material online are just trolling and find it funny, but the people who are really dedicated content creators, the people who are spending massive amounts of time on this, this is more than just trollingor if it is trolling, its trolling for a purpose. Its not just because they find it funny.

a no-brainer

That is a quick summary about the alt-right. Because of the alt-rights white nationalism and white supremacy, you can understand why Texas Pastor Dwight McKissic proposed the SBC adopt a resolution against the ideology.

I thought it would be a no-brainer, I thought it would be a slam-dunk, McKissic told Roland Martin on One News Now, after the SBC initially refused to consider his resolution. I thought they had turned a corner, at least in the sense of being able to intellectually, theoretically, biblically, affirm what the Bible says, that one God created all men equally.

The SBC did get it right the next day with the revised resolution, but the approved resolution left out two aspects of McKissics proposalthe so-called curse of Ham and the political aspect of alt-right ideology.

The Texas pastors proposal said: Whereas, the roots of White Supremacy within a Christian context is based on the so-called curse of Ham theory once prominently taught by the SBC in the early yearsechoing the belief that God through Noah ordained descendants of Africa to be subservient to Angloswhich provided the theological justification for slavery and segregation. The SBC officially renounces the curse of Ham theory in this resolution .

After three whereas statements dealing with politics, McKissics proposal included this statement: Resolved, that we reject the retrograde ideologies, xenophobic biases and racial bigotries of the so-called alt-right that seek to subvert our government, destabilize society, and infect our political system.

The approved SBC resolution excluded these two subjects.

Myths vs. facts

The curse of Ham theory still courses through the Christian South. It is part of the reason so many church-goers can still be racist and think little of it. They feel they have biblical justification. They dont. And we must continue to attack this falsehood.

Dallas Pastor Tony Evans does a great job of undermining the curse of Ham myth in his book, Oneness Embraced. Myths, however, do not need facts, they simply need supporters, Evans writes.

I have not found reference to the curse of Ham in alt-right literature, but the idea is there among racists who call themselves Christians. The adopted SBC resolution, by failing to condemn the so-called curse of Ham, leaves room for supporters of this falsehood to continue moving through Southern congregations as the venomous evil spirit of racism they embody.

I will not go into this error much, but any of us can go to that wonderful source of popular wisdom, Wikipedia, and learn the basics. As that entry begins, The Curse of Ham is a misnomer for the curse upon Canaan, Hams son, that was imposed by the biblical patriarch Noah. The curse referred to the people Israel would later conquer in occupying Palestine, the promised land. Canaan did not refer to black people.

The curse of Ham is a double lie. Noah cursed Canaan, not Ham, and Canaan does not refer to people of African descent.

Now, as to politics being left out of the approved resolution. The alt-right is seen as an important part of the electoral support behind Donald Trump.The final resolution steps gingerly around the issue of widespread Southern evangelical support for Trump in the election. This is understandable. Many Southern evangelicals who voted for Trump say they were primarily voting against Hillary Clinton. They do not want to be branded as racists because of their vote.

I hope the SBC resolution will surface the reality of the white supremacy and white nationalism associated with the alt-right. Racism keeps surfacing in various ways because evil doesnt give up easily.

Its important we understand the wolf when it reappears in new sheeps clothing.

(Note: For a straightforward presentation on what the Bible says about race, visit the Christian Life Commission website.)

Ferrell Foster is director of ethics and justice for the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission.

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2nd Opinion: Old wolf of racism appears in alt-right sheep's clothing - Baptist Standard

NBCNews.com

A Look at the Alt-Right Movement as It Seeks Mainstream Recognition NBCNews.com A Look at the Alt-Right Movement as It Seeks Mainstream Recognition. Sun, Jun 25. The movement believes in protecting white European identity ideas traditionally associated with white supremacy. Its founder, Richard Spencer, credits the election of ...

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A Look at the Alt-Right Movement as It Seeks Mainstream Recognition - NBCNews.com