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Last weeks shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority whip, has focused some media attention on the relatively unfamiliar phenomenon of left-wing extremism. But other recent developments make it clear that that right-wing radicals are actually far closer to achieving real political power than their leftist rivals.

Perhaps the best indicator of this trend is the fact that in Virginia, a day before the Alexandria shooting, Republicans nearly nominated a gubernatorial candidate named Corey Stewart, whose signature campaign issue was standing up for the Confederacy.

That position was somewhat of a reversal for Stewart, who less than a year ago hailedthe renaming of a local middle school to honor a black veteran instead of a white politician who fought against racial integration. Stewart is originally from Minnesota and can claim little or no Southern heritage.

But none of that really mattered after Stewart decided to challenge Ed Gillespie, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, for the GOPs gubernatorial nomination. Virginia elects its governors in odd-numbered years, outside the usual cycle of presidential or congressional elections. That often means these elections have low turnout in general and low Democratic turnout in particular.

Stewart last year served as the chair of Donald Trumps Virginia campaign at least until he was fired over his angry protests to Republican Party officials that they werent supporting Trump eagerly enough. When he decided to run for governor, he took up the torch of the defeated Confederacy, assuming that its most loyal defenders would be dedicated enough to show up and vote in the Republican primary. Soon enough, he began comparing those who advocate removing Confederate monumentsto members of the terrorist group ISIS.

If we allow them to destroy our history, to try to rewrite history, to sanitize history, we are losing part of our identity here in Virginia, Stewart said at a rally last month, in his slight but noticeable Midwestern accent.

Old-school Lost Cause racists werent the only ones who noticed Stewarts efforts, however. He also captured the attention of the high-tech white supremacist activists who consider themselves part of the alt-right.

Stewart never explicitly identified himself with the alt-right but was clearly happy to have its support. He actively courtedracist activists, using the alt-rights favorite insult cuckservative to describe Gillespie during an ask-me-anything session on Reddits home for Trump supporters. (The portmanteau blend of cuckold and conservative is commonly used in far-right circles to deride Republicans who are insufficiently supportive of anti-immigrant policies or other ideasfavored by white nationalists.)

During Stewartscampaign, alt-right advocates often spoke supportively of him. Some attended rallies thathe held in front of Confederate monuments. Many more organized their own events, most prominently inNew Orleansbut also in Charlottesville, Virginia, a largely liberal college areawhich is one of the states larger cities.

While his fellow VirginiaRepublicanscondemned the Charlottesville gathering, Stewart did not. Instead, he denounced the citys black vice mayor for wanting to remove a statue of Civil War general Robert E. Lee. In February Stewart even spoke at a rally hosted by a group started by alt-right bloggers. At the time that Stewart joined them, the organizations website promoted the alt-rights cartoon mascot, Pepe the Frog.

Less than a week before the June 13 primary election, Stewart denounced the racist activistshe had spent months courting. In a June 9 press conference, he accused his former allies of trying to inject racism into a debate about the Confederacy.

I completely condemn the Klan and all those racist groups, Stewart said. I want no association with them because theyre trying to hijack this issue. He added,Theyre trying to make it about race. This issue has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with preserving our history and preserving our historical monuments.

While Stewarts chances were consistently downgraded by Virginia political observers, he almost defeated Gillespie on Election Day. Stewart came within 1percentage point and about 4,300 votes of becoming the GOPs official nominee for governor.

For the most part, the alt-right seems to have missed Stewarts last-minute denunciation or simply decided to ignore it. In any case, activists dont seem to have held it against him. In a retrospective headlined Alt-Right Candidate Corey Stewart Almost Wins Virginia GOP Primary, a writer for the popular Daily Stormer blog portrayed the campaign as an illustration of how hismovement is gradually gaining power within the Republican Party:

Stewarts struggle didnt pan out as we had hoped, but this was a learning experience and a message to all the detestable cuckolds out there, a pseudonymous writer named Eric Striker wrote. It shows that an underdog can help his chances by working with us untouchables, while a well-funded hack condemning us like Gillespie crawls to the finish line wheezing.

For his part, Stewart is vowing to continue the struggle and not become a GOP team player.

This fight will continue, and Ill continue to fight as long as youll fight with me, he said at a rally after his loss.Theres one word youll never hear from me, and thats unity.

* * *

While Stewart is thus far the most high-profile Republican with active connections in the alt-right world, he is not the first. As Salon reported last year, Paul Nehlen a firebrand conservative who was heavily promoted by Breitbart News and several national talk radio hosts in his 2016 primary challenge to House Speaker Paul Ryan has also courted extremists on the far right.

In December several months after he was decisively defeated, Nehlenappeared in a Reddit open question sessionfor the forum sites popular (and now banned) alt-right community.

In the session, Nehlen argued that the alt-lite, an extreme right faction somewhere between hard-core conservatives like Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert and the openly racist alt-right, was too moderate to stop white genocide, the belief that Western governments are deliberately replacing citizens of European descent with people of other ancestries.

Shifting to an alt-light is not going to help, shooting each other from the side and back will not help, Nehlen wrote. I may not agree with everything you say, but I dont have to beat you over the head with your own words.

A few days later, Nehlen appeared on a highly popular far-right podcast called Fash the Nation where he spent an hour being interviewed by the hosts. He also used the word cuckto describe Republicans who opposed the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

While Nehlen was unsuccessful in his campaign against Ryan, like Corey Stewart he has vowed to continue the fight. On June 16, he announced he would once again challenge the speakerin the 2018 Republican primary.

Millions of Americans voted for President Trump, and they expect Paul Ryan to work to repeal Obamacare, end bad, job-killing trade deals, close the border and back the Presidents strong, America-first agenda. But that hasnt happened, Nehlen wrote in a news release.

Shortly after the announcement, one of the Fash the Nation co-hosts tweeted out a link to Breitbart News story about it, telling his followers to #FireRyan.

Many young Republicans want to do just that.As Mediaite reported yesterday, an intern for Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., recently blasted Ryan as a cuck and proudly called himself a bigot against Muslims. That intern is far from alone. As the anti-abortion blog LifeSiteNews recently wrote, the religious right is being replaced withthe alt right.

That hasnt quite happened yet, but given that alt-lite sites like Infowars and the Gateway Pundit already attract more traffic than mainstream conservative and libertarian sites like National Review, Townhall and the Weekly Standard (according to industry tracker SimilarWeb), its only a matter of time before a Republican politician aligned with the alt-right manages to win the GOP nomination for some significant office.

Once that happens, theres no telling how quickly the American rights spiral intoasymptotic nihilism will accelerate or where it will end up.

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How soon will the alt-right win an election? Neo-Confederate Corey ... - Salon

Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail. Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Rex

So the Mail responded with both barrels (Letters, June 23). That trigger-happy metaphor says it all. Lefties dont reach for their guns or express hatred against others including Daily Mail readers they use satirical cartoons and mild rebukes. The increasing numbers of death threats in our society virtually all come from alt-right extremists, as even Charles Foster might agree. It is not the readers who leadthe alt-right charge at the Mail, but the unbalanced editors, who go far beyond simply having opinions. Has this mild letter put me in the firing line? Virginia Cumming London

As Charles Foster suggests, it isnt always possible to divine the political stance of people from the newspapers they read. A late and much-missed colleague used to buy the Daily Mail every day, which astonished me because I knew where he stood politically. I tackled him one day about it. Youre about as leftwing as its possible to be without disappearing over the horizon. Why do you buy the Mail, I asked. To which he replied: Its the only paper that gives Tony Blair the kicking he deserves. Nigel Stapley Wrexham

Join the debate email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

Read more Guardian letters click here to visit gu.com/letters

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Daily Mail and 'alt-right' put lefties in firing line - The Guardian

In a proceedings paper presented at a Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence social media conference, a team of British, Italian, and Cypriot academics who worked with a Telefonica researcher presented their work analyzing 8,000,000 comments from 4chan's "politically incorrect" (AKA /pol/) boards, a hive of alt-right racism and hate.

The researchers attempted to quantify the effects that /pol/'s "raids" had on the discourse in mainstream political discourse, tracing the flows of news and talking points from /pol/ to and from Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

They found that alt-right raids were remarkably effective at steering the wider discourse, with "12% of the alternative news on worldnews (one of the main news boards on reddit) coming from 4chan. And over 16% of the alternative news on the same board is coming from The_Donald."

Here, we studied whether, once an event happens on one Internet platform (say, a hyperlink to a piece of news), the same event happens on another platform. It will be the exact same news link being posted on /pol/ that then makes its way to Twitter, lets say. We use a mathematical technique called 'Hawkes-process modelling', in which we can say with reasonable confidence that a particular event actually is related to the previous one that happened.

So we did this study, the first of its kind in tracing links between services. The idea here is that there has been quite some work on studying fake and alternative news. People look at how alternative news spreads on Twitter, for example; how people reshare it. But these services do not live in a vacuum theyre part of the greater web. These places where alternative news stories are posted and they talk about them and they make up these crazy conspiracies and all of that: we wanted to understand whether this actually has an impact on the wider web.

Kek, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump: A Measurement Study of 4chans Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [Gabriel Emile Hine, Jeremiah Onaolapo, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nicolas Kourtellis, Ilias Leontiadis, Riginos Samaras, Gianluca Stringhini and Jeremy Blackburn/11th Annual International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media]

Shining a light on the dark corners of the web [Daniel Cressey/Nature]

(via Naked Capitalism)

In a paper for IEEE Security, researchers from Cyberpion and Israels College of Management Academic Studies describe a Password Reset Man-in-the-Middle Attack that leverages a bunch of clever insights into how password resets work to steal your email account (and other kinds of accounts), even when its protected by two-factor authentication.

If youre an American whos lucky enough to live somewhere that received large influxes of immigrants during the Age of Mass Migration (1860 to 1920), congratulations! The immigrants who came to your territory brought along higher incomes, lower unemployment, higher levels of educational attainment and no reduction in social cohesion!

When Thomas Piketty and his team undertook their landmark study of wealth inequality in the world, they had to rely on the self-reported income of the super rich to see just how income was distributed by definition, they couldnt directly measure the unreported income hidden in tax havens (though they did estimate it, with []

Even though credit cards now feature an EMV chip for securing transactions, they still have to include the magnetic strip for compatibility with older point of sale systems. Because of this, theres no way for the chips new security capabilities to protect against card skimmers in the wild.How do you protect yourself from legacy-technology-induced fraud? []

As the old saying goes, You should sit in meditation for 30 minutes every day. Unless you are too busy, in which case you should meditate for an hour. Since most of us have an endless list of things to do and people to see, carving out quiet time can feel impossible, especially when most []

The Bragi Dash Truly Wireless Smart Earphones are far more than your run of the mill Bluetooth earbuds. While the earpiece design makes these earbuds ideal for exercise and activity, and passive noise cancelling is conducive to a more serene listening experience, these buds go well beyond just playing music.First of all, they can actually []

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Quantifying the influence of 4chan's alt-right trolls on normies ... - Boing Boing

Baby boomers and the Jewish elites, rather.

Disdain for baby boomers is a foundational tenet of the Alt-Right that associates the post-WWII generation with warmongering, selfish capitulation to big business at the cost of principled conservatism, and, most offensively, voluntary subjugation of themselves and their children to so-called cultural Marxism.

Ironically, some of the Alt-Rights most vociferous critics of baby boomers, such as Richard Spencer, depended on their parents while their movement careers were in their infancy. Spencer, head of the white nationalist National Policy Institute (NPI) and the de facto leader of the Alt-Right, lived out of his parents second home in the resort town of Whitefish, Montana, while building his reputation within the movement.

Richard Spencers grandfather was a wealthy Louisiana doctor-turned-cotton planter and there has been some speculation that the sale of family farming land has allowed him to pursue his life of thought-crime. His fathers salary as an ophthalmologist afforded Spencer the opportunity to attend St. Marks School of Texas, arguably Dallass most prestigious prep school. Spencer then went on to attend some of the most elite and expensive universities in the nation.

One of many memes mocking Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes.

Theres a yawning gap between the familial resources afforded to the Alt-Rights leaders and many of their adherents, but that hypocrisy hasnt impeded the base from running with the vitriolic anti-boomer sentiment propagated by its leading lights.

The biggest cultural changes of the 20th century occurred during the 1960s when the baby boomer generation was coming of age, wrote Ben Richards on the Daily Stormer. Through the use of televised propaganda, many of that generation bought into the Jewish promoted ideals of Cultural Marxism. This was sold to them as a liberating form of rebellion against the conservative ideals of their parents. Jews were able to use the rebellious nature of their youth to push a society destroying agenda that is still playing out today.

While the Alt-Right by and large a youthful movement celebrated Trump's election, the supporters who actually propelled Trumps candidacy to victory consisted of a demographic that the Alt-Right loathes: baby boomers.

Dissatisfaction over President Trumps abandonment of campaign promises which has increased daily among even his most enthusiastic supporters has forced the Alt-Right to find other outlets for their rage. Recently, this has taken the form of physical theatrics like the confrontations in Houston with the armed cosplayers in fatigues that make up This is Texas.

Militias like This is Texas which organized the Hermann Park protests in Houston have become vehicles for the Alt-Right to pivot back to their defining anger toward baby boomers. Much of this rage is attributed to declining economic prospects for millennials and generation Z due to the perceived selfishness of boomers and the resulting fragmentation of communities.

The only places a young man can find entry level work any more is in large urban cities for some shitty giant corporation that can afford to take a chance on a young guy, but has no problem giving him the boot if it ain't working out, wrote Doctor Mayhem in a thread titled Why We Should Hate Boomers and Owe Them Nothing on The Right Stuffs 504um. The real kicker is dad, mom, grandpa, and grandma then have the gall to bitch that you moved so far away, without even considering that it was their political apathy that brought in Juan, Carlos, and Chang to take all the decent entry level jobs for pennies on the dollar, forcing you to move.

Richard Spencer frequently and self-satisfyingly acknowledges the indebtedness of the Alt-Right to the left for this line of boomer critique in an April 21 video titled Bill OReilly and the End of Boomer Conservatism.

In the video Spencer lifts up the disgraced Fox News television anchor Bill OReilly as an icon of white America and of conservative America, before tearing him down as the archetypical Boomer Conservative.

To simply deny this and think race can be dissolved into muh patriotism or to loudly harangue anyone who doesnt think that race structures society is a kind of clueless denialism ... It is something certainly characteristic of boomer conservatism, where they will very cluelessly, very absurdly claim that race doesnt exist or they dont see it and were all muricans and thats something that millennials certainly scoff ... its something that the entire left scoffs at and they scoff at it because it does lack self-awareness, it lacks truth, its a way of glossing over some deeper problem, or deeper essence of our society.

Spencers own lack of self-awareness is whats truly on display here. While trying to make the novel point that the Alt-Right is taking cues from the left, who in Spencers alternate universe are also so-called race realists, he repeats one of the most tired tropes in politics: Everything is my parents generations fault and they dont understand me at all!

Through the tweet storm, Griffin attempts to level the economic plight of Selma, as a proxy for the blue-collar South, at the feet of John Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement, supported by boomers.

Meanwhile, Spencers only job to speak of is running a faux-think tank out of an Alexandria, Virginia, townhome.

Brad Griffin AKA Hunter Wallace of Occidental Dissent and the Neo-Confederate League of the South, made his own attempt at Spencers banal point three months earlier in a slew of tweets titled The Truth About Selma, depicting a road-trip from the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery through the rural Black Belt.

This acknowledgement of poor and working-class woes, blindered by a strict focus on race, is a favorite recruitment strategy of the hallucinatory chess masters of the marginal right. Its success has been notably invisible.

Griffin names the boomer.

In a post on The Right Stuffs Neo-Confederate offshoot Identity Dixie, a pseudonymous author, Braxton Bragg, shared a post titled Thoughts on the Boomer Question, which unpacks several of the grievances that the Alt-Right holds against the boomers.

The first key issue on which Boomers are ideologically different, from younger generations and the Alt-Right, is the question of race and egalitarianism. The majority of Boomers espouse the idea that all races of men are physiologically and psychologically the same ... The second key issue on which the Boomers differ ideologically, is on the question of Jewish influence and the United States relationship with Israel. ... Lastly, the Boomer generation lacks an understanding of the contrast between the world they grew up in and the world Generations X and Y have had to contend with. The Boomer generation had opportunities set before them by their parents, yet some of them chose to be indolent and instead railed against their parents as part of the counterculture movement ... The taxation of working class whites to subsidize the existence of those living off the welfare state has made it disadvantageous to start a family. Yet, many Boomers only see their kids being lazy or incapable.

The latter point betrays the political underpinnings of the Alt-Right as a reactionary movement animated by the grievances of a young, web-savvy whites who resent the opportunities available to their parents and grandparents and seek redress for socio- economic woes solely through racial separation.

It also neatly encapsulates the entire feud last Saturday between This is Texas and the Alt-Right and all of the shitposting that followed. An incapable militia group showed up en masse to protest an antifa event that never got closer to reality than Facebook, while a mob of fashy trolls exploited that ineptitude and spent a week online making lazy memes essentially complaining that mom and dad ruined everything.

Continued here:
Grilling Boomers: The Alt-Right Gets All Fired Up about BBQ (the Baby Boomer Question ) - Southern Poverty Law Center

Media Matters for America (blog)

Reporters fall into the alt-right trap with Julius Caesar stunt Media Matters for America (blog) Ever since President Donald Trump hired then-Breitbart.com chief executive Stephen Bannon to run his presidential campaign, the press has been struggling to comprehend the alt-right movement that his website helped promote. While many journalists ... Critics allege alt-right activists are attempting to profit from Shakespeare in the Park protestsTheBlaze.com 'Julius Caesar' interrupted again by pro-Trump protestersNew York Post Two Protesters Disrupt 'Julius Caesar' in Central ParkNew York Times New York Times -Los Angeles Times -New York Times all 153 news articles »

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Reporters fall into the alt-right trap with Julius Caesar stunt - Media Matters for America (blog)