Archive for the ‘Alt-right’ Category

Protesters Gather Outside ‘Alt-Right’ Leader’s Virginia Office | NBC4 … – NBC4 Washington

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A group of protesters gathered Sunday outside the offices of Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who is credited with coining the term "alt-right."

Protesters have convened outside Spencer'sVirginiaoffices regularly in recent months, but the organizers said Sunday's gathering was larger than usual. The protest came a day after racist fliers with messages including "Stop the blacks" and "You're losing your country, white man" were found in Alexandria, Virginia.

Sunday's protesters held signs saying "White supremacy not welcome" and "Love not hate."

"Its particularly important that we lead the way for our kids," said one protester, who gave his name only as Allen. "I would like to believe that some of the explicit racism and implicit racism thats still around here will be a thing of the past in their generation. But if not, we need to teach them to stand up."

Alexandria residents woke up Saturday morning to find racist flyerson poles and car windows. The images on some of the fliers are the same as those on a white supremacist website that endorses "American fascism."

Mayor Allison Silberberg issued a statement, saying the city denounces "hate speech and hate crimes and discrimination in all forms."

Alexandria police are investigating.

Published at 6:17 PM EDT on May 28, 2017 | Updated at 10:19 PM EDT on May 28, 2017

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Protesters Gather Outside 'Alt-Right' Leader's Virginia Office | NBC4 ... - NBC4 Washington

‘Alt-right’ celebrates alleged body slam of Jewish reporter Ben Jacobs by GOP congressional candidate – Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Ben Jacobs, above, had been following the House campaign of Greg Gianforte for several weeks when he was allegedly assaulted by the candidate. (Screenshot from ABC News)

(JTA) Users of websitesassociated with the alt-right are cheering a Republican congressional candidate from Montana for allegedly body slamming Jewish reporter Ben Jacobs.

There was no indication that Greg Gianforte knew or cared that Jacobs was Jewishwhen he allegedly threw The Guardian political reporter to the ground on Wednesday evening and broke his glasses, leading to misdemeanor assault charges. But that has not stopped online commenters from making the connection on platforms frequented by the alt-right, a loose right-wing movement that includes white nationalists and anti-Semites.

A user on the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer posted an article by The Guardian, a London-based daily, about the incident with the title Montana Republican Stands up to the Jewish Media. The user commented, I dont know anything about this guy, but I can appreciate him treating the jewish media how it deserves to be treated.

Responses included Body slamming k*** media members should become standard for Republican candidates. It should be part of the party platform. Also, The night of the broken glasses wont soon be forgotten, an apparent reference toKristallnacht, a Nazi pogrom considered the start of the Holocaust.

On 4chan, an online message board credited with launching the alt-right, threads about the incident frequently turned anti-Semitic, with comments like, One day our patience will come to an end and then we will grab these insolent Jews by their throats and stuff their lying mouths shut! and Shouldve stomped the Jewlet.

Breitbart News calledthe platform for the alt-right by its former top executive, current White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon reported the story straightforwardly, acknowledging that Jacobs story was supported by an audio and an eyewitness from Fox News. The comment section, however, featured a handful of anti-Semitic remarks, like the left wing marxist Jew reporters had best watch their arse. But unlike in other forums, other users were quick to criticize them.

Jacobs has publicly discussed his Jewish background, and on Twitter often weighs in on issues related to Judaism and anti-Semitism, including the alt-right. In 2015, he wrote a guide tofirst-time participants in a Passover seder advising, praise the brisket, and dont mention Israel lest they start an argument.

Gianforte, a high-tech millionaire, is the Republican candidate in a special election for Montanas lone seat in the House of Representatives. He has been endorsed by President Donald Trump. Jacobs asked the candidate about his views on the Republican health care plan before the alleged assault.

Although Jacobs has been following Gianfortes campaign for several weeks, the candidate did not seem particularly familiar with his work at the time of the alleged assault. In a recording of the incident, Gianforte can be heard saying, Youre with The Guardian? The last guy did the same damn thing.

You just body slammed me, Jacobs says. Id like to call the police.

Gianforte campaign spokesman Shane Scanlon said in a statement that Jacobs entered the office without permission, aggressively shoved a recorder in Gregs face, and began asking badgering questions.

Jacobs was asked to leave. After asking Jacobs to lower the recorder, Jacobs declined. Greg then attempted to grab the phone that was pushed in his face. Jacobs grabbed Gregs wrist, and spun away from Greg, pushing them both to the ground, the statement said.

Richard Spencer, a white supremacist and alt-right leader, tweeted Thursday, Im not a fan of Gianforte at all, but his version of events simply sounds more plausible. Spencer is a native of Whitefish, Montana. Andrew Anglin, the editor of The Daily Stormer, in January organized a neo-Nazi March in the city, purportedly because Jewish residents were threatening a local business run by Spencers mother. It was canceled because organizers did not file the required paperwork.

Twice this month, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel fliers were droppedoutside homes in Bozeman, Montana.

Gianforte is scheduled to appear in Gallatin County Justice Court by June 7. He faces a maximum $500 fine or six months in jail if convicted.

Today is the final day of voting in Montanas special election to replace Ryan Zinke, the former Montana Republican now running the Interior Department. Going into Thursday, Gianforte held a single-digit lead over Democrat Rob Quist, a folk singer and first-time candidate.

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'Alt-right' celebrates alleged body slam of Jewish reporter Ben Jacobs by GOP congressional candidate - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

For Alt-Right Trolls, Star Trek: Discovery Is an Unsafe Space – The New Yorker

The franchises claim to fame, dating back to the days of Lieutenant Uhura and Captain Kirk, is its advocacy for science, non-belligerence, and multiculturalism.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY CBS VIA GETTY

This being the United States in 2017, Internet trolls are accusing Star Trek: Discovery, the newest incarnation of the sci-fi franchise, due to dbut on television in the fall, of white genocide. The commotion began last week, when theshows trailerfirst appeared on YouTube. It opens with a conversation between the two lead characters, a starship captain and her first officer, played by Michelle Yeoh and Sonequa Martin-Green, both women of color. Very quickly, the comments section was filled with garden-variety Trekkie gripesthe Klingons looked weird, there was too much lens flare, the dialogue was hammy, the uniforms were non-canonical. Many commenters, though, were clearly appalled by the absence of white men in command positions. Where is the alpha male that has balls and doesnt take crap from anyone? one asked. Is everything going to have to have females in every fucking thing? another asked. A third person called Yeoh a reject from a overseas customer-support line. A fourth dubbed the show Star Trek: Feminist Lesbian Edition.

Two and a half years ago, in the very same corners of the Internet, there was a similar campaign against Star Wars: The Force Awakens, whose trailer featured a female protagonist and a black man wearing the iconic white carapace of a Storm Trooper. That incident was absurd enough, but in the case of Star Trek the outrage is even more confounding than usual. The franchises claim to fame,its central premise, is its advocacy for science, non-belligerence, and, above all, multiculturalism. In its fifty-year history, Star Trek has cornered the market on tolerance and cosmopolitanism. Even those who have never watched the original series, which aired in the late nineteen-sixties, likely know that it featured the first interracial kiss on network televisionbetween William Shatners Captain Kirk and Nichelle Nicholss Lieutenant Uhura.

And intergalactic office romance is really the least of it. Each successive Star Trek cast has been like a model United Nations. Nicholss black communications specialist worked alongside George Takeis Japanese helmsman and Walter Koenigs (admittedly campy) Russian navigator. Leonard Nimoys Spock was half-human, half-Vulcan, and he bore traces of the actors own upbringing in a poor Jewish neighborhood in Boston. The Vulcan hand greeting, for instance, which Nimoy invented, is the Hebrew letter shin, the symbol for the Shekhinah, a feminine aspect of the divine. The original series aired only a few years after the Cuban missile crisis, at the height of the Vietnam War and the space race, and its vision of a reconciled humanity was bold. Nichols, who considered leaving the show after the first season, has said thatshe was persuaded to stay onby Martin Luther King, Jr., who told her that he watched Star Trek with his wife and daughters.

Later manifestations of the franchise continued the tradition. The captain of the Enterprise in The Next Generation was a Frenchman from Bordeaux (though he spoke impeccable Oxbridge English). The chief engineer, Geordi La Forge, was black, and his colleagues on the bridge included an alien and an android. For seven seasons, T.N.G. explored much more than space: itsketched the contours of a modern utopiain which people, freed from material want, could pursue knowledge, justice, and the greater good. The series early-nineties spinoff, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, went even further. It was a sort of Casablanca in space, with characters from all races and worlds and cultures mingling, not always harmoniously, on a lonely outpost. Benjamin Sisko, the stations commanding officer, was a black man and a single father. His deputy was a female alien and former resistance fighter. And then there was Voyager, whose captain, played by Kate Mulgrew, was the only woman to serve as a central character in any of the Star Trek seriesuntil Yeoh and Martin-Green.

It is neither surprising nor especially interesting that Discovery has caused a conniption among the Bannonite mob. It is, however, a little ironic, because in many ways Star Trek falls short of the social-justice-warrior label. In the original series, for example, no one seemed bothered by the fact that short-skirted female crew brought the male senior officers their lunches, or that Captain Kirk seemed barely able to contain his sexual appetites. In T.N.G., La Forge kissesa white engineer, but only in holographic form. The series bartender, maternal and full of folksy alien wisdom, is played by a black woman, Whoopi Goldberg. Throughout the franchise, there is a complete absence of gay or even mildly gender-fluid characters in Starfleet uniforms. (That erasure was repaired, but only in passing, in the last movie, Star Trek Beyond.)

Indeed, Star Trek can often be seen as patronizing, if not conveniently delusional. The United Federation of Planets, despite its vaunted tolerance and inclusiveness, is mostly led by older white men. The explorers motives are represented as pure, unencumbered by cultural chauvinism, yet their science always prevails over aliens indigenous superstitions. By a strange and circuitous logic, the trolls who scream, White genocide! have espoused this very argument against the show. In effect, they are pining for the least appealing aspects of Star Trek, those that arise from unconscious slips and lingering prejudices, despite the writers best intentions. But it seems clear that they are fighting a losing battle. As the franchise continues to evolve to better reflect the tastes and the diversity of a global audience, the trolls will find it increasingly difficult to locate a safe space for their nativist fantasies, on Earth or among the stars.

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For Alt-Right Trolls, Star Trek: Discovery Is an Unsafe Space - The New Yorker

The alt-right is furious at Trump for his foreign trip An error occurred. – Salon

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Trumps Syria strike, while widely praised in the mainstream media, drewsignificant backlash from the presidents populist base. Now, five weeks later, Trumps first foreign trip has ushered in a new wave of criticism from his core group of supporters.

One week after the military action, British Infowars vlogger Paul Joseph Watson was joined on his Infowars show by Jack Posobiec, director at Citizens for Trump, where he explained why hed jumped Off the Trump train the week prior.

400,000 Syrians had died in this civil war over the past six years before the chemical weapons attack, he told Posobiec.Assad had been killing his own people for six years. . .its a civil war; thats what happens.

Watson also noted that at a news conference in the Turkish capital, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asserted on March 30 that the Syrian people would determineAssads fate.

What changed one week later? Watson asked. The only thing I can see is Bannon beingdemoted.

Posobiecs answer: A fundamental shift within the administration.

Its a fundamental shift basically with him out of the picture, and with [National Security Adviser] H.R. McMaster now there,he explained. H.R. McMaster is tied to [former director of the Central Intelligence Agency] David Petraeus . . . [and] a lot of people that were involved with the Obama administration and the Bush administration, so having these people in there allows for them to create a way where they can feed Trump any assessments, any intel they want without any conflicting views.

According to Mike Cernovich, Trump isnt draining the swamp, hes drowning in it. And the Pizzagate-pushing conspiracy theorist also attributes Trumps shift to McMaster.

More war is coming, and I dont know how to tell you the swamp is drowning Trump, he lamented.

On the other hand, theres been no shortage of ominous moments from Trumps first foreign trip, which kicked off with a record arms dealwith Saudi Arabia ($110 billion) on Saturday.

I think it was a bad idea to go to Saudi Arabia, Infowars commentator David Knight announced Monday. He then drew on some of the eerie symbolism viewers may have missed.

President Trump, Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi were all standing there holding this orb with our hands on it, Knight explained. Everybodys having a lot of fun with that picture, because they look pretty bad when theyre lit from the bottom . . . but what nobody is paying attention to is that that was all part of a ceremony about setting up a global organization.

Of course, the symbolism was not lost on everyone. As Vox summed up:

Think about it for a second: This is Donald Trump the guy who campaigned on banning Muslim immigration to the United States and replacing globalism in foreign policy with America First literally holding a globe surrounded by Muslims. Thats absurd!

I think hes not being very well served by the people who planned this trip,Knight added, turning to what he believed was the worst photo-op; a sword dance with the Saudis and administration officials.

I hope that. . .when they take these swords for the photo opportunities, that theyve wiped the blood off of them, Knight said, referencing beheadings. When you shake hands with people like that, sometimes you get blood on your hands, and we may wind up with blood on our hands in terms of this big arm deal, but of course [Trumps son-in-law] Jared Kushner was at the center of that.

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The alt-right is furious at Trump for his foreign trip An error occurred. - Salon

Latest Murder Shows Alt-Right Bleeding Into Real Life – ATTN:

University of Maryland Police Department via AP America was forced to once again reckon with the "alt-right" movement last week.

Richard Collins, a black man and a Second Lieutenant in the US Army, was killedby a white college student who followed a white supremacist Facebook page.

He was waiting for an Uber at a bus stop at the University of Maryland when Sean Urbanski approached him and stabbed him to death. Collins would have graduated from Bowie State on May 23. The college draped his gown and cap over a chair in memoriam Tuesday.

Urbanski, who is a student at the University of Maryland, followed a Facebook group steeped in alt-right ideology, and as a result the killing is being investigated as a hate crime.

The stabbing murder of #RichardCollins III is the latest in a wave of terrorist attacks tied to the alt-right/white supremacist movement. pic.twitter.com/GhWqWfOIP9

As defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center, it's "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.

Members of the nebulous group were emboldened last November with the election of President Donald Trump, a candidate who spoke to many of the concerns of white nationalist America.

"They've gotten a huge boost from attaching themselves to the Trump presidency and of course with Steve Bannon now as Chief Strategist," said Baltimore activist Delo Taylor. Bannon described Breitbart as the "platform of the alt-right" in 2016.

George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University, told ATTN: that the term alt-rightis useful to delineate the current, online driven white nationalist movement from white power movements of the past.

"The alt-right functioned as a sort of online Trojan Horse to channel large numbers of particularly young white men toward racist and misogynistic politics. It has used irony and online memes to make people comfortable with joking about these things before then fully embracing them, and has been incredibly effective in doing so."

Liberals: Ignore it, it will go away Klanfederate Nazis: O hai,

Destroy White Terror By Any Means pic.twitter.com/asi3wlaZrV

According to a study conducted by researcher Brian Levin of the nonpartisan Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, reports of bias influenced crimes increased in some cities late last year following the presidential election. In one of the most notorious instances in just the last month, Alexander Jennes Downing verbally berated a Muslim family at a Florida beach before being arrested and charged with public intoxication.

"The ascendance of Trump in the US and the larger wave of far-right nationalism globally in places like Europe has given white supremacists a huge megaphone," Taylor said. "And its emboldened this movement to the point where some who would otherwise be just your typical internet troll have migrated off the message boards and are now engaging in real-life acts of terrorism."

Taylor draws a direct line from the hate speech online to the violence against marginalized groups in the streets.

"We saw it in Charleston [where Dylann Roof killed 9 black parishioners at a Methodist Church], we saw it Quebec with the mosque shooting and the knife attack on a black man in New York. What those incidents all have in common is radicalized white male terrorists who had immersed themselves in this alt-right universe online before deciding to act out their hatred in real life."

Even with the increase in real world harassment and violence at the hands of the alt-right, the murder of Collins on May 20 was a new apex of horror in an already polarized country.

Urbanski was a member of an alt-right/white nationalist Facebook group called "Alt-Reich Nation." The page which has since been taken down was managed by an Indiana man named Matthew Lamb.

Lamb's Facebook page is littered with offensive, racist statements and hate speech.

ATTN reach out to Lamb for an interview but did not receive a response.

"Collins is only the latest of many victims of white nationalists that the media hesitates to call white nationalists," Ciccariello-Mahersaid. "[They prefer] to treat these as isolated incidents when they are in fact part of a fascist resurgence that needs to be prevented by any means."

Taylor agreed that that the movement needs to be stopped, and said the best resistance is simply standing your ground.

"Don't allow yourself to be afraid or intimidated by the harassment and other tactics employed by far-right extremists," Taylor said. "Their power lies in their ability to silence their enemies through fear."

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Latest Murder Shows Alt-Right Bleeding Into Real Life - ATTN: