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The defeat of Colombias referendum in October of 2016 was a shocking development. Liberal and left-wing observers failed to predict that voters would be won over by the Rights fear-mongering anti-peace campaign.

In Colombia, ideological vestiges of the Cold War have been refashioned to direct fear and anger towards a fictional gender ideology that supposedly poses a spiritual threat to Christian values. In the lead-up to the peace referendum, right-wing groups were able mobilize the imaginary threat of a queer, communist conspiracy to generate panic and turn it into political capital.

Its time we grappled with the gruesome consequences of a political conjuncture in which online media figures, conservative religious movements, and a generalized politics of fear all intersect to shore up support for the Right, even in a country poised to overcome a persistent conflict that has raged for more than fifty years.

After four years of negotiations between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Popular Army (FARC-EP), an end to Colombias long internal conflict seemed near. But in October 2016, with only 37 percent of the almost 35 million eligible voters showing up to the polls, the peace agreement was rejected by a margin of just 50.21 percent.

A few days after the failed referendum, Juan Carlos Vlez, manager of the campaign opposing the peace agreement, was interviewed by La Repblica, a well known newspaper in Colombia. According to Vlez, the success of his campaign was due to two factors: 1) the importance of digital social networks over other media sources, and 2) a differential approach to messaging that targeted different class audiences.

The anti-peace right targeted high- and middle-income Colombians by telling them that they would be responsible for the economic burden of the agreement the cost of peace. Meanwhile, among low-income voters, the Right stirred fears about possible reductions to social welfare as the national budget changed to prioritize the reintegration of ex-combatants. But inflecting everything was an angry hysteria about sexual diversity a specter of creeping cultural deviance which the Colombian right successfully associated with the proposed peace agreement.

In Vlezs words, We were looking for people to go out to vote while pissed off. In this, Vlez and his collaborators were clearly successful. But to understand why this tactic was so effective, its necessary to go back months before the referendum.

In August 2016, the streets of large cities like Bogot, Bucaramanga, Cali, and Medellin were filled with thousands of people dressed in white shirts waving Colombian flags. They carried banners and chanted the only guideline the kids need is the bible. These mobilizations were convened through social media and endorsed by both Protestant and Catholic leaders. The marchers criticized the governments intention to open up a discussion about sexual diversity in public schools and railed against the institutionalization of what they referred to as gender ideology.

Oswaldo Ortiz, a Youtube personality and so-called digital pastor, exemplifies how conservative groups successfully used social media to link this fear about sexual diversity to opposition to the peace agreement. Ortiz is a thirty-something lawyer and a self-proclaimed heterosexual activist in a crusade against what he calls the gay lobby. In his Youtube videos, Ortiz mixes a conservative religious agenda with an easy-going, modern attitude. His videos show him jogging, often using hashtags such as #runningwithjesus.

Like conspiracy-minded commentators in the United States and elsewhere, Ortiz is obsessed with revealing the pernicious influence of gender ideology in Colombian society at large.

In one video, Ortiz presents footage of Humberto de la Calle, the governments chief negotiator during the peace process. The clip shows de la Calle at a press conference, repeating, You are not born a man, you become a man. You are not born a woman, you become a woman.

In another video, Ortiz features the Argentine reactionary Augustin Laje, whose latest book (The Black Book of the New Left: Gender Ideology or Cultural Subversion) argues that sexual diversity, feminism, and environmentalism replaced proletarianism in leftist politics after the fall of the Soviet Union. The books cover features an image of Che Guevara wearing striking red lipstick, superimposed over a rainbow flag.

In the interview, Laje defines gender as the cultural aspect of human sexuality. It becomes an ideology, he says, when the cultural aspect displaces the natural determinations.

In a similar vein, popular evangelical pastor Alejandro Ortiz recently wrote in an article addressed to atheists, gays, lesbians, extreme environmentalists, feminists, and evolutionists the day will come when God will put the saved on his right hand, and on the left yes, on the left the accursed. The evangelical right has arrived to Colombia, and arrived to stay.

While its true that the Colombian congress began implementing a nearly identical peace agreement just a month after the defeated referendum, the Colombian population remains politically polarized, which poses significant challenges for any future reconciliation.

In Colombia, drummed-up hysteria over gender ideology channels public support for the right wing by linking Christian fundamentalism with anticommunist rhetoric. Gender ideology evokes the specter of a conspiracy threatening traditional values like Christianity, heterosexuality, and market liberalism and allows the Right to mobilize fear in the service of their political agenda.

This tactic is nothing new. Throughout history, fear has proven to be a dangerous and effective political tool. During the Cold War, the threat of a nuclear attack kept the American population on guard, allowing the militarization of everyday life. More recently, the clash of civilizations narrative that laid the groundwork for the war on terror has successfully mobilized fear in the service of NATOs crusade against Islamic fundamentalists. Today, the upsurge in racism and xenophobia in the United States, materialized in Trumps Muslim Ban, recalls the right-wing fantasy of an armed Christianity capable of meeting the threat of hostile heathenism.

Colombia is no exception. In the 1980s, the National Restoration Movement (MORENA) was formed as a paramilitary front under the auspices of wealthy cattle ranchers, drug dealers, and politicians. The movement, led by paramilitary leader Ernesto Baz, claimed that its purpose was to defend traditional Christian values in Colombia.

In his book The Para-State: An Ethnography of Colombias Death Squads, anthropologist Aldo Civico describes how Colombian paramilitarism won support among the population:

Support has also come from common people, who are often thankful for the kind of order that [the paramilitaries] provide or, at a minimum, have seen them as a minor and necessary evil to exterminate the brutes the guerrillas, but also the desechables, literally the disposable people, the scum of the earth such as drug addicts, petty thieves, and homosexuals. The paramilitaries have functioned like a sanitation department, disposing the waste.

When Orlando Ortiz was criticized for promoting hate speech, he claimed that he faced persecution from Christianophobes in the Gay Lobby. When his Facebook and Youtube accounts were closed due to complaints, Ortiz declared that he and his followers were subjected to a Digital Genocide. Like alt-right reactionaries in the US and elsewhere, Ortiz attempts to flip the arguments against him by posing as a victim of hate speech whenever his right to promote hate speech is denied.

But since the implementation of the new peace agreement, at least twelve social leaders have been killed in 2017. Pro-agreement activists risk their lives as the government dismisses the existence of paramilitary activity in departments like Caquet, Choco, Antioquia, Cordoba, Cesar, and Valle del Cauca. In this historical context, the article by evangelical pastor Alejandro Ortiz entitled Christians Are at War with the LGBTI Community reads like a call to arms. There are victims of violence and persecution in Colombia but theyre not members of the Christian right.

As the Colombian peace process continues to unfold in uncertain conditions, we must remain attentive to the fear-mongering tactics of Colombias hateful right-wing tactics that have already proven troublingly successful, and that may prove successful again.

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Colombia's Christian Alt-Right - Jacobin - Jacobin magazine

Hundreds of conservative protesters hosting a Free Speech Rally on Boston Common clashed with counter-demonstrators from local socialist and anti-fascist groups yesterday after American flags were burned and insults were hurled across a police line and at least one face-to-face confrontation turned violent.

Protesters on both sides of the police line showed up seemingly prepared for violence, many were wearing protective sports equipment, goggles and helmets, while others carried flagpoles, umbrellas and sticks. The gathering was sparked by a Free Speech Rally organized by local conservative and alt-right groups.

Were trying to show that Boston stands against hate, said Paul Weiskel, one of the organizers of the counter-protest, who described the day as a success. Its clear to the public walking through the Common that theres plenty of people who are very uncomfortable with the rhetoric and the symbols that are being used by the alt-right.

As many pro-Trump demonstrators worked to keep their supporters on their side of the Common, members of the Boston Democratic Socialists and the Boston Chapter of Antifa assembled in front of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument waving black flags and chanting No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!

White supremacy is alive and well and its important to stand up to it, said one counter-protester who asked to be identified as Cole P.

As police officers worked to keep the two groups apart, demonstrators using megaphones spent more than four hours shouting insults across the barrier and one self-described anarchist set a small American flag on fire. At one point a girl who said she was a Quincy High School student threw a rock at the pro-Trump side.

Tensions reached a boiling point about 1:45p.m., when 28-year-old Salvatore Guytano Cippola, of Oceanside, N.Y., crossed a police barrier in an attempt to hand one of the counter-protesters a Pepsi a move that appeared to be an attempt to mock a recent commercial that featured Kendall Jenner handing a cop a soda.

Cippola was at least the fourth demonstrator to try to pull off the joke.

As he approached the group, a group of counter-protesters began shouting at him and telling him to go back to his side of the Common.

During the ensuing back-and-forth, Cippola and 19-year-old Elise Hinman, of Clovis, Calif., allegedly began shoving each other and eventually Cippola, Pepsi still in hand, allegedly threw a punch that struck Hinman in the face. Police say both were arrested on a charge of affray.

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Tempers flare at 'Free Speech Rally' as alt-right, socialist groups ... - Boston Herald

There are certain books where, as you're reading, you realize your mind is about to change. Reading Kill All Normies is one of those experiences. Written by Angela Nagle, an Irish writer and academic known for articles identifying "The New Man of 4chan," the book is a record of the recent online "culture wars", culminating in the 2016 US election and the triumph of the alt-right. It is also an indictment of the left, pinpointing just how it allowed this to happen.

The book opens with a cultural history, "From Hope to Harambe," outlining the progression from mid-00s pickup artist communities, to overtly anti-feminist "neomasculinity," to Gamergate (here Nagle's narration takes a near-audible sigh), leading to its collusion with 4chan's troll army and its political awakening as the alt-right. Nagle wrote her PhD dissertation on online misogyny, witnessing this evolution in real-time. "There's a sort of broad arch of reactionary politics which moves from anti-feminism to racism," she explains, meeting me in Dublin to talk about the book.

With its promise of a collective identity, the alt-right can seduce and assimilate these groups, lending them a sense of coherent identity.

Nagle approaches the alt-right as a tangle of wayward factions, united in their loathing of the left. Named for Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci who argued that political change follows cultural change, the "Gramscian Alt-Light" are those people you've seen on 4chan threads: creative, angry, unpredictable, but politically vacuous and messy. The "Manosphere" are men threatened by feminists, who they claim augur in civilizational decline and "cucking." They have converted their misogyny into racism, which links them with more old-fashioned far-right bigotry.

What each group shares is a fear of the future, an atomized life spent forever alone. With its promise of a collective identity, the alt-right can seduce and assimilate these groups, lending them a sense of coherent identity.

Among the alt-right's leaders, Nagle sees Richard Spencer as the most influential and the most likely to sustain a political career. "Mike Cernovich, Lauren Southern and Milo, all those people are brilliant at media," says Nagle. "They're really good at Twitter, but they're shallow thinkers. Richard Spencer is much smarter. He realizes that conservatism will never be cool, so he's trying to bring in figures from the dissident left."

Essentialist arguments about what it is to "be a man" have evolved to address what it is to be a white man. Nagle cites "Return of Kings" (a "neomasculinity" blog) author Roosh V's transition from pickup artist to alt-right proponent as an example. Overwhelmed by a sexual hierarchy in which they cannot compete, and immersed in anti-immigration rhetoric and talk of "white genocide," the alt-right has coalesced around an aggressive, ultra-conservative version of white masculinity.

Nagle identifies a contradiction at the heart of the alt-right's demands: It might call for a return to old-fashioned values, but it fails to recognize how those same forces that brings it together erode any chance of returning to that lifestyle (the kind lived by people who hardly use the internet in the first place). "I think they want out of their lives, because their own lives are nothing like that," Nagle explains. "They're living the ultimate kind of individualism. They spend their time watching porn and playing video games. They're not part of any greater purpose." Spencer himself alludes to this in speeches, stating that "in a culture which offers video games, endless entertainment, drugs, alcohol, porn, sports, and a thousand other distractions to convince us of another reality, we want to cut all of that away."

This argument for the "real" stretches far beyond the online right: As a generation born far away enough from lifetime monogamy, home ownership, job security and a life without technology, we have little concept of the "normal" we're denied. On the alt-right, this plays out as an irresolvable frustration. "When they talk about 'normies,' explains Nagle, "they're also saying 'I want a normal life. I want a wife and a house and a family.' They're deeply conflicted, because everything they hate in this world is what they are the ultimate example of."

It would be tempting to dismiss this as an attack on easy targets (a group of antisocial teenage boys), but Nagle never dismisses their hopes and frustrations. Instead, she traces where they come from. Nor does she spare the online left: Kill All Normies can be categorized alongside Jarrett's Kobek's 2016 anti-novel I Hate the Internet in that both titles attack the online left from the left. Beside the /b/tards and racists and the Men Going Their Own Way (aka "MGTOW," the anti-feminist group that claims to renounce women and sex entirely), still it is the left who come out looking worst of all.

This is what makes Kill All Normies so troubling, and in other ways so exhilarating to read. Nagle attacks a liberal internet sunk in filter-bubbled complacency, drunk on the relative ease of expressing one's politics in retweets, and obsessed with calling out the right-wing bogeyman.

Nagle links this stagnation to a poverty of thought: "The thing is, you cannot come up with new ideas if the intellectual culture of your movement is totally closed down. Which has been the case for years. That's why the alt-right has been such a shock, because everyone was banking on the fact that everyone now agrees with us."

Nagle's argument finds horrifying validation at the book's conclusion, which leaps forward to January of this year, immediately after the suicide of author and cultural critic Mark Fisher. Rather than mourning his loss, or expressing condolences to his bereaved family, members of the online left gloated and portrayed his untimely death as a victory:

Nagle is damning here, writing that "this response is a fairly typical example of precisely the sour-faced identitarians who undoubtedly drove so many young people to the right during these vicious culture wars."

In the recent past, Fisher came under fire online for his essay "Exiting the Vampire Castle," which argues against the online left's call-out culture as obstructing change, and breeding a further sense of futility among the online left. When I interviewed Fisher two years ago about his Facebook project "Boring Dystopia," he was certain that Facebook, Twitter and their ilk would die away within our lifetimes.

This hasn't yet come to pass. Rather, "online politics" have gone mainstream, and won an election. What went so horribly wrong in online life, that it got this bad? Have we learned to love the filter bubble so much that we've forgotten our own humanity?

More than anything, this book is about the a battle for the real. What is real? Who gets to be a normie?

It is tempting to dream of an end to Twitter, of Facebook imploding and Instagram going offline, to put an end to this culture war. But Nagle isn't convinced it would solve our dilemma: "I think it would be replaced by something that would fulfill the same purpose. I wouldn't want to suggest a technical solution to what is in essence an absence of ideas."

The book ends with the alt-right on the ascendant, spilling off the screen and into real life as riots erupt at American universities. The alt-right has been validated: we have already let them, to paraphrase Ivanka Trump (herself misquoting Ayn Rand). Now, who is going to stop them?

More than anything, this book is about a battle for the real. What is real? Who gets to be a normie? What will we accept as "normal," and what will we stand against? To Nagle, the challenge posed is a moral one: "We think of them as kind of a dirty word, one which reminds of us of reactionary politics, but moral questions are so important. We constantly make moral decisions, whether we want to or not. And the central issue of the alt right is a moral one."

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'Kill All Normies' Is About the Alt-Right But the Left Ends Up Looking Worse - Motherboard

Sonja Trauss, founder of the pro-gentrification Bay Area Renters Federation, at her office in San Francisco, March 24, 2016. (Photo: Andrew Burton / The New York Times)

In San Francisco's Mission District,flyerspasted on mailboxes and light poles warn longtime residents of the new "conquistadores," the hordes of wealthy tech industrialists who've descended on the neighborhood en masse over the past few years, displacing many in the Latinx-heavy neighborhood to the outer reaches of the Bay Area.

But it's not just lower-income people who are feeling set upon. Rich newcomers also see themselves as an interest group in need of a voice. "Someone needs to represent people who haven't yet moved into a neighborhood," said pro-development activist Sonja Trauss, who moved to Oakland in 2011, at an Aprilreal estate industrysoiree in Vancouver. In San Francisco, "the people who haven't yet moved in" most often means the tech industrialists, lured by high salaries, stock options and in-office employee benefits like massage therapists and handcrafted kombucha.

But these new tech "immigrants," as Trauss refers to her kinfolk, spell disaster for current San Franciscans. In 2015, the city-funded homeless count found71 percent of homeless SanFranciscans were housed in San Franciscobefore being pushed onto the streets.

Some have given up, leaving the Bay altogether. Others are funneled into modern-day debtor's prisons asregulations against homeless encampments, newjailexpansionacross the region and increased militarized policing throughUrban Shieldand other social control projects have coincided with new incubators of this quickly replicating tech invasion, such as Uber's new anchor headquarters in downtown Oakland.

A Campaign to Legitimize the Luxury Condo Boom

A founder of the Yelp.com web empire, Jeremy Stoppelman,bequeathed $100,000upon new Oakland resident Trauss in 2015, with the stated goal of clearing the way for more housing units, even if those units were only accessible to the richest of the rich. That investment helped to spark a libertarian, anti-poor campaign to turn longtime sites of progressive organizing into rich-people-only zones.

YIMBYs [Yes in My Back Yard] accuse anti-gentrification activists -- those calling for affordable units instead of luxury ones -- of preventing the construction of new housing development, thus reducing the new housing supply and driving up rents. But whileYIMBYism is championed as progressive urban policy, critics likeactivist Tory Becker of the anti-gentrification direct action groupLAGAI,believe it's actually rooted in the same classist, racist ideologies it supposedly seeks to disrupt.

If simple supply and demand were a universal solution to rising housing inequality, then building new housing units in cities where the costs of living are high would indeed be a route to cheaper, better housing for all. However, the real world doesn't work that way, and the YIMBYs' "build, build, build" platform only stands to benefit a fortunate few.

The reality is that a low-income family of color who has lived in an area for years does not have the economic or cultural capital of the tech-moneyed arrivals who've got the local police station saved in their frequent contacts list.

TheAnti-Eviction Mapping Project, a project tracking displacement and evictions in the Bay Area,recently joined with the Eviction Defense Collaborative and San Mateo Legal Aid to conductresearchon who is being evicted and why. The results were revealing.

"We found evictions are severely impacting poor and working-class Black and Latinx residents, seniors, female-headed households, non-English-speaking residents and households with children," Erin McElroy, founder and researcher for the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, told Truthout. "Disproportionately, those in [YIMBY movement] leadership roles are in tech and are young, white men."

High-income earners, like the tech workers who can afford market-rate housing, are effectively displacing communities and small businesses that depend on lower-income inclusionary housing and land-use policies, such as rent control that offer protection from unregulated market forces; protections won because of decades of grassroots activism by working class communities of color. For example, the famous 1977International Hotelanti-eviction campaign led by Asian American leftists and Filipino elders in San Francisco's then-sanctuary for Filipinos known as Manilatown, sparked both community development and tenants' rights movements against the onset of neoliberal racial capitalism.

YIMBYs brand the activists continuing the tenant's rights legacy as "NIMBYs" who are aligning themselves with wealthy homeowners. However, activists like Becker and McElroy, who have been in the game for much longer than Trauss and company, foresee a new wave of redevelopment like that of the 1960s and 1970s, when "urban renewal" made a few people rich, while leaving large swathes of city dwellers homeless or forced to migrate out of the areas where their families had lived for generations. In the 1960s writer James Baldwin remarked that San Francisco's "urban renewal" of its then-Black-majority Fillmore district was "negro removal." Under the YIMBY flag, the same is happening today with low-income Black, Latinx and transgender people of color being the core targets of displacement. The YIMBY movement's developer allies and tech-employed urbanites stand to profit off this disruption of communities.

Just a couple years later, Trauss is now leading an army with soldiers around the world, from Boulder to Bratislava, while dominating the dialogue on how to deal with the very real problem of housing inequality. Entrenched online in the libertarian strongholds of Reddit and TechCrunch, and in the real world through real estate- and tech-sponsored nonprofits likeSPURandYIMBY Action, Trauss's followers live by the neoliberal belief that deregulation and building more housing, even if it's only affordable to the richest of the rich, will trickle down and eventually make housing affordable for all. Her vision is Reagonomics "dressed up in a progressive sheep's costume," according to Becker. But Trauss's "fresh approach" to the dilemma of exploding housing costs has got conservative libertarians and lefty media outlets alike foaming at the mouth for more.

A Grassroots Facade

In its recent portrait of Trauss and the movement she helped to spark, The New Yorkernoted that Trauss breakfasted last fall with PayPal cofounder and Trump advisor Peter Thiel. Trauss explained to Truthout in an email on April 26 that she "got an introduction to him from a mutual acquaintance," and had met with him with the goal of raising money for her cause.

Trauss "had the oatmeal," The New Yorkerreported, while Thiel ate quiche. Details like these represent the media's overwhelming depiction of the queen of YIMBY, which paints her as an in-the-trenches upstart who's disrupting the affordable housing movement, without digging into the question of whom YIMBY ideals really benefit. Using tactics and lingo adapted from progressive movements, YIMBY is gaining traction in places where tenants' rights groups have managed to push back against the gentrification of cities that have historically been socially and economically welcoming to low-income people, immigrants and people of color, like the Bay Area, New York City, and Toronto.

"YIMBY brings together community groups, advocates, and grassroots organizations," reads the Toronto YIMBY Party's website. But North America's first YIMBY convening, YIMBY2016, was funded by groups, such as the National Association of Realtors and the Boulder Area Realtor Association.

With President Trump experiencing a massive drop in popularity, Trauss later participated in a protest outside top Trump-ally Thiel's house. "What was Trauss doing aligning herself with a rightwing conservative like Thiel in the first place?" asks Becker, who believes Trauss espouses "social fabric-ripping" beliefs that are, in effect, "white supremacist."

Are the people-of-color-led community groups likeCausa Justathat supported amoratorium on luxury condo construction"just as bad" as anti-immigrant Trump supporters? Trauss thinks so,calling people who didn't support new market-rate condo projects in central San Francisco "nativists"because they don't welcome with open arms the construction cranes building lavish condos with butterfly gardens and valet parking in traditionally working-class neighborhoods.

McElroy says Trauss's allegations disregard the anti-racist organizing by Latinx groups in the Mission District. "This YIMBY tactic [of calling Latinx organizers 'anti-immigrant'] depends upon both 'All Lives Matter' and free-market logics, not to mention the idea that the knowledge produced by housing justice groups is inferior, outmoded and irrelevant."

However, with a combination of supporters with fat wallets -- real estate speculators, development corporations and homeowners concerned with increasing their own property values -- and a smart public relations game, YIMBY has mounted a formidably destructive campaign in barely three years. It is steamrolling the traditional housing movement concept of centering the most vulnerable populations: the homeless, the poor people living paycheck-to-paycheck and the ever-dwindling middle class."NowHiring" signs are gathering dustin the windows of restaurants and retail shops across the city as lower-income people who serve the wealthy their $6 pieces of toast on carb-free cheat days can't afford to live in the city anymore.

Deadly Neoliberal Policies

Infill, with its self-aware, geek-chic name, is the podcast that Trauss co-hosts with another YIMBY-to-watch, Laura Foote Clark. When Truthout asked for evidence that the YIMBY trickle-down model would benefit people who aren't making tech salaries, Foote Clark was quick to send a dozen papers that claim to show how neoliberal deregulation will end the housing crisis, and that rich NIMBYs are the main benefactors of further regulation.

But tell that to people likeIris Canada, the 100-year-old Black woman who had used local regulations to stay in her home of six decades, only to be evicted in February. "This eviction killed her," Iris's niece, also named Iris, said at a March 29 vigil for her aunt, who died from a stroke just a month after her eviction.

What Foote Clark sells as objective economics are neoliberal policies that Truthout and others have widely debunked -- policieswhicharesetuptokillanyonewithoutlotsofmoney. The experiences of dozens of tenants like Canada, those who have died because of the crisis of neoliberal urbanism, are utterly disappeared from such studies. As McElroy cautions, YIMBY policies are "divorced from longstanding on-the-ground organizing and analytics produced by those whose lives are most impacted by hyper-gentrification."

Foote Clark's Oakland-based counterpart, Victoria Fierce, is a former techie who was bestowed enough cash by wealthy benefactors to work "as an activist full-time." Fierce moved to the Bay Area three and a half years ago, and describes her YIMBY organizationEast Bay Forwardas an "anarchist" group that wants to see market-rate housing built now so that in 30 years, low-income people might be able to afford to move here.

San Francisco Ethics office filings make contributions to political organizations like Trauss-ally SPUR available on its website; the names of the country's largest development companies like Boston Properties, Lennar and Shorenstein consistently show up on these contribution filings. These corporations are hardly the allies of "true anarchists that work around anti-capitalist principles," says Becker. When asked about her organization's alliance with SPUR and realtors, she responds that the groups have "a shared goal ... so we work together."

YIMBYs are engaging in -- and sometimes winning -- other battles. In Southern California, AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) head Michael Weinstein led a campaign for a moratorium on luxury condos in quickly gentrifying downtown LA. He was attacked by YIMBYs whocharacterized Weinstein as a zillionairewho "didn't like another building blocking the view from his office."

Weinstein wrote in response: "We have witnessed how San Francisco, where AHF has clinics for testing and treatment, has become a rich ghetto. Low-income people by the tens of thousands have been displaced, and diversity is harder and harder to find. The same thing is unfolding in Los Angeles." Up the coast, in 2015, a reported 20 percent of HIV-positive people left San Francisco. "The reason is displacement," said Brian Basinger, head of the HIV housing nonprofit Q Foundation (formerly the AIDS Housing Alliance).

San Francisco's Latinx-heavy Mission District and the Bayview neighborhood, one of the last bastions of Black life in the city, have been targets of the free-market "build, build, build" ideology.

So have progressive nonprofits like the Sierra Club, which faced two attempted takeovers by YIMBY politicos,attemptingto control the Sierra Club's stamp of approval(important in cities with progressive-leaning voters like San Francisco or Toronto) on development projects.

Decades-long progressive organizing -- in communities actively fighting YIMBYs -- around environmental and climate justice concerns are being "co-opted and rearranged" according to McElroy, who believes demands for social and economic justice "can't be tethered to capitalist libertarian fantasies of disruption." These campaigns include fighting atoxic power plantin the Hunters Point neighborhood and building newcommunity agricultural projectsin the Excelsior district.

The "deep contradictions within YIMBY logic can't be ignored," says Becker. In 2016, billionaire Stoppelman, whose pockets had helped Trauss out with her initial startup cash -- what Trauss calls her "self-actualization funding" --famously firedan employee who publiclywrotethat she couldn't afford to live off the wages Yelp's subsidiary Eat24 was paying her. "We are expanding our Eat24 customer support team into our Phoenix office," he responded.

In the wake of other "alt-right" successes, the real estate industry is learning the art of dressing down, community activist-style. Under YIMBYnomics, more luxury condos will be built and people like Stoppelman will become richer, as the less wealthy are forcibly removed under a so-called "pro-housing" banner.

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YIMBYs: The "Alt-Right" Darlings of the Real Estate Industry - Truth-Out

Fox News has long touted the supposed firewall between its hard news reporting and its conservative opinions. But that line often becomes blurred, as is seemingly the case with White House correspondent Kevin Corke.

Although hes in a position normally reserved for the most fair-minded reporters, and on-air he presents himself as such, Corkes personal Twitter feed has often read like an outpost of retweets and supportive commentary for alt-right users and conspiracy-theorist zealots. At one point, he uncritically promoted a gossip-rag claim that Hillary Clinton had bisexual trysts.

On Monday, the morning after Emmanuel Macron handily defeated far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the French election, Corke quote-tweeted a video from notorious Alex Jones associate and conspiracy theorist InfoWars editor Paul Joseph Watson alleging voter fraud.

The unverified footage purported to show duplicate Macron ballots being sent out with none for Marine Le Pen.

Corkes commentary: whoa... but then again, Im not surprised. Are you?

As a White House reporter, youd think Corke would know better than to skip right past the whole trust but verify step of the reporting process and give a tacit endorsement to the same conspiracy theorist whose greatest hits include 9/11, the London Tube bombing, and the Boston Marathon bombing were all inside jobs.

But Corke is apparently no normal White House reporter at a national news network.

Upon being called out, Corke deleted that tweet. And dozens of other questionable ones. His choice of which ones to delete are telling.

Among his now-scrubbed items:

On May 6, Corke affirmatively wrote Indeed to a tweet from conservative actor and Twitter troll James Woods (who infamously gloated when one of his online foes died), saying: How sad for #America that without alleged hacking, we would never have known about #Clinton operatives & #DNC rigging her nomination.

On May 5, Corke quote-tweeted an article about Macrons campaign being victim to a massive, coordinated hacking before the election. Yeah, uh huh... just in case you lose? #skeptical, Corke snarked in response.

On May 2, in response to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) calling upon President Trump to resign, Corke mockingly tweeted, The new face of the Democratic party? #MaxineWaters #goodluckwiththat.

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On April 19, Corke retweeted notorious alt-right ringleader Mike Cernovich excoriating The New York Times as fake news for a side-by-side image showing lower turnout among the New England Patriots for their White House visit in 2017 than in 2015. (Interestingly, however, Corke did not delete his retweeting of Cernovich from April 13, in which the troll wrote: The narrative went from, Trump was never wire tapped, to, It was during incidental intelligence gathering.)

On March 22, Corke retweeted Watson asking, following the London stabbing attack, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, a city attacked over 5 hours ago, has not appeared once on camera to reassure the public. Where is he?

On February 10, amid ethical concerns over top White House aide Kellyanne Conway hawking Ivanka Trumps clothing items on national television, Corke tweeted this now-deleted non-sequitur: People worked up by @KellyannePolls comments about @IvankaTrump looked the other way about @HillaryClinton s email server #justsayin.

Several days after President Trumps inauguration, on January 23, Corke tweeted a flow chart asking, Is Donald Trump Your President? with all options for U.S. citizens leading to the answer Yes, Donald Trump is your president. Corkes caption: In case it wasnt clear

On January 17, Corke retweeted an InfoWars-branded image from Alex Jones official account showing a skeleton seated in a chair, with the caption: STILL WAITING FOR EVERYONE TO MOVE TO CANADA.

On January 14, a week before inauguration, Corke tweeted an image of the U.S. electoral map showing vast swaths of red (for Trump) with smatterings of blue (for Clinton). Just a little reminder, he wrote, this is the reality of the situation. Deal with it. Vote next time and or stop whining.

Fox News did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did Corke, who could not be reached because he blocked this writer on social media. RTs and Likes mean nothing, his Twitter bio declares, however.

And while Corke seemingly scoured his recent timeline to remove questionable content, he missed a handful of other times hes uncritically retweeted the fringe musings of Jones, Cernovich, and Watson.

On April 10, Corke retweeted Cernovich posting photographs of walls allegedly protecting wealthy Mexican homes, with the caption, Mexican elites have walls, but Americans can't. In late 2015, Corke boosted at least two separate Alex Jones articlesone claiming the PC crowd wants to ban ham sandwiches (the PC crowd, in this case, was a British religious group) and the other claiming Sweden had banned the use of the word immigrants (they didntit was a TV networks guideline for employees).

Corkes uncritical retweeting of fact-free, alt-right trolling seems to have frequently caused a problem with some of his followers. Oy, reading is fundamental. I just told you that I stand by my tweets... From me. Tweets from me. My opinions... Clear now? he tweeted at one user in November who perceived his feed to be too pro-Trump.

And in October 2016, Corke retweeted a proudly alt-right user promoting a National Enquirer story claiming Hillary Fixer Breaks Ranks: I Arranged Sex Trysts For Her With Men & WOMEN. Corke included no commentary or explanation for his decision, as White House correspondent, to retweet a clearly salacious story boosted by a near-anonymous alt-right troll.

But when called out for so un-skeptically promoting such content, Corke replied to one irate user: just making sure you know what's out there.

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Fox News White House Reporter Mass-Deletes Tweets, Including Alt-Right Conspiracy Theories - Daily Beast