Archive for the ‘Alt-right’ Category

Fake News Purveyors Promote Alt-Right Claims That Susan Rice And James Comey Imperiled By Supposed FBI … – Media Matters for America


Media Matters for America
Fake News Purveyors Promote Alt-Right Claims That Susan Rice And James Comey Imperiled By Supposed FBI ...
Media Matters for America
Fake news purveyors are promoting dubious claims from alt-right figures Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec that former FBI Director James Comey dropped an FBI investigation into former national security advisor Susan Rice because it would have ...

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Fake News Purveyors Promote Alt-Right Claims That Susan Rice And James Comey Imperiled By Supposed FBI ... - Media Matters for America

With development activists compared to the ‘alt-right,’ the housing … – San Francisco Examiner


San Francisco Examiner
With development activists compared to the 'alt-right,' the housing ...
San Francisco Examiner
The debate over housing, or lack thereof, in San Francisco is complicated enough already without having to compare one side of the debate to Nazis. (Jessica ...

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With development activists compared to the 'alt-right,' the housing ... - San Francisco Examiner

Colombia’s Christian Alt-Right – Jacobin – Jacobin magazine

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

Tempers flare at ‘Free Speech Rally’ as alt-right, socialist groups … – Boston Herald

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

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

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