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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.

Visit link:
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.

View original post here:
Fox News White House Reporter Mass-Deletes Tweets, Including Alt-Right Conspiracy Theories - Daily Beast

At least nine fliers promoting groups associated with the so-called alt-right were posted around campus on Tuesday. | Greg Fails/The Cougar

Several fliers promoting so-called alt-right groups were found Tuesday morning posted on bulletin boards and dropped in newsstands across the University of Houston campus.

Six of the nine fliers, which contain an image of a protester wearing a gas mask and carrying a shield and American flag instructing readers to report Antifa Activity to your Local Proud Boys or Alt-Knights #Maga, were found by members of The Cougar at the courtyard within the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication.

The other three fliers were found taped to the Cougar Postings board between Agnes Arnold Hall and the Science and Research 1 building and dropped in a newsstand in Philip Guthrie Hoffman Hall near Einstein Bros. Another was on a bulletin board at the Blaffer Art Museum taped to another flier which promoted an anti-fascism website.

According to the groups Facebook page, the Proud Boys valueminimal government, maximum freedom, anti-political correctness, anti-racial guilt, pro-gun rights, anti-Drug War, closed borders, anti-masturbation, venerating entrepreneurs, venerating housewives, and reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism during an age of globalism and multiculturalism.

The Proud Boys group which was founded by Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes in 2016 accompanied the recently formed Alt Knights during April protests at the University of California, Berkeley where the two organizations clashed with members of Antifa, aworldwide anti-fascist organization.

Whats been going on, until recently, is the communist group Antifa has been showing up in face masks to attack people on the right, said Alt Knights founder Kyle Chapman, 41, in an interview with The Cougar. Chapman goes by the moniker Based Stickman online, and he said the individual pictured on the fliers spread throughout campus is supposed to be him.

The organization, which Chapman called a grassroots movement led by people inspired by the battles at Berkeley, has no official structure. Its members purpose is to attend free speech events to protect protesters on the right from physical assault, he said.

Chapman said he didnt know who posted the fliers at UH, but he said active members of his group live in Houston.

The alt-right phenomenon is one that has been very difficult and odd for the conservative movement on campuses, said history senior Matt Wiltshire, former president of the College Republicans at UH. It takes certain aspects of the right and left and combines them into something that I dont think is a political philosophy.

Wiltshire said the College Republicans and Young Americans for Liberty were unaware of the fliers and both groups should not be associated with the alt-right. He said he believes the fliers may be connected to what he called a nasty feud between the YAL and the UH chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.

The posting of fliers doesnt sound like tactics used by the alt-right. It sounds like that of the left like, say, the Students for a Democratic Society, Wiltshire said.

History senior and President of the YAL chapter Michael Anderson said he agrees with Wiltshires assertion that the fliers were planted by a left-wing group. He acknowledged the existence of a feud between the organization and Students for a Democratic Society, calling it kind of petty and kind of funny.

A spokesperson for the Students for a Democratic Society at UH denied the allegations. The group advocated for students to tear down similar fliers on sight.

They are full of s***, and we are confident that many students are well aware that white supremacism is on the rise and very real in Texas and across the United States, the group said in a message to The Cougar from its Facebook page.

These flyers were put up by groups organizing explicitly around the banner of white nationalism in an ongoing effort to intimidate and target oppressed communities, anti-racist organizers, and local progressive forces.

[emailprotected]

Tags: alt-right, anti-fascism

Does the construction along Spur 5, which will eventually impact the U.S. 59 north and south on-ramps from I-45, affect your commute to class?

Total Voters: 106

Link:
Fliers promoting alt-right groups found on campus - The Daily Cougar

Image: Screengrab via Altrightreport

Yesterday, protesters and counter-protesters gathered around Lee Circle in New Orleans, the site of one of the states many monuments to Confederate figures which are now scheduled (over 150 years after the Civil War ended) to be torn down. Since the election of Donald Trump, weve seen many images like the one above from demonstrations that have turned violent. In this case, however, the man on the ground wasnt hit by antifa or the police: Americas far right are beginning to turn on their own.

Dressed in metal armor and bearing an American flag, an unidentified man clashed with Stars and Bars-waving neo-Confederates guarding the monument of General Lee. In a Periscope video, the man claims to have traveled from Los Angeles to take part in the protest, and alludes to his involvement as a Trump supporter in the bloody and vicious streetfights that broke out in Berkley. You guys dont understand youre working against the movement, he tells a group of people who wanted to see the statue stay, referencing the obvious racial implications.

Removing the statues requires specialized equipment, and the ugly spirit of Dixie refuses to die quietly. As reported by the Times-Picayune, every heavy crane company in southern Louisiana has received threats in one form or another.

Ive never seen anyone cause in-fighting like this, but this is also the first time people that are what I call MAGA supporters have encountered real white nationalists, Alt Right Report, a Twitter user who was at the event, told Gizmodo in a direct message. You could tell a lot of the people there supporting the statue did not want to identify with the nationalist groups.

While some in the alt-right suspected the armored manwho theyve since dubbed the cuck knight, a demeaning spin on the alt-knight Kyle Chapmanto be a leftist plant, others later noted that the man stayed through the remainder of the event. Another user who filmed the incident was quick to point out that Twitter users within the moderate spheres of the alt-right werent helping to signal-boost the infighting. Maybe they didnt want to dox an ally. Maybe they just werent comfortable siding with Confederate flag-waving white nationalists.

Animosity has long existed between the various factions of the far right. 4chans /pol/ views Redditr r/the_donald as normies; 8chans /pol/ sees 4/pol/ as soft for refusing to seriously acknowledge the Jewish question and other tinfoil hat theories; The Right Stuff, Daily Stormer, and other more overt hategroups disregard basically any forum that doesnt devote itself to humping the corpse of Adolf Hitler. Is InfoWars controlled opposition? Whos really /ourguy/? For a while it didnt matter, as these groups were united in electing Trump as the best hope for achieving their own goals. Now that hes in power and revealing himself to be the spectacular failure half the country knew he would be, those unaddressed questions are spilling out into physical conflicts.

And for some, physical conflict is their entire reason for participation. One of the men pushing against the ersatz knight in the video holds a sign that reads Im just here for violence.

Historically, even alliances between explicitly white power groups do not last. A coalition of MAGA rubes, neo-Nazis, trolls, ethno-nationalists, ex-GamerGaters and other reactionaries will be all the more volatile. Friction between ideals is tearing them apart, or members are forced to clear an increasingly high bar to prove their loyalty. Its a familiar form of scene policing called a purity spiral, and its what attentive people have already seen happening on various imageboards and forums for the past few weeks. Make no mistake, this may be the first fight of this kind within the far right, but it will be far from the last.

Read this article:
So Begins the Alt-Right Purity Spiral - Gizmodo

Who, or what, is Kek?

A typical 'Kek' meme combining Donald Trump and Pepe the Frog.

You may have seen the name bandied about on social media, especially in political circles where alt-right activists and avid Donald Trump supporters lurk. Usually it is brandished as a kind of epithet, seemingly to ward off the effects of liberal arguments, and it often is conveyed in memes that use the image of the alt-right mascot, Pepe the Frog: Kek!

Kek, in the alt-rights telling, is the deity of the semi-ironic religion the white nationalist movement has created for itself online partly for amusement, as a way to troll liberals and self-righteous conservatives both, and to make a kind of political point. He is a god of chaos and darkness, with the head of a frog, the source of their memetic magic, to whom the alt-right and Donald Trump owe their success, according to their own explanations.

In many ways, Kek is the apotheosis of the bizarre alternative reality of the alt-right: at once absurdly juvenile, transgressive, and racist, as well as reflecting a deeper, pseudo-intellectual purpose that lends it an appeal to young ideologues who fancy themselves deep thinkers. It dwells in that murky area they often occupy, between satire, irony, mockery, and serious ideology; Kek can be both a big joke to pull on liberals and a reflection of the alt-rights own self-image as serious agents of chaos in modern society.

A 'Kekistan' banner was part of the scene at the alt-right "free speech" rally April 15 in Berkeley, CA.

Most of all, Kek has become a kind of tribal marker of the alt-right: Its meaning obscure and unavailable to ordinary people normies, in their lingo referencing Kek is most often just a way of signaling to fellow conversants online that the writer embraces the principles of chaos and destruction that are central to alt-right thinking, as it were.

The name, usage, and ultimately the ideas around it originated in gaming culture, particularly on chat boards devoted to the World of Warcraft online computer games, according to Know Your Meme. In those games, participants can chat only with members of their own faction in the war (either Alliance or Horde fighters), while opposing players chats are rendered in a cryptic form based on Korean; thus, the common chat phrase LOL (laugh out loud) was read by opposing players as KEK. The phrase caught on as a variation on LOL in game chat rooms, as well as at open forums dedicated to gaming, animation, and popular culture, such as 4chan and Reddit also dens of the alt-right, where the Pepe the Frog meme also has its origins, and similarly hijacked as a symbol of white nationalism.

At some point, someone at 4chan happened to seize on a coincidence: There was, in fact, an Egyptian god named Kek. An androgynous god who could take either male or female form, Kek originally was depicted in female form as possessing the head of a frog or a cat and a serpent when male; but during the Greco-Roman period, the male form was depicted as a frog-headed man.

More importantly, Kek was portrayed as a bringer of chaos and darkness, which happened to fit perfectly with the alt-rights self-image as being primarily devoted to destroying the existing world order.

In the fertile imaginations at play on 4chans image boards and other alt-right gathering spaces, this coincidence took on a life of its own, leading to wide-ranging speculation that Pepe who, by then, had not only become closely associated with the alt-right, but also with the candidacy of Donald Trump was actually the living embodiment of Kek. And so the Cult of Kek was born.

Constructed to reflect alt-right politics, the online acolytes of the religion in short order constructed a whole panoply of artifacts of the satirical church, including a detailed theology, discussions about creating meme magick, books and audio tapes, even a common prayer:

Our Kek who art in memetics

Hallowed by thy memes

Thy Trumpdom come

Thy will be done

In real life as it is on /pol/

Give us this day our daily dubs

And forgive us of our baiting

As we forgive those who bait against us

And lead us not into cuckoldry

But deliver us from shills

For thine is the memetic kingdom, and the shitposting, and the winning, for ever and ever.

Praise KEK

Kek adherents created a whole cultural mythology around the idea, describing an ancient kingdom called Kekistan that was eventually overwhelmed by Normistan and Cuckistan. They created not only a logo representing Kek four Ks surrounding an E but promptly deployed it in a green-and-black banner, which they call the national flag of Kekistan.

The banners design, in fact, perfectly mimics a German Nazi war flag, with the Kek logo replacing the swastika and the green replacing the infamous German red stripes. Alt-righters are particularly fond of the way the banner trolls liberals who recognize its origins.

In recent weeks, alt-right marchers at public events planned to create violent scenes with leftist antifacist counterprotesters have appeared carrying Kekistan banners. Others have worn patches adorned with the Kek logo.

Video compiled from alt-right sources.

Besides its entertainment value, the religion is mainly useful to the alt-right as a trolling device for making fun of liberals and political correctness. A recent alt-right rally in support of adviser Stephen Bannon in front of the White House, posted on YouTube by alt-right maven Cassandra Fairbanks, featured a Kekistan banner and a man announcing to the crowd a Free Kekistan campaign.

One of the leaders of the group offered a satirical speech: The Kekistani people are here, they stand with the oppressed minorities, the oppressed people of Kekistan. They will be heard, they will be set free. Reparations for Kekistan now! Reparations for Kekistan right now!

We have lived under normie oppression for too long! chimed in a cohort.

The oppression will end! declared the speaker.

The main point of the whole exercise is to mock political correctness, an alt-right shibboleth, and deeply reflective of the ironic, often deadpan style of online trolling in general, and alt-right troll storms especially. Certainly, if you any normies were to make the mistake of taking their religion seriously and suggesting that their deity was something they actually worshipped, they would receive the usual mocking treatment reserved for anyone foolish enough to take their words at face value.

Yet at the same time, lurking behind all the clownery is a serious idea that alt-righters actually seem to take seriously: Namely, that by spreading their often-cryptic memes far and wide on social media and every other corner of the Internet, they are infecting the popular discourse with their ideas. For the alt-right, those core ideas all revolve around white males, the patriarchy, nationalism, and race, especially the underlying belief that white males and masculinity are under siege from feminists, from liberals, from racial, ethnic, and sexual/gender minorities.

In such alt-right haunts as Andrew Anglins neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, references to the Kek religion have become a commonplace, and Kek as the god of chaos has been credited at the site, besides electing Trump, with killing over 30 people in a fire at an Oakland artists collective. A very early Stormer disquisition on Kek by Atlantic Centurion, published in August 2015, explores the many dimensions of the Kek phenomenon in extensive theological detail, connecting their belief system to Buddhism and other religions.

It is the Kek the Bodhisattva who can teach our people these truths, if we are willing to listen and to commit ourselves to the generation of meme magick through karmic morality and through the mantra of memes. By refusing to cuck and by rejecting the foul mindsets of our invaders and terrorizers, we will move the nation away from its suffering under the pains of hostile occupation, and closer and closer to its final rebirth. If instead, our people cuck and adopt the foul mindsets, they will generate not Aryan karma but further mosaic samsara.

The trve power of skillful memes is to meme the karmic nation into reality, the process of meme magick. By spreading and repeating the meme mantra, it is possible to generate the karma needed for the rebirth of the nation.

Anglin himself makes frequent references to Kek, making clear that he too subscribes to the underlying meme-spreading strategy that the religion represents. Describing a black artists piece showing a crucified frog which appeared to Anglin to be a kind of blasphemy of the Kek deity he declared that theres some cosmic-tier stuff going on out there. Another post, published in March, was headlined: Meme Magic: White House Boy Summoned Spirit of Kek to Protect His Prophet Donald Trump.

Anglin devoted the post to explaining a teenagers use of an alt-right hand signal while meeting Trump, concluding that the only possibility here is that this is an example of Carl Jungs synchronicity seemingly acausal factors culminating to create an event based on its meaning. But it is not really acausal it merely appears that way to the non-believer. It is our spiritual energies, channeled through the internet, that caused this event to manifest, he wrote. It is meme magic.

Whether they really believe any of this or not, the thrust of the entire enterprise is to mock everything politically correct so loudly and obtusely and divertingly that legitimate issues about the vicious core of white male nationalism they embrace never need to be confronted directly. The alt-rights meme war is ultimately another name for far-right propaganda, polished and rewired for 21st-century consumers. The ironic pose that Kek represents, and accompanying claims that the racism they promote is just innocently meant to provoke, in the end are just a faade fronting a very old and very ugly enterprise: hatemongering of the xenophobic and misogynistic kind.

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What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right 'Deity' Behind Their 'Meme Magic' - Southern Poverty Law Center