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Kyle Chapman, known to his fans on the alt-right as Based Stickman for beating aleftistprotester with a wooden stick at an early March pro-Trump protest in Berkeley, California, wants people to think hes tough. In late April Chapman announcedon Facebook hiscreation of a new group of right-wing street fighters, called theFraternal Order of Alt-Knights (or FOAK), dedicated to defense and confrontation in the streets. You could almost hear thechest-thumping right through the computer screen.

This organization is for those that possess the Warrior Spirit, Chapman wrote. The weak or timid need not apply.

A few days after that, the Proud Boys network, a group that Vice co-founder and former Fox News contributor Gavin McInnes calls a pro-West fraternal organization, posted a notice about the formationof the alt-knights orderand a call for strong minded men who are comfortable in fisticuffs to join. I reached out toChapman in hopes of seeing his warrior spiritfor myself. Alas, I ended up disappointed.

Initially, Chapman seemed interested in talking and gave me his phone number. But when I called him, he refused to speak to me, insisting that I email my questions instead. Since then nearly a week has gone by, and Chapman has not answered my emailed questions or any of my follow-up nudges on Facebook. (He has read them, though.)The warrior spirit is apparently not enough to help him tough out a conversation with a journalist about why he believes the world needs the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights.

The public claim is that this organization is needed for self-defense.

The Proud Boys are already known to escort woman and targeted speakers to events for protection against violent anti-speech protesters, a blogger named PawL BaZile wrote on the Proud Boys website. FOAK will now take the next logical step in organizing the Proud Boy watchdogs into a force to protect and serve when the police are told to stand down.

Investigative journalist and Southern Poverty Law Center contributor David Neiwert, who has won a National Press Club award for his investigations ofhate groups, is skeptical about these claims.

These guys are there looking for a fight, Neiwert said in a phone conversation. These guys are clearly quasi-fascist, classic protofascists, and theyre on the track to full-fledged fascism. All we need to do is look at history and see how it happened.

Neiwert said he consultshistorian Robert Paxtons theory, published in 1998 in the Journal of Modern History, that delineates the five stages of fascism. Right now, Neiwert argued, far-right elements are seekingto consolidate power and that requires recruiting mainstream conservatives totheir side. By going out into the street and picking fights with leftists, under the guise of free speech and self-defense, groupslike the Proud Boys and the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights can play themartyr and give ordinary conservatives an excuse to rally around them.

My Salon colleague Matthew Sheffield offered a similar analysis last week in a Salon article, arguingthat those on the alt-rightare now angling for more mainstream support, and the quickest way to do that is by portraying themselves as frontline defense against a supposedly violent leftist uprising.As evidence, Sheffield pointed out that propaganda portraying these far-right racist and neo-Nazi groups as free-speech martyrs has quickly migrated to more mainstream conservative sites that also cater to alt-right audiences.

The claim of Chapman and his fellows to be gentle lambs merely provoked by violent leftistsis hard to swallow on its surface, because they just so happen to hold their rallies in places they know have a large presence of antifa activists. Antifa is the label adopted by advocates fora subculture promoting a set of tactics and practices that have developed since the early 20th century (and the rise of fascism in Italy) as a confrontational response to fascist groups, rooted in militant left-wing and anarchist politics,according to Natasha Lennard of The Nation.

But thats not the only reasonits hard to buy the claim that Chapmans hard-right acolytes aregoing into this fight reluctantly.

We dont fear the fight. We are the fight, BaZile crowed in his post announcing the formation of the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights..

Especiallyilluminating was the response that Chapman received when he put out a call on Facebook, under his own profile and the Based Stickman fan page, for a symbol/crest to represent the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights. The self-seriousness of those who responded was matched only by the near-pornographic enthusiasm forviolence.

Heres a sampling of some of the popular submissions:

The above graphic is apparently a reference to former Chilean dictators purported habit of disappearing leftists by throwing them out of helicopters.

Soon there will be a court test for the theory that these far-right forces are deliberately starting fights so they can play the victim afterward.

Last week prosecutors in Seattle filed charges against the married couple Elizabeth and Marc Hokoanainconnection withthe shooting of a man who attended an Inauguration Day protestof a speech by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of Washington.

The Hokoanas have tried to depict the shooting as an act of self-defense, but a prosecutor argued that the couple created a situation designed to allow Elizabeth Hokoana to shoot the victim in the middle of an extremely crowded event under the guise of defending herself or her husband.

Prosecutors have gathered evidence of premeditation, including Marc Hokoanas statementthat he wanted to crack skulls and coaching his wife, who was carrying the gun, by saying, They have to start this. They have to start it, during the fight.

Neiwert, who was at the event and captured video of the events preceding the shooting, told me on the phone that the victim,Joshua Dukes, had beentrying to break up fights. The Seattle prosecutors agree, arguing that Dukes was shot when he confronted Marc Hokoana for pepper-spraying the crowd.

But Neiwert doesnt want to let leftist protesters off the hook entirely, however.

For the most part, the antifa people are peaceful, Neiwert said, but he also reportedhaving seen antifa protesters throwing rocks and punches. He wasbangedaround a few times at the Seattle protests by antifa radicals trying to knock the camera out of his hands.

Right now the left is being outsmarted by these guys, Neiwert said. Antifa protesters are playing into the hands of the protofascists by giving them the fight they want, he argued.

Even though the Southern Poverty Law Center officially discourages efforts to confront right-wing protesters, Neiwert thinks theres value infirm opposition, [being] out there saying no, you dont speak for us; you dont speak for America.

But you cant do it, Neiwert said, by fighting them physically, adding, All you do is prove their point or seemingly prove their point. Certainly you give the media the opportunity to say, See, both sides are equally bad.

Instead, Neiwert argued that the left should confront protofascists with mockery.He sent me a post he wrote in February forhis personal blogrecountingwhat transpired ata 2005 neo-Nazi rally in Olympia, Washington,when progressive protesters showed up in clown costumes and performed dances to mock goose-stepping.This whimsical display reduced the neo-Nazis to sputtering but impotent rage, he wrote.

In 1993, Molly Ivins reported on a similarcounterdemonstration in Austin, Texas, where 5,000 anti-racist protesters met a Ku Klux Klan rally andmoonedg Klansmen.

Citizens dropped trou both singly and in groups, occasionally producing a splendid wave effect, Ivins said. It was a swell do.

Considering the utter self-seriousness of the protofascists, this could well be an effective response. Its certainly better than giving them a fight, which allows the far-right forces toportray themselves as martyrs and victims and mighteven aid them in rallying more mainstream conservatives to their side.

Meet their macho bravado with clown noses and fart noises. Its tough to play brave soldiers facing down violent leftistsin the face of that.

See more here:
Alt-right hopes to organize street-fighting goon squad: Is it more than macho posturing? - Salon

TAI staff writer Jason Willick is inNew York magazines newserieson theright-wingfringe in American politics thatlatched itself on to Donald Trumps presidential candidacy. With Park MacDougald of Foreign Affairs, he profilesSteve Sailer, the reclusive California-based blogger whohas been run out of mainstream discourse for his racial demagoguery, but who has also quietly built up a large but overlookedinfluence onthe American right, prefiguring many of the ideas that Trumpism would bring to the fore.

After Mitt Romneys 2012 loss to Barack Obama, the Republican establishment undertook a rigorous postmortem and, looking at demographic trends in the United States, determined that appealing to Hispanics was now a nuclear-level priority. And yet their successful candidate in the next election won by doing precisely the opposite. The Trump strategy looked an awful lot like the Sailer Strategy: the divisive but influential idea that the GOP could run up the electoral score by winning over working-class whites on issues like immigration, first proposed by the conservative writer Steve Sailer in 2000, and summarily rejected by establishment Republicans at the time. Now, 17 years and four presidential cycles later, Sailer, once made a pariah by mainstream conservatives, has quietly become one of the most influential thinkers on the American right. []

Sailers body of work points to a politics very much like the Trumpism of the campaign trail nationalistic, contemptuous of limitations on acceptable discourse, and laden with occasionally sinister racial undertones without directly challenging the principle of equality under the law. Sailer sees himself as having presented an intellectual justification for commonsense politics, which Donald Trump, by being ignorant of the (as Sailer put it in an email to us) Davos Man conventional wisdom, arrived at out of instinct.

As Andrew Sullivan arguesin hisleadpiece for the series,The Reactionary Temptation, far-right politicsis a major force in our political moment, and its better for all of usto understand its often-frightening appeal than to dismiss it out of hand or ritualistically bury it in epithets. So read the whole thing.

The rest is here:
An Overlooked Maven of the Alt-Right - The American Interest

Speaking out against the far right and threats to free speech at UC Berkeley

AN ONGOING controversy at the University of California-Berkeley over whether right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter would speak on campus following the cancellation of her event by the university administration came to a head on April 27 when "alt-right" groups targeted Berkeley for the third time in recent months and confronted left-wing, anti-fascist protesters while claiming to defend free speech.

Coulter, who was originally invited to speak on April 27, but whose speech was cancelled and then rescheduled due to security concerns, waffled about whether she would appear on campus anyway. Her supporters rallied, using the cancellation to their advantage to claim that the right's free speech rights were under attack.

Meanwhile, the media speculated that there would be another round of violent clashes.

Anticipating this, Berkeley city officials and UC Berkeley administrators mobilized hundreds of officers from every police department in the area, both on and off campus, which had a chilling effect on protest. There were at least five arrests on Thursday, including one incident of racial profiling in which police detained a Latino member of the Underground Scholars Initiative, a group of formerly incarcerated students at UC Berkeley.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TWO SEPARATE rallies were planned for Thursday, regardless of whether Coulter showed up or not.

Alt-right and anti-fascist protesters faced off at Martin Luther King Civic Center Park in downtown Berkeley. Dozens of right-wingers turned out, clearly emboldened by their rampage in April, when they mobilized at least several hundred from up and down the West Coast, ready to inflict violence on the outnumbered counterdemonstrators.

This time, the police operation kept the two sides apart, and the right didn't get to attack those who stood and chanted against them in the park.

There was another gathering on Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus, where the International Socialist Organization (ISO) announced its "Alt Right Delete" initiative in opposition to the right-wingers and in defense of free speech.

Alt Right Delete is an effort to build a larger mobilization capable of confronting the racists and reactionary in Berkeley. It also aims to reclaim the ideals of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s from the right-wing's distortions and reinvigorate its radical, socialist and anti-racist roots.

As Mukund Rathi, a law student at UC Berkeley and member of the ISO, explained at the demonstration:

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement arose out of the struggles of civil rights activists and socialists against segregation and anti-Black racism in California. These activists, many of them students, were engaging in militant demonstrations and sit-ins to win equal rights for Black people...

It is absurd for the far-right provocateurs, white supremacists and the College Republicans to claim this legacy...

The greatest threat to free speech, on college campuses and elsewhere, comes from these right-wing forces. They will use violence against those who wish to speak and assemble freely. And this should not surprise us--we can't possibly believe that white supremacists and neo Nazis have anything but violent hostility towards their opponents.

Due to the massive police presence and the threat of far-right violence, many people were discouraged from turning out to the rally on campus. Among the 30 to 40 who did, some held signs reading "Fascist-Free Campus" and "Immigrants Are Welcome Here," and chants rang out in defense of immigrant students, refugees and workers.

Coulter's racist and xenophobic views are abhorrent, but it does not benefit the left if the university denies her a venue, giving her and the bigots who celebrate her a chance to play the victim.

We believe it is important to distinguish between the right of students to protest Coulter's speech and the university canceling a forum where she was to appear. A defense of free speech from the left needs to oppose the state and other authorities exercising their power to censor speakers, because this will inevitably be used against left-wing speakers and activists. Our power lies in mobilizing the largest number of people possible to confront the right.

UC Berkeley, along with many other universities, has a record of shutting down speakers in solidarity with Palestine, repressing student workers and silencing sexual assault survivors. Protecting the right of the oppressed to fight back against these attacks means defending free speech rights.

Effective opposition to Coulter and alt-right speakers can take shape without relying on the university officials to intervene, which will ultimately jeopardize the left. The goal of Alt Right Delete is to build a movement that protests right-wingers like Coulter effectively, through a mass mobilization of students and members of the Berkeley community, without curtailing our right to speak freely.

Read more here:
Organizing for an alt-right delete at Berkeley - Socialist Worker Online

Right-wing US and UK media and social media users have tried to start an online war to stop Emmanuel Macron being elected, but with little success.

The Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington, and Buzzfeed, a US online publication, highlighted the new campaign in the run-up to the second round of the French presidential vote on Sunday (7 May).

With Russia already in the spotlight for anti-Macron fake news and cyber attacks, the Atlantic Council said the English-language alt-right was also trying to sway EU politics.

It described the alt-right movement as being marked by nationalist, anti-Islam, and anti-globalisation sentiment and said its supporters had in the past focused on national issues, such as the US election or the Brexit referendum.

These [anti-Macron] efforts appear to mark a further stage in the evolution of the alt-right from a collection of largely national actors to a would-be international one, it said.

It said the efforts began with a post on 4chan.org, an online message board, on 25 April, two days after Macron beat Marine Le Pen, a far-right candidate, in the first round of the election.

The 4chan.org post called for a total meme war against Macron.

We must bombard French social media with pro-Le Pen propaganda, to remind the French who is on their side, it said.

A meme is a catchy image or idea designed to go viral on the internet.

The post said one anti-Macron meme should be designed to appeal to centre-right French voters by suggesting he was weak on immigration and security. It said a second meme should appeal to the left by showing him as a banker capitalist pig.

The post linked to a UK far-right YouTube channel, The Thinkery, which gave meme-making tips.

The same day, a US alt-right publication, Liberty Blitzkrieg, ran a story that called Macron a banker puppet and that was replicated by seven other alt-right media.

The following day, on 26 April, alt-right accounts linked to Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands called for the creation of a Macron Antoinette meme on the reddit.com online message board.

The idea was to both emasculate Macron and to make him look elitist by reference to the old French aristocracy.

The Thinkerys video had been viewed 144,000 times by Monday (29 April), but the #MacronAntoinette hash tag had attracted just a handful of posts.

These memes are unlikely to have a significant impact on the French election, the Atlantic Council said.

Buzzfeed, in an article last week, said alt-right users of 4chan.org also tried to spread the unsubstantiated accusation that Macron was having an affair with his step-daughter, Tiphaine Auziere, but that it failed to catch on.

The alt-right memes echoed anti-Macron fake news in Russian state media in recent months.

Russian media claimed he was an agent of US bankers, that he was funded by Saudi Arabia, and that he had a gay love affair in stories spread online by Russian trolls and bots.

Some social media users who spread the 4chan.org anti-Macron memes had in the past also reposted Kremlin content.

East Stratcom, a counter-propaganda unit in the EU foreign service, has started to include stories by Breitbart, the leading US alt-right publication, in its review of Russian disinformation.

A European diplomat, who asked not to be named, also told EUobserver that US sleuths, the FBI, were investigating potential links between Breitbart and the Kremlin.

Stratcom has included Breitbart stories due to their similarity to Kremlin anti-migrant material, but did not claim they worked together.

The European diplomat said right-wing online media often echoed Russian propaganda because they had the same ideology rather than due to shady ties.

Breitbarts London office could not be reached for comment.

See the article here:
US alt-right joins Russia in anti-Macron attack - EUobserver

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