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Imagine for a moment the outrage that would (rightfully) erupt if a mainstream publication wrote an indictment of an entire sect of Islam, while getting basic facts like the name of the sect wrong, and hit publish the night before Ramadan began. Or the outrage that would (rightfully) erupt if Breitbart or an alt-right site published the same about Jews. The latter did happen over the weekend, only it wasnt Breitbart writing a diatribe against a secret web of shadowy Jews, but instead, Politico Magazine.

This is, unfortunately, becoming a bit of a tradition at the publication. On the eve of another major Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah, Politico published a piece accusing politically conservative Jews of remaining silent on Donald Trumps ascension. Because of the rules regarding work and technology on major Jewish holidays, many Jewish writers and publications were unable to respond to the smear in a timely manner, although Tablet Magazines Yair Rosenberg took the time to do so, pointing out for both the writer and editor of the publication just how Jew-y the anti-Trump camp of the conservative movement was and is.

Now Politico is accusing Jews of the opposite: working in a secretive, highly-funded conspiracy to put Trump and Russias Vladimir Putin in power, and keep them there. Or something. Truthfully, I didnt really understand the crux of the piece, despite reading it several times.

Politico took great pains to tie the Chabad movement to Putin, and in so doing, omits a few fairly crucial points that could have been fleshed out by actually speaking with a representative of the movement (this guy might have been a good person to start with). While there are outposts of the movement in Russia, there also exist outposts everywhere else in the world. Their emissaries, called schulchim, are technically titled messengers because they talk to anyone, anywhere, in an attempt to spread Judaism to Jews in far-flung corners of the Earth.

Chabads history in the former USSR is filled with persecution, arrest, and exile. To survive anywhere, but especially in a land as hostile to Jews as Russia is, its no wonder the group has worked hard to remain in the governments good graces.

Blind to the blatant anti-Semitic tropes it trotted out, Politico then paints the movement as a large, rich, tightly woven organization, a depiction straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In reality, individual Chabad houses, which start with seed money from headquarters, are soon expected to be self-sufficient through fundraising and operate as franchises, not as branches of the Brooklyn headquarters. (Disclosure: This is why I am a nominal monthly donor to the Chabad of Cambodia, which provides essential services to Jewish residents and visitors to the country, from free holiday and Sabbath meals to burials to weddings.)

Like many other Modern Orthodox Jews, the Kushner family are involved in the movement because of its inclusive nature and contagious positivity regarding doing mitzvahs (good deeds) and serving God in a Jewish context. The connections it forms between Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared and the movement are basically that they, like most other religious Jews, have donated to those involved in the movement and have friends within it.

The Kushners now attend the Chabad synagogue in their new home of Washington DC. This could be seen as part of a giant conspiracy, or it could be that they reject the other two other Orthodox options downtown: Kesher Israel, which was between rabbis at the time of the Kushners move and still recovering from a major scandal; and Ohev Shalom, whose rabbi publicly denounced Ivankas father both by screaming at him from the crowd at AIPAC in 2016 and after in the pages of the Washington Post, calling the current president wicked. With those pieces of information, the Kushners decision to attend the local Chabad synagogue upon moving to Washington becomes a bit less salacious.

To their credit, even on the eve of what is the biggest and most labor-intensive holiday on the Jewish calendar, the social media team at Chabads headquarters in Brooklyn are taking the hit job in stride, tweeting missives like:

Several hours after the piece was published, the attached text header and photo were quietly edited to seem just a tad less anti-Semitic, replacing a photo of Jews in the shadows with that of Putin. Considering the hypersensitivity of the media to anti-Semitism in the age of Trump, its remarkable just how much they are willing to dabble in it themselves to form a connection, no matter how tenuous, between Trump and Putin. Simple fact-checking like the name of the movement itself was omitted, with tweets and the first published drafts of the piece referring to the group as The Chabad (which would be as ridiculous as saying The Catholic or The Protestant).

Weve spent the better part of the last year being warned about the dangers of the rise of the alt-right. Even I doubted the power the alt-right apparently wields, which apparently includes the ability to convince a mainstream American publication to publish 4,000 words of anti-Semitic garbage on the eve of a major Jewish holiday. Can they silence the rest of the mainstream media, which reports breathlessly on every headline related to Jews at Breitbart?

With most American Jews signing offline for the next few days in celebration of our freedom from bondage in Egypt, its up to the non-Jews working in media to pick up the slack on renouncing this article for what it is. (Before you ask, Politico: Yes, The Jews let a few of The Catholic and The Secular work in media too.)

Bethany Mandel is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist and a freelance writer on politics and culture.

Continued here:
Who Needs Alt-Right Theories About Jews When You Have Politico? - The Federalist

In a passionate blog post, alt-right darling Richard Spencer detailed his plan to implement a population congress to begin the process of improving the American gene pool.

This body to direct and control the population through Birth rates and immigration, and direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with the taste, fitness and interest of the individuals.

The main objects of the Population Congress would be:

(a) to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of our population.

(b) to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen,decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11.

(c) keep the doors of Immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feeble-minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphiletic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred from entrance by the Immigration Laws of 1924.

(d) apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization, and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

Oh, wait a second, my mistake. That was actually from a speech given by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger to the New History Society in 1932.

However, Spencer did say very similar things recently in a video he uploaded to Twitter. (For more on the video, read Jonathan Van Marens fantastic write-up at The Bridgehead.)

We need to recognize this potential for both good and evil or good and bad within contraception itself, that this is something that can be a great boon for our people, for our race, or it can be a great detriment. Contraception has been a great detriment because precisely the people who shouldnt be using it are using it. We want smart people to have more children. I sometimes want smart people to be a little more reckless. Dont plan. Dont use a condom. What Im saying basically is the abortion issue is just a much more complicated issue than this kind of good or evil binary that the pro-life movement and the Christian movement want to use. We need to be more adult than they are.

Translation: More babies from the fit, less from the unfit.

The ideology of both Sanger and Spencer is called eugenics. Its the belief that genetic cleanliness is necessary for a better world, and that reproductive technology should be used to stifle the growth of unfit or dysgenic populations. Both Sanger and Spencer use those exact terms.

In fairness to Spencer and the alt-right, Sanger is significantly more abhorrent. She believed not only that the dysgenic should be encouraged to use birth control, but that they should be forcibly sterilized and segregated from the rest of society, as she describes in her population congress proposal. Spencers white identitarianism is viciously racist and anti-American, but never has he advocated that kind of violence.

As a self-described eugenicist, it was not uncommon for Sanger to advocate for these kinds of programs. Rather, coercive population control tactics and dehumanization of lower class people were common threads through nearly everything she said and did.

In chapter 13 of her book Women and the New Race, Sanger writes of birth control technology thusly: Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.

Not only is the worldview of Spencer and the alt-right deeply rooted in that of Sangers, Spencer often cites one of Sangers colleagues, Lothrop Stoddard, including in his recent video:

We actually have to think about an issue like abortionin a complicated manner, something that that issue deserves, Spencer said. Lothrop Stoddard talked about contraception, not so much abortion but contraception, as a potentially world-changingfor the goodtechnology, or something that could change the world for the worse. In a way he was absolutely right and I think contraception has to a large degree changed the world for the worse. Intelligent people will engage in family planning because they naturally have long time horizons, they think ahead. They arent just going to go run and have sex with someone without a condom and get them pregnant and so onIn a way, contraception has been terribly dysgenic in the sense that it is only the smart people that really use it. Smart people are not using abortion as birth control. Smart people are using abortion when you have a situation like Down Syndrome or you have a situation where the health of the mother is at risk. I would say that it is the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics who use abortion as birth control, as a kind of late-term birth control.

Stoddard was an outspoken supporter of Adolph Hitler and was the Exalted Cyclops of the Massachusetts Ku Klux Klan. He authored The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, among many other books and articles on the topic. In 1939, he met with Hitler and Gestapo commander Heinrich Himmler, and established himself as one of the primary influencers of Nazi racial propaganda in the German education system.

Sanger and Stoddard were very close. Sanger featured Stoddards writings in her magazine, Birth Control Review, and appointed Stoddard as a founding board member of the Birth Control League, later renamed Planned Parenthood. Spencer is well-versed in the ideas of Stoddard and discussed them in detail in a 2013 podcast with Jonathan Bowden.

Certainly, with somebody like Lothrop Stoddard, who were going to speak about a little bit later, it was a position held by someone who openly thought of himself as a progressive and a modernist, Spencer said in the interview. And [eugenics] also had some popular appeal. Actually, in a talk I gave not too long ago at the H. L. Mencken Club, I showed some pictures that were actually taken by a very good book, a biography of Lothrop Stoddard which was written by a Left-liberal who doesnt like Stoddard very much but recognizes his importance, but these pictures were of eugenic buildings at the state fair. I believe a famous one was from the Kansas State Fair. They would have a competition for the fittest family, and what they wanted to see was a good genotype. That was a healthy family with all boys and girls looking strong and smart and good-looking parents and things like this. So, eugenics really had a positive value in peoples lives. It was something that meant that they were healthy and good and normal and people of quality.Obviously, this has gone through a total reversal.

I think we should talk about all of these things in detail, but maybe you could pick up on the basic history of eugenics that Ive just outlined that something that was hegemonic has become unspeakable just over the course of 100 years. Something that was endorsed by presidents and now is associated with crazed lunatics. Maybe just talk a little about that and talk a little bit about why that happened.

Not only does Spencer know of these people and their views, but he decries the downfall of eugenics and is attempting to repopularize the once-dormant movement. The alt-right is the resurrection of the eugenicists. This is a frightening phenomenon and its something the left and right can and should come together to attempt to stamp out, but we wont be able to do that unless we attack the ideology at the roots.

Its about eugenics. Its about the eugenic and the dysgenic, the fit and the unfit, the humans and the human weeds. These arent new ideas. To effectively combat the Spencer and the alt-right, we all must acknowledge their ideological roots: the eugenics movement of the early twentiethcentury, and its most prominent advocate, Margaret Sanger.

Here is the original post:
Planned Parenthood's Founder Is The Original Alt-Right Supremacist - The Federalist

President Trumps surprise decision to launch 59 missiles at a Syrian airfield, and his call for all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, angered some of his staunchest supporters paleo-conservatives, noninterventionist libertarians and the self-identified members of the alt-right nationalist movement.

[U.S. strikes Syrian military airfield in first direct assault on Bashar al-Assads government]

During Trumps presidential bid, the once-isolated antiwar voices on the right often thought theyd found an ally. As a pundit (largely on Twitter), he criticized military intervention, occasionally positing that it was being done to help Barack Obamas presidency in the polls.

As a candidate, Trump won primaries despite denouncing the Iraq War something that seemed outside the bounds of Republican politics. And in the final stretch of the campaign, he embraced an argument popular on the antiwar right, that Hillary Clintons bellicosity would lead to a war and he would prevent one.

Obamas 2013 climb-down on attacking Syria was celebrated by anti-interventionists. And this week, in the first hours after news spread of a chemical weapons attack, anti-interventionists stuck with their notion that Trumps victory over Clinton would mean a less aggressive foreign policy. In a report about Clintons Thursday interview at a Women in the World summit, where she called for airstrikes, Alex Joness InfoWars website told readers that while sarin gas has been suspected in the attack, the actual chemical used has not been confirmed.

[Analysis: Trump loves a conspiracy theory. Now his allies in the fringe media say hes falling for one in Syria.]

Hours later, the Trump administration ordered the airstrikes, and the president gave a statement that could have been uttered by George W. Bush, calling on nations to unite against terrorism. The Twitter account of race- and immigration-focused website VDare, a wellspring of Trump support, suggested that Trump had made a strategic blunder that would benefit terrorists.

Justin Raimondo, the libertarian editor of AntiWar.com, tweeted:

That prompted Daniel McAdams, a director of former U.S. representative Ron Pauls think tank, to chide Raimondo for ever believing Trump was opposed to intervention.

Paul Nehlen, a businessman who ran an unsuccessful, Trump-like primary campaign against House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, suggested that the airstrikes contradicted Trumps America First message.

Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute and the coiner of the alt-right brand, a small, far-right movement that seeks an all-white state, denounced the airstrike tweets. He then recorded a video message, full of worry that Trump had betrayed his voters by signing off on a policy favored by hawks.

Millions of people voted for Donald Trump so we could avoid nonsense on this, Spencer said. Millions of people voted for Donald Trump because we saw an authenticity in his opposition to these kinds of wars.

Jones had a similar response, following up on days of speculation that the chemical attack was a false flag meant to start a war with disbelief that Trump could fall for it.

Its incredibly evil to know that Hillary started it all with Obama, and now weve got to see our media, clearly with a false flag, selling all this, and then Trump about to do it, he said.

But the clamor on the antiwar right was largely drowned out Thursday night by praise from outlets and politicians who normally had little good to say about Trump.

Read more:
Alt-right and anti-intervention libertarians reject Trump missile strike on Syria - Washington Post

A videotape with excerpts from a forum on modern-day fascism has propelled Northern Arizona Universityinto the national debate over campus free speech and intimidation, both online and in the classroom.

Some of the fallout includes a professor who complained to police of fears for her safety after the videotape surfaced on an alt-right website, and the student videographer, who is looking to transfer because she doesn't feel welcome.

Free speech, said the professor, does not include hate speech.

Theres a difference between expressing ideas, which is different from racism and sexism, said Lori Poloni-Staudinger, the Politics and International Affairs department chair at NAU who was attacked online.

But the student, freshman political science major Melissa Miller, feels equally aggrieved.

I am being bullied by professors in their classrooms and in these faculty meetings. It's sick. No matter what your political background there is no business singling out a student publicly with no correct information, or accusing her of things when you don't have the whole story, she wrote in a recent Facebook post.

The video includes an NAU professor calling President Trump the rapist in chief and a lecturer, misidentified as Poloni-Staudinger, comparing todays politics to the conditions that gave rise to the Nazis.

Poloni-Staudinger said the flood of threats started the day after the forum and included comments such as, When are these professors going to understand that theyre going to pay for this with their lives? Theyve become the hunted. And handling things with a 9 mm.

Miller, who took the video and gave the rights to it to the alt-right website, Campus Reform, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that shes been threatened, too. She said she went to the forum because shes a political science major and recorded the event for her notes. (The forum was not sponsored by the department.)

It might have stopped there, she said, if she hadnt learned later that another NAU professor at the forum criticized her after she had stepped out of the room for videotaping lectures and posting them to another alt-right website, Professor Watchlist, for the purpose of intimidation. As a result, she sent the videotape to Campus Reform, which posted an excerpt along with a story based on its contents.

Miller states in a Facebook post that no NAU professors are on the Watchlist and a check of the Watchlist shows that she is correct. However, Campus Reform has posted another video of an NAU political science class and a letter from an NAU English teacher docking a student one point from their paper because they used the word mankind instead of a gender neutral term. In the letter the English teacher gives the student a chance to make up the 11 points they missed on the paper and leave mankind in the paper, but would still dock one point for mankind.

Campus Reform, which bills itself as reporting on conduct and misconduct at universities, is a project of the Leadership Institute, which, according to its website, teaches conservatives of all ages how to succeed in politics, government, and the media.

Campus Reform eventually corrected its error in misidentifying Poloni-Staudinger, but not before the damage had been done. Shes still getting threats and nasty comments, forcing her to shut down her social media accounts.

She also took screen shots of the threats and reported them to NAUs Police Department. She was told the department cant do anything about the threats because theyre too general -- they refer to professors and teachers, but not action against Poloni-Staudinger specifically. The universitys harassment policy also doesnt specifically include online harassment.

"NAU respects the right to free speech of all participants in the educational experience. We also expect that individuals exercise their rights with integrity, honesty, and respect for other participants," NAU Assistant Director of Communications Heidi Toth told The Chronicle, and NAU Director of Communications Kim Ott reiterated to the Arizona Daily Sun.

Poloni-Staudinger said she feels that free speech including the forum -- is open to all on campus and she didnt have any problem with conservative groups being on campus. Shes worked with the Young Republicans and Young Democrats. Her class also had a frank discussion after the November election results came in.

But Miller is still transferring at the end of the semester.

Y'all ruined my life at NAU, she posted to Facebook. People think I'm alt-right and a racist.

See more here:
Video posted to alt-right website sets off firestorm at NAU - Arizona Daily Sun

White supremacist Richard Spencer.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

If the alt-rights core ethos could be reduced to a single maxim, it would be this: to each his own. This is the attitude that undergirds the support for racial and cultural separation and white nationalism that the movement is most closely associated with. It is also the attitude that undergirds the movements less widely discussed isolationism, which was brought into the spotlight Thursday night as President Trump ordered a strike against Bashar al-Assads forces in Syria.

Richard Spencer, whose support for Trump has dimmed as Trumps stances on immigration have, according to Spencers harsh measure, softened, issued what is perhaps his most forceful rebuke of the president so far in a video titled The Trump Betrayal. I have to be brutally honest, he said. I am deeply disappointed in Donald Trump. Im shocked, and Im angry. And I am ready to condemn Donald Trump. He was far from alone. The #AltRight is now totally independent of Trump, and this anti-West, pro-terrorist foreign policy, the white nationalist publication VDare tweeted. Organize, organize, organize. So Trump's first forceful action as President was supposedly to defend the same people that mow down white children with trucks, the Right Stuff founder Mike Enoch wrote disgustedly.

This was a reaction foretold by the alt-rights very origins. The split between the mainstream conservative movement and the paleoconserativesthat is, those fixated on maintaining traditional cultural and religious identity who would become the alt-rights intellectual progenitors in the United Statescame into being over not only racism but also opposition to American intervention in the Middle East, including the Iraq war.

9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted, paleoconservative Pat Buchanan said in a 2002 appearance on Hardball. We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and were supporting Israel and all the rest of it.

This sentiment and the larger divide within the movement was the subject of an essay called Unpatriotic Conservatives, published by the conservative writer David Frum in National Review less than 24 hours before the invasion of Iraq began. In opposing the Iraq war and interventionism, he wrote, paleoconservatives had made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe and included among their ranks some who yearned for the victory of their nations enemies. Peter Brimelow, founder of VDare, responded with a post arguing that defeating terrorism would be a matter of keeping unassimilable would-be terrorists out of the country. Instead, America's establishment is committed to seeking a foreign policy answer to terrorism, of vast ambition and indefinite scope, on the other side of the globe, he wrote. Whatever the merits of this answer, it cannot be denied that a fraction of the resources devoted to it would have sealed the borders and ended the illegal immigration crisis.

Some of the far rights opposition to Middle East intervention was driven by anti-Semitic theories about the role of shadowy Jewish globalists in setting American foreign policy. But overall, the stance of what would become the alt-right on the Iraq war, nation-building, and interventionist foreign policy was motivated by opposition to the idea that Western-style democracy could be delivered by force to people seen as backwardsand also by the desire, voiced by Brimelow, to see resources devoted to making the country whiter and more prosperous. Does anyone want to consider what our aims are in all this? Spencer asked of the Iraq war in 2008. What might actually be accomplished by democratization? If the Baghdad parliament were running efficiently, would anything change?

Those concerns remain Friday with Syria, along with some added panic about the flow of Muslim nonwhite refugees into the West that the conflict has produced. A large and underrated part of the promise the alt-right saw in Trump was his repeated (albeit frequently contradicted) commitment to keeping America out of not only Syria but foreign conflict more broadly. That commitment is now dead and the shockwaves felt in the movement have been huge. No more wag the dog, no more 4D chess, no more decisive leadership, Spencer tweeted Friday afternoon. The Syria strikes must end now.

More:
Why the alt-right hates Trump's Syria strike. - Slate - Slate Magazine (blog)