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Readers of The Right Stuff long knew that founder "Mike Enoch" had two main interests: technology and white supremacy. Posts on the neo-Nazi site have included discussion of "a new blogging platform built on node.js," while other less techie content has alluded to the "chimpout" in Ferguson, putting Jews in ovens, and Trump's "top-tier troll" of Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In January, Enoch was outed as Mike Peinovich, a Manhattan-based software engineer. His unmasking highlighted a lingering question about the racist far-right movement that rose to prominence with Donald Trump's election: What support might the so-called alt-right have among techies?

Ever since I began investigating the extremist groups lining up behind Trump last spring, several of their leaders have made big claims to me about an alt-right following in Silicon Valley and across the broader tech industry. "The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year old tech-savvy guy working in IT," white nationalist Richard Spencer insisted when I interviewed him a few weeks before the election. "I have seen so many people like that." Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, told me he gets donations from Silicon Valley, and that Santa Clara County, home to Apple and Intel, is his site's largest traffic source. Chuck Johnson, the publisher of the conspiracy-mongering site Got News, said he gets lots of pageviews from the Bay Area.

"If you even try to posit that racism and sexism aren't why women and minorities aren't making it, that it's some combination of talent and values, people's heads just explode."

After Peinovich was outed, he also insisted to me that many techies secretly identify with the alt-right, which he attributed to a backlash against the "corporate feminist and diversity agenda" of tech companies. "The fact that speaking up about this virtually guarantees career and social suicide, as in my case, shows why so many white males in tech would be attracted to the alt-right."

None of these alt-right figures would provide any data to support their claims. As I've reported, some alt-right sites have wildly overstated their reach. Moreover, the tech industry is renowned for its globalist outlook: Public opinion surveys conducted by a Stanford political economist have found that rank-and-file workers in Silicon Valley exhibit less racial resentment and more favorable views towards most forms of immigration than average Americans.

Nonetheless, "alt-techies" as Spencer and others call them, do appear to play a role in a movement that first incubated in the backwaters of the internet and eventually spread online with the rise of Trump. Some heroes of the far right are associated with tech: They include former Breitbart News "tech editor" Milo Yiannopoulos; the infamous neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer (a.k.a. Weev); and the video gaming vlogger Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, whose "Pewdiepie" YouTube channel featuring Nazi-themed jokes has 54 million subscribers. (Last monthKjellberg apologized for the jokes and said he is not a Nazi).

There are also successful figures in the tech industry who appeal to and have commingled with the alt-right: The DeploraBall, a gathering of far-right activists and conspiracy theorists during Trump's inauguration, was co-organized by software investor Jeff Giesea and attended by tech billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel. San Francisco-based tech entreprenuer Curtis Yarvin is known for launching the pro-authoritarian "neoreactionary" movement and reportedly has been in contact with Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon. (Yarvin denies this.) Giesea and Yarvin, both of whom I interviewed, reject the "alt-right" label for its associations with white nationalism, yet they share the movement's disdain for the race and gender politics of the left. (Thiel's media representative did not respond to a request for comment from him.)

To further gauge the influence of the alt-right in tech, I interviewed seven people in the industry who embrace aspects of the movement. They included current or former employees of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter, some of whom responded to me after I reached out to them through their Facebook pages. They asked that I not publish their names, citing concerns about their jobs. I also interviewed two techies associated with the Daily Stormer; one declined to disclose his identity to me but has a posting history on the site indicative of working in tech in the Bay Area.

Three of the alt-techies I interviewed said explicitly that they were white nationalists. The others did not identify that way, but they emphasized their belief in racial or gender differences in IQ or social behavior, and strongly rejected identity politics, affirmative action, and what they see as toxic political correctness. Their views shed light on how the alt-right has found a receptive audience on the margins, at least, of the tech world.

A former product manager for a top tech company who now consults for Twitter told me that white and Asian male domination in the tech sector has more to do with innate abilities and culture than discrimination. "If you even try to posit that racism and sexism aren't why women and minorities aren't making it, that it's some combination of talent and values, people's heads just explode," he says. "They just refuse to even float the idea."

"I'm not necessarily saying any one race is bad," says "Mark," a former software developer for Yahoo and Facebook. "But we should at least agree that statistically race and sex genes do make us differ enough on average to make things uneven in certain areas."

"The history of nearly every field of science and engineering was driven by white Europeans," declares a 45-year-old computer chip designer who says he lives in Berkeley, and who posts under the name "White Morpheus" on the Daily Stormer. "Nobody will say their real feelings [about the alt-right] because a mob of fat blue-hair complainers will drive you away from your career forever. Peter Thiel coming out [for Trump] was a joy to us all, because he could show his support for the Trump train where we could not."

In 1990, Ku Klux Klan "Grand Dragon" Don Black created Stormfront as a dial-up computer bulletin board for former KKK leader David Duke's campaign for Louisiana governor. By 1995 it had evolved into the first major public website dedicated to promoting white supremacy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. But online hate speech mostly remained confined to its traditional base of neo-Nazis and Klansmen until the launch in 2003 of 4chan. Originally conceived as an anonymous message board for discussing Japanese anime and manga, 4chan attracted a cult following among techies at around the same time that its political discussion board, now known as /pol/ (short for "politically incorrect"), became a hotbed for racist jokes and ironically intended Hitler memes.

A Hitler meme on 4chan

The political glue binding the predominately young, male 4chan community is essentially anti-leftist: a disdain for identity politics and so-called "social justice warriors." This attitude thrives amid a culture of anonymity, in which status ostensibly comes from pageviews rather than one's gender, ethnic, or social background. "Larry," a software engineer for Google and alt-right fan, points to the infamous 4chan post, "There are no girls on the internet," where one 4channer profanely lectures another about how online life is a meritocracy in which gender should play no role.

Yet, hostility towards women and people of color thrives on 4chan and on Reddit, the social sharing site whose political and gaming forums /r/the_donald and /r/kotakuinaction are popular with the alt-right. In 2014, 4chan and Reddit users launched an elaborate campaign of rape and death threats against female video game developers that became known as Gamergate. They found champions in Yiannopoulos,whoarguedthat the true victims were the men whose gaming culture was being destroyed by "feminist bullies" and the "achingly politically correct" tech press, and in Mike Cernovich, a blogger who has trumpeted the neuroticism and other alleged weaknesses of women as well as what he claims to be thecriminal proclivitiesof certain ethnic groups. When former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao last year banned five "harassing subreddits," including one called ShitNiggersSay, the move unleashed weeks of bigoted trolling (a.k.a. "shitposting") and digital vandalism on the siteand a migration to a Reddit copycat site, Voat. (More recently, similar migrations took place after Reddit banned /r/altright and discussion of the fake-news scandal #PizzaGate.)

The anonymity of 4chan and Reddit make it impossible to tell to what extent they are dominated by tech workers, though an abiding interest from the tech press suggests considerable overlap. "It's definitely geek culture," says McGill University cultural anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, who has studied how 4chan gave rise to the hactivist group Anonymous. "Clint," a Valley cybersecurity startup founder and long-time visitor to the site, told me that the majority of active users on 4chan/pol/ are in tech, though typically in lower-level system administrator and tech support jobs that come with a lot of downtime during the workday. Dale Beran, who recently wrote about the political history of 4chan, argues that techies have become less dominant as 4chan and similar sites have expanded, though they still play a role: "We can define [4chan users] by their retreat into the computer, which means a lot of them have computer skillswhether that's networking or coding or whateverbut to some it may have simply been World of Warcraft."

"Most contributions that built the internet came from white people," declares one notorious hacker.

Before Gamergate, Larry, the Google software engineer, was "a standard Democrat straight-voting person," as he puts it. But reading about the movement in the tech press and on pro-Gamergate websites "did highlight some of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies with positions on the left," he says. A comment in a Gamergate thread led Larry to the Unz Review, a website run by Palo Alto tech entrepreneur and former GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz. There, Larry says he was exposed to treatises on "human biological diversity" expounding on the supposed cognitive differences between intellectually superior and inferior races.

Human biological diversity has also gained currency in the Valley through computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Starting in 2007, in series of blog posts often cited by alt-right followers, Yarvin laid out a political philosophy known as neoreaction or the "Dark Enlightenment." Combining a technocratic sensibility with reactionary political thought, neoreaction rejects Enlightenment conceptssuch as democracy and equality of the races and sexesand instead advocates something much closer to authoritarianism. Yarvin believes government would work much better if run like a tech company and helmed by an all-powerful CEO president. He spoke admiringly Napoleon, whom he considers to be "kind of the Steve Jobs of France."

Yarvin's blog combines dorky programmer lingo with dense references to obscure, proto-fascist political texts. "When I started blogging 10 years ago, the availability of completely unorthodox written content [online] was mostly confined to the pre-1923 corpus, which Google did such a nice job scanning," Yarvin told me in an email. He believes that software programmers are attracted to his writings because they "are always looking for something to do with their restless, fidgety brains. Especially if it's weird and doesn't involve dealing with physical humans."

Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who reportedly gave Trump more than $1 million during the campaign and was an adviser on Trump's transition team, has circled neoreactionary ideas. "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," hewrote on the Cato Institute's blogin 2009, adding that women and "welfare beneficiaries" have through their voting habits "rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron" (He clarified two weeks later that he supports women's suffrage and redirected blame for the supposed demise of democracy on "unelected technocratic agencies.")

Thiel is reportedly an investor in Yarvin's cloud computing company, though Yarvin told me that he and Thiel have never discussed neoreaction. Michael Anissimov, another well-known neoreactionary blogger, was formerly the media director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has received funding from the Thiel Foundation.

While a student at Stanford University in 1987, Thiel founded the conservative Stanford Review to inspire campus debate by "presenting alternative viewpoints." In the 1995 book "The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus," Thiel and former Stanford Review editor-in-chief David O. Sacks argued that multiculturalism at colleges was hurting education. In one bizarre passage, they speculated that some college date-rape cases were actually "seductions that are later regretted"a comment for which Thiel apologized last October, telling Forbes: "Rape in all forms is a crime. I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise."

DeploraBall cosponsor Jeff Giesea, also a former Stanford Review editor, worked for Thiel Capital Management in the late 1990s. Last year, Giesea partnered with far-right blogger Mike Cernovich on MAGA3X, a digital operation dedicated to waging meme warfare on behalf of Donald Trump's campaign. Enlisting a network of pro-Trump Twitter influencers such as former BuzzFeed employee Anthime Gionet (a.k.a. Baked Alaska) and right-wing troll Jack Posobiec, the group spread Breitbart News content and memes based on conspiracy theories such as #SpiritCooking and #Pizzagate. The DeploraBall stirred controversy among the alt-right when Giesea and Cernovich decided to remove Gionet from their "featured guests" list after he posted several anti-Semitic tweets. But Giesea told me that he generally agrees with the views of alt-right fellow travelers such as Yiannopoulous. In January, he told BuzzFeed: "I see Trumpism as the only practical and moral path to save Western civilization from itself."

In 2014, Jesse Jackson began pushing Silicon Valley tech companies to disclose statistics about the racial and gender composition of their workforces. By the following summer, he had pressured Google, Facebook, Apple, and many other major tech companies to reveal their paucity of black, Hispanic, and female employees and commit to making improvements. But when he appeared on Reddit that summer to answer questions about diversity in tech, he faced a virulent backlash. By far the most up-voted question began: "You are an immoral, hate-filled race baiter that has figured out how to manipulate the political system for your own gain."

The comment came from an anonymous account that was later deleted; few people in Silicon Valley are willing to question the value of diversity out in the open. "If there was [opposition to diversity policy], it's probably something someone says to themselves in the car on the way home or on the bus on the way back to San Francisco," says Reed Galen, a GOP consultant who advises tech companies and has been trolled online by the alt-right over his criticism of Trump.

Chuck Johnson, who runs the pro-Trump site Got News from his home in Fresno and claims to have received funding offers from wealthy tech investors, points to an obvious outlet for closeted alt-techies: "A lot of these people see a sort of ostracism takes place [after they question the value of diversity], and they either rebel against it internally or they go online and they have a different identity and they shitpost on Reddit."

Several alt-techies I interviewed said they were fans of "A Troublesome Inheritance," a national bestseller published in in 2014 by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade that makes a case for the existence of differences in average IQ and behavior between races. The book and others like it have been widely criticized by geneticists as misleading, overly speculative, and not based on scientific consensus, but the alt-techies claim such critiques are just political correctness. "Nobody wants to touch it or admit it for fear of being branded alt-right," Mark, the Facebook engineer, told me.

"Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary," the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night.

White supremacists see the historical dominance of Silicon Valley by white males as a reflection of the world's natural order. "The reality is that for the vast majority of all human civilization the majority of makers have been white," insists Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. Weev,a notorious trolland hacker who says he does tech support for the Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff. "Most contributions that built the internet came from white people," he says, but now "our contributions are essentially being stolen from us."

Alt-techies are scornful of South Asians working in Silicon Valley under H-1B visas. White Morpheus, the Daily Stormer reader, told me that he became a white supremacist after working with "unqualified subcontinentals who were brought in by visa fraud to drive down American engineering wages" and who "produce sub-par work product." (Before I contacted him, White Morpheus had posted on Daily Stormer about forming a neo-Nazi meet-up group in Silicon Valley and using programming tools to create more video games "like Angry Goy.")

The H-1B visa program, which Trump has vowed to reform, is unpopular among many tech workers due to concerns about its effect on wages and job security. Studies have shown that the largest recipients of H-1B visas are outsourcing firms, and that H-1B workers get paid less money than their American counterparts for the same work. But hardcore racists see an opening to turn the H-1B debate into a recruitment tool in the Valley. "Abill is being introducedin the House of Representatives that will neutralize the economic advantages these anti-American companies get from gaming the H1-b visa system," a contributor to the Daily Stormer wrote recently. "If the cucks in Congress dont block it, the not-so-humanitarian motives of big business in browning and third-worldizing America will be revealed."

"Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary," the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night. The post elicited an outpouring of solidarity from many Bay Area techiesbut not from Andrew Torba, an alum of the Y-Combinator tech incubator, who tweeted a screenshot of the post with the line: "Build the wall."

When other Y-Combinator graduates began criticizing Torba on Facebook, he waded into the fray: "All of you: Fuck off," he wrote. "Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it." Using an alt-right term meant to demean mainstream conservatives, he added: "I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a president into office, cucks."

Y-Combinator soon banned Torba from its alumni network for "speaking in a threatening, harassing way towards other YC founders," in violation of its ethics policy. Torba denied threatening or harassing YC founders and called the ban "a quintessential example of Silicon Valley censorship in action." He later turned down my request to speak with him about the incident by posting parts of my email to him on social media with the comment: "We don't interview with fake news sites."

Picking fights online may have helped Torba's startup Gab, a social media network that quickly positioned itself as a haven for alt-right-ers banned from Twitter. Gab's frog logo is reminiscent of the alt-right mascot Pepe the frog, and Torba has posted on Gab what could be construed as riffs on the Pepe hand signal and the alt-right's red pill meme. (A Gab spokesman said Torba does not identify as part of the alt-right). Trump's victory seemed to encourage other alt-techies to speak up, albeit pseudonymously.

"What if some cultures are better?" a commenter wrote a few days later on Y-Combinator's popular social forum, Hacker News. "Why should we respect foreign cultures if they don't respect our own? Why should you lose your job if you make a joke in public that some people deem offensive? Why is racism against whites and sexism against men acceptable?"

Another commenter on the thread chimed in: "Based on the tone of the comments around here lately, I'm getting a sense that HN has been populated by closeted alt-right for a while now." (A few weeks later, Hacker News announced a "political detox week" in which political stories and threads were banned.)

A similar controversy has played out in recent months on Redditanother young, male, techie dominated siteas r/The_Donald has risen to become one of the site's most active subreddits. Its participants are notorious for trolling other Reddit communities and attacking people based on their religion, race, gender, and sexual identity, as Gizmodo's Bryan Menegus has documented. Citing two former Trump campaign officials, Politico's Ben Schreckinger recently reported that Trump's campaign team privately communicated last fall with r/The_Donald's most active users to seed new trends and feed catchy memes from the site back to Trump social media director Dan Scavino.

The gaming vlogger Pewdiepie, whose YouTube channel is the world's largest, made rape jokes early in his career and sometimes uses the word "slut" as an insult. Since August, he has made nine videos featuring Nazi imagery or anti-Semitic humor, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. (He later apologized but also said that the Journal took the remarks out of context). In a vlog posted in January that has been viewed more than 7 million times, he jokes about getting banned from Fiverr, a website where freelancers offer their services for $5, after hiring people to make a video of themselves holding a sign that said, "DEATH TO ALL JEWS"drawing kudos from neo-Nazis. In February, Disney's Maker Studios said it would no longer run PewDiePie's network and YouTube canceled the release of the second season of his reality show, "Scare PewDiePie."

The alt-techies I spoke with remain aware of the risks of emerging further from the shadows. "If I posted publicly about what I told you, I'd get fired," says Larry, the Google software engineer. "Even with Trump, there is huge cultural inertia."

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Meet Silicon Valley's Secretive Alt-Right Followers - Mother Jones

Misogynistic, and highly populist and led unofficially led by Richard Spencer, the alt-right movement a faction of people with extremely far-right idealogies expanded underneath values that President Donald Trump supported throughout the election. Preaching strict white ethnonationalism, the movement eerily resembles the Nazi party. During a rally in Washington D.C., members of the alt-right were filmed chanting Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory! The alt-right has grown rapidly since Nov. 8, gaining additional momentum when the infamous Steve Bannon was chosen to become Trumps Chief Strategist. Yet, despite their sudden rise, alt-right leaders recognize that there is additional recruiting to be coordinated.

This time, it includes attracting women to join the dark side.

Writers that identify as alt-right have termed the process of bringing females into the movement, giving women the red pill. And it is understandably difficult. At each rally that is held, supporters rattle about the importance of alpha-males, often suggesting that women hold little value in the working class. Instead, a womans place is frequently identified as in the kitchen a disgraceful notion which marks a significant regression from past societal advances. Herein lies the issue with attracting women into the movement. However, this hasnt stopped female alt-righters from attempting to teach men about the recruitment process.

Earlier this month, The Economist featured a story about two writers named Cecilia Davenport and Wolfie James. Although they each have unique styles, they share a common interest. According to The Economists story, Mr. Spencer has said he believes women constitute around one-fifth of the movements followers. Others who are familiar with the movement tend to agree that there is simply not enough representation of women in the group. That is where writers such as James and Davenport fit into the broader picture.

Through blogging, women in the alt-right are trying to gather others that are secretly partial to the movement. As Davenport wrote in response to The Economist, You see alt-right women a lot more at private gatheringsmen are, by nature, more likely by nature to take risks: and there are real risks involved in being active in this cause. Similar to others, Davenport recognizes that there is the potential to grow the movements female base. This prospect is exciting for a predominately white, heteronormative group of males that seeks the attention of women. Davenport continues by saying, alt-righters want women to have the option to stay home and raise a family, making a sensible plea for women to support the cause. If one makes belonging at home a privilege, rather than a punishment, there will naturally be women curious about the movement.

Conversely, there are others who believe that women will need a significant push from their alt-right boyfriends to join the movement. Among those who believe this is Wolfie James, who wrote the original manual for red-pilling women. While I make reference to her work, I refrain from providing any direct link, as the articles language is rather vulgar and distressing. With sections entitled, Trigger her emotions; dont try to win an argument, Fear monger, and Support her when she starts to embrace it, James describes a step-by-step approach for men to recruit their partners. The manuals rhetoric primarily uses fear as the catalyst for bringing skeptical women into the movement. It should be noted, though, that lacking from the guide is a strategy for alt-right men to actually attract women in the first place.

Its difficult to fathom that a political movement aimed at restoring white male nationalism is actively attempting to recruit women. Yet, unofficial leaders such as Spencer are convinced that females are apt to join the cause with a little nudge. Whether it be from Davenport and James or others hidden amongst a sea of alpha-males, there is a growing push to expand the party. To expand the notion that multiculturalism is rife with issues, and that only a white America is safe from the tyranny of diversity. This notion could not be farther from the truth or worth anyones respect regardless of gender or race.

letters@chronicle.utah.edu

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Women of the Alt-Right - Daily Utah Chronicle

Anti-Semitism among Muslims might not be acquired through the mothers milk, but it is nonetheless a part of the socialization of Muslims, especially from North Africa and the Middle East. The historic expulsion of 850,000 Mizrachi and Sephardic Jews, who were forced to leave their homes in these Muslim countries with only the clothes on their backs and what they could carry, should not be forgotten. The Jews in this region had preceded by more than a thousand years the seventh century Islamic invasion that came out of the Arabian desert.

With Muslims now fleeing this region for Europe, the plight of Europes Jews is now almost indistinguishable from that of their ancestors as Europe fell under the jackboot of fascism. For a Jew dressed as a Jew, his yarmulke makes him a target. The only difference is that, today, Europes political leaders give lip service to condemning anti-Semitism but are unwavering in their determination to absorb an endless stream of migrants steeped in a culture of anti-Semitism.

Indeed, even with the Trump administrations policy of extreme vetting of refugees, will anyone bother to vet them for anti-Semitism?

French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen says she will prohibit the display of religious garb in public. She need not worry about the Jews. Those who will not flee France will undoubtedly stuff their yarmulkes in their pockets and make sure their tzitzit are tucked safely inside their garments.

America, too, has seen a rise in anti-Semitism, most notably on the college campus. The purveyors of this anti-Semitism are the Muslim Student Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the largely Muslim organizers of the dual anti-Semitic hate fests known as Israel Apartheid Week and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. There is no Palestine Apartheid Week to publicize a political entity where no Jew is allowed to live and where selling land to a Jew is a crime punishable by death.

So, why have some 1,000 rabbis signed a petition in support of Muslim immigration to America? Do they not see what is happening in Europe? Are they bereft of any sense of the history of their own people in the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa? Do they not comprehend that the Jews of Egypt, who preceded Islam, experienced dhimmitude as late as 1920?

When automobiles were on the road, airplanes were in the sky, and radio connected the peoples of the world, Egypt was treating Jews under restrictions designed for the seventh century. With the Jews gone, the Salafists in Egypt are calling for the imposition of the jizya tax on Coptic Christians in the 21st century.

Certainly, one can point to individual Muslims who are tolerant and countries such as Morocco where an enlightened brand of Islam is practiced. But this does not mitigate the threat of anti-Semitism, if the European experience is visited upon America.

Moreover, the rabbis who sign such petitions, who in their navet and their misguided desire to display some false sense of virtue, are a threat to the Jewish community. For America is not Europe in the sense that Americans will not tolerate here what Islam has done to Europe. There will be a backlash, some of which is already manifest in the ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidency.

Americans will organize against an assault on their culture and way of life. And when elected officials do not act, America has a long and ugly tradition of vigilantism that meted out justice on the frontier and harsh, brutal injustice ever since.

You might think the far right comprises Trump supporters and the people at Breitbart. Nonsense. That is just a political play by the left. The real alt-right resides beneath the political surface. Generally, they dont write editorials or give interviews.

If there is a reaction to Muslim immigration, they will be the primary beneficiaries, because it will give them a mechanism for mobilization. As in all such mobilizations, they will blame the Jews. Just as in Germany, the far right now blames the Jews for the Islamic assault on their culture. Islamic immigration has caused a resurgence of the German far right.

The 1,000 rabbis with their vacuous petition will have given them a symbol for mobilization.

The good rabbis should remember that Jews, even in America, are like a school of fish threatened from above by birds of prey and from below by sharks. The rabbis have provided succor to both.

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Progressive Rabbis Naively Help Strengthen the 'Real Alt-Right' - American Spectator

Striking a blow for liberal democracy ... detail from Marvels Captain America, issue No 1. Photograph: Courtesy of Marvel

Comics have never shied away from punching a Nazi. Captain America socked Hitler himself on the jaw in his first issue back in March 1941, with Superman and Batman also stepping up to fight the Fhrer that same decade.

But long after the Third Reich was toppled, Nazis and fascists continued to make good villain fodder for superheroes. For Captain America, Marvel created out-and-out Nazi agent Red Skull (who also became a communist in the 1950s), as well as the green-garbed fascist, terrorist, criminal organisation Hydra. In DC Comics, there was Captain Nazi genetically altered by his scientist father to fight for Hitler who was sent by the Nazis to fight American superheroes, and there were evil groups like Hive and Kobra.

Even during the 1990s, Marvels Avengers West Coast had a team of supervillains called the Lethal Legion that included demonically enhanced versions of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Stalin (renamed Coldsteel).

Today, comic-book writer Jeff Lemires new title for publisher Valiant, Bloodshot Salvation, is putting the alt-right in the villain role. Living in a world in which humans are transformed into enhanced killers through a controlled infection, Bloodshot has super-strength, speed and endurance. But the current incarnation Ray Garrison, who is attempting to settle down with his girlfriend Magic, is faced with in-laws you wouldnt want over to dinner: a cruel and sadistic clan of white supremacist criminals.

Set to debut in September with art by Lewis LaRosa and Mico Suayan, Bloodshot Salvation was announced at Comic Con in Seattle as [carrying] strong anti-fascist overtones as Bloodshot confronts the resurgent white supremacist underground of modern-day America.

Lemire, who is Canadian, told CBR.com that the man-made plague that sparks mindless violence in its victims was his take on Americas far right, saying: America is a scary place and I say that as one of your neighbours from the north who is equal parts terrified, appalled and saddened on a daily basis by something new going on, not the least of which is the rise of Trump.

Like most of us, Lemire didnt think there would be any more superheroes socking Nazis, 75 years after Captain America first took on Hitler. I dont think I would have ever anticipated the things that have happened over the last couple of years, Lemire told the Washington Post. I never really thought Id be commenting on this stuff the way I am or feeling compelled to, thats for sure.

So the real-world dramas of Trumps presidency are getting an airing on the page. Comic-book shenanigans it all might be, but with the USs new commander-in-chief firing off executive orders like Spider-Man slings webs, the fist-shaking cartoon baddies of yore simply wont cut it for todays comic-book audiences. The comics market is wider than its ever been before, and crucially, it has a far greater proportion of female readers. Competing for attention with the likes of Netflix, they have to be at least as sophisticated and well-written. These days, Spider-Man doesnt pull on his tights just because the Green Goblin has decided to rob a bank; Spidey today is a mixed-race teenager who has to deal with school drama, family drama, survivors guilt. For a long time now, weve been getting more depth to our heroes and now we look for credible reasons why the bad guys are so malign.

So while punching Nazis might suddenly be more relevant than it has been for decades, heres to hoping that comic books can deal with fascism and the far right in a far more nuanced way than a cheeky right hook to Hitlers face.

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Alt-right comic book villains? Comics have moved on from punching Nazis - The Guardian (blog)

White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and White House chief of staff Reince Priebus spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Feb. 23. Bannon said the media is "adamantly opposed to" the president's agenda. (The Washington Post)

Leading conservatives have taken to pretending that the alt-right is a fringe movement that they and President Trump have disavowed. In recent interviews and at a high-profile conservative conference last month, conservatives have taken great pains to distance conservatism and the Trump administration from any alt-right influence.

But heres the reality: The alt-rights deep influence over this White House is on display daily in Trumps rhetoric and his administrations policies. The alt-right influence on Trump matters: it means the most powerful man in the world is under the influence of a racist and white nationalist movement. And conservatives should reckon with this more forthrightly.

For instance, note this podcast that the Washington Posts Jonathan Capehart conducted with American Conservative Union president Matt Schlapp. Capehart pointed out that Stephen K. Bannon and Stephen Miller are Trumps top White House advisers, and asked: Doesnt that mean, that despite the concerns, the alt-right is now mainstreamed, if not the power within the White House? Schlapp flatly denied that the alt-right had been mainstreamed in this manner.

Bannon who is now Trumps most influential adviser told melast summer, when he was chairman of Breitbart, that his site was the platform for the alt-right. Capehart questioned Schlapp about this, but Schlapp argued, implausibly, that this is not as significant as it appears. Schlapp insisted that when Bannon said that Breitbart is the platform for the alt-right, he wasnttrying to endorse the racist ideology of that group. Yet Breitbart was and remains one-stop shopping for readers looking for anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-refugee rhetoric and disinformation, as well as stories about black crime.

This echoed similar head-in-the sand denials that were on full display last month at the ACUs Conservative Political Action Conference. For instance,Dan Schneider, the ACUs executive director, delivereda speech denouncing the alt-right but not as the far-right white nationalist movement that it is, but rather as garden variety left-wing fascists. By attempting (not very convincingly) to pin the movement on the left, Schneider sought to portray the alt-right as an interloper thatis not exerting any influence over Trump or his conservative supporters.

But hours later, Schlapp welcomed Bannon for an interview on the CPAC main stage. Schlapp didnt ask Bannon a single question about the alt-right or about what Bannon meant when he claimed that his web site was a platform for it.

The reality is that itisunder Bannons influence that the administration has taken its actions that most thrill the alt-right, most notably his moves to step up deportation of undocumented immigrants, and ban refugees and migrants from Muslim-majority countries.

When Bannon and I spoke this summer, he tried to deny to me that the alt-right is a white nationalist movement, although he did concede that white nationalists and anti-Semites could be attracted to some of thephilosophies of the alt-right. But, as I have writtenafter Trump tapped himto head up his campaign, Bannon nonetheless praised the deeply Islamophobic ethno-nationalism on the rise in Europe, like the National Front in France, led by far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.

No, they aren't just pranksters and they aren't an extension of European nationalism. Reporter and author Olivia Nuzzi tackles five myths about the alt-right. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

And then theres Trumps choice of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. During the transition, alt-right leaders were delighted with the Sessions pick, pointing to his opposition to immigration as well as their hope that he would stop enforcing civil rights laws and might even prosecute Black Lives Matter protesters.

As Emily Bazelon writes, Sessions has long been a devoted Breitbart reader, and met regularly with the sites writers. Trumps dark vision of America as besieged by inner city crime, immigrants, and refugees, Bazelon notes, provides clear justification for policies that will advance Sessions, Bannon and Millers divisive nationalism. Justice Department policy, under Sessions, she adds, aims to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a longstanding desire to reassert the countrys European and Christian heritage.

Indeed, Sessions is altering the core mission of the Department of Justice to one with less of a focus on civil and voting rights. Trumps false claims about voter fraud are straight out of the ugly maw of alt-right meme-making, portraying supposed voter fraud as a scourge perpetrated by African-Americans and undocumented immigrants a possible signal that a crackdown on voting rights is coming, one that Sessions would likely help carry out from the Justice Department.

Despite the determined spin, the reality is that Trumpism would not exist without the alt-right. Conservatives can pretend its fringe and has little to no influence on the Trump administration but the proof is in the policy.

Read more here:
Conservatives insist Trump is not influenced by the alt-right. Here's why they're wrong. - Washington Post (blog)