Archive for the ‘Alt-right’ Category

Letter: Alt-right ‘minority’ isn’t under threat – The Daily Tar Heel

| Published 5 hours ago

TO THE EDITOR:

On Feb. 13, Chris Watson wrote to the DTH that there is a small, but growing minority on campus. This supposed minority lurks everywhere, under many names, and in all departments. We exist, Mr. Watson assures his readers, as if the banal question of their existence was ever in doubt.

We are told that the specter of social justice haunts our classrooms, making it impossible for students to address content because we are too busy paying attention to the trivial matters of race or ethnicity.

Furthermore, radical leftists, Marxists, and anarchists are to blame for this. Please, Mr. Watson, if you see any of these so-called radicals on campus, do let me know. I cant seem to find them anywhere. More important, however, are the tired platitudes deployed. We hear about leftist violence, censorship of free speech and Americas courageous past. These claims are unsubstantiated.

So here is the push back. The violence on the working class is a result of capital and corporations run amok. The alt-right president is the most powerfully heard voice in the world hardly a lack of free speech. Americas history is the history of slavery, abuse, dispossession and state violence against the most vulnerable.

Id like to remind the alt-right minority how hard it is to focus on content when youre worried about your visa status, or routine traffic stops resulting in abuse or death or the threat of deportation from ICE patrols in your neighborhood.

Heres to an America without fear.

Micah Hughes

Graduate student

Religious studies

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Letter: Alt-right 'minority' isn't under threat - The Daily Tar Heel

Sparks fly over alt-right agitator on Maher’s show – Leader-Telegram

NEW YORK While conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos insulted comics Lena Dunham, Leslie Jones, Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman, his appearance on HBOs Real Time with Bill Maher was relatively tame at least until the television cameras were turned off.

It was later, during an online-only Overtime segment of Mahers Friday night show, that two of Mahers three panelists hurled expletives at the Breitbart News senior editor.

Mahers booking of Yiannopoulos, author of the upcoming book Dangerous, drew attention earlier this week when journalist Jeremy Scahill backed out of the show because of his hateful diatribes. The conservative gadfly has become a lightning rod; his planned speech at the University of California, Berkeley, was canceled earlier this month when protests erupted.

Maher, a free speech advocate, told Yiannopoulos that he thought he was colossally wrong on most issues, but if I barred everyone from the show who I thought was colossally wrong, I would be talking to myself.

Yiannopoulos called Maher his favorite liberal.

The interview segment featured few harsh exchanges with Maher, and Yiannopoulos was not included in a panel discussion that featured comedian Larry Wilmore, author and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance and former U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican. But online, Yiannopoulos joined the other three to answer questions from viewers.

The starting-off point was when Yiannopoulos defended his criticism of a transgender person and saying, without offering evidence, that transgender people were involved in a disproportionate number of sex crimes. Wilborn objected, saying that for a long time, homosexuality was considered a disorder.

Maybe it is, said Yiannopoulos, who is gay.

Maybe you are, Wilborn said, But most homosexuals are not.

Nance observed that Yiannopoulos seemed confused about who and what he was. When Maher tried to referee, Yiannopoulos said that he always seemed to have awful people on the show, who are so stupid.

Thats when Wilmore exploded, telling Yiannopoulos to go (bleep) yourself.

When the oddity of an openly gay man being seen as a leader of the alt-right movement was pointed out, Yiannopoulos said that the worst people on the far left and far right all hate me.

Retorted Wilmore: I think youre leaving out a lot of people.

Nance added an expletive when the Breitbart editor said he had no problems with the issue of President Donald Trump and ties to Russian, profanely dismissing him because he was not an American. Yiannopoulos is British.

It stopped there. Kingston declined a chance to be the third panelist to swear at Yiannopoulos.

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Sparks fly over alt-right agitator on Maher's show - Leader-Telegram

Alt-Right: Pictures, Videos, Breaking News

I must confess -- I love reality TV. It's like junk food for the brain. When life gets too heavy, you've had a rough day and you just want to tune out, reality TV provides the perfect escape. I was really looking forward to the new show from Donald Trump, but it's just awful.

Farrah Alexander

Writer. Mama. Wife. Lover of nap time. Blogger at fortheloveofwineandcoffee.com

While Trump is delusional about voter fraud, he is a cunning opportunist. Moreover, his Machiavellian chief strategist and senior counselor, Steve Bannon, and the renowned political dirty trickster, Roger Stone, a longtime intimate, are masters of the art of propaganda.

Dr. Milton Mankoff

Sociologist and psychotherapist interested in world affairs, culture, media and human behavior.

For the extreme alt-right movement, Trump has arrived as its Oval Office savior, as the two sides team join forces to wage war on jihadists supposedly pouring across America's borders.

Presumably you've actually read the Lord of the Rings -- though from my experience, those who share your political affiliations aren't overly fond of books, except, perhaps, when throwing them on bonfires, or waving them in front of frenzied television crowds as examples of intellectual elitism.

Josh Schrei

writer, teacher, producer, traveler, activist

"Fear Makes People Stupid, So Let's Scare the Hell Out of 'Em" -- de facto RNC policy The first time I was in Whitefish was the last time the Falcons...

The chief strategist in the White House, a man who rallied a growing white nationalist movement behind Donald Trump, is now telling the news media to ...

The Milo Yiannopoulos show made a stop at the University of Washington in Seattle Friday night, the night of Minority-President Trumps inauguratio...

Bob Ostertag

Composer, Historian, Journalist, and Professor of Technocultural Studies and Music at UC Davis

White nationalist Richard Spencer was punched in the middle of a TV interview on inauguration day. Spencer Selvidge/Reuters Samuel Merrill, Ume Un...

The Conversation Global

The Conversation is a collaboration between editors and academics providing informed news analysis and commentary free to read and republish

Donald Trumps election has led to an upsurge in Alt-Right politics, characterizing a political ideology of far-right white nationalism. This artic...

Eli Erlick

Transgender Youth Activist, Writer, Public Speaker

Part of the purpose of art is to incite debate, even at the expense of offending people.

2017 - "Hold on tight and enjoy the ride." The refugee crisis: "Daesh, dashing, dashed." ...

It is the year 2017 and the social media rules. For many, this form of electronic or internet-based communications has become the principal source for...

In this era of dramatic, rampant, and incessant political change, predictions about the future can no longer be based either on conventional wisdom or...

Daniel Wagner

Managing Director of Risk Cooperative / Co-author of "Global Risk Agility and Decision Making".

By Claire Landsbaum Back in May, while addressing a crowd of supporters in Spokane, Washington, Donald Trump took time to lament the current state of...

The Cut

Combining the beauty of a high-end fashion magazine with the dynamic energy of the web

I see a lot of fear as we enter this new era. For all those activists and scholars, supporters and minorities, we must walk into this time with more awareness and attention to truth. We must wear this truth lovingly. Without this, we may win, but it will be temporary.

So black people are being killed for doing certain things, allow Outspeak to save your life.

Zac Thompson

Outspeak Editor - in partnership with The Huffington Post

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Alt-Right: Pictures, Videos, Breaking News

Alt-right website tries to weed out Jews from drug reform – The Times of Israel

NEW YORK Back in 1971, the father of the American War on Drugs drew a connection between Jews and cannabis.

You know its a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish, president Richard Nixon said. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them? I suppose its because most of them are psychiatrists.

Most Jews are not psychiatrists, of course, just as most marijuana law reform activists are not Jewish. Nixon, however, wasnt alone in calling Jews out for their involvement in cannabis policy.

An anti-Semitic article published by alt-right website The Daily Stormer in late November entitled Weed Kikes Attacking Jeff Sessions! denigrates a number of Jewish activists by name for opposing President Donald Trumps nomination of Jeff Sessions for US Attorney General, a position that directs federal drug law enforcement.

The Jews come at you from every angle. Here they are coming at you from the weed lmao [sic] angle, the article says. The marijuana legalization agenda is entirely Jew.

The Daily Stormer, recently ranked the USs top hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), took its name from Der Strmer, a Nazi newspaper started by Julius Streicher, who was later hanged for war crimes at Nuremberg. SPLC calls the website a malignant presence in the real world.

Andrew Anglin, who runs the Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, wearing a pro-Donald Trump hat after endorsing the Republican frontrunner. (Wikipedia/BFG101/CC BY SA-4.0)

The Daily Stormer article, one of many displays of anti-Semitism that seem to be gaining traction in America, doesnt merely attack Jews for being Jewish: The pretense of this article is that association with Jews is inherently a smear against the drug reform movement.

It sets a dangerous precedent, though its argument itself isnt very strong. The story names a prominent Jewish cannabis activist, Adam Eidinger from Washington, DC, who led protests against Sessions nomination, and later goes on to describe a cannabis-themed seder that took place in Portland, Oregon last year.

Perhaps the articles strongest or most accurate point is acknowledging a Jew group that considers legalizing drugs as part of the Jew agenda of Tikkun olam (fixing the world).

There are indeed many Jewish cannabis activists (and many Jewish psychiatrists). Including those interviewed for this article, many of these activists propose that drug policy reform really does align with Jewish values like tikkun olam and standing up against oppression.

The alt-right may be using anti-Semitism to discredit marijuana law reform and clearly the marijuana legalization agenda is not entirely Jew, as the article states, but Jewish morality does play a role for some of the Jewish activists who are motivated by social justice.

Sessions, who was recently confirmed as US attorney general, has been hostile toward cannabis and thinks marijuana law reform is a tragic mistake. He has said that good people dont smoke marijuana. According to 1986 Senate committee testimony, the former Alabama senator once said he thought the Ku Klux Klan were okay until learning that they smoked pot.

Sessions has also criticized former president Barack Obamas administration for not enforcing federal prohibition in the now 28 states that legalized medical or recreational marijuana.

Sen. Jeff Sessions arrives to testify at his confirmation hearing to be attorney general of the US before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 10, 2017, in Washington, DC. (AFP/Molly Riley)

With Sessions confirmation, drug policy reformers are worried he will undermine Americas fast-growing cannabis industry and progressive trend toward more lenient state policies.

Anti-Semitic slurs against Jewish people for being drug policy reformers is an attempt to delegitimize drug policy reform through anti-Semitism

To throw anti-Semitic slurs against Jewish people for being drug policy reformers is an attempt to delegitimize drug policy reform through anti-Semitism, says Eidinger, founder of DCMJ.org, which helped legalize cannabis in the city of Washington, DC. The Daily Stormer article features a photo of Eidinger holding a bong.

It gets scary when the most die-hard Trump partisans, who happen to be neo-Nazis, are coming after you, Eidinger says.

Customers buy products at the Harvest Medical Marijuana Dispensary in San Francisco, California, April 20, 2016. (AP/Haven Daley)

Jewish Manhattan Assembly member Richard Gottfried, who originally proposed New York States medical marijuana program, says tikkun olam inspired him to advocate for reform. He now fears medical marijuana patients will suffer if Sessions attacks state policies.

I have definitely noticed in my unscientific sampling that Jews tend to enjoy their ganja

My views on marijuana and all public issues have been strongly influenced by my upbringing, which included Jewish values focusing on justice and personal responsibility for promoting a better world for all, says Gottfried. Of course, Judaism is not alone in upholding the value of healing the world.

When, for example, African Americans are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for pot, despite comparable rates of use with the rest of the US, marijuana law reform often falls under the greater social justice umbrella.

Marijuana buds drying at a pot farm in Northern California. Recreational marijuana use is legal in eight states. (Madison Margolin/Times of Israel)

I think its interesting that many of us who work in drug policy reform are Jewish, and I have definitely noticed in my unscientific sampling that Jews tend to enjoy their ganja, says Natalie Ginsberg, policy and advocacy manager at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

Jews who are impacted by generations of trauma or who suffer from anxiety may gravitate towards cannabis as medicine, Ginsberg says.

Also, personally, both cannabis and Judaism have empowered me to question things and see the greater context, so I can see why neo-Nazis would feel especially threatened by the combination, says Ginsberg.

In a political atmosphere that marginalizes Muslims, Mexicans, and other minorities, Jews are acutely sensitive to being scapegoated, and drugs are a scapegoat for all sorts of problems, says Rick Doblin, executive director of MAPS.

When you have a whole cultural system built on throwing people in jail for drug use that in many cases is not harmful, but beneficial, you have a massive scapegoating problem going on, says Dobin.

The seder plate at LeOrs inaugural Cannabis Seder included a marijuana leaf. (photo credit: Alain Sylvestre Media)

Roy Kaufman, co-host of a cannabis seder in Portland, Oregon, and mentioned in the Daily Stormer article, finds common ground between Jewish tradition and drug policy. The Passover story is one of bondage to freedom, he says, just as ending prohibition takes people out of bondage and into personal freedom, to choose whats best for their health.

Meanwhile, Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), a nonprofit advocating for reform, draws a connection between prohibition and Nazi Germany, where his grandfather had perished.

Any time the majority thinks that it needs to impose its particular morality on the minority, not just for our sake but their sake, thats trouble, Nadelmann says in an interview.

While many American Jews are not as directly impacted by the War on Drugs as people of color, many nonetheless feel a responsibility to act on behalf of those who are, says Amanda Reiman, DPAs former marijuana law and policy manager.

What we need is a proliferation of people who are willing to fight and defend the rights of people, even if theyre not directly affected by [the War on Drugs], and thats whats under attack in that article, she says. The reason were involved in drug policy is because of tikkun olam.

Protesters wearing white sheets shout at Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) as he arrives for his confirmation hearing to be the US attorney general on January 10, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP)

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Alt-right website tries to weed out Jews from drug reform - The Times of Israel

PewDiePie: Alt-Right Nazi, Victim of Political Correctness, or Just an Idiot? – Reason (blog)

Aftonbladet/ZUMA Press/NewscomPewDiePie, the biggest Youtube star you've probably never heard of (especially if you're older than 30), just lost his Disney contracta source of millions of dollars in revenueover allegations of anti-Semitism.

It's an easy, even obvious, storyline for this season of Life as We Know It Right Now, given increasing awareness of the alt-right movement and its penchant for overt pro-Nazi displays. The kids are not alrightthey're flocking to their computers to share Pepe the frog memes and tell jokes about sending Jewish writers to the gas chambers. And on and on.

For many, PewDiePie's downfall will probably feel gratifying: yes, there are limits to how far this sort of behavior can progress. For others, his belated comeuppance is insufficient, and does nothing to address the toxicity of teenage (particularly white) male online culture. In a lengthy essay for BuzzFeed, writer Jacob Clifton laments "that 'edgelords,' the boys and men who group together online for the explicit proliferation of hate speech and misogyny, will almost inevitably keep pushing the line until they end up in a truly dark place."

"This is about understanding what lies beneath this dark side of the internet, and how to stop it," writes Clifton.

But Clifton's essay makes little effort to understand the phenomenon he's describing. And he offers absolutely no advice for how to stop it. Here's how his article ends:

PewDiePie is a symptom of a majority illness, but because he accidentally got rich, we seem content to let the buck stop with him. His downfall feels anti-capitalist, it feels nonconformist, it makes us feel all the things we love to feel when trying to prove we're better than. But the truth is that the soil this stuff grows in is the reality of our country and world, and we will go on encouraging this behavior, and these thoughts, until they bear their fruit.

The reason for that is terrible, and quite simple: because the whiny self-importance and self-indulgence of white male rage from Gamergate to Anonymous, WikiLeaks to the Fappening, all the proliferating forms of alt-right confusion and rage you couldn't possibly discern from that of even the least radical right is so repugnant that it's nearly impossible to see through. But we won't heal, and they won't heal, if we don't try. Their pain is pathetic, but watch how it spreads.

The reason Clifton doesn't actually offer a solution to this problem is probably because there isn't one: it's just so much broader, and more permanent, than Clifton notes here. Young men have always acted out in unpredictable and frustrating ways: the alt-right is just the current manifestation of "white male rage."

That's not an excuseI'm not saying boys will be boys as if it isn't a problem, because sometimes it is. Rather, I'm saying that boys doing stupid, irksome things has always been a problem. We don't really have any evidence that the problem is getting more substantialand I'd have a hard time believing that the average white male between the ages of 15 and 25 is worse behaved now than he was 50 years ago, given the decline in violence and crime in generalbut we're paying more attention to it now because it's chosen the form of an easy political narrative: ahhh, look at all the Nazi kids who love Trump!

When I was in high school, other boys loved to draw penises on everything. It's a weird fact, but there it is. If you left your notebook unsupervised, even for a moment, you would soon find it covered in dicks. Why a bunch of teenage boysall of whom insisted, loudly and frequently, that they weren't gaywould enjoy drawing pictures of the male reproductive organ mystified me at the time, as it still does today.

Teenage boys are probably still drawing dicks, but they're also writing #MAGA and Build the Wall and creating Pepe memes. Teachers call it the Trump effect, as if young men were perfectly well-behaved until Trump came along. Again, we don't know that bullying has gotten worse, and to the extent we can measure it, schoolyard bullying seems to be falling over time, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

It's true that a certain kind of bullyingthe anti-Semitic, pro-Trump, alt-right kindis more noticeable than it was before. We probably shouldn't discount the possible political implications of this. It would be wrong, of course, to pretend that white nationalism isn't making any sort of comeback. But we also shouldn't pretend that the kids are doomed because they currently prefer a different kind of sick humor than they used to. Again, teenagers were always laughing at incredibly inappropriate thingsthat thing just happens to be PewDiePie's awful jokes, at the moment.

This was, essentially, the defense offered by PewDiePiereal name Felix Kjellberg, who made $15 million last year saying dumb things on the internet. Kjellberg is a blond-haired blue-eyed Swede, but as far as I can tell, he's not actually an anti-Semite, Trump supporter, alt-right, member, or Breitbart contributor. He landed himself in hot water because, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, he made as many as nine anti-Semitic jokes in his videos.

The following example is illustrative. There are online services that allow you to pay random people halfway around the world to do or say whatever you want. PewDiePie decided to test one of these services outlong story short, two tribal-looking fellows unfurled a banner that read "Death to All Jews" as PewDiePie exclaims "I didn't think they would actually do it." He recorded both thingsthe incident, and his own reactionand posted in on Youtube.

Funny? Not really. Offensive? Sure. Evidence of deep-seated anti-Semitic animus? Well, that might be a stretch. Here's how PewDiePie defended himself:

Mr. Kjellberg defended himself from criticism in a Jan. 17 video, saying "I think there's a difference between a joke and actual like... death to all Jews. If I made a video saying"Mr. Kjellberg then quickly cuts to a close-up of his face illuminated brightly"Hey guys, PewDiePie here. Death to all Jews, I want you to say after me: Death to all Jews. And, you know, Hitler was right. I really opened my eyes to white power. And I think it is time we did something about this." The video then zooms back out and he adds: "That is how they're essentially reporting this, as if that's what I was saying."

One gathers, if you believe PewDiePie's explanation, that he could have used any edgy statement, like "Bush did 9/11." Why can't anyone take a joke anymore? is the underlying theme.

I'm reminded of the most recent season of South Park (spoilers to follow). One of its main plots involved Gerald Broflovski being unmasked as an internet troll. He enjoys shrieking at people online, telling them to kill themselves, and photoshopping penises over their faces. Why? Because it's funny, he claims. Later, when other trolls try to recruit him into their group, he insists he isn't one of them. What they do to people is horrible and stupidhe's not like them at all. What Gerald does is funny, he claims. Still later, when the villain of the season attempts to troll the entire U.S., Gerald challenges him. Join me, the villain offers Gerald, and together we will troll the world. But Gerald is horrified by the villain's plans and kills him. "Fuck you," Gerald says. "What I do is fucking funny, bitch."

This gagGerald insisting that his actions are fundamentally different because his horrible trolling is funnyperfectly encapsulates the teenage male attitude, and PewDiePie's humor. Stupid, random, shitty things are selectively funny to kids, and always have been. There's no ideology here beyond typical teen nastiness.

Disney, of course, is well within its rights to can PewDiePie for any reasonand not wanting to be associated with Nazi humor is a reason I support. It is not censorship when one private actor refuses to endorse or fund the speech of another private actor. It's just business. We shouldn't treat Kjellberg like a victimof political correctness, or of anything else. Even without Disney and Youtube, he's still a 28-year-old millionaire with a sizeable audience. He can clean up his act and try again.

Nor should we forget the fact that the White House is currently occupied by someone whose foremost advisor was the boss of an online media hub that deliberately and successfully catered to an alt-right audience. I share some of Clifton's concern that "the whiny self-importance and self-indulgence of white male rage" has taken a particularly pernicious form at the moment. But I wouldn't be surprised if it fizzles out on its own and the kids go back to drawing dicks.

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PewDiePie: Alt-Right Nazi, Victim of Political Correctness, or Just an Idiot? - Reason (blog)