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Donald Trump with aide Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of the far-right website Breitbart. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

A rightwing network of British bloggers and social media activists has emerged as an increasingly influential voice for white nationalists and for those who oppose multiculturalism. The network is also credited with helping propel Donald Trump to the presidency, a new report has claimed.

In its annual audit of the far right, Hope not Hate, the UKs largest anti-racism and anti-extremism movement, said that although conventional far right groups such as the English Defence League continue to fracture, new forces have surfaced that can reach a vast international audience and bolster support for the alt-right, which is defined as the far right with a fringe white nationalist element that opposes multiculturalism and defends western values.

Analysis of the global far right network during 2016 a year that witnessed Brexit and a marked populist resurgence throughout Europe and the US identified 28 far right groups active in the UK but also named a cohort of Britons that it said were instrumental in propagating alt-right views and masterminding attacks on liberal democracy.

It was a year where a new far right threat became more evident, one that played out largely on social media and to an international audience, the report states. It is a threat that has been at the heart of the global fake news phenomenon and one that can engage and mobilise far greater numbers of people across Europe and north America.

An example of these activities is provided by London-based Paul Watson, described as editor, staff writer for the conspiracy website InfoWars whose most popular article on Friday morning was headlined: Trump destroys leftist judges. Watson, who has 483,000 Twitter followers and 764,872 subscribers on YouTube, is named as a central disseminator of the conspiracy theory concerning Hillary Clinton having debilitating health issues in the runup to the US election, including the Is Hillary Dying? hoax.

During a series of unashamedly conspiratorial videos that were viewed millions of times, Watson, originally from Sheffield, suggested Clinton might have had syphilis, brain damage and Parkinsons disease as well as alleging she was a drug abuser. Watsons conspiracy theories were also taken up by Fox News, the right-leaning US broadcaster.

Another Briton said to have had an influential intervention in the US elections is 52-year-old Jim Dowson, a Scottish Calvinist who founded the far right, anti-Muslim party Britain First. Dowson, from a hub in Hungary, set up a network of US-focused websites and Facebook groups with the intention of promoting Trump and denigrating his rival during the US election.

Dowsons websites include Patriot News Agency whose postings have been viewed and shared tens of thousands of times in the US and whose articles on Friday include a critique of a new Netflix series which it accused of stoking anti-white racism. An investigation by the New York Times in December claimed that although a sizeable volume of US election fake news emanated from central and Eastern Europe, Dowsons operation was the only obviously politically inspired intervention.

Among the increasingly internationalised far right movement, Dowson is considered adept at building an online fanbase, managing to attract 1.4 million Facebook followers to Britain First. Dowson himself has described his strategy as spreading devastating anti-Clinton, pro-Trump memes and sound bites into sections of the population too disillusioned with politics to have taken any notice of conventional campaigning.

According to Hope not Hates report, Dowson spent much of 2016 building an international network of far right parties, militia groups and religious extremists. His anti-immigrant group Knights Templar International opened a branch in Budapest, Hungary, where former BNP leader Nick Griffin was witnessed as a frequent visitor along with known far right faces from Sweden and the US.

Hope not hate expects Dowsons influence to grow this year as he fosters relationships with Russia and far-right agitators in Europe and the US. A recent Dowson alliance involves Aleksandr Dugin, a facist with alleged links to the Kremlin and who is understood to be helping Dowson construct a new office in the Serb capital Belgrade that will promote far right news sites entirely in Cyrillic script.

Nick Lowles, chief executive of Hope Not Hate, said: The fact that a young man sitting in a small flat in south London can create headlines in the US or a British extremist can use the Hungarian capital as a base to influence politics in central, eastern and southern Europe makes monitoring and countering these groups very difficult.

Another Briton named as a highly effective voice for the far right, even though he has attempted to distance himself from the movement, is Milo Yiannopoulos, technology editor of Breitbart News, the US website which claimed to have 45 million unique readers in the weeks up to and during the aftermath of Trumps election.

The former executive chairman of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, is now Trumps chief strategist, a man promoted to the National Security Council and who Time magazine referred to last week as possibly the second most powerful man in the world. In a speech to a conference at the Vatican in 2014, Bannon made it a political objective to undermine liberal democracy in Western Europe through the advancement of nationalist movements.

Yiannopoulos, banned from Twitter in July for inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others, reportedly recently signed a 200,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster. The 33-year-old from Kent, recently defended by Trump as a symbol of free speech after demonstrators violently protested against his planned speech at the University of California, Berkeley, has more than 525,000 fans on YouTube.

Other key British figures include vlogger Colin Robertson, who produces white supremacist YouTube videos from his parents home in West Lothian, Scotland. Despite such humble surroundings, Robertson was invited to speak at the notorious far right rally in Washington DC last November that was organised by nationalist thinktank the National Policy Institute (NPI), and where crowds chanted Hail Trump and made Nazi salutes.

The 34-year-old also spoke at an inaugural meeting last year of the rightwing Seattle Forum, a branch of a UK network which, according to Hope not Hate, is expanding rapidly. The London Forum held five meetings last year, the latest in September, with speakers including Holocaust denier David Irving and US far right writer F Roger Devlin who contributes to the white nationalist journal Occidental Quarterly. Other Britons who addressed the NPI event in Washington included Matthew Tait, a former British National Party organiser who organised a series of alt-right socials in Holborn, London, at the end of last year.

Another development was the governments decision to proscribe the neo-nazi group National Action as a terrorist organisation. Supporters of the group celebrated the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox who was killed last June by rightwing extremist Thomas Mair, 53. The authorities are understood to have intelligence that some of its senior activists were trying to encourage younger recruits to conduct acts of terrorism and were required to place antisemitic stickers on Jewish buildings and neighbourhoods as part of their initiation.

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How Britain's extremist bloggers helped the 'alt-right' go global - The Guardian

A rallying cry adopted by For Honor players may sound familiar to those well-versed in the conservative political landscape. Deus vult, a phrase thats become popular with the multiplayer games community, may have origins in 11th-century Europe, but its more recently been associated with the alt-right movement.

Deus vult is Latin for God wills it, which became a stirring declaration for the Crusaders. It concluded a speech made by Pope Urban II, calling defenders of Christianity to action in the fight to win back their Holy Land from its Muslim occupants. It became symbolic not just of pride in the Christian state, but in Western culture as a whole.

The religious, historical nature of the phrase is obvious and inextricable, and thats what accounts for its use by the community of games like For Honor. The action fighting game is set in medieval times, with players choosing between knights, samurai and vikings. In keeping with the time period, players who choose the knight class can often be found cheering Deus vult!

The phrase is a major meme in the For Honor community, and it appears to be recycled from older medieval times-based games. That includes Crusader Kings, which had an expansion called Deus Vult; the phrase also appeared in its sequel. Its used by recent beta testers in a plethora of threads on the subreddit and official For Honor forum. There are jokes about the meme and how common it is, but more often than not, players just post it as a rallying cry much like how it was originally intended.

Very important day tomorrow..

FOR HONOR BETA FUCK YES. KNIGHTS KNIGHTS KNIGHTS KNIGHTS KNIGHTS KNIGHTS KNIGHTS KNIGHTS KNIGHTS DEUS VULT!

Despite the lighthearted use of the phrase by the For Honor community, rooted in pre-existing video game culture, the alt-right had resurfaced the age-old battle cry months earlier for more sinister purposes.

Members of the alt-right movement, which propagates racist, misogynistic, xenophobic and other hateful ideologies, co-opted Deus vult for its purposes during the 2016 election season. The group turned the phrase into a hashtag that accompanied its political tweets, and reports of it graffitied in public places followed.

Ishaan Tharoor of the Washington Post wrote last November of why the alt-right, and particularly supporters of then-President elect Donald Trump, was so drawn to Deus vult as a symbol of Judeo-Christian pride.

Both Trump and those in the seething online churn of the alt-right a catchall term for a coterie of neo-fascists, white supremacists, ethno-populists, anti-feminists and other far-right extremists who cheered Trump's electoral victory on Nov. 8 also embrace a clash of civilizations, he wrote. The president-elect signaled as much in a major foreign policy speech in April, when he rejected the idea of universal values and trumpeted the promotion of Western civilization.

The alt-rights memeification of Deus vult is just one part of whats seen as the groups larger obsession with anti-Islamic discourse and medieval imagery. While this connection has been debated some argue that the phrases popularity is only attributable to Crusader Kings the prevalent understanding is that Deus vult in the alt-right context is just another code word for hate-mongering. (Its also another example of the movement re-appropriating iconography for its purposes. Refer to the history of the Pepe the frog meme for more on that.)

The current surge of Deus Vult does not seem to be part of [Crusader Kings], but part of a growing hatred for islamification, proved by simply reading the comments that come with that phrase, explained one Redditor to another asking about the phrases proliferation last October.

In the case of For Honor, Deus vult is just a phrase used by the community without any political associations. (Weve contacted Ubisoft for comment and will update if we hear back.) The meme, too, is divorced from the alt-right movement. Instead, its just one uncomfortable way that the games burgeoning community intersects with one of the internets most incendiary.

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For Honor's accidental alt-right connection - Polygon

People say left-wingers are touchy. But it only took a 30-second teaser for Netflixs new show Dear White People to get alt-right viewers to cancel their subscriptions.

And judging from some misreadings of the clip, many didnt even give it the full 30 seconds.

Were not just talking about easily-swayed Twitter sheep. The knee-jerking extended to the more cultured spokesmen of the movement with 100k+ followers.

Considering the alt-right are winning the culture wars at the moment their man is in the White House and liberal America is licking its wounds why are they so thin-skinned?

One-time Buzzfeed writer Tim Treadstone, aka @BakedAlaska claimed that the anti-white show promotes white genocide, and created the #NoNetflix boycott hashtag, which has been trending for two days.

But he has since claimed that it is Dear White People director Justin Simien who is shutting down debate:

Really? Theres a difference in loudness between simply not watching a show, even blocking one person on Twitter, and ditching a whole network.

As well as throwing the baby out with the bathwater, this is the definition of shutting down debate.

Which is odd, considering alt-right criticisms of liberals center on their oversensitivity and propensity to take things out of context. Youve got your eager-for-a-fight SJWs; fragile snowflakes who cant stand the heat, people who cant take a joke. More often than not, just sore losers.

But whats worse than a sore loser? A sore winner.

If people on the alt-right had stayed for the full 30 seconds of the Dear White People teaser, they might have seen that it presents a critique.

Going even further back, you might discover that the 2014 movie on which the show is based critiques people of all leanings. It lampoons privileged racism, and those who think it no longer exists but also takes on overzealous activists and people who are lukewarm about standing up for what they believe.

At the very start, one character calls in to the main character Samantha Whites radio show and asks whether it would be okay if he had one called Dear Black People. The question is debated. Everyone gets it from all sides, and this changes their outlook.

It is a film about the act of debate, self-criticism and re-evaluation. But it seems in our era of anti-intellectualism, any attempt to educate oneself or someone else is frowned upon.

The alt-right position themselves as provocateurs, but dont know how to respond to criticism.

Their political representative, President Trump, doesnt believe in climate change and so has cut funding to research into establishing whether it is a thing or not. His press secretary Sean Spicer told a room full of journalists to stop criticising his administration the day after the inauguration.

The truth is, the alt-right attracts the thin-skinned.

I mean, you have to be quick to take offence in order to wilfully misread black lives matter as black lives matter more; to think that voicing how its not okay to shoot a black person on sight is itself a racially motivated attack, or, in the case of Tomi Lahren who hates whiners as bad as systematic lynchings by the KKK.

In the case of Dear White People, the argument is this:that outlining the ways in which people have been racist in the past and in the present is itself racist against racists.

Do you follow? No? Thats because its bollocks.

The alt-right have always been thin-skinned but we just hadnt seen it. Not too long ago they were outliers with nothing to lose. They didnt have to justify themselves because nobody paid them enough heed to challenge them. Now they are a dominant political voice, but havent developed the diplomacy that comes with having to satisfy everyones gripes.

Dear White People director Justin Simien responded to the backlash in a Facebook post (which he later deleted): I feel strangely encouraged. To see the sheer threat that people feel over a date announcement video featuring a woman of color (politely) asking not to be mocked makes it so clear why I made this show.

Now there has been a backlash to the backlash. Some outlets have begun endorsing the show. The heat has lead to people who might not have seen the original film looking it up on Netflix.

It even inspired someone to coin the phrase broflake to needlealt-right guys who are nonetheless hypersensitive. In the end, the jokes on them.

See the article here:
The Alt-Right Are Winning. So Why Are They So Thin-Skinned? - Heat Street

Yesterday, Netflix premiered the trailer for Dear White People, a series based on a film that was released in 2014 and doesnt seem to have made much of an impact on the worlds supply of white people. But since the online communities who like to call people sensitive snowflakes are also big into projection, trollish alt-right types who frequent 4chans /pol/ board and Reddits r/the_donald (where else?) are freaking the fuck out about the trailer, calling for white people to #BoycottNetflix over the companys brazen act of anti-white discrimination and white genocide, i.e., acknowledging the existence of people of color in its customer base.

Like most right-wing boycotts, the only ones who are being punished here are the boycotters themselves, who now will never know how The Santa Clarita Diet ends. And Netflix makes a point of not releasing ratings for its shows, so even if the boycott does make an impact (it wontthe company added 1.45 million subscribers in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2016, and has more than 93 million subscribers worldwide, so it couldnt give less of a fuck about a handful of easily offended white people), Netflixs stock wouldnt be affected either way.

If youve been keeping track, this now means that white supremacists can no longer drink Coke, Pepsi, or Budweiser (or Budwiser, as they spell it), eat Oreos, go to Starbucks, watch Star Wars movies, or binge on Netflix. Oh well, more bandwidth and corn syrup for the rest of us.

[via Gizmodo]

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Alt-Right trolls boycott Netflix because they're scared of Dear White People - A.V. Club

BTW

AmidDonald Trumps mercurial ascent into presidency, internet fans have created a puzzling musical movement, "Trumpwave."

According to knowyourmeme, the originating movement is called fashwave. It takes elements of glitchy, internet-spawned electronic musicvaporwave and synthwave, mostlyand adds references to Trump via '80s yuppy-inspired artwork.

BuzzFeed's Reggie Ugwu wrote about fashwave as:

Now, Trump branding is leading the musical releases.

Andrew Anglin, from white supremacist website Daily Stormer, called itthe official soundtrack of the alt-right. (The alt-right is a loosely organized white supremacist online movement.)

The forms of music associated with previous White Nationalist movements, various forms of rock music, are pretty dated, explains Anglin. In the end, the solution to this problem had been staring me in the face all along. The Whitest music ever: Synthwave.

Its become a serious issue among vaporwave artists, to the point that an emergency summit was called last year to mitigate the scenes creeping fascism.

The banality of the comments in these videos alone is mortifying. But luckily the music sucks.

H/T Thump

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'Trumpwave' emerges as the alt-right's meme-heavy soundtrack - The Daily Dot