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Brooklyn-based Utopia has picked up worldwide sales rights to Hayley Garrigus You Cant Kill Meme, a documentary feature which drills down on the political meme warfare enshrined by Donald Trumps presidential victory in 2016.

The acquisition comes just ahead of the films world premiere at Montreals Fantasia Film Festival this month. An on demand release in North America is planned for this fall, Utopia announced Monday.

You Cant Kill Meme explores the rise of political meme instrumentation, anticipated by a 2004 visionary non-fiction book by R. Kirk Packwood called Memetic Magic: Manipulation of the Root Social Matrix and the Fabric of Reality.

The film sees Garrigus interview Packwood and other figures in the meme magic world to trace the emergence of figures such as Pepe the Frog, originally a comic book slacker, and Kek, an Egyptian deity of darkness before dawn, in order to understand their centrality for alt-right advocacy. You Cant Kill Meme argues that these memes delivers an inside joke, triggers an emotional reaction and creates a sense of belonging.

What was learned in 2016 has now become standard practice, director-cinematographer Garrigus says in voiceover.

Alternating interviews with personal details about Garrigus research, the doc also studies a moment of meme magic when alt-right assertions about Hilary Clintons health condition transformed into a dominant political narrative. The assertion helped move the dial on voters intentions and meme Trump into power, according to the doc.

Packwood explains the emotional origins of meme culture in a sense of social inadequacy. You want to introduce some form of chaos to break down social hierarchy, he argues. Other interviewers are Billy el Brujo, a white-paint faced internet meme magic worker, and Las Vegas lightworker Carole Michaella.

Through conspiracy and confrontation, You Cant Kill Meme offers nuance in our cultural assumptions about meme culture, said Danielle DiGiacomo, head of content at Utopia. Utopia is ecstatic to transfix viewers with the films unraveling of modern-day internet communication, whose real-world implications are often oversimplified.

You Cant Kill Meme is produced by Samuel Gursky, Kerry Mack and Michael Beuttler, and edited by Beuttler and Garrigus, who spent three years working on the film. Its original music is composed by Tom Moore and Michael Beuttler.

Co-founded byRobert Schwartzman, Utopia is a sales and distribution company known for feature films includingEmma SeligmansToronto 2020 standout Shiva Baby, and Annabelle Attanasios 2019 SXSW hit Mickey and the Bear.

Upcoming Utopia releases include Sundance and New Directors/New Films 2021 selections El Planeta and Were All Going To The Worlds Fair; Dasha Nekrasovas Berlinale premiere The Scary of Sixty-First, in partnership with Shudder; and the Dash Snow documentary Moments Like This Never Last from Cheryl Dunn and Vice Studios.

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Alt-Right Meme Culture Documentary You Cant Kill Meme Swooped on by Utopia (EXCLUSIVE) - Variety

As we view and read unending news stories about the devastation wrought by climate change (wildfires, historic flooding, super-heated waters killing fish, record heat waves all over the world), its worth noting that the State of Illinois recently missed an historic opportunity to cut pollution that is a major cause of this problem.

Climate scientists the world over are saying that we must reduce carbon pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels that power our heating, cooling and transportation sectors. Renewable sources of energy are available right now that would reduce pollution and improve public health, but clean energy legislation that would have helped us reduce our reliance on dirty fossil fuels recently failed to pass the Illinois State legislature. How could we have missed this opportunity to clean our environment?

SEND LETTERS TO: letters@suntimes.com. Please include your neighborhood or hometown and a phone number for verification purposes. Letters should be approximately 350 words or less.

Supporters of dirty fossil fuels say we need a balanced approach to energy policy. The truth is that the Illinois power grid is out of balance now. Clean renewable energy only accounts for 8 to 10% of Illinois energy production. This percentage is woefully inadequate and shows that we are failing to live up to our responsibility to give future generations healthy air to breath. If we are to be responsible stewards of our environment, we must pass legislation that insures we use more clean, renewable energy (solar and wind) to power our state. Failure to do so is to make a future clean up much more difficult for our children and grandchildren.

The Illinois state legislature must act as soon as possible to pass clean energy legislation that will create good jobs and clean our air and water.

Mark Kraemer, Wilmette

As a frequent reporter of incidents to the Chicago Police Departments TipSubmit website (new.tipsubmit.com), Im frequently disappointed because nothing seems to get done. Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police Supt. David Brown seem to agree with what Brown said earlier this week, that the police cant solve crimes alone and need the public to work with us.

Yes, as reported on June 18 in the Sun-Times, the city for years sought security fixes at home where eight people recently were shot, ut nothing was done.

I can assure you this was not the only time a house was reported to the police for criminal activity and nothing was done. Though the narrative from City Hall is that residents dont report problem locations, thats certainly not the case in all situations. The four murders at that house might have been avoided had reports to the police actually been acted upon.

Michael Pearson, Englewood

All public schools require multiple vaccinations when registering children for classes. This is for the sake of protecting all children. If you dont feel your child should have to comply, send them to a private school. Its that simple.

Edwina Jackson, Washington Heights

Why does the media describe the ultra-right or alt-right as conservatives? What do they conserve? They certainly arent interested in conserving civil rights, human rights or our planet.

When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joked about hitting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a gavel, he was not being conservative; he was pandering to his base, the Republican Partys motley crew of far-rightists, white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-fascists and advocates of violence. All those people whom the previous occupant of the White House helped his party solidify.

They should be described as far-right, ultra-right, or alt-right definitely not as conservatives.

Muriel Balla, Hyde Park

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Pass legislation that insures we use more wind and solar energy to power Illinois | Letters - Chicago Sun-Times

Neo-fascist fraternities that glorify violence and cater to bigots of all stripes have no place in Portland. Despite that fact, a local Proud Boys chapter has been meeting on a monthly basis at Mathews, a dive bar at 133 Free St.

A recent article in the Mainer (formerly the Bollard) by Chris Busby sheds light on the issue through an interview with former Mathews bartender Pat Hogan.

Hogan is a hero for refusing to serve these fascists, and for sounding the alarm about their organizing and recruiting activities. He lost his job over it, but he did the right thing. Mathews, on the other hand, deserves a general boycott by any self-respecting Portlander for continuing to serve as a meeting place for an alt-right hate group. In doing so, Mathews immediately put at risk any marginalized person living or working nearby, as the Proud Boys have a well-documented history of violently assaulting minorities.

The Canadian government has designated them as a domestic terrorist organization, and the U.S. Department of Justice has already begun prosecuting multiple Proud Boys members for their roles in the Capitol insurrection.

It is not hyperbolic to call them what they are: fascists, sympathizers and apologists. I hope our community can come together and confront far-right radicalism wherever it might rear its ugly head. And we should duly punish local businesses that provide space and resources for their dangerous activities.

If Mathews continues to host a far-right, violent gang, than why shouldnt the city of Portland revoke their liquor license?

Madison RaymondPortland

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Letter to the editor: Portlanders should boycott bar that's site for hate group meetings - pressherald.com

When people act like jerks on social media, one permanent response is to ban them from posting again. Take away the digital megaphone, the theory goes, and the hurtful or dishonest messages from those troublemakers wont post a problem there anymore.

What happens after that, though? Where do those who have been deplatformed go, and how does it affect their behavior in future?

Assistant Professor Jeremy Blackburn, Department of Computer Science, Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen.

An international team of researchers including Assistant Professor Jeremy Blackburn and PhD candidate Esraa Aldreabi from the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Department of Computer Science explores those questions in a new study called Understanding the Effect of Deplatforming on Social Networks.

The research performed by iDRAMA Lab collaborators at Binghamton University, Boston University, University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany was presented in June at the 2021 ACM Web Science conference.

Researchers developed a method to identify accounts belonging to the same person on different platforms and found that being banned on Reddit or Twitter led those users to join alternate platforms such as Gab or Parler where the content moderation is more lax.

Also among the findings is that, although users who move to those smaller platforms have a potentially reduced audience, they exhibit an increased level of activity and toxicity than they did previously.

You cant just ban these people and say, Hey, it worked. They dont disappear, Blackburn said. They go off into other places. It does have a positive effect on the original platform, but theres also some degree of amplification or worsening of this type of behavior elsewhere.

More about Blackburn

The deplatforming study collected 29 million posts from Gab, which launched in 2016 and currently has around 4 million users. Gab is known for its far-right base of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, anti-Semites and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Using a combination of machine learning and human labeling, researchers cross-referenced profile names and content with users that had been active on Twitter and Reddit but were suspended. Many who are deplatformed reuse the same profile name or user info on a different platform for continuity and recognizability with their followers.

Just because two people have the same name or username, thats not a guarantee, Blackburn said. There was a pretty big process of going through creating a ground truth data set, where we had a human say, These have to be the same people because of this reason and that reason. That allows us to scale things up by throwing it into a machine learning classifier [program] that will learn the characteristics to watch for.

The process was not unlike how scholars determine the identity of authors for unattributed or pseudonymous works, checking for style, syntax and subject matter, he added.

In the dataset analyzed for this study, about 59% of Twitter users (1,152 out of 1,961) created Gab accounts after their last active time on Twitter, presumably after their account was suspended. For Reddit, about 76% (3,958 out of 5,216) of suspended users created Gab accounts after their last post on Reddit.

Comparing content from the same users on Twitter and Reddit versus Gab, users tend to become more toxic when they are suspended from a platform and are forced to move to another platform. They also become more active, increasing the frequency of posts.

At the same time, the audience for Gab users content is curtailed by the reduced size of the platform compared to the millions of users on Twitter and Reddit. This might be seen as a good thing, but Blackburn cautioned that much of the planning for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol happened on Parler, a platform similar to Gab with a smaller user base that skews to the alt-right and far-right.

Reducing reach probably is a good thing, but reach can be easily misinterpreted. Just because someone has 100,000 followers doesnt mean theyre all followers in the real world, he said.

The hardcore group, maybe the group that were most concerned about, are the ones that probably stick with someone if they move elsewhere online. If by reducing that reach, you increase the intensity that the people who stay around are exposed to, its like a quality versus quantity type of question. Is it worse to have more people seeing this stuff? Or is it worse to have more extreme stuff being produced for fewer people?

A separate study, A Large Open Dataset from the Parler Social Network, also included Blackburn among researchers from New York University, the University of Illinois, University College London, Boston University and the Max Planck Institute.

Presented at the AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media last month, it analyzed 183 million Parler posts made by 4 million users between August 2018 and January 2021, as well as metadata from 13.25 million user profiles. The data confirm that users on Parler which briefly shut down and was taken off of Apple and Google app stores in response to the Capitol riot overwhelmingly supported President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again agenda.

Regardless of what Parler might have said, publicly or not, it was very clearly white, right-wing, Christian Trump supporters, Blackburn said. Again, unsurprisingly, it got its largest boost right at the 2020 election up to a million users joining. Then around the attack at the Capitol, there was another big bump in users. What we can see is that it was very clearly being used as an organization tool for the insurrection.

So if banning users is not the right answer, what is? Reddit admins, for example, have a shadow-banning capability that allows troublesome users to think theyre still posting on the site, except no one else can see them. During the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter added content moderation labels to tweets that deliberately spread disinformation.

Blackburn is unsure about all the moderation tools that social media platforms have available, but he thinks there need to be more socio-technical solutions to socio-technical problems rather than just outright banning.

Society is now fairly firmly saying that we cannot ignore this stuff we cant just use the easy outs anymore, he said. We need to come up with some more creative ideas to not get rid of people, but hopefully push them in a positive direction or at least make sure that everybody is aware of who that person is. Somewhere in between just unfettered access and banning everybody is probably the right solution.

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Study shows users banned from social platforms go elsewhere with increased toxicity | Binghamton News - Binghamton University

Mr. Regnery attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied political science and joined the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative student organization co-founded by Mr. Buckley. He left before graduating to work on Senator Barry Goldwaters 1964 presidential campaign.

In the 2017 interview with Buzzfeed, one of the few times he spoke to the news media, he claimed that his efforts on behalf of Mr. Goldwater included what he called Operation Dewdrop, in which he attempted to deter Democratic voters in Philadelphia by hiring a plane to seed the skies with dry ice, in the hopes of making it rain. He failed though, he recalled, he burned his fingers on the ultracold dry ice containers.

Mr. Regnery later returned to Chicago, where he worked for Joanna-Western Mills. He became the companys president in 1980 but was ousted a year later, after several quarters of poor financial performance. According to his own account, he spent the rest of his career in a variety of businesses, while also dabbling in Illinois politics.

In his memoir, he recounted how he first began to turn against the Republican Party after listening to a speech in 1993 in which the economist Milton Friedman declared that the end of the Cold War meant that the free-market economic doctrines of the Reagan era had won. In an early sign of that break, according to a 2017 profile in Mother Jones, Mr. Regnery ran unsuccessfully for Illinois secretary of state in 1994 on the Term Limits and Tax Limits Party ticket.

Five years later, he convened a Whos Who of white supremacists for a conference in Florida, where he delivered a speech, For Our Childrens Children, in which he said the only way to save Americas white identity was for it to break up into several smaller countries, one each for the countrys various ethnic groups.

His racism grew more explicit. He announced plans in 2004 to start a whites-only dating site. It never happened, but he continued to worry that white people were in danger of extinction: In 2006 he delivered a speech in Chicago in which he said, The white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity.

By then he had severed most of his ties with mainstream Republicans, and they with him. That same year the leadership of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which he had joined in college, removed him from its board.

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William H. Regnery II, 80, Dies; Bankrolled the Rise of the Alt-Right - The New York Times