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White nationalist group the Dominion Movement said it was on "hiatus" after the Christchurch mosque shootings on Friday March 15, 2019.

A soldier charged with sharing military information that threatened New Zealand's security was leading a growing white nationalist movement.

The 27-year-old soldier, who has name suppression, was arrested in December at Linton Military Camp in circumstances that were shroudedin secrecy.

The man had been planning a trip to Russia for ChristmasStuffrevealed at the time. He is now being supervised by the Defence Force while awaiting a military court trial.

He is charged with accessing a computer system for a dishonest purpose and for disclosing information that prejudiced the security or defence of New Zealand. It is not known who he supplied the information to.

READ MORE:*Soldier with far-right links accused of disclosing military information*Arrested New Zealand soldier with far-right ties was questioned after March 15 attacks*The 'growing' white nationalist group with a 'harmful and violent' ideology*What is known about theidentitarianmovement backed by the Christchurch shooting accused*Austria considers dissolving far-right group amid Christchurch shooting link probe

Stuff has confirmed the soldier was behind an online profile namedJohannWolfe, a self-described co-founder of the white nationalist group the 'Dominion Movement', which subscribed to the sameidentitarianpolitics as the March 15 terror suspect.

DEFENCE FORCE/SUPPLIED

A New Zealand soldier who allegedly distributed stolen military information was a co-founder of far-right group the Dominion Movement.

The group shut down its internet presence in the hours after the Christchurch mosque attacks, but a seemingly identical group - 'Action Zealandia' - has since emerged and earlier this month vandalised signage at a National Party office in Auckland.

The soldier was also questioned by police after March 15, Stuff has previously reported.

The soldier, under the pseudonym, was interviewed by the Australian alt-right podcast station The Convict Report produced by white nationalist group The Dingoes which also shut down afterthe March 15 attack.

A source close to the soldier has confirmed to Stuff the soldier is the person named JohannWolfe in the podcast interview.

Those close to the soldier weredevastated after listening to the content of the interview, according to the source.

"It's heartbreaking listening to this. I know his family, this is not how he was raised," they said.

The soldier told the interviewers of their success at gaining new recruits for the white nationalist group.

"We're getting a reputation. We have a well-fostered public image of being well-natured and well-intentioned," he said.

"We focus on the positives rather than the negatives: the love of our own culture and our own heritage, instead of what we hate about other races - which is an easy trap to fall into."

He describes his own entry to the far-right ideology, saying he found solace in online humour after feeling "beaten over the head" for being white.

The soldier then spends much of the interview making what many would regard as racist remarks about Mori, and talks "extreme anti-European agitation" from the Government.

The Dominion Movementgroup, on its website, claimed meetings with both Australian counterparts from 'Identity Australia' and with Kerry Bolton, the former secretary of the white nationalist group National Front.

The soldier's involvement in white nationalist groups did not end after March 15.

His arrest first came to light aftermembers of the far-right Christian group Wargus Christi began talking about a member being arrested in a chatroom on the Telegram app.

"One of our boys has been arrested for reasons still unknown," a message from the Wargus Christi group read.

Whether he was involved with Action Zealandia, an apparentsuccessor to the Dominion Movement, is unknown.

Members of Action Zealandiagroup mask their identities on online posts, and have been plastering their white nationalist message in cities around the country.

On January 10, the group posted a series of images showing its members defacingsigns at the National Party's Greenlane office, due to it housing the office of Chinese MP Jian Yang.

Both the Defence Force and police were continuing a combined criminal investigation into the soldier.

Questions put to the New Zealand SecurityIntelligence Service were not answered.

Defence Minister Ron Mark in December alluded to the soldier posing a security risk to New Zealand.

"I'd like to think that any Government department that has the security interests of this nation at heart would be monitoring itself, as well," he said.

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Soldier alleged to have traded military information was leader of white nationalist group - Stuff.co.nz

It wouldn't be a Pittsburgh wedding without a cookie table. But why keep the tradition exclusive to happy couples? In the spirit of the season, Pittsburgh City Paper is celebrating the holiday cookie table. Were reviewing bakery favorites, family recipes, and grocery store staples until the table is full. click to enlarge

CP photo: Lisa Cunningham

Starbucks 2019 holiday cookie and coffee cup

Surely youve seen online trolls take to social media around this time every year to blast the coffee company for its supposed War on Christmas for its non-denominational holiday cup designs. (I mean, we all know you cant praise Jesus unless you drink a latte with skim milk and two pumps of hazelnut syrup out of a to-go cup plastered with the son of Gods face, right?)

But the festive (but not too festive) holiday cups havent been the only controversial item at your favorite American coffee company chain. Back in 2010, Starbucks customers cried foul when polar bear cookies with a scarf made out of red icing ended up looking like the animal had just gotten its neck slit. (Having the polar bears head raised high, with the scarfs red icing, extra thick, dripping down in two nondescript lines didnt help.)

If youve also got a sense of humor about these kinds of things or, if maybe youre equally as deranged? youll be happy to hear that this years snowman-shaped shortbread cookies still have a little bit of that bloody homage to their polar bear cousins.

CP photo: Lisa Cunningham

Black buttons, black eyes, and a black smile, paired with a tiny flash of a bright orange nose complete the characters design, with a delightful sprinkle of snow-like flakes of sugar along the bottom of the cookie as a final touch.

Paired with a latte (in a Merry Coffee cup, of course), this years cookie was a tasty treat with a soft texture, strong buttery flavor, and worth every one of the 390 calories it contains.

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Let the alt-right have their 'War on Christmas' if it means more delicious cookies for the rest of us - PGH City Paper

The gesture is not the only symbol to have been appropriated and swiftly weaponized by alt-right internet trolls. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified memes featuring the hoax religion of Kek and the cartoon character Pepe the Frog, among others, as being at the forefront of white nationalists efforts to distract and infuriate liberals.

A number of high-profile figures on the far right have helped spread the gestures racist connotation by flashing it conspicuously in public, including Milo Yiannopolous, an outspoken former Breitbart editor, and Richard B. Spencer, one of the promoters of the white power rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that resulted in the death of a 32-year-old woman.

The gesture was in the headlines again after Roger Stone, a longtime political adviser to President Trump, met with a group of white nationalists known as the Proud Boys in Salem, Ore., in 2018 and was photographed displaying it with them.

Critics expressed outrage when a former White House aide, Zina Bash, appeared to be flashing the sign as she sat behind Brett M. Kavanaugh during his televised Senate confirmation hearings for his appointment to the Supreme Court. Defenders of Ms. Bash insisted that she had not intended any racist connotation and was merely signaling O.K. to someone.

That the gesture has migrated beyond ironic trolling culture to become a sincere expression of white supremacy, according to the Anti-Defamation League, could be seen in March 2019 when Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist accused of killing 50 people in back-to-back mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, smiled and flashed the sign to reporters at a court hearing on his case.

Some people who have used the gesture publicly in a way that seemed to suggest support for racist views have faced consequences. In 2018, the United States Coast Guard suspended an officer who appeared to use the sign on camera during an MSNBC broadcast. Later that year, four police officers in Jasper, Ala., were suspended after a photo was published showing them flashing the sign below the waist. And over the summer, a baseball fan was barred indefinitely from Wrigley Field in Chicago after making the gesture behind the NBC sports commentator Doug Glanville during a broadcast of a Cubs game.

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When the O.K. Sign Is No Longer O.K. - The New York Times

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDSGetty Images

At Saturdays Army-Navy football game, Army cadets and midshipmen appeared to flash a hand sign that has been adopted by white supremacistsand now officials say theyre investigating the incident.

During the game, which was attended by President Trump and held at Philadelphias Lincoln Financial Field, ESPNs Rece Davis reported live surrounded by students from the United States Military Academy and the Naval Academy. According to The New York Times, on at least five occasions, some of the cadets and midshipmen appeared to be making the sign.

The gesture, formed with one hand by touching the thumb to the index finger while leaving the other three fingers splayed, began being associated with the far right in the wake of a 2017 4chan hoax that attempted to spread the idea that the hand sign formed the letters "WP," standing for "white power." Aside from being well-known as the OK sign, the hand gesture has also been deployed as a part as the schoolyard circle game. But while its white supremacists associations may have begun a hoax, the symbol has since been adopted by real-life members of the alt-right and hate groups.

The Anti-Defamation League counts the gesture in its database of hate symbols, noting that "at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy." White nationalist Richard Spencer has been photographed using it, as has alt-right agitator Milo Yiannopolous. Most horrifying of all, after 50 worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand mosques were murdered, the alleged shooter flashed the sign during a court appearance.

Military officials told The Washington Post that they were investigating whether or not the cadets intended to signal support for white supremacist ideologies with the gesture. Last year, a member of the Coast Guard appeared to make the gesture in the background of a news broadcast. The Coast Guards official Twitter account subsequently tweeted that the organization had "identified the member and removed him from the response," writing that his "actions do not reflect those of the United States Coast Guard."

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Military Officials Are Investigating Possible White Power Signs Flashed During the Army-Navy Game - Esquire.com

Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon.

Nixon was a bully, a cynic, and a crook who did all kinds of damage to American politics and society, not to mention to Cambodia and Vietnam, too. And yet he had a sense of obligation to his officeand to the Republican Party, a venerable institution that got its start in the 1850s by opposing the spread of slavery.

And so in August 1974, after the congressional leadership of the Republican Party told him that they wouldnt stand for the Watergate cover-up, Nixon got on a helicopter and flew out of history.

This is not how the Trump era will end.

The year 1977 marks a watershed in the modern history of the American right, a moment of departure from the kind of Republican Party that eventually rejected Nixon.

That year, the Cato Institution was formed in Washington to peddle free-market fundamentalism as the answer to Americas ills. Also that year, a group of fundamentalist Christians built Focus on the Family to uphold traditional patriarchy as Gods command. And a fringe group within the National Rifle Association turned what had been an apolitical hunters organization into a hyper-aggressive lobbying group for arms manufacturers and their most angry customers.

These groups shared a grand narrative of America, in which rugged individualists and virtuous families built the country with Bibles in one hand and guns in the other. The protagonists in this story were of course white, just like the great majority of the people in these movements.

During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan drew these forces into an upbeat nationalism. Americas mission, he told the faithful, was to defeat godless Communism at home and abroad.

The subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire vindicated his take-no-prisoners approachand the more extreme voices on the right, whose think tanks and pressure groups now formed a vast echo chamber impervious to political debate.

When Bill Clinton came to office in 1992, he hoped to appeal to centrist Republicans as a pro-business New Democrat from a southern state. Instead, a new wave of right-wing figures in Congress and beyond accused the Democrats of all kinds of perversions and impeached Clinton over his unseemly sex life, resulting in some bizarre political theater.

Although these tactics narrowed the Republicans appeal, the party returned to the White House when George W. Bush squeaked out an electoral victory in early 2001. This kept the extremists within the party, for the moment.

In the wake of terrorist attacks later that year, Bush briefly rose to Reaganesque stature with the economic and religious right, even though he scolded and disappointed white nationalists.

But while Reagans crusade against Communism had ended in global victory, Bushs war in Iraq ground to a bloody stalemate. And as the recession of 2008 cast a dreary pall over America, Barack Obama rose to power by promising hope and change.

Although he, too, was a New Democrat in economic termshis signature health-care law stemmed in part from another conservative think tankObama embodied the liberal vision of a multi-racial nation within a complicated world.

As president, he described his views on touchstone issues such as gay marriage as evolving and sought middle grounds with old enemies like Cuba and Iran.

In response, the far right took over the Republican Party, using not only think tanks and radio shows but also alt-right websites and chat rooms that became safe spaces for virulent racism.

Extremists in the so-called Tea Party movement, which paved the way for todays Make America Great Again supporters, targeted moderate Republicans while Fox News hosts and shock jocks called Obama a Marxist and terrorist sympathizer.

When Obama cruised to a second term against Mitt Romney, millions of Republicans turned to a helter-skelter politics of rage and paranoiaand into the arms of Trump, a vulgar demagogue of huge appetites and thin scruples.

Once again, this shrank the Republican Partys field of voters to older, whiter, and more conservative audiences. Against the uninspired campaign of Hillary Clinton, however, Trump stumbled into the White House with 46.1% of the popular vote.

Although most Americans dont like him, Trump has an 80% approval rating among Republicans. He uses this popularity, along with his Twitter feed, to bully Republican dissidents into silence.

In any case, the Republicans now have little choice but to double down on their far-right vision of America, using voter suppression to eke out more wins in the Electoral College. Having alienated almost every other demographic, they must stick with their Trump-loving base. They have no one else.

Indeed, the contemporary Republican Party has many elements of a cult of personality. Rick Perry, the former energy secretary, even recently likened Trump to the patriarchs of the Old Testament. The party does not even try to control its fringe elements; it is a fringe element, an anti-democratic force of recent history that threatens to consume the worlds oldest democracy.

This means that Trump will survive the impeachment process in early 2020, no matter what malfeasance comes to light. The Republicans will protect their man at all costs. And Trump will do everything he can to win in November, unburdened by any sense of propriety, fairness, or facts. Its not even clear if he would accept defeat.

Against such a foe, the Democrats best chance is to lose their fear of itand then call on their growing majority to demand a broader, more decent definition of government of, by, and for the people.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Why Donald Trump will survive impeachment - Quartz