Via Liz Fong-Jones. Having trouble choosing limited quotes that even come close to doing this horrible mess justice, and I would definitely recommend reading the whole article.
Since August, screenshots from Google’s internal discussion forums, including personal information, have been displayed on sites including Breitbart and Vox Popoli, a blog run by alt-right author Theodore Beale, who goes by the name Vox Day. Other screenshots were included in a 161-page lawsuit that Damore filed in January, alleging that Google discriminates against whites, males, and conservatives.
What followed, the employees say, was a wave of harassment. On forums like 4chan, members linked advocates’ names with their social-media accounts. At least three employees had their phone numbers, addresses, and deadnames (a transgender person’s name prior to transitioning) exposed. Google site reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones, a trans woman, says she was the target of harassment, including violent threats and degrading slurs based on gender identity, race, and sexual orientation. More than a dozen pages of personal information about another employee were posted to Kiwi Farms, which New York has called “the web’s biggest community of stalkers.”
Meanwhile, inside Google, the diversity advocates say some employees have “weaponized human resources” by goading them into inflammatory statements, which are then captured and reported to HR for violating Google’s mores around civility or for offending white men…
Yonatan Zunger, a high-ranking veteran engineer who left Google eight months ago, says the internal culture has become a textbook case of the “paradox of tolerance,” the notion that if a society is tolerant without limit, it will be seized upon by the intolerant.
The combatants represent just a sliver of Google’s more than 75,000 employees. Executives seem to want everyone to get back to work, rather than be forced into the awkward position of refereeing a culture war. “Just like they’re reporting me, I’m reporting them as well,” says Alon Altman, a senior engineer and diversity advocate. After Damore’s memo was disclosed in August, Altman says the complaints from both sides amounted to “a denial-of-service attack on human resources.”…
Fong-Jones is used to being harassed online. But she was quickly flooded with direct messages on Twitter containing violent threats and degrading and transphobic slurs based on gender identity, race, and sexual orientation. One commenter on Vox Popoli wrote that, “they should pitch all those sexual freaks off of rooftops.”
That’s when it clicked: perhaps some of her coworkers’ questions had not been in good faith. “We didn’t realize that there was a dirty war going on, and weren’t aware of the tactics being used against us,” she says. The stakes soon became clear. A few days later, alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos shared an image with his 2.5 million Facebook followers featuring the Twitter bios and profile pics of eight advocates at Google, many of them trans employees…
Some employees see similarities between some of the behavior inside Google and alt-right manuals for fighting advocates for social justice, such as one written by Beale that instructs readers to “Document their every word and action,” “Undermine them, sabotage them, and discredit them,” and “Make the rubble bounce” on your way out the door.
Beale says they’re right. “I know that there are a number of people there who have read [the guide], I know that they’re using it,” Beale told WIRED. He claims to have had contacts inside the company for years and dozens of followers. He says he doesn’t know if Damore has read his guide, but is following the playbook. Damore says he has not read the manual.
Another unfortunately good point:
Christopher Schmidt (@crschmidt) tweeted at 2:11 PM on Fri, Jan 26, 2018: I think this is the key thing. Google is large enough that these folks form a cohort; at any other company, they are just “that one guy”… who chases every under represented minority out. Stop looking at pipeline: start looking at Pepe.
My son was in Charlottesville. He probably went with his friends, but I don’t know for sure because I haven’t talked to him in about three years.
Maybe some alt-righters were born into racist families and then they just follow along, but we weren’t like that. He grew up in a big, multicultural city. When he was a kid, he was very accepting — his friend group was ethnically diverse, we often hosted overseas exchange students. He was dating someone who wasn’t white. He was a responsible kid. I mean, he would occasionally drink and smoke pot and stuff like that, but he wasn’t getting into trouble or anything. He had a few close friends, but he was not that great with getting girlfriends.
He was a good student, smart, sweet, and we were close. He always told me he loved me. But over time he began to change. I was worried it was drugs or depression. He started treating me like shit. I remember one time I went to hug him and he nearly ripped me a new one just for touching him. He said, “We have nothing in common.” I was hurt. That was just the beginning.
When he was in his late teens, he started listening to this podcast FreeDomain Radio. After he told me about it, I googled it, and from that point forward, my life was never the same. It was founded by this guy Stefan Molyneux, who I later learned is a major figure on the alt-right. He spews horrible things. I heard him listening to the podcasts in his bedroom. My son started saying things like, If we could just get the Asians out of here it wouldn’t be so crowded. I realized he was getting into really dangerous stuff. He was beyond the point where we could have a rational discussion. Not long after, I told him I thought he should move out.
After he left, we stopped talking and he pretty much alienated his closest friends. The only way I could keep track of him was by watching his online presence on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (I remembered his nicknames from when he lived at home). I saw that he was questioning the Holocaust, and tweeting about Trump, white supremacy, and all this horrible stuff about women. On his YouTube account, people were commenting that women don’t need to have education because their place is at home having babies. I panicked and approached a local religious group that’s very knowledgeable about cults and they said, Just wait it out and take care of yourself.
These days, I check up on him whenever I’m on the computer — it’s constant. I’ve got all his social-media pages pinned on Google Chrome. Sometimes he removes posts quickly and sometimes he makes things public and leaves them there. Maybe he wants me to see? I make sure I’m not logged in when I look at his accounts because I don’t want him to block me.
I recently saw him on a video, he looks healthy. Taking good care of yourself is all part of the white-supremacy thing, right? They have to be in good shape in case there’s violence, and they have to be fit so they can make good white babies. My thinking these days is God forbid he should have kids.
And what makes it worse is that any community support for deradicalization is being actively eroded by the government.
If you’re a parent and your teenager starts obsessively watching beheading videos and researching plane tickets to the Turkey/Syria border, I’m not saying you’re lucky by any means, but at least you’ve got to know there’s a serious problem. There’s nothing like that for white radicalization because it blends in so seamlessly to “acceptable” right-wing activities in white communities…
President Donald Trump initially condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” for the tragedy, later placing the blame on white supremacists after a storm of backlash. But those words haven’t been backed up by policy—in June, the Trump administration dropped funding for one of the few organizations devoted to countering and de-radicalizing white extremists in the United States.
Founded in 2009, Life After Hate is run by former members of racist extremist movements who now work to counter and reform white nationalists. Under former President Barack Obama, the organization received $400,000 as part of its Counter Violent Extremism (CVE) program—the only anti-white nationalism group given funding under the program. After Trump’s election, Life After Hate reportedly saw a 20-fold increase in calls for help from those reporting signs of radicalization in themselves or others.
Journalists interview a supporter of alt-right speaker Richard Spencer in Gainesville, Fla. on October 19. (By Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post)
● “Making Sense of the Alt-Right” – by George Hawley ● “Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right” – by Angela Nagle ● "Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” – by David Neiwert
If Donald Trump did not exist, it would be necessary to prevent him.
Trump’s electoral victory one year ago this week was not merely his own, nor that of the befuddled party that relinquished its nomination to him. It was also a triumph for the dark tangle of forces we’ve come to know as the alt-right. Long before the 2016 campaign, the alt-right was already gathering strength and allies; it simply needed a standard-bearer. Then there was Trump, a leader with enough star power and authoritarian charisma to grant his alt-right supporters visibility and stature, to lower the social costs of open bigotry, to give energy to the movement’s underlying vision.
Several people have sought to interpret that vision — Hillary Clinton gave it a go with a harsh campaign speech, while Breitbart offered a sanitized taxonomy of the group — and now books on the subject are starting to pour forth. Although it’s hard to pin down a shifting collection of meme-crazed commenters, hard-core conspiracists and race-obsessed marchers long enough to bind them in hardcover, three new works make that effort from different vantage points. In “Making Sense of the Alt-Right,” University of Alabama political scientist George Hawley attempts to clarify first principles. In “Kill All Normies,” journalist Angela Nagle dives into online communities to grasp the alt-right’s subculture. And in “Alt-America,” researcher David Neiwert goes back decades to assemble the players and turning points that pushed the fringe toward the mainstream.
Together, these books suggest a movement with more staying power than may seem evident, and one that, for all its attacks on left-wing identity politics, is particularly focused on supplanting traditional conservatism with a white identity politics of the right. And although alt-right supporters are energized by Trump, they are not beholden to him. Indeed, the president’s alt-right credentials may be more about aping its brutal sensibility than fully embracing its substance. Trump’s self-interest helped pull the alt-right out from the digital swamps, but he may be simply marking the beginning of its rapid ascent, with some truer and more skilled political patron yet to come.
● “Making Sense of the Alt-Right” – by George Hawley
The name is confusing and misleading, yet somehow spot on.
“Alt-right” suggests a new mutation of right-wing politics, but it is in fact “totally distinct from conservatism as we know it,” Hawley explains early in his book, which draws on writings, speeches and interviews of alt-right figures. Proponents of the movement, he notes, are largely uninterested in moral traditionalism, economic liberty, a strong national defense — all the premises of 20th-century American conservatism. Tax cuts do not energize their ranks, and even abortion is fine if it serves eugenic purposes. They are driven, more than anything, by identity politics, which in their case is a more elevated description for unadulterated racism.
Hawley traces the origins of the “alt-right” term to the late 2000s, when it was initially a catchall for right-wingers opposed to traditional conservatism. Over time, however, its racial connotations came to dominate. Today, Hawley writes, “the most energetic and significant figures of the movement want to see the creation of a white ethnostate in North America.”
White supremacists want to dominate other racial or ethnic groups; white nationalists want to see those competing groups gone altogether. Alt-right advocates fall in the latter category, Hawley argues, their minds inspired by pseudo-academic racist tracts and their rage stoked by Black Lives Matter or the latest fight over campus dogma. Alt-right animosity toward the GOP flows from the belief that even though they depend on white votes, “conservatives in power rarely promote white interests.”
It’s a highly debatable point, certainly; Hawley himself believes that the United States has operated as a de facto white supremacist nation for much of its history. But the alt-right wants de facto to become de jure, too — to explicitly wage battle against the growth of non-white communities, including immigrants, in the United States, and to “push transparent white-identity politics, with the ultimate goal of stopping and even reversing these demographic trends,” the author writes.
Given this objective, “alt-right” might sounds too vague and innocuous. (The Associated Press, for instance, avoids the termbecause the editors think it masks racist aims.) Richard Spencer, the most recognizable alt-right voice in America, hasn’t always been so crazy about it, either. “It never struck me as satisfying at all,” he explained after leaving Alternative Right, an online magazine he founded. “It really is kind of a negative conception of who we are. You’re alternative to what?”
But the name has stuck, more by default than design. And it fits in a fundamental way, because the movement is based on its opposition — an alternative — to conventional conservatism. “Trump could not have captured the GOP nomination if the mainstream right was not already in a weakened state,” Hawley writes. “And the Alt-Right would similarly not be growing if more people continued to find traditional conservatism appealing.”
What the alt-right aims for, then, is to lose the “alt” and become the right. Despite its newfound infamy and White House sympathizers, Hawley isn’t sure it’s quite ready. “To move beyond being a nuisance on social media and actually to change the politics and culture of the United States, the Alt-Right will require a level of seriousness and organization it has not yet displayed.”
● “Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right” – by Angela Nagle
That lack of seriousness is not incidental to the alt-right, but central to its origins and self-perception. In “Kill All Normies,” Nagle describes a world, found in sites such as 4chan and Reddit, where nihilism, cynicism, irony and absurd in-joke humor have mingled with pornography, racism and misogyny to produce a “taboo-breaking anti-PC style” that characterized the early alt-right. This sensibility infected the public conversation via social media, and in particular through the alt-right’s penchant for Internet memes.
That is why Pepe the Frog molted from a comic-book figure into an online symbol of white nationalism; why three parentheses around a name came to signify the subject’s Jewishness and signal a target for anti-Semitic digital abuse; why “red pill” went from a device in the 1999 sci-fi film “The Matrix” to a verb — being “redpilled” — that marks the moment when someone grasps the truth and embraces a new way of thinking. (The “normies” of Nagle’s book title is alt-slang for whites who have not achieved racial consciousness and militancy.)
The “Gamergate” controversy starting in 2014 — when female video-game creators and their supporters suffered harassment and death threats emanating from the digital cesspools — was the moment that brought “rightist chan culture, anti-feminism and the online far right closer to mainstream discussion and . . . politicized a broad group of young people, mostly boys, who organized tactics around the idea of fighting back against the culture war being waged by the cultural left,” Nagle writes. In this view, the alt-right is about more than race; it is an indiscriminate and brutal aesthetic that also targets women, religious and cultural minorities, and virtually anyone promoting notions of egalitarianism — all for the sake of forestalling a supposed civilizational and demographic decline.
So while Nagle worries about the substance of the alt-right, it is a substance she deems inextricable from its style. The rise of Trump and of the alt-right, embodied in popular culture by figures such as Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos, “are not evidence of the return of the conservatism,” she writes, “but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake.” It is a co-opting of 1960s-style liberalism, she argues, and a dramatic departure from “church-going, upstanding, button-down, family-values conservatism.”
The counterculture never died. It just switched sides. Transgression now lives on the right; dogmatism on the left.
Nagle worries that the left — enmeshed in what she calls the “Tumblr liberalism” of gender fluidity, consumerist posturing and “performative vulnerability” — is ill-equipped to beat back the alt-right assault. She laments that even an intellectual lightweight such as Yiannopoulos can travel the country and expose the “deep intellectual rot in contemporary cultural progressivism,” which has become skilled only in purging internal dissent and reciting jargon. In its eagerness to take offense, she contends, the left has forgotten how to formulate arguments.
● "Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” – by David Neiwert
Neiwert looks beyond conservative schisms, left-wing failings and online subcultures to pinpoint the experiences and beliefs that bind the alt-right together, and he calls the world he finds “Alt-America” — “an alternative dimension, a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia.” It is a world of Patriots and Three Percenters, a world where Ruby Ridge and Waco loom as eternal warning signs of encroaching fascism, where the federal Bureau of Land Management is more hated than the IRS. It is an environment suffused with conspiracy and grievance, where Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, climate change is a hoax, Hillary Clinton is an agent of the New World Order (always in acronym form, NWO), and where white men are the truly downtrodden — because white identity politics remains, Neiwert explains, “the beating heart of Alt-America.”
His analysis can be too broad, as though Alt-America encompasses everything the author dislikes. (Sure, Rex Tillerson is a questionable secretary of state, but does his thinking really reveal the same degree of “extremism” as Attorney General Jeff Sessions or former national security adviser Michael Flynn?) Still, Neiwert draws some intriguing connections.
Where Hawley saw few links between the tea party movement and the alt-right, for instance, Neiwert argues that the tea party laundered the nuttiest ideas of Alt-America into the mainstream of U.S. politics. He points out that the Gadsen flag and its “Don’t tread on me” rattlesnake, a fixture at tea party rallies during Obama’s first term, was a popular symbol for militiamen out west in the 1990s. He chronicles how ranchers who took stands against federal agencies became Fox News heroes, one more way to smuggle Alt-American notions into popular circulation.
Neiwert considers the GOP and traditional conservatives complicit in the degrading of discourse and truth on the far right, whereby “rational anger and discontent with the federal government was being transformed into an irrational, visceral, and paranoid hatred of it.” Conspiracy theories and white-nationalist narratives coalesced in response to the nation’s first black president, giving Trump his opening. Birtherism became his calling card to Alt-America; the border wall and travel ban his sales pitch.
● Conclusion:
Trump has been described America’s first white president for his explicit race-baiting and reflexive impulse to undo the legacy of his black predecessor. He may also be America’s first troll president, one who treats governance as a culture war, the Oval Office as a subreddit, and the bully pulpit as a means to cyberbully his foes.
Trump fits with the alt-right’s abusive culture, and studies of the psychology of online trolls highlight their deception, narcissism and manipulativeness — traits not inconsistent with what psychiatrists observe in our 45th commander in chief. “Why We Need a Troll as President” was even the headline of a bizarrely foreshadowing argument by a contributor to Spencer’s alt-right website during the 2016 campaign. “Trump is worth supporting,” the writer argued, “because we need a troll. . . . We need someone who can break open public debate… . The fact that Trump himself is part of this same farce is utterly irrelevant.”
Yet though alt-righters become gleeful when Trump shares racially misleading crime statistics or offers a both-sides take to neo-Nazis marching and engaging in deadly violence, “saying that Trump and the Alt-Right are simpatico amounts to whitewashing the Alt-Right,” Hawley contends. The core alt-right wants more than greater immigration restrictions and temporary travel bans against a handful of Muslim-majority countries. It wants nonwhites out of the country altogether. Trump and his aides have called for measures that, however extreme, fall short. White-nationalist writer Matthew Heimbach, for example, endorsed Trump’s candidacy with the caveat that Trump “is not the savior of Whites in America.” And even former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon — who has bragged of giving the alt-right a platform as head of Breitbart — is more a populist and economic nationalist, Hawley argues.
Over time, however, that the administration’s loyalty to the movement may prove less consequential. Trump’s jumble of beliefs — and really, does he have any guiding ideology beyond self-aggrandizement? — matters less than where a newly empowered and overtly racist political force attempts to take the country.
“What Trump has succeeded in doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, has been to make the large and growing number of proto-fascist groups in America larger and more vicious,” Neiwert concludes. These groups won’t be deterred by a confused left or craven right. The conservative movement can’t purge them the way William F. Buckley cast out the Birchers, even if it wanted to do so — alt-right supporters “do not care what Ross Douthat thinks of them,” Hawley notes wryly. Nor will they be limited by the fumblings of the president they helped bring to power.
The alt-right is on the move, the distance from 4chan to Charlottesville just part of a longer march. I wonder if even Trump fully understands — or cares — what he has let slip.
This is very important post. Unfortunately it is necessarily long due to do the research. Like and reblog. And then you can read it parts.
I’m going to make it a bit longer by adding another important viewpoint. Russian long-range political analysis was summed up in the excellent political strategy book “Foundation of Geopolitics" by Aleksandr Dugin in 1997, which outlines what needs to happen for Russia to become the primary superpower. The goals and strategies outlined predict Brexit, Ukraine expansion, dismantling Georgia, encouraging isolationist policies in the U.S., and encourage destabilizing internal American conflicts. We’ve seen these tactics increasingly at play in the election interference and online propaganda tactics. One of the key conflicts to exploit is America’s unresolved issues with racism.
From the book: Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting
all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus
destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics.“
This isn’t the cause of these problems, but there are external interests with millions of dollars working on a decades-long plan to actively exacerbate them.
Alt-right blogger Jenna Abrams (@Jenn_Abrams) enjoyed a large following in Twitter, and her tweets were cited by Buzzfeed, the NY Times, and other news agencies. It turned out “she” was another creation of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government-funded troll farm in St. Petersburg.
Its important to remember that Richard Spencer is well educated. He has a BA and MA, and was a doctoral candidate at Duke before he left to do his white nationalist bullshit. His MA thesis was on Adorno.
He’s not “ignorant” or stupid. Hes quite intelligent, and he has chosen not out of ignorance but out of conscious meditated choice to be an enemy of the people of the world.
The other side is not full of people who are less intelligent than you, and the sooner you realize that the sooner you will stop underestimating them and be able to actually fight them effectively.
The first time I saw this, it bothered me a lot. I mean, I know that smart people can be very wrong about things, but in a sector that manufactures impostor syndrome, it seems weird to have someone emerge so committed to being drastically, appallingly, confidently, steadfastly wrong.
So I went and did some research. This article was immensely helpful.
Spencer comes from a fairly wealthy background. He doesn’t care about class or religion, and he actually hates democracy. What he cares about is some nebulous idea of culture of “white Christendom” – even though he himself is an atheist. And when he did graduate work, he found thinkers who confirmed his ideas about culture – Nietzsche, Herder, and Schmitt. These thinkers, surprise surprise, were the favourite philosophers of the Nazis.
And I mean, I know people who work on Nietzsche and Herder, because they did have a huge influence. But my colleagues regard the Holocaust as horrific, and for Spencer it wasn’t a deal-breaker.
His work on Adorno alleges that Adorno loved Wagner’s music despite Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Obviously it got him an MA, but it doesn’t feel like a stunning insight.
Spencer believes in fascism and white supremacy, but he has a complicated, cynical relationship with some of the other ideas he espouses. He doesn’t believe in Christianity. He doesn’t support Donald Trump; just finds him awfully convenient. He doesn’t believe in freedom or democracy. He professes not be believe in violence, either, although I’d say genocide is pretty darned violent. He says stuff sometimes just for its shock value, in the belief that it will make people less critical of his ideas.
He’s a privileged boy who found books that tell him why he deserves to be privileged. He’s trolling people on the left and cynically manipulating people on the right. And no, none of this redeems him as a person, or decreases by one iota the harm that he’s done. But it helps me understand how a smart person comes to espouse this very unsmart nonsense.
The narrative surrounding last weekend’s protests in Berkeley took shape on social media and was picked up, at least in part, by mainstream news outlets. The result was a skewed presentation of events that was almost entirely devoid of the context in which they took place. Even more troubling: that narrative was influenced by pro-Russian social media networks, including state-sponsored propaganda outlets, botnets, cyborgs, and individual users.
Just a warning to everybody, please be aware of white supremacists bloggers posing as minorities saying wildly inflammatory, offensive things in an effort to bait other groups and sow discord within the left.
I just caught out a blogger pretending to be Black saying Jews were leaches on society and that Hitler had been in the right. They started off with a vaguely SJ-sounding post but then their language descended into alt-right speak real fucking quick, and I knew there was no goddamn way they were who they claimed. One look at their archive proved they were a white supremacists who had actually posted years worth of violent anti-Black commentary.
I know it’s easy to get worked up and taken in on here when we feel attacked—we’ve all fallen victim to trolls—but if somebody claims to be a Black person but uses Nazi language about Jews, or a Jewish person but uses German eugenics-based anti-immigrant language, or Arab but uses old Confederate language about Black people, and so on, please be very wary, check, and block.
They have been doing this on Twitter for a while, creating almost laughably bad accounts of what racists think Jews, Black folks, Latinxs, etc. sound like, and obviously Tumblr is the next frontier.
Just beware, trust your instincts, and remember: IF IT SOUNDS LIKE A NAZI, IT’S PROBABLY A NAZI.
“The revelation comes as a new Tory-supporting youth group, called Activate, was launched to try to engage young people in politics in a similar way to Momentum, the left-wing Labour campaign organisation. However, the group’s social media launch was widely ridiculed for its overuse of hashtags and memes.
Guido Fawkes (?!), which published the leaked messages, said the WhatsApp group was used as a “precursor” to the Activate group.
During the conversation, one member refers to an event as a “fine opportunity to observe the spice homo chav”.
Another immediately replies: “And gas them all.”
The first activist then jokes that he or she is “gonna run some medical experiments on them” before the second adds: “We could use them as substitutes for animals when testing.”
As the conversation continues, the pair make a string of further offensive comments about poor people.
The first suggests “experiments” could be conducted “to see why they are so good at producing despite living rough”.
Realising the direction the chat has taken, he adds: “Okay we gotta be careful otherwise this is turning [in]to a Nazi chat.“
Undeterred, the second person continues: “Vermin often populate at high rates…But seriously, chavs are an actual problem”.
As other young Tory activists join in the troubling conversation, talk turns to “solutions” for dealing with “chavs”.
Suggestions include “chavocide”, “turn the Isle of Wight into a super prison”, “shooting peasants” and “compulsory birth control on chavs”.
Anyone who thinks that these people aren’t typical of the Tory party is really deluding themselves.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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