i withdraw this post after news that the atomwaffen division is getting torn apart over satanism; there’s no way that fiction can keep up with reality here and I should have known that when the funniest things in the table by far were the ones directly taken from the news
Another Atomwaffen-affiliated person created a Gab account aimed at
“exposing” the group’s satanic ties, and started leaking Atomwaffen chat
logs, alongside Harry Potter memes. That person linked to audio of a
call, purportedly between Atomwaffen members arguing about satanism.
“In
your opinion, Satanism contradicts the ideals of national socialism,
right?” one Atomwaffen member asked another during the debate.“Yeah,” the second man answered.
“Okay,
I’m not gonna try to get mad and say you’re a fuckin idiot,” the first
said. “Like, I want to know legitimately what part of it contradicts the
ideals of national socialism.”
“Uh, every part. I’ve literally read both those books. Nothing in it stood out to me as—”
“Have
you read the Satanic Principles?” the first Atomwaffen member
interrupted. “The fucking baseline ideas of what Satanism stands for?
You cannot honestly read that and tell me it reflects none of what
national socialism teaches.”
I genuinely find it hard to believe that this is real and not part of some government plot to infiltrate and dismantle Atomwaffen, but who knows.
horseshoe theory; both extreme left and extreme right have inane splittists.
Some of the Viking reenactors I know are giving it up because of the unfortunate association with far-right groups. I do not blame them for doing this, as I am sure it’s quite upsetting to be mistaken for a neo-Nazi. I support people doing whatever they have to to avoid this.
However, I am really bothered by the idea that there’s something *morally correct* about ceding your passions to supremacist groups. I am deeply uncomfortable with the praise such people have gotten for “doing the right thing”. You know what that’s saying? It’s saying that racists can point to whatever they please and go “it’s ours now”, and *by your own standards* you have to give it to them! Not only did you build the most exploitable loophole ever, you’ve practically drawn them a map!
I do not wish to acquiesce to neo-Nazis in any other context, and I’m not starting now. Hate groups do not get to set the standards for my communities. I’m genetically disabled and engaged to a Jew, and I *delight* in the middle finger my presence in Viking reenactment holds up to Nazi ideology. Like hell I’m going to go “oops, my bad, this actually *does* belong to you!”
It doesn’t. It doesn’t get to. History belongs to goddamn everyone, and in fact *making people think it doesn’t* is one of the great tragedies of racism. I sincerely believe that connecting to shared human heritage is one of this world’s foremost delights, and supremacist groups do not get a say in how I express that.
This is literally something /pol/ knows and exploits.
Maybe the pendulum swings and white people wave to stay in their lane and can *only* play vikings. Stranger things have happened.
In what other ways does /pol/ exploit this? I can think of a couple.
Think the ‘It’s Okay to be White’ thing from a while back. Clearly a /pol/ op and everyone knows it’s a /pol/ op, but knowing it’s a /pol/ op gets people to overextend and say that everyone saying it’s okay to be white is a far-right white nationalist.
Or Pepe memes, for that matter.
Honestly, I’m not expecting the left to die on this hill, or on any of the others, but I would like to see them fucking fight on one for once, instead of immediately retreating to the next one the moment some asshole starts to climb it. Make a goddamn stand for once and say ‘no, you can’t have this, this belongs to us/everyone’ instead of immediately ceding ground and then claiming anyone who didn’t run away with them fast enough is just another enemy pursuing them.
Make a goddamn stand for once and say ‘no, you can’t have this, this belongs to us/everyone’ instead of immediately ceding ground and then claiming anyone who didn’t run away with them fast enough is just another enemy pursuing them.
I know it’s poor forum etiquette to quote something only to shout “FUCKING THIS”, but…FUCKING THIS
I keep seeing that post of a particular nation of native folk who willingly gave up the swastika because the nazis had ruined it. And everyone congratulated them, which I understood. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the world had to. That symbol was used by nearly every culture under the sun. Now, I don’t really think there’s any need for white folks to use a swastika what with the whole history of it, but I feel it’s a similar thing. Folk from southeast asia, india, certain parts of the middle east, all use the swastika in some form or another as a religious or cultural symbol. there’s no need to demand people give up on every piece of art or media or history that some piece of shit nazi decides to grab a hold of. We didn’t give up wagner because hitler liked it and thought it was super deep.
Yes! I was thinking about this regarding Norse paganism too. I actually know a couple of pagans who have stopped using Norse symbolism (Mjolnir, etc.) in solidarity with antifascist movements. That’s their choice, and I understand why they feel the well has been poisoned, but like…I don’t think a religious minority being pressured to give up their deeply felt traditions is something to celebrate.
This this this.
Nazis are very good at appropriating their own cultures, and I really hate how the standard reaction to them doing that is to go, “OK, I guess that’s a Far Right Symbol now. Put it down everyone, it’s tainted forever now.”
It’s especially damaging because a lot of things this happens with are culturally and/or historically important. I feel like a lot of people are being robbed of things that they should have access to, that it would be beneficial for them to have access to, that matter to them and their communities, because some people decided that those things aren’t worth protecting from the clutches of the far-right.
The number of white supremacist murders in the United States more than doubled in 2017 compared to the previous year, far surpassing murders committed by domestic Islamic extremists and making 2017 the fifth deadliest year on record for extremist violence since 1970.
In its annual assessment of extremist-related killings, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found white supremacists and other far-right extremists were responsible for 59 percent of all extremist-related fatalities in the U.S. in 2017, up dramatically from 20 percent in 2016.
White supremacists were directly responsible for 18 of the total 34 extremist-related murders in 2017, according to the new ADL report, Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2017. A total of nine deaths were linked to Islamic extremists.
The most recent ADL data shows that over the last decade a total of 71 percent of all fatalities have been linked to domestic right-wing extremists, while 26 percent of the killings were committed by Islamic extremists. The other 3 percent of deaths were carried out by extremists not falling into either category.
“These findings are a stark reminder that domestic extremism is a serious threat to our safety and security,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “We saw two car-ramming attacks in the U.S. last year– one from an Islamic terrorist and another from a white supremacist in Charlottesville—and the number of deaths attributed to white supremacists increased substantially. The bottom line is we cannot ignore one form of extremism over another. We must tackle them all.”
Murder and Extremism in 2017: Major Findings
ADL’s Center on Extremism has been tracking data on domestic extremist-related murder in the U.S. since 1970. The 2017 assessment found:
With 34 total deaths, 2017 was the fifth deadliest year for extremist violence since 1970, but there was a marked decline from the much higher total fatalities recorded in 2016 and 2015.
The 18 white supremacist murders included several killings linked to the alt right as that movement expanded its operations in 2017 from the internet into the physical world – raising the likely possibility of more such violent acts in the future.
Unlike 2016, a year dominated by the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando, Florida, committed by an Islamic extremist, a majority of the 2017 murders were committed by right-wing extremists, primarily white supremacists, as has typically been the case most years.
Far-right extremist violence accounted for 59 percent of the total, or 20 deaths.
An Islamic extremist still committed the single deadliest incident in 2017: the New York City bike path vehicular homicide attack, which killed eight people.
“When white supremacists and other extremists are emboldened and find new audiences for their hate-filled views, violence is usually not far behind,” Greenblatt said. “We cannot ignore the fact that white supremacists are emboldened, and as a society we need to keep a close watch on recruitment and rallies such as Charlottesville, which have the greatest potential to provoke and inspire violence.”
The report also noted a spate of killings in 2017 by black nationalists as a possible emerging extremist threat. Black nationalists were responsible for five murders in 2017, and this came on the heels of other violent incidents with black nationalist connections in 2016 and 2014.
‘But-BUT… Her Muslim Terrorists… Or… Emails?… What were we supposed to be screaming about, again?… I’m getting a headache from all this thinking… Who’s got the FoxNews Ap on their phone?!?!
this is hella scary. the president of the U.S is literally retweeting anti-Muslim propaganda. this is the shit dictators do when they want to ostracize a certain demographic. don’t tell me there’s nothing wrong and horrifying about this.
This is disgusting and exactly what Carl Schmitt describes as the “Sovereign Exception”.
Basically, the sovereign (The president), decides on who is the “exception” in society and to whom the rights of citizenship apply or do not apply.
The acceptance of this is one of the quickest ways for democracy to degenerate into tyranny. Instead of upholding our values for everyone, we allow the government/regime to decide and it is all fun and games until you find out they are coming for you next. That’s how tyrants stay in power, there always has to be an enemy.
This is even worse than it looks, believe it or not.
I don’t know anything about the middle tweet, but the other two were discussed on TRMS tonight. The top one was two Dutch minors, neither of whom are Muslim. They were both born in the Netherlands as Dutch citizens. The attacker was charged, sentenced, and has served time for what he did. The victim asked that the video NOT be shared because he did not want to relive it, but someone saved it, rebranded it as anti-Muslim propaganda, and shared it again as such, where it has now reached international attention.
But the third video is far, far worse.
I say this with no ambiguity or exaggeration: that video is explicitly unedited propaganda originally produced and distributed by Al Qaeda. The only change from its original distribution is that it has been captioned in English. Al Qaeda produced that video. It was then redistributed, unchanged (except for English language compatibility), by a far right English white nationalist political party called Britain First (presumably the BF in that twitter handle). From there it was retweeted by the sitting president of the United States.
A propaganda video produced and distributed by Al Qaeda has now been distributed, unedited and unchallenged, by and with the implicit endorsement of, the sitting president of the United States.
Donald Trump, in his capacity as the U.S. President, has publicly endorsed an Al Qaeda propaganda video in its original form as produced by a terrorist organization that is explicitly an enemy of the United States.
So this wasn’t just anti-Muslim propaganda being retweeted by the president. This was 100% literal terrorist propaganda produced by a terrorist organization being endorsed and distributed by the president of the United States, who is using it to fuel his anti-Muslim agenda. (Which isn’t even getting into his financial ties to sanctioned entities in Azerbaijan known to have had dealings with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, one of the world’s best known and most prolific sponsors of global terrorism.)
That’s where we are as a country right now.
Hi, Brit here. Jayda Fransen is one of the leading members of Britain First, a fringe far right group who conduct regular “patrols” in ex-military vehicles and generally adopt strong military imagery.
They’re also extremely scummy even outside of the whole fascist wannabe-paramilitary group shtick. They use stuff like animal rights stuff to clickbait people onto their FB page – y’know, the type of stuff that your average everyday person is sympathetic to – and then work from there to put out hate speech on a scale that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. In addition to this, they impersonate the British Legion – a genuine charity – to manufacture outrage and enmity with the tried and tested “support our troops!” bullshit.
Lee Rigby, a soldier who was violently murdered in broad daylight in a terrorist attack, is also frequently used as a figurehead by them – even after multiple warnings and threats of legal action by his family. People don’t really like their family being tied to fascist propaganda, but BF don’t give a shit.
It’s really unsurprising that Trump is coming out in support of them, I just thought I should share precisely how repulsive and morally repugnant the ‘organisation’ who Trump RTed is. Context is important, and yes, it really is THAT bad.
I was originally gonna keep this in the tags, but I had too much to say. So, apologies for this not fitting the theme of my blog, it’s just so important that I had to get it out there. Your regularly scheduled anime nonsense will resume immediately.
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.
The far right spread fake antifa propaganda that they’ve made. They spread contradictory lies by pretending a decentralized group with no rules or controls with varying methods and ideologies, has a manual.
The far right make false signs and pretend to be antifa at demos to discredit us and play us off as racist thugs, talk about projection.
Now they intentionally act as innocent to instigate fights and play us as the ones causing problems.
The far right are Built on lies and propaganda, so many of their articles end up being fake, based on false statistics, small slithers of information taken out of context. They intentionally generate and spread false information to forward their agenda.
I wish I could find one thing I read a while back, with someone talking about the actual history around the Civil War in the North Georgia mountains compared to the number of assholes currently flying the stars and bars under the carefully pushed impression that it really is their “heritage”.
Depressingly similar pattern in my part of Virginia, yeah. The bit that only didn’t get split off to make WV because it already had enough rail infrastructure that Virginia wanted to hold onto.
@illuminatiswag – Yeah, I’m in the UK now, and I thought I was going to have a stroke the first time I saw something like this:
Outside the soccer stadium, European extremist political groups have been known to fly the Confederate flag, too. European skinheads and neo-Nazis have sometimes adopted the Confederate flag, especially in Germany, where the swastika and other symbols of Nazi Germany are officially banned by law. Many Europeans see the flag as a de facto sign of far-right political leanings: A Confederate flag that was spotted in a photograph of a French police station last year caused a minor scandal.
Bizarrely, American Civil War reenactions have become popular in Germany, with significant numbers of Germans preferring to fight on the Confederate side. “I think some of the Confederate reenactors in Germany are acting out Nazi fantasies of racial superiority,” Wolfgang Hochbruck, a professor of American Studies at the University of Freiburg, once told American journalist Tony Horwitz. “They are obsessed with your war because they cannot celebrate their own vanquished racists.”
It’s disconcerting enough elsewhere in the US. Where it’s a lot harder to claim ignorance of some of these connotations, even with some of the rest of the weird resurgence that apparently started in the ‘40s. It’s a mess.
I don’t 100% agree. I think free speech is important, and c’mon, look at the government and law enforcement we’ve got right now: do you trust these people to decide which speech is okay?
I believe the right to free speech includes abhorrent speech. However, the right to free speech does not include:
– Speaking unopposed.
– Being praised for your speech.
– Being respected for your speech.
– Speech on the platform of your choice. (This one is sort of complicated because “you’re free to say anything… alone in your basement” is really not free speech, but on the other hand I don’t think any specific person or organization is obligated to give you a platform.)
– Speech without people telling you to shut up. Someone saying “you shouldn’t say that” or even “you shouldn’t be allowed to say that” is exercising their free speech, not curtailing yours, unless they’re willing and able to actually force your silence.
– Being exempted from other laws (i.e., harassment, terroristic threats, incitement to violence) because you happened to violate those laws via speech.
–
So yeah, I’m actually super big on free speech, but only in the literal, limited sense.
Anyway, they only called this Boston rally “Free Speech” for two reasons:
1. Neo-Nazis are making this big push to clean up their act, to show up in polos and khakis, and to not have swastikas out in the open. Naming their rally “Free Speech” instead of “White Nationalism” is part of the respectability initiative.
2. They get to sneer “why are youagainst free speech?” at all the anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters.
Nazis are trying to hide behind free speech.
It doesn’t really hold that therefore any group advocating free speech are nazis.
I’m really confused by this, and I’ve been looking for evidence that this was in any way a white supremacist rally, and I can’t find any.
From googling it does look like that free speech rally organisers weren’t nazis at all, but they were far right people, so I think I know what kind of free speech they think is under attack. It does seem like people were worried the rally would attract nazis and white supremacists and the counter protest was in response to that fear. I’m unclear whether this fear materialised at all as I read people say they saw some nazis but there are no confirming pictures or sources I can find.
I also think it is true the alt right/nazis/white supremacists have hijacked “free speech ” as a code to say their right to be nazis must be protected, which unfortunately complicates things for true free speech supporters.
From what they’ve said on their FB, they’re explicitly a coalition across the political spectrum. Explicitly including progressives. Which is different to a group of people only from the far right.
Free speech is an important political principle, and letting nazis hijack it so much that the knee-jerk reaction to free speech is “you’re a nazi” is really fucking dangerous.
It seems like the far right are trying to use “free speech” in very much the same way as bigots want to wrap discrimination and harassment up in the idea of “religious freedom”. (Or “traditional values”, or…) Very much the same type of calculated push.
Which really doesn’t make me more inclined to just let them hijack and twist those concepts out from under everybody else, no. That would be a huge mistake.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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