Tag: Fascism

  • Steve is on a mission

    Bannon is spreading his poison in a wider circle.

    Donald Trump‘s former adviser Steve Bannon is setting up a foundation to boost the spread of far-right political groups across Europe.

    The strategist hopes the non-profit organisation called “The Movement” will rival the liberal Open Society Foundation set up by billionaire George Soros in 1984.

    “Soros is brilliant,” Mr Bannon told the Daily Beast website. “He’s evil, but he’s brilliant.”

    Since his departure from the White House in August last year, the former Breitbart editor has met a series of right-wing leaders including France’s Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel of Alternative for Germany, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Nigel Farage.

    In France told a Front National rally to wear the label of racism as a badge of honor. In the UK he called Tommy Robinson the backbone of Britain. (So he’s the Pennines then?)

    He said he believed that “right-wing populist nationalism” is the future of Europe after decades of integration.

    The Brexit referendum victory in 2016 was followed by the election of Donald Trump in the US and the rise of right-winger Matteo Salvini to become Italy’s deputy prime minister this year.

    Mr Salvini has announced a census of the country’s Roma community and closed its ports to humanitarian ships rescuing migrants off the coast of Libya.

    Springtime for racism and xenophobes.

  • One dead, at least 19 injured

    This country has fallen into the abyss.

    Violence erupted on Saturday as hundreds of white nationalists had gathered here for a rally and clashed with counterprotesters, resulting in at least one death and prompting the governor to declare a state of emergency.

    After the rally at a city park was dispersed, a car plowed into a crowd near the city’s downtown mall, killing at least one person and injuring at least 19 others, according to a spokeswoman for the University of Virginia Medical Center. The authorities did not immediately say whether the episode was related to the white nationalists’ demonstration, but several witnesses and video of the scene suggested that it might have been intentional.

    Well, if you look at the video, there seems little question it was intentional.

    Witnesses said a crowd of counterdemonstrators, jubilant because the white nationalists had left, was moving up Fourth Street, near the mall, when a gray sports car came down the road and accelerated, mowing down several people and hurling at least two in the air.

    “It was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Robert Armengol, who was at the scene reporting for a podcast he hosts with students at the University of Virginia. “After that it was pandemonium. The car hit reverse and sped and everybody who was up the street in my direction started running.”

    People who make a principle of racial hatred are more likely to do that kind of thing than people who don’t.

    Donald Trump has unleashed a nightmare on us. He did it deliberately, with malice aforethought, both to get attention and acclaim for himself, and because he likes it.

    Saturday afternoon, after initially issuing a brief denunciation on Twitter, President Trump, speaking at the start of a veterans’ event at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., again addressed what he described as “the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

    In his comments, President Trump condemned the bloody protests, but he did not specifically criticize the white nationalist rally and its neo-Nazi slogans beyond blaming “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”

    Which is a malevolent, blood-curdling lie.

    “It’s been going on for a long time in our country, it’s not Donald Trump, it’s not Barack Obama,” said Mr. Trump…

    No too damn right it’s not Barack Obama, but it damn well is Donald Trump. Barack Obama is the one who went to that funeral in Charleston; Donald Trump is the one who targets immigrants and Mexicans and wanted to see the Central Park 5 executed for something they didn’t do.

    The demonstration, which both organizers and critics had said was the largest gathering of white nationalists in recent years, was organized to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park that once bore the name of the Confederate general, but was renamed Emancipation Park.

    It was organized to protest the removal of a symbol of slavery. They want to keep symbols of slavery in public spaces. That’s their “cause.”

    The turmoil in Charlottesville began with a march Friday night by white nationalists on the campus of the University of Virginia and escalated Saturday morning as demonstrators from both sides gathered in the park. Waving Confederate flags, chanting Nazi-era slogans, wearing helmets and carrying shields, the white nationalists converged on the Lee statue and began chanting phrases like “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”

    We’re in the abyss.

  • The noise and the silence

    This is highly edifying.

    Donald “president” Trump has not said a word about the Charlottesville rallies.

  • Not sorry

    Jared Yates Sexton on what it’s like to report on threat-mongering fascists in Trump’s Modern Presidential.

    It only took a few minutes to figure out that HanAssholeSolo, the person behind President Donald Trump’s most retweeted tweet, had also used racial slurs and posted derogatory comments about Muslims. Then, there was the one that caused all the problems: a thread entitled, “Something Strange About CNN…can’t quite put my finger on it…,” with a graphic of dozens of the network’s talents with tiny blue Stars of David.

    This one:

    Image result for cnn star of david

    Daily News

    My reporting on the Stars of David meme quickly went viral. At this moment it’s been shared more than 14,000 times by the likes of CNN’s own Jake Tapper and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who’s had his own run-ins with the president as of late. In the past, when a post or story of mine has garnered that much attention, I’ve always dealt with the inevitable criticism and harassment that follows. Sure enough, it wasn’t far behind.

    Before the hour was up I was receiving messages from the usual customers: anonymous accounts with Pepe avatars and bios declaring themselves “ethnonationalists” and “white identitarians.” Despite my southern Baptist upbringing, they assumed I was Jewish because I’d uncovered anti-Semitism, and so the threats and memes predictably featured pictures of Adolf Hitler, scenes from the Holocaust and other anti-Semitic garbage. I was peppered with the usual slurs and insults before a user calling his or herself “Pepe’s Imam” told me: “There’s a civil war coming, leftist. Memes are the least of your problems.”

    Over the past few weeks I’d heard plenty of talk about a new civil war, this one supposedly the looming violent clash between left and right. Since last year I’ve been threatened regularly, including an incident in which somebody circled my house at four in the morning, and so I’ve kept a close eye on extreme rightwing communities. In their posts and on the subculture’s favorite media outlet InfoWars, I’d heard talk of that conflict, but now the rhetoric seemed universal.

    With some of them, it’s “just” talk. But we don’t know what percentage that “some” is, so we don’t know what percentage the others are – the ones for whom it’s not just talk. It’s fatuous to pretend this kind of mutual frotting of rage is entirely inert. Some people act on their rages, and the more rages are stoked and amplified, the more people will be inspired to make them physical. Circling someone’s house at 4 in the morning is not inert.

    Other threats appeared on related sites, particularly on 4chan, the wild west of internet forums. Here, in reference to my reporting, they talked openly about “the Journocaust,” a term some used in place of the civil war. The fantasy seemed to be open hostilities in which journalists, academics and liberals could be hung in public, an event some called “The Day of the Rope” after a plot point in William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel about a fictional race war some in the extreme right hold as a holy book of sorts.

    One anonymous member counseled on how to intimidate and threaten me without running afoul of social media moderators and the authorities. Another posted excerpts from a short story about killing journalists with lines like, “the media lies, the media dies” and “a traitor in front of a camera is still just a traitor.” Yet another said death was too good for journalists and “they should have their flesh twisted from their bones.”

    And then, this:

    I mean, he’s not wrong. If I could slit his flabby neck and dump him in a ditch somewhere without getting caught, I absolutely would in a heartbeat.

    Same goes for pretty much any shitlib whiny or fake-news propagandist. The only thing stopping me is that it would be inconvenient, and the fact that the law enforcement apparatus is still semi-functional.

    Again – could be just hot air – or could be the literal truth. It’s not reassuring.

    Things didn’t slow down.

    The Daily Stormer, the most popular Neo-Nazi publication in America, set its sights on me and declared my agenda as “Jewish.”

    Then, former imperial wizard of the Ku-Klux-Klan and recent U.S. Senate candidate David Duke, one of the leaders in white supremacist thought, weighed in and said people like me had “promoted the mass collective guilt of Whites and laughed about it,” a charge that seemed to open the door for more white supremacists to come after me.

    Still not reassuring.

  • They

    Well this is terrifying.

    https://youtu.be/PrnIVVWtAag