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Showing posts with label alt-right. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alt-right. Show all posts

Saturday, November 25, 2023

"Undercover With the New Alt-Right," by Amanda Moore in The Nation

Journalist Amanda Moore went undercover for 11 months and demonstrated her point that the extremism that's playing out currently in our country is more dangerous than the press has fully grasped. That said, in days of late, I am hearing more mainstream news media specifically using the word "fascism" to describe Donald Trump and his followers. Yes, long overdue. 

For example, Joe Scarborough in Morning Joe recently said, "It's way too late to call this fascism." Absolutely. It's a good thing to call this out as it's leading to the rise of violence in our country, against Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and U.S. minorities.

Amanda's story is riveting and illuminating of not only the expansiveness of this far-right ecosystem, but also an animated youth movement within doing all they can to infiltrate, and ultimately take over, the GOP. 

I appreciate Amanda's work in Texas where she identifies a link between anti-Semitic white supremacist holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and an anti-immigrant group, Texans for Strong Borders, that as previously posted to this blog. is entangled with Texas Republican Party leadership and GOP Chairman Matt Rinaldi himself. These dynamics have fostered a serious divide within the Texas Republican Party that you can learn about in this October 9th Texas Tribune piece by Robert Downen titled, Conservative PAC leader’s meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes leads to condemnations, escalates GOP infighting.

These are troubling times in our state and nation, no less.

-Angela Valenzuela

AUGUST 22, 2023 | The Nation
For 11 months, I pretended to be a far-right extremist. I discovered a radical youth movement trying to infiltrate the Republican Party.
AMANDA MOORE


Going to a Proud Boys riot with a neo-Nazi is not something I ever expected to do. But in August 2021, I found myself driving through downtown Portland, Ore., with an avowed white supremacist named Alex Nelson. We were on our way to the abandoned K-Mart parking lot that the Proud Boys had commandeered for their “Summer of Love” rally. The event marked the one-year anniversary of a “Back the Blue” demonstration that had become a brawl between the Proud Boys and militias on one side and anti-fascist counterprotesters on the other.

Earlier that week, Nelson, a man in his late 20s who was fond of discussing his “Anglo heritage,” had invited me to join him to watch what he assumed would be violent clashes. “Portland has canceled all parades and markets for the past year and a half. This is the only culture in Portland now. There will probably be a thousand spectators or more lining the bridges and sidewalks,” he assured me.

By then, I had been undercover with the far right for nine months, motivated by my belief that the fascist threat to the country was misunderstood by much of the press and far more dangerous than what was being reported. At first, I had planned only to sell the audio from “Stop the Steal” rallies to a podcast and write a couple of blog posts. But I found myself wanting to get a behind-the-scenes look at the far-right movement—to go to events from which the press was barred and observe extremists when they felt they were in their “safe space”—so the project grew into something far bigger: a long-term infiltration of the network of young white nationalists in America.As we cruised the city, Nelson said, “The people who go to that parking lot, they’re highly violent, unhinged, very angry older Gen X or boomers. You can’t just show up—they have to know you. And they don’t know anyone under the age of 35.”

By contrast, he added, last night he had been to an Oregon Young Republicans meeting that was “full of normal, healthy, attractive young people.” As we pulled up to a red light, Nelson looked over at me and smirked. “But none of those people are going to be in the K-Mart parking lot.”

People in the political center and on the left tend to have a monolithic view of the far right. In reality, it is an expansive ecosystem that includes neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, conspiracy theorists, anti-government militias, and white nationalists. These groups have some beliefs that conflict, but they are generally willing to overlook their differences. Still, not every group uses the same tactics to try to gain power.

Monday, December 04, 2017

When 20,000 American nazis descended upon New York City


This should indeed get taught in every history or Ethnic Studies class in the U.S.  

Lest we forget...

Angela

When 20,000 American nazis descended upon New York City


Originally published: The Atlantic by Emily Buder video by Marshall Curry (October 10, 2017)

In 1939, the German American Bund organized a rally of 20,000 Nazi supporters at Madison Square Garden in New York City. When Academy Award-nominated documentarian Marshall Curry stumbled upon footage of the event in historical archives, he was flabbergasted. Together with Field of Vision, he decided to present the footage as a cautionary tale to Americans. The short film, A Night at the Garden, premieres on The Atlantic today.
“The first thing that struck me was that an event like this could happen in the heart of New York City,” Curry told The Atlantic. “Watching it felt like an episode of The Twilight Zone where history has taken a different path. But it wasn’t science fiction – it was real, historical footage. It all felt eerily familiar, given today’s political situation.”
Rather than edit the footage into a standard historical documentary with narration, Curry decided to “keep it pure, cinematic, and unmediated, as if you are there, watching, and wrestling with what you are seeing. I wanted it to be more provocative than didactic – a small history-grenade tossed into the discussion we are having about White Supremacy right now.”
“The footage is so powerful,” continued Curry, “it seems amazing that it isn’t a stock part of every high school history class. This story was likely nudged out of the canon, in part because it’s scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget.”

View video at this link.

Friday, September 22, 2017

Who Exactly Is the Alt-Right? As Told by the Alt-Right

 Check out this informative piece by Ben Chapman, 2017. 
You may be scared of the Alt-Right. I can safely say that you don’t have to be. Remember that the Alt-Right is a coalition. It doesn’t exist in and of itself, but rather as a collection of other groups too weak to function on their own.
Additionally, the Alt-Right is unorganized. Yes, they have the ability to show up to the same place and chant the same things, but when it comes to underlying goals, the Alt-Right is scattered. As long as their group remains the cultish, brash, pseudo-intellectual movement that they currently are, they will never be anything more than glorified internet trolls.
Finally, we must realize that this movement is not based on hate. As easy as it may be to ascribe Nazism, Klanism, and supremacism to hatred, this is misled. The Alt-Right is a movement based on ignorance, and it is borne out of failed educations and crumbling social structures.
With these facts in mind, and with the Alt-Right’s veil lifted, we can address the problems that lead to this plague. Supremacist ideas won’t ever disappear completely. They will always exist somewhere. But I believe that, if addressed, it one day won’t be a topic worth writing about.
According to Chapman's analysis, these folks are little more than "glorified trolls" that could have really benefited from a good education, especially Ethnic Studies.

Angela



by Ben Chapman

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

America was never a white country — here’s why it never will be


Events in Charlottesville recently cascaded into domestic terrorism. Three dead and dozens wounded as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other “alt-right” members descended upon the university that Thomas Jefferson built; their purpose, it is alleged, to defend a statute a monument to the Confederate Civil War soldier, General Robert E. Lee. These radical rightists arrived from all across the United States upon the college town of Charlottesville to protect, in their words, their “white” heritage. Among the many problems, I have with so-called “white supremacists” is their purposeful mixing of “heritage” with “history,” rhetorically pining for a once proud “white” America.But history proves that America was never white.

That I need to make this statement, and worse, that some may take offense from it, shows the blurring rhetoric between what is Heritage and what is History. I’ll return to this later. For now, some History.
The first successful colonial holding in these current United States was Spanish, at St. Augustine, Florida, established 1565, four decades plus prior to Virginia’s Jamestown.

America was never white.

Speaking of Jamestown, the first Africans were brought into Virginia on a Dutch trading ship in 1619, a year before Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts.
America was never white.

And nearly half of those Pilgrims could not speak English. Of the near half that couldn’t, most spoke Dutch, with a scattering of German and French. America from the get go was not an English-speaking nation. When the Puritan, William Bradford, arranged the first Indian Treaty signing in 1621, it was with Massasoit, a Pokanoket of the Wampanoag Confederacy. At this time, depending on which archeologist you ask, the native population of North America was anywhere between 8 to 20 million. English speakers? Less than a thousand.

America was never white.

And it was the Dutch who seemed ascendant, as they settled New Amsterdam and the Hudson River Valley beginning in 1625. English-speaking America was in the minority of the European languages spoken by 1670. The French were firmly in place along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes region, and it may come as some surprise to many Americans, but Green Bay, Wisconsin was once “La Baye des Puants” which is what the French called it when they founded “The Bay of Stinks” in 1634. Spain still reigned in Florida and along the Gulf Coast. Even the Swedes set up shop along the Delaware River taking up large swaths of what is today Delaware and Pennsylvania.

And if you were around in the mid-eighteenth century, don’t ask Benjamin Franklin about the indentured Palatines. In 1751 Franklin penned, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.” where he openly called German-speakers “swarthy” and “stupid,” that they would likely “Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them” unless there was a change to immigration policies.

Of course, one of the more famous eighteenth-century colonial wars, the French and Indian War, lasted nine years, and only after victory was secured in 1763, did English speakers become dominant among the many European powers that settled North America.

Back to Africans, according to SlaveVoyages.org, the activities of the Atlantic slave trade brought 9,507 Africans to mainland America by 1699. Over the next 75-years or a year before the United States declared its Independence, another 220,000 were brought to slave upon the American mainland. The 1790 census (the first undertaken by the United States) proved 740,054 Africans in America or 26.5% of the population just a year after the Constitution was ratified.

America was never white.

And the Revolutionary War was not white on white violence, or English speakers against Mother England. There was the famed Ethiopian Brigade, which General George Washington did his best to avoid. Yes, blacks fought on both sides of the war. And Crispus Attucks was black and he was the first to die at the Boston Massacre of 1770. Indians, too, fought in this war, forced to take sides by both British and colonial forces.

America was never white.

Even when the nation was young, and found a bargain from Napoleon to purchase all of Louisiana – yes, we gained the entire Mississippi River watershed, but since France had only just won Louisiana, a trophy for defeating Spain in Europe, and unable to hold on to Haiti in the Caribbean where slaves successfully rebelled, America received the Midwest which was filled with the indigenous mostly, and some Spaniards too.

America was never white.

Equally, the war of 1812, which once again pitted the United States against Britain, was not wholly a white on white conflict. Again, Native Americans took sides, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh had formed a large multi-tribal Confederacy and played an enormous role in ensuring that the young United States failed at taking Canada. The great United States Navy admiral, Oliver Hazard Perry, along with Daniel Dobbins, a shipmaster, built a fleet from Greenwood on Lake Erie using African Americans to build and then man the fleet. At War’s end, at the Battle of New Orleans, General Andrew Jackson’s fighting force included Choctaw Indians and freed blacks.
America was never white.

Texas, and the Mexican-American War which followed its annexation, obviously entailed the gaining of territory inhabited by Native Americans and Hispanics. When gold was all the rage in California, the world landed upon its shores. People from Europe, South America, and yes, Asia (China, in particular) descended and many remained.

America was never white.

In military history the 54th All Black Regiment of the Civil War, the 369th Infantry known as the “The Harlem Hellfighters” in World War One, and the all-Japanese 442th Infantry during the Second World War, still – to this day – remain some of the most wartime decorated units of our country’s fighting forces.

America was never white.

Which brings us to the topic of heritage and history. For this, I’ll quote famed historian David Lowenthal. Author of The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Lowenthal remarks that heritage is not history at all: “it is not an inquiry into the past, but a celebration of it a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes.”

Monuments, under this definition, are not history. Monuments are memory-makers, celebratory edifices erected to hide History’s complexity, drown curiosity, and feed the simple in the present and in the future.

If we dig past the monuments of the Robert E. Lee’s and the Stonewall Jackson’s erected in the 1920s (Jim Crow era) or the 1950s (Civil Rights era), some in far away Arizona (Arizona achieved statehood in 1912, the Civil War ended in 1865), what we get to is a place called the past were easily traceable demographics prove a country filled with ethnicities from all over the world. What the alt-right desires are an America where whites maintain some semblance of power over anyone of color if not outright ethnic cleansing. Their rhetoric of Heritage is pure myth, a fabrication of a false past, creating memory where none existed.

America was never white, and it never will be.

Joe Krulder, Ph.D., teaches history at Butte College.
This article was originally published at History News Network

Sunday, August 13, 2017

What UVA did wrong when white supremacists came to campus by Shaun R. Harper and Charles H. F. Davis

I agree with yesterday's Los Angeles Times Opinion-Editorial by professors Shaun R. Harper and Charles H. F. Davis.  Specifically, they critique President Sullivan's NOT naming the problem for what it is.

I encourage you to read, "Charlottesville Was Not a “Protest Turned Violent,” It Was a Planned Race Riot.  Isn’t it time for the media to be honest and call white supremacists the domestic terrorists that they are?" by Zenobia Jeffries in YES! Magazine (August 12, 2017), who also doesn't mince her words on the matter.

Like Republican Corey Garner is doing (read story here), we must call out white supremacy for what it is in all its manifestations.  The events in Charlottesville are inescapably about racism and extreme-white politics and how hate-filled and lethal they are. 

When we consider that nationally, 83% of our college and university presidents are white, according to 2016 data from the American Council on Education, it is incumbent upon them to both anticipate and respond swiftly and boldly to racism and xenophobia—beginning by a naming it as such whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head.  Our universities should also focus on having diverse leadership and faculty.

-Angela Valenzuela

What UVA did wrong when white supremacists came to campus, by Shaun R. Harper and Charles H. F. Davis



“White lives matter, you will not replace us,” chanted white nationalists as they marched through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Va., with tiki torches Friday night. On Saturday, Ku Klux Klan members and others displaying Confederate flags, swastikas and an array of hate symbols gathered for a rally in Emancipation Park in that small, majority-white college town.

In a four-sentence statement on the university’s website, UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan deemed the campus march “intolerable” and “entirely inconsistent with the university’s values.” Sullivan also added that she was “deeply saddened and disturbed by the hateful behavior displayed by torch-bearing protesters that marched on our grounds this evening.”

But Sullivan’s message, and subsequent university postings Saturday, failed to explicitly name white supremacy as the motive of the protesters and made no mention of race. We suspect that many black parents who are about to drop their 17- and 18-year-olds off for move-in day and the fall term at UVA in the next week are worried. They have heard nothing from campus leadership that is likely to assure them that UVA is firmly committed to addressing racism when it occurs on and around campus.

The posted statements don’t say that the “hateful behavior” of the “Unite the Right” marchers targeted people of color. When black freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania received messages containing racial slurs and threats of lynching last November, Penn’s President Amy Gutmann and other administrators repeatedly called these acts racist and acknowledged that black students were victims of the digital attacks. Higher education leaders must explicitly and specifically denounce racism as alt-right and other white nationalist groups bring hate to campus.

The UVA statements do nothing to debunk Ku Klux Klan members’ and others’ claims about the status of white people. By far, whites make up the largest racial group at UVA, campus statistics show. There were 13,098 white students during the 2016-17 academic school year, compared with 1,323 blacks and 1,285 Latinos. Furthermore, last year only 87 of the university’s 2,754 faculty members were black. White men made up 49.1% of the faculty. These numbers make clear that white lives, especially white men’s lives, do in fact matter at UVA and in Charlottesville, and are in no danger of being replaced. The university must deploy these facts against the alt-right’s erroneous assertions.

In moments of racial crisis, students and faculty — especially people of color — look to senior administrators for guidance and reassurance. They expect courageous leadership and the responsible use of evidence. Mishandling these situations in raceless ways does nothing to confirm, for instance, that black lives matter. It signals to students and faculty that their university is either too unaware, too afraid or insufficiently skilled to talk about racism, let alone to address it. According to 2016 data from the American Council on Education, 83% of college and university presidents in our nation are white. Campus chief executives, including those who are people of color, join white nationalists in preserving and exacerbating white supremacy when they neglect to name and boldly counter racism.

Shaun R. Harper and Charles H. F. Davis III are professors at USC’s Rossier School of Education. They lead the USC Race and Equity Center.

Saturday, July 08, 2017

The rise of multiracial and multiethnic babies in the U.S.

We are not solely a multicultural, diverse society, but a highly inter-racial one, as well, albeit with variability on this across the nation.
In 1980, 7% of all newlyweds were in an intermarriage, and by 2015, that share had more than doubled to 17%, according to a recently released Pew Research Center report.
I, too, like and appreciate that despite the increasingly visible white, Alt-Right, ethnonationalist agenda for racial purity, the country as a whole sees interracial unions as a positive thing.

-Angela

 

June 6, 2017
By Gretchen Livingston 

One-in-seven U.S. infants (14%) were multiracial or multiethnic in 2015, nearly triple the share in 1980, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. This increase comes nearly a half century after the landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage.

Multiracial or multiethnic infants include children less than 1 year old whose parents are each of a different race, those with one Hispanic and one non-Hispanic parent, and those with at least one parent who identifies as multiracial. This analysis is limited to infants living with two parents because census data on the race and ethnicity of parents is only available for those living in the same home. In 2015, this was the case for 62% of all infants.
The rapid rise in the share of infants who are multiracial or multiethnic has occurred hand-in-hand with the growth in marriages among spouses of different races or ethnicities. In 1980, 7% of all newlyweds were in an intermarriage, and by 2015, that share had more than doubled to 17%, according to a recently released Pew Research Center report. Both trends are likely spurred in part by the growing racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S.
The general public seems mostly accepting of the trend toward more children having parents of different races. In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 22% of U.S. adults said more children with parents of different races was a good thing for society, while half as many (11%) thought it was a bad thing. The majority (65%) thought that this trend didn’t make much of a difference.
Among all multiracial and multiethnic infants living with two parents, by far the largest portion have one parent who is Hispanic and one who is non-Hispanic white (42%). The next largest share of these infants (22%) have at least one parent who identifies as multiracial, while 14% have one parent who is non-Hispanic white and another who is Asian.
The share of infants in two-parent homes who have parents of different races or ethnicities varies dramatically across states. For example, 44% of infants in Hawaii are multiracial or multiethnic. Shares are also high in Oklahoma and Alaska (28%). 


At the same time, just 4% of children younger than 1 in Vermont are multiracial or multiethnic, as are 6% of those in North Dakota, Maine, Mississippi and West Virginia.
Topics: Birth Rate and Fertility, Intermarriage, Marriage and Divorce, Parenthood, Race and Ethnicit

Monday, May 29, 2017

One of Their Own: Alternative Racist Conference Welcomes Jews

This is a really interesting, if disturbing, report from a February, 2009, conference in a Baltimore Washington International Airport titled, "Preserving Western Civilization Conference," attended by the likes of David Duke and UT Law Professor Lino Graglia. This will have been a definite touchpoint for what today is known as the "Alt-Right," movement whose ideology tapped into white racial fears and buoyed Donald Trump into power.

The conference was actually convened by Jewish astrophysicist Michael Hart whose book titled, Understanding Human History, addresses "differences" in intelligence between various ethnic and racial groups. It's interesting to see the far right come together—academics together with neo-nazis in order to promote a "new" American Renaissance, the title of a racist publication. At least one proposal that came out was a "new, all-white political party." So I guess the Republican Party wasn't already white enough...

Other notables present were Steve Farron from Johannesburg, South Africa, author of The Affirmative Action Hoax and Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Farron and Rushton's agendas are to demonstrate IQ differences between whites and blacks.

Graglia commented on the need to get rid of birthright citizenship, an interpretation derived from the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Islam also took some hits, including a proposal to outlaw it. Hart himself compared the Koran to Mein Kampf and Islam to Nazism. Check out the http://www.splcenter.org/ website for more info.

-Angela

Intelligence Report
Summer 2009

One of Their Own: Alternative Racist Conference Welcomes Jews

By Janet Smith

Baltimore, Md. — Seventy people, including a few well-known mainstream academics, joined prominent white nationalists and academic racists gathered in the Four Points Sheraton at the Baltimore/Washington International airport this February for the first-ever "Preserving Western Civilization Conference." Its aim: to defend "America's Judeo-Christian heritage and European identity." But not much civilized was said there. Rather, the discussion centered around claims that blacks are not as intelligent as whites, immigrants are destroying America, and Islam is no religion of peace — it's expansionist, intolerant, militant, and seeks to destroy.

The conference was convened by Jewish astrophysicist Michael Hart, author of the racist book Understanding Human History, which focuses on alleged differences in intelligence between various ethnic and racial groups. In the past, Hart was a regular at the biannual conferences put on by American Renaissance, a racist publication whose editor wrote, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that "[w]hen blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears." Though few in number, Jewish academic racists were active in American Renaissance right from the start, welcomed by that group's leader, Jared Taylor, who even once arranged for kosher meals. But Taylor has also welcomed as speakers outspoken anti-Semites, including Holocaust denier Sam Dickson and neo-Nazi activist Steven Barry, making for a potentially volatile situation. Read on here.

Friday, February 03, 2017

Exposé on The Nationalistic And Christian Right Influences On Trump


Sarah Posner, a reporter with The Nation's Investigative Fund, talks about how the Steve Bannon-Jeff Sessions-Mike Pence nexus is influencing President Trump's policies.
This should concern us.  Continue listening or read full transcript here.

#AltRightMeans

Monday, December 12, 2016

Trump and the De-Normalization of Bigotry and Inflammatory Rhetoric

I've been reading about this person, Richard B. Spencer, who is the face of the "Alt-Right" movement that some view as the "U.S. neo-Nazi movement," a phrase that they want to distance themselves from.  It is not a large movement, but it is clearly emboldened by a Trump administration. If you go to their Facebook page, you can read more about their white nationalist views here.  

I offer also the following articles as possible additional starting points for your own investigation of this extremist movement which though small, presents optics through social media that render them inescapably allied to the KKK and neo-Nazi's.
The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the alt-right “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”
Five myths about the alt-right .  A myth, among others, that Nuzzi dispels is that Trump isn't sympathetic to their movement. 
"[Trump] has never asked its members to stop photoshopping Jewish journalists into gas chambers in his honor. What’s more, he has often seemed to wink in their direction by deploying their rhetoric, with his talk of opposing “globalism,” his repeated retweets of alt-right Twitter accounts and his use of imagery — such as a Star of David illustration — that originated on Nazi websites."
This extremism is precisely why we need ethnic studies as a normalized part of education in order to non-normalize the racism and inflammatory rhetoric that's getting normalized by a Trump presidency.  Stated differently, ethnic studies is as much for whites as for non-whites because it provides readings, evidence, and frameworks that lead to an understanding of the historicity of race as a social construct—as well as how race intersects with other markers of identity like gender, social class, sexual orientation, religion, and so on.  

That is, race is a modern idea that tracks back to the imperialist exploits of Europeans.  A classic in this regard is Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Pre-contact America had no such construction of race. Rather race came into being as an actual word or concept with the consolidation of slavery in North America.  There is a deep history on the social construction of race that I can't give justice to right here, but this is a starting point.

A Trump presidency notwithstanding, our youth should not be deceived by the hateful ideology of this fringe movement. Moreover, there is much to know and celebrate about a multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual America and world.  My thoughts this morning....


Angela Valenzuela


'Hail Trump!': White Nationalists Salute the President Elect


Video of an alt-right conference in Washington, D.C., where Trump’s victory was met with cheers and Nazi salutes.


Daniel Lombroso / The Atlantic