Daddy State Averted

Idaho - land of gemstones, mighty fine potatoes, and bigoted shitheads.

WaPo: (pay wall)

31 tied to hate group charged with planning riot near LGBTQ event in Idaho

Police in Idaho arrested 31 people who had face coverings, white-supremacist insignia, shields and an “operations plan” to riot near an LGBTQ Pride event on Saturday afternoon. Police said they were affiliated with Patriot Front, a white-supremacist group whose founder was among those arrested.

Authorities received a tip about a “little army” loading into a U-Haul truck at a hotel Saturday afternoon, said Lee White, the police chief in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a city of about 50,000 near the border with Washington. Local and state law enforcement pulled over the truck about 10 minutes later, White said at a news conference.

Many of those arrested were wearing logos representing Patriot Front, which rebranded after one of its members plowed his car into a crowd of people protesting a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.

The group’s founder, Thomas Ryan Rousseau, was among those arrested, according to jail records. Like the others, Rousseau was arrested on a charge of criminal conspiracy to riot, a misdemeanor. The arrestees were held on $300 bail. Some of the other men arrested also have been linked to the group.

A man is detained with a group of 31 people who were charged with criminal conspiracy to riot, in Coeur d’Alene. (North Country Off Grid/YouTube/Reuters)

In photos and videos posted on social media, a group of men dressed in hats, sunglasses, white balaclavas and Patriot Front’s signature khaki pants were seen kneeling on the ground with their hands zip-tied behind their backs as police officers kept watch. An onlooker taunted the group, yelling, “Losers!”

White said the people were headed to City Park, which was hosting Pride in the Park, an event advertised as a “family-friendly, community event celebrating diversity and building a stronger and more unified community for ALL.” Organizers did not immediately respond to telephone and email requests for comment from The Washington Post on Saturday evening, but they wrote in a post to the group’s Facebook page that it was a “successful” event.

The group, North Idaho Pride Alliance, urged people to “stay aware of your surroundings this afternoon and evening” in the city.

Authorities had been aware of online threats leading up to the weekend, White said, so police had increased their presence in the city’s downtown. Two SWAT teams and officers from the city, county and state assisted in the arrests.

The Panhandle Patriots, a local motorcycle club, had planned a “Gun d’Alene” event on the same day as Pride in the Park to “go head to head with these people,” an organizer said in April during an appearance with state Rep. Heather Scott (R).

The organizer was not identified by name in a video but wore a vest bearing the alias “Maddog” and the insignia of the Panhandle Patriots group. He lamented that the Pride gathering would be “allowed to parade through all of Coeur d’Alene,” saying that “a line must be drawn in the sand” against such LGBTQ displays. Scott did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post late Saturday.

In a news release posted on the group’s website, the Panhandle Patriots encouraged the community to “take a stand” against the LGBTQ “agenda.” It also suggested without evidence that “extremist groups” were trying to hijack the event to provoke violence and said the group would change its event name to “North Idaho Day of Prayer” in response.

Suggesting without evidence that someone is doing the shit you're doing - "extremist groups trying to hijack the event" - is classic Daddy State.

Rule 1: Every accusation is a confession

Reached by phone late Saturday, a representative for the Panhandle Patriots declined to comment on the day’s events, telling The Post, “We are not answering questions right now.”

White did not mention a connection between the Panhandle Patriots event and the arrests. He said those arrested had come from several states “to riot downtown,” with riot gear, at least one smoke grenade and documents “similar to an operations plan that a police or military group would put together for an event.”

A white-supremacist march in D.C. was pushed by a fake Twitter account, experts say

He did not see firearms at the scene of the arrest, he said, but emphasized the situation was “very fresh.”

However, firearms were present in the vicinity of the park, White said. Police had been in contact with the FBI “all day,” he said.

White noted that the authorities’ understanding of the situation was still developing and said at the news conference that law enforcement had not yet interviewed those arrested. Representatives for Patriot Front were unable to be reached for comment.

More charges are possible, White said. The first court appearances for those arrested will probably be on Monday, Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris said.

AHA! But Never Mind

There's a quality of endlessness in the epic amounts of horrendously shitty behavior that get revealed on a fairly regular basis.

And what makes it all even worse is the feeling that the people indulging in all that shitty behavior are shielded from being held fully accountable because of their connections in government, and their PR consultants' cozy relationships with media.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Huge hack reveals embarrassing details of who’s behind Proud Boys and other far-right websites

Researchers say it will allow them to gain important new insights into how extremists operate online

Epik long has been the favorite Internet company of the far-right, providing domain services to QAnon theorists, Proud Boys and other instigators of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — allowing them to broadcast hateful messages from behind a veil of anonymity.

But that veil abruptly vanished last week when a huge breach by the hacker group Anonymous dumped into public view more than 150 gigabytes of previously private data — including user names, passwords and other identifying information of Epik’s customers.

Extremism researchers and political opponents have treated the leak as a Rosetta Stone to the far-right, helping them to decode who has been doing what with whom over several years. Initial revelations have spilled out steadily across Twitter since news of the hack broke last week, often under the hashtag #epikfail, but those studying the material say they will need months and perhaps years to dig through all of it.

“It’s massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I’ve seen and, as an extremism researcher, it’s certainly the most interesting,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism. “It’s an embarrassment of riches — stress on the embarrassment.”

Epik, based in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish, has made its name in the Internet world by providing critical Web services to sites that have run afoul of other companies’ policies against hate speech, misinformation and advocating violence. Its client list is a roll-call of sites known for permitting extreme posts and that have been rejected by other companies for their failure to moderate what their users post.

Online records show those sites have included 8chan, which was dropped by its providers after hosting the manifesto of a gunman who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; Gab, which was dropped for hosting the antisemitic rants of a gunman who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Parler, which was dropped due to lax moderation related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

Epik also provides services to a network of sites devoted to extremist QAnon conspiracy theories. Epik briefly hosted the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer in 2019 after acquiring a cybersecurity company that had provided it with hosting services, but Epik soon canceled that contract, according to news reports. Epik also stopped supporting 8chan after a short period of time, the company has said.

Earlier this month, Epik also briefly provided service to the antiabortion group Texas Right to Life, whose website, ProLifeWhistleblower.com, was removed by the hosting service GoDaddy because it solicited accusations about which medical providers might be violating a state abortion ban.

An Epik attorney said the company stopped working with the site because it violated company rules against collecting people’s private information. Online records show Epik was still the site’s domain registrar as of last week, though the digital tip line is no longer available, and the site now redirects to the group’s homepage.

Epik founder Robert Monster’s willingness to provide technical support to online sanctuaries of the far-right have made him a regular target of anti-extremism advocates, who criticized him for using Epik’s tools to republish the Christchurch gunman’s manifesto and live-streamed video the killer had made of the slaughter.

note: the guy who runs a web hosting service where all this shittiness can live and thrive is named "Monster" - there can be nothing more perfect than that anywhere in the universe.

Monster also used the moment as a marketing opportunity, saying the files were now “effectively uncensorable,” according to screenshots of his tweets and Gab posts from the time. Monster also urged Epik employees to watch the video, which he said would convince them it was faked, Bloomberg News reported.

Monster has defended his work as critical to keeping the Internet uncensored and free, aligning himself with conservative critics who argue that leading technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and YouTube have gone too far in policing content they deem inappropriate.

note: and that's the key - they can hide their shitty behavior behind a claim of "freedom", using the strength of our constitution against us.

Monster did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post. But he said in an email to customers two days after hackers announced the breach that the company had suffered an “alleged security incident” and asked customers to report back any “unusual account activity.”

“You are in our prayers today,” Monster wrote last week, as news of the hack spread. “When situations arise where individuals might not have honorable intentions, I pray for them. I believe that what the enemy intends for evil, God invariably transforms into good. Blessings to you all.”

Since the hack, Epik’s security protocols have been the target of ridicule among researchers, who’ve marveled at the site’s apparent failure to take basic security precautions, such as routine encryption that could have protected data about its customers from becoming public.

The files include years of website purchase records, internal company emails and customer account credentials revealing who administers some of the biggest far-right websites. The data includes client names, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and passwords left in plain, readable text. The hack even exposed the personal records from Anonymize, a privacy service Epik offered to customers wanting to conceal their identity.

Similar failings by other hacked companies have drawn scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, which has probed companies such as dating site Ashley Madison for failing to protect their customers’ private data from hackers. FTC investigations have resulted in settlements imposing financial penalties and more rigorous privacy standards.

“Given Epik’s boasts about security, and the scope of its Web hosting, I would think it would be an FTC target, especially if the company was warned but failed to take protective action,” said David Vladeck, a former head of the FTC’s consumer protection bureau, now at Georgetown University Law Center. “I would add that the FTC wouldn’t care about the content — right wing or left wing; the questions would be the possible magnitude and impact of the breach and the representations … the company may have made about security.”

The FTC declined to comment.

Researchers poring through the trove say the most crucial findings concern the identities of people hosting various extremist sites and the key role Epik played in keeping material online that might otherwise have vanished from the Internet — or at least the parts of the Internet that are easily stumbled upon by ordinary users.

“The company played such a major role in keeping far-right terrorist cesspools alive,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism. “Without Epik, many extremist communities — from QAnon and white nationalists to accelerationist neo-Nazis — would have had far less oxygen to spread harm, whether that be building toward the Jan. 6 Capitol riots or sowing the misinformation and conspiracy theories chipping away at democracy.”

The breach, first reported by the freelance journalist Steven Monacelli, was made publicly available for download last week alongside a note from Anonymous hackers saying it would help researchers trace the ownership and management of “the worst trash the Internet has to offer.”

After the hackers’ announcement, Epik initially said it was “not aware of any breach.” But in a rambling, three-hour live-stream last week, Monster acknowledged there had been a “hijack of data that should not have been hijacked” and called on people not to use the data for “negative” purposes.

“If you have a negative intent to use that data, it’s not going to work out for you. I’m just telling you,” he said. “If the demon tells you to do it, the demon is not your friend.”

Several domains in the leak are associated with the far-right Proud Boys group, which is known for violent street brawls and involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and was banned by Facebook in 2018 as a hate group.

A Twitter account, @epikfailsnippet, that is posting unverified revelations from the leaked data, included a thread purporting to expose administrators of the Proud Boys sites. One man who was identified by name as administrator of a local Proud Boys forum was said to be an employee of Drexel University. The university said he hasn’t worked at Drexel since November 2020.

Technology news site the Daily Dot reported that Ali Alexander, a conservative political activist who played a key role in spreading false voter fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, took steps after the Jan. 6 siege to obscure his ownership of more than 100 domains registered to Epik. Nearly half reportedly used variations of the “Stop the Steal” slogan pushed by Alexander and others. Alexander did not reply to requests for comment from the Daily Dot or, on Tuesday, from The Post.

Extremism researchers urge careful fact-checking to protect credibility, but the data remains tantalizing for its potential to unmask extremists in public-facing jobs.

Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit whistleblower group, said some researchers call the Epik hack “the Panama Papers of hate groups,” a comparison to the leak of more than 11 million documents that exposed a rogue offshore finance industry. And, like the Panama Papers, scouring the files is labor intensive, with payoffs that could be months away.

“A lot of research begins with naming names,” Best said. “There’s a lot of optimism and feeling of being overwhelmed, and people knowing they’re in for the long haul with some of this data.”

So what exactly happened as a result of the Panama Papers? Anybody remember?

Today's Today

August 12, 2017

CHARLOTTESVILLE — Ryan Kelly had been working all day when he heard a car rev its engine and saw a flash of metal speed by. He didn’t know what was happening; he didn’t think. He did what photojournalists do: pointed his camera and shot.

What he captured on Aug. 12, 2017, was an image that would command the world’s attention, win journalism’s highest honor and symbolize the worst moment of this university town’s worst day: a gathering of white nationalists and the killing of a young woman who came to protest them.

WaPo:

White supremacists made Charlottesville a symbol of racism. Black residents say it still is.

Her whole life, Dorenda Johnson has endured racism in Charlottesville. Growing up in a city built with the help of enslaved people, she attended integrated schools but often found herself assigned to segregated classes. She spent years working as an administrative assistant in a University of Virginia hospital wing that — until last year — was named after a notorious white supremacist.

So she was hardly surprised in 2017 when hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on the college town for a “Unite the Right” rally — an event that transformed Charlottesville into a national symbol of racism. But the 61-year-old hoped the violence that left a counterprotester dead and dozens injured would finally jolt local leaders into a commitment to address the city’s racial inequities.

For Johnson, now a member of the city’s new Police Civilian Review Board, that day has not arrived.

“I said after ‘Unite the Right,’ ‘Well, now, hopefully your eyes will be finally open.’ Not! I am very disappointed and plain old sick and tired of being sick and tired,” said Johnson, who lives with her two grown sons in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhood of Orangedale-Prospect. “I would really like my sons to leave the city. I don’t want them to get stuck in a rut here. There is very little that they can do to better themselves here.”

In interviews with The Washington Post, numerous other Black residents and activists echoed her frustration. They said they are still pressing for change even as racial justice protests grip the rest of the country after George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police May 25.

It matters little, they repeatedly said, that much of the city’s leadership is Black, including the mayor, police chief and city manager/chief executive officer. They say gentrification continues pushing minorities and other low-income residents out into neighboring counties. About 20 percent of Charlottesville’s 47,000 residents identified themselves as Black, Black/Hispanic or other races in the most recent census data.

- and -

In recent weeks, “volunteer statue guards” have arrived at night armed with guns to ward off protesters eager to deface the statues of Lee and fellow Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, according to C-Ville, a weekly newspaper in the city. (Last month, the Lee statue was splattered with red paint.) And burning tiki torches were recently discovered outside the homes of two local anti-racism activists. Similar flaming torches were carried by white supremacists three years ago in their march on the University of Virginia campus to the statue of Thomas Jefferson.

“These guys are not going away,” said one of the activists, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for reasons of safety. “I keep finding alt-right stickers on my mailbox and all around my neighborhood. Did I feel like my life was threatened? After 2017, it’s hard to dismiss something like that.”

There's a feeling of "wanting to get back to normal", but we have to keep in mind that "normal" wasn't a very good circumstance for way too many people.

We have to try to get back to wanting something better - wanting to move towards that more perfect union.

We have an awful lot of work to do.

Daddy State Update

Daddy State Awareness - Rule 1:

Every accusation is a confession.

In an attempt to inoculate yourself from criticism, you can always preemptively accuse "the other side  of doing what you're planning to do (even if the other side doesn't actually exist), which gives you a potent combo - Straw Man plus Projection.

The Right Radicals love to pimp the big scary "AntiFa" boogeyman. Just as they love pimping the Caravans and the gun-grabbers and Sharia Law and and and.

Fuck that shit - we have to be smarter than that.

HuffPo:

The Proud Boys want the public to believe that they’re a “drinking club” who only resort to violence to defend themselves from anti-fascist protesters during political rallies.

But in private, these extremists have discussed injuring and even killing their adversaries, plotting tactics and optics for months in order to assert a claim of self-defense should they face charges.

According to private chat logs obtained exclusively by HuffPost, the punch-happy, pro-Trump street gang was particularly excited for its “Resist Marxism” rally, scheduled for April 6 in Providence, Rhode Island. With the right plan of attack, members said, this one could put them back on the map.

The group had been floundering ever since 10 of its members were arrested for assaulting protesters outside a GOP event in New York City last year. Their leader, Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, reportedly arranged for his followers’ surrender.

In the chats, covering a time period between February and March of this year, members claimed they needed a conclusive “win” this time around, which they defined as a bloody battle against “antifa” in Providence. If this brawl were bigger and more violent than previous iterations, they might regain some of the street cred and followers they’d lost.

“We’ll grow this group of patriots and we’ll never back down,” wrote the event’s organizer, Proud Boys member Alan Swinney, in the private chat messages. “If we win, it will make more patriots come to the next rally. We just need to go there and we’ll beat them. We’ll have enough to crush them at some point.”

The piece goes on

The Proud Boys repeatedly acknowledged that their plans could get them in trouble.

“I advise all of you to only speak in terms of self-defense and never speak of premeditated violence,” wrote a man who identified himself as Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman, an extremist who has previously been convicted of violent felonies and is known for his attacks at rallies and repeated parole violations, among other crimes.

He added: “I could be liable for what happens in Providence. So please stop making it easy for these people to prosecute us by putting threats of violence in writing that can be used against us later.”

Few seemed to listen, and leaders like Swinney had to attempt damage control on a regular basis.

- and -

In an interview, Swinney corroborated the authenticity of chat screenshots HuffPost showed him and said he personally agreed with statements about “smashing commies” like Mastrostefano’s.

“He specifically said ‘when the time comes,’” Swinney told HuffPost, adding later: “When the time comes, and the order is given, I’ll do whatever it takes to stop these people. The constitution is the greatest document of freedom ever written. I’ll give my life to defend it if nessicary [sic].”

NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES Proud Boy Alan Swinney at a rally.

Swinney also confirmed that the Proud Boys had been planning another rally in Providence, which they hoped to hold June 1, but which now appears to be on the rocks if not canceled. He said he wouldn’t be going due to his personal monetary woes, which he blamed on “the left, SPLC and feds.”

Ed Note:

I can find no reports of a Proud Boys rally in June 2020

Moving Past It

A Nazi asshole killed Heather Heyer and injured 35 others when he drove his car into a group of people here in my home town August 12, 2017.

That asshole made a deal and changed his plea to guilty for 29 Federal Hate Crime charges.

As part of the deal, prosectors didn't ask for the death penalty, and the judge is reviewing the thing now.

James Fields could be sentenced to life plus 419 years in federal prison.

WaPo:

James Alex Fields Jr., 21, of Ohio admitted guilt to 29 of 30 counts in a federal indictment as part of a deal with prosecutors, who agreed they would not seek the death penalty in a case that has come to symbolize the violent resurgence of white supremacism in the United States. Fields is set to be sentenced July 3.

Late last year, Fields was convicted in state court of first-degree murder and other charges for killing Heather D. Heyer, 32, and injuring dozens at the chaotic Unite the Right rally on Aug. 12, 2017. The jury in that case recommended a life sentence, and a state judge is scheduled to formally impose it in mid-July.

The kicker, and a little taste of something I can't quite put my finger on:
Attorney General William P. Barr approved the deal.

This Wacky World

Another indication that Cult45 is nine kinds of fucked up: The Germans are pushing back against the US ambassador because he's just a little too Right-Wing for them.

There's a silly irony in that, but there's also a very serious reality - nobody's gonna know more about how to spot a Nazi douche nozzle than the Germans.

NPR:

Richard Grenell has been the U.S. ambassador to Germany for barely a month, but already politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are demanding he be recalled.

The uproar is over Grenell's recent comments on Twitter and the right-wing Breitbart news site in support of Europe's conservative politicians who he said are making gains against the political establishment. German and U.S. politicians charge that the remarks could amount to meddling in Germany's political affairs.

Our State Department, meanwhile, is defending Grenell with the usual "Hey, c'mon, he's entitled to an opinion".

Aye, there's the rub.

Ambassadors are representatives of POTUS. Grenell wouldn't be there if he wasn't in line with 45*, and that puts him in line with Putin, and that puts him in line with the Daddy State Plutocracy bullshit being pimped around the world.

Dear "Conservatives"

I can't take you at your word because the things you say make it impossible for me to  discern a consistently coherent worldview on your part.

Alt-Right Playbook:

Today's Tweet

FYI: Dr Ford has already been doxxed, and she's getting the threats and harassment from the Alt-Right and the trolls that we've come to expect from such lovely people those assholes.

hey dudebro,

imagine if u were drinking with a girl and then she tied u up, put on a strap-on, and fucked u with it with no lube against ur will. think u would come out the next day and tell everyone what happened? next year? ever?

— m i t h (@ManInTheHoody) September 18, 2018

The Alt-Right Playbook

Some interesting analysis from Innuendo Studios:

Bad arguments aren't a bug - they're a feature.

"Framing" and "Boxes": very similar to the Straw Man Fallacy.

Anniversary

Joe Heim, WaPo:

CHARLOTTESVILLE — There are no visible scars on Charlottesville. It remains a beautiful, leafy town of 50,000 residents with a thriving core, great restaurants, a bustling nightlife, and the cultural and intellectual amenities of being home to the state’s signature university and a major hospital. 

But if the outward appearance is unchanged, those who live here know how injured the city is and how strained the recovery has been. On Aug. 12, the city will mark one year since racial hatred bared its fangs here, menacing a community and a country. There will be prayer services and music and tributes to the injured and the dead. It is being billed as a day to remember and to heal after a tumultuous and often painful year.

Charlottesville has spent the better part of the past 12 months remembering and recovering. It also has been taking stock and placing blame. There has been plenty of that to go around. Blame for law enforcement that didn’t protect its citizens. Blame for the city council and the local and state government that planned ineffectively. Blame for the university that didn’t communicate the danger to its community. Blame for President Trump for not speaking out unequivocally to condemn the marchers who had spewed their racist views.

- and -

The violence of last August shattered the conceptions some here had of their home. There was a desire to look at the white supremacists as invaders and outsiders, even though two of the organizers, Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer, were U-Va. graduates and Kessler lives in the city. The city had to more closely examine what it represented.

“We lost our naivete,” said Kathy Galvin, 62, a city councilwoman who has lived in Charlottesville since 1983. “It is easy to kind of take comfort in all the accolades we got up until that point. ‘Most innovative city, the happiest city.’ But there were many of us who knew that we had entrenched pockets of poverty that were also aligned by race and were legacies of Jim Crow.”

While the process has been difficult, it has also been illuminating, Galvin said.

A Profile

Some good stuff from Luke O'Brien at The Atlantic:

The calls marked the start of a months-long campaign of harassment orchestrated by Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the world’s biggest neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer. He claimed that Gersh was trying to “extort” a property sale from Sherry Spencer, whose son, Richard Spencer, was another prominent white nationalist and the face of the so-called alt-right movement.

The Spencers had long-standing ties to Whitefish, and Richard had been based there for years. But he gained international notoriety just after the 2016 election for giving a speech in Washington, D.C., in which he declared “Hail Trump!,” prompting Nazi salutes from his audience. In response, some Whitefish residents considered protesting in front of a commercial building Sherry owned in town. According to Gersh, Sherry sought her advice, and Gersh suggested that she sell the property, make a donation to charity, and denounce her son’s white-nationalist views. But Sherry claimed that Gersh had issued “terrible threats,” and she wrote a post on Medium on December 15 accusing her of an attempted shakedown. (Sherry Spencer did not respond to a request for comment.)

Andrew Anglin

-and -

Anglin is an ideological descendant of men such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who created the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, and William Luther Pierce, who founded the National Alliance, a powerful white-nationalist group, in the 1970s. Anglin admires these predecessors, who saw themselves as revolutionaries at the vanguard of a movement to take back the country. He dreams of a violent insurrection.

But where Rockwell and Pierce relied on pamphlets, the radio, newsletters, and in-person organizing to advance their aims, Anglin has the internet. His reach is exponentially greater, his ability to connect with like-minded young men unprecedented.

He also arrived at a more fortuitous moment. Anglin and his ilk like to talk about the Overton Window, a term that describes the range of acceptable discourse in society. They’d been tugging at that window for years only to watch, with surprise and delight, as it flew wide open during Donald Trump’s candidacy. Suddenly it was okay to talk about banning Muslims or to cast Mexican immigrants as criminals and parasites—which meant Anglin’s even-more-extreme views weren’t as far outside the mainstream as they once had been. Anglin is the alt-right’s most accomplished propagandist, and his writing taps into some of the same anxieties and resentments that helped carry Trump to the presidency—chiefly a perceived loss of status among white men.

If there's a Saving Grace here, it's the fact that these assholes talk big and deliver little.

Yes, I know, being inspired to kill somebody with a car or with a bomb or whatever is, by definition, a big thing. 

What I'm saying is that these guys like to whip each other into a rich creamy lather, but so far, they've been way short when it comes to being able to deliver on their threats. 

The anonymity of the intertoobz is a lot like having Invisibility as your super power.  You can "do" practically anything with near-perfect impunity in cyberspace. But when it's time to translate that video gamer shit into meatspace action, they seem reluctant to show up.

So far, it's just been a few crazies - which I think is pretty much the point. Anglin wants to motivate. He wants to spur others into taking the risks - funny how the Anglins and the Zawahris of the world say it's everybody's sacred duty to sacrifice for the noble cause, but they have important shit to do, so they'll have to stay back here in the rear with the gear.

Anyway, these worm cocks are plenty dangerous, but so far, their numbers are low when it comes to taking action - nowhere near the level needed for critical mass.

BTW - Is it just me, or has anybody else noticed what seems to be the usual pattern of the projection of self-loathing with these jagoffs?

The Nazi Next Door

NYT put up a piece by Richard Fausset that everybody seems to think is "normalizing" Nazis. Kinda hard to disagree with that.

Here's a look:

HUBER HEIGHTS, Ohio — Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall. They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.

Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.

But Mr. Hovater, in the days leading up to the wedding, was somewhat less anxious. There are times when it can feel toxic to openly identify as a far-right extremist in the Ohio of 2017. But not always. He said the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him, demonstrating that it is not the end of the world to be attacked as the bigot he surely is: “You can just say, ‘Yeah, so?’ And move on.”

Nice try, NYT.  But you fucked it up. Again.

Here's a piece from James Hamblin at The Atlantic, mocking the Times as they just "put this out there and let you guys see for yourselves how awful it is that Nazis are just like everybody else":

“What can I say,” jokes Stevenson, as he sees me taking note of the spice rack. “I like garlic powder.”

We both chuckle. The shimmering evening sun glints off the porcelain saltshaker and casts a long shadow onto the linoleum. As I follow its path, his wife Stephanie appears in the kitchen doorway, an exasperated look on her face.

“You forgot to put the toilet seat down again,” she says, rolling her eyes and pulling her phone out of her back pocket. Stephanie is pretty. Her hair is saffron and flaxen, and she wears jeans also, and she has a wry smile.

Stephanie Stevenson is followed by a normal dog, who walks into the room with a slight limp, and Stephen pets it. He leans in.

“The Jews control all the money, and the world would be better off if they were dead,” he says, petting the dog. “Who’s a good boy?”

The question is rhetorical. I ask about the wallpaper.

Some people disagree with Stevenson’s political views.

“He’s a nice enough guy,” said the local grocer, Butch Tarmac, a registered Democrat. “He buys apples and pancake mix. I also like those things. But I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on the bit about the one true race cleansing the soil and commanding what is rightfully theirs.”

You Can Call It A Polecat

...but it's never gonna be nuthin' but a fuckin' skunk.

Nice try on that rebranding thing, fellas, but this

...is still this

Hardening Evidence

So, this isn't fully baked yet - it has to be submitted for peer-review and then maybe we'll see it in the journals.

Vox, Brian Resnick

One of the starkest, darkest findings in the survey comes from a simple question: How evolved do you think other people are?

Kteily, the co-author on this paper, pioneered this new and disturbing way to measure dehumanization — the tendency to see others as being less than human. He simply shows study participants the following (scientifically inaccurate) image of a human ancestor slowly learning how to stand on two legs and become fully human.

Participants are asked to rate where certain groups fall on this scale from 0 to 100. Zero is not human at all; 100 is fully human.

- and (btw) -

Also important: Alt-righters in the sample aren’t all that concerned about the economy. The survey used a common set of Pew question that asks about the current state of the economy, and about whether participants feel like things are going to improve for them. Here, both groups reported about the same levels of confidence in the economy.

What’s more, “the alt-right expected more improvement in the state of the economy relative to the non-alt-right sample,” the study states (perhaps because their preferred leader is president).
Fake Jesus wept.

This Gets Weirder Still

"So you're not really a White Supremacist?"

"Apparently not."

It's a wonderment.

hat tip = @justcallmeBABA

Same Assholes, New Century

It still seems like a recycled bromide when we try to remind ourselves that we've seen this "Take Our Country Back" malarkey before.

But in certain parts of the world, they remember the lessons quite well, and apparently, a lot of them won't be putting up with any of our bullshit.

The Guardian:

A drunken American tourist has been beaten up in the German city of Dresden after he repeatedly raised his arm to give the Nazi salute, police said.

The 41-year-old man, who was lightly injured in the attack, was being investigated for violating the law against the use of symbols from banned organisations, Dresden police said in a statement.

The incident happened on Saturday morning as the tourist, who was “strongly under the influence of alcohol”, left a bar in the eastern city’s Neustadt area and repeatedly gave the Hitler salute on the street.

“An unknown passerby then beat up the man and slightly injured him,” the statement said.
Don't Be A Sucker

History doesn't actually repeat itself. But because we tend to make the same mistakes every hundred years or so, it sure as fuck rhymes.

Yeah - Even Those Assholes

Unite The Right rally is on track - Aug 12, 2017 at Emancipation Park in Charlottesville.

Reminding us of the foundation of the First Amendment, Lloyd Snook put up this post at Snook & Haughey (here in Charllottesville):

Many in the community want the City to withdraw the permit necessary for them to take over Emancipation Park for the day. There are many legal reasons that the City might scrutinize the permit application very closely, but we need to steer clear of the illegalreasons that have been suggested. Let’s look at what the City can or cannot do.

The City can regulate or deny a permit application for reasons of safety, but notbecause of the content of what the alt-right people are going to say. Any regulations must be content-neutral.

The City can impose conditions and restrictions on marches and demonstrations only if the conditions and restrictions are reasonably tailored to specific needs and problems, and only if the conditions and restrictions do not have the effect of being an undue burden on public speech.

The City cannot pass on the costs of security to the permit applicants, at least where the security costs are incurred to protect against the angry responses of others.

Content Neutrality:

There are a few points that need to be made here:

• Hate speech is still protected under the First Amendment.
• Unpopular speech is protected under the First Amendment.
• Government cannot regulate or restrict protected speech.
• There is no such thing as a list of domestic terrorist organizations whose members can be denied the civil rights given to the rest of us.

From The Daily Progress:

Advocating pro-white viewpoints and flanked by members of the Warlocks Motorcycle Club, local right-wing blogger Jason Kessler spoke outside the Charlottesville Police Department on Tuesday night to discuss his upcoming rally and to denounce his opponents.

Kessler’s “Unite the Right” rally, planned for Aug. 12 at Emancipation Park, will take place a little more than a month after about 50 members of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Justice Park that drew more than 1,000 counter-protesters.

-and-

Kessler has distanced himself from the KKK rally, saying that the leader of the Klan chapter that filed for the city permit is an FBI informant and was paid by “left-wing groups to discredit legitimate conservatives.”

hat tip = Walker Thornton

Today's Tweet Storm

Storified for your convenience

@TheRickWilson I made a #Storify of the rant:

"Fire Mueller. Get it over with." https://t.co/82hO3Msc9l

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 13, 2017

Curiouser

"I’ll beat your goddamn ass." Alex Jones went off on an unhinged rant, even by his standards, against Adam Schiff: https://t.co/NUxzo4J1mx pic.twitter.com/adty7sUA6w

— Media Matters (@mmfa) April 4, 2017

Uhh - was Mr Jones threatening a US Congress member with bodily harm?

Secret Service might wanna hear about that one: 202-406-5708

And maybe the Capitol Police as well: (202) 225-0911

The Silo Effect

Columbia Journalism Review:

While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.

Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”

It's the narrow-mindedness, stupid.

While you're trying to see country and party and candidates from a perspective that includes as many aspects as possible, Alt-Right Conservatives (eg) are being fed a steady diet of binary purity, narrowing the perspective down to some pretty ridiculous bumper sticker sloganeering that sometimes contradicts itself.

"My guys are always and only good which means your guys can't be anything but always and only bad."

But there's a kind of Orwellian contradiction to it too. If I start with that binary, but then apply the negative component to "the system of a corrupt duopoly" (eg), then the benefit of the smear accrues to whoever I can make you believe is standing against whatever's being smeared. So while the overall approval for Congress is low and constantly beat down by relentless generalized attacks on "idiots in da gubmint", I can condition you at the same time to see "our guys" as fighting the noble fight to hold back the onslaught of the ruinous agenda of tax-n-spend libruls and blah blah blah.

Remember that while the approval numbers for Congress as a whole are dismal, 90-95% of these people get re-elected. A big bunch of the reason for  that on the GOP side is gerrymandering and voter suppression, but let's put all that together with a message of "they all suck, but my guy's one of the good ones - he's lookin' out for me".  Now we have that the cult thing - isolation and indoctrination, which is where that thing about The Breitbart Sphere comes in.

And not to get all Both-Sides-ey on ya, but it's become a lot more visible on the left as well. The big myth being peddled the hardest is that Hillary didn't win because "she's not Democrat enough". "She's a creature of Neo-Liberalism." "She abandoned traditional Democratic Party values". None of that is flat-out untrue, but it illustrates for me that the Purity Warriors are revving up, and I'm not going along with that because I see it as having full potential to be translated to little more than fulfillment of the Both-Sides prophesy.

Analogy Alert

We're almost completely off the pavement on the righthand shoulder, and we have to steer  to the left to keep from hitting the bridge abutment up ahead. But if we yank the wheel and over-correct, we run just as big a risk of veering all the way over into the left lane and being smushed head-on by a cement truck.

The point being that The Logical Extreme is where good ideas go to die. Keeping it down the middle isn't sexy and it's not terribly satisfying and it can feel just like losing, but it's what we have to do in order to sustain this little experiment in self-government.

In the end it all depends on factual information, and the ability to test the information so we can make accurate assessments of its veracity.

Let's review:

In the presence of confirming evidence

and

the absence of conflicting evidence,

the statement is more likely to be true

I the presence of conflicting evidence

or

the absence of confirming evidence,

the statement is more likely to be false