| No Images? Click here   Welcome to week five of HuffPost’s revamped newsletter about hate and extremism in America! Every week, reporters Luke O'Brien and Christopher Mathias will bring you news and insight from the dark corners of our increasingly polarized political system. From resurgent white nationalists and anti-government militia to social media propagandists and internet trolls, we’ll cover the characters and conversations from around the lunatic fringe. We’ll also look at the far left anti-fascist groups that battle the far right online and in the streets. The alt-right doesn’t know what to make of the Atomwaffen Division, the bloodthirsty group of young neo-Nazis connected to five murders and an elaborate bomb plot in just the last eight months. On Gab, that fever swamp of microblogging racists, many deride Atomwaffen as a bunch of autistic LARPers or likely federal informants. But others praise Atomwaffen as the vanguard of a new generation of fascists, finally willing to step away from the keyboard and do something.“At least Atomwaffen have balls,” one Gab user wrote this week, after it was revealed the alleged murderer of Blaze Bernstein — a gay and Jewish college student stabbed 20 times this month and thrown in a shallow grave — was a 20-year-old Atomwaffen member. Atomwaffen is scary for a few reasons. They’re largely anonymous, well-armed and enamored with both Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler. They’re prolific propagandists too, producing ISIS-style recruitment videos and plastering college campuses with vile posters. They have disturbing delusions of starting an end-of-days race war, and they’re holding military-style training camps to prepare. Mostly though, they appear to be a group of young, lost white dudes who met on the internet.Before the Bernstein murder, Atomwaffen was connected to a double murder in Florida, a plot to bomb power plants and synagogues in Florida, and a double murder in Virginia. All of the Atomwaffen members or admirers behind these crimes were under 21 years old.None of the crimes appear to have been coordinated. Nor does it seem like they were all solely motivated by ideology. Most, it seems, arose partly from domestic disputes, highlighting the volatility and desperation of young men who become enthralled by the rotten promises of white supremacy.It feels like it’s a matter of when, not if, an Atomwaffen kid is in the news again. It was maybe just a red flash on a television screen, a bolt of ginger somewhere in the gallery on Tuesday night. Chuck Johnson, the red-headed, red-bearded racist Holocaust-denying far-right troll, had somehow made his way into the State of the Union address. Johnson is a person of interest in national politics these days. He helped broker a meeting between Russia-loving Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Julian Assange, is refusing to comply with the U.S. Senate’s Russia probe, is suing Twitter for banning him after he threatened a Black Lives Matter activist, and spends his spare time lying about people and raising money for neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin.So how’d he get into the SOTU? The answer to that question is also the winner of our Cuck o’ the Week award: Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz from Florida. We’ve seen Gaetz, who has been calling for special counsel Robert Mueller to be fired, in action before — most notably when he embarrassed himself in a bumbling interview about the just-released House Republican Russia memo. Now he’d given his guest ticket to a depraved racist subversive wanted for questioning in the Russia probe.When asked why he invited Johnson to join him at the SOTU, Gaetz laughably claimed to have “no idea” who Johnson was, despite the Capitol Police having flagged the red troll as a person of interest in an unrelated, undisclosed matter. Johnson, meanwhile, told The Daily Beast that he’d been introduced to Gaetz by another unidentified member of Congress.It is said the cuck crows thrice. But when the cuck crows this hard, we only need to hear it once. Congratulations, Matt Gaetz!The night before Richard Spencer spoke at the University of Florida last fall, HuffPost met him and his cronies in the middle of the Florida countryside. Spencer tried to look cool and ominous, standing in the dark swilling bourbon and puffing on a cigar. We asked him and Eli Mosley, formerly of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa, why it was so important for them to hold events at universities. “This is a young person’s movement,” Spencer said.“Young people matter, and college campuses have been where political battles have been fought since the ’60s and before it,” said Mosley. “This is where political change happens. Fundamentally, it’s where the most anti-white institution is. Academia has become a factory for anti-white individuals, and to teach whites to hate themselves.” And now there’s data to prove that Spencer, Mosley and their ilk are targeting college campuses aggressively. A new report Thursday from the Anti-Defamation League counted a total of 346 incidents of white supremacist flyers, banners, posters or stickers being found on college campuses since Sept. 2016.There were 147 incidents of hate propaganda during the 2017 fall semester alone, the report states, compared to 41 such incidents in the fall semester of 2016. That’s a 258 percent increase.“White supremacists are targeting college campuses like never before,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL CEO. “They see campuses as a fertile recruiting ground, as evident by the unprecedented volume of propagandist activity designed to recruit young people to support their vile ideology.”Just earlier this week, the white supremacist group Vanguard America vandalized a Black History Month poster at Middle State Tennessee University with its own propaganda: a flier reading “PROTECT WHITE FAMILIES.”Blood and SoiledTo understand the dangers posed by today’s far-right extremists we need to listen to them. Each week, the Angry White Men blog highlights a snippet of conversation from an “alt-right” podcast to show you how fascists and racists really think. Don't say we didn't warn you, America….On the eighth episode of their paywall show Strike and Mike, “alt-right” white supremacist podcasters Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, Eric Striker, and special guest Andrew Anglin, a tiny bald man who publishes The Daily Stormer, wondered whether President Donald Trump is truly carrying the banner for racism and fascism in America. The alt-right has vacillated from disappointment to cautious optimism during Trump’s first year in office. Some have blamed Trump’s inability to go full Hitler on obstructionist Democrats, Republican turncoats, and “so-called judges,” while others are more “black pilled” – that is, depressed or hopeless – and consider Trump a shill for Jewish interests.The Strike and Mike lads temporarily turned on Trump after he bombed Syria. But Trump’s general degeneracy and casual racism won them back. In particular, they believe the president harbors anti-Semitic beliefs. Peinovich complimented Trump for giving Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) the nickname “Sneaky Dianne,” which he interpreted as a dog whistle. “‘Sneaky Dianne,’ I love that one,” he gushed, “that’s fuckin’ great. You tellin’ me Trump doesn’t know about Jews, I simply don’t believe you. He does.” Peinovich celebrated the “amazing revelation” in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury that Trump apparently knows who in his cabinet is and isn’t Jewish, which Wolff called “creepy.”“Trump is aware,” Striker asserted, joking that when the president “sees a Jew in the Oval Office … lasers start comin’ out of his eyes.” (This is not the first time the President has been accused of anti-Semitism. John R. O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino quoted Trump as saying he only wanted “short guys that wear yarmulkes” counting his money.)But Trump’s actions as president have rarely crossed into overt anti-Semitism, although there have been several questionable moments: Trump fearmongered about George Soros during the campaign, omitted Jews from a Holocaust Remembrance Day statement and, most infamously, described the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville as “very fine people.”According to Peinovich: “[T]he great thing about Trump is – again, there’s so many good things about Trump, and it’s not necessarily just Trump himself, it’s what his presidency, his candidacy revealed. Because people are more Jew-aware now than they were a couple years ago.”Jew-aware. It’s a grotesque term used by white supremacists to measure the traction their foundational conspiracy theory has in the mainstream. To increase levels of Jew-awareness, Peinovich and his website, The Right Stuff, popularized the use of (((echoes))) online to harass Jews and highlight each time a prominent Jewish writer or activist says something anti-Trump or what white supremacists believe to be “anti-white,” which could be any form of criticism of their deranged, hateful agenda.White supremacists prey on gullible minds and create doubt about the rational world. That’s the only way they win converts. And to that end, Trump has indeed been a boon for the alt-right.Former Maricopa County Sheriff and everlasting racist Joe Arpaio announced his candidacy for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona in early January and, boy oh boy did the Republican get his campaign off to an appropriately bigoted start. Two weeks after his announcement, Arpaio gave an interview — at least the fifth one of these he’s done — to the American Free Press, a newspaper founded by white supremacist Willis Carto that takes the evidence-free editorial position that the Holocaust never happened.“I talk to anybody,” said Arpaio, who has banned reporters from press conferences, ignored requests for county records, and threatened to arrest journalists. “I have an open-door policy. I don’t research every company that talks to me.”When HuffPost read several of the American Free Press’ Holocaust-denying headlines to Arpaio, and asked whether he would condemn the publication, he refused.  Related links:  White supremacy won't fall with just a few statues. Keep up with the story here.©2018 HuffPost | 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 |
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