| No Images? Click here   Welcome to week six 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.  Earlier this week The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Arthur Jones, a longtime neo-Nazi, is poised to win the GOP nomination for a congressional seat in Illinois. (He’s running unopposed in the primary and will surely lose in the general election.) The story went uber-viral. CNN got the cranky ol’ Nazi on air. He called the Holocaust an “extortion racket” and the CNN host told him “you’ll go down in flames.” It made for good TV.But Jones isn’t the only white supremacist nutjob seeking public office in 2018. HuffPost found three other candidates. Two are running for Congress, and the third is running for the state House in Montana.A couple more announced campaigns, then dropped out of their respective races. Augustus Invictus, the goat-blood drinking white supremacist who was scheduled to speak at the deadly Charlottesville rally in August, abandoned his bid for U.S. Senate. Tom Tancredo — a 5-term congressman who associates with racist groups like VDARE, and who thinks the U.S. should bomb the holy city of Mecca — dropped out of his race for Colorado governor last month.And then there are all the candidates who talk just like white nationalists but don't advocate for an ethno-state or anything like that. We're talking Joe Arpaio, Steve King, and others. We talked to former KKK grand wizard David Duke about all this. He’s run for office many, many times and in 2016 he got 58,000 votes (!) in his run for U.S. Senate. Duke is pretty stoked about all this white supremacist politickin’.“I think it’s about time,” he told HuffPost. “I think there’s a tremendous amount of frustration in the white community and that we’re at a tipping point.” Elliot Kline aka Eli Mosley, the former headman for Brooks Brothers neo-Nazi outfit Identity Evropa, has bragged often about his military service. He served in the infantry in Iraq, he told people. He embedded with the Iraqi Army and killed hostiles, he said. He was a hardened combat vet. In Charlottesville, he sashayed in front of cameras wearing camo, trying to act all Audie Murphy. But there was always something more Sergeant Schultz about him, and when The New York Times looked at his military records, it became obvious why: Kline’s Pennsylvania National Guard unit had never even deployed. And he’d been lugging around the most shameful kind of lie for a wannabe far-right warrior. Unprecedented levels of cuckery. If you had to pick a public event debut for the alt-right in America, it would have to be the “Sacramento Stab-fest” in June 2016, when a crew of neo-Nazi skinheads teamed up with Matt Heimbach’s Traditionalist Workers Party for a rally at the California State Capitol. The fascists were met by a much larger number of anti-fascists. Knives were produced. Ten people went to the hospital with stab wounds or lacerations, two of them in critical condition. Nine of them were anti-fascists.A valid question that gets asked when these clashes happen is what role the police played. Talk to anti-fascists and you’ll hear story after story of cops either ignoring threatening behavior from far-right extremists or colluding with fascists and racists to target antifa. There has been a consistent effort on the right to vilify anti-racist and anti-fascist activists as a graver threat than far-right extremists who behave like domestic terrorists.Now, court documents from criminal proceedings in the Sacramento Stab-fest reveal that California police worked closely with white supremacists to identify counter-protesters. The records also show police “expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity,” according to The Guardian, which has more on the story.Alleged wife-beater Rob Porter is not outwardly a member of the misogynistic alt-right movement. But he has that fashy look. And he does those fashy things (allegedly). The White House staff secretary resigned this week after news broke that he’d physically abused (allegedly) his two ex-wives. Porter’s (alleged) violence was pardoned, if not celebrated, in certain dank corners of the alt-right. “More than likely, a woman who gets a black eye from her husband did something to deserve it – for example, getting in his face or otherwise refusing to stop nagging him,” Andrew Anglin wrote at The Daily Stormer. Whatever comes Porter’s way now will likely be less than what he deserves. He’s from an uppercrust conservative family. He’s Mormon. The FBI learned about the (alleged) abuse while doing a background check last year on Porter. And hell, he was once the president of Harvard’s Young Republican Club, a breeding ground for high-octane neo-fascists of the Ayn Rand variety who tend to coast through life. But this week, at least, he’s up shitzkrieg.   To 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….For the past half year, Andrew Anglin’s The Daily Stormer website has taken its licks on the internet – and with good reason. The cesspool of racism and thinly-veiled sexual frustration (its pint-sized publisher’s problems with women are too numerous to list) first lost its .com domain after Anglin mocked the alleged murder of Heather Heyer by a fellow white supremacist at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Since then, the website has been kicked off so many domains that even Anglin and his contributors have lost track. After the site got bounced from its .top domain, Lee Rogers, a Daily Stormer writer and key Anglin lieutenant, blew his stack on the most recent episode of his Infostormer podcast.“You Jews that are doing this, you think you’re clever, you think you’re funny by getting a domain name banned?” he fumed. “Well, the joke is on you, because all this is doing is drawing more attention to what we’re saying and the type of material that we’re posting on the site. It’s that simple.”Sure, guy. Sure. Andrew Anglin has turned into the Wandering Nazi, cursed by his own depravity to roam the internet pipes while his anti-establishment lackeys beg the federal government to prevent domain registrars and social media sites from banning violent white supremacist content. But Rogers still believes the Stormer will continue attracting readers. Or maybe disaster tourists.“[I]t’s like when you have a train wreck, okay? Or you have an accident on the side of the highway. Well, I mean what happens when there’s something like that that happens? Well everybody as they go by the train wreck or the car accident, they rubberneck and they take a look at what happened. And that’s largely what you have with the Daily Stormer.”The Daily Stormer is a train-wreck-car-crash? On that point, Rogers is certainly correct.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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