| No Images? Click here   This is HUFFPOST FRINGE, your weekly postcard from the political wilderness, with reporters Luke O'Brien and Christopher Mathias.Three white dudes were found guilty of terror charges in America yesterday.Patrick Stein, Curtis Allen and Gavin Wright, members of a small militia group called the “Crusaders,” could now face up to life in prison for their plot to massacre Somali Muslim immigrants in Garden City, Kansas. They called Muslims “cockroaches.” Stein called himself “Orkin Man” in group texts. “You can’t kill one of them,” he said. “You have to kill all of them. They keep coming back. You have to exterminate them all.”Stein, 49, Allen, 50, and Wright, 52, had started to gather explosives and were planning on bombing an apartment complex home to many Somalis and the mosque at the site. Stein talked about detonating the bombs during prayer times when Muslims would be “packed like sardines” inside. The shock waves from the bombs, he hoped, “would make Jello of their insides.” It was an FBI informant, Dan Day, who foiled their plot. He wore a wire and masqueraded as a militiaman, secretly recording their meetings. He was the prosecution’s most important witness during the trial. He was nervous, and once broke down in tears on the stand while recounting the scary moment when he thought Stein might shoot two Muslim women right in front of him.HuffPost was there for most of the five-week trial, often the lone media outlet in the courtroom. (Recent studies show the media pays far less attention to terror cases when the alleged terrorists aren’t Muslim.)We found the trial offered a portrait of how angry white dudes in America get radicalized. Stein, Allen and Wright devoured Islamophobic content online. Jurors heard recordings of them discussing “civilization jihad” and “taqiyya,” terms mostly tossed around by anti-Muslim propagandists like Robert Spencer, Pam Geller, Brigitte Gabriel, and Frank Gaffney — a group that includes some of the White House’s favorite experts on Islam. The three men loved Donald Trump, too. Stein called him “the Man.” As Trump told an apocryphal story about dipping bullets in blood to kill Muslims, they talked about dipping their bullets in pig’s blood. They even planned their attack for just after election day in November 2016, so as to not hurt Trump’s chances at winning.Last month, three other Trump fans were arrested for bombing a Minnesota mosque. And up in Canada this week, prosecutors revealed that Alexandre Bissonnette searched Trump-related content over 800 times online before he opened fire inside a Quebec mosque in January 2017, killing six men.This all made it feel rather rich of Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to proclaim yesterday that the verdict in Kansas was a “victory against domestic terror and hate crimes.” Sessions himself, after all, has deep ties to anti-Muslim hate groups like the David Horowitz Freedom Center.It being 2018 and all, your hardened Fringe correspondents weren’t so sure these three militia members would be found guilty at all. We thought they might walk. America has a tough time calling white guys terrorists. The verdict feels like a small corrective to that. A congressional candidate. A public school teacher. A finance bro and prominent Twitter troll. And now, thanks to the sleuthing of Friend of the Fringe (FoF) Laura Basset, HuffPost has exposed yet another white nationalist.Kristen Hatten, a prominent anti-abortion activist and recent contributor to the Dallas Morning News, seemed to get radicalized into white nationalism after Trump’s election. From Laura:Hatten wrote in late 2016 that she found Trump to be so “creepy, gross and tacky” and such a “repugnant chauvinist” during his campaign that she quit the internet for a while to avoid reading about him. But after he won, something changed. Hatten began sharing white supremacist content on social media. She self-identified on Twitter as alt-right and “ethnonationalist” ― the same term used by white nationalist icon Richard Spencer. She mused on Facebook that immigrant “invaders” are replacing white Europeans in their own countries, and shared a post imploring Trump to grant “asylum” to white South Africans.She also retweeted some vile, racist propaganda from Spectre, the podcaster you might remember from previous Fringe newsletters. Hatten sent Laura a relatively in-depth response to a question on whether she considers herself a white nationalist. “I admit to being racist by today’s standards, but…” it starts, which is really all you need to know. (But really, go read Laura’s whole article. It’s great.)It’s not surprising, of course, that an anti-abortion activist could slide so easily into white nationalism. As Laura put it:Throughout the history of the abortion wars, a great deal of violent energy has been generated at the confluence of anti-abortion activism and white supremacy. The first known murder of an abortion provider was committed by a former Klansman. The kinship isn’t hard to understand: Both are movements of the status quo, dedicated to preserving a white patriarchal order.Cuck o' the Week Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet takes the cuck-cake this week. Although Baked has been responsible for numerous self-owns in the past — a weepy bear mace routine in Charlottesville and a parking lot freakout after his Twitter account was shut down are two that leap to mind — his latest cuckery involves a woman. A real woman! This mysterious lady started appearing on Baked’s YouTube streams and was soon faulted by Baked’s alt-right accomplices for having a softening influence on the edgelord, who was suddenly telling commenters to knock it off with the talk about gassing Jews and exterminating blacks. Fascists will eat their own at the first sign of weakness, and Baked has been getting devoured for days. You better not call Tyrone. As one of the organizers of the deadly Unite the Rally rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, white supremacist Michael Joseph Chesny — who went by “Tyrone” in an online chatroom used to plan the event — he discussed turning vehicles into weapons and running over protesters in the weeks before another racist did exactly that. Chesny, who at the time was an active-duty U.S. Marine with a specialty in explosives, was anonymous then. Not anymore. Last month, Charlottesville-based activist Emily Gorcenski doxed him after putting together clues about Tyrone’s identity, including a statement he’d made about being caught hanging a racist banner from a building. That admission led Gorcenski to a news story about two Marines getting arrested for hanging the same banner. One of them was Chesny, whose violent chatroom messages as “Tyrone” are already part of a federal lawsuit filed against Unite the Right organizers. Chesny was discharged from the Marines in early April. His last known coordinates place him up shitzkrieg.Blood and Soiled 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….On the April 13, 2018, episode of “Radio Renaissance,” Devin Saucier aka “Henry Wolff” (above) and Paul Kersey congratulated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on his recent re-election. Saucier cut his teeth on white identity politics as a member of the now defunct group Youth for Western Civilization, and briefly made headlines in 2016 for carrying a pro-Trump sign that read, “Better to grab a p***y than to be one.” Kersey, who takes his name from the anti-hero of the “Death Wish” franchise, runs the racist blog Stuff Black People Don’t Like.Naturally, these “alt-right” white supremacists are enamored with Orbán, whose electoral victory was dubious at best. Orbán packed the nation’s Constitutional Court with allies and gerrymandered electoral districts to favor his ruling Fidesz party. While both Saucier and Kersey did their best to defend Orbán’s win as legitimate, it probably wouldn’t matter to them if he were an outright dictator. The alt-right has a love affair with iron-fisted authoritarians from the late Augusto Pinochet of Chile to the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.Also, Orbán is very racist. He frequently scapegoats Middle Eastern migrants for Hungary’s problems, using them as an excuse to fence off the country’s borders. And he launched an anti-Semitic propaganda campaign against liberal billionaire George Soros, who was born in Hungary and whom neo-Nazis and white supremacists use as a convenient “globalist” bogeyman.“[Orbán] is promising to pass these ‘Stop Soros’ laws, potentially next month,” Saucier crowed. “These laws sound really fantastic. It’s basically making it so that any NGO that is dealing with migration has to obtain a license from the government.” Kersey touted the situation in Hungary – where tens of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets to demand a new election – as reason for hope. “Everybody wants to think that things can’t get better, that we’ve reached the pinnacle, it’s all decline, it’s all downhill. … [that] a European renaissance is impossible” he said to listeners. But he pointed to the perseverance of Orbán, whose 1987 arrest by “communists” was immortalized in a widely shared photograph (below), and Jean-Marie Le Pen, who contributed to Europe’s fascist “awakening” (or “rebellion,” in Saucier’s words). It seems obvious, but we’ll say it anyway: White supremacy is a worldwide problem.  HuffPost is now a part of Oath and a part of Verizon. On May 25th 2018 we will be introducing a new Oath Privacy Policy which will explain how your data is used and shared. Learn More.White supremacy won't fall with just a few statues.Did a friend send you this? Subscribe to HuffPost Fringe. Want more? Check out The Morning Email.©2018 HuffPost | 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 |
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