Alt-right furries and HuffPost Fringe spring break

Fringe up your life. No Images? Click here       This is HUFFPOST FRINGE, your weekly postcard from the political wilderness, with reporters Luke O'Brien and Christopher Mathias.    Fringe up your life HuffPost Fringe is taking a lil’ spring break this week. Luke’s busy with a super Fringe-y story coming your way today or tomorrow, so keep an eye out for that. And Chris just got back from traipsing around the west Kansas prairie, where he’s been covering a foiled militia plot to massacre Muslims. All that said, we have some exciting Fringe news. We’ll be gracing your inboxes on Tuesdays from now on instead of Fridays! (Apparently, more people are likely to read The Content on Tuesdays.) Tell your friends to subscribe and Fringe up their lives! And although we’re taking a spring break, we’d be remiss not to share a few choice links from over the past week. Remember that teacher we here at Fringe exposed as a white nationalist podcaster? She resigned! Chris and friend of the Fringe (FoF) Ryan Reilly have been tag-teaming the terror trial of three “Crusaders” militia members who plotted to bomb an apartment complex occupied by Somali Muslims. The government’s most important witness — an FBI informant named Dan Day — has been testifying over the past week. He got choked up recounting when he thought he’d have to kill militiaman Patrick Stein to keep Stein from killing two Muslim women. The prosecution also played recording after recording for the jury of the three militiamen spewing genocidal hate of Muslims. The defense, meanwhile, has thus far characterized such talk of mass murdering Muslims as mere bluster. “Locker room talk,” one attorney said. But the prosecution had one of the militiamen’s anti-Muslim bigot friends testify that this was more than just bluster. “I had a gut feeling that what was just banter back and forth, ranting and everything else, was turning into something more serious and concrete,” he said. Speaking of anti-Muslim terror, some people have declared today “Punish a Muslim” day. It’s messed up. If you’re not Muslim, look out for your Muslim neighbors, all right? Also read what Khaled Beydoun has to say about all this. (Also, check out his new book.) FoF Priscilla Frank has an amazing story about alt-right furries. Really putting the “fuhrer” in furries. The Fur Right. The Furred Reich. Dear god, you need to read this. Lastly, Brendan O’Connor over at Splinter wrote a really important longread about the fascist movement in America, and the “constantly shifting network of personality cults, animated by misogyny, racism, and a libidinal desire for violence” that is the alt-right. We can’t recommend it highly enough. Although we’re on spring break, we couldn’t not not do Cuck o’ The Week this week. And below this week’s cuck, we still have your weekly Blood and Soiled column. Man, we don’t know how to take a spring break!   Cuck o' the Week    “I Am A Federal Informant,” read the headline on Chris “The Crying Nazi” Cantwell’s website. Doh! Talking to the FBI is not a good look for an ultra-tough white supremacist “alt-right” warrior. But Cuckwell is someone who breaks under pressure. Dude even filmed himself sobbing after learning he was wanted by the cops for tear-gassing counterprotesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last summer. After Cuckwell admitted to neo-Nazi hacker-troll Andrew “weev” Auernheimer that he was blabbing to the federales, Auernheimer outed him. (You can’t trust Nazis, Cuckwell!)     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 March 27, 2018, episode of his “Thoughts of the Day” podcast, pseudonymous alt-right podcaster Grandpa Lampshade appeared to have all but given up hope on a unified white nationalist movement. In alt-right parlance, this feeling of despondency is known as taking the “black pill” – and Lampshade evidently overdosed before he started recording. First, Lampshade – whose nom de plume stems from the post-WWII rumor that Nazis made lampshades out of human skin – broke the news that his PayPal account had been shut down by “kikes,” meaning he can only rely on Bitcoin donations. And if that weren’t bad enough, the alt-right has become increasingly fractured as of late. Lampshade wouldn’t get into specifics, but he’s likely referring to the internecine squabble over “optics”; an affair/domestic abuse incident that took down the Traditionalist Worker Party; and the revelation that Christopher Cantwell has been working as a federal informant. The alt-right, or what has been referred to by supporters as “White Nationalism 2.0,” was supposed to transcend the sort of bickering that laid waste to older neo-fascist/white power movements. It was supposed to succeed where the National Vanguard and White Aryan Resistance and the National Alliance failed. But so far, the fresh faces of WN 2.0 have been as impotent as the old guard that preceded them. Grandpa Lampshade recognized this. Seemingly resigned to the fate of the alt-right, he stated matter-of-factly: “Things in our circles are what they are. There’s no point in pretending they aren’t.” Of course, he still postulated that the cause of this infighting was that their movement was infiltrated by “actors whose sole purpose is to intentionally sow that dissension in the ranks.” “It’s just aggravating, and a bit discouraging,” he continued. “It’s kinda like my PayPal being shoah’d, it’s not necessarily surprising or unexpected to look around and after we’ve had a couple of years or so of success … to see things starting to deteriorate back down like they tend to [have] happened in the past.” Lampshade admitted that modern white nationalists had scoffed at older generations because of their tendency to collapse into “bitter, factional fighting and spiraling down and not accomplishing anything.” But as far as he was concerned, this new crop of fascists were throwing stones from glass houses. “What’s the frickin’ difference [between the movements]?” he asked. Right now, he’s not the only neo-Nazi pondering this.       White supremacy won't fall with just a few statues. Did a friend send you this? Subscribe to HuffPost Fringe. ©2018 HuffPost | 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 You are receiving this email because you signed up for updates from HuffPost Feedback | Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe   - - Unsubscribe