Plus neo-Nazis describe who radicalized them. No Images? Click here       This is HUFFPOST FRINGE, your weekly postcard from the political wilderness, with reporters Luke O'Brien and Christopher Mathias.    The antifa boogeyman in Georgia One year ago, most Americans had no idea what the hell antifa meant. Then Charlottesville happened, and suddenly people had opinions about An-TEE-fa. “Yes, Antifa Is the Moral Equivalent of Neo-Nazis,” read the headline of a Washington Post op-ed, published in the days following the deadly white supremacist rally. “Trump Is Right—Violent Extremists on Both Sides Are a Threat,” was the headline in USA Today. “The Hard Right and Hard Left Pose Different Dangers,” was The Wall Street Journal’s.   Adam Johnson at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting looked at how six major newspapers covered antifa in the month after the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville: Between August 12 and September 12, these papers ran 28 op-eds or editorials condemning the anti-fascist movement known as antifa, or calling on politicians to do so, and 27 condemning neo-Nazis and white supremacists, or calling on politicians—namely Donald Trump—to do so….. Johnson was eloquent about how this created a false equivalency: A month after a leftist protester was killed by a self-professed neo-Nazi, it’s notable that a slim majority of opinion in major newspapers focused on those devoted to combating racism rather than to those advancing it. Bear in mind that one side  kills more people than any other ideology in the country and openly promotes genocide, while the other supports aggressive tactics to prevent the promotion of genocide, and hasn’t killed anyone. This past weekend in Newnan, Georgia, HuffPost found a city as derisive and scared of antifa as it was of the neo-Nazis coming to town to hold a rally. Jeff Nelms, who camped out in his friend’s gun shop to protect it from vandals, said antifa and neo-Nazis were both “scum.” “Neither one of these groups represent who we are and what we stand for,” Newnan Police Chief D.L. “Buster” Meadows told a local paper. Meadows somehow believed up to 12,000 antifa members were going to show up to protest the Nazis. This was a wildly, wildly high estimate, which Meadows used to justify the veritable army of some 700 officers who were summoned to police the event. (Ultimately, only a couple hundred anti-fascist protesters and about 30 Nazis turned up.) Many of the officers wore military fatigues, bulletproof vests and helmets, and carried semi-automatic rifles. They drove around in armored vehicles as helicopters and drones circled overhead. Newnan looked like it was under military occupation. Militarized officers approached a group of anti-fascist protesters before the rally started, demanding they remove their masks or be arrested. Anti-fascists often wear masks to protect their identities from both neo-Nazis and law enforcement. When HuffPost asked a lead officer if it was illegal to wear masks, he said yes, it was in Georgia, referring to a 1951 law aimed at combating hooded Ku Klux Klan members. The irony of using that law to arrest anti-racist protesters seemed lost on him. More officers arrived in armored vehicles, cornering the anti-fascists, some of whom the officers then tossed to the ground and arrested. Your Fringe correspondent has been to a lot of big protests (in Charlottesville, New York, Baltimore, Berkeley, California and Shelbyville, Tennessee) but had never seen policing this aggressive. At one point, an officer pointed his gun at the protesters, none of whom appeared to be armed. HuffPost managed to take this photo: The anti-fascists — some of whom, sure, probably wanted to punch a Nazi that day — were never really a threat, though. They were standing on a sidewalk waiting to march to a counter-protest, where they’d get to scream at some Nazis from behind a fence. Police, perhaps learning from Charlottesville, had done a good job at making sure the two sides would be separated all day. This week, MuckRock dug up some documents showing that Newnan, a city of less than 40,000 people, had received nearly 1 million dollars in military equipment from the Pentagon. What Huffpost witnessed in Newnan was a scary confluence of two different trends: the continued vilification of anti-fascists and the militarization of police. Who knows what could happen at the next rally. As for the neo-Nazis who turned up in Newnan, they were pathetic. Led by “commander” Jeff Schoep, the National Socialist Movement members and a small continent from League of the South arrived an hour late to their own rally. Schoep gave a rambling speech as his NSM subordinates threw up Nazi salutes. When HuffPost asked Schoep about these Nazis salutes, he claimed they were actually “Roman salutes.” (NSM has been trying this PR maneuver for years.) HuffPost told him that was BS, and Schoep got huffy and threatened to kick HuffPost out of the park for being “disrespectful.” He didn’t, the coward. Later that night, NSM members built a burning swastika in the Georgia countryside.  READ MORE   Pathways to hate At the end of March, commenters in the forum of the white nationalist website The Right Stuff asked themselves a question that people who follow extremism are always trying to answer: What brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem? Understanding how and where and why (mostly) young men turn to hate -- and often, it is violent hate -- is critical if we hope to address the problem. The Southern Poverty Law Center collected the responses of 74 TRS commenters who described how they were radicalized. While the threads on the forum dealt specifically with how people arrive at TRS and Andrew Anglin’s The Daily Stormer, which are among the most hardcore and openly neo-Nazi sites in the alt-right, what’s interesting are the pathways to getting there. The two influences cited most by commenters were Jared Taylor and /pol/, which show how the “alt-right” has combined an old-school white supremacist ideology with the memeing and social media skills of digital natives. Taylor is one of the intellectual godfathers of today’s white power movement, whereas /pol/ is a no-holds-barred 4chan imageboard teeming with rabid trolls. More revealing is that three of the top 10 influences TRS commenters cited were figures in the “alt-lite” movement, a cabal of nativist propagandists who call themselves “civic nationalists” and disdain public sieg heiling, but nevertheless share much of the racist and fascist ideology of the alt-right. Stefan Molyneux, a glib and popular YouTuber who pushes racist pseudoscience, was the most important alt-lite stepping stone to far-right extremism, followed by Gavin McInnes, the irony-slinging founder of the Proud Boys, a violent white gang that attracts racists and outright white supremacists. The third was Milo Yiannopoulos, the racist huckster and former Breitbart editor. And this is why the alt-lite is so dangerous — maybe even more dangerous than the outright Nazis. Without it — and the TRS commenters admit this — it’s far more difficult to make the leap from being a “normie” to a hard-boiled Daily Stormer Nazi. The alt-lite radicalizers are the easy alternative at first, the safe entry point to an echo chamber of hate where susceptible minds can then be drenched with in-group propaganda and sent on their way. After a few months, they’ve moved further right and are talking about about race war and gassing Jews. Not many come back. READ MORE     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…. Last Friday was April 20. Or 4/20. For many people, it’s a day for jazz cigarettes. For the alt-right, neo-Nazis and other racist crackpots, it’s a different holiday. Adolf Hitler, you see, was born on April 20, 1889. Hitler is now 129 years old, his cryogenically preserved body stored in a Nazi moonbase awaiting the Fourth Reich, when der Führer will be thawed and given the keys to 8chan. Haha! Just kidding. Hitler offed himself, and his body was dumped in a bomb crater and burned. Almost everyone is glad for his going. But a handful of fiends still celebrate his arrival. On Twitter, that meant dozens of people with Groyper avatars praising “Uncle” Adolf and tweeting photos of their idol on his birthday last Friday. On Truth Will Out Radio, a podcast hosted by Sven Longshanks and Dennis Wise, it meant a mawkish retrospective of the dictator’s life. Not much is known about Wise, aside from the fact that he produced Adolf Hitler: The Greatest Story NEVER Told, a ham-fisted attempt at Nazi propaganda. Suffice it to say, Wise is a huge fan of the megalomaniacal mass murderer. Together the pair engaged in breathtaking historical revisionism, putting a positive spin on Nazi Germany’s most draconian policies and outright ignoring inconvenient facts about genocide, forced labor camps, militarism abroad and a brutal crackdown on civil liberties at home. Even trying to understand the mental gymnastics white supremacists go through to cling to their unfounded ideas can be exhausting. According to Longshanks, Hitler “gave children rights” through programs designed to weed out the sick and disabled. “He did his very best to prevent children [from] being born with limbs missing, or mentally deficient,” he said. Wise mumbled something about how German courts needed to sign off on sterilizing someone and that this wasn’t done “on a whim.” Besides, Longshanks added, this “improved the racial hygiene” of Germany. Guys, that’s called eugenics. Hundreds of thousands of people were sterilized, and tens of thousands were given the designation “Lebensunwertes Leben” (“life unworthy of life”) and murdered under Hitler’s Action T4 euthanasia program. But the whitewashing wasn’t over. When the hosts discussed the treatment of Jewish people, particularly after the passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which barred Jews from all civil service positions, Longshanks complimented Hitler for “removing the Jews from power,” but not in a “nasty way.” By that, he meant they were “asked to leave their positions” and “given full pensions.” He omitted the fact that Jews who had not worked in civil service for 10 years wouldn’t have received anything, but that’s beside the point. By that time, the Nazi regime had already launched a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses and would go on to limit the number of Jewish children in public schools and strip Jews of their citizenship. Hitler was not a man motivated by a desire to protect human rights. And 4/20 ain’t for Nazis. It’s for chiefing a fatty of sticky-icky.     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 You are receiving this email because you signed up for updates from HuffPost Feedback | Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe   - - Unsubscribe