| No Images? Click here   This is HUFFPOST FRINGE, your weekly postcard from the political wilderness, with reporters Luke O'Brien and Christopher Mathias.There are a ton of white nationalists on Twitter. One of them is a sitting U.S. congressman from Iowa.“Europe is waking up... Will America... in time?” Rep. Steve King tweeted Tuesday, linking to an anti-immigrant tweet from Mark Collett, a well-known British neo-Nazi. Friend of the Fringe (FoF) Arthur Delaney confronted King three times Wednesday in D.C., asking the congressman why he was essentially pushing neo-Nazi propaganda on his official Twitter feed. King refused to comment three times.On Thursday, after news outlets across the country picked up on HuffPost’s reporting, a gaggle of Hill reporters, including Delaney, pressed King on the issue. Finally, the honorable gentleman from Iowa responded:“That was a Breitbart story,” King told reporters Thursday, describing his thought process when he sent the tweet. “I recognized the format of it. I’m walking between meetings. I don’t know the names of who wrote the article or who might have tweeted it. I’ve never heard them, and I still don’t know them.”A reporter asked King if he knew the tweet had been written by a Nazi sympathizer.“I still don’t know that,” King said.To be clear, Collett is as “hardcore” a white supremacist as they come, an expert in the U.K. told your Fringe correspondents. Dude has described himself as a “Nazi sympathizer,” has talked admiringly of Adolf Hitler, and he is a regular on the racist podcast and vlog circuits, yuckin’ it up with the likes of David Duke as he rambles on about how the Jews are destroying civilization with pornography. King’s Twitter feed could easily be mistaken for an alt-right account. He only follows 164 people, most of them MAGA pundits, fellow GOPers, and dubious far-right propaganda sites like “the Voice of Europe.” But the congressman also follows a handful out-and-proud white nationalists, including Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian alt-right vlogger, and Blair Cottrell, the thuggish Australian white supremacist who’s called for hanging a picture of Hitler in every classroom.The media has thus far been shy about calling King a white nationalist. That should change. The evidence is all there: he’s repeatedly praised Geerts Wilders, the deeply Islamophobic Dutch politician who has advocated for banning all mosques and Qurans in the Netherlands.Last year, King tweeted a photo of himself next to Wilders. “Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end,” read the caption. “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,” he also tweeted last year. “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” (Later, defending that tweet on CNN, King stated “we need to get our birth rates up or Europe will be entirely transformed.”)  He once tweeted “diversity is not our strength” — a phrase white supremacists have been using for years — while linking to an article on Voice of Europe. The article quotes Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, as saying that “mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life but a lower one.”In a 2016 MSNBC appearance, King suggested white people have contributed “more to civilization” than “any other subgroup.”He was a birther, has stated that America shouldn’t apologize for slavery, and has claimed that most undocumented immigrants are “drug mules.”He also kept a Confederate flag on his desk — despite being from Iowa, a state that sent thousands of soldiers to fight for the Union.And yet this GOP has granted King with powerful committee positions including — get this — chairman of subcommittee on the constitution and civil justice. This is partly due to King’s seniority, and to Iowa’s importance in presidential politics. It’s also because the GOP is fine with having white nationalists in its ranks.Back in Iowa, he is co-chair of the campaign to elect Kim Reynolds for governor. Reynolds didn’t respond to a Fringe request for comment on whether she condones neo-Nazi propaganda.Meanwhile, it’s been four days since King posted the tweet and — despite scores of news articles about the post, and despite Collett definitely being a white supremacist — King still hasn’t deleted it.Mekelburg madness  Most racists and bigots don’t want to take responsibility for their hateful words. So they hide today online, behind fake names and frog avatars and disinformation. But journalism has long tradition of unmasking hatred, dating back to when reporters and editors exposed the KKK’s “Invisible Empire” in the 1920s.But the far-right doesn’t like exposure. And they didn’t like it when one of your Fringe correspondents revealed the identity of one of Twitter’s most influential Islamophobes.For over five years, Amy Mekelburg had anonymously spewed Islamophobia on Twitter. She’d amassed more than 200,000 followers, including Sean Hannity, Roseanne Barr and the personal account of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Mekelburg earned endorsements from President Donald Trump and Michael Flynn and was tied into a well-funded network of other Islamophobes with connections to the GOP establishment. She was also running a website that sought to paint ordinary Americans who had shown sympathy for Muslims as “accomplices” to jihad.She was newsworthy, in other words.Even before our story ran, however, a cybermob of Trump supporters, white nationalists and internet stalkers formed to harass HuffPost employees and their family members. The harassment lasted over a week and the mob posted the home addresses of many HuffPost staffers. One of your Fringe correspondents received dozens of death threats over Twitter, phone, email and text. The mob even targeted people who didn’t work at HuffPost but had similar names. There was discussion about murdering journalists on their way to work.The mob’s goal was simple and obvious: intimidate the press into silence so bad actors can keep slinging hate anonymously on social media. Platforms such as Twitter give racists and bigots all the tools they need to broadcast propaganda and form harassment gangs. Without the scrutiny of the media, the problem will only worsen.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….White nationalists are nothing if not wedded to the past. They cling to antiquated beliefs about race, gender roles and nationalism. But even for them it’s unusual to get worked up over a movie 27 years after its theatrical release, which is what they did on the latest episode of The Right Stuff’s Hate House podcast. The show’s host Larry Ridgeway – possibly a reference to the similarly named “Green River Killer” – spoke with Robert “Azzmador” Ray of The Daily Stormer about the critically acclaimed Spike Lee flick “Jungle Fever.”It took some work to get there, though. The two started off talking about the revelation that a Texas candidate for Dallas County commissioner, Vickers “Vic” Cunningham, promised to financially reward his children if they married white, straight, Christian spouses. (Cunningham ended up losing.) White nationalists, who fear the contamination of their white bloodlines by Third World Untermenschen, sympathized with Cunningham and were surprised that people viewed their anti-race mixing beliefs as odious.Which takes us back to “Jungle Fever,” a movie about – as the title suggests – a relationship between a black man named Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes) and a white, Italian-American woman named Angie Tucci (Annabella Sciorra), and the discrimination they face as a result. Ridgeway played audio from a scene where Tucci’s racist father finds out about the relationship and beats her in retaliation while screaming racial epithets. Ray and Ridgeway took perverse pleasure in the thrashing, constantly pausing it to laugh and repeat the racial slurs.“[That’s] what should be happenin’ to the 7 percent of white women who think it’s a good idea to…go and sleep with these fuckin’ apes,” Ridgeway said.Ray agreed. “[That’s] basically what used to happen to what few women would do that,” he said. “[T]hese women, they really have no conscience [and will] “bang whatever.” He continued by saying the only thing that can stop this is “social pressure,” in the form of families disowning them and community members looking at them “like rotten, tainted meat.”Ridgeway blamed this change on – who else? – a Jewish-controlled media. (White supremacists blamed many of their grievances on the false conspiracy theory that Jews control the media.) “That is why this shit’s going on,” Ridgeway said. “You have these people in the media puttin’ it out there that popular – the popular opinion, public opinion is that the best thing white women can do is fuck niggers!” He then asserted, without evidence that 7 or 8 percent of the population has been brainwashed.In his mind, white women who date non-white men were recently indoctrinated, which ignores how in the Jim Crow era mixed-race couples weren’t depicted on television and anti-miscegenation laws were used to criminalize them. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court struck down such laws in Loving v. Virginia. The first televised interracial kiss didn’t air until a year later on Star Trek. If dating within one’s race has be brainwashed out of people, why is social pressure necessary to prevent it?Naturally, neither Ray nor Ridgeway bothered to raise those questions let alone answer them. Neither are historians. But they did continue to heap scorn onto interracial couples and circled back to the film, which he called “race-mixing propaganda to influence young people” and convince them that anyone who opposes it is a “horrible, evil person.”We doubt they’ll be reviewing “Do the Right Thing” next.  HuffPost is now a part of Oath and a part of Verizon. On May 25, 2018 we introduced a new Oath Privacy Policy which explains 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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