Let's Talk About the Radicalization of Young White Males Online
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Crayola Coyote
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MysticMonroe
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THIS! I think the woke black people should do more stuff in private. Not in the public. But more in private messages, group chats, or in person in only black meetings, seminars. Where absolutely no non-blacks or c00ns can be invited, not even security, planners, etc. Like some of those speakeasy type bars that were 'word of mouth' that need secret codes to get in. And we teach each other about the enemy, how to deal with them, how to speak to them, how to talk to the cops,etc.
Airbnb Is Deactivating Accounts Of People Trying To Attend A White Supremacist Rally
The rally is set to take place in a Virginia park where earlier this year white supremacists gathered with torches to protest the removal of a Confederate statue.
Michelle Broder Van DykeAugust 7, 2017, at 6:05 p.m.
In anticipation of a white supremacist rally scheduled for this Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, Airbnb has started deactivating accounts of people it believes are booking units to host gatherings related to the rally.
The rally is going to be attended in part by staff from neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, which among other things has a section called "Jewish Problem" and frequently uses racial slurs. Airbnb suspects that several of its units were booked in relation to the gathering.
Airbnb said in a statement to BuzzFeed News it established community rules in 2016 that "make good on our mission of belonging" and that "those who are members of the Airbnb community accept people regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age."
The Airbnb Community Commitment is something signed by all people using the service, Airbnb said, and the company is removing people from the platform who are "antithetical" to this policy. They added that they are able to find these users who violate the policy "through our background check" and the "input of our community."
People online started noticing over the weekend that Airbnb users were being deactivated in anticipation of the rally.
Jason Kessler, a white supremacist helping to organize the rally, called on Twitter for a boycott of Airbnb because "we are having our civil rights violated."
"You see this thing going that's going on with Airbnb," said Kessler in a video. "Anybody who is not just in the alt-right, but who is conservative, right-wing or cares about civil liberties should start boycotting Airbnb. Airbnb are cancelling people's reservations to stay in Charlottesville ... based on political ideology."
Saturday's event is planned to be held in a park that was also the site of a torch-wielding rally in May, protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The park was named Lee Park, but in June its name was changed to Emancipation Park by the City Council.
Kessler has said the current rally is about supporting the Confederate monument, and that "any motion to force supporters from demonstrating in front of (it) is a deliberate infringement of our first amendment rights," according to WVIR.
The Southern Poverty Law Center says the Unite the Right rally is expected to draw hundreds of people from across the country who consider themselves part of the far-right spectrum, such as neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and Ku Klux Klan members.
“This is the biggest rally event we’ve had this millennium,” white nationalist Brad Griffin said on a radio show hosted by David Duke, the former KKK leader.
Andrew Caballero-reynolds / AFP / Getty Images
Members of the Ku Klux Klan wave flags as they hold a rally in Charlottesville on July 8, 2017 to protest the planned removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee.
Despite backlash to the rally, and planned counterprotests, the neo-Nazi event reportedly does have a permit.
"We are trying to be really careful about this," Mayor Mike Signer said last Wednesday, after a long, closed-door meeting took place to look for ways to stop the event. At the time, the mayor and city council said there was nothing they could do to stop the rally.
On Monday, City Manager Maurice Jones said at a news conference they would grant Kessler the permit for his rally, but only if he would move it to McIntire Park. He said the decision came after Kessler indicated more than 400 people would be attending the rally, which was the estimated amount in his original permit application.
Signer also shared a statement on Facebook, saying he "wholeheartedly" supports the city manager's decision "because of the ballooning size of the event's attendance," and that he felt it balanced the right to free speech and public safety.
"Government has no more central duty than protecting life and property. Given the sheer numbers predicted, the City Manager is right to conclude that this event is incompatible with the dense and urban location of Emancipation Park, right next to our Downtown Mall," Signer said in his statement. "However, at McIntire Park, the voices of all can be heard in a way that's consistent with our duty to the public."
In response to the announcement, Kessler tweeted "Nothing will stop us."
Chet Strange / Getty Images
Counter protestors gather during a Ku Klux Klan protest on July 8, 2017.
Airbnb has previously come under fire for its policies regarding racism, which led the company to update its guidelines and agree to allow government officials to investigate certain hosts who have been reported for discrimination.
CORRECTION
August 7, 2017, at 8:05 p.m.
Jason Kessler's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this post.
Michelle Broder Van Dyke is a reporter and night editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in Hawaii.
Contact Michelle Broder Van Dyke at michelle@buzzfeed.com.
Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.
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White Nationalism’s New Clothes | Hannah Gais
This American Carnage
Hannah Gais, June 1
White Nationalism’s New Clothes
Dressing down the so-called “alt-right”
"The naked emperor," stencil graffiti by Edward von Lõngus. / Ivo Kruusamägi
W
O
R
D
F
A
C
T
O
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Y
RICHARD SPENCER HAS TAKEN A BREAK from leading torch-wielding mobs to get back in shape, as we learned this month when photos emerged of his dressing-down at a local fitness center. A fellow gym rat recognized Spencer and gave him hell for being a white supremacist. “You don’t get to be a Nazi from nine to five,” his challenger said later, explaining why she bothered to confront Spencer during his solo session.
This was a late-capitalist turf war of a particular kind—a real-world dispute over what caliber of person should be allowed to pay $100 a month to drape his body undisturbed across the sticky equipment of a nondescript workout facility in the D.C. suburbs. It eventually spilled into the digital sphere, igniting a multi-day Twitter feud over who deserved to be there: the woman who yelled, or the Nazi who sweated. Our tireless pundits took up this question with alarming speed, but ultimately, it wasn’t theirs to answer. That honor belonged to the discerning management team of the Old Town Alexandria branch of Sport & Health, a subsidiary of US Fitness Holdings LLC, the “ninth largest health club company in the United States.” They told Spencer to stay away.
Certain bakeries refuse to sell wedding cakes to gay couples, and certain gyms oust despicable Nazis from their member rolls.
Spencer’s response was what you’d expect—pocked by smarm and anti-Semitism. “I am wandering the earth looking for a new gym,” he offered in a late-night tweetstorm days after the fact. “So this what it feels like to be a Jew…”
With so few public spaces in America to feud over, we’ve begun to adjudicate the boundaries of civil discourse in the tinier, sweatier worlds of private membership. Our “public” universities are too expensive to attend, our “public” parks close at dark, and our “public” sidewalks are increasingly the target of anti-protest legislation. Meanwhile, certain bakeries refuse to sell wedding cakes to gay couples, and certain gyms oust despicable Nazis from their member rolls before they can build their deplorable muscles. To be comfortable in America, the private spaces must work in your favor. Most of the time, you notice only when they don’t.
Private spaces afford a sort of vulnerability to those whose success is dependent on carefully curated public identities. Nowhere is this more apparent than the resurgent far right. Everywhere Richard Spencer—our valiant cheerleader for “peaceful ethnic cleansing”—goes, he wears an outfit that your time-travelling friend from the 1980s would dub “preppie,” and which real humans in the present have described as “dapper,” “sharp,” or—and this is the intended goal, apparently—“radical-traditionalist.” Fitted pants are involved, topped by a button-up, and—depending on the season—a vest, tweed, linen, plaid, khaki, a jaunty cap, a pocket square, or some unholy combination of the above.
Count me among those who do not give a rip about Richard Spencer’s wardrobe; still, his tweed is fair game because it affords him plausible deniability. Despite hundreds of bald-faced statements to the contrary, Spencer’s attire—especially when combined with his academic pedigree—allows him to pass as a (hyper-conservative) public intellectual, rather than a know-nothing peddler of the basest form of racial animus. He can still swan around Northern Virginia predicting that his white-nationalist think tank, the inconspicuously named National Policy Institute, will continue to attract educated, middle- and upper-class aspirants of the finest and most influential sort, until it gathers enough steam to migrate across the Potomac River, where it will displace the Cato Institute as our nation’s leading center of respectable conservative policy and research, or some utter garbage like that.
His suit is his disguise, and he wears it so doggedly that he almost fools us into thinking that he has fooled himself. This is partly why it is so satisfying to witness Spencer in situations where he’s been caught unaware—more than entertainment value, the grainy photos of his gym ouster show a denuded dunce who can’t have it both ways. As a woman a full foot shorter than him gets in his grill, Spencer searches for help, all the while donning athletic attire that looks like it’s been gathering mothballs in his overstocked closet. It’s a reminder that we need to do more of this: catch the white supremacists off guard, refuse his terms, reveal his disguises.
No, this is not a call to punch or pants our nation’s egghead-wannabe eugenicists. There are better options.
Some of them I’ve tried. Like many left-wing academics, journalists, and researchers before me, the far right’s efforts to re-imagine American ethnonationalism drew me to their private conferences, conventions, and symposia, whether they wanted me in attendance or not. These are their “safe spaces”—although they loathe the term—and they don’t take kindly to interlopers. Inside these spaces, I’ve gotten a clearer picture of what the so-called “alt-right” is up to than I’ve seen anywhere else. And this includes a first-hand look at how they mimic the conventions of academic culture to shore up their program of exclusion.
Conferences are notoriously boring; it’s part of what Spencer and his colleagues like about them. Although the notion of an “intellectual” racism geared toward educated, middle-class partisans has been around for centuries, the roots of the current generation’s normalization effort goes back to the late 1980s. The year 1988 brought us Louisiana state representative David Duke—the former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard gone politician and pundit. Four years later, Yale/Sciences Po-educated Jared Taylor founded American Renaissance (AmRen)—a Virginia-based “think tank” and (now online) journal that bills itself as the premier destination for “race realist” content.
In contrast to the militia movements sprouting up throughout the American West in the early 1990s, AmRen was once (and arguably still is) a standard-bearer for “sophisticated” racism. Later in the decade, it began holding conferences modeled after those organized by the usual D.C. policy shops. One early report from The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education observed that “for the most part, civility reigned at the conference.” Indeed, “the entire weekend passed without one speaker using the word ‘******’ though in their private moments not all were so genteel—and these attendees tout advanced degrees, not prison tattoos.”
The goal behind these gatherings was obvious. To ensure its survival, the ethnonationalist movement needed to work against the received idea of racists as hilljack psychopaths and to appeal to the ever more disgruntled ranks of the white middle class. Years before Richard Spencer could’ve dreamed of capturing the attention of the mainstream media, academic Carol Swain observed in her 2002 book, The New White Nationalism in America, that “unlike the Klan and Nazi movements, white nationalism is aggressively seeking a mainstream audience, and in going mainstream it has found it necessary to abandon most of the tactics, postures, and regalia of the older racist right, which no longer resonates with America.” As one pseudonymous blogger observed in Radix Journal in 2015:
When I use the words, “White Nationalism,” what comes to mind? Probably skinheads, swastika tattoos, and jackboots. Maybe some heavy metal, if you are into that kind of music. Oh, and Klan rallies. . . . Only a tiny, tiny minority of White Nationalists actually wear those kind of clothes or associate with those kind of people. In fact, of that minority, probably half of them are FBI plants. I stay as far as possible from those types as I can. They are kooks.
Today’s intellectually minded white nationalists may throw up the occasional festive “Sieg Heil”—or even call to “party like it’s 1933.” But they do so after making a conscientious effort to trade in their white hoods for suits, violent screeds for polite conversations about postmodern political theory, and rural cross burnings for cocktail-sipping networking events. America’s white nationalist elite had, as Swain noted more than a decade before many of its current figures became household names, remodeled itself to become “preeminently a movement of discourse, persuasion, and ideas.” Its “idea-centric” approach mirrored that of European nativist groups abroad, including the European ideological predecessor to America’s alt-right: France’s Bloc Identitaire. The radical far-right organization, which was inspired by the French New Right (Nouvelle Droite) school of political thought, has given rise to spinoff groups in a number of European nations. As Fabrice Roberts, Bloc Identitaire’s founder and the occasional white nationalist conference speaker, explained in an interview, the right’s “struggle for the cultural hegemony must be total and therefore take different modes of action: agitprop operations, community network development, creation of alternative media, development of our presence on of the Internet, etc.”
This American Carnage
Hannah Gais, June 1
White Nationalism’s New Clothes
Dressing down the so-called “alt-right”
"The naked emperor," stencil graffiti by Edward von Lõngus. / Ivo Kruusamägi
W
O
R
D
F
A
C
T
O
R
Y
RICHARD SPENCER HAS TAKEN A BREAK from leading torch-wielding mobs to get back in shape, as we learned this month when photos emerged of his dressing-down at a local fitness center. A fellow gym rat recognized Spencer and gave him hell for being a white supremacist. “You don’t get to be a Nazi from nine to five,” his challenger said later, explaining why she bothered to confront Spencer during his solo session.
This was a late-capitalist turf war of a particular kind—a real-world dispute over what caliber of person should be allowed to pay $100 a month to drape his body undisturbed across the sticky equipment of a nondescript workout facility in the D.C. suburbs. It eventually spilled into the digital sphere, igniting a multi-day Twitter feud over who deserved to be there: the woman who yelled, or the Nazi who sweated. Our tireless pundits took up this question with alarming speed, but ultimately, it wasn’t theirs to answer. That honor belonged to the discerning management team of the Old Town Alexandria branch of Sport & Health, a subsidiary of US Fitness Holdings LLC, the “ninth largest health club company in the United States.” They told Spencer to stay away.
Certain bakeries refuse to sell wedding cakes to gay couples, and certain gyms oust despicable Nazis from their member rolls.
Spencer’s response was what you’d expect—pocked by smarm and anti-Semitism. “I am wandering the earth looking for a new gym,” he offered in a late-night tweetstorm days after the fact. “So this what it feels like to be a Jew…”
With so few public spaces in America to feud over, we’ve begun to adjudicate the boundaries of civil discourse in the tinier, sweatier worlds of private membership. Our “public” universities are too expensive to attend, our “public” parks close at dark, and our “public” sidewalks are increasingly the target of anti-protest legislation. Meanwhile, certain bakeries refuse to sell wedding cakes to gay couples, and certain gyms oust despicable Nazis from their member rolls before they can build their deplorable muscles. To be comfortable in America, the private spaces must work in your favor. Most of the time, you notice only when they don’t.
Private spaces afford a sort of vulnerability to those whose success is dependent on carefully curated public identities. Nowhere is this more apparent than the resurgent far right. Everywhere Richard Spencer—our valiant cheerleader for “peaceful ethnic cleansing”—goes, he wears an outfit that your time-travelling friend from the 1980s would dub “preppie,” and which real humans in the present have described as “dapper,” “sharp,” or—and this is the intended goal, apparently—“radical-traditionalist.” Fitted pants are involved, topped by a button-up, and—depending on the season—a vest, tweed, linen, plaid, khaki, a jaunty cap, a pocket square, or some unholy combination of the above.
Count me among those who do not give a rip about Richard Spencer’s wardrobe; still, his tweed is fair game because it affords him plausible deniability. Despite hundreds of bald-faced statements to the contrary, Spencer’s attire—especially when combined with his academic pedigree—allows him to pass as a (hyper-conservative) public intellectual, rather than a know-nothing peddler of the basest form of racial animus. He can still swan around Northern Virginia predicting that his white-nationalist think tank, the inconspicuously named National Policy Institute, will continue to attract educated, middle- and upper-class aspirants of the finest and most influential sort, until it gathers enough steam to migrate across the Potomac River, where it will displace the Cato Institute as our nation’s leading center of respectable conservative policy and research, or some utter garbage like that.
His suit is his disguise, and he wears it so doggedly that he almost fools us into thinking that he has fooled himself. This is partly why it is so satisfying to witness Spencer in situations where he’s been caught unaware—more than entertainment value, the grainy photos of his gym ouster show a denuded dunce who can’t have it both ways. As a woman a full foot shorter than him gets in his grill, Spencer searches for help, all the while donning athletic attire that looks like it’s been gathering mothballs in his overstocked closet. It’s a reminder that we need to do more of this: catch the white supremacists off guard, refuse his terms, reveal his disguises.
No, this is not a call to punch or pants our nation’s egghead-wannabe eugenicists. There are better options.
Some of them I’ve tried. Like many left-wing academics, journalists, and researchers before me, the far right’s efforts to re-imagine American ethnonationalism drew me to their private conferences, conventions, and symposia, whether they wanted me in attendance or not. These are their “safe spaces”—although they loathe the term—and they don’t take kindly to interlopers. Inside these spaces, I’ve gotten a clearer picture of what the so-called “alt-right” is up to than I’ve seen anywhere else. And this includes a first-hand look at how they mimic the conventions of academic culture to shore up their program of exclusion.
Conferences are notoriously boring; it’s part of what Spencer and his colleagues like about them. Although the notion of an “intellectual” racism geared toward educated, middle-class partisans has been around for centuries, the roots of the current generation’s normalization effort goes back to the late 1980s. The year 1988 brought us Louisiana state representative David Duke—the former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard gone politician and pundit. Four years later, Yale/Sciences Po-educated Jared Taylor founded American Renaissance (AmRen)—a Virginia-based “think tank” and (now online) journal that bills itself as the premier destination for “race realist” content.
In contrast to the militia movements sprouting up throughout the American West in the early 1990s, AmRen was once (and arguably still is) a standard-bearer for “sophisticated” racism. Later in the decade, it began holding conferences modeled after those organized by the usual D.C. policy shops. One early report from The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education observed that “for the most part, civility reigned at the conference.” Indeed, “the entire weekend passed without one speaker using the word ‘******’ though in their private moments not all were so genteel—and these attendees tout advanced degrees, not prison tattoos.”
The goal behind these gatherings was obvious. To ensure its survival, the ethnonationalist movement needed to work against the received idea of racists as hilljack psychopaths and to appeal to the ever more disgruntled ranks of the white middle class. Years before Richard Spencer could’ve dreamed of capturing the attention of the mainstream media, academic Carol Swain observed in her 2002 book, The New White Nationalism in America, that “unlike the Klan and Nazi movements, white nationalism is aggressively seeking a mainstream audience, and in going mainstream it has found it necessary to abandon most of the tactics, postures, and regalia of the older racist right, which no longer resonates with America.” As one pseudonymous blogger observed in Radix Journal in 2015:
When I use the words, “White Nationalism,” what comes to mind? Probably skinheads, swastika tattoos, and jackboots. Maybe some heavy metal, if you are into that kind of music. Oh, and Klan rallies. . . . Only a tiny, tiny minority of White Nationalists actually wear those kind of clothes or associate with those kind of people. In fact, of that minority, probably half of them are FBI plants. I stay as far as possible from those types as I can. They are kooks.
Today’s intellectually minded white nationalists may throw up the occasional festive “Sieg Heil”—or even call to “party like it’s 1933.” But they do so after making a conscientious effort to trade in their white hoods for suits, violent screeds for polite conversations about postmodern political theory, and rural cross burnings for cocktail-sipping networking events. America’s white nationalist elite had, as Swain noted more than a decade before many of its current figures became household names, remodeled itself to become “preeminently a movement of discourse, persuasion, and ideas.” Its “idea-centric” approach mirrored that of European nativist groups abroad, including the European ideological predecessor to America’s alt-right: France’s Bloc Identitaire. The radical far-right organization, which was inspired by the French New Right (Nouvelle Droite) school of political thought, has given rise to spinoff groups in a number of European nations. As Fabrice Roberts, Bloc Identitaire’s founder and the occasional white nationalist conference speaker, explained in an interview, the right’s “struggle for the cultural hegemony must be total and therefore take different modes of action: agitprop operations, community network development, creation of alternative media, development of our presence on of the Internet, etc.”
PART 2:
What is it like inside one of these elaborate and often secretive events? Incredibly white, but you knew that already. Some of them offer press passes—such as the NPI conference in November, which was overrun with journalists—but others have required me to go incognito, which I can manage only because my skin is every bit as pasty as Spencer’s. I had the unfortunate honor of covering (and nearly being chased out of) the now-infamous NPI dinner with Tila Tequila just weeks after Trump’s electoral win in November. For people who claim to have ideas they want the whole country to hear and obey, they sure have a lot to whisper about. Earlier in May, the far-right publishing house Counter Currents held a strictly vetted conference in New York City that was barred to “outside agitators.”
These pseudo-academic babblers have managed to conceal the ferocity of their hatred with exclusivity, insularity, self-congratulation, and tweed.
One thing I’ve learned from my research is how thoroughly these pseudo-academic babblers have managed to conceal the ferocity of their hatred with academic culture’s bad habits: exclusivity, insularity, self-congratulation, tweed. Their conference programs look like any number of others proceeding in snazzy convention centers and faded hotel ballrooms across the country. Meet and greets and keynotes, hors d’oeuvres and panels, name tags and networking—who would have pegged these as the weapons of a resurgent far right dreaming of genocide?
Most of us still don’t. But one perk of sitting through a session in which far-right white nationalists talk among themselves—instead of to the media—is that their ideas are bound to reveal themselves eventually. The sooner we recognize that their anti-democratic goals are distinct from their fastidiously professionalized methods, the sooner we can understand their connection to the history of racism in America, and what it is they want with our future. “Attending alt-right conferences [is] an essential part of doing this kind of reporting and [allows you to bypass] the scripted narrative they are keen to deliver,” noted Carol Schaeffer, a journalist and researcher focused on the international far-right, in an interview. You get a perspective “that you can’t see from plucking the leaders from their perches and putting them in an interview scenario.”
Daryl Lamont Jenkins, an anti-racist, anti-fascist activist and founder of One People’s Project, has been doing such work for years. “Look at somebody like Matthew Heimbach,” he said of the twenty-six-year-old leader of the Traditionalist Youth Network during a phone interview. “Everything you know about Heimbach he has provided. There’s a lot that we need to do in order to make sure that the things they don’t want to talk about are put out there. The only way you’re going to do that is do the legwork yourself, doing the research they don’t want you to do [and] being in the places that they don’t want you to be. . . . You get access to things that they wouldn’t expect you to have.”
Grappling with a resurgent far-right for the Trump era involves renegotiating the space we’ve ceded to these groups, both in terms of journalistic coverage and our daily lives. Our responsibility as reporters and researchers is to shed light on Spencer’s heavily perfumed vat of sewage. We should, in other words, stop handing white nationalists the mic and start historicizing their ideas.
For a movement that dresses itself up in the trappings of mainstream academia, any blandly critical coverage on a major cable news network can be a blessing. A Spencer-studded episode of CNN’s United Shades of America adds nothing to the collective good, but it does manage to downplay the threat posed by Spencer’s ideas. Oppositely, by capturing his followers throwing up Nazi salutes in unscripted coverage of a quasi-academic conference, we can expose the inconspicuously named “alternative right” for what it really is: a band of racists hiding behind butchered postmodernist rhetoric.
Keeping self-styled white nationalist leaders from permeating the airwaves may be one aspect of “no platforming”—and an easy, uncontroversial one at that. Appearing on CNN isn’t a right in any coherent philosophical or legal sense—it’s a privilege. But hosting conferences without disruption from protesters isn’t one either. Even the private businesses that have refused to host white nationalist groups are within their rights to do so. There’s no coherent “slippery slope” argument to be made against Sport & Health’s anti-fascist gesture.
After all, politics doesn’t stop in the locker room. And unless you’re Edward Norton in American History X, you sure as hell don’t get to be a Nazi from nine to five.
Hannah Gais is The Baffler’s audience development associate and a curmudgeonly freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Pacific Standard, Commonweal, Outline, Al Jazeera America, U.S. News and World Report, First Things, and many more outlets that she’s too lazy to name.
You can find her on Twitter @hannahgais.
What is it like inside one of these elaborate and often secretive events? Incredibly white, but you knew that already. Some of them offer press passes—such as the NPI conference in November, which was overrun with journalists—but others have required me to go incognito, which I can manage only because my skin is every bit as pasty as Spencer’s. I had the unfortunate honor of covering (and nearly being chased out of) the now-infamous NPI dinner with Tila Tequila just weeks after Trump’s electoral win in November. For people who claim to have ideas they want the whole country to hear and obey, they sure have a lot to whisper about. Earlier in May, the far-right publishing house Counter Currents held a strictly vetted conference in New York City that was barred to “outside agitators.”
These pseudo-academic babblers have managed to conceal the ferocity of their hatred with exclusivity, insularity, self-congratulation, and tweed.
One thing I’ve learned from my research is how thoroughly these pseudo-academic babblers have managed to conceal the ferocity of their hatred with academic culture’s bad habits: exclusivity, insularity, self-congratulation, tweed. Their conference programs look like any number of others proceeding in snazzy convention centers and faded hotel ballrooms across the country. Meet and greets and keynotes, hors d’oeuvres and panels, name tags and networking—who would have pegged these as the weapons of a resurgent far right dreaming of genocide?
Most of us still don’t. But one perk of sitting through a session in which far-right white nationalists talk among themselves—instead of to the media—is that their ideas are bound to reveal themselves eventually. The sooner we recognize that their anti-democratic goals are distinct from their fastidiously professionalized methods, the sooner we can understand their connection to the history of racism in America, and what it is they want with our future. “Attending alt-right conferences [is] an essential part of doing this kind of reporting and [allows you to bypass] the scripted narrative they are keen to deliver,” noted Carol Schaeffer, a journalist and researcher focused on the international far-right, in an interview. You get a perspective “that you can’t see from plucking the leaders from their perches and putting them in an interview scenario.”
Daryl Lamont Jenkins, an anti-racist, anti-fascist activist and founder of One People’s Project, has been doing such work for years. “Look at somebody like Matthew Heimbach,” he said of the twenty-six-year-old leader of the Traditionalist Youth Network during a phone interview. “Everything you know about Heimbach he has provided. There’s a lot that we need to do in order to make sure that the things they don’t want to talk about are put out there. The only way you’re going to do that is do the legwork yourself, doing the research they don’t want you to do [and] being in the places that they don’t want you to be. . . . You get access to things that they wouldn’t expect you to have.”
Grappling with a resurgent far-right for the Trump era involves renegotiating the space we’ve ceded to these groups, both in terms of journalistic coverage and our daily lives. Our responsibility as reporters and researchers is to shed light on Spencer’s heavily perfumed vat of sewage. We should, in other words, stop handing white nationalists the mic and start historicizing their ideas.
For a movement that dresses itself up in the trappings of mainstream academia, any blandly critical coverage on a major cable news network can be a blessing. A Spencer-studded episode of CNN’s United Shades of America adds nothing to the collective good, but it does manage to downplay the threat posed by Spencer’s ideas. Oppositely, by capturing his followers throwing up Nazi salutes in unscripted coverage of a quasi-academic conference, we can expose the inconspicuously named “alternative right” for what it really is: a band of racists hiding behind butchered postmodernist rhetoric.
Keeping self-styled white nationalist leaders from permeating the airwaves may be one aspect of “no platforming”—and an easy, uncontroversial one at that. Appearing on CNN isn’t a right in any coherent philosophical or legal sense—it’s a privilege. But hosting conferences without disruption from protesters isn’t one either. Even the private businesses that have refused to host white nationalist groups are within their rights to do so. There’s no coherent “slippery slope” argument to be made against Sport & Health’s anti-fascist gesture.
After all, politics doesn’t stop in the locker room. And unless you’re Edward Norton in American History X, you sure as hell don’t get to be a Nazi from nine to five.
Hannah Gais is The Baffler’s audience development associate and a curmudgeonly freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Pacific Standard, Commonweal, Outline, Al Jazeera America, U.S. News and World Report, First Things, and many more outlets that she’s too lazy to name.
You can find her on Twitter @hannahgais.
The Political Payoff of Making Whites Feel Like a Minority
Lynn Vavreck @vavreck AUG. 8, 2017
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Nationality, race and ethnicity are a large part of identity for most people. Factors like this matter more for some people than others — and for some groups more than others — but a sense of group awareness or membership exists in varying degrees across all segments of American society.
Often it’s easy to see the signifiers of such group identity, in distinctive music, food or clothing, for example. But sometimes when symbols or language are co-opted, it is harder to spot. In 2015, Donald J. Trump’s “make America great again” and “build a wall” started out as simple but powerful slogans. As time went on, they became more infused with a specific meaning that symbolized the concerns and preferences of a substantial set of white Americans.
Mr. Trump’s appeals were a form of group politics or identity politics, and he continues to focus on threats to white identity as president.
Some Trump critics find his focus on whites as a group outrageous or counterproductive. But survey data suggest that many white Americans do feel threatened, and that they think there are policies that discriminate against them and should be changed.
Two examples of the president’s efforts and the underlying support for his positions illustrate these trends.
Photo
A senior White House adviser, Stephen Miller, said that the Statue of Liberty is a “symbol of American liberty lighting the world” but that it had little to do with immigrants. CreditBebeto Matthews/Associated Press
On Wednesday, he offered his support for a bill that would cut legal immigration to the United States in half, saying “this legislation demonstrates our compassion for struggling American families who deserve an immigration system that puts their needs first and that puts America first.” To achieve its goal, the plan would limit entry for some family members of American citizens and permanent residents.
In explaining how limiting the entry of relatives would put the needs of American families first, a White House policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said it was “common sense” that immigration was costing Americans jobs. He then suggested that the family members who would be denied entry under the proposal were largely low-skill workers who were taking jobs away from struggling Americans.
The claim about who, if anyone, suffers from the immigration of low-skilled workers is nuanced. Debate on the question is active. If people come to America because they have a relative living here, it does not mean by definition that they are low-skilled workers. Despite the difficulty of nailing down the effects of low-skilled immigration on American families, public opinion on the topic — at least for a particular set of Americans — may reflect the “common sense” Mr. Miller described.
In January 2016, the American National Election Study asked 875 white Americans this question: How likely is it that many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead? On average, 28 percent of the white population thought it was extremely or very likely that white people could not find work because of minorities seeking those same jobs. Roughly half the white population thought it was at least moderately or slightly likely. Only 21 percent thought this was not at all likely.
Differences emerge across party lines, even among whites. Close to 20 percent of Democrats thought it was extremely likely that the prospects for white job-seekers would be threatened by the presence of minority workers, while 34 percent of Republicans (and 30 percent of independents) felt this way.
Among white Republicans and independents, an even greater divide becomes clear: White voters who preferred Mr. Trump to one of the other candidates in the Republican field were nearly twice as likely to anticipate white job loss to nonwhite workers (48 percent compared with 24 percent).
Photo
At a Trump campaign rally on Long Island last year. CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
The survey also asked white people how important it was for whites to work together to change laws that are unfair to whites. On average, 38 percent said it was extremely or very important. Only a quarter thought it was not important at all — a category that presumably also encompasses people who thought no such laws existed.
These trends also help to frame President Trump’s other recent announcement that the Justice Department would be investigating college admissions procedures that might discriminate against white applicants.
The difference between white Democrats and Republicans on the importance of uniting as a group against discriminatory laws is only five percentage points, with Republicans believing it was more important than Democrats and independents.
The divide, however, among Republicans who preferred Mr. Trump in the primaries and those who chose someone else is overwhelming. Nearly 60 percent of Mr. Trump’s primary supporters thought organizing to change laws that are unfair to white people was extremely or very important. Only 15 percent thought it was not important at all to do so. Supporters of other G.O.P. candidates, on average, were about half as concerned.
The data show that race is less important to white Americans’ sense of self than to nonwhites — more white people say being white is not at all important to their identity relative to the numbers who say so in other groups. But Mr. Trump’s continued efforts to remind white Americans of their group status may increase the number of white people who think of themselves through a racial lens. It is one of the ways that his campaign and presidency may reshape public opinion and politics.
He is capitalizing both on an existing sense of threat among white voters and the opportunity to shape the way whites — because of their group membership — think of themselves.
Lynn Vavreck, a professor of political science at U.C.L.A., is a co-author of the coming “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.” Follow her on Twitter at @vavreck.
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A version of this article appears in print on August 8, 2017, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: The Political Payoff of Depicting White Identity as Under Siege. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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For the New Far Right, YouTube Has Become the New Talk Radio
By JOHN HERRMANAUG. 3, 2017
From a video on Paul Joseph Watson’s Youtube channel YouTube
In June, Zack Exley, a political organizer and a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, published a report on “Black Pigeon Speaks,” a political commentator on YouTube. In Exley’s judgment, B.P.S. is emblematic of a marginal but ascendant sort of YouTube figure — a type that is becoming a meaningful force in the practice of politics online. B.P.S. has, by any objective standard, a significant and engaged audience; at the moment, he has about 215,000 followers, and his uploads have been viewed more than 25 million times. In an introductory video, he describes himself as something like a pundit or an analyst: “I attempt to make sense out of the increasingly nonsensical world we all share,” he says of his channel. “I try and be only as offensive as I need to be.” His videos are unhurried, heavy on explanation and argument, regularly stretching over the 10-minute mark. And, as Exley notes, his politics skew right. Hard right:
He is a traditionalist in many ways, and is positive about Christianity as a cultural force and foundation of Western civilization, but he is not a Christian. He defies the postwar “fusion” of classical libertarianism and evangelical Christianity. B.P.S. believes in a global conspiracy of central bankers led by the Rothschilds who are driving immigration into predominantly white countries to increase the pool of “debt slaves” and to drive down wages; thinks that “cultural Marxism” is a Jewish conspiracy that is undermining Western civilization; and believes that women being allowed to do whatever they want, including choosing their own mates, is the deathblow to Western civilization.
Like its fellow mega-platforms Twitter and Facebook, YouTube is an enormous engine of cultural production and a host for wildly diverse communities. But like the much smaller Tumblr (which has long been dominated by lively and combative left-wing politics) or ***** (which has become a virulent and effective hard-right meme factory) YouTube is host to just one dominant native political community: the YouTube right. This community takes the form of a loosely associated group of channels and personalities, connected mostly by shared political instincts and aesthetic sensibilities. They are monologuists, essayists, performers and vloggers who publish frequent dispatches from their living rooms, their studios or the field, inveighing vigorously against the political left and mocking the “mainstream media,” against which they are defined and empowered. They deplore “social justice warriors,” whom they credit with ruining popular culture, conspiring against the populace and helping to undermine “the West.” They are fixated on the subjects of immigration, Islam and political correctness. They seem at times more animated by President Trump’s opponents than by the man himself, with whom they share many priorities, if not a style. Some of their leading figures are associated with larger media companies, like Alex Jones’s Infowars or Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media. Others are independent operators who found their voices in the medium.
To the extent that these personalities challenge their viewers, it’s to commit even more deeply to what their intuitions already tell them is true — not despite those opinions’ rejection from mainstream liberal thought, but because of it. Theirs is a potent and time-tested strategy. Unpopular arguments can benefit from being portrayed as forbidden, and marginal ideas are more effectively sold as hidden ones. The zealous defense of ideas for which audiences believe they’re seen as stupid, cruel or racist is made possible with simple inversion: Actually, it’s everyone else who is stupid, cruel or racist, and their “consensus” is a conspiracy intended to conceal the unspoken feelings of a silent majority. Trump has developed an intuition for this kind of audience cultivation; so have countless pundits, broadcasters, salespeople and politicians of different populist political stripes. But Exley, in his final analysis of B.P.S., points to an especially apt historical parallel: conservative talk radio. “Fixated as they are with Fox News,” he says, “liberals, scholars and pundits have failed to give talk radio — which is almost wholly conservative — its due, even though it’s now nearly three decades old and reaches millions each day. They now stand to miss a new platform that, so far, is also dominated by the right wing.”
The radio comparison is a useful one. Talk radio’s growth followed decades of deregulation and disruptive opportunity: the rise of FM radio during the late 1960s and ’70s, the abandonment by music stations of the low-fidelity AM band and the 1987 revocation of the Fairness Doctrine, a rule through which the Federal Communications Commission attempted to regulate a sort of balance into content produced by licensed broadcasters. The subsequent rise of conservative talk radio, typified by superstars like Rush Limbaugh, had enormous influence and continues to attract millions of listeners a day, well into the internet era. Its style, once novel, is now familiar. There’s the casual, knowing rapport with listeners; the baggy, multihour shows, which double as news digests; the moralizing monologues that transition seamlessly into jokey rants and asides. But something about the medium seems to favor the right. Repeated, strenuous attempts by liberal broadcasters to replicate conservative talk radio formats have not fared well. Air America, which was launched in 2004 and shuttered in 2010, helped propel talent into other venues — Rachel Maddow to television, Al Franken to the Senate — but failed as a sustainable answer to combative conservative talk radio. AM opened a space for reaction, but seemed to have no room for the counterreaction.
YouTube’s political context is similar in some notable ways: the value it places on personalities; its reliance on monologue and repetition; its isolation and immunity from direct challenge; its promise to let listeners in on the real, secret story. Both are obsessed with persuasion and conversion, combined with a giddy disbelief at the sheer stupidity of liberals, who — and this is part of the fun — aren’t listening. Comparing YouTube to talk radio is also a useful reminder of how potent a medium can become while still appearing marginal to those who don’t care for it or know much about it. For listeners of conservative talk radio — where right-wing populist rhetoric has flourished for decades, and where hosts can get away with authoritarian flirtations and xenophobic rhetoric that mainstream politicians can’t — the rise of Donald Trump was somewhat less of a surprise than it was for many others.
The YouTube right may be comparatively marginal and ragtag, but it’s also comparatively young. If talk radio primed listeners for Trump’s style and anticipated the American right’s current obsessions, the YouTube right is acquainting viewers with a more international message, attuned to a global revival of explicitly race-and-religion-based, blood-and-soil nationalism. Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars, 35, is perhaps the archetypal YouTube-right vlogger; he has nearly a million followers, and his videos have been viewed more than 215 million times. He has in the last month published videos with titles including “Staged Video Shows ‘Refugee’ Fake Drowning,” “Finsbury Mosque Terror: What They’re NOT Telling You,” “The Truth about Refugees” and “Why Leftists Submit to Terror.” The scripts for these videos are straightforward nativist polemics, with a particular focus on Europe — Watson is from Northern England — delivered in a relentlessly insistent tone, and quite close to the camera. Watson posts extended “roasts” of his political villains, as well as rants that betray a peculiar blend of self-taught reaction: against pop culture, broadly, but also against “modern architecture” and “modern art.” If one video sums up what a receptive viewer might take from subscribing to his channel, it’s “Some Cultures are Better than Others.”
@Y2Dre @Shook @Raymond Burrr @Red Shield @bdizzle @satam55 @Houston911 @Sagat @Trajan @Sukairain @YouMadd? @Diasporan Royalty
PART 2:
Watson frequently suggests that ideologies like his represent a sort of new counterculture and boasts about the right wing’s dominance on the YouTube platform. “Twitter is a tiny echo chamber,” he tweeted earlier this year. “I’m not sure the left understand the monumental ass-whupping being dished out to them on YouTube.” And in terms of sheer numbers and visibility on the platform, the YouTube right is substantial. Among the wide range of pundits, ideologues and highly YouTube-specific personalities, a few archetypal examples appear.
From a 2017 video on Lauren Southern’s YouTube channel. YouTube
There’s Stefan Molyneux (around 644,000 subscribers, with videos totaling around 118 million views), an Irish-Canadian who, like Watson, has civilizational, apocalyptic fixations — “The Truth About The Paris Terrorist Attack,” “The Death of Germany,” “What Pisses Me Off About Fake News” — but tends to linger on purported sins of rhetoric, fallacy and logic. He is especially fond of the phrase “Not an argument!” and has pinned a video at the top of his channel titled “Take The Red Pill,” a reference to a scene in the science-fiction film “The Matrix,” in which the protagonist is asked to make a choice between remaining ensconced in a comfortable illusion and being exposed to a harsher reality. (The term was adopted by men’s rights activists to describe their awakening to what they call an antimale bias in society, but it has become a versatile metaphor for reactionary political activation: against feminism, against immigration, against social justice, against the media.)
Lauren Southern (310,000 subscribers), who previously worked with Rebel Media, a right-wing Canadian media company, is something of a roving correspondent, making recent stops in France (“Paris Train Station Overwhelmed With Migrants”), Germany (“Getting Stalked at #G20”) and California (“BATTLE OF BERKELEY”). According to recent videos, she is preparing to join and document the #DefendEurope campaign, a civilian “identitarian humanitarian” effort to intercept refugee boats in the Mediterranean and “make sure that they will be brought back to Africa.”
And Stephen Crowder (830,000 subscribers) is a right-wing comedian and talk-show host whose act is built almost exclusively around saying things he imagines liberals won’t allow him to say, and formulating some of these things into “pranks.” In practice, this means videos with names like “#SJW Feminist Festival Crashed By Crowder ... In Underwear,” and “HIDDEN CAM: ‘Stealing’ Illegal Immigrant’s Jobs!” Crowder, whose chuckling, boyish presentation contrasts with his peers’ more pedantic affectations, nonetheless shares many of their causes. His YouTube profile concludes, proudly, “Hippies and Muslims hate me!”
There are countless other forms of political expression on YouTube, but no bloc is anywhere near as organized or as assertive as the YouTube right and its dozens of obdurate vloggers. Nor is there a coherent group on the platform articulating any sort of direct answer to this budding form of reaction — which both validates this material in the eyes of its creators and gives it room to breathe, grow and assert itself beyond its immediate vicinity.
Just ask YouTube itself. In mid-July, the company launched “YouTube Creators for Change,” which it described as “global initiative dedicated to amplifying and multiplying the voices of role models who are tackling difficult social issues with their channels.” Its roster included YouTube personalities from various subcultures — style bloggers, essayistic vloggers, comedians, musicians — and its stated intention was to drive “greater awareness and productive conversations around social issues.” It was an openly and moderately progressive project, in a familiar corporate tradition. It was also rolled out alongside a broader campaign on the site to counter “extremist” content. The ostensible target of that campaign was videos promoting terrorism. But a recent post from YouTube invokes Creators for Change in the service of somewhat broader goals, promising “tougher treatment to videos that aren’t illegal but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism.”
The YouTube right has portrayed statements like this as a regulatory threat — a precursor to censorship, or perhaps as some latter-day, private analogue to the Fairness Doctrine. Its members believe that their videos and accounts are doomed to be banned, delisted or stripped of lucrative ads, effectively diminishing their presence on the platform. But for the moment, in Creators for Change, the right also saw a narrative opportunity. In response videos, YouTube and its owner, Google, were cast as an oppressive establishment forcing left-wing politics into users’ feeds. Black Pigeon Speaks published his own video, “#CreatorsForChange — YouTube Propaganda Gets REKT — Yet Again,” in which he quickly segued from the platform’s campaign to a brazen claim that “diversity always leads to fractured societies that always break down.” The comments on YouTube’s original video introducing the program were rapidly flooded with bile. “Meet the rainbow coalition of YouTubers who hate white people!” read one top-voted comment. “I never hated diversity until media began to forcefully push it down my throat,” read another.
It was, for the YouTube right, an expression of power — internal to YouTube, to be sure, but projected outward into the platform’s wider world in a visible and disconcerting way. Its members had, in their view, fended off an intrusion into a venue over which they feel a real and potentially lasting claim. Watson, who frequently portrays his political cohort as victims of censorship on YouTube and elsewhere, tallied the moment as a victory for his team. He captured a collage of negative comments and posted it on Twitter, alongside a laughing emoji. “Politically active YouTube users are so beyond red-pilled,” he wrote, “they’ve basically made it a right-wing safe space.”
@Y2Dre @Shook @Raymond Burrr @Red Shield @bdizzle @satam55 @Houston911 @Sagat @Trajan @Sukairain @YouMadd? @Diasporan Royalty
Watson frequently suggests that ideologies like his represent a sort of new counterculture and boasts about the right wing’s dominance on the YouTube platform. “Twitter is a tiny echo chamber,” he tweeted earlier this year. “I’m not sure the left understand the monumental ass-whupping being dished out to them on YouTube.” And in terms of sheer numbers and visibility on the platform, the YouTube right is substantial. Among the wide range of pundits, ideologues and highly YouTube-specific personalities, a few archetypal examples appear.
From a 2017 video on Lauren Southern’s YouTube channel. YouTube
There’s Stefan Molyneux (around 644,000 subscribers, with videos totaling around 118 million views), an Irish-Canadian who, like Watson, has civilizational, apocalyptic fixations — “The Truth About The Paris Terrorist Attack,” “The Death of Germany,” “What Pisses Me Off About Fake News” — but tends to linger on purported sins of rhetoric, fallacy and logic. He is especially fond of the phrase “Not an argument!” and has pinned a video at the top of his channel titled “Take The Red Pill,” a reference to a scene in the science-fiction film “The Matrix,” in which the protagonist is asked to make a choice between remaining ensconced in a comfortable illusion and being exposed to a harsher reality. (The term was adopted by men’s rights activists to describe their awakening to what they call an antimale bias in society, but it has become a versatile metaphor for reactionary political activation: against feminism, against immigration, against social justice, against the media.)
Lauren Southern (310,000 subscribers), who previously worked with Rebel Media, a right-wing Canadian media company, is something of a roving correspondent, making recent stops in France (“Paris Train Station Overwhelmed With Migrants”), Germany (“Getting Stalked at #G20”) and California (“BATTLE OF BERKELEY”). According to recent videos, she is preparing to join and document the #DefendEurope campaign, a civilian “identitarian humanitarian” effort to intercept refugee boats in the Mediterranean and “make sure that they will be brought back to Africa.”
And Stephen Crowder (830,000 subscribers) is a right-wing comedian and talk-show host whose act is built almost exclusively around saying things he imagines liberals won’t allow him to say, and formulating some of these things into “pranks.” In practice, this means videos with names like “#SJW Feminist Festival Crashed By Crowder ... In Underwear,” and “HIDDEN CAM: ‘Stealing’ Illegal Immigrant’s Jobs!” Crowder, whose chuckling, boyish presentation contrasts with his peers’ more pedantic affectations, nonetheless shares many of their causes. His YouTube profile concludes, proudly, “Hippies and Muslims hate me!”
There are countless other forms of political expression on YouTube, but no bloc is anywhere near as organized or as assertive as the YouTube right and its dozens of obdurate vloggers. Nor is there a coherent group on the platform articulating any sort of direct answer to this budding form of reaction — which both validates this material in the eyes of its creators and gives it room to breathe, grow and assert itself beyond its immediate vicinity.
Just ask YouTube itself. In mid-July, the company launched “YouTube Creators for Change,” which it described as “global initiative dedicated to amplifying and multiplying the voices of role models who are tackling difficult social issues with their channels.” Its roster included YouTube personalities from various subcultures — style bloggers, essayistic vloggers, comedians, musicians — and its stated intention was to drive “greater awareness and productive conversations around social issues.” It was an openly and moderately progressive project, in a familiar corporate tradition. It was also rolled out alongside a broader campaign on the site to counter “extremist” content. The ostensible target of that campaign was videos promoting terrorism. But a recent post from YouTube invokes Creators for Change in the service of somewhat broader goals, promising “tougher treatment to videos that aren’t illegal but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism.”
The YouTube right has portrayed statements like this as a regulatory threat — a precursor to censorship, or perhaps as some latter-day, private analogue to the Fairness Doctrine. Its members believe that their videos and accounts are doomed to be banned, delisted or stripped of lucrative ads, effectively diminishing their presence on the platform. But for the moment, in Creators for Change, the right also saw a narrative opportunity. In response videos, YouTube and its owner, Google, were cast as an oppressive establishment forcing left-wing politics into users’ feeds. Black Pigeon Speaks published his own video, “#CreatorsForChange — YouTube Propaganda Gets REKT — Yet Again,” in which he quickly segued from the platform’s campaign to a brazen claim that “diversity always leads to fractured societies that always break down.” The comments on YouTube’s original video introducing the program were rapidly flooded with bile. “Meet the rainbow coalition of YouTubers who hate white people!” read one top-voted comment. “I never hated diversity until media began to forcefully push it down my throat,” read another.
It was, for the YouTube right, an expression of power — internal to YouTube, to be sure, but projected outward into the platform’s wider world in a visible and disconcerting way. Its members had, in their view, fended off an intrusion into a venue over which they feel a real and potentially lasting claim. Watson, who frequently portrays his political cohort as victims of censorship on YouTube and elsewhere, tallied the moment as a victory for his team. He captured a collage of negative comments and posted it on Twitter, alongside a laughing emoji. “Politically active YouTube users are so beyond red-pilled,” he wrote, “they’ve basically made it a right-wing safe space.”
@Y2Dre @Shook @Raymond Burrr @Red Shield @bdizzle @satam55 @Houston911 @Sagat @Trajan @Sukairain @YouMadd? @Diasporan Royalty
Free White & 21
AAGang
PART 2:
Watson frequently suggests that ideologies like his represent a sort of new counterculture and boasts about the right wing’s dominance on the YouTube platform. “Twitter is a tiny echo chamber,” he tweeted earlier this year. “I’m not sure the left understand the monumental ass-whupping being dished out to them on YouTube.” And in terms of sheer numbers and visibility on the platform, the YouTube right is substantial. Among the wide range of pundits, ideologues and highly YouTube-specific personalities, a few archetypal examples appear.
From a 2017 video on Lauren Southern’s YouTube channel. YouTube
There’s Stefan Molyneux (around 644,000 subscribers, with videos totaling around 118 million views), an Irish-Canadian who, like Watson, has civilizational, apocalyptic fixations — “The Truth About The Paris Terrorist Attack,” “The Death of Germany,” “What Pisses Me Off About Fake News” — but tends to linger on purported sins of rhetoric, fallacy and logic. He is especially fond of the phrase “Not an argument!” and has pinned a video at the top of his channel titled “Take The Red Pill,” a reference to a scene in the science-fiction film “The Matrix,” in which the protagonist is asked to make a choice between remaining ensconced in a comfortable illusion and being exposed to a harsher reality. (The term was adopted by men’s rights activists to describe their awakening to what they call an antimale bias in society, but it has become a versatile metaphor for reactionary political activation: against feminism, against immigration, against social justice, against the media.)
Lauren Southern (310,000 subscribers), who previously worked with Rebel Media, a right-wing Canadian media company, is something of a roving correspondent, making recent stops in France (“Paris Train Station Overwhelmed With Migrants”), Germany (“Getting Stalked at #G20”) and California (“BATTLE OF BERKELEY”). According to recent videos, she is preparing to join and document the #DefendEurope campaign, a civilian “identitarian humanitarian” effort to intercept refugee boats in the Mediterranean and “make sure that they will be brought back to Africa.”
And Stephen Crowder (830,000 subscribers) is a right-wing comedian and talk-show host whose act is built almost exclusively around saying things he imagines liberals won’t allow him to say, and formulating some of these things into “pranks.” In practice, this means videos with names like “#SJW Feminist Festival Crashed By Crowder ... In Underwear,” and “HIDDEN CAM: ‘Stealing’ Illegal Immigrant’s Jobs!” Crowder, whose chuckling, boyish presentation contrasts with his peers’ more pedantic affectations, nonetheless shares many of their causes. His YouTube profile concludes, proudly, “Hippies and Muslims hate me!”
There are countless other forms of political expression on YouTube, but no bloc is anywhere near as organized or as assertive as the YouTube right and its dozens of obdurate vloggers. Nor is there a coherent group on the platform articulating any sort of direct answer to this budding form of reaction — which both validates this material in the eyes of its creators and gives it room to breathe, grow and assert itself beyond its immediate vicinity.
Just ask YouTube itself. In mid-July, the company launched “YouTube Creators for Change,” which it described as “global initiative dedicated to amplifying and multiplying the voices of role models who are tackling difficult social issues with their channels.” Its roster included YouTube personalities from various subcultures — style bloggers, essayistic vloggers, comedians, musicians — and its stated intention was to drive “greater awareness and productive conversations around social issues.” It was an openly and moderately progressive project, in a familiar corporate tradition. It was also rolled out alongside a broader campaign on the site to counter “extremist” content. The ostensible target of that campaign was videos promoting terrorism. But a recent post from YouTube invokes Creators for Change in the service of somewhat broader goals, promising “tougher treatment to videos that aren’t illegal but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism.”
The YouTube right has portrayed statements like this as a regulatory threat — a precursor to censorship, or perhaps as some latter-day, private analogue to the Fairness Doctrine. Its members believe that their videos and accounts are doomed to be banned, delisted or stripped of lucrative ads, effectively diminishing their presence on the platform. But for the moment, in Creators for Change, the right also saw a narrative opportunity. In response videos, YouTube and its owner, Google, were cast as an oppressive establishment forcing left-wing politics into users’ feeds. Black Pigeon Speaks published his own video, “#CreatorsForChange — YouTube Propaganda Gets REKT — Yet Again,” in which he quickly segued from the platform’s campaign to a brazen claim that “diversity always leads to fractured societies that always break down.” The comments on YouTube’s original video introducing the program were rapidly flooded with bile. “Meet the rainbow coalition of YouTubers who hate white people!” read one top-voted comment. “I never hated diversity until media began to forcefully push it down my throat,” read another.
It was, for the YouTube right, an expression of power — internal to YouTube, to be sure, but projected outward into the platform’s wider world in a visible and disconcerting way. Its members had, in their view, fended off an intrusion into a venue over which they feel a real and potentially lasting claim. Watson, who frequently portrays his political cohort as victims of censorship on YouTube and elsewhere, tallied the moment as a victory for his team. He captured a collage of negative comments and posted it on Twitter, alongside a laughing emoji. “Politically active YouTube users are so beyond red-pilled,” he wrote, “they’ve basically made it a right-wing safe space.”
@Y2Dre @Shook @Raymond Burrr @Red Shield @bdizzle @satam55 @Houston911 @Sagat @Trajan @Sukairain @YouMadd? @Diasporan Royalty
This article adds to your argument about the lack of counter propaganda to the Right
Also I'm happy to see Stefan Molyneux getting called out. His channel is pretty dangerous (effective).
black people have been ahead of the game on this for years
its low-key hilarious
we saw this shyt coming
many of us predicted the Obama backlash too