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On June 26th, Richard Spencer, founder of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, and Laura Loomer, of Julius Caesar protest fame, presided over competing alt-right rallies in the capital. Spencer has little regard for Loomer and her ilk, whom he likes to call alt-light.

Loomer, who is Jewish, has called Spencer out for hating Jews.

The alt-right has no central leadership, and its self-styled figureheads have struggled to distance the movement from out-and-out neo-Nazis. The spat between Spencer and Loomer is the latest chapter in the ongoing confusion over what core beliefs define the alt-right, and which groups of people it excludes.

Loomer seems to represent the side of the alt-right that emphasizes memes and political provocation. Spencer is a straight-up white nationalist who advertises his northwestern European pedigree on Twitter.

Andrew Marantz recently reported in the New Yorker on how this branding war is pushing people in Loomers corner to rebrand as the New Right. Loomers circle, which includes the conservative blogger Lucian Wintrich, the conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and the alt-rights meme mastermind Mike Cernovich, is embracing the term New Right to avoid being branded the alt-light by Spencers supporters.

As in D.C., public alt-right protests in Texas have given way to far-right infighting. Militiamen have attacked alt-right protesters for being too racist. Attempts to save Confederate icons have been exposed as pure delusion.

Earlier this month, on an overcast Saturday in a Houston park, nearly 1,000 people showed up to counter-protest a protest (and alleged destruction) of a statue of Sam Houston, the founder of Houston, Texas. Those in attendance believed themselves to be defending one of the great figures of the Confederacy. They brought Confederate flags, lots of guns, and plenty of meme posters.

Except that there were no plans to remove the statue. And Sam Houston wasnt a Confederate.

The destruction of the statue was a hoax perpetrated by what the Houston Press identified as an online alt-right collective. The collective was participating in a national operation to create fake anti-fascist (antifa) social media accounts in an attempt to mock anti-fascist activists.

Some Texas media outlets, however, believed the hoax, and reported on the impending removal of the statue. In response, alt-right and white supremacy groups organized a counter-protest to keep the statue from being removed. Police created designated protest and counter-protest areas that Saturday morning, but protest section remained empty.

(For the record: Sam Houston hated the Confederacy, and Jefferson Davis. He cursed it from his deathbed.)

This episode happened on the same day that anti-Muslim marchers at Austins edition of the national March Against Sharia found themselves outnumbered 10-to-1 by pro-Muslim counter-protesters. (The Austin marchers also did not have the proper permits.)

At the Houston protest, one pro-statue protester a member of the Oath Keepers militia ended up trying to put another pro-statue protester in a chokehold for bringing posters with racist memes.

I thought we were on the same side, the man holding the posters said. (At other March Against Sharia marches, armed Oath Keepers were protecting people in the March Against Sharia.)

These are good memes! the man added.

Contact Ari Feldman at feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman.

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Female 'Alt-Right' Jew Takes On Richard Spencer The Forward - Forward

The Summer of Chaos just wont die. The widely debunked meme claiming Black Lives Matter activists were colluding with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and billionaire George Soros resurfaced in a lawsuit filed by a policemanwounded in an ambush in Baton Rouge in 2016.

That suit, filed Friday by an unnamed police officer who was left permanently disabled after being shot in an ambush, claims the shooter, Gavin Eugene Long, was influenced by the anti-police rhetoric of Black Lives Matter.

The lawsuit alleges that the defendants five prominent Black Lives Matter activists orchestrated the so-called Summer of Chaos, cultivating an atmosphere that encouraged others to harm police in retaliation for the death of black men killed by police.

This, according to the lawsuit, was part of a grander plan to engage in violence calculated to lead to the imposition of martial law.

One problem: The so-called Summer of Chaos is a conspiracy theory created by the alt-right blogosphere. The news site Intellihub first published a story alleging Black Lives Matter protests were part of an elaborate scheme to disrupt key election events, trigger the implementation of martial law, and ultimately allow President Barack Obama to seize a third term in office.

The lawsuit references the meme as it attempts to blame Black Lives Matter forLongs actions. According to the complaint, Long went to Baton Rouge to exact revenge for killing and acting out in violence, as [Black Lives Matter] had directed its followers as to how to react to the killing of black men by police, and that retaliation against police was proper behavior in warfare and revolution.

The suit names as defendants key figures associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, including DeRay McKesson, Johnetta Netta Elzie, and founders Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, as well as the movement as a whole.

The leaders of [Black Lives Matter] not only incited the violence against police in retaliation for the death of black men shot by police but also did nothing to dissuade the ongoing violence and injury to police, alleges Officer John Doe, age 42, father of two and an 18-year veteran of the force, who was shot in his head, abdomen, and shoulder. In fact, they justified the violence as necessary to the movement and war.

Referencing The Summer of Chaos added a layer to the conspiracy, and connects it to a theme that has simmered in the alt-right blogosphere for the past year.

It began when when Intellihub published allegedly hacked private correspondence between Black Lives Matter activists including McKesson, Elzie, and Samuel Sinyangwe in which they appeared to speak broadly and openly about their plot to destabilize the United States with a little help from the Obama Administration.

McKesson confirmed to fact-checking site Snopes that his account was hacked and the correspondence was fabricated.

The Summer of Chaos term gained traction the month after two officer-involved deaths of black men (Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge) triggered nationwide protests, and culminated in two separate ambushes of police officers: one in Dallas, andthe Gavin Long shooting in Baton Rouge.

Donna Grodner, the attorney representing the officer, was not available for comment.

Long, a former Marine who served in Iraq and who died during a shootout with police, touted himself as a life coach and produced rambling videos and writings where he discussed spirituality, masculinity, fitness, police shootings, and race. He identified himself as a member of the anti-government sovereign citizen movement, but in a video manifesto recorded before he traveled to Baton Rouge, he asserted that he was not affiliated with any group.

McKesson and other prominent figures associated with the Black Lives Matter movement condemned the tragedy and said the movement did not condone violence against police officers, reiterating calls for peaceful protest.

The officer is seeking $75,000 in damages.

Visit link:
Cop uses debunked alt-right meme in Black Lives Matter lawsuit - VICE News

Many people were alarmed by the National Rifle Association video that gained wide circulation on social media last week. The official spokesperson of the NRA, talk-show host Dana Loesch, rails against all sorts of contemporary dangers criticizing the U.S. President, protesting in the streets and stops just short of a call to armed insurrection.

Much has been said about the content of the speech, but I was also intrigued by the choice of images that flickered rapidly as the speech unfolded. The montage was of all sorts of apparently random things. Ordinary building were intercut with footage of political demonstrations. Some of the photos were of contemporary art and architecture. One brief image was of a swirly Frank Gehry building (the Walt Disney Concert Hall, home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra); one was of Anish Kapoors shining egg sculpture in Chicago, Cloud Gate.

So they are not random after all. Art, particularly avant-gardist art, has long been the target of conservatives in all countries. Art is part of the great fraud that is being perpetrated on ordinary people: It is an extension of the media and therefore always fake news. The speech is explicit about the role of art in the hoax: They use their singers and comedy stars and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again, Loesch says.

A less widely circulated alt-right (a U.S.-based white nationalist movement) video lecture also appeared at the end of June, this one specifically about the role of architecture in the fraudulent liberal conspiracy. This one, made and promoted by the far-right site Infowars, is an anti-architecture narrative spoken by British-born activist Paul Joseph Watson. It is titled Why Modern Architecture Sucks. It has, so far, more than 300,000 views. The 35-year-old Watson is an Infowars editor-at-large and a contributor to The Alex Jones Show, the radio branch of Infowars. Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist who believes that the Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting was, as with the moon landing, staged by the U.S. government.

Watsons polemic against modern architecture (which includes all trends in postwar architecture, including postmodernism) is a familiar one. We heard it from Prince Charles in the 1980s. Architecture that respects the form follows function dictum, as well as the more ornate experiments of recent years, is stark and ugly and inhuman. The grand old cities of Britain have been disfigured by monstrous concrete housing projects and public buildings. This ugliness leads to alienation and social problems. People dont want to live in high-rises. Concrete, glass and steel are cold building materials. People lost cozy neighbourhoods when row-house slums were torn down.

And he makes well-known charges of totalitarian tendencies against the most famous of idealistic modernists, especially Le Corbusier. In this, he is not at all wrong. Le Corbusier did hold quite a few alarming beliefs. He did see architecture as a form of social engineering and he did have links to fascism and if his rigid planned cities had ever been constructed, they would have been a social nightmare.

Nor is Watson wrong that the famous failed housing projects of the sixties and seventies, and the most unpopular of brutalist buildings, were designed by left-wing idealists. Brutalism was the product of a heady optimistic time that envisioned classless equality in what was probably a naive way.

Watson goes farther. Modernist architecture is not just socialistic, but inherently totalitarian. It aims to take away our freedoms. It represents globalism itself. The globalist goal is to make the whole planet identical. If we revere the local and reject the global, we retain architectural idiosyncrasies and charm.

This echoes the nationalism of the right: National differences are valuable; we must protect our national identity from foreign influences and religions. This is why free trade and open borders are bad. (By the way, the supposed enemies of this local/national culture are not just Muslim. The comments that follow this video quickly turn to overt anti-Semitism, with many posters embedding artists and architects names in triple parentheses, code for Jewish identity. A comment such as (((Whos))) behind modern art? is a veiled suggestion that art is Jewish.)

Watson singles out one particularly daring recent building, the art museum in Graz, Austria, built in 2003 by Colin Fournier and Peter Cook to look like a giant blob with sucker-like protrusions. Watson hates it of course, but its particularly gleeful about its being an art museum. Of course it is! Contemporary art is just as decadent.

What is the problem with new art and architecture? The word postmodernist comes up here not to describe actual postmodernism (in architecture, that category would actually include nostalgic pastiches of the kind that Watson seems to favour) but to mean everything that is new and bad. In some conservative circles right now, the word is used interchangeably with politically correct and Marxist. Watson rails against the relativist, collectivist, postmodernist lie that objective standards of beauty dont exist.

He is not the first political thinker to deride the cosmopolitan tendencies of avant-gardist art, nor to think of it as degenerate (though he carefully avoids using that word). He is wrong about a number of things. Postmodernism doesnt mean what he thinks it does and it is explicitly opposed to the modernism he so despises. Furthermore, the authoritarian tendencies of utopists such as le Corbusier, as well as the failures of mid-century social-housing plans, have been critiqued to death by the very artists he thinks are complicit. But he is right about one thing: There is a very strong link between contemporary artists and left-wing political thought, even radical leftist thought. He is not wrong to see impulses toward equality and cultural internationalism in all this odd stuff; he is not wrong to see it influenced by academic political theory.

The alt-rightists are not very clear, however, on what they would like to see replace contemporary art and architecture. Right now, they hate Shakespeare just as much as they hate Renzo Piano, just as much as they hate Saturday Night Live. What kind of art is left? Are they going to be brave enough to say that they despise the idea of art itself?

Follow us on Twitter: @GlobeArts

Link:
Russell Smith: The alt-right vs. the avant-garde - The Globe and Mail

Liberals have won enough big battles in Americas culture wars in recent years most notably the growing support for same-sex marriage that they may have persuaded themselves that their views were universal and their victories would continue. But as two new Supreme Court decisions relating to religion made clear, conservative forces are far from down and out. Last Monday, the high court used a unanimous unsigned opinion to announce it would take up the constitutionality of President Trumps proposed temporary ban on incoming travelers from six mostly Muslim nations. In so doing, justices overruled several federal trial and appellate courts and allowed the ban to take effect. Liberals who say its irrational for Americans to worry about domestic Islamist terrorism havent gotten far in the court of public opinion one poll showed one-third of Democrats are for Trumps travel ban and now theyve been rebuffed by the highest actual court as well. In the second decision, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the state of Missouri could not exclude a Lutheran religious school from receiving a grant from a government program that reimburses the cost of rubberizing the surface of playgrounds to make them safer. In writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that it was odious to exclude a religious organization from public benefits available to other groups. But in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor depicted the decision as a profound break with American legal tradition by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church. In another decision, the court confirmed it would hear a case involving a Christian bakery owner who declined to make a cake for a gay couple indicating at least some sympathy for the argument that religious freedom may extend to business owners decisions on whom to serve. How will the court rule? Thats unclear. Whats clearer is what impact Trumps Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch could have. If the 15 cases in which he has ruled are any indication, the Fivethirtyeight website found that Gorsuch may settle to the right of the conservative lion he replaced, Antonin Scalia. In each of these cases, Fivethirtyeight noted, Gorsuch has sided with the courts most conservative member, Justice Clarence Thomas. Gorsuchs selection may also be driving the swirling rumors that the courts swing vote libertarianconservative Justice Anthony Kennedy may soon retire. If Kennedy is confident his replacement would be someone he finds as impressive as Gorsuch, his former clerk, that might make retiring an easier decision. If that happened, the court could swing substantially to the right. If Kennedy retires, CNN wrote, Donald Trumps legacy is set. Time will tell if last weeks opinions are as farreaching as they seem. But theres no disputing the decisions reflect a view of the world much closer to one shared by millions of Trump voters.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

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Culture-War Victories In Supreme Court - The Daily Record (registration)

EDITORS NOTE: Its that time of the year again when Robin takes off for his monthlong family trip to Europe. His travels this week take him to La Spezia close to the beautiful Cinque Terre area of Italy. Next weekend, hell wind up as usual exploring the delights of Tusany. In his absence a great number of showbiz entertainers, celebrity VIPs, chefs, restaurateurs and our Vegas dignitaries have stepped forward to write their guest columns.

Most entertainers know Robins fascination with magic and magicians and heres one explanati0on as to why Vegas is known as the city of magic: Guest columnist Jeff McBride runs the top magic school in Las Vegas teaching wizards the wonders of their art.

Why is magic popular in a high tech world?

Perhaps we all crave the high touch that the world of magic gives us. Nothing can equal the feeling of experiencing great magic live and in person and Las Vegas casino bookers and showroom managers have known this for many years.

Magic is BIG box office! More and more magic shows are popping up on the Las Vegas Strip and all over the world.

Las Vegas has developed its very own brand of Razzle Dazzle illusion. Now, the Las Vegas look of magic is taking the world by storm!

The Las Vegas Magic invasion!

Do you remember the 1964 British invasion?

The Beatles stormed the USA creating a new sensation in music.

Now, something like that is happening again, only this time it is the Las Vegas Magic Stars!

Greg Gleason, Dean Gunnarson, Arian Black and I will be storming Asia and will appear in Macau, Malaysia, Taiwan, and multiple cities all through mainland China. The show is produced and directed by Tobias Beckwith. Learn more about our Las Vegas Magic Stars world tour at lasvegasmagicstars.com.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. Abraham Lincoln

Are you easily fooled?

A recent BBC article explains why our mind is easily fooled.

The real boom in studying illusions began in the 19th century. A school of scientists who studied perception among many other things created simple illusions to shed light on how the brain perceives patterns and shapes, which kick-started the early theories on how our eyes can play tricks on our mind.

One school of thought suggests that some illusions highlight the way the brain constantly tries to predict what will happen. The theory goes that many illusions show that we try to predict the future to compensate for the slight delay between an event and our conscious perception of it. The real boom in studying illusions began in the 19th century.

The light from these words you are reading has to reach your eye, before a signal travels to the brain to be processed this takes time, which means the world you perceive is slightly in the past. Mark Changizi, a theoretical neurobiologist, believes the brain may make predictions about your surroundings in order to perceive the present.

Read the full article here.

Who will fool Penn & Teller?

My friends have been challenging me to do this for the past couple of years. Now, I have gone forward and accepted the challenge! Can I do it?

You will have to tune in to the show in July to see if I can actually pull this off and be one of the rare few magicians in the world that have indeed fooled Penn & Teller.

Will you be watching?

SO YOU WANT TO BE A MAGICIAN?

Magic is a fun hobby for many and for the select few a lucrative profession. If you want to learn the tricks of the trade, following are a few places to start. The Magic & Mystery School serves up magic lessons and private classes for a matures and professionals.

Can you make my wife disappear?

We magicians here that line all the time! But If you really need to make a person disappear, you can find the building plans at Top Hat & Wand Magic Shoppe at 5115 Dean Martin Boulevard, 702-448-7191. Scott Brown and Scott Steelfyre hold court each day to help train local and visiting wonder workers. You can browse the latest books, DVDs, inventions and illusions.

MASTERS OF ILLUSION on the CW network features the new faces of magic. Tune in this summer to see the cutting edge of our magical art.

MAGICIAN OF THE MONTH!

Will Bradshaw is one the the most-working illusionists and escape artists in Vegas. You can catch his amazing act as part of the Fremont Street Experience downtown. Will Bradshaw is one of the new breed of Las Vegas performers and you will do well to go see him now before you have to pay a high ticket few one day soon! More info: themagicofwill.com.

WHERE DO MAGICIANS GO TO BE INSPIRED?

After a long day of mastering the impossible and competing for showrooms, most every magician in Las Vegas attends our monthly magic party called Jeff McBrides WONDERGROUND is now in its eight year and is the best value in Vegas $10 for locals gets you an epic night of immersive magic theater, with over 20 performers, dancers and artists. This is a locals favorite and it has become known as the center of the Las Vegas Magic community.

Now you can see the new stars of Vegas at WONDERGROUND.

Each month,WONDERGROUND conjures up a three-hour magic extravaganza produced by a team talented magicians. Tim Wise and Will Bradshaw host stage shows. Simone Marron is the Queen Bee of the Las Vegas magic scene and can be seen holding court each month. You can witness local and visiting international illusionists sharpening their skills and working on new mysteries in hopes of baffling Penn & Teller on their next season of Fool Us. You can witness the new breed of Vegas magic each month onstage and up close! Recent showstoppers include; Bizzaro, variety artists Les Contortionettes, juggler Niels Duniker and comedy daredevils Ryan Stock and Amberlynn.

The Amazing Jonathan made a guest appearance recently with his new show

You can meet many celebrity magicians. Recent visitors included Siegfried, Lance Burton, Mac King, Mat Franco, Xavier Mortimer, Fredric DaSliva, Murray, RJ Owens, Dan Sperry, Rudy Coby, Gerry McCambridge and Kevin James.

Later this week our guest columnists include The Mirage headliner Terry Fator, Dancing with the Stars hero Maksim Chmerkovskiy and Britney Spears sports instructor Jenn Barret.

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All about Las Vegas Magic - Las Vegas Review-Journal