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Five days ago, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), calmly looked into the cameras of local Tennessee news stations and stated that he had doubts about President Donald Trumps stability.

It was a shocking assessment and not just because Corker is not a man known for hyperbole. These types of things arent said about presidents; certainly not in the open. But it was said by Corker, and for the fairly clear purpose of putting Trump on notice that Senate Republicans were running out of patience with his presidency.

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump did little to earn back more patience. Those, like Corker, who were hoping that the president would suddenly discover a more conciliatory side were likely left severely disappointed by a rally that was equal parts angry, combative, rambling and foreboding.

To say Trump was in campaign mode would probably be to overstate how he was on the previous campaign. Speaking in Phoenix, he viciously attacked the news media, left-wing protesters, and members of his own party whom he blames for the stalling of his legislative agenda.

At one point, he went on a 25-minute rant against the press, with multiple gestures towards the pen at the back of the Convention Center. He blamed them for misrepresenting his remarks on the terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend. And then, when reading from printed copies of those remarks, he misquoted himself, conveniently failing to mention that he had blamed both sides for the atrocities.

When not reading off the teleprompter, Trump appeared angry. He threatened to shut down the government if he didnt get funding for his famed border wall. He blamed the filibuster for stalling much of his agenda, even as he claimed to have passed more bills than any president since Harry Truman. And he went after congressional Republicans for being insufficiently obedient, even as his relationship with GOP leadership reaches new nadirs.

Mitch is not going to be happy, a senior Trump official conceded The Daily Beast late on Tuesday evening, referring to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He probably wasnt expecting an hour of tax reform. But couldnt have expected a shutdown threat either.

Republican operatives who watched Trumps speech expressed shock at the spectacle. Rick Wilson, a vocal, often acerbic critic, called it absolutely bat crap crazy on CNN. Others deemed the president a mad man

But Trumps base, fresh off a frustrating Monday evening that saw the president back a more hawkishor globalistAfghanistan policy, was thrilled at his willingness to embrace the red-meat elements of his platform at the expense of establishment Republicans.

Steve Bannon, the recently ousted White House chief strategist, was ecstatic with Trumps performance on Tuesday, according to two sources at Breitbart News, the pro-Trump website that Bannon chaired before joining the White House, and to which he returned after his departure last week.

Globalists can only make Trump pivot so much, one Breitbart editor told The Daily Beast.

As he heads into a thicket of major legislative battles this fall, however, Trump needs Republican elected officials more than Breitbart readers or Republican cable news pundits to rally to his side. Chief among them is McConnell, who controls the Senate floor and who has not spoken with the president in weeks, according to a Tuesday report from the New York Times that described in detail the increasing hostility between the two men.

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Trump could have used his Tuesday address to patch things up with the Majority Leader. Instead, he likely inflamed tensions by lending his weight to efforts to pick off a vulnerable member of McConnells caucus, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, an outspoken Trump critic. Nobody wants me to talk about your other senator, whos weak on borders, weak on crime, Trump said of Flake at one point, without naming him.

Leading up to the speech, administration officials had felt nervous anticipation over the possibility that Trump would veer from prepared remarks onto one of the many tangents that frequently color his campaign speeches. We are no more terrified going in than we are the other six days out of the week, a senior White House official told The Daily Beast on Tuesday afternoon.

Administration officials had hoped that Trump would stick to his teleprompter, as one senior aide put it, albeit while recognizing that its like roulette with him. By the evening, those fears proved valid. During the speech, Trump suggested that he will pardon Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio at some unknown later date.

The comments flatly contradicted those of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who told reporters on Tuesday: there will be no discussion of [an Arpaio pardon] today at any point. They also ignored the advice of top administration officials, including White House chief of staff John Kelly, who, according to multiple senior aides, encouraged Trump not to make Arpaio a central focus of the rally for fear of attracting unnecessary controversy.

During his speech, Trump hinted that hed been told to avoid the topic. I won't do it tonight because I don't want to cause any controversy, he said of a potential Arpaio pardon. But, as is often the case, he couldnt help himself. Arpaio, he assured the crowd, is going to be just fine.

Read more from the original source:
Donald Trump Goes Scorched Earth in Wild, Angry Arizona Speech - Daily Beast

Last night, Donald Trump did the responsible thing. He reneged on a campaign promise to avoid losing a war. Thats exactly what we want presidents to do when they win elections, learn new information, and begin to fully understand the strategic, cultural, and political ramifications of promises foolishly made. We want them to do what Trump candidly did last night admit that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, if there is any such thing as a bipartisan strategic commitment, its a commitment to never again preside over a debacle like the fall of Saigon. No president wants to be the man who watches from the Oval Office as the last helicopter lifts off the roof, leaving behind abandoned and desperate allies as sworn enemies sweep into a foreign capital. This is especially true when those sworn enemies have used that same land as base to plan, train, and inspire terrorists to strike targets inside America.

Three consecutive presidents have faced their moments of truth, and three consecutive presidents have made similar decisions (though in different ways). When Iraq teetered on the brink of collapse, George W. Bush rejected immense political pressure to withdraw and instead doubled down with a potent troop surge that for a time decisively tipped the balance of power against al-Qaeda.

His successor, Barack Obama, at first failed his test, pulling troops from Iraq in spite of multiple warnings that the consequences could be catastrophic. But then, he reversed course. When ISIS blitzed across northern and western Iraq, Obama could have stayed out. He could have left Iraq to fend for itself. But he didnt. He intervened with decisive enough force to halt ISISs offensive and then slowly (too slowly) provided indispensable military force to assist counter-offensives that killed ISIS fighters by the thousands and rolled back ISISs gains. By the end of his second term, the Nobel Peace Prize winner hadnt ended any wars. Instead, America had boots on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.

Trump ran as a non-interventionist. He ran as the guy who would decisively end Americas endless foreign wars. But when his moment of truth arrived, Trump kept American troops in Iraq and Syria. In fact, he ramped up American military efforts. And now he wants to reinforce Afghanistan, loosen rules of engagement that have hampered American troops and hurt morale, and place welcome pressure on Pakistan to act like an ally, not an enemy, in the fight against the Taliban.

Why? Why did three different presidents with three very different ideologies reach such similar conclusions? Cynics and conspiracy theorists blame a foreign-policy blob or the persistent and allegedly pernicious influence of warmongering generals. But theres a simpler, more obvious, and I believe more accurate reason: It is plainly and obviously not in Americas national interest for its terrorist enemies to win and maintain safe havens overseas.

Its a simple reality that when terrorists possess safe havens, they become far more dangerous. Look at what al-Qaeda was able to accomplish when it dominated Afghanistan. It launched terror attacks that destroyed American embassies, nearly sank an American warship, and ultimately did more damage in American cities than any foreign enemy since the British burned Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812.

Look at ISISs deadly reach once it dominated northern Iraq and northern Syria. Europe has suffered through a deadly spike in terrorist violence, with hundreds of civilians killed and injured. Here at home, terror plots and attacks increased as well. Of at least 96 known domestic plots and attacks since 9/11, more than one-third occurred in the last three years since the rise of ISIS, and the casualty count in deaths and injuries has increased dramatically.

As should be obvious by now, when fighting a militaristic theological movement conventional military victory simply isnt attainable. While there may be political settlements in given regions at given times, there wont be a USS Missouri moment with al-Qaeda, ISIS, or any successor jihadist group. Theyre not going to lay down their arms, and thus its not really even in our power to truly end the war. Wars end when both sides stop fighting, not when just one side wants to make it stop. We can certainly diminish the jihadist threat, and we can certainly cripple jihadist forces. We cannot, however, extinguish the jihadist impulse.

Advocates of an American withdrawal should think hard about the consequences. They should consider whether a Taliban-led government in Kabul is in Americas best interests or whether its worth expending a very small fraction of our military power to keep a jihadist enemy from winning a historic victory. Indeed, denying terrorists safe havens should be the cornerstone of American military strategy, and that requires constant vigilance and potentially a permanent military commitment.

Perhaps one day the Taliban will exhaust themselves and seek peace. Likely not. But we in turn cannot grow weary in our own commitments to our own defense. In his speech, Trump provided an interesting definition of victory attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al-Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge. In other words, victory is a process, and while the aim is to inflict a lasting defeat on Americas enemies, there is no timetable for this war.

Good. Our enemy doesnt have a timetable. Jihadists have fought the perceived enemies of Islam for more than a thousand years. Our nations commitment to its people should be clear. Each and every year that jihadists are willing to fight is a year that we are ready and able to defend ourselves, to deny them safe havens, and to strike them before they can strike us.

Trumps change of heart is significant, and its a signal to our foes. American presidents, when confronted with reality, have risen to the occasion. One more American president has said no to another Saigon. Hes said no to another surrender. Americans can and should breathe easier President Trump wont be the president to lose this war.

David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and a veteran of the Iraq War.

Read more:
Donald Trump Decided Not to Lose the War in Afghanistan - National Review

Inquiring minds want to know: What exactly is the alt-right, and how large is the audience for the movement?

The essence of the alt-right can be distilled to this catchphrase: All people are not created equal. Thats even more extreme than it may sound. Prominent alt-right thinkers dont only believe that some are naturally taller, stronger or smarter than others, but also that some groups are more deserving of political status than others. They reject the concept of equality before the law.

Andrew Anglin is editor of the most popular alt-right web magazine, the Daily Stormer. He has written that The Alt-Right does not accept the pseudo-scientific claims that all races are equal. He also supports repatriation of American blacks to Africa or autonomous territory within the U.S.

Not all alt-right thinkers are so radical in their aims, but they all believe in some form of race-based political inegalitarianism. The unequal brigade includes in its ranks editors of and regular contributors to many alt-right web magazines, including Richard Spencer of Radix Journal, Mike Enoch of the Right Stuff, Brad Griffin (also known as Hunter Wallace) of Occidental Dissent, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and James Kirkpatrick of VDARE (named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born in America).

The exact size of the alt-right is perhaps not of the utmost importance. As an ideological movement, the alt-right seeks not immediate policy or electoral victories, but longer-term influence on how others think about politics. Still, its possible to get a sense of the scope of this netherworld through web traffic.

From September 2016 to May 2017, I analyzed visits and unique visitors to scores of political web magazines of various political orientations. (One person accessing a site five times in a month represents five visits but only one unique visitor). Through interviews and using the site Media Bias / Fact Check, I identified nine alt-right sites, 53 sites associated with the mainstream right, and 63 with the mainstream left. I excluded left- or right-leaning general-interest publications, such as BuzzFeed, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Data were obtained from SimilarWeb, a well-known provider of web-marketing information. All audience figures given here are monthly averages for the nine-month period I studied.

The total audience for alt-right political sites is much smaller than the audiences for mainstream left and right sites. The nine alt-right sites combined received nearly 3 million visits and 839,000 unique visitors, compared with 236 million visits and 102 million unique visitors for the mainstream left, and 264 million visits and 111 million unique visitors for the mainstream right.

But these numbers are less comforting than they may seem.

The coarsely racist Daily Stormer received 997,000 visits and 284,000 unique visitors. In so doing, it drew a larger audience than the sites for such longstanding mainstream magazines as the Washington Monthly (766,000 visits, 259 thousand unique visitors) and Commentary (594,000 visits, 268,000 unique visitors).

American Renaissance (497,000 visits, 158,000 unique visitors) and VDARE (427,000 visits, 132,000 unique visitors) both had larger audiences than the sites of the familiar leftist magazines Dissent (193,000 visits, 82,000 unique visitors monthly) and the Progressive (142,000 visits, 64,000 unique visitors).

Of course, traditional intellectual elites have not been overthrown. The audiences for the Nation (4.3 million visits, 2.4 million unique visitors), the New Republic (3.8 million visits, 2.2 million unique visitors), and National Review (nearly 10 million visits, 4.2 million unique visitors), all well-established magazines, were far larger than that of the combined alt-right.

The picture changes substantially, however, if we stretch the definition of an alt-right site to include Breitbart News. My sources did not classify it as such and the site does not explicitly reject political equality as the alt-right does. But former Breitbart editor Stephen K. Bannon once declared that his publication was the platform for the alt-right and its incendiary populism is very much in the movements style. At 85.4 million visits and 24 million unique visitors, it operates in a different league not only from the Daily Stormer, but from most tradition left- and right-wing political publications.

The anti-democratic alt-right has arrived and established a toe hold in our political discourse. That is the real matter of concern.

Thomas J. Main is a professor at the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs of Baruch College, City University of New York. His book The Rise of the Alt-Right will be published in the spring of 2018.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook

Read the original here:
What's the alt-right, and how large is its audience? - Los Angeles Times

Jason Kessler, an organizer for the Unite the Right Rally, was interrupted by counterprotesters on Aug. 13 as he tried to give a news conference. (Elyse Samuels,Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)

On the day after a white nationalist rally rocked Charlottesville,Jason Kessler stood behind a bank of microphonesand introduced himself as the organizer of the Unite the Right protest that had sparked the violence in the city.

Screams and boos drowned out Kesslers voice as he tried to addressthe deadlyunrest that had engulfed the Aug. 12 rally. The news conference was ultimately shut down; police officers, whom Kessler accused of not doing enough to stop theviolence, rushed him to safety as angry counterprotesters chased himaway.

Now, Kessler is scorned not only by those who screamed at him outside Charlottesville City Hall on the day after the death of counterprotester Heather Heyer.

Far-rightfigures have since distanced themselves from Kessler, as well, an indication that his fairly new allegiance with the loosely organized alt-right abruptly endedafter a broadside against Heyer was tweeted from Kesslers account nearly a week after she died.

[Watch: Charlottesville counterprotesters shut down a white nationalists news conference]

Kessler, meanwhile, seemsto have disappeared from public view.

Im not talking to reporters right now, he said Monday when reached by The Washington Post, before hanging up.

His Twitter account appears to have been deleted. His blogand that ofUnity and Security for America, a conservative group he founded, are also gone; so is that groupsFacebook page.

Last week,Kessler told Fox Newsthat he was in hiding because he was hit with a stream of death threats after the bloodshed in Charlottesville.

Condemnation poured in over the weekend after Kesslers account tweetedinflammatory remarks about Heyer, the 32-year-old woman who was killed when a car allegedly driven by a Nazi sympathizer plowed into a group of counterprotesters.The disavowals suggested that the alt-right, a movement that blossomed on social media and the Internet, may besplintering online after the disaster in Charlottesville.

[The road to hate: For six young men, Charlottesville is only the beginning]

Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting Communist. Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time, read the tweet, which linked to a Daily Stormer article that disparaged Heyer.

Richard Spencer,a leader of the alt-right, which seeks a whites-only state, slammed Kessler, saying attacking Heyerwasmorally dubious and beyond reckless.

Its just the exact wrong thing that anyone should be saying at this point, from a moral perspective and from a strategic perspective, Spencer told The Post on Monday. This woman did nothing wrong. She might very well have disagreed with the rally, but she did absolutely nothing wrong.

Spencer added: I oppose communism as much as anyone, but historical payback is ridiculous. I dont know what he was thinking.

On Twitter, Spencer urged othersto stop associating with Kessler.

It was a sentiment shared by otherswho took to social media to slam the Unite the Right organizer.

Assuming this is a real tweet and his account was not hacked, I will no longer attend or cover events put on by Jason Kessler. Very gross,tweetedJames Allsup, a budding alt-right figure who resigned as head of Washington State Universitys student GOP group after participating in the Charlottesville rally.

Tim Gionet, another prominent alt-right figure who is known online as Baked Alaska,said that insulting Heyer is terribly wrong and vile,tweeting:We should not rejoice at the people who died in Charlottesville just because we disagree with them.

Before going underground, Kessler acknowledged that the tweet sent from his account was offensive, though he did not say that he had written it.

I repudiate the heinous tweet that was sent from my account last night. I have been under a crushing amount of stress & death threats, Kessler wrote Saturday on social media,according to the Los Angeles Times. Im taking ambien, xanax and I had been drinking last night. I sometimes wake up having done strange things I dont remember.

[Lets party like its 1933: Inside the alt-right world of Richard Spencer]

The Times reported that a self-proclaimed hacker and Internet trollsaid on the social media service Gab that he had hacked Kesslers Twitter account.The Post has notconfirmed the veracity of that claim.

The alt-right movement grew through blogs, online message boards and social media accountscreated by followers who believe that white identity is under attack by multiculturalism and political correctness,according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Spencer reserves the National Press Club in Washington at least twice a year for a gathering of alt-right followers, noted the SPLC, whichdescribesthe alt-rights self-proclaimed leader as a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old, a kind of professional racist in khakis.

Kessler, like Spencer, attended the University of Virginia. According to the SPLC, he organized the Unite the Right rallyafter Spencer made headlines in May by leading a torch-bearing eventin Charlottesville.

The SPLC describedKessler as a newcomer to the white nationalist scene.Known in Charlottesville as a local conservative blogger, hepublished an articleon Nov. 24 calling the citys vice mayor, Wes Bellamy, a blatant black supremacist and led anunsuccessful petitiontoremove Bellamy from office.Kessler said he hadunearthed offensive and homophobic tweets written several years ago byBellamy.

[Charlottesville violence prompts black U-Va. athletes to reflect on their experience]

Hefounded the nonprofit Unity and Security for America, whichcalls fordefending Western Civilization. He also sought to establish himself as the lone dissenter in the capital of the resistance that is Charlottesville,as declared by the citys mayorshortly after President Trumps inauguration.

Kessler found an ally in U.S. Senate candidate Corey A. Stewart, a darling of the alt-right who made several public appearances with the local blogger. In February, Stewart, then a GOP gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, attended Kesslersnews conferenceabout an effort tooust Bellamy from office.

A few days ahead of the Charlottesville rally, Kesslertold The Post, The genesis of this entire event is this Robert E. Lee statue that the city is trying to move, which is symbolic of a lot of other issues that deal with the tearing down of white peoples history and our demographic replacement.

White nationalists were met by counterprotesters in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, leading Gov. Terry McAuliffe to declare a state emergency. A car plowed into crowds, killing one person and injuring 19 others. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

But shortly after the rally turned violent, Kessler came under scrutiny from right-wing websites. Rumors about his political leanings and loyalty to far-right ideologies have since circulated online.

[A neo-Nazis rage-fueled journey to Charlottesville]

Some, including DC Whispers, pointed to suspicions that Kessler was involved in the Occupy movement and was a supporter of President Barack Obama. The website also said Kessler did not become a white nationalist until after Trump was elected.

Who is this guy? Is this a mistake or is he indeed a liberal gone racist? Is he a plant and this whole thing a set up to pit Americans against each other? Lots of questions and very, very few answers, wrote a bloggerfor Rightwing News.

Kesslertold Snopesthat he supported and voted for Obama in 2008 but became disenchantedwiththe administration andDemocrats. He said that hehad attended an Occupy rallyin Charlottesville in 2011 but found that his views didnt align with those of the protesters.

According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Kessler tweeted in November that many alt-right followers used to be liberals. He also said that he voted for Trump in the primary and general elections.I like Trump more than I did Obama, he wrote on Nov. 6. My Trump enthusiasm is through the roof. I like people who push the edge.

Spencer said that he met Kessler briefly several months ago. Kessler really jumped on the bandwagon after the success of the Charlottesville torch rally in May, Spencer said.

He also criticized Kesslers handling of the Unite the Right rally. Law enforcement officers canceledthe event afterthe clash between rally attendees and counterprotesters.Hes not a very good organizer. Its haphazard, Spencer said. I was skeptical of the whole thing. It took on a life of its own.

Nevertheless, Spencer attended the rally. Aflierlisted him as one of the featured speakers, along withKessler, Gionet (a.k.a. Baked Alaska) and Michael Hill, president of the Southern pro-secession group League of the South. Spencertold The Post days before the eventthat he was concerned about violence, but he said he worried it would come from antifascists, or antifa, activists.

In terms of organization maybe theres some incompetence, Spencer said Monday of Unite the Right. Everyone has to make mistakes, and we learn from them.But disparaging Heyer and rejoicing in her death should not be condoned,he said.

Eli Mosley, an organizer for the white separatist group Identity Evropa, said in aTwitter threadabout Kessler that in the future, event organizers will face extreme vetting like never before to ensure this doesnt happen.How, exactly, such vetting would occur for a movement with no formal membership, no formal leadership structure and mostly online followers, is unclear.

After Charlottesville, Spencersaid, future demonstrations should be tightly focused and organized by people he trusts.This is a serious movement, hesaid of the alt-right,a term he coined. And we need serious people leading them.

Kessler has maintained that he did nothing wrong in Charlottesville.

He told Fox Newslast week that he had never metJames Alex Fields Jr., 20, who was charged with second-degree murderin the deadly crash. Kesslersaid he met with police before the rally and went over safety plans. He also said he had not received calls or visits from police or federal investigators.

Asked by Fox about Heyers death, Kessler said, simply: No comment.

READ MORE:

A running list of companies that no longer want the Daily Stormers business

I was wrong: U-Va. newspaper editor says he was naive about alt-right

See the original post:
The man who organized the Charlottesville rally is in hiding and too toxic for the alt-right - Washington Post

When hundreds of white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville with lit tiki torches and swastikas, chanting "Jews will not replace us," they drew the ire of countless left-leaning groups, civil rights activists, politicians from both sides of the aisleand also of Stormfront, the decades-old internet watering hole for David Duke-style white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Many of Stormfront's users viewed the actions of the Unite the Right rally-goers (most of whom fall under the self-selected moniker of " alt-right ," although "Nazis who like memes" also works) as outrageous, shameful, and counterproductive to their shared goals of securing a future for the white race. Stormfront posters complained that the ragtag collection of groups brandishing homemade shields and screaming openly about Jews gave other neo-Nazis a bad name. They viewed the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer almost exclusively as bad PR.

The rifts between Stormfront's white supremacists and the younger, more internet-savvy generation that cut its teeth on 4chan have shown before . In fact, Stormfront's frustration with the Charlottesville rally-goers reflects the same ideological disagreements that have divided white supremacist groups since the early days of the Ku Klux Klan. New racists, same fights.

Stormfront's present-day concerns coalesce around recruiting best-practices. The alt-right's flamboyance, they say, could alienate potential enlistees to their movement of hate.

"Some were carrying swastikas and that isn't good for our image, because of the propogabda [sic] embedded into everyone's minds," wrote user pontypool , although he later added that he was "glad for any whites uniting, even, the morons."

This is still a propaganda battle," another user wrote . "How does this help us win a propaganda battle? Someone died and around twenty people went to the hospital."

Screenshot via Stormfront.

Beyond shields and swastikas presenting a bad look, the two sides also disagree on long-term strategy. "The factions, in my view, generally reflect differences of opinion that hinge on the normative role of the state in securing or legitimizing white supremacy," says Christopher Petrella, a lecturer in American cultural studies at Bates College.

Where the alt-right sees the establishment as effectively useless, Petrella says, members of Stormfront believe that white nationalists can best further their causewhich, again, is turning the US into a white ethnostateby insidiously working their way into the mainstream. Torches and Nazi chants aren't exactly the best foot forward.

By contrast, the forum postings argue, if you can make yourself sound even moderately reasonable to people who'd rather not think of themselves as racist, then you've already won.

Screenshot via Stormfront.

Stromfront's white supremacists rolled their eyes even at the branding around Charlottesville. "Calling it 'Unite the Right' was a huge tactical error, one Stormfront user wrote. "If they really wanted to accomplish their goal of protecting confederate monuments, they would not have alienated the many many left-wing historic preservationists who have actual power and who would otherwise greatly sympathize with such a cause.

I've yet to see any common White man or woman jump off the fence and join the ranks," wrote VikingSong . "The only folk angry about what's been going on are us who are WNs [white nationalists] anyway! But maybe it's because I'm a 'normie,' who hasn't been 'red pilled' enough? Maybe I need a 'woke' twenty something, with a whole vocabulary of infantile buzzwords at their command, to explain their strategy to me because I sure as hell can't understand it?

They even disagree on President Donald Trump. While the alt-right sees a powerful ally in the Oval Office, Stormfront user Danger2443 believes the group has been worse for the president's image than his more traditional Nazi supporters. To his mind, Stormfront's version of white nationalism has already succeeded, because "when a Presidential candidate retweets White Genocide, refuses to disavow its author Bob Whitaker and still gets elected, that means WN is on the way to public acceptance. As for the alt-right, Danger2443 believes that their undisciplined clowning embarrassed [Trump] in front of the country.

Ashley Feinberg

The Alt-Right Can't Disown Charlottesville

Ashley Feinberg

Trump Cribbed His Charlottesville Press Conference Straight From Fox News

Emma Grey Ellis

Don't Look Now, But Extremists' Meme Armies Are Turning Into Militias

Experts see echoes of a decades-old divide in the alt-right and Stormfront infighting. In 1954, southerners created White Citizens Councils to protest desegregation. A 1956 article described the Citizens Councils this way: "They shun both the Klans reputation for violence, and their haberdashery; their members are respectable citizens of the community, the quintessence of the civic luncheon club. At their meetings there is emphasis on speakers from the ministry and the universities. ... The White Citizens Council movement today has had to throw off the Klans stigma and repudiate its legacy."

That division "spoke to the continuing power of white supremacy in marshaling both violence and politics to prevent equal justice for all people," says Walter Greason, a historian at Monmouth University. "Even within these two main branches, there were hundreds of local derivations that focused on specific approaches to punish civil rights organizations. In fact, it took almost 30 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act for the social stigma attached to supporters of racial equality to decline."

In the same way the White Citizens Councils avoided signifiers like white hoods, Stormfront founder Don Black has tried to ban the use of racial slurs entirely. And its not just explicit obscenities Black wants his users to avoid; he also wants to give off an air of general respectability, asking that people make an effort to use proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization (no ALL-CAPS posts).

Of course, Stormfront's veneer of propriety is only that. According to a 2014 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center , Stormfront users committed 100 murders between 2009 and 2014. "Investigators find that most offenders openly advocated their ideology online for lengthy periods while sucking up the hatred around them," the SPLC wrote. "Yet Stormfronts founder, former Alabama Klan leader Stephen Donald 'Don' Black, shrugs off responsibility for what he has wrought."

And despite their differences with the alt-right, not everyone on Stormfront thought that the Charlottesville rally was a net negative. The event was the first time in decades that a large number of whites stood up at a demonstration, for that alone it is a huge success, wrote KevinCannon . Another noted that , The pictures of the torchlight march in particular were beautiful and evocative. Made me wish I was there. The fact that Trump won't join the left media hate wagon condemning the rally as Nazi violence is another huge plus.

Stormfront may condemn the alt-right's actions and see them as incompetent fools, but they share the same endgame of a white nationalist state. The more the factions overcome those differences, the greater the risk. "We are on the edge of very volatile tipping point," says Greason, "where the nation could reject white supremacy at its roots, or where we could go backwards into an acceptance of racial injustice that hasn't prevailed in a generation."

In fact, if white supremacists have grown enough in number to splinter and repeat the infighting of the 1950s, the US may sit closer to rolling back those societal gains than many assume. "The outright rejection of Klan ideology is largely a 21st-century phenomenon," Greason says. The challenge now is keeping it that way. Stormfront and the alt-right may disagree on tactics, but they're both pushing toward the same cliff.

Read more:
Stormfront Nazis Think the 'Alt-Right' Is Full of Idiots - WIRED