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On 7 November, Lana Lokteff, an American white nationalist, introduced a thought criminal and political prisoner and friend as a featured guest on her internet talk show, Red Ice TV.

For about 90 minutes, Lokteff and her guest Greg Johnson, a prominent white nationalist and editor-in-chief of the white nationalist publisher Counter-Currents discussed Johnsons recent arrest in Norway amid authorities concerns about his past expression of respect for the far-right mass murderer Anders Breivik. In 2012, Johnson wrote that he was angered by Breiviks crimes because he feared they would harm the cause of white nationalism but had discovered a strange new respect for him during his trial; Breiviks murder of 77 people has been cited as an inspiration by the suspected Christchurch killer, the man who murdered the British MP Jo Cox, and a US coast guard officer accused of plotting a white nationalist terror attack.

Just a few weeks earlier, Red Ice TV had suffered a serious setback when it was permanently banned from YouTube for repeated violations of its policy against hate speech. But Red Ice TV still had a home on Facebook, allowing the channels 90,000 followers to stream the discussion on Facebook Watch the platform Mark Zuckerberg launched as a place to share an experience and bring people together who care about the same things.

The conversation wasnt a unique occurrence. Facebook promised to ban white nationalist content from its platform in March 2019, reversing a years-long policy to tolerate the ideology. But Red Ice TV is just one of several white nationalist outlets that remain active on the platform today.

A Guardian analysis found longstanding Facebook pages for VDare, a white nationalist website focused on opposition to immigration; the Affirmative Right, a rebranding of Richard Spencers blog Alternative Right, which helped launch the alt-right movement; and American Free Press, a newsletter founded by the white supremacist Willis Carto, in addition to multiple pages associated with Red Ice TV. Also operating openly on the platform are two Holocaust denial organizations, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust and the Institute for Historical Review.

Theres no question that every single one of these groups is a white nationalist group, said Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Centers (SPLC) Intelligence Project, after reviewing the Guardians findings. Its not even up for debate. Theres really no excuse for not removing this material.

White nationalists support the establishment of whites-only nation states, both by excluding new non-white immigrants and, in some cases, by expelling or killing non-white citizens and residents. Many contemporary proponents of white nationalism fixate on conspiracy theories about demographic change and consider racial or ethnic diversity to be acts of genocide against the white race.

Facebook declined to take action against any of the pages identified by the Guardian. A company spokesperson said: We are investigating to determine whether any of these groups violate our policies against organized hate. We regularly review organizations against our policy and any that violate will be banned permanently.

The spokesperson also said that Facebook does not ban Holocaust denial, but does work to reduce the spread of such content by limiting the distribution of posts and preventing Holocaust-denying groups and pages from appearing in algorithmic recommendations. Such limitations are being applied to the two Holocaust denial groups identified by the Guardian, the spokesperson said.

The Guardian undertook a review of white nationalist outlets on Facebook amid a debate over the companys decision to include Breitbart News in Facebook News, a new section of its mobile app dedicated to high quality journalism. Facebook has faced significant pressure to reduce the distribution of misinformation on its platform. Critics of Breitbart News object to its inclusion in what Zuckerberg has described as a trusted source of information on two fronts: its repeated publication of partisan misinformation and conspiracy theories and its promotion of extreme rightwing views.

A growing body of evidence shows the influence of white nationalism on Breitbarts politics. Breitbarts former executive chairman Steve Bannon called the site the platform for the alt-right in 2016. In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported on emails and documents showing how a former Breitbart editor had worked directly with a white nationalist and a neo-Nazi to write and edit an article about the alt-right movement.

This month, the SPLC and numerous news organizations have reported on a cache of emails between the senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and the former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh showing how Miller pushed for coverage and inclusion of white nationalist ideas in the publication. The emails show Miller directing McHugh to read links from VDare and another white nationalist publication, American Renaissance, among other sources. In one case, reported by NBC News, Breitbart ran an anti-immigration op-ed submitted by Miller under the byline Breitbart News.

A Breitbart spokeswoman, Elizabeth Moore, said that the outlet is not now nor has it ever been a platform for the alt-right. Moore also said McHugh was a troubled individual who had been fired for a number of reasons including lying.

Breitbart is the funnel through which VDares ideas get out to the public, said Beirich. Its basically a conduit of conspiracy theory and racism into the conservative movement We dont list them as a hate group, but to consider them a trusted news source is pandering at best.

Facebook executives have responded defensively to criticism of Breitbart Newss inclusion in the Facebook News tab, arguing that the company should not pick ideological sides.

Part of having this be a trusted source is that it needs to have a diversity of views in there, Zuckerberg said at an event in New York in response to a question about Breitbarts inclusion. Campbell Brown, Facebooks head of news partnerships, wrote in a lengthy Facebook post that she believed Facebook should include content from ideological publishers on both the left and the right. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and a longtime Facebook executive, questioned on Twitter whether the companys critics really want a platform of our scale to make decisions to exclude news organizations based on their ideology. In response to a question from the Guardian, Mosseri acknowledged that Facebook does ban the ideology of white nationalism, then added: The tricky bit is, and this is always the case, where exactly to draw the line.

One of the challenges for Facebook is that white nationalist and white supremacist groups adopt the trappings of news outlets or publications to disseminate their views, said Joan Donovan, the director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard and an expert on media manipulation.

Red Ice TV is a group that styles themselves as a news organization when they are primarily a political organization, and the politics are staunchly white supremacist, Donovan said. We have seen this happen in the past where organizations like the KKK have produced their own newspapers It doesnt mean that it qualifies as news.

Many people argue that Breitbart is more of a political front than a news operation, she added. When Steve Bannon left Breitbart in order to work much more concretely with campaigns, you could see that Breitbart was a political organ before anything else. Really what they were trying to do was give white supremacist politics a veneer of objectivity.

Donovan said she expects platform companies will reassess their treatment of Breitbart following the release of the Miller emails. She also called for Facebook to take a more holistic approach to combating US domestic terrorism, as it does with foreign terrorist groups.

A Facebook spokesperson noted that Facebook News is still in a test phase and that Facebook is not paying Breitbart News for its inclusion in the program. The spokesperson said the company would continue to listen to feedback from news publishers.

Facebook has long asserted that hate speech has no space on Facebook, whether it comes from a news outlet or not.

But the $566bn company has consistently allowed a variety of hate groups to use its platform to spread their message, even when alerted to their presence by the media or advocacy groups. In July 2017, in response to queries from the Guardian, Facebook said that more than 160 pages and groups identified as hate groups by SPLC did not violate its community standards. Those groups included:

American Renaissance, a white supremacist website and magazine;

The Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist organization referenced in the manifesto written by Dylann Roof before he murdered nine people in a black church;

The Occidental Observer, an online publication described by the Anti-Defamation League as the primary voice for antisemitism from far-right intellectuals;

the Traditionalist Worker party, a neo-Nazi group that had already been involved in multiple violent incidents; and

Counter-Currents, the white nationalist publishing imprint run by the white nationalist Greg Johnson, the recent guest on Red Ice TV.

Three weeks later, following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Facebook announced a crackdown on violent threats and removed pages associated with the the Traditionalist Worker party, Counter-Currents, and the neo-Nazi organization Gallows Tree Wotansvolk. Many of the rest remained.

A year later, a Guardian review found that many of the groups and individuals involved in the Charlottesville event were back on Facebook, including the neo-Confederate League of the South, Patriot Front and Jason Kessler, who organized Unite the Right. Facebook took those pages down following inquiries from the Guardian, but declined to take action against the page of David Duke, the notorious white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

In May 2018, Vice Newss Motherboard reported on internal Facebook training documents that showed the company was distinguishing between white supremacy and white nationalism and explicitly allowing white nationalism.

In July 2018, Zuckerberg defended the motivations of people who engage in Holocaust denial during an interview, saying that he did not think that theyre intentionally getting it wrong. Following widespread criticism, he retracted his remarks.

It was not until March 2019 that Facebook acknowledged that white nationalism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups and banned it.

Beirich expressed deep frustration with Facebooks track record.

We have consulted with Facebook many, many times, Beirich added. We have sent them our list of hate groups. Its not like theyre not aware, and I always get the sense that there is good faith desire [to take action], and yet over and over again [hate groups] keep popping up. Its just not possible for civil rights groups like SPLC to play the role of flagging this stuff for Facebook. Its a company that makes $42bn a year and I have a staff of 45.

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Facebook banned white nationalists months ago. But prominent groups are still on the platform - The Guardian

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro is outraged that Chick-fil-A is no longer donating to anti-LGBT charities. (Araya Diaz/WireImage)

US conservative pundit Ben Shapiro is outraged that fast-food outlet Chick-fil-A is no longer donating to anti-LGBT charities and honestly who is even surprised by this.

The Daily Wire editor-in-chief took to Twitter yesterday to denounce the censorious Left while calling the companys move terrible.

For years, the baptist-owned chain has been dogged by boycotts and backlash from queer activists for its ties to groups that oppose marriage equality.

But officials confirmed that the chain will no longer do so and instead divert donations to supporting food banks and fighting against homelessness, prompting outrage from some right-wing figures.

As conservative circles have defended the company for its religious freedom in the past, Shapiro and several other right-wing personalities came together to mourn their loss.

Shapiro tweeted: Chick-Fil-A has survived and thrived because they served everyone AND refused to cater to the cancel culture.

Now theyve caved at the behest of the censorious Left.

This is a terrible move and just the latest indicator that the centre cannot hold.

Shapiro then elaborated his point, but basically said the same thing again.

A country in which we only eat at restaurants where we agree with the owners politics when the owners politics does not affect anything happening inside the restaurant is a country that cannot survive as a unified entity, he tweeted.

While fellow Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh chimed in: Chick-fil-A defied the LGBT rage mob for years and only grew in popularity because of it.

Now all of a sudden they cave. This is the most pointless and counter productive surrender Ive ever seen.

The LGBT rage mob had, for years, raised awareness of the companys long and complicated history with LGBT+ rights, such as its CEO stating his opposition to marriage equality.

Moreover, Rubin Report presenter Davie Rubin, who once blamed wildfires on a utility company hiring gay people, was roiled at the news.

He said: Chick-fil-A was actually cool because it stood up to the progressive mind virus which is cancel culture.

Im not going back to that sad, dry, pathetic Burger King chicken sandwich.

However, as many users pointed out, Rubin was essentially calling for Chick-fil-A to be cancelled for caving into cancel culture.

Yes, one user said, boycott them to show you oppose cancel culture!

In retaliation, Rubin hit back that he advocates for the free market and for companies to do as they please.

But as more brought to light, he said this while detracting a company for doing exactly that.

They didnt cave to cancel culture, Blaine explained.

They simply shifted their donations toward causes (education, homelessness & hunger) that effect more people directly.

They have stated *nothing* about LGBTQ+ pressure.

Moreover, some were simply perplexed that Rubin was outraged that Chick-fil-A was now re-directing money to combat homeless charities instead:

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Ben Shapiro and his alt-right rabble are mourning the loss of homophobic chicken - PinkNews

Democrats who think that President Trump may have committed an impeachable offense for apparently trying to extort Ukraine are " human scum." A Republican congresswoman trying to make a political point during said hearing is " lying trash." Just as every person with an "R" next to their name became "racists," and every person with a "D" became "socialists," we have diluted the meaning of every word in the book as it pertains to politics, and now we're reaping the rewards.

Barack Obama was not a socialist, a fact that we can surely all see with his recent demands that Democrats slow down their sprint towards Stalinism. But the Right abandoned all nuance when it came to the former president and his social-democratic ways. Now, legitimately socialist Bolshevik presidential candidates and rising superstars have radically shifted the party's Overton window on policy. And conservatives no longer have the language to describe it.

Mitt Romney was not a racist. His vehement condemnation of Trump shrugging off literal white nationalists in Charlottesville should have made that clear. But just as all Republicans were for the better part of a decade, Romney was effectively smeared as a racist during the most milquetoast Republican presidential campaign of a generation. And now actual alt-right racists have earned the embrace of prominent Republicans, and Stephen Miller sits in the West Wing, firing off V-Dare and American Renaissance articles to journalists.

We should be able to excoriate racists and racism-apologists as such. But when everyone's already been branded a racist, no one is.

Now we've cranked the euphemism treadmill so fast that we're flying off the back end. Democrats and Republicans alike are now happy to get in the gutter and call each other scum and trash, using words we might have once reserved for machete-wielding MS-13 members and torch-bearing neo-Nazis. Words are supposed to mean things, but we've desensitized everyone. When perfectly fine members of Congress are now trash and scum, what do we call actual bigots or authoritarians? What about predators and murderers?

This isn't healthy. It isn't normal. But we can at least say that it's bipartisan.

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We've been flung off the euphemism treadmill - Washington Examiner

The second half of the book looks at the use of the swastika and related imagery post-World War II, as taken up by nascent nationalists after the fall of the Soviet Union, skinheads and neo-Nazis, ignorant designers, and, today, the alt-right. As Heller notes, "Many contemporary hate markers are rooted in Nazi iconography both as serious homage and sarcastic digital bots and trolls."

The Internet, particularly our social media-fueled version of it, has created a new ecosystem for hate speech and symbols, all of which can be rapidly produced, trafficked and consumed, at times unwittingly. If, as Heller writes, "symbolism plays a huge role in propagating unsavory ideas," then recognizing those symbols for what they are, is critical.

"I think the more information out there, the better," he says. "But does that mean that information is being digested?" When dealing with the dissemination of troubling designs, the slipperiness of online accountability and the contrarian, rebellious and disingenuous attitude of many of these symbols' users doesn't make the distinctions between malice, a joke or an honest mistake any clearer.

"In any case, the intent is not the issue; history is," he writes. Heller is known for his in-depth knowledge of design history. At SVA, he lectures on the history of graphic design and illustration. Throughout the book, Heller is emphatic that the past not be forgotten, or re-branded. He stresses the now-crucial mnemonic function of the swastika, as the number of those who lived through Nazi atrocities grows fewer, or as memes and misinformation campaigns diminish the severity of the intolerance and injustice, it stands for.

"This is a book that has been designed about a symbol that is being constantly designed, but it's not about design per se," Heller says. "It's about a totality of meaning, context and presentation."

"I can't predict how [the book is] going to be used, and I can't even say how I want it to be used except that I hope it brings people to talking about the symbol."

Read more:
SVA MFA Design Co-Chair Steven Heller Examines the Swastika in 'Symbols of Hate' - SVA Features

I initially assumed that angry students had heckledDonald Trump Jr. off the stage last week as he was promoting his new book at UCLA. I was wrong. Junior's big on "owning the libs." He surely showed up at the event armed with snappy comebacks aimed at collegiate "snowflakes," but ended up getting a bitter dose of what Republican politics of the future may look like, courtesy of an emerging right-wing political faction known as the "Groypers."

The Groypers (aka the Groyper Army) call themselves "America first nationalists," so you may wonder what sort of beef they have with a Trump. Their leader is Nicholas J. (Nick) Fuentes, an unwavering Trump supporter and Holocaust denier who marched with white nationalists in Charlottesville. His grudge isnt against Don Jr., but rather with the book event's moderator, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative activist group focused on college campuses. Kirk's transgression was fearing alt-right contamination of his "respectable" organization and firing a woman for associating with the Groyper Armys commander-in-chief, who runs a YouTube channel called America First" which promotes views that arent respectable.

Fuentes and his Groypers are trying to fashion themselves as the uncompromising outsiders of the Rightrebels who refuse to sell out to the Republican establishment. As Trump rose to power on his outsider stance, it's a claim that could carry clout. Fuentes' problem with making it stick, however, is complicated by his anti-Semitic, anti-gay, and anti-immigrant rhetoric. When your views appear indistinguishable from Richard Spencer, a claim to being the wave of future conservatives is a hard sell.

The Groyper symbolis a version of the alt-rights Pepe the Frog. As political guerillas, the Groyper Army stages stuntsat conservative events, films them, and distributes the videos on the Internet to broadcast their power. Trump Jr. cancelled the Q&A session to prevent getting Groyped, which is what got him jeered off the stage. Groypers like to use Q&A sessions to ask embarrassing questions about such loaded issues as the changing demographics in the U.S. ("white genocide" is the term they use) and the Republican preoccupation with Israeli.e. the Jews.

Nick Fuentes, a Boston University dropout, was once caught on a hidden microphone saying he's "not a fan of race mixing." He believes homosexuals and transsexuals are degenerates, and talks about the "mannerisms and customs of white people. Fuentes, who uses the word "liberal" when discussing the ultra-conservative views of Ben Shapiro, is part Latino, although he considers himself white. But he won't call himself a white nationalist. Instead, he talks of the need for America to maintain its "European" dominance.

Fuentes' reticence in embracing certain poisonous labels associated with the alt-right gives the impression of a marketing-savvy messenger who wants to be allowed to nibble around the edges of respectable political discourse. If he's able to seed conservative culture with his extreme views now, perhaps the day will come when such coyness is no longer necessary. But debating whether or not the Groypers are a part of the alt-right is little more than an academic exercise. If Fuentes and his band of pranksters somehow found themselves in power, they'd shut the borders to non-whites and target Jews, gays, transsexuals, and other minorities. The alt-right would have little to complain about.

The Groypers, who brag about "wins" at Republican events they target, are capitalizing on the divide within pro-Trump conservatism that surfaced after the Charlottesville rally. Richard Spencer thought the naively designated "Unite the Right" protest would be the impetus for getting a seat at the political table, but instead it relegated him to irrelevance. Spencer now has to endure ridicule after a leaked audioreveals him spilling racial slurs in an apoplectic rage, while Fuentes burnishes his reputation as an authentic defender of conservative values from the paleoconservative point of view.

Fuentes believes the pro-Trump movement has been diluted by fake conservatism and deep state operatives. The Groypers disparage putting the economy ahead of their race-based vision of the American nation. They prefer the Pat Buchanan vision of this nation over that of Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, and rail against the degeneracy of those rejecting what they call their traditional Christian values. While some of his fellow extreme right-wingers have been censored on YouTube and other social media, Fuentes continues to gain followers. Twitter took Richard Spencer's blue check away, but Fuentes still has his.

The Groyper Army rejects the concept that this nation is based, above all, on ideas. To them, America is a "people" and a "land." That's what the Charlottesville protestors were referring to with their Nazi-derived chant, "Blood and soil!" In their world, the Jews are bankers and industrialists holding down those who, by their ethnicity alone, have a natural right to power.

The Groypers are a younger and fresher version of the alt-right that went into oblivion on the day after the Charlottesville rally ended, but they've just slapped a fresh coat of paint on the same old white nationalist ideas. Fuentes, a Catholic, wants you to believe that his politics are religion-based, but his differences with Spencer are mostly stylistic. They might have a heated debate over whether or not Donald Trump is awesome, but not over matters of substance.

Read more from the original source:
The Groypers Emerge As the Far Right's Enfant Terribles - Splice Today