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The images appeared on Twitter in late 2016 just as the presidential campaign was entering its final stretch. Some featured the message vote for Hillaryand thephrases avoid the line and vote from home.

Aimed at Democratic voters, and sometimes singling out Black people, the messages were actually intended to help Donald J. Trump, not Hillary Clinton. The goal, federal prosecutors said, was to suppress votes for Mrs.Clinton by persuading her supporters to falsely believe they could cast presidential ballots by text message.

The misinformation campaign was carried out by a group of conspirators, prosecutors said, including a man in his 20s who called himself Ricky Vaughn. On Monday he went on trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn under his real name, Douglass Mackey, after being charged with conspiring to spread misinformation designed to deprive others of their right to vote.

The defendant, Douglass Mackey, tried to steal peoples right to vote, a prosecutor, Turner Buford, told jurors Monday morning during his opening statement. He did it by spreading a fraud.

A few minutes later, a defense lawyer, Andrew J. Frisch, said that Mr. Mackey, a staunch political conservative, would testify in his own defense. Mr. Frisch added that his client had been trying only to attract attention to himself by posting memes, not carry out a clandestine conspiracy.

Mr. Mackey did not share these memes as some sort of grand plan, he said, adding that it was not a crime to vigorously support your candidate of choice.

Prosecutors have said that Mr. Mackey, who went to Middlebury College in Vermont and said helived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, used hashtags and memes as part of his deception and outlined his strategies publicly on Twitter and with co-conspirators in private Twitter group chats.

Obviously we can win Pennsylvania, Mr. Mackey said on Twitter, using one of his pseudonymous accounts less than a week before the election, according to a complaint and affidavit. The key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.

That tweet, court papers said, came a day after Mr. Mackey tweeted an image showing a Black woman in front of a sign supporting Mrs. Clinton. That tweet told viewers they could vote for Mrs. Clinton by text message.

Prosecutors said nearly 5,000 people texted the number shown in the deceptive images, adding that the images stated they had been paid for by the Clinton campaign and had been viewed by people in the New York City area.

On the trials first day of testimony, prosecutors presented several witnesses.

One, Jess Morales Rocketto, said she was working for the Clinton campaign when the deceptive images urging viewers to vote by text began circulating in late 2016. She testified that those images had used a hashtag from the campaign as well as a logo that closely resembled the campaigns own logo.

Its a very sneaky graphic, she said. Its definitely designed to look very close to a legitimate ad.

Mr. Mackeys trial is expected to provide a window into a small part of what the authorities have described as broad efforts to sway the 2016 election through lies and disinformation. While some of those attempts were orchestrated by Russian security services, others were said to have emanated from American internet trolls.

People whose names may surface during the trial or who are expected to testify include a man who tweeted about Jews and Black people and was then disinvited from the DeploraBall, a far-right event in Washington, D.C., the night before Mr. Trumps inauguration and an obscure federal cooperator who will be allowed to testify under a code name.

As the trial has approached, people sympathetic to Mr. Mackey have cast his case as part of a political and cultural war, a depiction driven in part by precisely the sort of partisan social media-fueled effort that he is accused of engineering.

Mr. Mackeys fans have portrayed him as a harmless prankster who is being treated unfairly by the state for engaging in a form of free expression. That notion, perhaps predictably, has proliferated on Twitter, advanced by people using some of the same tools that prosecutors said Mr. Mackey used to disseminate lies. Mackey supporters have referred to him on social media as a meme martyr and spread a meme showing him wearing a red MAGA hat and accompanied by the hashtag #FreeRicky.

Some tweets about Mr. Mackey from prominent figures have included apocalyptic-sounding language. The Fox personality Tucker Carlson posted a video of himself on Twitter calling the trial the single greatest assault on free speech and human rights in this countrys modern history.

Joe Lonsdale, a founder of Palantir Technologies, retweeted an assertion that Mr. Mackey was being persecuted by the Biden DOJ for posting memes and added: This sounds concerning. Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, replied with a one word affirmation: Yeah.

Mr. Mackey is accused of participating in private direct message groups on Twitter called Fed Free Hatechat, War Room and Infowars Madman to discuss how to influence the election.

Prosecutors said people in those groups discussed sharing memes suggesting that celebrities were supporting Mr. Trump and that Mrs. Clinton would start wars and draft women to fight them.

One exchange in the Madman group centered on an image that falsely told opponents of Brexit that they could vote remain in that British referendum through Facebook or Twitter, according to investigators. One participant in the group asked whether they could make something similar for Mrs. Clinton, investigators wrote, adding that another replied: Typical that all the dopey minorities fell for it.

Last summer, defense lawyers asked that Mr. Mackeys case be dismissed, referring to Twitter as a no-holds-barred-free-for-all and saying the allegedlydeceptive memes had been protected by the First Amendmentas satirical speech.

They wrote to the court that it was highly unlikely that the memes had fooled any voters and added that any harm was in any event far outweighed by the chilling of the marketplace of ideas where consumers can assess the value of political expression as provocation, satire, commentary, or otherwise.

Prosecutors countered that illegal conduct is not protected by the First Amendment merely because it is carried out by language and added that the charge against Mr. Mackey was not based on his political viewpoint or advocacy. Rather, they wrote, it was focused on intentional spreading of false information calculated to mislead and misinform voters about how, where and when to cast a vote in a federal election.

Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis ruled that the case should continue, saying it was about conspiracy and injury, not speech and adding that Mr. Mackeys contention that his speech was protected as satire was a question of fact reserved for the jury.

The prosecutions star witness is likely to be a man known as Microchip, a shadowy online figure who spread misinformation about the 2016 election, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Microchip was a prominent player in alt-right Twitter around the time of the election, and Judge Garaufis allowed him to testify under his online handle in part because prosecutors say he is helping the F.B.I. with several other covert investigations. Sunday, the case was reassigned to U.S. District Judge Ann M. Donnelly.

In court papers filed last month, prosecutors said they intended to ask the witness to explain to the jury how Mr. Mackey and his allies used Twitter direct messaging groups to come up with deceptive images discussing the time, place, and manner of voting.

One of the people whom Microchip might mention from the stand is Anthime Gionet, better known by his Twitter name, Baked Alaska; he attended the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. He was barred from the DeploraBall after sending a tweet that included stereotypes about Jews and Black people.

In January, Mr. Gionet was sentenced to two months in prison for his role in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

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Trial of 2016 Twitter Troll to Test Limits of Online Speech - The New York Times

Some people just love, love, love being conned.

I hear from them all the time, folks who swallow the most preposterous nonsense and yet remain convinced that they are worldly sages, the only ones who see whats really going on.

A recent example came from a correspondent who lives in Kokomo. He wrote in response to something Id written about former Vice President Mike Pences break with former President Donald Trump.

The correspondent offered two predictions in his latest missive.

The first was that Trump would be elected president again in 2024. The second was that President Joe Biden would be imprisoned for unspecified crimes.

These were but the latest in a series of predictions the email writer has offered all of them spawned by the hallucinatory atmosphere of the alt-right media biosphere. Dark fantasies spring up in that strange soil faster than weeds in an untended garden.

This same guy has predicted at different times that former President Barack Obama and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also would serve prison time, that Trump would lead Republicans to surging triumphs in 2018, 2020 and 2022, that Trump would be re-elected, that COVID would be nothing but a blip .

You get the idea.

There is no fact related to Donald Trump or the political scene these days to which this guy does not seem to have a natural immunity.

Hes typical in that way of a lot of my correspondents. They all see the world through Trump-filtered glasses, all the while accusing the rest of us of being myopic.

The reason Im focusing on him is that in all other ways he seems to be an intelligent and accomplished man. He has held positions of responsibility in his community and seems to command respect there.

Yet, when it comes to Donald Trump, his senses seem to flee him.

If the former president offered to sell him oceanfront property in Nebraska, this guy would slap his money down, set up his beach chair somewhere just west of Omaha and wait for the tide to roll in.

And, when the waves refused to lap at his toes, this same guy would buy without question or qualm Trumps explanation that someone a Democrat or a RINO (Republican in name only) had stolen the Pacific Ocean from them.

Because the fact that someone had pocketed a body of water that covers 30% of the earths surface is so much easier to believe than accepting the idea that a guy who has a well-documented history of lying might have misled him is.

In fact, its just as easy to swallow that as it is to buy the notion that someone could engineer a massive conspiracy to deny Trump the 2020 presidential election and yet somehow leave every other election in every other state untouched.

This is what puzzles me.

This guy and many others like him clearly arent dumb. They seem capable of exercising discernment and judgement in all other areas of their lives.

But they cannot process evidence when it comes to Donald Trump.

Do they not notice when things they have been promised assured, over and over again would happen do not occur?

Do they not realize, for example, that, even when Trumps party controlled the presidency, Congress and the courts, the former president still couldnt find grounds to bring charges against Obama and Clinton?

Or that, if Trump had anything on Biden, the former president wouldnt have needed to extort such dirt from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy?

This blindness goes beyond partisanship.

Partisanship can prompt a rational person to argue that Bidens inflation-reduction program is or isnt working, depending upon his or her political leanings.

It cannot persuade anyone rational, though, to contend that inflation doesnt exist. Partisanship does not provide adequate explanation or justification for denying plain facts.

But that is what Trump lovers do again and again and again.

They are so enraptured by the former presidents fantasy construct of effortless omnipotence and endless victimhood that they eat it all up, then ask for seconds and thirds. They love the taste so much they dont even notice the contradiction that someone so powerful shouldnt be so easily victimized.

Why are they so blind?

Because they want to believe they could have bought the ocean for a song if only someone hadnt taken it from them.

Some people just love, love, love being conned.

Original post:
John Krull: Waiting for the waves in Nebraska - Kokomo Tribune

The relationship between Black people and Jewish communities has been complex throughout history with moments of solidarity and collaboration and instances of tension and conflict.

Both share a history of surviving violence and oppression and have fought alongside each other during the fight for civil rights.

But, there have been conflicts between the two communities particularly related to economic and political power. Jewish business owners and landlords have been accused of extorting Black communities while Black leaders have been criticized for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories.

That relationship was the center of a grassroots conversation Wednesday night hosted by leaders of Denvers Jewish and Black communities. The grassroots panel discussion led by Caren Press, Theo E.J. Wilson and Evan Weissman drew more than 100 people.

Its important to recognize and address these complexities and work toward building a stronger relationship based on mutual respect, understanding and solidarity, said Michelle Quattlebaum, Denver Public Schools board director, at the event.

This includes acknowledging and confronting past harms, listening and learning from one another and working together to address systemic issues that affect both communities such as racism, poverty and inequity, she said.

Attendees were invited to the school to discuss where their histories connect and diverge, so that they could heal and find ways to combat white supremacy together, said Press, a retired attorney.

The idea to host Wednesdays dialogue came after rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, spewed a series of antisemitic tropes online and on television. His rhetoric has led to vandalism, harassment, intimidation and violence, under the Ye Is Right campaign, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League.

At the event Wednesday, Weissman, who is Jewish, and Wilson, who is Black, said they held a discussion in Montbello with Black people and Jewish people shortly after Wests remarks. Jewish attendees seemed to unanimously agree the comments were antisemitic. But that was not the case for all Black community members who attended.

In his well-known 2004 song, All Falls Down, West ironically raps, They made us hate ourself and love they wealth, referencing Americas stubborn racial divide and the growing economic wealth gap between white and Black Americans.

West seemed skeptical of white supremacy, according to the lyrics in that song, but he changed his tune when Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, Wilson said.

In 2018, West said he thought slavery was a choice, then, he wore a White Lives Matter shirt, and made antisemitic comments on the show Drink Champs, shortly before praising Adolph Hitler while wearing a ski mask.

Heres why what Kanye did was dangerous, Wilson said during the Wednesday night event. People are not grasping the power of stochastic terrorism, the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of violence against them.

The Anti-Defamation League has been tracking a progressive spike in hate crimes against Jewish people since before Trump was elected. After Trump, West and far-right groups promoted tropes about Jewish peoples power and their false belief that Jewish people control the world, for example, instances of violence against Jewish people have increased.

Stochastic terrorism was present in Nazi Germany when Jewish people were regularly called subhuman, and during the Rwanda genocide, when Hutus called Tutsis cockroaches, leading to violence against both groups, Wilson said.

When one oppressed group discriminates against another oppressed group, they often inadvertently align themselves with white supremacy, by using white supremacist tropes and arguments to defend and spew their hatred, such as by focusing on an alleged inferiority of people who are not white, Wilson said.

Wrong move, Wilson said Wednesday night. You forfeit the moral high ground that you won by overcoming oppression when you ally yourself with the forces that would commit hate crimes against that group, and you, too.

Wests problematic comments further fractured a divide already present between Black people and Jewish communities, Wilson said.

In late 2022, Black NBA player Kyrie Irving tweeted a link to the 2018 film Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America. The movie, driven by antisemitic tropes, made false and hateful claims, including the claim that the Holocaust never happened. For a week, he declined to apologize or say that he did not hold antisemitic beliefs. He was suspended indefinitely from the Brooklyn Nets and did eventually apologize.

Heres a rule of thumb: Dont be a shill for white supremacy, Wilson said.

The relationship between Jewish people and Black people becomes even more fraught and complex depending on who is spewing antisemitism, Wilson said.

There is a disparity, weve noticed, on how the Jewish community reacts to white antisemitism and Black antisemitism, he said.

For example, in 2019, white House Republican Mo Brooks of Alabama read a passage from Hitlers 1925 book, Mein Kampf, and used its contents to attack Democrats and news reporters during an investigation into the Trump campaigns ties to Russia.

Around the same time, Black rapper Nick Cannon was fired from his long-standing show Wild n Out after spewing antisemitic conspiracy theories.

(Brooks) read Mein Kampf into the Congressional Record and (he) did not receive the same kinds of consequences, Wilson said. So now we have to unpack whats going on. Perhaps is the adjacency to whiteness and the myth of Black dangerousness one of the things playing into this disperate role, and is it skewing the common ground that we all must find?

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In 2015, Wilson infiltrated the alt-right movement by creating fake white supremacist social media accounts and using the online platforms to view the same kinds of stories and videos fed to alt-right groups. The goal was to better understand the movement, he said.

What I found was this: The Jews were a favorite scapegoat of white supremacists when confronted about white supremacy and it was super weird, Wilson said. When I talked about the colonization of Africa, and when I talked about the genocide of Native Americans, for some reason, it was always the Jewish peoples fault. Some of the antisemitic tropes are exacerbated, and not alleviated, by proximity to whiteness. Theyre made worse by it.

Antisemitism has mostly affected white Jewish people through interpersonal bigotry and hatred, Weismann said.

There also has been systemic, structural and institutional ways that antisemitism has played out, he said. But, by and large, for white Jews, right now, that is not the case at the moment, and it hasnt been for quite some time.

The point is to take that, and (decide) what do you do with it? Do you use that in an empathetic way to understand who is on the receiving end of systemic oppression today? For white Jews, we have to acknowledge the power that we have. Being able to be white, being able to exist and not have to face the same systemic oppression, what do you do with that?

He encouraged, not only white Jewish people, but all attendees Wednesday, to show up in solidarity and support any group that is oppressed, all the time, and not just when the issue directly impacts them, when its convenient, or when theyre feeling a visceral reaction to a current event.

After the panel discussion, many attendees asked Wilson and Weissman to explain how Zionism plays a role in Black-Jewish relations and the ability for the two groups to stand in solidarity with one another.

Heres whats interesting about Zionism, Wilson said. Martin Luther King was a Zionist at first. In fact, Zionism was a popular perspective in Black America at first. What changed it? We know the date: June 7, 1967.

The Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Syria and Jordan commenced after years of tension between Israel and its neighbors. Israel Defense Forces launched preemptive air strikes and ground offenses that crippled the opponents before seizing the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

The war ended with a ceasefire, but significantly altered the map of the Middle East, and gave rise to lingering geopolitical tensions.

The war also created hundreds of thousands of refugees. And more than 1 million Palestinians began living in occupied territories under Israeli rule.

After that war, Israel immediately began constructing Jewish-only settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, which are declared illegal under international law and continue to cause conflicts between the two groups living there.

When Black Americans saw what happened to Palestine, they didnt necessarily see Israel defending itself, Wilson said.

Martin Luther King, who was against all violence was put off by the events in the Six Day War, Wilson said. And many Black Americans felt similarly, in general, he added.

What we saw, and what a lot of Black people see in Palestine, is Jim Crow on steroids, he said. We (Black Americans) know, like nobodys business, what it means to not have a land of your own, to be kicked out of everywhere and to be oppressed everywhere you go.

Do Jews have to pass through checkpoints run by Palestinians? Or is it the other way around? Wilson asked. So, from our lens, until we figure out how Israel can look a lot more like a place that Dr. King would probably want to lend his moral support to, its going to be difficult for us to get on board. I believe that everybody deserves a homeland, but, like this? That is the question the Black community has about Zionism and Israel.

Increasingly, younger Jewish people are fighting against Zionism or questioning it, Weissman said. And some Jewish people, depending on their age or political views, may agree with that fight, he said.

Growing up, Weismann had more Muslim Palestinian friends than Jewish friends.

His parents were Zionists, he said. And I understand it. But something about it didnt rub me right.

He would ask his family questions about Zionism, a political ideology that called for the creation of a Jewish state, and now supports the continued existence of Israel as such a state. When Weissman asked questions, he was shushed by family members, who said he was bringing more pain to the family.

I would get every single defense, and some of those defenses would make sense, and some of them were absolute garbage, Weissman said Wednesday night. Because youre seeing the repercussions, both here and in Israel, and the trope that Jews are progressive, except for in Israel, that cant always last. We have to answer those questions. To me, its clear that something needs to change within the Jewish community to realize that there was a Judaism long before there was Zionism and there can be a future where Zionism looks different or doesnt exist and where people can still be safe.

Before the panel discussion ended, attendees said they were committed to continually finding ways to band together and fight collectively against white supremacy, such as by creating educational events to study history, dispel myths and show how racism and antisemitism connect and how people can interrupt racist behavior, and tropes, when they encounter them.

Read more from the original source:
Denver's Black, Jewish communities focus on shared history of ... - The Colorado Sun

In recent years, adherents to the alt-right, a radically nationalist and xenophobic faction of the American right wing, have increasingly made their presenceknown, both in the digital sphere and in the streets. But while the term alt-right may evoke images of its most prominent partisans white supremacists and neo-Nazis in practice, it is a much more dangerously complex spectrum of political views.

Despite this, most discussions of online radicalization focus largely around the descent into these extremist groups, and not the subtle ways in which the echo chambers and deliberate isolation of the alt-rights indoctrination networks operate. These networks, collectively known as the alt-right pipeline, are especially dangerous to young men, but a narrow discussion of the pipelines threat means that the full scope of the issue is rarely addressed. From the violent extremes to the tamer, but much broader, wing of the alt-lite (a faction dominated by popular conservative commentators and public firebrands), the same tactics are used to exploit and radicalize the rising generation. I speak from personal experience when I say that failing to address the alt-right pipeline as a complex and multidimensional issue only serves to make it stronger.

The conventional wisdom is that the alt-right pipeline targets white men who are angry at the world, a group that originally self-identified as involuntarily celibate, birthing the abbreviation incel. These observers rightfully point out the pervasive misogyny of the alt-right, and treat it as a vehicle and prerequisite for radicalization. While this interpretation of the alt-right, one that emphasizes the pipelines exploitation of latent misogyny and sexual frustration through male bonding gone horribly awry, is accurate in many cases, it cannot be applied to every case of alt-right internet radicalization. I, for example, was only thirteen when my fall down the pipeline began. My fatal element was not male rage but self-doubt.

For most of my childhood, I was incredibly susceptible to peer pressure. I developed a personal identity, but my public identity was often whatever I thought would fit in best. The problem was only exacerbated when I hit puberty. I was an atheist when my predominantly Catholic friends were bonding over teaching religious education classes at their churches, a progressive but only beginning to understand the importance of what that meant, and starting to come to terms with what I now know to be my bisexuality. At the time, I was unsure of who I was supposed to be, or even who I was.

This was around the same time that YouTube began to play a larger role in my life, and there, I found my gateway drug to the alt-right: Dave Rubin. In Rubin, I saw a vision of myself; he was an openly gay atheist man who called himself a classical liberal. I began watching the Rubin Report on YouTube religiously, and slowly but surely bought into his message: the modern lefts obsession with identity politics went too far. The assertion was straightforward enough for me to understand, and having next to no frame of reference with which to refute it, I did the only thing I thought epistemically sound: accept it as true.

I was working my way through Rubins content when I found his multi-part interview with alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, during which Yiannopoulos half-heartedly described African-Americans as being the last oppressed group in the United States. I had no experience with the nuance of condemnable views in American politics, so even Yiannaopouloss begrudging admission of any form of systemic racism was enough to convince me that he was worth more attention than I previously thought. With Yiannopouloss points going unchallenged, I was led to believe that his rhetoric held a legitimate place in the political spectrum. Once again, with no frame of reference to do otherwise, I accepted that I must have been wrong about him, and considered myself responsible for learning more about his perspective.

I gradually cycled through the videos that my new, extremely skewed frame of reference deemed acceptable, avoiding only the most flagrant content. By then, however, YouTube had worked its magic and determined what would appeal to me most moving forward. Videos recommended through the YouTube algorithm account for 70 percent of time spent on the site. Without thinking, I let the up next timer run down, and I was directed to the next video then the next, each more aggressive than the last.

And so began a months-long tumble down the alt-right pipeline, but I was never able to acknowledge that I was trapped. I still considered myself a progressive; in my mind, I was not buying into the alt-rights rhetoric, I was learning their arguments to make my progressivism stronger. But I was more easily persuaded than I knew, and even if my intentions were sound, Ben Shapiro spoke too quickly and Steven Crowder too aggressively for me to be able to process what I was hearing beyond a superficial level. My teenage mind could not keep up, and without any conscious understanding, I was cheering along with Jordan Peterson as he destroyed feminism and as SJWs were owned with facts and logic. Before I could think through what I had watched, I was onto the next video, and my internal understanding of the world became echoes of Louder with Crowder, the Daily Wire, and PragerU.Assuming I was merely developing a more nuanced understanding of the world, the true weight of what I was watching never set in with me. I began referring to myself as a social conservative, but never publicly. I figured discussing it with my friends was a non-starter; after all, in my mind, they had fallen victim to the machinations of the radical left. I was the enlightened one.

But even as I tumbled headfirst down the alt-right pipeline, I never fell far enough to seal myself into a true echo chamber. In fact, what I broadly defined as my social conservatism rarely left YouTube. The outside world continued around me unaffected; the only impact was in how I saw it. I certainly never shared these hateful views with anyone, because on some subconscious level, I still knew that they were unacceptable for a reason.

I resigned myself to the fact that I would forever be misunderstood, because the alt-right only knows, and therefore only teaches, two emotions: anger and fear. Both of these are generalized and are used to target, broadly, the unknown; anything the alt-right does not understand, like, or benefit from, it views as inherently dangerous. In my time, the prime example of this was the concept of intersectionality. I never learned the true definition of intersectionality, that racial, ethnic, and class identities intersect with one another and should be included in progressive movements. Instead, I learned Ben Shapiros definition, that according to current leftist orthodoxy, your opinion only matters relative to your identity.

I began to see the world the way those commentators saw it. I felt threatened where there was no threat, attacked where there was no attacker, and defensive of this new identity I had been given, an identity I had never wanted to have. The world I experienced and the world I saw were fundamentally disconnected. Overwhelmed, I sank into a depression. Their anger and fear had broken me, but it had not made me angry or afraid. It had just made me sad.

In the end, that disconnect was what saved me from sinking into the fascism and white supremacy of the alt-rights public persona. Real life is not as rapid-fire or one-sided as alt-right YouTube, and when I found my peers discussing the ideas that I had been indoctrinated to believe, I realized that the people I respected had clear and concise refutations to each of those ideas. The pipeline had given me definitions of things like intersectionality, social justice, and even feminism that were dangerously inaccurate, and when I actually began challenging the views pressed upon me, they fell like dominoes.

During my time in the alt-right pipeline, I found myself echoing reactionary talking points because I had been told to see conflict where none was necessary. I was inexperienced, and that made me the alt-rights perfect target.

If we as a society are to genuinely address the root causes of the alt-right pipeline, we must come to terms with what it actually is. While it often capitalizes on the worst of human impulses, it also capitalizes on naivete and ignorant innocence, regardless of age or circumstance. It looks different for everyone, from the veteran told to fear racial replacement by Tucker Carlson to the teenager who lingered too long on a promoted Will Witt video on Facebook. For those who know no better, the alt-right is a comprehensive and comprehensible way of understanding the world.

Refutations and rebuttals of alt-right talking points must also be adapted to the digital sphere. Right-wing pundits and commentators have the most popular podcasts, Facebook pages, and YouTube channels, meaning that they are often the first thing a person genuinely looking for political discourse will find. The alt-right has already adapted to the internet and is using their head-start to indoctrinate a generation. To combat this, viable alternatives to the alt-rights demagogic rhetoric must be available to discourage people from internalizing its narrative.

Lastly, the alt-right pipeline must be addressed as a public health issue. I was never happier when I found my identity in the alt-right than I had been before or than I am now. Caught in the alt-right spiral, I told myself the world misunderstood me, when in reality, I had just cut myself off from it. My mental health only recovered when I escaped the pipeline.

Falling down the alt-right pipeline is an intensely personal process, and it must be addressed as a personal issue. But more importantly, it must be acknowledged that the alt-right pipeline doesnt lead anywhere: It just keeps descending. And while that means it will become harder and harder to address with time, it also means no one is ever too far gone.

Returning from the alt-right pipeline was without question the greatest triumph of my adolescent life. Only then was I able to fully appreciate the rich diversity of our world and understand the nuances necessary to make genuine progress. More than ever before, too, I was able to understand myself, and fully embrace who I truly was, not the person the alt-right told me I should be.

The internet is still largely in its infancy, but the alt-right and its intermediaries have already been able to establish a funnel to create new acolytes. To combat it, we must first understand it, in all of its complexity.

Image by Ales Nesetril is licensed under the Unsplash License.

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The Dangerous Subtlety of the Alt-Right Pipeline

As alternative right-wing ideas have crept into mainstream American politics, its imperative to understand why. Where exactly did the alt-right come from? If this racist ideology is an alternative, what are its leaders rebelling against? Alt-right is an alternative to what?

Saif Shahin, an American University School of Communication professor, has expertise in global media and politics, critical data studies, and digital discourses. He researched the digital interactions of alt-right leaders to better ascertain how their influence proliferated.

We tracked the diffusion of the alt-right ideology on Twitter between 2009 and 2016 on a year-by-year basis. And we got some very interesting results, says Shahin, an assistant professor of communication studies and a faculty fellow with the Internet Governance Lab.

Shahin co-authored the paper on alt-right Twitter with Margaret Ng, a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Theyll present the paper at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in January, and it will be published in the conference proceedings.

The origin of the alt-right movement can be traced to a live speech in late 2008, just after Barack Obama was elected president. Paul Gottfried, a self-described paleoconservative, gave the address at the H.L. Mencken Club titled The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.

Gottfried asserted that neoconservative figures who had become prominent during the George W. Bush administration had failed. As Shahin interprets the speech, Gottfried was questioning how mainstream conservatives couldnt prevent the election of the nations first black president.

The alt-right movement basically started as a reaction to Obamas election in 2008. Not that these tendencies havent been there for much longer, Shahin says. But the idea they proposed was that the conservative movement needed to return to its roots. Hence, the need for an alternative right.

Shahin and Ng looked at the Twitter activity of 18 accounts previously identified as white nationalist by George Washington Universitys Program on Extremism. Some represent racist hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, and Neo-Confederates, and others are more cult-like independent figures. The two researchers measured how frequently alt-right leaders original tweets were retweeted, and they did a year-by-year social network analysis of who was retweeting whom. What they found was a movement that spread exponentially from 2009 through 2016.

Obamas early period in office was relatively quiet for the emerging alt-right, even as the so-called Tea Party was making waves in established political circles. In 2009, most of these white nationalist accounts were not even operational. We only saw 59 retweets that year, he says. By 2012, there were up to 6,265 retweets.

That year, Obama was up for re-election, which kickstarted a flurry of alt-right online activity. 2012 was a pivotal moment for white nationalism, Shahin says. The second coming of Obama was its big fear.

Another critical event in 2012 was the death of Trayvon Martin, an African American high school student shot by George Zimmerman. When Zimmerman was controversially acquittedhe claimed self-defenseit helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement online. But according to Shahins research, it also caused a spike in anti-black racist vitriol and retweets by alt-right leaders.

Alt-right retweets grew steadily from 2012 through 2014, and then Shahin and Ng saw a big jump in 2015. What happened during that time? Donald Trump arrived on the scene and announced his run for the presidency.

Then in 2016, it just exploded, he says. Even in 2015, we found around 27,000 retweets. By the next year, we were looking at more than 258,000 retweets.

This research does not exploreand takes no position onwhether Trump is using white nationalist rhetoric. It also doesnt analyze Trumps tweets or whos retweeting him. But Shahin and Ng do argue that alt-right leaders took inspiration from Trumps presidential campaign. Crucially, Shahin explains, Trump became a cause for alt-right Twitter to unite around.

Initially, with Nazis or Neo-Confederates, there was not a lot of retweeting across these groups. So even as they were growing, they were kind of growing on their own, Shahin says. In 2016, we see that these groups shed their differences and closed ranks around Trumps leadership. A fragmented movement thus came together and became a blowhorn for Trump on Twitter.

Another interesting finding is the centrality of David Duke, a former KKK Grand Wizard, to white-nationalist online unification and growth. While some media outlets portray the alt-right as a phenomenon of young, angry white menwho happen to be internet-savvyDuke is in his late 60s and has been steeped in white hate activism for decades. (Duke is depicted in Spike Lees film BlacKkKlansman, which is set in the early 1970s.)

While some observers characterize online hate as just hot air or trolling, Shahin notes that upswings of Twitter racismwhich happened in 2012 and 2016coincide with violence against minorities in physical spaces.

Offline, during these periods, you see increasing numbers of attacks on black youth by the police and vigilantes. Following Trayvon Martin, you see a whole series of shootings in different parts of the country, he says. Digital politics is very closely related to real-world politics. If white shooters get acquitted, it encourages more white people to think that, this is legitimate. This is acceptable. That leads them to go online and post more racist tweets or retweet other white nationalists. The online vitriol, in turn, feeds offline angst in day-to-day interactions between whites and non-whites.

As they monitored a steady increase of alt-right retweets from 2009 to 2016, Twitter itself expanded substantially. But Shahin says thats part of the story, too.

Twitter grew because it started being adopted by more and more constituencies, and they used social media to spread their message, he says. One part of that story is the so-called Black Twitter, which other scholars have studied. Another part, which not many have paid attention to, is what we call White Twitter.

As a platform, Twitter can be used for widely supported charitable causes or nefarious purposes. But its role as a meeting place for like-minded individuals is a 21st century reality.

It enabled the formation of these networks where people could practice and reaffirm their own identitiesby connecting with others like them.

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How the Alt-Right Happened | American University, Washington, DC