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Keith Fuller, 49, of Murfreesboro is wrapped in a Confederate flag as David Lee Oliphant, 37, of Portland yells across a police line to counter protesters during the "White Lives Matter" rally on the square in Murfreesboro, on Oct. 28, 2017. The Anti-Defamation League as trackedmore than 100 incidences of white supremacist propaganda in Tennessee since the beginning of 2018.(Photo: HELEN COMER/DNJ)

Incidents of white supremacist propaganda distributed across the nation more than doubled between 2018 and last year,making 2019 the second straight year that the circulation of propaganda material has more than doubled.

The incidents include103 events in Tennessee since the beginning of 2018,according to an Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism report released Wednesday.

The report lists2,713 nationwide cases of circulated propaganda by white supremacist groups, including flyers, posters and banners, compared with 1,214 cases in 2018.

The printed propaganda distributed by white supremacist organizations includes material that directly spreads messages of discrimination against Jews, LGBTQ people and other minority communities but also items with their prejudice obscured by a focus on gauzier pro-America imagery, according to the report.

There were some high-profile incidents in Tennessee, including a police shootout, two killings and white supremacist rallies at Montgomery Bell State Park. But the majority of events were more subtle handing out flyers, hanging banners and posting stickers promoting "alt-right" groups.

One reported incident in Tennessee took place on Jan. 1, 2018, in Knoxvillewhen members of the Smoky Mountain Fugitive task force captured prison gang member Ronnie Lucas Wilson. Wilson, a white supremacist, was convicted and sentenced to prison in 2019 for pulling a shotgun and wounding a Knoxville police officer who pulled him over for speeding.

Attendees listen as Rick Tyler speaks during his "White Nationalism: Fact or Fiction" event in the Alumni Memorial Building on University of Tennessee's campus in Knoxville on May 28, 2019. Tyler's appearance was one of more than 100 incidents of white supremacist propaganda in Tennessee since 2018 tracked by the Anti-Defamation League.(Photo: Caitie McMekin/News Sentinel)

In Memphis, the ADL reported Identity Evropa, an alt-right group, distributed flyers at the University of Memphis that read: "European roots American greatness." They also posted stickers featuring their group logo.

In a separate incident in Memphis, the report continued, several peopleassociated with the Shield Wall Network demonstratedagainst the removal of Confederate monuments.

Also listed among the Tennessee incidents is the 2018 Antioch shootingin which Travis Reinking allegedly opened fire inside a Waffle House,killing four people and injuring four others. But the ADL noted that despite reportsReinking had claimed to be a so-called sovereign citizen,"the shooting appears to have been non-ideological in nature."

CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS IN TENNESSEE: Where they are and when they were built

The sharp risemade2019 the second straight year that the circulation of propaganda materialmore than doubled across the U.S. and followed a jump of more than 180% between 2017, the first year the ADL tracked material distribution, and 2018.

While last yearsaw cases of propaganda circulated on college campuses nearly double, encompassing 433 separate campuses in all but seven states, researchers found that 90% of campuses only saw one or two rounds of distribution.

Oren Segal, director of the ADL's Center on Extremism, pointed to the prominence of more subtly biased rhetoric in some of the white supremacist material, emphasizing "patriotism," as a sign that the groups are attempting "to make their hate more palatable for a 2020 audience."

By emphasizing language "about empowerment, without some of the blatant racism and hatred," Segal said, white supremacists are employing "a tactic to try to get eyes onto their ideas in a way that's cheap, and that brings it to a new generation of people who are learning how to even make sense out of these messages."

The propaganda incidents tracked for the ADL's reportencompass 49 states and occurred most often in 10 states: California, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, Washington and Florida.

The Anti-Defamation League's online monitoring of propaganda distribution is distinct from its tracking of white supremacist events and attacks, and that tracking does not include undistributed material such as graffiti, Segal explained.

Elana Schor, with the Associated Press, contributed to this report. Reach Natalie Neysa Alund at nalund@tennessean.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.

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Report finds 103 incidents of white supremacist propaganda in Tennessee since 2018 - Tennessean

Members of fringe groups espousing anti-women rhetoric are migrating from milder online communities and becoming more toxic, data research suggests.

A recent study into the so-called "manosphere"a network of Reddit pages, social network accounts, YouTube channels and message boardsused a machine learning tool from Google to help track the "toxicity" of user comments, and detailed a clear rise in hate speech over time.

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These niche communities do not just shout into the void, their actions have previously sparked online harassment campaigns and violent outbursts.

The scattered collection of male supremacy groups is by no means limited to the involuntary celibate (Incel) community, which shot to the mainstream's attention in 2018 when a man killed 10 people in Toronto after using the term "Incel Rebellion" on social media.

Broadly, members of the incel community gather anonymously to blame women for their lack of sexual relationships, in some cases advocating for physical and sexual violence as a result.

But such groups date back years, and fresh analysis indicates a concerning trend: users are moving from tamer communities in favor of groups with "severe toxicity" ratings.

Researchers built a dataset of about 7.5 million posts from seven forums and over 30 million posts from 57 Reddit pages, known as subreddits, that are linked to the manosphere. Forums included Incels.is, The Attraction, SlutHate and Rooshv. Reddit groups included Pick Up Artists (PUA), Men's Rights Activists (MRA) and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW).

"Older communities, such as MRA and PUA, are becoming less popular and active, while newer communities, like Incels and MGTOW, are thriving," researchers noted.

The paper continued: "We also find that communities increasingly share the same user base, and that there is substantial migration from the communities to the newer ones. Worryingly, the latter are more toxic and espouse nihilistic and extreme anti-women ideologies."

The findings were laid out in the paper "From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: A Data-Driven Sketch of the Manosphere," as MIT Technology Review reported last week. The data-driven study was one of the most comprehensive conducted on the manosphere communities.

Analysis indicated manosphere-related subreddits showed similar user toxicity levels as other fringe social media or messageboard sites, including Gab and 4chan.

The data suggested users who migrate to new platforms "become more toxic." It indicated that the Reddit pages had "substantially lower toxicity scores" than forums, which could potentially be due to the website having stricter moderation and content removal policies.

Researchers wrote: "There are migratory movements from communities such as MRA and PUA to newer ones, such as The Red Pill, MGTOW, and Incels.

"We also find that some of these movements (PUA to TRP) and (MRA to MGTOW) are associated with an increase in severe toxicity according to [Google's] Perspective API."

The technology uses machine learning to score comments based on toxicity, based on a scale of "Very toxic" to "Very healthy," the developers explain on the official website.

The paper went on to warn: "We find evidence given significant overlap and migration across communitiesthat these contradictory ideas may very well be steps toward a radicalization pathway. Many of the individuals involved with the PUA community went onto more extreme anti-feminist communities such as TRP, which in turn strongly migrated to MGTOW."

In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center published a history of the male supremacy websites and beliefs, noting overlaps with an emerging political subset: the alt-right.

"A tight overlap exists between the 'alt-right,' white supremacist and male supremacist circles, which feed each other's narratives of the dispossession and oppression of white men, which is blamed on minorities, immigrants and women," the fact sheet read. "Both the alt-right and the manosphere agree that feminism is the cause of Western civilizational decline. In fact, the misogyny intrinsic to the 'alt-right' might very well be one of its distinctive features."

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'Manosphere' Communities Online Are Only Getting More Toxic, Research Shows - Newsweek

Gaming is a complicated industry. Video games, once considered a niche childrens form of entertainment, have become a massive, several hundred billion dollar industry bigger than music or film. Gamings role in culture has evolved from the World of Warcraft parody on South Park to streamers like Ninja playing Fortnite with Daily Show host Trevor Noah. Games are an undeniably mainstream phenomenon making tons of cash. Yet at the same time, the industry faces constant controversy over toxic fanbases, abusive working conditions for employees, casino-esque monetization schemes and being a breeding ground for the alt-right. The new Apple TV+ comedy Mythic Quest: Ravens Banquet attempts to tackle all of these aspects of gaming both ugly and positive and it does so better than any other show has. It might indeed be the Silicon Valley of gaming after HBOs similarly styled comedy takedown of tech.

Rob McElhenny and Charlie Day of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia wrote and produced Mythic Quest, which features a game studio full of oddballs developing a massively-multiplayer online fantasy game named in the shows title. McElhenney stars as Ian McGrimm, the intensely narcissistic visionary behind Mythic Quest. The lead writer of the games lore C.W. Longbottom played by F. Murray Abraham is a misogynist drunkard whose claim to fame is a Hugo science-fiction award from decades ago. Poppy (Caitlin McGee) is the overstressed lead engineer of the project struggling to be heard in a cult of ego, and Brad (Danny Pudi) runs a gambling-like monetization scheme to keep the money flowing which he describes as the perfect fusion of art & commerce. David (David Hornsby) is the studios indecisive, beta cuck CEO trying to keep both the creative and finance sides of the studio happy. On the outside, streaming personality and 14-year old Pootie Shoe (Elisha Hennig) a parody of real-life video game influencers like PewdiePie sways influence over the development team by providing his thoughts on Mythic Quest to an audience of millions.

If such characters seem absurd or larger-than-life, viewers should understand that Mythic Quest actually depicts the games industry and surrounding culture admirably well for a TV show better than Law & Order at least. The ego-clashing, ugly business on the inside and sway of influencers and rabid fans beyond the studio mirror many situations in the real-life gaming landscape. Particularly noteworthy is the depiction of overworked, underappreciated quality-assurance testers Rachel (Ashly Burch, who is actually a voice actress for many real video-games) and Dana (Imani Hakim). Quality assurance testers and programmers in the games industry are notoriously overworked in crunch periods and rarely supported by any kinds of labor unions. Mythic Quest does an admirable job of calling attention to this issue while keeping things comedic and relatively light.

Overall, Mythic Quest '' gets the often-at-war clash of cultures between busy, diverse, and passionate game developers and obsessive, frequently white-male and sometimes toxic fanbases. The shows third episode for instance, reveals that a large portion of Mythic Quests audience are actual white supremacists. The situation is not a far cry from similar 4chan-esque communities that form around online games. Finance-man Brad cynically insists they are still just paying customers, while Poppy and other creatives are shocked and struggle to deal with the PR crisis. Video games may be a profitable and extremely successful industry that brings joy to many, but the culture and circumstances surrounding them range from absurd to horrific. Mythic Quest '' is not exactly a Frontline investigation into these issues, but it does at least attempt to bring them to a more mainstream audience of viewers on Apple TV+.

While much of the shows humor benefits from an understanding of video games and their culture going in, Day and McElhenney do a decent job of explaining lingo on-the-go. Certain references, like the name dropping of popular gaming news sites Kotaku and Polygon might fly by more casual viewers, but the show can still be appreciated for its oddball sense of humour and characters. Fans of Day and McElhenney may be disappointed in Mythic Quests failure to bring the cynical yet brilliantly funny potion of catharsis of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but it does manage to be a decent sitcom that tackles new and relevant subject matter for television in a genuine and sometimes even insightful way. Put plainly, Mythic Quest is going more for chuckles and smirks than riotous laughter. For audiences that want a low-key and accessible look at the games industry that is amusing and clever Mythic Quest is more than worth a playthrough.

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'Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet' actually gets gaming right, flaws and all - University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily

This past November, the Highland Park Borough Council in New Jersey voted downa contentious resolution condemning anti-Semitism. The reason? Israel supporters in the borough insisted the resolution specifically condemn the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

The council was right to reject the resolution with this stipulation. The alleged connection between BDS and anti-Jewish bigotry is a hoax perpetrated by those desperate to silence the growing movement for Palestinian freedom.

In reality, the2005 BDS call, modeled on the earlier BDS call against apartheid South Africa, is a rights-based campaign for justice and equality that explicitlycondemnsanti-Semitism, along with all forms of racism.

BDS demands an end to Israels occupation of the 1967 territories, full equality for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship (today, over65 Israeli lawsdiscriminate against Palestinians throughout historic Palestine), and the right of return for Palestinian refugeesdriven from their homesto make way for the Israeli state during the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948. These demands are the crucial first steps in dismantling anapartheidIsraeli regime where,in the wordsof Israeli academic Ilan Pappe, the value of ethnic superiority and supremacy overrides any other human and civil value.

In short, BDSrejectsZionism asettler-colonial ideologythat demands aJewish-supremacist statein Palestine not Judaism or Jews.

Unable to refute this distinction, Israel supporters are determined to erase it altogether through a sweeping set oflaws, resolutions, and related measures, including several in New Jersey (see proposed senate antisemitism bills4001and4169).

This lawfare campaign is undergirded by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliances (IHRA) 2016 Working Definition of Antisemitism adopted by the Trump State Department and Department of Education under which anti-Zionism, or even lesser criticisms of Israel, are classified as inherently anti-Semitic.

Donald Trumps recentExecutive Orderdemonstrates with chilling clarity how the fabricated IHRA definition, which the order explicitly incorporates, will be weaponized to threaten constitutionally protected expressions. Under the ruse of combating anti-Semitism on college campuses, the order effectivelyreframesanti-Zionist advocacy as a violation of Title VI civil rights protections.

The order,writesJoshua Leifer inJewish Currents, makes a mockery of anti-discrimination law, laying the ground for the absurd yet all-too-imaginable scenario in which a granddaughter of a Palestinian refugee expelled from the Galilee in 1948 is held to have violated a fourth-generation American Jews civil rights for claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor one of the IHRAs specific examples of antisemitism.

The rise of genuine anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence in this country is a frightening reality, as the Tree of Life massacre, the Jews will not replace us rally in Charlottesville, and other recent episodes remind us.

But responsibility for resurgent anti-Semitism lies with a white nationalist alt-right movement closely connected to, and emboldened by, the Trump regime. As diaspora Palestinian scholar and political commentator Nada Elianotes, some recent attacks may also result from others having picked up on this energized antisemitic discourse.

The Palestinian rights movement hasrepeatedlydenouncedthese anti-Semitic attacks. Indeed, the alt-rightdrawsinspirationfrom the ethno-nationalism of Israel and Zionism, not the anti-racist struggle of indigenous Palestinians.

Despite the movements denunciations, Zionistshave exploitedthe current climate to further defame BDS. On January 9, congressional sponsors introduced pro-IsraelH.Res.782, which falsely accuses BDS, with neither explanation nor evidence, of exposing students to rampant anti-Semitism on college campuses across the country. The message couldnt be clearer: if you stand up to Zionist apartheid, you will be smeared as a Jew-hater.

Omar Barghouti, BDS co-founder,advocatesa single democratic state that recognizes and accepts Jewish Israelis as equal citizens and full partners in building and developing a new shared society, free from all colonial subjugation and racial discrimination and separating church and state.

BDS helps light the way for this vision of justice for all throughout historic Palestine. Those who slander it understand neither antisemitism nor justice.

This post first appeared as an op-ed at the Star-Ledger in New Jersey last month.

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Linking BDS to antisemitism is a hoax perpetrated by those seeking to stifle growing Palestinian solidarity - Mondoweiss

Good question! Photo: Universal Pictures

Last August, Universal made headlines by pulling its upcoming movie The Hunt from theatrical release and shelving the film indefinitely. The studio put out a statement along with its announcement, which said, in part, We stand by our filmmakers and will continue to distribute films in partnership with bold and visionary creators, but we understand that now is not the right time to release this film. That all changed today, however, when producer Jason Blum and The Hunt co-writer Damon Lindelof told The Hollywood Reporter that the movie is coming to a theater near you on March 13. The specifics of it, however, remain largely unknown, given that few people inside let alone outside the film industry have seen it. Its fair to wonder: What the hell is everyone talking about?

A quick recap of the movies first attempt at release: Universal started pulling back on its marketing campaign following the mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas. Based on the trailer and the limited official plot descriptions provided by Universal, The Hunt directed by Craig Zobel and written by Nick Cuse and Lindelof (who all executive-produced the film with Blum) focuses on a group of Americans who are kidnapped and dropped off in a rural area in Europe. In this natural arena of sorts, they are then hunted down by rich people who have paid for the Most Dangerous Game experience of murdering them with an array of weapons, including guns. In light of the two recent instances of gun violence in the U.S., Universal decided it was best to shelve the movie and give it no rescheduled release date.

In the latest THR interview, Lindelof says a perception [of The Hunt] was largely formed based on all the events in the aftermath of the horrific weekend before. [But] we really dont want to be pointing fingers, and more importantly, we dont want to be wagging fingers at anyone for overreacting or reacting incorrectly. We just felt like the movie was being misunderstood. What exactly is there to misunderstand about a film Blum is now framing as probably the most judged movie thats ever existed that everyone who judged it hadnt seen? Heres your brief guide:

A preferred refrain on Fox News last week claimed the movie features privileged vacationers hunting down deplorables. While privileged vacationers does seem appropriately vague, there is no use of the word deplorable in the trailer or official plot descriptions provided by the studio, either in conjunction with the trailers release, or even in various casting announcements reported by the trades. The first footage does feature characters saying they hail from Wyoming, Mississippi, and Florida. One character tells us every year a bunch of elites kidnap normal folks like us, but neither the elites nor the normal folks use the word deplorable.

So, does The Hunt feature deplorables being hunted for sport? After ads for the movie were pulled, the Hollywood Reporter posted a few quotes from the movies screenplay. It reportedly referenced our ratfucker-in-chief and slaughtering a dozen deplorables. One of the journalists who co-authored that piece, Kim Masters, told Vulture those phrases are in fact in the film or, at least, in the cut of the film the studio was sitting on before it was shelved. That means the existence of the word deplorables is: confirmed.

Next up, the word liberal elite has been used to describe the hunters of The Hunt, and heres where we have a change from the original press run. That ideological qualifier did not appear in any of Universals official descriptions, and a detail that accompanied the casting announcement for Betty Gilpin said the pic explores escalating aggressiveness between the political right and left in America without specifying the ideological alignments of the characters. In the newly cut trailer, we now have a character saying Did you read that article? Every year these liberal elites kidnap a bunch of normal folks like us and hunt us for sport. The way the trailer cuts during that line implies the posh looking liberal elites are doing bad things to people, so we can switch the status of this detail to: confirmed.

The movies first trailer features a photo lineup of the hunted, showing the individuals doing things like holding a gun in front of an American flag, posing with a poached rhinoceros, marching with a tiki torch similar to those carried by white nationalists, sitting menacingly behind what looks like a podcast microphone. Some of the images contained within the photo lineup have been associated with conservatives, the alt-right, and/or neo-Nazis some of whom are Trump supporters but theres no direct mention of any of the hunted voting for Trump. The original title of the film was Red State vs. Blue State, and based on reporting by THR it was apparently received with trepidation when Universal bought the project. But considering the persistent vagueness of Red State vs. Blue State and the fact that the new trailer does not provide political party alignment, and that producer Blum announced the new release date saying None of us were interested in taking sides with this movie, Vultures conclusion about whether or not Trump supporters are the ones being hunted remains: We have no idea.

Another description that has come up about the antagonists in the The Hunt is that they are globalist elites. None of the information provided about The Hunt has specified whether or not Hilary Swank, who seems to be the architect of the murder game, and her clientele are globalist or isolationist or members of the New World Order. All we know is that they are rich enough to buy their way into the Hunt, and rich enough for Swanks character to say in the trailer, We pay for everything, so this country belongs to us. (Honestly, they sound a lot like the members of the Elite Hunting Club from the Hostile franchise, and those guys were mostly just politically ambiguous assholes.)

So, are the bad guys the globalist elite? Even with the new trailer, which seems to make the The Hunts narrative progression more transparent than the first marketing campaign, the verdict stays the say the same: cant stress enough how little information we have.

The president weighed in on the moral compass of Hollywood during the first wave of controversy, explaining during a press appearance on the White House lawn that an unnamed upcoming movie is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. While he did not specifically name The Hunt, that particular film was mentioned several times on Fox News prior to his quote. Trump also tweeted, Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and, They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our Country!

Based on what little we have seen, is The Hunt racist? Really tough to make an assessment on this one based on two trailers, but what weve seen features entirely white-on-white violence and one actor saying, Im playing an Arab refugee, but I identify as white. I think thats problematic, too, in some way. Do we have access to any other details whatsoever about the individual characters or their ideological motivations within the movie? No. Judgment: truly cannot tell you anything about this movie.

Honestly that: seems possible, but with a lot less ennui than Joker.

This has been your myth-busting guide to The Hunt. Stay vigilant, everyone.

*This story has been updated to include comment from a journalist at The Hollywood Reporter as well as new facts available based on the renewed marketing campaign.

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Wait, What Is The Hunt Even About? - Vulture