http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/0 ... f-origins/
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by American Dream » Thu May 19, 2016 10:55 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Tue May 24, 2016 4:22 pm
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by American Dream » Fri Jun 17, 2016 7:03 pm
Racist Seeking Racist: How the Internet Helped Create Dylann Roof
Dylann Storm Roof is seen in his booking photo after he was apprehended in the June 17, 2015, fatal mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., that left nine people dead at one of the nation’s oldest black churches.
Before accused South Carolina church shooter Dylann Roof one year ago walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where parishioners welcomed him into their Bible study, he was “locked in his room looking up bad stuff on his computer,” Paige Mann, Roof’s former stepmother, told Time. “Something on the computer drew him in—this internet evil.”
Roof might have remained a crazed, lonely landscaper had he not been able to find other like-minded white supremacists on the internet. Had he not found his tribe, there is a chance that his hatred might have remained insulated, and maybe nine black worshippers wouldn’t be dead. There is a chance that he may have never learned the secret, white power numerology behind 1488 or the history of Rhodesia without racist online forums and dubious subreddits.
For all the wonderful things the internet has given us, unified hatred might be the unforeseen backlash of having us all connected. Now lonely, deranged, racist thinkers have forums and groups; places where they can share information to fuel their like-minded evil thinking; a place where their hate is not only welcomed but embraced. A place that encourages hateful people to act on their feelings. And even more dangerous, an anonymous mask to hide behind.
by American Dream » Fri Sep 09, 2016 8:22 am
by American Dream » Sat Sep 17, 2016 11:16 am
JOKE’S ON WHO?
Dylann Roof, 4chan, and the New Online Racism
4chan’s trolling culture didn’t just birth Guy Fawkes hacktivism—it also inspired the racist and neo-fascist sites where the Charleston terrorist lurked.
JACOB SIEGEL 06.29.15
To understand Dylann Roof’s thinking, he tells us, we have to go back to 2012. To Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, the moment that Roof writes in his manifesto that he was reborn as a white nationalist. Roof’s inspirations are clear in a way that his psychology is not. They go back further than the Martin case into centuries of American history and, along another path, less clearly marked, to the peak years of a now widespread Internet culture, when a new kind of reactionary sensibility was hatched.
A reactionary, defiantly anti-social politics has been emerging for the last decade. It was well known under the auspices of “trolling” and well hidden by its pretense of trickstersism. It was actually juvenile fascism and vitriolic racism but, because it grinned and operated in cyberspace, it was a sensation when it first appeared less than a decade ago. Excitable theorists, bored journalists and naive political activists looked at its strange, adolescent face and pronounced on its revolutionary potential.
According to the accepted wisdom, trolls were fiercely apolitical pranksters up until they put on Guy Fawkes masks and became the radical progressives known as “Anonymous.” But Anonymous doesn’t have a monopoly on trolling’s political legacy. They are only its nominally left-wing manifestation. Something else has been growing in the online ferment they came out of—something that Anonymous and its supporters want to disown—a politics that is temperamentally of the right, not quite coherent, though Anonymous isn’t always either, but unified by certain passions, a conspiratorial bigotry and anti-black racism above all.
This is another legacy of 4chan, the infamous online message board that spawned trolling culture. It is a different branch of politics than the hackitivism associated with Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, but its roots are the same. While Anonymous has gotten most of the attention, the trolls they left behind on 4chan have seen their influence spread as well, though without a catch-all name or striking avatar to easily refer to them. You can see this other side of trolling’s inheritance spreading on popular sites like Reddit and in the widespread adoption of the rhetorical style they developed: using bombast and absurdism to hide racist tropes in conceptual riddles.
If Roof was not directly shaped by that Internet culture, he nonetheless moved in the world it helped create.
We know that Dylann Roof had a history of taking drugs and that friends say he had expressed interest in committing a mass shooting, but little else about his psychological state leading up to his massacre. We know from what he told the woman he left alive to explain what he’d done, since he apparently intended to kill himself, and from his manifesto that he believed he had no choice but to murder defenseless black people—he specified defenseless; he wanted a slaughter, not a fight—in service to his white nationalist ideology. And we know where the ideas in Dylann Roof’s manifesto first appeared: almost verbatim on a neo-fascist website inspired by 4chan’s politics.
Back to Trayvon Martin. If there is a single event that sparked the current period of social unrest, the national controversy around race and policing, and the largest protest movement of President Obama’s second term, it is the night in February 2012 when a mixed-race Florida man, alarmed by the presence of an unarmed black teenager in his community, confronted and killed him after a struggle.
The fault line exposed by the killing of Martin is still sending out aftershocks. It inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and its more radical offshoots, including a group that named itself after Martin, despite objections from his family, and became notorious after leading a chant calling for “Dead cops” in New York.
The Martin case, and the mainstream media’s handling of it—marred by both casual slanders of Martin and outright distortions about Zimmerman—reverberated in the Internet’s ideological echo chambers, the former inspiring the nascent protest movement that reemerged in Ferguson, the latter inspiring a right-wing counter-movement online.
A story that had started on Twitter before it was picked up by news continued to spread on the populist Internet.
The racial and political divisions revealed by perceptions of Martin’s death and the media’s handling of it attracted activists to the cause. Some organized protests. One anonymous Internet user hacked Martin’s email and social media accounts and posted the results online in an effort to depict him as a thug and drug user, and justify his shooting death. The hacker, who went by the name Klanklannon, posted an edited, slideshow version of the messages stolen from Martin’s accounts. Klanklannon, as the name suggested, was a white supremacist, and a member of 4chan’s political message board, "/pol/," which is where the hacks were first posted.
“The event that truly awakened me,” Dylann Roof wrote before walking into a church in South Carolina and killing nine of the black parishioners who had invited him into their Bible study group, “was the Trayvon Martin case.”
It’s not all that far from the mainstream of American discourse to the places where Roof dwelled online, but the distances get skewed by perspective.
The organized political groups that inspired Roof, like the Council of Conservative Citizens, have, while courting influence, been considered disreputable for decades. That’s a far cry from the kind of ambivalent, if not adulatory treatment, offered to the avatars of 4chan’s bleeding-edge web culture, who were fêted by academics and journalists even as their much pondered trolling cleared out a space online for a new breed of fascist websites, like the one Roof appears to have visited online.
There’s something immediately familiar about The Daily Stormer, where whole passages from Roof’s manifesto first appeared. Its name is taken from Hitler’s paper of record, the Nazi propaganda organ Der Stürmer. The site owes as much, perhaps more, to the style and mode of political rhetoric developed on the 4chan message board as it does to any tract published by the KKK or American Nazi party.
The parallels between Roof’s manifesto and the comments on The Daily Stormer, written under the name aryanblood88, suggest that either Roof was the commenter or he visited the site often enough to have plagiarized from it for his manifesto. In response to the connection, the site’s proprietor, Andrew Anglin, has repudiated Roof’s crime and publicly disavowed violence, while endorsing many of Roof’s views. Anglin did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Before running The Daily Stormer, the 30-year-old Anglin ran a site called Total Fascism. Like many other Americans his age, he is fluent in digital culture and its unique approach to racial hatred. His popularity—the site’s traffic has grown continually since 2013, the L.A. Times reported—comes as much from knowing his audience as from his ideas.
“A lot of people on the Internet prefer to write long essays, which a lot of people don’t read, which have a limited audience,” he told the L.A. Times about the founding of The Daily Stormer, sounding like any other online editor. “I wanted something punchy and funny and enjoyable to read.”
Then he added: “I believe white people deserve their own country.”
Anglin, who occasionally writes the white nationalist version of media criticism, and devotes much of his coverage to what he sees as the Jewish-controlled liberal establishment’s cover-up of black-on-white crime, has studied the digital landscape. He cites 4chan as a touchstone and looks to Reddit as the natural arena in which to expand his neo-fascist enterprise. His site exists in a feedback loop with both of them, exchanging ideas and members alike.
“Daily Stormer is a perfect example for me of the influence 4chan has had on the rest of the messaging machine for white supremacy,” Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, tells me. Hankes has written about Reddit’s emergence as the single largest gathering place for racists online and how he first sussed out the connection between Roof and The Daily Stormer. He sees the style of racism originally perfected on 4Chan’s message boards—where the racism is only as effective as the meme that spreads it—as a template for Anglin’s site. “A lot of the same images, a lot of the same rhetorical styles are being emulated on Daily Stormer and it’s pretty successful. The website has taken off.”
The Daily Stormer has succeeded by marketing itself to younger people who prefer droll commentary to the stern politics of an older generation of racist sites—and, crucially, by hitching its fascism to a wider reaction against political correctness and left-wing activism. Even the most rabid Gamergaters, men’s rights activists and anti-social justice warriors tend not to think of themselves as fascists. Anglin and others like him want to change that by radicalizing the center and moving the discourse on to their own grounds. That effort has been aided invaluably by the anonymous shock troops on Internet message boards.
by American Dream » Mon Sep 26, 2016 1:24 pm
by American Dream » Thu Oct 06, 2016 10:13 am
The Toxic, Bullying Troll Culture Has Made Much of the Internet Dangerous; Just Perfect for Donald Trump's Political Rise
This is where trollism—or what we now refer to as trolling—has led. On 4chan, Reddit, and other forums where hate was encouraged and allowed to grow unchecked, the alt-right has developed into a loose coalition of (mostly) angry white men who believe and propagate the idea that they are this country’s oppressed class. In this alt-landscape, Latinos and blacks are stealing their rightful spoils; feminism is upsetting the natural men-on-top order of things; Muslim invaders are destroying the country; and an international Jewish conspiracy is trying to wipe out the white race with tools that include miscegenation and homosexuality. Men who aren’t on board with the alt-right's retrograde cause are labeled “cucks,” a corruption of cuckold (or “cuckservatives” in the case of Republican opponents). (The SPLC notes “the phrase has a racist undertone...implying that establishment conservatives are like white men who allow black men to sleep with their wives.”) They describe revelatory moments—in this warped context, going all in on racism and misogyny—as swallowing the “red pill,” as in the film The Matrix.
"Essentially, you choose the red pill of truth as opposed to the blue pill of delusion," Richard B. Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute (a very neutral sounding name for a white nationalist think tank), told Vice recently. "That is, the truth about race, the truth about America, the truth about the Jewish influence, the truth about women...These are hard truths, and these are truths that go against the grain of liberal ideology and wishful thinking."
Jared Taylor, an outspoken white nationalist, has stated that while there are “areas of disagreement” among alt-right adherents, “the central element of the alt-right is the position it takes on race.” If those sentiments seem a lot like the thinking espoused by Donald Trump, then you’ve stumbled onto the reasons why the movement has thrown its vast virtual weight behind the candidate. Page views on Reddit boards /r/WhiteRights and /r/The_Donald have increased by leaps and bounds, in some cases, rising by tens of millions month over month. It is not a coincidence this growth has happened as “the number of white nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathizers on Twitter have multiplied more than 600 percent in the last four years, outperforming the so-called [ISIL] in everything from follower counts to number of daily tweets,” according to a George Washington University study. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s campaign head and the executive chairman of Breitbart News, has proudly dubbed his publication “the platform for the alt-right." There’s strength in numbers, and the spread of Trumpism and alt-righties has helped make the internet a difficult place to exist for many.
In recent months, targets of online hate, including New York Times writer Jonathan Weisman (who devoted a column to the anti-Semitism alt-righters and other Trumpites have tweeted at him) and feminist writer Jessica Valenti (whose 5-year-old daughter was threatened with rape by an Instagram troll) have abandoned parts of social media. Journalist Julia Ioffe told the Guardian that she has received calls from people who’ve serenaded her with Hitler speeches, and was the subject of a neo-Nazi website post titled “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian Kike Julia Ioffe in GQ!” Bethany Mandel wrote about being subject to so much anti-Semitism—she was called a “slimy Jewess” and told she “deserve[s] the oven”—that fear prompted her to buy a gun. Cleveland.com columnist Henry J. Gomez writes that he’s seen a rise in hate mail following Trump’s ascension, with messages suggesting he should be "on the other side of the wall" and that his heritage should "disqualify" him from covering the presidential campaign. Much like the possibility of a Trump presidency, the alt-right’s “trolling” isn’t a joke, but a dangerous reality that taints online and offline lives, which are one and the same.
American Dream » Sat Sep 17, 2016 10:16 am wrote:
JOKE’S ON WHO?
Dylann Roof, 4chan, and the New Online Racism
4chan’s trolling culture didn’t just birth Guy Fawkes hacktivism—it also inspired the racist and neo-fascist sites where the Charleston terrorist lurked.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... acism.html
by American Dream » Sat Oct 08, 2016 8:19 am
The Toxic, Bullying Troll Culture Has Made Much of the Internet Dangerous; Just Perfect for Donald Trump's Political Rise
“Don’t feed the trolls,” the saying goes, as if it were really that easy. As a prescriptive for navigating the harassment, hatred and bile that now fester on and darken the Internet and social media, it’s both woefully inadequate and unrealistic advice. Like its closely related partner, “Don’t read the comments,” the suggestion that we all just ignore the toxic venom spewed online by actors who often travel in packs and attack in hordes, underestimates the unignorable provocation, emotional trauma and bonafide fear they purposely create and instill. The bunk idea that we can all just look away—or more annoyingly, log off, shut down or shut up—is the quaint, ineffective (and in our current troll-glutted climate, offensive) relic of a bygone era. It’s a holdover from a time when the internet was a kinder, gentler digital space and the trolls who roamed it less malicious monsters than playful pranksters.
The evolution of trolling, like that of the internet itself, has occurred with surprising and unpredictable speed. In the early days of the World Wide Web, trolling took the form of a relatively innocuous—though intrusive and annoying—type of merry pranksterism. Fusion contributor Kristen V. Brown describes 1990s Usenet forums as sites where trolling was considered “a little like a prank phone call”; one 2002 Urban Dictionary entry defines trolls as people who post “deliberately provocative message[s]...with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument,” while another states that “trolling does not mean just making rude remarks: shouting swear words at someone doesn't count as trolling...and isn't funny.”
Examples of latter-day trolling might include putting up wantonly obtuse, logically circuitous, mind-blowingly stupid, off-topic or antagonistic messages (often dubbed “flaming”), crafted solely for the purpose of frustrating or otherwise irritating more sincere members of an online community. The idea was that trolls didn’t mean the dumb things they said, though successful trolling—and this is key—required that those they aimed to piss off believe that they did. “Troll” was a label the angry members of an online community imposed on troublemakers, a way to identify and ferret out those hellbent on ruining an otherwise good conversation.
“There would be guys who would go onto the Star Trek newsgroup and say, ‘You know, I think Spock was actually human,’” says Jon Hendren, who has become one of the internet’s most revered trolls based on a series of outrageous stunts, including appearing on a TV news segment about Edward Snowden and instead discussing the plight of Edward Scissorhands. “It would garner these huge lengthy responses from guys who would list every time Spock said something about being Vulcan. You knew the guy who said that [Spock was human] was not being serious, but he also wasn't breaking any rules. He's getting his jollies from that—and I think that's what trolling is to me. It's where you play within the bounds of an established system...to highlight the absurdity within those systems, hopefully in a funny way.”
4chan and Reddit went live in 2003 and 2005 respectively, and the two sites become epicenters for trollish behavior. Whereas trolling had previously been a thing you were accused of by those who disapproved of your behavior, now “trolls” began to claim the title for themselves, considering it a source of pride.
“4chan was when people really started to take that label on as something that they wore almost as a badge of honor,” says Whitney Phillips, a media folklorist and actual scholar on internet trolls, whose doctoral thesis served as the foundation for 2015’s This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. “This was a point of subcultural identification. It was a way to connect with the people who were around you who were engaging in similar behaviors. It was a way of marking an in group, essentially.”
Phillips, who has spent nearly a decade e-staking out the virtual spaces trolls frequent, such as 4chan, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter, notes in her book that there is “every indication that the vast majority of subcultural trolls—certainly the ones I interacted with—are relatively privileged white males for whom English is either a first or second language.” In the mid-aughts, as the particularly white-male dominated spaces of 4chan and Reddit grew exponentially, trolls began taking up more and more digital space, not just on those sites but across the internet in general. Just as in real life (or IRL), when groupthink and mob mentality are added to the churn of toxic masculinity, sexism, racism, white supremacy and male fragility, the results were predictably ugly. Trolls had long claimed they were in it “for the lulz,” which is sort of like lolz, but at other people’s expense. In the decided shift in the tone of trolling, the incredibly unfunny invective was often directed at women, African Americans and other people of color, as well as other historically marginalized groups.
In many ways, internet forums in the U.S. offer an unvarnished look at America’s essential character; a transparent account of what this place is really about when you strip away accountability and offer anonymity in its place. On Reddit and 4chan, particularly the latter’s anything-goes /b/ board, extreme racism and vicious misogyny flourished, with cruelty and abuse becoming key traits of the hivemind personality. Administrators at 4chan and Reddit responded to the explosion of hate speech and vitriol by doing absolutely nothing, then followed that up by turning their inaction into a policy of sorts, framing it as vague, overly simplistic advocacy for free speech. That approach quickly succeeded in creating an environment less known as a site for the unimpeded exchange of ideas than a welcome haven for white nationalists, anti-Semites and women haters.
by seemslikeadream » Sat Dec 17, 2016 11:30 am
Donald Trump's Newest Cabinet Member Has Ties to Neo-Confederate Group That Inspired Dylann Roof
Add another name to the growing list of white supremacist sympathizers in the president-elect's inner circle.
By Travis Gettys / Raw Story December 16, 2016
Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Interior has gotten donations from white supremacists and endorsed them in political races.
Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT), like chief of staff Steve Bannon, brings troubling ties to organized hate groups to the Republican president-elect’s inner circle, reported Fusion.
Zinke made news during his 2014 election campaign when he accepted a $500 donation from Earl Holt, head of the Council of Conservative Citizens, whose writings about “brutal black on white murders” inspired Dylann Roof, who gunned down nine black worshipers the following year in a Charleston, South Carolina, church.
A spokeswoman for Zinke later said the congressman would donate that contribution to a fund for the victims’ families.
The website also reported he co-sponsored legislation to designate English as the official language in the U.S., and he discussed the bill in an interview with the anti-immigrant ProEnglish organization, which has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Zinke endorsed a Montana statehouse candidate who was active in a white nationalist group as a student at Liberty University and has extensive ties to European right-wing extremists.
Taylor Rose, the former vice president of the Youth for Western Civilization, lost his election race but garnered 47 percent of the vote, but he boasted that Zinke’s support — along with the backing of a couple of other Republicans — made him a mainstream candidate despite his racist writings, which were promoted by the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Rose’s campaign website claims he managed U.S. Sen. Steve Daines’ (R-MT) “campaign in the Northwest,” and he also claims he worked for state Sen. Jennifer Fielder, the vice-chair of the Montana Republican Party and CEO of the Koch-linked American Lands Council.
Greg Gianforte, who lost his Republican gubernatorial race, gave Rose $170 in campaign contributions, and he got the same amount from GOP state Sen. Mark Blasdel.
White nationalist Richard Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, has said he may consider running for the congressional seat vacated by Zinke.
The state’s Democratic Party called on GOP officials to denounce Spencer’s campaign, but they were a bit more reticent.
“I’m guessing most quarters of the Republican Party in Montana would look skeptically at Mr. Spencer,” said Jeff Essmann, the state’s GOP chairman.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politi ... red-dylann
by American Dream » Fri Dec 23, 2016 4:53 pm
by American Dream » Fri Jan 06, 2017 5:36 am
More than six weeks after killing nine members of a black congregation here in 2015, Dylann S. Roof wrote extensively in a journal about his purpose, emphasizing that he hoped to incite others to join him in fomenting a race war.
“I did what I thought would make the biggest wave,” the then 21-year-old white supremacist wrote, “and now the fate of our race is in the hands of my brothers who continue to live freely.”
Page after page from the journal was read aloud on Thursday afternoon in Federal District Court here, where jurors will decide, perhaps as early as next week, whether to sentence Mr. Roof to death. The journal provided a startling extension of the manifestoes Mr. Roof wrote before he opened fire in the fellowship hall of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015.
Seemingly aware that he faced the likelihood of at least a life term in prison, Mr. Roof wrote that he “would rather live in prison knowing I took action for my race than live with the torture of sitting idle.”
Mr. Roof’s choice to represent himself in the penalty phase of his trial, and to reject a defense based on mental incapacity, has raised questions about his desire to avoid execution. But in the aftermath of the attack, at least, he saw a continued purpose for his life.
“I want to live now,” he wrote in the journal, most of which was read from the witness stand by a Charleston County Sheriff’s Office official, Lauren M. Knapp. “I want to see a future. I want to help make the way.”
He began by explaining that he wanted to complete the rambling racist thoughts included in an online manifesto that he began before the massacre, which he said he “was unable to finish before because I was in a hurry to get to Charleston.”
In a dizzying blitz of insults and stereotypes, predictions and perceived problems, Mr. Roof railed against Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans, gays and Muslims. He said that Adolf Hitler would someday “be inducted as a saint,” and he warned that unless white people “take violent action, we have no future.”
by American Dream » Sat Feb 04, 2017 8:09 pm
Black Church Burning
“THE EVENT THAT TRULY AWAKENED ME,” Dylann Roof wrote in his manifesto, “was the Trayvon Martin case.” Unable to understand “what the big deal was” and incensed by the media treatment of George Zimmerman, Dylann Roof traveled to Charleston, South Carolina on June 17. He visited Mother Emanuel, the same church white supremacists burned down two centuries prior in response to Denmark Vesey’s supposed plotting of a rebellion, and sat for an hour with its congregation. When they started praying, he drew his weapon and pointed it at an 87-year-old woman. Her 26-year-old nephew told him, “You don’t have to do this.” Roof replied, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go.” Then he shot and killed six women and three men. Two survived by playing dead and lying in their community’s blood. He told one he let her survive to tell the world what happened.
The following week, eight black churches burned down. Many thought they were racially motivated. #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches trended on Twitter as news outlets compiled lists of black churches recently burnt down. In the months that followed, four cases were ruled accidents. The cause of one remains inconclusive. Three were ruled arsons. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fire Arms have neither suspects nor motivation for them, while a federal investigation concluded that the three fires were not connected. As far as federal investigators knew, the arsons were random, isolated acts of violence.
Though the law framed them as unconnected, it is impossible not to see the ideological links. As in the past, they were connected by a desire to destroy black spaces free of white surveillance. They were also retaliations against anti-police brutality protests and their increasing coverage, to say nothing of the increased protest and coverage of structural racism.
by American Dream » Sun Feb 05, 2017 3:59 am
On Attempts to Downplay Homegrown Fascism: Robin Philpot, racist apologist
Like so many others I avoided writing about the recent massacre of Québec Muslims because I felt the message of the attack was clear: fascism was alive and well in Canada, that its reemergence was not simply tied to Trump's election, and that there was no point in misery blogging an event that possessed such a clear message. That is, if we care about humanity, our outrage about an event should not require another online article that states the obvious; such articles might serve to cheapen the violence by using the massacre to make a point that was already clear. Islamophobia is alive and well, it's part of the politics of an ascending right, and this political sequence was already determined by multiple Canadian politicians and organizations who have sanitized ahead of time this indefensible violence.
But then Counterpunch published an article by Robin Philpot, The New World Order Hits Quebec City, and I'm so incensed by such a distortion of reality and avoidance of culpability that I feel something needs to be said. At the very least Counterpunch should be reprimanded for giving Philpot's bullshit analysis a platform. People were murdered by a fascist who the mainstream media is now trying to present (as usual) as a mentally unstable "lone wolf" child (despite the fact that he is 27) and a media site that claims it is "left" produces an article that is nothing more than a moral deflection: a white Québecois settler who doesn't want to talk about homegrown fascism and instead wants to pretend that the massacre is vague conspiracy theory. Indeed, Philpot's article is driven by the need to argue that Bissonnette is the very lone wolf––a violent agent unmoored from Quebecois society––that the liberal media has presented. (A presentation, it needs to be noted, they did not provide when the SQ first claimed that the murderer was one of the potential victims: when the suspect was an Algerian he was a terrorist; when he was revealed to be in fact a white settler he became a lone wolf.)
Philpot is an uncritical Québecois nationalist whose entire "leftism" is determined by his belief that Québec settlers are incapable of racism. As unique victims of Anglophone hegemony, according to Philpot, Québecois are intrinsically more progressive, understanding, and ethically pure. Despite the fact that Philpot, who at one time was a Parti Québecois [PQ] hack, rejected the PQ's racist Charter that would enshrine Islamophobia, he still maintains that there is no real Islamophobia in Québec beyond some malcontents and an anti-Québec Anglophone conspiracy. Philpot's Counterpunch article is not really interested in condemning the recent massacre, let alone taking it seriously; it is pretty clear, to anyone who bothers to read and think through its drivel, that the article's only intention is to make sure that nobody blames Franco Québec for the racist violence. Counterpunch has enabled a white settler to make white supremacist violence all about him!
If Counterpunch really cared about a progressive analysis of the recent Mosque attack then they wouldn't have published an article by a pseudo-leftist such as Philpot whose history is known to anyone in Québec who has been doing anti-capitalist organizing in the past few decades. This is the same Philpot who stood against Indigenous self-determination, going so far as to write a book where he claimed that Kanehsatake revolutionaries in the "Oka Crisis" (one of the key moments of anti-colonial resistance in Canada) were Canadian military contras whose purpose was to discredit the "progressive" settler town of Oka. To be clear, Philpot is a known colonial racist who tries to pretend that he is a member of the Canadian left: he is not; he is a colonial apologist and thus identical to the white supremacism of Bissonnette that he attempting to blame on external pressures. In the context #NoDAPL, which Counterpunch presumably supports, Philpot should be treated as persona non grata since he would be more than happy to endorse similar assaults on Indigenous communities in Québec. The fact that he had no moral problem with Oka's expansion into Kanehsatake in 1990––where they planned to obliterate a community cemetery––and in fact dismissed all criticism of this expansion as Anglo-chauvinism should have been seen as suspicious. The fact that he can dismiss the empirical evidence of setters lining up to throw rocks at the non-combatants leaving Kanehsatake when the barricades went up should be damning.
(Let's be clear: when Counterpunch publishes Philpot it's are claiming that it is okay to publish essays by those fuckers who think that settler racism is okay. Since Counterpunch has a history of defending Palestinian self-determination it should realize that Philpot's politics are logically equivalent to an Israeli settler claiming that Israelis, because of a history of anti-semitism, cannot be settler racists and that the Intifidas are anti-semitic conspiracies.)
According to Philpot, there is no racism in Québecois society because white Québec settlers are somehow uniquely predisposed to overcoming white colonial supremacy. More accurately, his worldview is such that Québec's existence has nothing to do with settler-colonialism, as if there was no French colonial project in the Western Hemisphere and the Franco settlers just magically appeared, living in harmony with the people whose land they stole, unlike their Anglo counterparts. The truth, of course, is that Québec was the result of a losing colonialism and is thus no different from any settler-colonial entity: racism is the foundation of these societies and thus racism is part of the Québecois subjectivity as much as it is a part of Anglo Canadian subjectivity. Philpot is in fact one of these racists as his treatment of the Oka event demonstrates.
It is indeed the case that Bissonnette cannot be blamed solely on the racism of Franco Québec culture (we find the same racism in Anglo Canadian society) and if Philpot had written an article pointing out this broader context it would be justified. But this is not the article he wrote: since his motivation was to dismiss Québecois racism rather than connect it to the larger trend of rising Canadian fascism, Philpot instead lapsed into bullshit conspiracy theory. Bissonnette exists outside of internal material relations and instead is a product of a vague "New World Order."
The New World Order! How such an article could be taken seriously nearly two decades into the 21st Century boggles the mind. You cannot help but feel you're reading a hot take written by someone trapped in the early 1990s whose political acumen hasn't evolved beyond high school politicization. Yeah I remember thinking there was a real political sequence called "the New World Order" way back in the 10th grade when I was listening to the Ministry song of the same name. The very terminology, let alone the claims Philpot ascribes to this terminology, belong to a political period that has since been eclipsed. It's really quite cartoonish.
The phrase "new world order" was George Bush Sr.'s way of talking about the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the emergence of the US as the primary world power. It was not the description of a political order separate from US-led imperialism, some Illuminati like structure of power (as Philpot presumes in his essay), but banal and in fact accurate statement about that conjuncture. That George Bush was indeed correct: with the fall of the Eastern Bloc there was a new world order in which the US was ascendant. A synonym of this "new world order", promoted by Francis Fukuyama, was "the end of history." Thus, the "new world order" was not a particular politics outside of capitalist-imperialism, as Philpot attempts to describe (and quite awkwardly), but the description of the victory of one imperialist power over its main challenger: the former rules of the cold war were no longer in effect, a new global game was emerging. But since then a lot of things have changed. Bush Sr. never conceived the ways in which the so-called "War on Terror" would play out, the return to power of Russia (but this time a capitalist Russia), the rise of China, the EU before and after Brexit… Philpot really needs to get his head out of the early 1990s' ass.
In an effort to dislocate the motives of the fascist who shot up the Québec City mosque from his concrete circumstances, Philpot courts the worst kind of conspiracy theory. (I'm sure that most of my readers have already suspected that "the New World Order" is a few steps shy from Jewish banking conspiracy garbage.) Meanwhile, Islamophobia is on the rise, fascists are murdering their racialized targets, and to deny that this problem is an external problem is to be complicit with fascism. Philpot's analysis is not only a joke for its "New World Order" garbage; it's a gross dismissal of racism on the part of someone who has a history of dismissing the racist fact of colonial society.
American Dream » Fri Jul 10, 2015 7:12 am wrote: http://blackcatnotes.com/2015/07/05/fro ... terrorism/From Rhodesia to Charleston: Looking for Who is Responsible for ‘Lone Wolf’ Racial Terrorism
Dylann Roof from jail.
The twenty-four hour news cycle often produces strong flashes when it transcribes hot news stories, coming in brief moments before the full picture has been painted. A shooting at the historic Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people declared official casualties of the church. Reports say that the shooter began as a parishioner joined in Bible study before picking up heavy artillery and opening fire.
At first this came as a big surprise, and certainly a break from the recent barrage of police murders that have marked the last months of coverage. This stood out as a return to a type of interpersonal violence that is easy to condemn and classify across the political spectrum. Confusion erupted and we saw that commentators were slow to cite race as the cause and to classify the deaths as an act of racial terrorism. The shooting in Charleston, which appears to many people on first glance as a completely random act of violence, is one that fits perfectly in an American tradition that has seen incidents like these without any evidence of slowing. It was not until eyewitness reports come in did the rhetoric begin to change, that its racial connection was solidified. One survivor reported that when confronted the shooter said,” I have to do it. You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. You have to go.” Now that his self-described “Manifesto” is in hand it is incredibly clear what this was: an act of racial warfare.
The document he produced can easily be dismissed as the rantings of a deranged young man, which, in some ways, it is, yet that misses one of the key insights that comes across in his work. The thought process and ideas he cites were not original to him and were instead adopted directly from publications and organizations that have constructed narratives about black populations in the United States. No substantive analysis is being done on the text, which is a common occurrence in American law enforcement as it brings out our desire to avoid adding reason and logic to events that seem to defy explanation. The first part of this is the immediate assumption of mental illness, which then relieves them of having to search for any logically sound reasoning. Mental illness is commonly used to completely reject normal engagement, which is partially why so many media outlets have denied this as an act of terrorism. Simply put: crazy people do crazy things, but terrorism, on the other hand is ideological. The second primary reason is that in it he takes a positive view towards racism, saying essentially that racist ideas are “correct.” This comes directly up against the understood notion in the liberal establishment that racism as a conscious concept has been completely overcome and that any example of racist ideas no longer need to be engaged because they are self-refuting. This is something that the radical left often shares as movements have long dispelled and challenged racist myths, yet this does not mean that a substantial population are not still promoting conscious racism in influential ways.
The issue of this as a “lone wolf” attack has led a lot of people confused. The term in this context comes from an essay from White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger as an option for violent action outside of an organizational structure. This has become incredibly important as we are seeing militant racist organizations like skinhead gangs or variants of the KKK decline sharply, yet we see violent actions remain constant. In the SPLC’s study of domestic right-wing terrorism over the last six years, they concluded that a full 74% of attacks where from a single person, and 90% either alone or in pairs. While the organized violent actors may be on the decline, the side that has only been increasing is the growing undercurrent of publications and blogs promoting the scientific racism of the future.
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