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Alt-Right Frames Wrong Esteban Santiago for Shooting, Kickstarts Racist Conspiracy Theory

Far rightwing figureheads immediately invented an elaborate and racist conspiracy theory that CNN had lightened a photo of alleged Fort Lauderdale airport shooter Esteban Santiago shortly after the Friday attack.

In reality, CNN had yet to air a picture of Santiago, let alone lightened a picture of him. The conspiracy also used a picture of an entirely different man named Esteban Santiago—not the alleged shooter.

Still, writers at websites like InfoWars and Gateway Pundit tweeted about CNN’s nonexistent Photoshop job. Former Republican Florida Congressman Allen West, who represented Fort Lauderdale itself, even tweeted about the conspiracy and linked to an article about it on his own website.

“Why is CNN attempting to make the shooter look more white? Bizarre,” reads InfoWars editor Paul Joseph Watson’s tweet, which had 3,500 retweets at press time.

Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft even wrote a story about the so-called incident, titled “Look How CNN Doctored Photo of Ft. Lauderdale Shooter Esteban Santiago,” which had 2,500 shares in its first hour on Facebook, according to BuzzSumo.

“It appears CNN doctored the photo to make the suspect look more white,” wrote Hoft. “Sad.”

The attached picture, which was neither aired nor lightened by CNN, is of a 39-year-old Esteban Santiago, who lives in New York state. The image was pulled from a Florida sex offender registry.

Instead, the Esteban Santiago who shot 13 people and left five dead in Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport on Friday was born in New Jersey and spent the last several years living in Anchorage, Alaska. According to officials, he is 26, not 39, and is currently in police custody.

A real image of the shooter circulated on the internet hours later, confirming that he is not the 39-year-old Santiago showed in Watson’s tweet and Gateway Pundit’s article.

What the alt-right is really about

Angela Nagle, Irish Times, 6 January 2017

Spencer is in the strict dictionary definition of the term, a racist. He claims “race is something between a breed and an actual species” and believes non-white Americans should leave in a ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’. He believes the Alt-right will infiltrate mainstream American culture and politics, starting with deporting undocumented immigrants under Trump. Spencer’s Alt-right takes influence from the French New Right who were often called ‘Gramscians of the Right’ applying the theories of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci , arguing that political goals would best be achieved through changing the culture and media from which formal politics would follow. And so far, it seems to be working.

The strictest definition of the Alt-right includes other overtly racial thinkers like Jared Taylor who calls himself a ‘race realist’, Steve Sailer who writes about ‘human biodiversity’ – a pretty transparent euphemism – and Nick Land who explores the idea of the ‘Dark Enlightenment’. All of these are to varying degrees preoccupied with racial IQ, the Bell Curve, Western civilisational decline due to increased racial impurity, cultural decadence, cultural Marxism and Islamification.

In its broader milieu, there is the ‘alt-lite’ made up of charismatic social media celebrities like Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopolous and VICE founder Gavin McInnes, mentioned in Pell’s piece. The alt-lite don’t share the hard alt right’s racial politics, despite the constant conflations of liberal media hyperbole – real Alt-righters regularly remind Milo he’s a ‘kike faggot’ – but all these groups have emerged online around the same time, and interact and promote each other, sharing many of the same hatreds of political correctness, feminism, immigration, the welfare state and the cultural left. They also share the same aesthetic sensibility that emerged from the anarchy of 4chan, the anonymous site that popularised the Pepe the frog memes, which proliferated during the Trump campaign.

The alt-right drove feminist writer Lindy West off Twitter. That has real-world political implications.




Prominent feminist and author Lindy West deactivated her Twitter account this week, and she was blunt about why: The social media platform, she alleged in an essay published by the Guardian, has refused to curb harassment carried out by members of the white nationalist, misogynist alt-right movement, thereby contributing to a global political crisis.

West has been targeted by sexist trolls on Twitter for years, and she has confronted them before, but she emphasized in her Guardian essay that she didn’t leave Twitter because all the sexist attacks she’s endured finally wore her down.

“I hate to disappoint anyone, but the breaking point for me wasn’t the trolls themselves (if I have learned anything from the dark side of Twitter, it is how to feel nothing when a frog calls you a cunt),” she wrote, referring to the alt-right’s use of Pepe the Frog as a racist unofficial mascot (much to its creator’s chagrin).

Rather, her breaking point — what made her feel she could no longer participate in the platform’s “profoundly broken culture” — was that Twitter has failed to acknowledge and deal with the alt-right’s use of the social network to spread its racist ideology, leading to severe, real-world repercussions:

The white supremacist, anti-feminist, isolationist, transphobic “alt-right” movement has been beta-testing its propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities for years now — how much hate speech will bystanders ignore? When will Twitter intervene and start protecting its users? — and discovered, to its leering delight, that the limit did not exist. No one cared. Twitter abuse was a grand-scale normalisation project, disseminating libel and disinformation, muddying long-held cultural givens such as “racism is bad” and “sexual assault is bad” and “lying is bad” and “authoritarianism is bad,” and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency. Twitter executives did nothing.

West’s declaration highlights the uncomfortable fact that Twitter has had years to make changes and reform its harassment and conduct policies, but has instead opted for a tentative, noncommittal, and often contradictory approach. And by failing to stop the rise of the alt-right in its midst, West argues, the site has helped to enable the spread of racist and anti-semitic ideology across the country.

...Twitter’s ongoing approach to dealing with both harassment and the alt-right has been characterized by conflict and confusion. In 2016, for example, while its well-documented harassment problem continued to worsen, the site remained slow to act and sometimes evaded or contradicted its own rules and policies.

In July, Twitter finally banned Breitbart writer and alt-right poster child Milo Yiannopoulos following several temporary suspensions ... but only after he led the aforementioned wave of harassment against Jones.

After the election in November, it launched new anti-harassment tools and internal protocols to help users report abuse, in addition to banning alt-right account holders like neo-Nazi-emboldening white supremacist leader Richard Spencer ... only to reinstate Spencer and bestow a shiny “verified” checkmark on Breitbart’s previously unverified Twitter account a few weeks later.

And all the while, Twitter’s rules and policies were frequently flouted by presidential candidate and now President-elect Donald Trump, whose behavior on the site often fits a pattern of harassment Twitter has banned before.

Many people interpreted these moves as a clear message from Twitter that it was ready to normalize white supremacy. After Trump weaponized the platform, using it to sic his supporters on anyone who spoke out against him, the site’s reinstatement of Spencer sparked widespread concern that Twitter was giving the alt-right an even larger microphone than it gained in the election. But right-wing extremists were delighted. “Jack finally kissed the ring,” exalted one Breitbart supporter.

For West, all of this came to a head in late December, when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asked users what changes they wanted to see on Twitter in 2017, then neatly sidestepped one overwhelmingly popular response: “Comprehensive plan for getting rid of the Nazis.” As West wrote:

“We’ve been working on our policies and controls,” Dorsey replied. “What’s the next most critical thing?” Oh, what’s our second-highest priority after Nazis? I’d say No 2 is also Nazis. And No 3. In fact, you can just go ahead and slide “Nazis” into the top 100 spots. Get back to me when your website isn’t a roiling rat-king of Nazis. Nazis are bad, you see?

In short, Twitter’s refusal to shut down hate speech and right-wing extremism led West to think of the site as equivalent to a local business with damaging affiliations — something she was no longer willing to support. “If my gynaecologist regularly hosted neo-Nazi rallies in the exam room, I would find someone else to swab my cervix,” she wrote.

Twitter isn’t going to ban individual hate groups on the basis of ideology alone.

It’s not like Twitter isn’t trying to deal with the problem. In an email to Vox earlier this week, a Twitter spokesperson pointed out that the site recently banned the formerly verified white supremacist Matthew Heimbach for violating its rules against violent speech, harassment, and other forms of abuse. Twitter has also suspended other known white supremacists, like fringe neo-Nazi Alex Linder, for the same reasons.

Still, West and others (justifiably) maintain that Twitter isn’t trying hard enough. Plenty of other, more prominent white supremacists remain active on the website — including former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. In addition to being a famous racist, Duke relentlessly tweets anti-Semitic statements about Jewish people and Israel, along with white supremacist propaganda, including thinly veiled Nazi rhetoric decrying “cultural Marxism.”

Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 08, 2017 2:28 pm wrote:Why did you skip the explainer from last week, though?

It even had a glossary!

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/the-a ... -1.2924658

RICHARD SPENCER: ALT-RIGHT, WHITE NATIONALIST, ANTI-SEMITE


Spencer, Anglin and Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism had for some time been at the edges of Spencer’s projects. Spencer promoted Kevin McDonald as a “thinker” on things Jewish. A former psychology professor, the white nationalist McDonald argues that Jews are driven to destroy western societies. He praised Anders Brevik, the racist who in 2011 massacred seventy-seven people at a Norwegian youth camp. Even pan-white nationalist Sam Francis had flirted with anti-Semitism, writing a foreword to Kevin McDonald’s 2004 book Understanding Jewish Influence. Richard Spencer posted both on his National Policy Institute website.

But recently anti-Semitism has surfaced as a central element of Spencer’s Alt-Right worldview.

A December 14, 2016 podcast by The Right Stuff (TRS) gave Spencer an opportunity to display his developing anti-Semitism. TRS’s Mike Enoch introduced the budding alliance between what Andrew Anglin dubbed the “First Triumvirate”:

Enoch: “This is actually the most interesting podcast on the Alt-Right that you’re gonna hear. It’s me, Mike Enoch, I’m here with Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin. So, what’s the likelihood that you’re gonna get all three of us on one radio program together?”

Anglin: “Well in the future it could be more and more likely…

Spencer: “This will be the nightly news, basically…”

Enoch: “We’re all here to show solidarity with one another. We all are coming from slightly different angles and approaches to this thing, but I think we’re all fundamentally on the same team.”

Anglin: “And more or less on the same page”

This exchange begs the question of just what “page” are they are on. Anglin’s page is filled with rabid anti-Semitism, including copious use of the slur “kike,” referring to Jews as “a virus” and a “human disease,” and targeting individual Jews with images of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and the infamous yellow Star-of-David “Juden” patches forced on Jews during the Holocaust. In a response to the upcoming march announced by Anglin, Spencer explained,

“Andrew Anglin and I have different styles; we have different approaches. But, I think Andrew Anglin saw me as part of the broader Alt-Right. He saw me as part of the broader, you could say, pro-white community. And he fought back. He saw me under threat and he fought back… I don’t know Andrew Anglin, terribly well. I’ve spoken to him over the phone once, and we were on a podcast together once. I can’t say that he’s a friend of mine, I’ve never met him. And again, he’s wild – I don’t think he’d be offended by my saying that. We have different styles. But this is one thing I will say, and I will say this with confidence – Andrew Anglin is a rational person.”

In contrast to Anglin’s “rational person” anti-Semitism, Spencer tries to walk a line between American Renaissance-style and neo-Nazi white nationalism. Spencer avoids the crass rhetoric of Anglin, preferring to cast the effect of an imagined Jewish power on “Western civilization” as “tragic.” Spencer masks his anti-Semitism in the “academic” veneer deployed by Kevin McDonald, casting his budding obsession with Jewish power in a language of cultural psychology and ethnic group politics. It is, however, a thin veil easily pierced by a quick read.

Spencer further elaborated on his view of Jews during the TRS podcast,

“The left always wants to believe that they are the underdog… This interesting elite class that we have now, it’s like elite that wants to pretend that it’s the underdog. It’s a very interesting thing psychologically…It’s obviously a Jewish trait…Jews can’t be the over-dog.”

Spencer added,

“The reason why Jews exist is because they have a sense of themselves and because they’re a little bit paranoid…They have to perceive anti-Semitism – I’m speaking from their perspective, not ours – they have to perceive anti-Semitism in order to generate and maintain group coherence.”

An exchange during the TRS podcast illustrates the distinctions between Anglin and Spencer’s “styles” and “approaches.” After Anglin expounded his views on Chinese people and Jews, concluding that the later have a “completely alien psychology,” Spencer added,

“I guess the difference is that unlike the Chinese, the Jews are really in our heads… I’m fine in a way…with like the alien way that the Japanese look at the world, you know, because…the Japanese are not an enemy of the white race. They’re just other… But we’re connected with the Jews in this way that we kind of both need each other in some terrible sense…I mean we have this strange, ambivalent relationship with Jews… but it’s almost like we don’t even know who we are without them at some level…They really are deep in our psyche. I don’t think we should underestimate the power.”

Mike Enoch responded, “I think that I get what you’re saying, and that it does seem like because of this sort of seemingly all-pervasive control of media and institutions…They’ve [Jews] like embedded themselves everywhere…I don’t think there’s like a need there, because I think it’s been a destructive relationship for 2000 years. More so recently when they were sort of integrated and took over a lot of institutions.”

Spencer clarified, apparently not wanting to seem too philo-Semitic:

“I’m not saying that we need them…I’m definitely not saying that European civilization wouldn’t exist without the Jews… But I am saying what you’re saying, which is it’s like, we can’t underestimate their power and the degree to which they really have embedded themselves in our civilization and our psyche. Like it is a powerful thing, we’re not dealing with Mexicans, we’re not dealing with a Chinese civilization…The Jews, it’s a much more painful relationship… It’s a very tragic thing.”

The exchange continues:

Anglin: “And Kevin McDonald talks about this, that they [Jews] sort of re-create the culture in their image to make it something that they comfortable with…They’ve overwritten our cultural values with their own cultural values.”

Spencer: “Well look…what I’m trying to get at, is I don’t want to be just a polemical person, where it’s like ‘The Jews are bad.’ We’ve got to get at that tragic element, to where we are…”

Enoch: “We have to also acknowledge that… this is a very cohesive group of people that is, you know, essentially eroding our cohesion for their own benefit, and like that’s f–ked up.”

Spencer: “Yeah, they kind of need us in a way…So I can imagine a European culture outside of the Jews…But in a weird way, it is the people that shall not dwell alone, to borrow a title from Kevin McDonald’s book. They do need us…in this tragic way.”

Anglin: “It’s a virus. They’re a human disease” [laughter]

Spencer: “Somewhat inflammatory language, but I understand what you’re saying.”

NO HONOR AMONG TROLLS: ‘THE RIGHT STUFF’ GETS DOXED BY THEIR OWN ‘MOVEMENT’

January 10, 2017

There’s been another round of doxing at the extreme alt-right podcast The Daily Shoah, and this time, we can thank the sectarian insanity of the alt-right movement itself.

It all started when Red Ice Radio hosted a discussion with the pseudonymous “Reactionary Jew” asking if reactionaries Jews had any place in the alt-right. Many meme hardened Nazi keyboard warriors were angered that the question was even being considered, and took to the alt-right Internet to denounce Red Ice’s capitulation to the Jewish agenda. Some regular posters from the 504ums (the private forum of The Right Stuff, home to The Daily Shoah, Fash the Nation, and our old pal Ghoul) took the side of Red Ice in the face of these attacks.

This was enough to set off a trollstorm on other boards, leading to TRS heavies, including Mike Enoch (founder of TRS), Seventh Son, and Bulbasaur, to be roundly accused of being soft on Jews and gays, of using message boards to “shill” for their own site (based simply on a few folks having shared some links), and of course, of being secret Jews or gays themselves. This touched off a puerile feud between boards, consisting mostly of idiotic trolling, immature accusations, and denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

TRS was given an ultimatum: apologize on the air, or face a doxing. As defiant screencaps from the 504um were leaked by TRS insiders onto other sites, Bulbasaur from TRS allegedly responded to a dox threat by daring people to try it. They called his bluff. When the dust settled, two prominent hosts of The Daily Shoah, including Bulbasaur, had been doxed by their own white nationalist “comrades.” This release of info also comes as another prominent Alt-Right celebrity, Millennial Woes has reportedly fled Scotland after having their information released as well.


Millennial Woes, another recently doxed Alt-Right podcast personality.

This childish spectacle once again demonstrates the shocking lack of seriousness, discipline, and solidarity in the alt-right ‘movement,’ and highlights that behind the occasional window-dressing of political sophistication, many of these pseudonymous goofballs are basically just internet trolls who almost always seem to be alone or in very small groups where they live, talking heaping piles of shit while never mobilizing any kind of effective street presence.

Millennial Woes is Him: Racist Video Blogger Outed, Reportedly Flees Country



The last video uploaded to the Millennial Woes YouTube channel presumably by Robertson says that he has left the UK in the wake of his outing, is now “being sheltered by fans abroad” and that the video may be his last upload. The video also states, “I do not hate women, Jews, Muslims, gays minorities or anyone else, and have consistently condemned violence.” Several videos from this channel, among them those that celebrated the anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death, called for Whites to be racist, and his speech at the Erkenbrand conference have been removed. Tweets accusing the police in the UK in aiding and abetting Muslims who rape and an ironic complaint of Facebook banning him for saying Muslim immigration should be banned, still remain. The UK, particularly Scotland, has laws forbidding hate speech.

I have come to believe, in the course of our bizarro unfriendship, that Milo believes in almost nothing concrete—not even in free speech. The same is reportedly true of Trump, of people like Ann Coulter, of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage: They are pure antagonists unencumbered by any conviction apart from their personal entitlement to raw power and stacks of cash.

– Laurie Penny

Does Neo-Nazi Media Kingpin Live on Upper East Side — With a Jewish Wife?

January 15, 2017 By Dan Friedman



Does a key media neo-Nazi — hitherto anonymous — live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his Jewish wife? That’s what reports from rival racist factions in the broader “alt-right” movement indicate.

Mike “Enoch,” head of neo-Nazi site The Right Stuff that puts out “The Daily Shoah” and “Fash the Nation” podcasts which also, most famously, developed the ((())) echoes plugin, has been exposed as Mike Peinovich, a software developer originally from Montclair, New Jersey.

By judicious removal of letters of his family name, Peinovich reportedly becomes “Enoch” — an allusion to British racial separatist politician Enoch Powell.

Nothing in the world of the “alt-right” agglomeration of misogynists, anti-Semites, and white supremacists is ever quite as it seems. What seems to have happened, though, is that resulting from a clash (on Red Ice Radio) about whether members should even speak to Jews, The Right Stuff crew got into a spat with an 8Chan group called Baphomet.

Baphomet responded by attacking the TRS site as well as revealing names, addresses and families of a number of key pseudonymous members of the “alt-right” including Enoch, who seems to have admitted the accusation.