NYTIMES: A Year After Charlottesville, Disarray in the White Supremacist Movement

Posted on August 14, 2018 by Luke Ford

From the New York Times:

“Now, we are facing so much pushback that people are not in the mood to celebrate,” said Richard B. Spencer, the white nationalist and prominent alt-right figure, who declined to attend Sunday’s event. “And I’m not going to do something demoralizing.”

The coalition of old-school racist groups, neo-Confederates and Internet-savvy white identitarians that brought about last year’s rally has proved, in the months since, to be a disparate herd that cannot agree on a leader or a particular brand of intolerance. Mobilizing large numbers of white supremacists in public appears to be a challenge, even though nobody would ever say they have gone away. In fact, their discriminatory messages are now echoed by some politicians and commentators…

But in a sign of the fracturing of the alt-right, before, during and after the Sunday rally, hard-core racists and neo-Nazis, whom Mr. Kessler has publicly disavowed, took to social media to attack him and this weekend’s protest, which was billed as a second Unite the Right event. Many of those attacks took place on Gab, an online forum to which many on the alt-right migrated after they were kicked off Twitter.

The attacks came from both well-known members of the alt-right and from anonymous followers. Their argument, in essence, was that Mr. Kessler was not extreme enough.

One Gab poster, who identified himself as Sterben, said that Mr. Kessler should have been more welcoming to Nazis and other such groups “because there’s more of us and history is never on the side of the cowards.”

A week before the event in Washington, Andrew Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, published an article titled, “Don’t Go to Unite the Right 2 — We Disavow.”

“We cannot win a battle on the streets,” Mr. Anglin wrote.

Instead, he counseled taking part in events like “Stormer Book Clubs,” where followers “can get together with other people who think like we do in real life.”

“We need to remain in the realm of the hip, cool, sexy, fun,” Mr. Anglin wrote. “We need to speak to the culture. We do not want the image of being a bunch of weird losers who march around” while “completely outnumbered and get mocked by the entire planet.”

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on NYTIMES: A Year After Charlottesville, Disarray in the White Supremacist Movement

Coverage & Commentary On Unite The Right 2 (8-12-18)

Posted on August 12, 2018 by Luke Ford

MP3.

Dennis Dale comments: “None of this is going to mean anything by this time next week, but it’s a win for Kessler. His critics were right–turnout was awful, but that didn’t turn out to be the disaster imagined, because the counter-protesters were so many and so manic. The story is a bunch of antifa starting fights with cops, harassing reporters and making general spectacles of themselves.
The low turnout and tepid speeches of Kessler et al only serve to make the lefty reaction look more paranoid.”

* NYTIMES: ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Lovely’: Trump Tweets Reflect Fixation on Women’s Appearances

* VANITY FAIR: HAS STEPHEN MILLER BECOME A SHADOW MASTER AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT?

* VDARE: Stephen Miller’s Uncle Raises Question: Should Jews Have Been Allowed To Immigrate?

* VICE: Of Course, ‘Mad Max’ Bernier Thinks More Diversity Is Bad

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on Coverage & Commentary On Unite The Right 2 (8-12-18)

Google Blocks JWed For Being ‘Exclusively Jewish’

Posted on August 12, 2018 by Luke Ford

JWed posts:

We need your help! Last summer, google blocked JWed ads in their display network because our ads said ‘Exclusively Jewish’. In a follow-up phone call, they advised us we need to remove the word ‘exclusively’ from not just our ads, but also from everywhere on our website!

We obviously did not comply because the whole reason for the existence of JWed is that we are Jewish-only and we promote Jewish marriage in order to reduce intermarriage. At the time, we spoke with some attorneys and decided against taking any action.

However, the situation with them just escalated in this past week, so it’s time for us to take action.

What Happened Next?

Last summer, advertising was not our top priority which is one reason why we chose not to fight Google at the time. However, in recent weeks, we have made plans to increase our advertising efforts to give you faces of more Jewish singles to choose from. Google Advertising remains one of the most effective ways to advertise so we looked for ways to work around their block. We determined we were willing to remove the word “exclusively” from our ads and landing page if we re-targeted our ads to people who we know already clicked on previous JWed ads (on Facebook, JPost.com, etc). This was our audience after all so how could Google object?

Boy were we shocked with their response! Last year they said the problem was “exclusively” but this time, they told us on the phone that we must also remove the word “JEWISH” from our ads AND everywhere on our website. They said our dating site would only be acceptable to them if it was a plain vanilla dating site for ALL people.

Why Are They Doing This?

Clearly, the reason for their policy is that they believe any service which exclusively serves one religion or ethnicity is somehow discriminatory. However, the Jewish religion demands that Jews marry only other Jews. This makes Google’s actions religious discrimination. Google can claim we are also religiously discriminating but there is one large difference. CHOICE. Consumers have the option to use any number of THOUSANDS of dating sites – many of which are far larger than JWed. If JWed does not serve their needs, they may try another dating site. However, Google has a MONOPOLY. There are no other cost-effective choices, particularly in display ads and retargeting.

Aren’t They Violating Their Own Policy?

You will note in their rejection message above and in their own written policies, they say advertising to specific ethnicities or races is prohibited but nothing is said about religion. Does google really want a fight to decide if Judaism is a religion or an ethnicity? After all, ANYONE can convert to Judaism. Last we checked, that makes us a religion.

Aren’t Their Actions Clearly Illegal? How Can this Happen!

Religious discrimination, violation of their own policies, abuse of monopoly power… take your pick. There is plenty here which seems illegal but the government has done nothing about this. Google is powerful so action will not be taken unless we band together and take action.
What Will JWed Do About It?
Honestly, we don’t know yet. If we make too much noise, Google could retaliate. We rely on their company for many critical business services including search advertising for which we have not been banned from yet; but we believe the time has come to do something.

Our next step is to raise awareness of this issue, and network with people within the Jewish community and beyond who care about religious freedom. Will that lead to Google dropping their ban, will it lead to us suing Google? We don’t know yet how that will play out.

In the meantime we need allies.

How Can I Help JWed?

Today all we are asking is for one simple thing. FOLLOW US ON TWITTER and FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS.

We have revived our Twitter account and we plan to raise awareness of what has happened here. We need you to retweet our posts to influential organizations, politicians, and other individuals who you think can help.

Through these efforts, we hope to gain free legal representation, public relations services, and other advocates who can help us traverse the terrain ahead. Ultimately, we would be happy if our efforts placed public pressure on Google to change their policy and lift the ban against JWed.

WE BELIEVE THIS IS POSSIBLE WITH YOUR HELP. After all, does Google really want to be accused of HINDERING an organization dedicated to reducing intermarriage 70 years after the Nazis tried to wipe us off the face of the earth?

Let’s make sure this is a battle that Google cannot win.

See you on Twitter! – https://twitter.com/JWed

Ben Rabizadeh,
Founder & President, JWed.com

Posted in Google, Jews | Comments Off on Google Blocks JWed For Being ‘Exclusively Jewish’

Ross Douthat: The White Strategy

Posted on August 12, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Ethnogenesis is most effectively implemented by attacking random members of a group for being members of that group.

In self-defense they begin to feel a sense of solidarity with other members of that group.

This is so profoundly obvious I’m unclear why it even needs to be mentioned.

It is true Trump lost the GOP many Romney voters, especially educated women, lost the popular vote, and carried the electoral college by winning PA, MI, and WI by very thin margins.

Trump, however, ran a disorganized campaign and was, notwithstanding some unique strengths, not a very good candidate. He also had the good luck of running against a nepotism/affirmative action candidate that was extraordinarily unpopular and united the GOP in a way Obama and Bill Clinton did not.

Other politicians can take Trump’s coalition and expand it just by being more personally appealing than him.

Would Tom Cotton, for instance, running on a Trumpy platform, lose many of Trump’s voters? I think he wouldn’t, but would also take back many of the educated McCain/Romney voters who defected or stayed home in 2016. The same for Mike Pence or Kris Kobach.

I seem to remember Ross linking right to iSteve several times before. But these days the kooks and “Featured Book: Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler” lined up to the right of the blog prevent that from happening.

Douthat is a conservative Catholic on social issues and centrist on economic issues, and I believe has likely been a straight-ticket GOP voter his whole adult life.

Also a Stevosphere member of long standing.

* As my favourite Jewish academic and Labour Lord likes to say, it isn’t that the English hate the Labour party, it is that the English think the Labour party hates them.

Obviously, the truth is that the English are racist for noticing…

* Sailer has catalogued the ‘Flight from White’ for a number of years now. Many Whites will simply attack other Whites in order to fit in with the zeitgeist or simply make up tall tales of their own ethnic background (Elizabeth Warren’s supposed ‘native ancestry’ fits this).

But there will be a core who do not shy away from the fight. And it is this core upon the future hinges.

* The polarization is inevitable. If you see anti-Whitism, don’t bother trying to argue against it. Just expose it. Encourage the person to say the most anti-White things possible.

* He wasn’t the perfect candidate but he was by far the best candidate, and one of the best of any era in this country. Trump’s no Demosthenes and he won’t have his speeches compiled as masterpieces of literature but his ability to get unlimited free publicity with his antics is just the right tool for survival in postmodern democracy.

* Republicans who are unapologetic, tough and practical – while also fair – will get more respect from all but the elite minorities. For example, cracking down on illegal immigration will be more popular with Hispanic voters than open borders. Why people can’t understand that a Texan roofer named Jorge might not be happy about a couple million Central Americans suddenly showing up just confounds me. And as for black voters, you aren’t going to outdemocrat the democrats, so appeal to the types who have their lives together and dislike the BLM punks. They need a reason to vote Republican, and if you just imitate the democrats with racial platitudes there is no reason.

Pandering will get Republicans nowhere. It will have diminishing returns for democrats as well. Now that minorities have more of their own candidates to choose from, why vote for some supplicating white sad sack?

The way forward for Republicans is to be unapologetic Americans. That includes being unapologetic about race, culture, religion, etc. You don’t gain admirers by grovelling. Especially not among your typical working class minorities.

Now the elite minorities are another story. They have assimilated to white elite norms of contempt for non-elite white Americans. Most of them are fully onboard with the new Morgenthau Plan for non-progressive white America. It’s a shame but it is what it is, and there’s probably not much that can be done about it besides clamping down on immigration from Asia and letting the Sarah Jeong’s of this world have it with both barrels.

And speaking of her, that fine lady is now Ross Douthat’ s esteemed colleague. Mr. Douthat, always ready to condemn any hint of something inoffensive and normal such as white solidarity, hasn’t made a peep about Jeong’s racial trash-talking. Her employment at the Times is only going to make him look more like a hypocrite than he already does. I mean, you could make excuses for Charles Blow, but not an ungrateful little snake like her. So every time he gets on his high horse about racism, people are going to know he works for a paper that endorses racial hatred of whites.

That can’t be a very comfortable position to be in for Ross.

Posted in America | Comments Off on Ross Douthat: The White Strategy

‘The Categorical Error At The Heart Of White Nationalism’

Posted on August 12, 2018 by Luke Ford

Davis Campbell describes himself as: “Sort of Chinese. Very Christian. The King’s College ’16. Harvard Law School ’21.”

He writes:

One of the assumptions of white nationalism, and of white identity politics more generally, is that “white people” are a distinct group united by a common heritage and a common interest in preserving that heritage.

This assumption is false.

A number of ethnicities and cultures have been absorbed under the category of “whiteness,” not because they share a common heritage, but because the members of those ethnic groups have relatively light skin. Yet shared skin color hardly forms a proper basis for a cohesive political community.

Of course, there is at least one people group in America whose members, despite having diverse ethnic backgrounds, have become a discernible ethnic and cultural group with a shared heritage. I refer to African-Americans, particularly those whose ancestors were brought here as slaves. The people who were brought over from Africa long ago belonged to various distinct tribes (seeing themselves as distinct, having different family histories, speaking different languages, etc.), but the shared experience of being forcibly brought to a foreign land as slaves, and the culture that grew out of that experience, was sufficient to provide the basis for a new shared identity. That shared identity was reinforced by generations of Jim Crow, and made possible the self-defensive political cohesion among blacks which, in turn, made possible the civil rights movement.

Nothing comparable exists for white people. There is nothing that makes “whiteness” into a legitimate basis for a shared identity among members of diverse ethnic groups. This is why white nationalists have to make up examples of anti-white oppression and “white genocide”; the threat of violence or oppression against “white people” would give whites a reason to unite in political self-defense. And generally, when white nationalists want whites to act in “self-defense,” they mean writing white supremacy into the law.

The United States historically saw itself as a white nation. That’s why the first immigration law of 1790 restricted citizenship to white people of good character.

I’d love to see Davis Campbell go to China and tell the Chinese that being of Chinese ancestry means nothing for Chinese citizenship. I’d love to see him go to Japan and tell people there that there’s no need for Japanese ancestry for somebody to become Japanese. Obviously, no white person can ever become Chinese or Japanese.

George Hawley wrote in his 2017 book Making Sense of the Alt Right:

* Detailing the history of white nationalism in America is trickier than it first appears. This is because, despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, the United States operated as a de facto white-supremacist nation for most of its history.

* Jefferson was no racial egalitarian—see his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” where he states his belief that blacks “are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”13 The case against Jefferson as an egalitarian is even weaker when we note that Jefferson hoped that, after slavery was eventually abolished, freed blacks would be returned to Africa.

Moving forward through history, it is easy to find evidence that Americans continued to view the United States as a “white country,” and policies designed to maintain white demographic dominance were often uncontroversial: the Chinese Exclusionary Act of 1882, the Immigration Act of 1924 (which ushered in a four-decade period of low immigration), and President Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback (which forcibly deported undocumented immigrants), to name just a few. The Progressive movement that thrived in the early twentieth century had a transparent racial and eugenicist element to it. Famous progressive eugenicists such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard thought the idea of racial equality was absurd.

…white supremacy was formally institutionalized throughout most of American history.

* Jared Taylor, of the “race-realist” realist” group American Renaissance, probably agrees with Senator Bernie Sanders on very little, but his own writings on this subject (“Since early colonial times, and until just a few decades ago, virtually all Whites believed race was a fundamental aspect of individual and group identity”)15 clearly echo Sanders’s claim that the United States was created “on racist principles.”16 Although they reach different conclusions, both men argue that the United States was viewed by its founders as a country for people of European ancestry.

Encyclopedia:

The first statute in the United States to codify naturalization law. Alternately known as the Nationality Act, the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” who had been in the U.S. for two years. In effect, it left out indentured servants, slaves, and most women. This implied that black and, later, Asian immigrants were not eligible to be naturalized, but it said nothing about the citizenship status of non-white persons born on American soil. Subsequent nineteenth-century legislation included a racial requirement for citizenship. It was one of several early immigration laws that shaped the framework and outcome of the Ozawa v. United States case in 1922.[1]

Upon declaring independence from Great Britain, the leaders of the new republic aspired to create a distinct American nationality and minimize the risk of another monarchy. When they drafted the 1787 Constitution, they did not define what they meant by “natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States” and said very little about immigration. As historian Rudolph Vecoli notes, “one became an American by choice, not by descent,” through a common commitment to the doctrine of natural rights. Consequently, the only distinction between “natural born” and naturalized citizens it made was that the latter were to be ineligible for the presidency. It did authorize Congress to “establish a uniform Rule of naturalization” and allowed for the “migration or importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit,” resulting in a steady flow of slaves until 1808.[2]

The Naturalization Act of 1790 set the criteria for naturalization to two years of residency, proof of good moral character, and an oath to support the Constitution. It also mandated that one must “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to every foreign Prince, Potentate, State or Sovereignty.” Despite its generous terms extending citizenship to all children of citizens, it denied the right to naturalize to “persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States.” The law’s use of the phrase, “free white person,” also excluded blacks and immigrants of other races from being eligible for citizenship.[3] In 1795, as anti-immigrant feeling began to grow, the necessary period of residence was increased to five years. Without the right to naturalize, immigrants would not be able to vote and would have no political voice or power.

In 1870, Congress created a second racial category. In keeping with the reforms of the Reconstruction era, the new legislation gave “aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent” access to citizenship. Racial barriers to naturalization remained for Asians, but loopholes in citizenship rules and procedures allowed for successful petitions for naturalization through local courts. The Naturalization Act of 1906 standardized the application process with direct bearing on the Ozawa case. This legislation now regulated nonracial requirements such as filing a declaration of intention and appearing before a judge, but the preceding racial limitations were left intact.

Posted in Alt Right, America, Nationalism | Comments Off on ‘The Categorical Error At The Heart Of White Nationalism’

This Week’s Parasha – Shofetim (Deuteronomy 16:18–21:9)

Posted on August 12, 2018 by Luke Ford

Wikipedia: “Shofetim or Shoftim (שֹׁפְטִים‬ — Hebrew for “judges,” the first word in the parashah) is the 48th weekly Torah portion (פָּרָשָׁה‬, parashah) in the annual Jewish cycle of Torah reading and the fifth in the Book of Deuteronomy. It constitutes Deuteronomy 16:18–21:9. The parashah provides a constitution — a basic societal structure — for the Israelites. The parashah sets out rules for judges, kings, Levites, prophets, cities of refuge, witnesses, war, and unsolved murder victims.”

This is my favorite Torah portion.

* Justice is a word that makes Jews excited just like the word “love” makes Christians excited. (Dennis Prager)

* The idea of one God with one moral code for humanity (ethical monotheism) makes the pursuit of justice easier. That’s why the Torah condemns idolatry, because that compromises ethical monotheism.

Deuteronomy:

17 Do not sacrifice to the Lord your God an ox or a sheep that has any defect or flaw in it, for that would be detestable to him.

2 If a man or woman living among you in one of the towns the Lord gives you is found doing evil in the eyes of the Lord your God in violation of his covenant, 3 and contrary to my command has worshiped other gods, bowing down to them or to the sun or the moon or the stars in the sky, 4 and this has been brought to your attention, then you must investigate it thoroughly. If it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done in Israel, 5 take the man or woman who has done this evil deed to your city gate and stone that person to death. 6 On the testimony of two or three witnesses a person is to be put to death, but no one is to be put to death on the testimony of only one witness. 7 The hands of the witnesses must be the first in putting that person to death, and then the hands of all the people. You must purge the evil from among you.

8 If cases come before your courts that are too difficult for you to judge—whether bloodshed, lawsuits or assaults—take them to the place the Lord your God will choose. 9 Go to the Levitical priests and to the judge who is in office at that time. Inquire of them and they will give you the verdict. 10 You must act according to the decisions they give you at the place the Lord will choose. Be careful to do everything they instruct you to do. 11 Act according to whatever they teach you and the decisions they give you. Do not turn aside from what they tell you, to the right or to the left. 12 Anyone who shows contempt for the judge or for the priest who stands ministering there to the Lord your God is to be put to death. You must purge the evil from Israel. 13 All the people will hear and be afraid, and will not be contemptuous again.

14 When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us,” 15 be sure to appoint over you a king the Lord your God chooses. He must be from among your fellow Israelites. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not an Israelite.

18: 9 When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there. 10 Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, 11 or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. 12 Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord; because of these same detestable practices the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you. 13 You must be blameless before the Lord your God.

You have a separation of powers in the Torah constitution with the Israelites, priests, Levites and King constantly checking each other.

From CNN:

(CNN)Far-right groups and counterprotesters are expected to converge on the nation’s capital Sunday, one year after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, left one person dead and elevated racial tensions in America.

The “Unite the Right 2” rally is being billed as a “white civil rights rally” meant to protest “civil rights abuse in Charlottesville.”
Sunday’s demonstrations and the opposing rallies are taking place in an atmosphere of heightened racial tension.
In recent months, anxiety over racial bias and racism has been exemplified in instances in which police were called on people of color for innocuous acts like napping in a dormitory common room, having a barbecue and going to the pool.
This week, NFL players in the first preseason games resumed their protests over police brutality against blacks by raising their fists, kneeling or sitting out during the National Anthem.
“We’ve always acted as if black lives never mattered, as if people of color never mattered,” Susan Bro, the mother of the counterprotester killed in Charlottesville last year, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday. “We really have not treated people of color in the same way we ourselves want to be treated. And I’m calling b.s. on that.”
As many as 400 people are expected to attend Sunday’s white nationalist demonstration, according to the event’s permit application submitted by Jason Kessler, the same person who organized last year’s “Unite the Right” rally in opposition to the renaming of two parks honoring Confederate generals.
That event included white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Participants are expected to gather at Washington’s Foggy Bottom subway station at 5 p.m. ET before marching to Lafayette Square park, across the street from the White House, according to the permit application.

They won’t be alone. A series of counterprotests are planned in Washington throughout the day, led by members of 40 anti-racism groups. The Shut it Down D.C. Coalition, for example, scheduled its own rally beginning at noon to counter “Unite the Right 2.”
Black Lives Matter DC is hosting the “Rise Up Fight Back Counter-Protest” between 2 and 7 p.m., just a block away from where “Unite the Right 2” is set to take place.
In the past, similar far-right demonstrations have been dwarfed by counterprotests.
For example, at a a separate Ku Klux Klan gathering in Charlottesville in July 2017, where Klansmen were outnumbered 20 to 1, according to Charlottesville officials.

Posted in Alt Right, Torah | Comments Off on This Week’s Parasha – Shofetim (Deuteronomy 16:18–21:9)

Popular Minneapolis Rabbi Charged In Underage Sex Sting

Posted on August 12, 2018 by Luke Ford

From the Forward:

A popular Minneapolis rabbi known for his student outreach work is facing charges stemming from a child sex sting conducted by Minnesota law enforcement in January and early February.

Rabbi Aryeh Cohen was arrested February 1, after exchanging messages with a federal agent posing as a 15-year-old for over a week, according to the criminal complaint filed Tuesday. The complaint alleges that Cohen discussed a sexual liaison with the agent on Grindr, a popular hookup site for men. He was arrested outside the North St. Paul apartment the agent had invited him to as part of the sting. He was charged with two felonies relating to electronic communication about sex with a minor.

Cohen is one of 17 men who have been charged through the sting in recent days.

“I sort of deserve it,” Cohen said unprompted while being taken to the local police department and before being informed of his Miranda rights, according to the complaint.

Posted in Abuse | Comments Off on Popular Minneapolis Rabbi Charged In Underage Sex Sting

THE ALT-RIGHT ONE YEAR AFTER CHARLOTTESVILLE

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Luke Ford

Jacob Siegel writes for Tablet:

I’ve had two conversations with alt right figurehead Richard Spencer. The first one I initiated a few years ago in the period when Spencer, experiencing his first flush of public recognition, was routinely described as dapper for wearing khakis and loafers. The second happened only a few months ago. He is no longer described as dapper, but then he is rarely mentioned at all these days.

The first conversation was in late 2016 a few months before the election of Donald Trump. We spoke by phone for a story I was writing for Tablet about Spencer’s one time mentor, a cranky paleoconservative intellectual and Brooklyn-born Jew named Paul Gottfried.

At the time the alt right was ascendant and I feared its growth would continue. I’d been interested in the movement since around 2012, when it was mostly unknown and no one viewed it as a viable political force, and I’d seen how far it had come in a short time.

I also thought American society was polarizing and fracturing creating spaces for new, more extreme political movements to grow out of the cracks. Then, a few months after speaking with Spencer and shortly after my story about the origins and nature of the alt right was published, Trump surprised nearly everyone and won the presidency.

Shortly after Trump’s election I went on a popular podcast hosted by some Libertarian friends who had previously compared Spencer to Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps. They argued that, like Phelps, Spencer was a media phenomenon. The alt right’s power and influence were being inflated, they claimed, by a credulous news establishment hungry for Nazis in headlines, in part to distract from that same establishment’s near total blindness regarding the Trump phenomenon. While agreeing with parts of that analysis, I countered that only a few years before no one had even heard of Spencer and now all of a sudden the President was tweeting alt right memes and appealing to them as an influential opinion bloc. Of course there was a danger of panic and overreaction but at the time, the opposite impulse, failing to take the new movement seriously, seemed to me the more salient risk.

Here’s what I thought might happen. Spencer and his wing of the alt right, which already had their own think tank and book publisher, would spread their ideas and influence through sympathetic elements in the new Trump administration. I never believed that a large, openly neo Nazi movement had any chance of success in America but a more insidious and cleverly calibrated creep of fascist and racist ideas seemed to me a very real possibility.

Then, one year ago Thursday came Charlottesville and an unexpected turning point for the alt right. The so called “Unit the Right” march in Charlottesville started with a call for various right wing groups to rally in defense of confederate monuments. It ended with a chant of “Jews will not replace us!” before descending into violence. A left wing counterprotestor, Heather Heyer, was killed when a man affiliated with the Alt Right drove his car into a crowd.

I’d feared a Spencerite faction of the alt right exercising its power in the shadows through policy papers and DC cocktail hours. Instead, Spencer was chasing headlines and leading groups overrun with phonies, two bit con men and social misfits on tiki torch marches through major American cities. After Charlottesville, the tendency it represented veered towards a cheap nazi burlesque, with people breaking down crying on Youtube videos and outing each other’s real identities while engaging in a series of endless infights. The piece de resistance came when the well-known leader of a white nationalist group, the Traditionalist Worker Party, was arrested and charged with beating up his wife and her stepfather. The stepfather, as Jerry Springer might have scripted, was also co-founder of the white nationalist group.

Now, some of the same people involved in the Unite the Right disaster are planning to rally this weekend in DC, after Charlottesville denied their request for a permit. The overwhelming likelihood is the counter-protestors will outnumber far right attendees by an order of magnitude.

Which brings me to my second conversation with Richard Spencer. I’d been invited to Washington DC this April to give a talk at Georgetown university on the question “Is the Alt Right Over?” About a minute before the event started an organizer approached me and whispered in my ear, “just so you know, Richard Spencer is in the audience.” I nodded and about thirty seconds later the talk’s moderator asked me the first question and we were off. It was toward the end, during the Q&A, when Spencer, after waiting his turn in line, approached the mie and asked a question..

It was no surprise to hear Spencer publicly acknowledge what a mess the alt right had become. He’d recently cancelled his college tour in the face of significant counter-protests and, in videos on his Youtube channel, had credited Antifa’s tactical effectiveness for dissuading him from organizing future alt right events. But what about white identity politics he asked me? Even if the militant, organized alt right seemed to have imploded, the resurgence of white identity politics was perhaps a larger and more durable force. The truth is I agree with that assessment but I didn’t say so at the time. Instead, I took some digs at him, Not by insulting him personally, just pointing out how pathetic his movement had become. Why speculate about the future, I asked, when we had the recent past and could examine all the sordid spectacle it afforded.

After the talk was over Spencer approached me to follow up with a small group in tow. He stuck out his hand. It stayed there. “You’ll talk to me but you won’t shake my hand,” he said, indignant. “Yes,” I said. He pushed on the question he’d already asked. What about white identity politics as a larger force in American politics?

I don’t have a neat answer to that question, not that I would have given it to him if I did. It was a long day and I wanted to get back to the nice hotel the university people had paid for but the question hung around.

Just this morning a new report was released by the academic George Hawley, one of the country’s most knowledgeable sources on the ideological roots and political morphology of the alt right. In the intro Hawley writes, “The Alt-Right as a term seems to be declining in popularity, as the movement has suffered a series of setbacks over the last year. Yet the constituency for explicit white identity politics remains.”

Whatever shape this politics takes, you’re unlikely to learn much about it from the spectacle this weekend in DC.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on THE ALT-RIGHT ONE YEAR AFTER CHARLOTTESVILLE

Book Club: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy (8-10-18)

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Luke Ford

MP3: https://soundcloud.com/luke-ford-666431593/book-club-hackers-heroes-of-the-computer-revolution-by-steven-levy

From Amazon.com:

This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy’s classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution’s original hackers — those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early ’80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.

Levy profiles the imaginative brainiacs who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems. They had a shared sense of values, known as “the hacker ethic,” that still thrives today. Hackers captures a seminal period in recent history when underground activities blazed a trail for today’s digital world, from MIT students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to the DIY culture that spawned the Altair and the Apple II.

Amazon.com Exclusive: The Rant Heard Round the World
By Steven Levy

When I began researching Hackers–so many years ago that it’s scary–I thought I’d largely be chronicling the foibles of a sociologically weird cohort who escaped normal human interaction by retreating to the sterile confines of computers labs. Instead, I discovered a fascinating, funny cohort who wound up transforming human interaction, spreading a culture that affects our views about everything from politics to entertainment to business. The stories of those amazing people and what they did is the backbone of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

But when I revisited the book recently to prepare the 25th Anniversary Edition of my first book, it was clear that I had luckily stumbled on the origin of a computer (and Internet) related controversy that still permeates the digital discussion. Throughout the book I write about something I called The Hacker Ethic, my interpretation of several principles implicitly shared by true hackers, no matter whether they were among the early pioneers from MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (the Mesopotamia of hacker culture), the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club (who invented the PC industry), or the slick kid programmers of commercial game software. One of those principles was “Information Should Be Free.” This wasn’t a justification of stealing, but an expression of the yearning to know more so one could hack more. The programs that early MIT hackers wrote for big computers were stored on paper tapes. The hackers would keep the tapes in a drawer by the computer so anyone could run the program, change it, and then cut a new tape for the next person to improve. The idea of ownership was alien.

This idea came under stress with the advent of personal computers. The Homebrew Club was made of fanatic engineers, along with a few social activists who were thrilled at the democratic possibilities of PCs. The first home computer they could get their hands on was 1975’s Altair, which came in a kit that required a fairly hairy assembly process. (Its inventor was Ed Roberts, an underappreciated pioneer who died earlier this year.) No software came with it. So it was a big deal when 19-year-old Harvard undergrad Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen wrote a BASIC computer language for it. The Homebrew people were delighted with Altair BASIC, but unhappy that Gates and Allen charged real money for it. Some Homebrew people felt that their need for it outweighed their ability to pay. And after one of them got hold of a “borrowed” tape with the program, he showed up at a meeting with a box of copies (because it is so easy to make perfect copies in the digital age), and proceeded to distribute them to anyone who wanted one, gratis.

This didn’t sit well with Bill Gates, who wrote what was to become a famous “Letter to Hobbyists,” basically accusing them of stealing his property. It was the computer-age equivalent to Luther posting the Ninety-Five Theses on the Castle Church. Gate’s complaints would reverberate well into the Internet age, and variations on the controversy persist. Years later, when another undergrad named Shawn Fanning wrote a program called Napster that kicked off massive piracy of song files over the Internet, we saw a bloodier replay of the flap. Today, issues of cost, copying and control still rage–note Viacom’s continuing lawsuit against YouTube and Google. And in my own business—journalism–availability of free news is threatening more traditional, expensive new-gathering. Related issues that also spring from controversies in Hackers are debates over the “walled gardens” of Facebook and Apple’s iPad.

I ended the original Hackers with a portrait of Richard Stallman, an MIT hacker dedicated to the principle of free software. I recently revisited him while gathering new material for the 25th Anniversary Edition of Hackers, he was more hard core than ever. He even eschewed the Open Source movement for being insufficiently noncommercial.

When I spoke to Gates for the update, I asked him about his 1976 letter and the subsequent intellectual property wars. “Don’t call it war,” he said. “Thank God we have an incentive system. Striking the right balance of how this should work, you know, there’s going to be tons of exploration.” Then he applied the controversy to my own situation as a journalism. “Things are in a crazy way for music and movies and books,” he said. “Maybe magazine writers will still get paid 20 years from now. Who knows? Maybe you’ll have to cut hair during the day and just write articles at night.”

So Amazon.com readers, it’s up to you. Those who have not read Hackers,, have fun and be amazed at the tales of those who changed the world and had a hell of time doing it. Those who have previously read and loved Hackers, replace your beat-up copies, or the ones you loaned out and never got back, with this beautiful 25th Anniversary Edition from O’Reilly with new material about my subsequent visits with Gates, Stallman, and younger hacker figures like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. If you don’t I may have to buy a scissors–and the next bad haircut could be yours!

Posted in Computers | Comments Off on Book Club: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy (8-10-18)

The Jewish Urge To Schmooze

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Luke Ford

Frame Game Radio tweets: 1. This is a thread about SCHMOOZING. I was at a business lunch today with a fellow Jew and it suddenly hit me – one reason for Jewish success is *The Jewish Urge To Schmooze.*

2. Yes, I know I’ve developed a reputation for being a Jewish guy who relentlessly chronicles the abuses and corruption within the Jewish Affinity Network. But allow me to proudly explore a perfectly innocent and totally powerful aspect of Jewish success dynamics.

3. I’ve noticed a pattern to human communications that differentiates “the median Gentile” and “the median Jew”. It’s not universal. It’s a bell-curve, where Jewish instincts appear, ON AVERAGE, to be 1-2 standard deviations more inclined to “schmooze” than Gentiles.

4. First a definition of terms. The charitable definition is that schmoozing is “intimate, cozy gossip.” The cynical definition is that schmoozing is “manipulative sweet talk to get what you want.”

5. Now, THE MAGIC: SCHMOOZING IS NOT NETWORKING. Networking is professional. Schmoozing is personal. Networking makes formal pair-bonds. Schmoozing makes implied pair-bonds. Networking is a firm handshake. Schmoozing is whispering in your ear.

6. I’ve deduced that schmoozing involves two critical mechanisms. The first is *VULNERABILITY*. The second is *BENIGN VIOLATION*. Let’s explore these two dynamics in turn:

Posted in Jews | Comments Off on The Jewish Urge To Schmooze