It’s embarrassing and stupid but in a way, you can’t blame him. He said much worse than that to Republican leaders right to their faces on national TV during the campaign and they all came crawling back, begging for an opportunity to kiss his ring and promising to do everything they could to help him.
Graham and Flake have voted for everything he’s wanted so far, so what the downside of insulting them to entertain himself and his cult? Nothing as far as I can tell. Both Graham and Flake will be there when he needs them.
On Tuesday night CNN reported that the WH had instructed their surrogates to back the President’s line that both sides were to blame for Charlottesville. And they did:
What’s a Fox and Friends host to do when they desperately want to push President Donald Trump’s narrative the “both sides” are to blame for Charlottesville, but their guests want to talk about what’s really going on in America right now?
Abby Huntsman found out Wednesday morning, in a segment first spotted by Mediaite, when she tried to start a debate over the statues of Confederate-era slaveholders but found her guests unexpectedly agreeing with each other about how “morally bankrupt” our president has become on the issue of race.
“It’s beyond a monument. This is about hatred. This is about white supremacy,” Wendy Osefo said, representing the left. “As a mother, to hear the president of these United States not sit here and condemn what has happened,” she added of the white supremacist terror attack that killed Heather Heyer, “as a black woman of two black boys, my heart bleeds. This is not talking points. This is personal. We as a nation, as a country, have to do better.”
Huntsman responded by simply echoing Trump—“there are good people on both sides of this debate”—and trying to get her representative from the right, Gianno Caldwell, to address the statue issue instead of responding to what Osefo had said.
He did not comply.
“I come today with a very heavy heart,” Caldwell said, already starting to tear up. “Last night I couldn’t sleep at all because president Trump, our president, has literally betrayed the conscience of our country.”
Caldwell went on, getting progressively more emotional as did Osefo.
“Strong emotions there, and, you know, it’s a tough debate,” was all Huntsman could come up with.
You’ll recall that her daddy has been nominated by Trump to be the US Ambassador to Russia.
When Donald J. Trump bought a fixer-upper golf club on Lowes Island here for $13 million in 2009, he poured millions more into reconfiguring its two courses. He angered conservationists by chopping down more than 400 trees to open up views of the Potomac River. And he shocked no one by renaming the club after himself.
But that wasn’t enough. Mr. Trump also upgraded its place in history.
Between the 14th hole and the 15th tee of one of the club’s two courses, Mr. Trump installed a flagpole on a stone pedestal overlooking the Potomac, to which he affixed a plaque purportedly designating “The River of Blood.”
“Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,” the inscription reads. “The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ ”
The inscription, beneath his family crest and above Mr. Trump’s full name, concludes: “It is my great honor to have preserved this important section of the Potomac River!”
Like many of Mr. Trump’s claims, the inscription was evidently not fact-checked.
“No. Uh-uh. No way. Nothing like that ever happened there,” said Richard Gillespie, the executive director of the Mosby Heritage Area Association, a historical preservation and education group devoted to an 1,800-square-mile section of the Northern Virginia Piedmont, including the Lowes Island site.
“The only thing that was remotely close to that,” Mr. Gillespie said, was 11 miles up the river at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff in 1861, a rout of Union forces in which several hundred were killed. “The River of Blood?” he added. “Nope, not there.”
Mr. Gillespie’s contradiction of the plaque’s account was seconded by Alana Blumenthal, the curator of the Loudoun Museum in nearby Leesburg. (A third local expert, who said he had written to Mr. Trump’s company about the inscription’s falsehoods and offered to provide historically valid replacement text, insisted on anonymity because he did not want to cross the Trump Organization by disclosing a private exchange.)
Between the 14th hole and the 15th tee of one of the club’s two courses, Mr. Trump installed a flagpole on a stone pedestal overlooking the Potomac, to which he affixed a plaque purportedly marking “The River of Blood.”
In a phone interview, Mr. Trump called himself a “a big history fan” but deflected, played down and then simply disputed the local historians’ assertions of historical fact.
“That was a prime site for river crossings,” Mr. Trump said. “So, if people are crossing the river, and you happen to be in a civil war, I would say that people were shot — a lot of them.”
The club does indeed lie a stone’s throw from Rowser’s Ford, where, as an official historical marker notes, Gen. J. E. B. Stuart led 5,000 Confederate troops including cavalry across the Potomac en route to the Battle of Gettysburg. But no one died in that crossing, historians said, or in any other notable Civil War engagement on the spot. “How would they know that?” Mr. Trump asked when told that local historians had called his plaque a fiction. “Were they there?”
Mr. Trump repeatedly said that “numerous historians” had told him that the golf club site was known as the River of Blood. But he said he did not remember their names.
Then he said the historians had spoken not to him but to “my people.” But he refused to identify any underlings who might still possess the historians’ names.
“Write your story the way you want to write it,” Mr. Trump said finally, when pressed unsuccessfully for anything that could corroborate his claim. “You don’t have to talk to anybody. It doesn’t make any difference. But many people were shot. It makes sense.”
In its small way, the plaque bears out Mr. Trump’s reputation for being preoccupied with grandeur, superlatives and his own name, but less so with verifiable facts, even when his audience is relatively small.
He believes what he wants to believe. Here was his tweet storm this morning:
Most of America is probably still feeling overwhelmed by the events in Charlottesville last weekend and our president’s outrageous reaction. Media reports suggest, however, that while Donald Trump has been even more volatile and short-tempered than usual lately, he is feeling a lot better after his Tuesday press conference, having freed himself of the burden of pretending to have a moral compass.
Refusing to pass judgment on allies and supporters, no matter what they do, is a fundamental characteristic of the man and a sincere reflection of his beliefs. This is the man, after all, who refused to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin for killing political rivals and members of the press when Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly pressed him on it, saying, “There are a lot of killers.You think our country’s so innocent?”
So it appears that letting off that steam on Tuesday made Trump feel a little more like himself. This has been a rough couple of weeks, even by the standards of his soap opera of a presidency. Indeed, looking back it seems that Trump started to come a bit more unglued than usual right about the time he learned that special counsel Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury in the Russia investigation and the FBI had staged an early morning search of former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort’s home.
We still don’t know what Trump is so worried about, but he’s definitely worried about something. Thinking about nuclear war and Nazi rallies was undoubtedly a nice distraction from whatever it is that’s bothering him so much.
But whether the president knows it or not, even the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally has deep connections to the global white nationalist movement, and the epicenter of that movement is in Moscow under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. Take, for instance, Matthew Heimbach, who was crowned by Think Progress as the “most important white supremacist of 2016″ and was one of the organizers of the Charlottesville event. Heimbach is the man who was arrested at a Trump campaign rally for pushing and screaming at a protester, and who later claimed in court that he believed Trump had “deputized” the crowd to defend him against the protesters.
Heimbach says, “Putin is the leader, really, of the anti-globalist forces around the world” and calls “Russia our most powerful ally” — and by “our,” he means the forces of white nationalism. The Southern Poverty Law Center dubbed him “The Little Führer.” Heimbach is also a member of the World National Conservative Movement, a product of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM):
The manifesto of the movement claims that the world is governed by the ideology of “liberalism, multiculturalism and tolerance.” This, in the view of the activists, results in “the erosion of nations, massive migration from countries with foreign civilizational bases, falling away from religion, replacement of spirituality by materialism, impoverishment of cultures, destruction of the family and healthy moral values” through “abortion, propaganda of debauchery and acceptance of sexual perversions”. Furthermore, the manifesto refers to the “super-national institutions” such as the EU and NATO, and argues that these forces represent “the global cabal” which, in the Russian cultural discourse, is essentially a euphemistic reference to the global Jewish conspiracy. The WNCM aims to counter liberalism and globalisation by staging a “conservative revolution” and bringing far right parties to power in Western societies.
That sounds strangely familiar doesn’t it?
Heimbach isn’t the only white supremacist Trump follower with a strong connection to Russia. Two years ago, The New York Timesreported on a conference in St. Petersburg featuring a big name in right-wing hate:
Railing against same-sex marriage, immigration, New York financiers, radical Islam and globalization, among other targets, one speaker after another lauded Russia and President Vladimir V. Putin as a pillar of robust, conservative, even manly values. . . .
The United States, as the main adversary, attracted the most hostility, but a couple of American speakers received warm applause by painting Washington as an aggressor trying to export its misguided new values.
Jared Taylor, who runs a website called American Renaissance, said the descendants of white Europeans risked being swept away by a wave of Africans, Central Americans and Asians. The United States, which he said worshiped diversity rather than Christianity, “is the greatest enemy of tradition everywhere.”
Jared Taylor is credited with coining the term alt-right. Here he is explaining what it means:
You will recall that President Trump’s strategic adviser Steve Bannon once described his far-right news site Breitbart as “the platform of the alt-right.”
Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, another organizer of the Unite the Right gathering, has praised Russia as the “sole white power in the world.” Spencer’s wife, the Russian born Nina Kouprianova (from whom he is reportedly separated) has helped the movement by translating the influential neo-fascist Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who promotes what the Daily Beast describes as “the modern incarnation of ‘Eurasianism,’ a geopolitical theory positing Russia as the inheritor of ‘Eternal Rome.’” Dugin has ties to virtually every American white supremacist leader in one way or another.
And then there’s David Duke, the noted former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who tweeted his gratitude for Trump’s support after his raucous press conference on Tuesday and told TV interviewers in Charlottesville, “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. That’s what we gotta do.”
After all the furious activity over the weekend, The Daily Stormer, the biggest neo-Nazi web site, was kicked off its American server. Wouldn’t you know it? It landed at a Russian domain.
None of this is to say that there is a secret international white supremacist conspiracy led by Trump and Putin. After all, it isn’t much of a secret: These ties are all out in the open. The point is that this is all of a piece: Trump’s casual immorality, his admiration for Putin and his sympathy for the white supremacists in America and their “cause” are not separate issues.
It may indeed turn out that Trump or members of his campaign team colluded with the Russian government to win the election, or that he had illegal financial dealings with oligarchs and kleptocrats that made him vulnerable to blackmail. It could be both of those things or something else entirely. But regardless of his legal exposure, it’s also clear that Trump is sincerely sympathetic to white nationalists who are devoted admirers of Vladimir Putin’s white nationalism. How much he knows or understands about that connection is impossible to say. But it’s yet another link between Donald Trump and Russia, and this one may be the most disturbing of all.
First of all, I very much enjoy your columns for the NY Times and often find myself laughing out loud as I read them. That is a Very Good Thing ™ right now, when there is so little to laugh at. But today, apropos Donald Trump, when you write:
We had no idea how bad this guy was going to be. Admit it — during the campaign you did not consider the possibility that if a terrible tragedy struck the country involving all of our worst political ghosts of the past plus neo-Nazism, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz would know the appropriate thing to say but Donald Trump would have no idea.
I can only respond that yes, I did know how bad this guy was going to be. Nearly every one of my friends did. The only exceptions were people like you, professional journalists.
But not just any old professional journalists. To be very clear, the only people I know who are in the least bit surprised at how awful Trump would be are top journalists, my talented, hard-working reporter/editor friends who have won major prizes – including the Pulitzer – and who work for major media – including, dear Gail, your own paper.
So the “we” you are talking about, the only ones with any intelligence who somehow convinced themselves that Trump would – what’s the phrasing? oh, yes, “pivot” and “become presidential” on January 20. Despite clear evidence that he was a racist, an anti-Semite (despite his son-in-law), more ignorant of world affairs than a deer tick who grew up in solitary confinement, and thoroughly corrupt and incompetent. Every single friend of mine could see what was coming quite clearly – except for those of you who toil for the mainstream media.
I assume this is just groupthink. Like every other other cohort, journalists mostly talk to other journalists and form a group consensus about things that concern the group. But had you truly listened to any of your non-journalist friends instead of dismissing them as just misinformed civilians with a blatantly liberal bias, you wouldn’t be the slightest bit gobsmacked at what’s going on- and you’d be doing a much better job of reporting it..
But ironies of ironies, when it comes to national political trends, mainstream journalists as a group often don’t listen carefully, especially when it comes to hearing out the concerns of liberals, scientists, and other normal people. Even the New Yorker’s David Remnick – no dummy – fell for George Bush’s lies about Iraq partly because he wouldn’t listen to clear, evidence-based voices that debunked those lies but fell outside the purview of his mainstream journalist vision. And just two days ago, the New York Times fell for rightwing false equivalence framing by publishing before his obscene press conference a disgraceful article that could easily be construed as equating a few shoving counter-protestors in Charlottesville with the violence of the Nazis.
Sadly, if you actually read this letter (very unlikely, I know), you’ll surely dismiss it, or vigorously defend your colleagues. Many of us have failed when we’ve tried to tell our journalist friends that they are being played for suckers by rightwing liars and mountebanks masquerading as sober, reasonable, serious people.
Sure, afterwards, after the Iraq debacle was clearly a catastrophe, after Trump received billions in free publicity, the mainstream media published mea culpas – and then fell again for the next set of rightwing talking points and lies.
So, Gail, because I so admire your work, I urge you to listen to your non-journalists friends, the ones who strike you as thoroughly cynical about the GOP and the rightwing – and not just the Nazis, but the Ryans and the Kasich’s, too.
Unlike you and your peers, we believe Trump, his cronies, and most of the nationally prominent GOP are extremely dangerous and have no incentive to mitigate their extremism. And we know – absolutely know – that far worse lies ahead. These people have barely started.
President Donald Trump’s decision to double down on his argument that “both sides” were to blame for the violent clashes at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was driven in part by his own anger — and his disdain for being told what to do.
Trump’s temper has been a constant force in this eight-month-old White House. He’s made policy decisions after becoming irritated with staffers and has escalated fights in the past few weeks with everyone from the Senate majority leader to the volatile dictator of North Korea.
The controversy over his response to the Charlottesville violence was no different. Agitated about being pressured by aides to clarify his first public statement, Trump unexpectedly unwound the damage control of the prior two days by assigning blame to the “alt-left” and calling some of the white supremacist protesters “very fine people.”
“In some ways, Trump would rather have people calling him racist than say he backed down the minute he was wrong,” one adviser to the White House said on Wednesday about Charlottesville. “This may turn into the biggest mess of his presidency because he is stubborn and doesn’t realize how bad this is getting.”
For Trump, anger serves as a way to manage staff, express his displeasure or simply as an outlet that soothes him. Often, aides and advisers say, he’ll get mad at a specific staffer or broader situation, unload from the Oval Office and then three hours later act as if nothing ever occurred even if others still feel rattled by it. Negative television coverage and lawyers earn particular ire from him.
White House officials and informal advisers say the triggers for his temper are if he thinks someone is lying to him, if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him.
That latter trigger — of attempting to corral him — set in motion the past five tense days surrounding Charlottesville. On Saturday, the president failed to condemn white supremacists, who had marched through the city shouting anti-Semitic chants and assaulting counterprotesters. One of them killed a 32-year-old woman and injured roughly 20 others when he rammed his car at a high speed into a crowd.
Under intense pressure from aides and fellow Republican lawmakers, whose support the president needs to advance his agenda, Trump gave a more conciliatory speech on Monday. He clarified that he does not support specifically the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but then he backtracked to his more defiant stance just 24 hours later during an impromptu news conference at Trump Tower, meant to focus on infrastructure.
“I do think there is blame — yes, I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump said, equating the actions of the white supremacists with the other protesters. Hate group leaders like David Duke saw the comments as yet another sign of the president’s support.
The majority of Trump’s top aides, with the notable exception of Steve Bannon, had been encouraging Trump to put to an end this damaging news cycle and talk that makes him seem sympathetic to groups that widely decry Jews, minorities and women. But the president did not want to be told what to do and seemed in high spirits on Tuesday evening, even as headlines streamed out about his seeming overtures to hate groups, according to one White House adviser who spoke to him.
The president “thinks he’s right. He still thinks he’s right,” an adviser said.
He’s not right. In the head.
Get a load of this:
But in this White House, Trump’s anger isn’t just a side detail for stories about the various warring ideological factions, or who’s up and down in the West Wing. Instead, that anger and its rallying cry helped to fuel his rise to the White House, and now Trump uses it as a way to govern, present himself to the American public and even create policy.
In one stark example, the president’s dislike of being told what to do played a role in his decision to abruptly ban all transgender people from the military: a move opposed by his own defense secretary, James Mattis, and the head of the Coast Guard, who vowed not to honor the president’s decree.
The president had grown tired of White House lawyers telling him what he could and could not do on the ban and numerous other issues such as labor regulations, said one informal White House adviser. While multiple factors were in play with the transgender ban, Trump has grown increasingly frustrated by the lawyers’ calls for further study and caution, so he took it upon himself to tweet out the news of the ban, partly as a reminder to the lawyers who’s in charge, the adviser said.
“For Trump, there came a moment where he wanted to re-establish that he was going to do what he was going to do,” said the adviser, who knows both the president and members of the staff. “He let his lawyers know that it’s his job to make decisions and their job to figure out how to implement it.”
This is not correct. The lawyers are there to tell him what’s legal and illegal. He seems to think that isn’t relevant.
Jesus.
Paul Krugman had it right when he tagged Trump as this guy:
Typical bully. Loud talk, brash talk when he thinks he is dominant in the interaction. Not so tough when the power dynamic is not stacked in his favor by firearms and numbers.
Timereports that Facebook yesterday shut down Christopher Cantwell’s Facebook and Instagram accounts after the violence in Charlottesville over the weekend. Cantwell featured prominently in a documentary on the protest produced by Vice. (You should watch it.)
Cantwell displays the arsenal he carries to be “ready for violence” at peaceful demonstatrations. He tells Vice he considers the car attack justified that killed 32-year old Heather Heyer on Saturday. In a later, personal video, Cantwell wipes away tears at the prospect of facing arrest (unconfirmed) over his participation in the Charlottesville protest.
The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Cantwell as a “36-year-old self-proclaimed fascist” who from his home in Keene, New Hampshire hosts the call-in talk show, “Radical Agenda,” streamed on Facebook and UStream three days a week:
On his show and in mordant essays published on his website Christophercantwell.com, this 36-year-old self-proclaimed fascist – whose style borrows from such mainstream shock jocks as Howard Stern and Opie and Anthony — argues for an Anglo ethno state free of African-Americans, Jews and non-white immigrants, save, perhaps, for the occasional exception.
In Cantwell’s world, Blacks are prone to violence and have lower IQs; Jews spread communism and can’t be trusted; immigrants are outbreeding whites; and a race war is all but inevitable.
“I want to be peaceful. I want to be law-abiding. That was the whole entire point of this,” Cantwell states in his personal video. “I’m watching CNN talk about this as a violent, white nationalist protest. We have done everything in our power to keep this peaceful!” he insists.
Including coming armed to the teeth. You know, just in case. Zenobia Jeffries of Yes! magazine rolls her eyes at such nonsense repeated by media outlets,”What happened in Charlottesville was white nationalist extremists inciting a riot.”
David Frum, writing for The Atlantic, decries the broadening, open display of firearms as weapons of intimidation:
But take care: As David Graham has observed here at The Atlantic, the right to carry arms is America’s most unequally upheld right. Ohio is an open-carry state. Yet Tamir Rice, a black 12-year-old, was shot dead in Cleveland within seconds of being observed carrying what proved to be a pellet gun. John Crawford was shot dead for moving around an Ohio Walmart with an air rifle he had picked up from a display shelf. Minnesota allows concealed-carry permit-holders to open carry if they wish—yet Minnesotan Philando Castile was killed after merely telling a police officer he had a legal gun in his car.
On the other hand, every white man who played vigilante in Charlottesville this weekend went home unharmed to his family, having successfully overawed the police—and having sent a chilling message of warning to lawful protesters.
No other democracy on Earth tolerates such antics. When libertarian-minded Americans lament the over-militarization of police, they might give some thought to what it takes to police a society where potential lawbreakers think it their right to accumulate force that would do credit to a Somali warlord. And not only accumulate it, but carry that force into public to brandish against fellow citizens who think differently from their local paramilitaries.
“Free speech” backed by threat of violence is not only anti-American, it is vile and as cowardly as Cantwell. Openly display of weaponry is not a celebration of freedom, but immaturity. Maybe after drying his tears, buying yet another weapon will soothe his nerves.
There have been many requests for people to look themselves in the mirror after the Charlottesville violence. What is there isn’t pretty. If antifa members are as morally superior as they believe, they’ll look themselves in the mirror too and leave their sticks and mace and masks at home.
“You’re not so tough without your car, are ya?” – quote from Kindergarten Cop.
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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
I’ve been trying to process President Trump’s insane “impromptu” press conference yesterday, in which the leader of the free world obstinately stood his ground in tacit support of the odious ideology that fueled the tragedy in Charlottesville. I have never witnessed any presidential press conference quite like this one in my lifetime:
You know who he’s really beginning to remind me of? I know what you’re thinking…but Hitler and Mussolini are too easy; I’m thinking in terms of form, over content. I think he’s modelling himself (consciously or subconsciously) after underworld kingpin Al Capone.
Think about it. Trump, like fellow native New Yorker Capone was wont to do, revels in public attention, and the more outrageous and/or egregious his misdeeds, the more unapologetic his public stance. Granted, Trump hasn’t murdered anyone (that we know of), but shares a gangster’s intuition for opportunistic profiteering.
That’s why Trump’s base loves him. He’s a natural-born outlaw:
As the historian notes in the clip, regarding Capone’s bluster:
“…he’s not going to deny that he’s a bootlegger; he’s not ashamed of being a criminal.”
And as “Capone” himself confides to the viewer:
“Those twits kept trying to nail me, and came up with squat. Of course, they didn’t have enough evidence to bring me to trial.”
Remind you of anyone else who calls impromptu press conferences, ostensibly to strut about and tout their ill-gained prestige, amazing accomplishments, and gloat over the inability of the law to nail ’em?
If you want to know where he gets his misinformation, this clears it up:
He has the entire federal government at his disposal. This is who he listens to. And so do his followers.
And if you’re wondering about how this alternate universe is organized, take a look at this:
THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SHOOK the foundations of American politics. Media reports immediately looked for external disruption to explain the unanticipated victory—with theories ranging from Russian hacking to “fake news.”
We have a less exotic, but perhaps more disconcerting explanation: Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.
While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.
Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”
We began to study this ecosystem by looking at the landscape of what sites people share. If a person shares a link from Breitbart, is he or she more likely also to share a link from Fox News or from The New York Times? We analyzed hyperlinking patterns, social media sharing patterns on Facebook and Twitter, and topic and language patterns in the content of the 1.25 million stories, published by 25,000 sources over the course of the election, using Media Cloud, an open-source platform for studying media ecosystems developed by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and MIT’s Center for Civic Media.
When we map media sources this way, we see that Breitbart became the center of a distinct right-wing media ecosystem, surrounded by Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed.
Read the rest.
Breitbart is the center of the right wing universe. It’s former editor, Steve Bannon is in the White House and is still affiliated with the site.
Elle Reeve, who made that Vice documentary about the Charlottesville rally was on Nicole Wallace’s show and had some very interesting insights into this movement. She has followed up with some of the people she interviewed and Wallace asked her what their next steps are. She said:
They want to avoid PR disasters like killing a person. But they also want to focus on aesthetics. That means getting rid of swastikas because they call that a dead ideology so there’s no point in bringing that out.
They also want to cut out, as they call it, white trash. They want to look like a middle class movement with clean cut good looking men. Its a movement focused on aesthetics. They want to look like successful people so that people want to join them.
When asked why it is they are so willing to show their faces on camera:
They feel emboldened by the events of the last year of political events. But they also have the internet. And that means that they can fund-raise from their supporters. There’s a site called researcher than can raise money for an alt-right cause, they can raise a hundred thousand dollars overnight. So they don’t have to depend on normal jobs anymore. They don’t have to worry about getting fired for their vile beliefs.
Is the “alt-right” distinct from white supremacy?
Only in tactics and the audience they’re looking for. They are not burning crosses. They are using social media. They’re using jokes and memes. They want to portray themselves as witty as intellectual as appealing to college students and not people that you would associate with racist movement of the past.
This is not new, actually. The original fascist movements were also extremely focused on aesthetics and wished to portray themselves as “clean-cut, good looking men.” In fact, it’s a hallmark of the ideology:
