Just found The New Republic‘s profile of Gisele Fetterman. The the Brazilian-born wife of the newest senator from Pennsylvania has, of course, drawn fire from the right:
“The right-wing hates women. They especially hate strong women, and I think that’s what you’re seeing,” said Gisele of the ceaseless ridicule she’s gotten from conservative media operatives looking to define her as self-serving and suspicious. “The fact that a spouse of a senator-elect has been attacked nonstop for the past 24 hours and everyone’s OK with it, and everyone thinks it’s normal.… It’s not normal,” said Gisele after her first day on Capitol Hill.
Correct on both counts. About the right’s view of women and about people accepting the attacks as normal. But it’s AOC’s quote that puts an exclamation point on it.
Gisele Fetterman is not the first Democratic woman of color to get “the Fox News treatment.” Representative Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez has been a national obsession in conservative media since she began her freshman term four years ago. “I think that it’s very important that she doesn’t have to handle that by herself and on her own,” Ocasio-Cortez told The New Republic when asked what advice she’d give Gisele about her new life in the toxic political inferno of congressional politics.
“It’s very important that the party sticks up for people. They haven’t done a good job in the past,” added Ocasio-Cortez.
The best bosses during my life as a cubicle-dweller — ones I admired — were those who interposed themselves between us and the suits. They took any incoming fire so we could keep doing our jobs. Democrats need to do better. But it may be too late.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi in July instructed the House Sergeant at Arms to give members $10,000 each to upgrade security at their homes. But it is not enough, members complained, in a time when threats against members have more than doubled since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016.
“If you put out hate into the world, it’s going to turn into action … and that’s what we’ve seen with Paul Pelosi,” said Gisele, referring to the October 28 assault by David DePape, who broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and attacked her husband with a hammer. Last week, the speaker said she would step aside from Democratic leadership.
Does anyone think it will get better with Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker?
Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. once treated our class to an amusing tale of how, in the early days of televsion, he advocated before U.S. regulatory authorities for the 3-color cathode ray system that produced a color picture. A competing scheme featured a spinning color wheel rotating at high speed. That worked fine for an oscilloscope-sized device, he told them. But scaled up to living room size it would require a wheel five feet in diameter. He had a demonstration model, he told them, but (IIRC) was afraid it might fly apart and harm someone if he turned it on. His 3-color cathode ray scheme won the day and color TV as we know it was approved.
Who remembers Thomas Goldsmith? Remember the humble VCR? Remember who invented it? Me neither.
But we might remember Elon Musk for destroying Twitter. A meme pointedly reminds people that Elon Musk did not start Tesla either.
This is a picture of Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard. They founded Tesla. You know, in case you thought it was someone else. pic.twitter.com/nPI9N4ZS7k
For all his Trumpish skill at self-promotion, the world’s richest man may be remembered for how he destroyed Twitter by turning it into a trollish cesspool.
Jelani Cobb argues at The New Yorker that without social media like Twitter, “George Floyd—along with Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor—would likely have joined the long gallery of invisible dead Black people, citizens whose bureaucratized deaths were hidden and ignored.” Nevertheless, it’s time to bail, Cobb argues:
The singular virtue of the fiasco over which Musk has presided is the possibility that the outcome will sever, at least temporarily, the American conflation of wealth with intellect. Market valuation is not proof of genius. Ahead of the forty-four-billion-dollar deal that gave Musk private control of Twitter, he proclaimed that he would “unlock” the site’s potential if given the chance. His admirers hailed his interest with glee. Musk has been marketed as a kind of can-do avatar, a magical mix of Marvel comics and Ayn Rand, despite serial evidence to the contrary, like the allegations of abusive treatment of Tesla workers.
Vowing to leave is easier than doing so, Cobb explains. But better that than help Musk remain afloat:
My decision to leave yielded a tide of farewells but also two other types of responses. The first was low-grade trolling that had the effect of validating my decision to depart. But the second was more nuanced and complicated, an argument that leaving offered a concession to the abusive, reactionary elements whose presence has become increasingly prominent since Musk took over. One person paraphrased the writer Sarah Kendzior, urging users to “never cede ground in an information war.” Those arguments are increasingly frail, though. If there is, in fact, an information war raging on Twitter, Musk is a profiteer. Twitter is what it always was: a money-making venture—just more nakedly so. And it now subsidizes a billionaire who understands free speech to be synonymous with the right to abuse others. (While claiming to champion free speech, Musk has selectively granted it, suspending accounts that are critical of him and firing employees who dissented from his view of how the company should be run.) The tech industry’s gimmick to monetize our attention has been astoundingly successful even if Twitter has habitually struggled to be profitable. In the end, Musk’s leadership of the company appears to be a cynical form of trolling—creating a welcoming environment for some of the platform’s worst actors while simultaneously hailing his new order for its inclusivity.
To the extent that people remain active on Twitter, they preserve the fragile viability of Musk’s gambit. The illusory sense of community that still lingers on the platform is one of Musk’s most significant assets. No matter which side prevails, the true victor in any war is the person selling weapons to both sides. It seems likely that this experiment will conclude with bankruptcy and Twitter falling into the hands of creditors who will have their own ideas of what it should be and whom it should serve. But at least in the interim it’s worth keeping in mind that some battles are simply not worth fighting, some battles must be fought, but none are worth fighting on terms set by those who win by having the conflict drag on endlessly. ♦
One of the barriers to leaving Twitter for a new social media platform is the annoyance of having to learn the quirks of a new one. For that, VCRs were for years a handy metaphor for me. Buying a new one was always a hassle. You knew how they worked and what basic functions they were supposed to have. But now you had to puzzle out where they’d hidden those functions on your new one.
A frustrated Mastodon user on a thread last night asked, “is there an edit button here?????”
Why yes, but where’d they hide it? What you see depends on how you’re viewing Mastodon.
On smartphone, click the three dots […] in the upper right hand corner of the post; select “Open in browser” from the drop-down; click three dots again on the browser version and the Edit function is visible in the drop-down on my Android. (Can’t speak for Apple users.) You don’t need the first steps on a desktop.
The NY Times reports today that wingnuts are often showing up in groups fully armed. They do this to intimidate people.
Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense — increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one’s voice and, just as often, quieting someone else’s.
This month, armed protesters appeared outside an elections center in Phoenix, hurling baseless accusations that the election for governor had been stolen from the Republican, Kari Lake. In October, Proud Boys with guns joined a rally in Nashville where conservative lawmakers spoke against transgender medical treatments for minors.
In June, armed demonstrations around the United States amounted to nearly one a day. A group led by a former Republican state legislator protested a gay pride event in a public park in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Men with guns interrupted a Juneteenth festival in Franklin, Tenn., handing out fliers claiming that white people were being replaced. Among the others were rallies in support of gun rights in Delaware and abortion rights in Georgia.
Whether at the local library, in a park or on Main Street, most of these incidents happen where Republicans have fought to expand the ability to bear arms in public, a movement bolstered by a recent Supreme Court ruling on the right to carry firearms outside the home. The loosening of limits has occurred as violent political rhetoric rises and the police in some places fear bloodshed among an armed populace on a hair trigger.
But the effects of more guns in public spaces have not been evenly felt. A partisan divide — with Democrats largely eschewing firearms and Republicans embracing them — has warped civic discourse. Deploying the Second Amendment in service of the First has become a way to buttress a policy argument, a sort of silent, if intimidating, bullhorn.
“It’s disappointing we’ve gotten to that state in our country,” said Kevin Thompson, executive director of the Museum of Science & History in Memphis, Tenn., where armed protesters led to the cancellation of an L.G.B.T.Q. event in September. “What I saw was a group of folks who did not want to engage in any sort of dialogue and just wanted to impose their belief.”
A New York Times analysis of more than 700 armed demonstrations found that, at about 77 percent of them, people openly carrying guns represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.
Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant and a loud group of armed men come through the door. They are ostentatiously displaying their weapons, making sure that everyone notices them. Would you feel safe or would you feel in danger? Would you feel comfortable confronting them? If you owned the restaurant could you ask them to leave? These are questions that are facing more and more Americans in their everyday lives as “open carry” enthusiasts descend on public places ostensibly for the sole purpose of exercising their constitutional right to do it. It just makes them feel good, apparently.
For instance, in the wake of the new Georgia law that pretty much makes it legal to carry deadly weapons at all times in all places, parents were alarmed when an armed man showed up at the park where their kids were playing little league baseball and waved his gun around shouting, “Look at my gun!” and “There’s nothing you can do about it.” The police were called and when they arrived they found the man had broken no laws and was perfectly within his rights to do what he did. That was small consolation to the parents, however. Common sense tells anyone that a man waving a gun around in public is dangerous so the parents had no choice but to leave the park. Freedom for the man with the gun trumps freedom for the parents of kids who feel endangered by him.
After the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, open carry advocates decided it was a good idea to descend upon Starbucks stores around the country, even in Newtown where a couple dozen armed demonstrators showed up, to make their political point. There were no incidents. Why would there be? When an armed citizen decides to exercise his right to bear arms, it would be reckless to exercise your right to free speech if you disagreed with them. But it did cause the CEO of Starbucks to ask very politely if these gun proliferation supporters would kindly not use his stores as the site of their future “statements.” He didn’t ban them from the practice, however. His reason? He didn’t want to put his employees in the position of having to confront armed customers to tell them to leave. Sure, Starbucks might have the “right” to ban guns on private property in theory, but in practice no boss can tell his workers that they must try to evict someone who is carrying a deadly weapon.
“We’re not breaking the laws,” Haros said. “We’re not here to hurt anybody. We’re not trying to alarm anybody. We’re doing this because it’s our constitutional right.”
Haros, who believes openly carrying firearms helps police, said citizens should know that the demonstrations will continue.
“It’s just for safety purposes,” Haros said. “Officers can’t be there at all times. We understand that. They can only do so much.”
So this fine fellow believes he is doing this to protect the public. And while they don’t wear uniforms so you can’t identify them, have no specialized training in the law, are not bound by police protocols or answer to the authority of the democratic system of government of the people, they have taken it upon themselves to look after all of us because the police are busy. (And presumably, unless you are wearing a hoodie and they think you look suspicious, you probably won’t get shot dead by mistake.) We used to have a name for this. It was called vigilantism. One can only hope that when a “bad guy” really does show up at your Jack in the Box or Starbucks and one of these self-appointed John Waynes decides to draw his weapon you’ll be as lucky as the innocent civilian who narrowly escaped being killed in error at the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.
All of this is allegedly being done to protect our freedoms. But it’s only the “freedom” of the person wearing a firearm that matters. Those parents who want their kids to feel safe in a public park aren’t free to tell a man waving a gun around to leave them alone, are they? Patrons and employees of Starbucks aren’t free to express their opinion of open carry laws when one of these demonstrations are taking place in the store. Those Jack in the Box employees aren’t free to refuse service to armed customers. Sure, they are all theoretically free to do those things. It’s their constitutional right just like it’s the constitutional right of these people to carry a gun. But in the real world, sane people do not confront armed men and women. They don’t argue with them over politics. They certainly do not put their kids in harm’s way in order to make a point. So when it comes right down to it, when you are in the presence of one of these armed citizens, you don’t really have any rights at all.
You can see why they think that’s freedom. It is. For them. The rest of us just have to be very polite, keep our voices down and back away very slowly, saying, “Yes sir, whatever you say, sir,” and let them have their way.
Eric Levitz at NY Magazine makes a very smart observation about one possible problem for Democrats going forward if they don’t pay close attention. He discusses the fact that among the ticket splitters were plenty of those white suburban voters who voted Republican for Governor but Democrat for other offices specifically citing the cases of Mike DeWine in Ohio and Brian Kemp in Georgia:
DeWine and Kemp have several things in common. But one of the most conspicuous is that both stumbled into public conflicts with Donald Trump as a result of their refusal to back his denial of the 2020 election results. After Kemp certified his state’s vote count, Trump cast him as one of the MAGA movement’s great betrayers, and recruited a primary challenger to oust the GOP incumbent. DeWine, meanwhile, went on CNN shortly after the 2020 race was called and said that Biden had “clearly” won, and that Trump should begin preparing for a peaceful transition. In response, Trump attempted (though ultimately failed) to find a credible primary challenger to back against DeWine.
In 2022, Republican candidates with strong ties to Donald Trump — and, more specifically, his attempts at election subversion — tended to dramatically underperform other GOP candidates. Given that pattern, it seems plausible that Kemp and DeWine owed some of their success to the aura of “moderation” they secured merely by being (1) objects of Trump’s ire, and (2) opponents of coups.
Which is a concerning precedent for 2024. If all GOP candidates must do to appear “moderate” in the eyes of suburban swing voters is to get into a high-profile fight with Donald Trump, then any Republican who manages to defeat Trump in the 2024 primary would look moderate to that constituency by default.
To be sure, there are plenty of other explanations for Kemp and DeWine’s ability to simultaneously win Biden voters and champion far-right policies. Incumbent governors tend to outperform other candidates. And in 2022, incumbent governors had the benefit of the American Rescue Plan’s largesse: Biden’s COVID stimulus showered state governments with funds, which made it possible for Republican state officials to slash taxes without significantly paring back spending on education or other social programs dear to the middle class. Indeed, both Kemp and DeWine increased funding for public schools with the former implementing a $5,000-a-year salary increase for Georgia teachers. It is possible that these substantive acts of moderation on high-salience state-level issues helped the governors persuade swing voters to look past their extremism on abortion.
Separately, it is also the case that many college-educated voters who reliably support Democrats in presidential elections nevertheless are willing to back Republicans at the gubernatorial level, where doing so can safeguard their property-tax rates (hence, half the governors in blue New England are Republicans). It is possible then that Biden voters’ willingness to back Kemp and DeWine does not signify an openness to supporting ideologically similar politicians for president in 2024.
And yet, given that many of the Democratic Party’s college-educated supporters did not reside in blue America before Trump’s nomination, there is reason to worry about such voters’ willingness to support very right-wing politicians who had public feuds with the ex-president in 2022.
Therefore, Democrats should do everything they can to ensure that Ron DeSantis (or some other conservative rising star) doesn’t get to claim the mantle of “moderation” in 2024, should they emerge as the Republican nominee. Democrats appear to have gotten some mileage out of denouncing “MAGA” Republicans and warning of the threat Trump poses to democracy. But in the coming years, they would be well advised to also mount a more conventional, ideological indictment of the Republican Party writ large. The GOP is locked into positions on reproductive rights and tax policy that are as unpopular today as they were in 2012 (if not even more so). If a GOP politician wants to force people to give birth, slash taxes on the rich, and “reform” Social Security, their willingness to honor the results of democratic elections shouldn’t count for much.
In 2022, swing voters proved adept at recognizing Republican extremism when it took the form of buffoonish apologists for insurrection. It is possible that the GOP’s standard-bearer will boast that same profile in 2024. But in the event that Trump loses the nomination, Democrats must be ready to help moderates see the radicalism lurking beneath country-club Republican respectability.
It’s long pas time for the Democrats to tie Trumpism to the entire party and make sure people know exactly what that means. It isn’t just rude tweets and bad manners. It’s an entire belief system and network of far right authoritarian operatives. And as the posts below demonstrate, the Republican establishment is very well aware of it and use it to their advantage.
I’m sharing Josh Marshall’s full article here because it’s the best thing I’ve read about the whole Elon Musk/Twitter saga. (You should subscribe to get many more excellent members-only articles like this.)
This isn’t just some unimportant little sideshow. It’s another sign of growing authoritarianism. It’s not a given that they will not be successful:
It’s a fascinating thing to watch far-right radicalization unfold in real time. I’ve been watching the Elon Musk and Twitter drama with a mix of fascination and awe. He bought Twitter as part of his romance with the “free speech”/anti-“cancel culture” right and Donald Trump. Just what set him off on that path has never been adequately or convincingly explained, though there are a number of very plausible and not-mutually exclusive theories. Over the last four weeks Musk’s attachment to this crowd and that ideology have been constantly apparent. He gave an early and even for him startling taste of this when he tweeted out a rank gay-bashing conspiracy theory about the QAnon dead-ender’s hammer attack on Paul Pelosi days before the November 8th election. The process has only accelerated and intensified over the subsequent four weeks.
As he virtually high-fives supporters on Twitter he’s moved on from “free speech” and ending bans on people like Donald Trump to a much more explicit insistence that old Twitter management ran the site with the express purpose of elevating the left over the right. So just two days ago, for instance, he wrote: “Far left San Francisco/Berkeley views have been propagated to the world via Twitter. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to anyone watching closely. Twitter is moving rapidly to establish an even playing field. No more thumb on the scale!”
Then a few hours later he followed up with this: “It is objectively the case that ‘conservative’ political candidates were more negatively affected than ‘progressive’ candidates. Anyone using Twitter knows this. Question is simply one of magnitude.”
This came in response to a comment from a Bitcoin enthusiast who wrote: “I heard from a primary source that political groups would regularly contact twitter to deboost their candidates’ detractors and twitter would happily do that. That seems to put the finger on the scale of democracy.”
Comments like these have become commonplace from Musk. But in recent days he’s increasingly been promoting far-right theories and white supremacist content that may be rife on Twitter but are not immediately tied to his claims about Twitter’s old management or anti-cancel culture activism.
Recent conversations he engages in have either been applauding him or encouraging him to crack down on “grooming” or pedophile or child exploitation accounts. Certainly management at any social network should be monitoring and rooting out such accounts. But it’s highly improbable that Musk’s team is more focused on combatting pedophiles and child exploitation than old Twitter management was. Indeed, Musk’s Twitter would likely be hard pressed to crackdown on anything at the moment since Musk has already fired most of the workforce that handled content moderation, hate speech and abuse of all kinds.
But you don’t have to look hard at these exchanges to see that pedophilia and child exploitation are not precisely what’s being discussed. They’re calls to crackdown on gay, trans and other accounts which the far right have rebranded as “groomers” and “pedophiles.” Increasingly, it’s even more scattershot and general. It’s a call to crack down on liberal or left-wing accounts or anything connected to the “woke mob,” since all those groups are by definition “groomers” and pedophiles. There’s far too little recognition of how much all of this amounts to little more than a mainstreaming or buttoning up of the PizzaGate and QAnon eliminationist conspiracy theories about Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton running pedophile sex rings.
Just in recent days he’s begun promoting explicitly white nationalist content too. Indeed, the two often meld together. Here he is, for instance, just yesterday.
This tableau requires some translation. “Ramzpaul” is Paul Ray Ramsey, a notorious white nationalist. Here Ramsey casually equates left-wingers with pedophiles and Elon replies validating the slur and saying Twitter is on the case.
Reducing pedophilia from a scourge to a cudgel isn’t new for Musk. In 2018 he lashed out at British cave explorer Vern Unsworth during the effort to rescue boys trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand after Unsworth turned down Musk’s offer to build a special submarine to facilitate the rescue. “Sorry pedo guy,” Musk tweeted, “you really did ask for it.” At his subsequent defamation trial, Musk explained that he meant the comment not as a factual statement but as an insult. The cave explorer’s rejection was “wrong and insulting, so I insulted him back,” Musk testified.
A day before Musk’s exchange with Ramsey there was this.
Again, some decoding and context is necessary. “Kim Dotcom” is a German national and notorious internet fraudster who has been holed up in New Zealand for years fighting extradition to the U.S. to face charges of racketeering, fraud and money laundering. Here he makes a straightforward statement of so-called “Great Replacement Theory” and Musk responds with a straight up, ‘Just so.’
Just as I was writing this post, there was this.
Or this interaction with Ian Miles Cheong also this morning. Cheong is another far-right influencer who has been banned from numerous platforms for a mix of fraud, harassment, impersonation and simply being a far-right weirdo.
Let’s start with the simple observation that it’s not ideal to have the owner of one of the world’s largest and most influential communication platforms operating in a social and political milieu of white nationalists and international outlaws. What captures my attention, though, is the process, the trajectory. It’s what we might call a narcissism/radicalization maelstrom and it mirrors what you could observe with Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016.
It’s clear that Donald Trump had dark political impulses and beliefs going back decades. He put his cards on the table clearly enough when he announced his presidential campaign with denunciations of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. But the politics wasn’t as fleshed out ideologically or as clearly articulated as it would soon become. You could watch in his online interactions how his ego followed the praise and fawning. His narcissism pulled him toward the people who became his most loyal online devotees and they were routinely and unsurprisingly the most ardent white nationalists and far-right agitators. They showed up increasingly in his Twitter timeline. He started engaging with them and promoting them. The point isn’t that Trump was some kind of naif pulled into a radicalization spiral. He had all the building blocks. I doubt very much that in mid-2015 Trump had any real familiarity with the arcana of racist and radical right groups, their keywords or ideological touch-points. But they knew he was one of them, perhaps even more than he did. They pledged their undying devotion and his narcissism did the rest.
Elon Musk is on the same path. There are various theories purporting to explain Musk’s hard right turn: a childhood in apartheid South Africa, his connection with Peter Thiel, disappointments in his personal life. Whatever the truth of the matter, whatever right-leaning tendencies he may have had before a couple years ago appear to have been latent or unformed. Now the transformation is almost complete. He’s done with general “free speech” grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He’s routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to great replacement.
One particularly notable hint about the future came in a fractious interaction on Wednesday when Musk rolled out his own antic Dolchstoßlegende manqué. In an exchange about advertiser departures and alleged media bias, Musk claimed that he had cut a deal with civil rights groups to create a “moderation council” but that they had broken the deal.
Perhaps needless to say, this did not happen. The reference is to a chaotic meeting Musk held with a group of leaders of prominent civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the ADL, on November 2nd. Musk had actually announced the “moderation council” days earlier. So even on its own terms the timeline doesn’t match up. We’re hardly four weeks into the Elon era on Twitter and he’s already cueing up a storyline in which he tried to placate the Blacks and the Jews and the gays but they betrayed him and set out to “kill Twitter.”
Not pretty.
Most of us know what it’s like to be caught up in the moment. In a moment of tense confrontation or ego injury it is natural, if unlovely, to pull tight to those who are there to defend you. Some of this is simply human nature. But with the likes of Musk and Trump it operates on a qualitatively different and more explosive level, the consequence of an innate narcissism, an ingrained sense of grievance and entitlement and the unique dynamics of social media. Their power and wealth also make their meltdowns vastly more consequential than yours or mine.
This far right movement is getting stronger. I hope that the normal people in this country don’t get complacent because we’ve managed so far to beat them back. They are getting stronger.
Trump’s dinner companion is a well known quantity to GOP insiders
Donald Trump says he knew nothing of this Nick Fuentes person who Kanye West brought with him to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. But according to Axios, he was impressed:
Trump at one point turned to Ye and said: “I really like this guy. He gets me,” according to the source.
According to Robert Costa, it’s unlikely that people around Trump, if not Trump himself, knew nothing of Fuentes:
Here’s how it works: Most elected Rs and their advisers closely follow the movements of base voters and track how they gather information. While they prefer to cast that ecosystem as something like a country club message board + Trump rallies, they know it’s anything but that…
For over a decade, since I began tracking it, there has been a rising, online extreme media landscape that now churns daily, but it is often on closed social media groups outside of media glare. It is in these spaces where unvarnished hate about Jewish people, racism is rampant.
Nick Fuentes, while young, has gained major traction in these spaces. He links himself and his followers to core tenets of Trumpism by chanting “America First” and uses monologues in the style of Alex Jones to gain notoriety with a cackling, racist, and grim take on modern U.S.
People in the GOP have noticed. Fuentes is not someone who has slipped under the radar. If you follow the base, you can’t somehow not see it, just like you can’t pretend groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers aren’t gaining ground in these same online spaces, too.
And some Rs are more overt than others in winking at, or meeting with, these types. But it’s often in the style of Rep. MTG earlier this year, when she spoke at Fuentes event. A brush up against that bloc, then quick distancing. And the cost of the brush up? Not a career killer…
In fact, as @axios notes, months after appearing with Fuentes, “Greene… is one of the most influential Republicans in the House” and a key player in keeping Trump base close to the House GOP leadership.
In case you were wondering exactly what kind of person Trump was entertaining this week, here’s a run down from the Anti Defamation League:
Groypers are a loose network of alt right figures who are vocal supporters of white supremacist and “America First” podcaster Nick Fuentes.
Patrick Casey, who heads the white supremacist American Identity Movement, is also a “lead” Groyper.
Groypers regularly confront mainstream conservative organizations like Turning Point USA (TPUSA) for failing to promote a truly “America First” agenda and for not being adequately “pro white.”
Many Groypers hold racist and antisemitic views.
Fuentes is careful to position the Groypers not as white supremacists but rather as “Christian conservatives” who oppose, among other things, immigration (undocumented and legal), globalism, gay and transgender rights and feminism.
Groypers charge that mainstream conservative organizations like TPUSA want to silence “dissidents” like Fuentes, who has been expelled from TPUSA events because of his extreme views.
Introduction
The so-called “Groyper army” (the term “Groyper” is explained below) is a white supremacist group that presents its ideology as more nuanced than other groups in the white supremacist sphere. While the group and leadership’s views align with those held by the white supremacist alt right, groypers attempt to normalize their ideology by aligning themselves with “Christianity” and “traditional” values ostensibly championed by the church, including marriage and family.
Like the alt right and other white supremacists, Groypers believe they are working to defend against demographic and cultural changes that are destroying the “true America”—a white, Christian nation. However, Groypers differ in a number of ways from the alt right. They identify themselves as “American nationalists” who are part of the “America First” movement. To the Groypers, “America First” means that the U.S. should close its borders, bar immigrants, oppose globalism and promote “traditional” values like Christianity and oppose “liberal” values such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. They claim not to be racist or antisemitic and see their bigoted views as “normal” and necessary to preserve white, European-American identity and culture, however some members have expressed racist and antisemitic views on multiple occasions. They believe their views are shared by the majority of white people.
A November 2019 article included a video highlighting the racist and antisemitic nature of the Groypers’ questions at an October 2019 TPUSA event at Ohio State University. One Groyper told the audience to Google the term “dancing Israelis,” a reference to an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claimed that Israelis carried out the 9/11 attacks and then celebrated as they watched the Twin Towers fall.
Another Groyper commented that “whites will account for less than 50% of the population in the United States” by 2045. He went on to claim that most groups other than whites, including immigrants, vote for Democrats, and added, “Can you prove that our white European ideals will be maintained if the country is no longer made up of white European descendants?”
At the Groyper Leadership Summit in Florida in December 2019, Groyper leader Patrick Casey, head of the white supremacist American Identity Movement, focused his remarks on changing demographics in the U.S. and the “downsides to diversity.” Casey said, “Now one of the main things we discuss when we’re talking about demographics is the effect that mass immigration from non-Western countries is having on our political institutions.”
Nick Fuentes, who runs the American First podcast and also spoke at the Groyper Leadership Summit, was even clearer in his remarks in terms of the Groypers’ wanting to maintain a white, Christian country. Fuentes asserted that “Los Angeles today is the epicenter of what the country will look like in the future.” He went on to argue, “Culturally, demographically, if you’re a white person and you go to Los Angeles, you’re a minority. If you go to a shopping mall, if you walk down a street, you are a minority. You had different people from different countries come into ours and they changed the texture of life.”
Fuentes rejected the white supremacist label and asserts that when others call him and the Groypers “racist,” it is “an anti-white slur.” He adds, “I am tired of caring what the left thinks. I care about the future of the country. We have to [say] what we mean. We have to do what we think is right.”
The Groypers’ focus on Turning Point USA stems primarily from their dislike of founder Charlie Kirk, who they consider insufficiently pro-white. Among their grievances: Kirk has spoken out against white supremacy and dismissed Ashley St. Clair, a TPUSA associate who was photographed at a dinner event attended by Fuentes.
Kirk is pro-Israel, and Groypers oppose Israel and are generally antisemitic. Groypers are also angry that Kirk has invited black conservatives and gay conservatives to TPUSA events as speakers. They believe Kirk is a hypocrite who doesn’t truly want to advance an “America First,” agenda which, for the Groypers, means “whites first.” And finally, they believe Kirk does not support free speech.
Origins
“Groyper” meme
The “Groyper” meme emerged online in 2017, showing up on various platforms including the anonymous image board 4chan. This was during the height of Pepe the Frog’s popularity with the alt right, and “Groyper” was a variation of Pepe the Frog, depicting the character resting his chin on interlinked hands. The Groyper meme was adopted by people connected with the alt right, who added Groyper-related images to their Twitter handles and profile pictures.
More recently, members of the alt right and Fuentes supporters adopted the Groyper meme as a symbol for the “Groyper army.”
Groypers want to confront mainstream conservatives about positions that Groypers believe are not in the best interests of whites. They believe that the mainstream conservative movement is just as responsible as liberals and the left for destroying white America, and that Groypers are the true future of the conservative movement.
And while they are often pitted against traditional conservatives, Groypers have received public support from high profile conservatives who are perceived to be mainstream, including political pundit Michelle Malkin.
On February 28, 2020, Malkin spoke at the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), organized by Fuentes and other Groypers. Speaking to an audience of white supremacists and far-right activists, Malkin complained about the stifling impact of the term “antisemitism,” while reeling off a series of antisemitic tropes.
“It’s antisemitic to mention George Soros’s billions,” Malkin said. “It’s antisemitic to criticize the Anti-Defamation League. It’s antisemitic to question whatever the precise number is of people who perished in World War Two. It is antisemitic for me, being married to a 100% Ashkenazi Jew, to question dual loyalties of people who are working here as agents of a foreign country.”
Leadership and followers
The people behind the Groyper movement include white supremacists from groups like American Identity Movement (AIM), formerly known as Identity Evropa.
Nicholas (Nick) Fuentes, 21, runs the “America First,” podcast. His previous podcast, “Nationalist Review,” was co-hosted by James Allsup, an open white supremacist who is now a member of American Identity Movement. Fuentes, who holds white supremacist views (but claims not to be a white supremacist), positions the Groypers as “Christian conservatives” who oppose immigration (undocumented and legal), globalism, gay and transgender rights, feminism and more. This, however, is a ploy to attract mainstream support and distract from the group’s fundamentally white supremacist ideology. Fuentes and his followers often dress in suits and ties to project a “mainstream” conservative image.
In his podcast on November 11, 2019, Fuentes repeatedly claimed that many of the Groypers, including himself, were once strong Trump supporters but are angry about the administration’s embrace of Israel, and about mainstream conservatives’ support of globalism, “endless wars” and other issues they feel run counter to an “America First” agenda.
Fuentes has made a number of racist and anti-Semitic comments on his America First podcast, but always claimed he was being ironic and provocative rather than expressing actual extremist views. He has referred to Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh as “shabbos goy race traitor” who works for Jews (Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative, runs the Daily Wire). On one of his podcasts, Fuentes “jokingly” denied the Holocaust and compared Jews burnt in concentration camps to cookies in an oven. Fuentes has also made racist comments, for example, asserting that segregation and policies in the pre-civil rights-era South like separate drinking fountains “was better for them, it’s better for us.”
Digby posted Friday on Graham Gallagher’s observations at TNR of how the right has grown not just righter but weirder. From testicle tanning to vaccine hesitancy, the fringiest of the right (including Tucker Carlson) have embraced “pseudoscience, tantric spiritualism, and self-help.”
I’ve long described the left’s embrace of New Age spirituality as a reaction to feeling adrift in a world stripped of myths that supply meaning, as an attempt to reconstruct the interior landscape from a pastiche of mystical icons. As usual, the right is a couple of decades late to the party.
Thus has the right moved from wearing their patriotism on the sleeves (figuratively) to outright rejection of Americanness (except as a cheap flag pin) and embrace of rule by strongmen if not full-on, medieval-style monarchy. Peasants want democracy, not aristocrats.
Allen West, the kookie former Texas Republican Party chair, has joined a self-styled Knights Templar, for heaven’s sake. The real ones disbanded in 1312, Gallagher writes.
“John Gibbs, a Republican nominee for a Michigan swing seat founded a think tank that argued for overturning the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote,” Gallagher observes:
Perhaps the most pernicious element of right-wing weirdness occurs at the intersection of standard traditionalist opposition to equal gender roles and an online youth subculture that has sought to make women’s disempowerment trendy. The idea of the “trad wife”—women who embrace subservient roles as homemakers and mothers, eschewing political leadership and careers—stands, like many of the weird right’s shibboleths, at the crossroads of internet meme, sociological critique, and political program. Trad wives are a pastiche of the idyll of the 1950s housewife and the imagined premodern agrarian mother, realities that only fully existed in advertisements and storybooks. They usually espouse complete submissiveness to husbands and a totalizing dedication to raising children.
That paragraph stood out because I’d just seen this TikTok video by Rebecca Larsen. She warns conservative women that their perceptions of being superior to others blinds them to the fact that conservative men with their manly tanned testicles view them as inferiors, as accessories.
Trad wife aesthetics are partly a result of right-wing influencers’ embrace of traditionalist religious attitudes. The embrace of traditionalist Catholicism and the rise of integralists like Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule—who espouses a quasi-theocracy that even the conservative stalwart George Will has said is “un-American”—are critical pieces of the aesthetic and moral revanchism now in vogue on the right.
The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—is, according to one critic, indicative of the educated and activist right’s “admiration for the [European] aristocratic past” and a longing for a new elite to which it feels it belongs. This segment of the right has, both programmatically and aesthetically, lost interest in conserving that which is American and moved on to mine its influences from stranger sources. Constitutionalism, Enlightenment rationality, religious freedom, and republicanism are out. European aristocracy, crusading holy orders, and mysticism are in. Mr. West may still make the usual overtures to Americana in press releases, but the Knights Templar (so far as I know) never made it to Texas.
That idealization of the European right has led not just to the fetishization of historical monarchism—cheerled by figures like the reactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin—but to more immediate fascination with contemporary autocrats, especially Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary and President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
The royalist strain is as persistent in American culture and politics as the paranoid style. Loyalists made up about 20 percent of the population during the Revolution. That figure reflects a similar proportion of those sentiments extant today.
Conservatives keep confirming that assessment. The only thing American about them beside their boasting is their birth certificates.
For more than 30 years, Susan Kamuda lived with her family several hundred yards away from an unassuming brick building situated in a small office park.
Kamuda’s son, Brian, remembers riding his bike past the building on his way through the neighborhood; he later taught a girlfriend to drive in the nearby parking lot.
Neither Kamuda nor the surrounding community knew that the building housed a company that was spewing a colorless gas into the skies above Willowbrook, a middle-class, suburban enclave south-west of Chicago. A company called Sterigenics used the gas, ethylene oxide (EtO), to sterilize medical devices and other products.
Kamuda, 70, had no history of breast cancer in her family. She won a $363 million judgment against Sterigenics over her 2007 diagnosis. Brian was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Kamuda knew of others near the plant who had fallen sick. Only recently had they begun to link the illnesses to proximity to the Sterigenics site.
EtO has been associated with an increased risk for cancer since the 1970s. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that the greatest cancer risk is for people who have lived near a facility that has released EtO into the air for many years.
Records show that regulators were concerned about the health risks associated with EtO when Sterigenics quietly moved into Willowbrook in 1984. That year Illinois environmental officials sent the company a letter warning that the facility could expose people living within a mile from the facility to EtO concentrations 14 times higher than amounts then considered safe.
This is not the first time I’ve come across EtO. It is used in small quantities in hospitals to sterilize instruments that cannot tolerate autoclave temperatures. It sterilizes effectively because it kills … basically everything. It’s not only toxic and carcinogenic, but explosive.
A site adjacent to a factory where my firm did some design/construct work sold EtO. Another engineer who’d had business there said one of his contacts had doodled out on his blotter how large a crater the explosion would cause if one of their EtO railcars blew up. Um, large.
Some years later, there was a derailment near Liberty, SC (IIRC). The state environmental agency’s press office statement over the radio said one of the overturned tank cars was leaking caustic soda, but that was contained. Another car, she said haltingly, contained “eth-yl-ene ox-ide.”
“I’m not sure what the properties of that are,” she went on, “but as a precuation they have ordered an evacuation of people living within a quarter of a mile.”
