Republican Child Molester’s Accuser’s House Torched

Roy Moore, most recently seen badly loosing a Senate race in a red-red state and refusing to concede, had been accused of multiple women of child molesting. Apparently some of the Republicans who wanted the child molester in office got revenge…

Yet another white-wing terrorsit attack.

Arson investigation underway after Roy Moore accuser’s home burns down

An arson investigation is underway after the Alabama home of one of the women who accused former GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore of inappropriate behavior burned down. The Etowah County Arson Task Force confirmed it is investigating the blaze in Gadsen and speaking to a person of interest. Authorities say there is no indication that the fire was related to Moore or the woman’s allegations.

According to the local news outlet AL.com, Tina Johnson’s home burned down Wednesday while she and her husband were at work and her grandson was at school. Johnson and her family said they lost everything they owned.

“I am devastated, just devastated,” Johnson told the news outlet. “We have just the clothes on our backs.”

Johnson and her neighbor Kevin Tallant told AL.com that other neighbors saw a young man who has a history of intoxication walking around the house at the time of the fire, and local authorities said they are speaking with a suspect.

“The ongoing investigation does not lead us to believe that the fire is in any way related to Roy Moore or allegations made against him,” the Etowah County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

Johnson accused Moore of groping her butt in 1991, when she was 28 and visiting his law office. Moore was already married at the time.

“He didn’t pinch it; he grabbed it,” Johnson told AL.com in November.

Moore was also accused of inappropriately touching underage women, including a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old when he was in his 30s.

Moore lost the election in the heavily red state to Democrat Doug Jones in December, but refused to concede.

 

Alt-Whiter Tries to Blow Up Train

Let’s see – this week we had an alt-right bozo murder his girlfriends family because they found out he was a Nazi…And now more terrorism from the Chumph’s “Good People”…

FBI accuses ‘alt-right’ white supremacist of terrorism after he hijacked a train in rural Nebraska

A Missouri man who attended the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last August has been accused by the FBI of commissioning a terrorist attack.

According to Lincoln, Nebraska’s Journal-Star newspaper, newly-unsealed FBI documents reveal that 26-year-old Taylor Michael Wilson, a man charged with attacking an Amtrak train and its employees in Nebraska while en route to St. Louis, was linked to a white supremacist group and had expressed an interest in “killing black people.”

Last October, a train conductor traveling through Furnas County, Nebraska noticed the train braking, and found Wilson “playing with the controls” in the engineer room. He was detained by the conductor, and when agents arrived at the scene, they discovered he had a legally-concealed handgun, along with “speed loaders, a box of ammunition, a knife, tin snips, scissors and a ventilation mask” inside his backpack.

He was charged with “felony criminal mischief and use of a deadly weapon during the commission of a felony,” and after posting bail in early December, was released from jail. Days after, the FBI searched his home and found a hidden stash of 15 firearms, ammunition and accessories, as well as “white supremacy documents and paperwork.”

According to the Journal-Star‘s report, the documents on Wilson also show that agents found “videos and PDF files on Wilson’s phone of a white supremacist banner over a highway, other alt-right postings and documents related to how to kill people.”

Agents interviewed an acquaintance of Wilson’s who told them that been acting strangely since the summer, and had joined an “‘alt-right’ neo-Nazi group that he found while researching white supremacy forums online.” The FBI believes he traveled with this group to the Charlottesville rally.

Another informant told agents that “Wilson has expressed an interest in ‘killing black people’ and others besides whites, and they suspect Wilson was responsible for a road rage incident in April 2016 in St. Charles where a man pointed a gun at a black woman for no apparent reason while driving on Interstate 70.”

 

Cover Up of Alt-right Cop Killer by MSM

Black man in Dallas shoots and kills cops… It’s news 24 x 7.

Black Man in Louisiana shoots and kills cop…It’s NEWS 24×7, including lots of attempts to blame BLM.

Whait alt-right racist shoots 4 Cops, killing one…And hardly a mumble.

Welcome to Jim Crow American News.

 

 

Facebook Cavalry Against Racist Trolls

The  alt-right has trained up a whole army of racist trolls to invade the Social Websites and Boards.

It can be awfully tough to fight these clowns if you are unprepared or don’t have the tools.

The Cavalry!

These are your white allies on Facebook

When you’re exhausted from debating race with strangers, they step in

Social media conversations on race typically take one of two routes.

The first, and the one less traveled, leads to a thoughtful, fact-driven exchange of ideas. The second (more popular) route leads to bitter back-and-forth filled with tired stereotypes or racially inflammatory barbs.

But now, when discussion swerves in the second direction, there’s a group of white allies prepared to do the rerouting.

White Nonsense Roundup is a social media watchdog group with about 100 white volunteers. Its goal: to relieve people of color from the emotional labor of engaging with a person’s racist or racially insensitive thoughts.

Say, a person of color makes a post about Black Lives Matter. Then others respond with ignorant or offensive comments. That person can tag White Nonsense RoundUp to snatch some edges — or, better put, to educate people with context and fact-based views.

Think of it like roadside assistance for social media debates you’re tired of having.

“It’s really unfair that we expect people of color to experience racism, but then also explain it to us,” the group’s co-founder Terri Kempton, a book editor and college instructor, told CNN.

How it started

After Philando Castile’s killing in 2016, Kempton saw a need for proactive involvement by white people like herself in conversations about race.

“I think, as white people, we are taught that intentions are all that matters,” Kempton said. “We think that if our hearts are in the right places and we consciously doubt racism, we’re good to go. So that was a light-bulb moment to me, where I didn’t think intentions are enough.”

So, she approached another white friend, Layla Tromble, and together they launched White Nonsense Roundup on Facebook, Twitter and later Instagram.

“I thought, ‘What about if we take on some of that emotional labor or burden?'” Kempton said. “Because white people are responsible for talking to other white people about racism.”

Their idea worked. Since its launch, White Nonsense RoundUp has gained more than 138,000 followers across its different accounts.

One of them is Kevin Tillman, an educator in Oakland, California, who says he uses the service almost every day. Tillman, 40, is a leader in the vegan hip-hop movement and often encounters trolls online.

“It’s inspiring. I really appreciate the work that they’re doing and I steadily promote them,” he said. “And the reality is white folks will sooner listen to them. They’re handling things people of color have been handling all our lives.”

Chenoa Alamu discovered White Nonsense RoundUp when she came across one of their posts that said it’s not the job of black people to educate white people.

“I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was such a breath of fresh air,” said Alamu, a violinist in Springfield, Illinois.

“I feel strong enough and have felt strong enough to have conversations about race on my own. But I was getting tired,” she said. “When I saw the (White Nonsense RoundUp) post, that’s when I was like, ‘Phew, finally somebody white who gets it … someone willing to carry the burden of racism.'”…More…

 

Official Pizza of the White Supremacists

Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter has certainly gotten his company in a mess of this one. The picture below is a fake. It is a photoshop put out by the neo-Nazis.

Consumer boycotts have become an effective way for us “little people” to punish egregious behavior by some corporations. A Marketer’s worst nightmare is to have their company identified with anything that destroys or harms their brand. It is bad enough when an employee does something stupid, but at least the company can take corrective action through punishing or firing the employee and distancing the company from bad actions.

With the Trump era comes a new problem. Undesirable or reprehensible groups associating their name and causes with corporate brands. Most recently, Papa John’s Pizza becoming the Pizza supplier of the alt-right and neo-Nazis. Now to be honest, the company’s association with these reprehensible groups isn’t entirely unearned. CEO John Schnatter’s foray into politics aligned with the right, has led some rather nasty groups to believe he is aligned with them. Schnatter’s outspoken opposition to the ACA, and later jumping in on the wrong side of the NFL Player protest controversy certainly didn’t earn his company, or personal image and friends.

Membership with the far-right extremists isn’t based on necessarily supporting their odious beliefs, it is often based simply on the idea that a certain person or group is “sticking it to the liberals”.

That has resulted in a 13% drop in stock price.

Now I have no idea of Mr. Schnatter’s beliefs. I would reject calling him a racist on the positions he has taken, however his company is being hammered by “guilt by association” even though there is little to no evidence that the company in any way attempted to support or to encourage that association. Mr. Schnatter certainly is a Republican. and demonstratively supports some of the right’s “politics of race”. That is a pretty broad range of folks, and groups which have vastly different views and agendas.

Yeah, John Schnatter -it’s unfair. But you really should have seen the sharks in that cesspool before you stuck your foot in. Politics always leads to “association”, quite often with fringe groups seeking validation, or some folks making bad assumptions. Which is why smart companies are very careful about what their brand gets attached to.

What happens when Nazis hijack your brand

The neo-Nazis were hungry. They’d spent the day in a Charlottesville courthouse testifying at the preliminary hearing of a white nationalist jailed for pepper spraying counter protesters during August’s deadly Unite the Right rally. Now, after the long drive home to Alexandria, Va., they craved pizza.

“We were going to order from the local place where we get pizza all the time, but we said no, Papa John’s is the official pizza of the alt-right now,” said Eli Mosley, the 26-year-old leader of the white separatist group Identity Evropa. “We’re just supporting the brands that support us.”

That show of support — unsolicited and unwanted by Papa John’s which Tuesday posted a tweet explicitly rejecting neo-Nazi ideas — exhibits an emerging danger to major American brands negotiating the racial politics that have cleaved the country.

It is no longer enough for companies to keep a low profile when it comes to polarizing issues involving race, brand experts say. Instead, some companiesare preemptively stating their positions, hoping to avoid being hijacked by white supremacists eager to spread their ideas into the mainstream by tying themselves to household brands, from pizzas and burgers to sneakers and cars.

“Companies need to take a public stand on issues that are affecting consumers in advance of being co-opted,” said Heide Gardner, chief diversity and inclusion officer at IPG, one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing conglomerates. “Brands need to build a certain level of sophistication around racial issues. They need to be really mindful of how charged the environment is and take pains to look at situations through a diversity lens.”

Papa John’s learned this lesson the hard way after the chain, a major NFL sponsor, found itself in the unwelcome embrace of neo-Nazi groups following a Nov. 1 call with investors that blamed disappointing pizza sales on football players’ protests against racism and police brutality.

Following the call, a neo-Nazi website hailed Papa John’s as “Seig Heil Pizza” with a photo of a pie whose pepperonis had been arranged into a swastika.

It didn’t matter that the company immediately condemned racism and all hate groups in a statement saying, “We do not want these individuals or groups to buy our pizza.”

“They can signal all they want but we know,” said Mosley, praising the chief executive’s statements.

The neo-Nazis’ campaign to co-opt brands has forced companies into a familiar pattern: corporate statements disavowing white supremacy, typically followed by silence, in hopes the controversy would blow over without long-lasting damage to their image and sales.

But that approach did not work for Papa John’s, whose stock had fallen by 13 percent since the earnings call by close of business Tuesday.

That night, in a renewed attempt to disown the neo-Nazis that have attached themselves to the brand, Papa John’s tweeted an emoji of a middle finger to “those guys.” The company also apologized for CEO John Schnatter’s “divisive” comments on the earnings call and affirmed its support for NFL players protesting inequality.

“We will work with the players and league to find a positive way forward,” the company tweeted. “Open to ideas from all. Except neo-Nazis.”

A spokesman told the Post Wednesday that they wanted to be “crystal clear” about where the company stood with regard to white supremacist groups.

Other companies should take heed of Papa John’s experience, experts say. As the marketplace becomes the latest battleground for the culture wars, brand strategists are advising companies accustomed to staying out of the political fray to proactively weigh in with bold statements about race — such as Nikeand Ben & Jerry’s have done — to thwart future attempts by hate groups to adopt brands as their own.

More brands, now on edge, are also building up their crisis management teams in preparation for the next racial flare up, said Tiffany Warren, chief diversity officer at Omnicom Group, a global marketing and corporate communications holding company.

“That’s the new reality,” Warren said. “It’s not just nice to have. It’s the way of doing business now.”

Some companies were just bystanders when they were swept up in the racially charged atmosphere.

Tiki Brand, owned by Wisconsin-based Lamplight Farms Incorporated, was simply minding its business as a purveyor of Polynesian kitsch, when its bamboo torches were used by white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville.

Images of angry young white men parading through the University of Virginia campus holding the flaming torches aloft turned the product once evocative of backyard barbecues and luaus into a symbol of white supremacy.

The company declined to comment on whether it has felt any financial impact from its tarnished image.

Other companies caught the admiration of neo-Nazis after their executives voiced support for President Trump or his policies.

Pottsville, Pa.’s Yuengling, touted as “America’s oldest brewery,” became the favored beer of white nationalists after the company’s owner backed Trump in the final days of the campaign.

Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer website, declared New Balance the “official shoes of white people” after an executive of the Boston shoe company praised Trump’s stance on trade soon after he was elected. Liberals tweeted pictures of themselves trashing or burning their New Balance sneakers.

Still other firms attracted the attention of white nationalists through branding mistakes of their own. Anglin proclaimed Wendy’s the “official burger of the neo-Nazi alt-right movement” after the fast food restaurant mistakenly tweeted a picture of Pepe the Frog, the white nationalist symbol, in the same red pigtails as the Wendy’s girl mascot.

And white supremacists celebrated when a casting call for a Cadillac commercial sought “any and all real alt-right thinkers/believers.” Cadillac said at the time it did not authorize the casting notice, but Anglin had already pounced, writing in a post titled “Yes, We are Mainstream Now” that “it was natural for a major American corporation to want someone from our movement.”…

 

Defunding the alt-right – Moneyman Robert Mercer Pulls the Plug

Looks like the paychecks just got pulled on the alt-right hate mongers.

Robert Mercer’s shunning of Milo Yiannopoulos leaves allies stunned — but is a lawsuit to blame?

Allies of shadowy hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer were shocked at the vehemence with which Mercer denounced provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos on Thursday, as well as Mercer’s disavowal of the “alt right” movement and the white supremacist values it espouses.

“Holy sh*t!” one Yiannopoulos supporter texted to Vanity Fair‘s Tina Nguyen after Mercer’s announcement. “I think it means Milo is officially de-funded.”

In his statement on Thursday, Mercer said, “[I]n my opinion, actions of and statements by Mr. Yiannopoulos have caused pain and divisiveness undermining the open and productive discourse that I had hoped to facilitate. I was mistaken to have supported him, and for several weeks have been in the process of severing all ties with him.”

Yiannopoulos — whose fortunes have been spiraling downward for nearly a year — was the subject of a BuzzFeed exposé last month that revealed his cozy relationship with white supremacists and even cozier relationship with the ghost writers who did the bulk of Yiannopoulos’ writing, uncredited and largely unpaid.

Mercer’s public statement from Thursday said that he is particularly bothered by accusations that he is a white supremacist.

“Of the many mischaracterizations made of me by the press, the most repugnant to me, have been the intimations that I am a white supremacist or a member of some other noxious group,” he wrote.

The Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis excoriated Mercer, however, for pumping millions of dollars into his various media projects, which Lewis contends have “destroy(ed) the conservative movement.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mercer, you don’t get to play Thoughtful Libertarian Man after bankrolling nativism, populism, and racism,” Lewis said.

Others, however, dismissed Mercer’s departure from Renaissance Technologies and sale of his share of Breitbart.com as a PR ploy designed to create public distance between Mercer’s business reputation and the increasingly toxic “alt right” brand of white supremacy.

“This seems to me much more like Robert Mercer separating…his image from his money-making capacity than an actual disassociation with the people he funded for so long,” said former Breitbart.com editor Ben Shapiro. “The only person who’s really damaged here is Yiannopoulos. Rebekah’s gonna continue funding Breitbart, [and] there’s no repentance or shift here…it’s just a P.R. maneuver to [take] pressure off his hedge-fund investors.”

One possible reason that Mercer is urgently attempting to rehabilitate his public image is a lawsuit filed by former Renaissance Technologies partner David Magerman, who has publicly accused Mercer of being a racist.

Magerman’s lawsuit revealed that Mercer told him that he believes the following things:

a) The United States began to go in the wrong direction after the passage of the Civl Rights Act in the 1960s;

b) African Americans were doing fine in the late-1950s and early-1960s before the Civil Rights Act;

c) The Civil Rights Act “infantilized” African Americas by making them dependent on government and removing any incentive to work;

d) The only racist people remaining in the United States are black; and

e) White people have no racial animus toward African Americans anymore, and if there is any, is it not something that the government should be concerned with.

 

Just Another Undercover Black Man – and the alt-right

Some research on the enemy…

 

Fighting Fascism – How the Nazis Tailored Discriminated Against Jews Based on American Jim Crow

Fantastic bit of history here. The neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and alt-right of today aren’t any different than Hitler’s Nazis.

Tuskeegee Airmen

761st Tank Batallion

 

A brief history of black Americans fighting fascism — from WWII to Charlottesville

In July 1943, one month after a race riot shook Detroit, Vice President Henry Wallace spoke to a crowd of union workers and civic groups:

“We cannot fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home. Those who fan the fires of racial clashes for the purpose of making political capital here at home are taking the first step toward Nazism.”

The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading African-American newspaper at the time, praised Wallace for endorsing what they called the “Double V” campaign. The Double Victory campaign, launched by the Courier in 1942, became a rallying cry for black journalists, activists and citizens to secure both victory over fascism abroad during World War II and victory over racism at home.

There is a historical relationship between Nazism and white supremacy in the United States. Yet the recent resurgence of explicit racism, including the attack in Charlottesville, has been greeted by many with surprise. Just look at the #thisisnotwhoweare hashtag.

As a scholar of African-American history, I am troubled by the collective amnesia in U.S. politics and media around racism. It permeates daily interactions in communities across the country. This ignorance has consequences. When Americans celebrate the country’s victory in WWII, but forget that the U.S. armed forces were segregated, that the Red Cross segregated blood donors or that many black WWII veterans returned to the country only to be denied jobs or housing, it becomes all the more difficult to talk honestly about racism today.

Nazis and Jim Crow

As Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime rose to power in the 1930s, black-run newspapers quickly recognized that the Third Reich saw the American system of race law as a model. Describing a plan to segregate Jews on German railways, the New York Amsterdam News wrote that Nazis were “taking a leaf from United States Jim Crow practices.”

The Chicago Defender noted that “the practice of jim-crowism has already been adopted by the Nazis.” A quote from the official newspaper of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary organization, on the origins of the railway ban stated:

“In the freest country in the world, where even the president rages against racial discrimination, no citizen of dark color is permitted to travel next to a white person, even if the white is employed as a sewer digger and the Negro is a world boxing champion or otherwise a national hero…[this] example shows us all how we have to solve the problem of traveling foreign Jews.”

In making connections between Germany and the United States, black journalists and activists cautioned that Nazi racial ideology was not solely a foreign problem. A New York Amsterdam News editorial argued in 1935:

“If the Swastika is an emblem of racial oppression, the Stars and Stripes are equally so. This country has consistently refused to recognize one-tenth of its population as an essential part of humanity…It has systematically encouraged the mass murder of these people through bestial mobs, through denial of economic opportunity, through terrorization.”

Victory at home

When the United States entered WWII, African-Americans joined the fight to defeat fascism abroad. Meanwhile, the decades-long fight on the home front for equal access to employment, housing, education and voting rights continued.

These concerns prompted James G. Thompson, a 26-year-old from Wichita, Kansas, to write to the editors of the Pittsburgh Courier. His letter sparked the Double Victory campaign. Considering his service in the U.S. Army, which was racially segregated during WWII, Thompson wrote:

“Being an American of dark complexion and some 26 years, these questions flash through my mind: ‘Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?’ ‘Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow?’…‘Is the kind of America I know worth defending?’”

For Thompson and other African-Americans, defeating Nazi Germany and the Axis powers was only half the battle. Winning the war would be only a partial victory if the United States did not also overturn racial discrimination at home.

These ideals seemed particularly far away in the summer of 1943, when racial violence raged across the country. In addition to the riot in Detroit, there were more than 240 reports of interracial battles in cities and at military bases, including in Harlem, Los Angeles, Mobile, Philadelphia and Beaumont, Texas.

These events inspired Langston Hughes’ poem, “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943”:

“Looky here, America / What you done done / Let things drift / Until the riots come […] You tell me that hitler / Is a mighty bad man / I guess he took lessons from the ku klux klan […] I ask you this question / Cause I want to know / How long I got to fight / BOTH HITLER — AND JIM CROW.”

The end of Hughes’ poem calls to mind the swastikas and Confederate flags that were prominently displayed in Charlottesville and at other white supremacist rallies. These symbols and ideologies have long and intertwined histories in the U.S.

Advocates of the Double Victory campaign understood that Nazism would not be completely vanquished until white supremacy was defeated everywhere. In linking fascism abroad and racism at home, the Double Victory campaign issued a challenge to America that remains unanswered.

 

Faux News, Tucker Caarlson – Advice on Car Terrorist Attacks Against the Left

No different than ISIS, here is a video shown on Faux News Tucker Carlson show advocating car ramming attacks against liberals and progressive demonstrators…It is not just a “Nazi” problem.

 

Charlottesville Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy Speaks Out

Charlottesville is getting ready to become a lot less tolerant of neo-confederate and racist groups.

They want to make a point, don’t move the statue, hand out some sledgehammers and let the people of the city take it down the way folks around the world, including in Germany and Iraq have taken down the monuments and artifacts of dictators…One small piece at a time.

 

Breaking the Alt-Right’s Piggy Bank

Surprised by Alt-Right and White Supremacist content on YouTube and Other sites…With Advertising for Coke or Pepsi right beside it?

While the tech companies were fine with it, and did little to filter it out – the big companies who buy ads aren’t happy at all.

Smack-down for the racist enabling tech companies.

Starbucks and Walmart join growing list of advertisers boycotting YouTube

Major companies pulling advertisements a sign that many doubt Google’s ability to prevent marketing campaigns from appearing alongside repugnant videos

PepsiCo, Walmart and Starbucks on Friday confirmed that they have suspended their advertising on YouTube, joining a growing boycott in a sign that big companies doubt Google’s ability to prevent marketing campaigns from appearing alongside repugnant videos.

The companies pulled their ads after the Wall Street Journal found that Google’s automated programs placed their brands on five videos containing racist content. AT&T, Verizon, Volkswagen and several other companies pulled ads earlier this week.

“The content with which we are being associated is appalling and completely against our company values,” Walmart said in a Friday statement.

Besides suspending their spending on YouTube, Walmart, Pepsi and several other companies have said they will stop buying ads that Google places on more than 2m other third-party websites.

The defections are continuing even after Google apologized for tainting brands and outlined steps to ensure ads don’t appear alongside unsavory videos.

If Google can’t lure back advertisers, it could result in a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Most analysts, though, doubt the ad boycott will seriously hurt Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet. Alphabet shares have fallen more than 3% since Monday, closing at $839.65 on Thursday.

Although they have been growing rapidly, YouTube’s ads still only represent a relatively small financial piece of Alphabet, whose revenue totaled $73.5bn last year after subtracting commissions paid to Google’s partners. YouTube accounted for $5.6bn, or nearly 8%, of that total, based on estimates from the research firm eMarketer.

Whether the recent events are a mere blip on the radar for Google or a harbinger of bigger problems to come may depend on whether the company can quickly improve its technical tools to give advertisers more control over where their ads appear.

YouTube has begun reviewing its advertising policies and will take steps to give advertisers more control, Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, wrote in a blogpost this week. Google also plans to hire more people for its review team and refine its artificial intelligence – a key step, since much of the ad-serving is handled by automation.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, acknowledged in a Fox News interview that ads appearing next to videos promoting hate speech or advocating violence had slipped through the digital cracks in Google’s elaborate ad-serving systems.

“We match ads and the content, but because we source the ads from everywhere, every once in a while somebody gets underneath the algorithm and they put in something that doesn’t match,” Schmidt said. “We’ve had to tighten our policies and actually increase our manual review time and so I think we’re going to be OK.”

But Google’s public statements have done little to assuage advertisers’ fears, said David Cohen, president, North America, for the media buying firm Magna Global.

Even before the most recent revelations about YouTube, control over online ad placement had become a hot-button topic for advertisers. Social networks and news aggregators came under fire during and after the US presidential election for spreading fake news reports, and advertisers have also sought to avoid having their brands appear beside content that they categorize as hate speech.

“Between non-human traffic and fraud, fake news and hate speech, brands are more concerned than ever,” said Marc Goldberg, CEO of Trust Metrics, a New York-based company that addresses ad fraud.

 

Is the Alt-Right Media Under Russian Control? A Treasonous Cabal in the White-Right

It appears the Russians have been using the alt-right media to promote and advance fake news stories in a disinformation campaign. It is unknown at this point if there is any collusion between the far right sites and the Russians, or if there is, how much. Specifically Brietbart and Alex Jones “Infowars” have bee extensively penetrated and used as vehicles to promote anti-Democrat propaganda and fake news.

Can you say the words “Vast White Wing Conspiracy”?

The Russians easily are posting propaganda and fake news in the white right media, through an internet tool called a “bot”. Much of the information posted on these sites come from the KGB.

There is no evidence that any of the far right sites has done anything to stop it.

Raising the issue of collusion between these folks and Russia to reach certain political goals – such as the Chumph’s election.

It is inconceivable that this sort of broad based disinformation action by the Russians without the full support, collaboration, and permission of the American actors involved.

This treason goes a lot deeper than just the Chump’s Russian owned campaign. Putin’s Bitch is making claims like the now thoroughly debunked “Obama wiretapped the Trump Towers”, directly sourced from media controlled by the Russian KGB spy agency, and Putin’s desk. There is more than coincidental information leading to the existance of collusion between the white right media and the neo-communists,

alt-right racist and former Brietbart head, Steve Bannon, now “National Security Adviser” and the Chumph’s right hand man, now may provide a direct link from the White House to the Russian KGB.

Breitbart and Infowars under investigation for ties to Russia: report

Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories — some fictional — that favored Donald Trump’s presidential bid, two people familiar with the inquiry say.

Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as “bots,” to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said.

The bots’ end products were largely millions of Twitter and Facebook posts carrying links to stories on conservative internet sites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars, as well as on the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, the sources said. Some of the stories were false or mixed fact and fiction, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the bot attacks are part of an FBI-led investigation into a multifaceted Russian operation to influence last year’s elections.

Investigators examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations took any actions to assist Russia’s operatives. Their participation, however, wasn’t necessary for the bots to amplify their news through Twitter and Facebook.

The investigation of the bot-engineered traffic, which appears to be in its early stages, is being driven by the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, whose inquiries rarely result in criminal charges and whose main task has been to reconstruct the nature of the Kremlin’s cyberattack and determine ways to prevent another.

An FBI spokesman declined to comment on the inquiry into the use of bots.

Russia-generated bots are one piece of a cyber puzzle that counterintelligence agents have sought to solve for nearly a year to determine the extent of the Moscow government’s electronic broadside.

“This may be one of the most highly impactful information operations in the history of intelligence,” said one former U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Bureau Director James Comey confirmed Monday at a House Intelligence Committee hearing what long has been reported: that the FBI is investigating possible links between individuals in the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian campaign to influence the election and whether there was any coordination between the two.

The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of multiple congressional panels examining Russia’s intervention, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that there was “circumstantial evidence of collusion.” There also is “direct evidence … of deception, and that’s where we begin the investigation,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California.

U.S. intelligence agencies charged in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the offensive, in which cyber operatives also hacked tens of thousands of emails from Democratic National Committee staff, Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and other Democrats.

A top priority of investigators is to determine who delivered those hacked emails to WikiLeaks, a London-based transparency site that published them online, the sources said. News stories about the emails embarrassed Clinton at key points in the campaign. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has denied that the Russian government was the source of the email dump.

As for the bots, they carried links not only to news stories but also to Democratic emails posted on WikiLeaks, especially those hacked from Podesta and made public in October, said Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford University Internet Institute who has researched the bot attacks.

Howard said that, as an example, bots had spread links to fictional stories that accused Clinton of involvement in running a child-sex ring in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor. The posts inspired a North Carolina man to drive to Washington and fire an assault weapon in the restaurant, according to police reports.

Howard’s study of bot-generated Twitter traffic during last fall’s Trump-Clinton campaign debates showed that bot messages favorable to Trump significantly outnumbered those sympathetic to Clinton.

He said his research showed that Americans who call themselves “patriotic programmers” also activated bots to aid Trump. In interviews, they described coding the computer commands in their spare time, Howard said.

Unlike counterintelligence investigators with more cyber sleuthing capabilities, Howard has not established that Russia was the source of the bot attacks he studied.

Russia also used “trolls,” hundreds of computer operatives who pretended to be Trump supporters and posted stories or comments on the internet complimentary to Trump or disparaging to Clinton. Sources close to the inquiry said those operatives likely worked from a facility in St. Petersburg, Russia, dedicated to that tactic.

“Russian bots and internet trolls sought to propagate stories underground,” said Mike Carpenter, a former senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration whose job focused on Russia. “Those stories got amplified by fringe elements of our media like Breitbart.”

“They very carefully timed release of information to shift the news cycle away from stories that clearly hurt Mr. Trump, such as his inappropriate conduct over the years,” he said, referring to the October release of a video in which Trump bragged about grabbing women’s genitals. That event corresponded with a surge in bot-related traffic spreading anti-Clinton stories.

An additional Russian tool was the news from its prime propaganda machine, Russia Today, with a global television and digital media operation and a U.S. arm, RT America.

Last Nov. 19, Breitbart announced that its website traffic had set a record the previous 31 days with 300 million page views, driven substantially by social media.

Breitbart, which has drawn criticism for pursuing a white nationalist agenda, was formerly led by Stephen Bannon, who became chief executive officer of Trump’s election campaign last August and now serves as Trump’s strategic adviser in the White House. The news site’s former national security editor, Sebastian Gorka, was a national security adviser to Trump’s campaign and presidential transition team. He now works as a key Trump counterterrorism adviser.

Breitbart’s chief executive officer, Larry Solov, did not respond to phone and email requests seeking comment.

Bannon and Gorka have controversial profiles. Bannon has been accused of taking anti-immigrant and racist positions. Last week, the Jewish newspaper Forward reported that Gorka had taken a lifelong loyalty oath to a Hungarian far-right group that for decades was allied with the Nazi Party.

The White House declined to respond to questions about Gorka.

Breitbart is partially owned by Robert Mercer, the wealthy co-founder of a New York hedge fund and a co-owner of Cambridge Analytica, a small, London-based firm credited with giving Trump a significant advantage in gauging voter priorities last year by providing his campaign with at least 5,000 data points on each of 220 million Americans.

InfoWars is published by Alex Jones, a Texas-based conservative talk show host known for embracing conspiracy theories such as one asserting that the U.S. government was involved in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. During the 2016 campaign, InfoWars.com was a loyal Trump public relations tool. Trump was on Jones’ show and praised his reporting.

“It’s the major source of everything,” Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant and campaign adviser, said last fall. Stone, who has regularly appeared on Jones’ show and was on Monday, has said he invites an FBI investigation into his campaign role. The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked Stone to preserve documents in connection with the Russian election inquiry.

 

Google/YouTube Monetizing Hate – Advertisers Flee

Funding for Richard Spencer, David Duke and other white-racist hate groups has traditionally been scarce. Your typical white-wing racist is no Rocket Scientist. The Internet provides the alt-right not only the opportunity to spread their message – but through advertising add-ons to make money with each click. Pull up a racist video, and get an Amazon ad in the margins. For each view the advertiser pays Google, who pays the bigots. Google and companies like Facebook have long ignored the content and environment of their streams, allowing hate groups and trolls to fester while taking a position that it is someone else’s fault.

Looks like Google is trying that again.

Perhaps one of the reasons Google has little sensitivity to the issue, is hey hire so few minorities?

Google Accused Of Making ‘Profit From Hatred’ As Major Advertisers Pull Out From YouTube

Google has been thrown onto the back foot by a mass withdrawal of advertising from YouTube, triggered by concerns about extremist content.

Having apparently failed to realise until now that their ads have been showing up next to hate speech and homophobia, corporations and media agencies have said they plan to pull their entire ad spend from the Google-owned company.

One of the latest to do so is the UK arm of France’s Havas, one of the world’s largest ad agencies, whose clients include Domino’s, Emirates and the BBC. It has pulled all its UK advertising – currently worth around £175 million ($217 million) a year: “@Havas_MGUK has made decision to protect brands it represents in absence of reassurance or change of policy from YT,” tweets CEO and country manager Paul Frampton Calero.

Corporations including the BBC and the Guardian have also pulled their ads, along with L’Oreal, Honda and major supermarket chain Sainsbury’s; and GroupM, part of ad giant WPP, has hinted it could follow suit.

The row really began with a report from The Times that revealed that extremist YouTube videos from the likes of American white nationalist David Duke and Holocaust-denying fundamentalist pastor Steven Anderson were carrying mainstream ads.

The ads are placed by the company’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange Service, AdX,  which uses programmatic trading to allocate ads automatically. These ads have been making money for the extremists – around £6 per 1,000 pageviews – as well as for Google itself.

As the row rumbled on, the company was called for talks at the UK Cabinet Office this afternoon, with Home Affairs Select Committee chairwoman Yvette Cooper describing its activities as ‘extremely troubling’.

“It is inexplicable to us that Google can move very fast to remove material from YouTube when it is found to be copyrighted, but that the same prompt action is not taken when the material involves proscribed organisations and hateful and illegal content,” she wrote in a letter to the company.

“The Committee expects to hear from you on how you are using some of YouTube’s very significant revenue to put this problem right by devoting sufficient resources to ensure that vile and illegal material is removed proactively from your platforms, and that neither you nor those that create these videos profit from hatred.”

The government has now pulled all advertising, including military recruitment and blood donation campaigns – and demanded to know whether Google will give it a refund.

“It is totally unacceptable that taxpayer-funded advertising has appeared next to inappropriate internet content – and that message was conveyed very clearly to Google,” a government spokesperson tells Forbes.

“The Cabinet Office has told Google it expects to see a plan and a timetable for work to improve protection of government adverts to ensure this doesn’t happen again. YouTube advertising remains on hold while that work is carried out.”

And, says the spokesperson, Google will be called back next week for a follow-up meeting at which it will be expected to promise further action.

Google is, well, practically grovelling.

“We’ve heard from our advertisers and agencies loud and clear that we can provide simpler, more robust ways to stop their ads from showing against controversial content,” says UK managing director Ronan Harris in a statement.

“While we have a wide variety of tools to give advertisers and agencies control over where their ads appear, such as topic exclusions and site category exclusions, we can do a better job of addressing the small number of inappropriately monetized videos and content.”

He adds that the company is now reviewing its policies and plans to make changes.

However, the cynic might note that these changes will, he says, ‘give brands more control over where their ads appear across YouTube and the Google Display Network’. In other words, they will put the ball in the advertisers’ court.

Next time this sort of thing happens – and it will – Google will be able to pass on at least some of the blame.

 

Antifas Battling the white-wing

I am neither an anarchist or socialist – but I support the Antifa movement’s methods of taking the white supremacist, neo-nazi, white right down. Especially in their efforts to expose the scum for the public to see and properly shame. Resist, deny, expose…fight.

The white right has held America hostage for a long time by waiving their guns. So far, that has been a relatively cost free exercise on their part…

I igure about the time somebody puts a 40 lb package of C4 in a CPAC meeting or Faux News studio…That illusion will begin to dissapate.

 

Anti-fascist radicals: Liberals don’t realize the serious danger of the alt-right

To the “antifa” movement, cowardly liberals are nearly as bad as Donald Trump and the white nationalist right

Since the election of Donald Trump, liberals and leftists have been discussing how to best respond to American conservatism’s transformation from a shopworn, Cold War, anti-government philosophy into something else.

To the anarchists and socialists who consider themselves part of the global “antifa” movement (an abbreviation for “anti-fascist”), the transition currently taking place on the right is all too familiar. The rise of the alt-right and white nationalism within the U.S. is something the mainstream left doesn’t take seriously enough, they say, even as many Democrats compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.

If it is actually true that the civic nationalism of Trump and his top strategist Steve Bannon are helping to lay the groundwork for a more radical right — intentionally or otherwise — then their self-described opponents on the left need to do more than wear safety pins and post Facebook denunciations of the president they didn’t vote for.

As Natasha Lennard wrote earlier this year at the Nation, coming to such a realization is difficult for many on the left. (Lennard is a former staff writer for Salon.) Despite their posture of desiring radical change, most are actually conservative in a certain sense:

Liberals cling to institutions: They begged to no avail for faithless electors, they see ‘evisceration’ in a friendly late-night talk-show debate, they put faith in investigations and justice with regards to Russian interference and business conflicts of interest. They grasp at hypotheticals about who could have won, were things not as they in fact are. For political subjects so tied to the mythos of Reason, it is liberals who now seem deranged.

Instead of merely talking among themselves about opposing racism, say the antifa activists, leftists need to take direct action to make being a white nationalist as difficult as possible. That’s why many antifas have concentrated their efforts on such tactics as doing targeting the financial means of support of websites they see as enabling or promoting fascist views, and even engaging in physical acts of assault against members of the far right.

“Only by fighting and destroying fascism can we actually defeat it,” an anonymous members of the website It’s Going Down told Salon via email.

The antifas’ anonymity is one of several superficial characteristics they share with their bitter rivals on the alt-right. Another is that they take politics much more soberly than their less extreme counterparts. For the antifas, understanding that white nationalists are deadly serious about instigating a “racial holy war” is the key to countering them.

“During the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, while anarchists and communists were literally fighting the fascists in the streets, the liberals and social democrats attempted to debate the Nazis point for point in the halls of power,” the anonymous activist continued. “This did nothing, and also normalized the positions of the Nazis and also made them into legitimate positions.”

The center-left’s desire for an open society is its critical weakness, a Nebraska-based antifa collective told Salon via email.

“Liberalism [has] proven itself unable to prevent the rise of fascism over and over again,” the activists said. “By the time liberals are comfortable with cracking down on fascism, it’s almost always too late. Antifa wants to make sure that no roots can take hold; that every attempt to organize and recruit for the fascist agenda is physically confronted and shut down.”

Beyond targeting far-right activists’ financial means and showing up to physically confront them at their events, many antifas have made it their mission to expose the true identities of popular alt-right figures so they cannot hide their views behind pseudonyms. The Nebraska activists provided an example of theis tactic last December when they exposed the identity of Cooper Ward, a University of Nebraska student who was outed as the co-host of a popular neo-Nazi podcast. He quit the program after being identified and has not returned.

Building a fanbase as an overt racist has become much easier in the eyes of some antifa thanks in part to the mainstream media, several antifa activists told Salon.

“There is nothing ‘objective’ about writing [an] article about alt-right neo-nazis without including perspectives of their ideological opposites,” argued the Nebraska activists. “We have noticed a marked lack of Antifa views in the mainstream media; we are denied a voice while they are elevated and made to seem mainstream.”

That alleged refusal to allow the antifa voice to be heard within mainstream journalism pieces about the alt-right is indicative of a systemic bias on the part of the press, It’s Going Down wrote:

The world the Alt-Right wants is not that much different from the one we live in now, just one where the class, gender, and racial divisions are more crystallized.

Anarchists, who fight for a world where power is horizontally organized and political power is taken out of the hands of a centralized State and decentralized into human communities, where people don’t work for wages but instead human labor is put towards needs and job, and where industrial production is destroyed in favor of sustainability — is such a radical vision, and one that truly seeks to liberate all poor and working-people from the sinking Titanic that we now currently inhabit, most journalists don’t want to touch it.

Antifa activists also take issue with liberals who think that letting people with racist or anti-Semitic views state them publicly somehow serves as a method of relieving societal pressures. Instead, as an anonymous essayist on the anarchist website CrimeThinc expressed it, such expressions merely increase the reach and influence of the far right:

Fascists are only attempting to express their views “peacefully” in order to lay the groundwork for violent activity. Because fascists require a veneer of social legitimacy to be able to carry out their program, giving them a platform to speak opens the door to their being able to do physical harm to people. Public speech promoting ideologies of hate, whether or not you consider it violent on its own, always complements and correlates with violent actions. By affiliating themselves with movements and ideologies based on oppression and genocide, fascists show their intention to carry on these legacies of violence — but only if they can develop a base of support.

The antifas’ brutal approach to politics has earned them no love from many liberal and leftist quarters. Even Occupy.com has featured a highly critical essay of the anonymous activists for being a “a devolution in the philosophy of the left.”

Radical and even violent action against the far-right probably does alienate some people, antifas are quick to admit, but it is also clear that direct street action also attracts support in ways that political speechifying or angry letters to the editor simply cannot. It is certainly true that more extreme supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement have made many right-wingers more antagonistic toward advocates of police reform. It’s also true that both the mainstream Democratic and Republican hierarchies were completely ignoring the issue before fires began burning in Ferguson and Baltimore.

An anonymous essayist writing at IGD late last year explored this point in detail:

Liberals and much of the Left claim that confrontational tactics hurt us more than they help, from breaking windows to blocking streets. But in reality, each and every time this plays out in our communities, it is simply not the case. In fact, confrontation and disruption, in other words: physically fighting, brings more people in than sign holding or writing letters to the editor ever did. If anything, the wet blanket and attempts to control things by protest managers and liberals kills social movements, not combative actions which can be disruptive and at times violent.

We see this playing out in every social struggle and movement. The riots, blockades, and clashes with the police in Occupy Oakland grew the size and scale of the movement, and were themselves informed by the Oscar Grant riots and student occupations of several years prior.

The Ferguson Insurrection inspired youth across the country and led to other uprisings and rebellions which pulled in tens of thousands. Despite “leaders” within the Black Lives Matter movement attempting to endorse the Democrats, channel the movement back into politics, and reduce it to simple reforms, the movement continues to evolve and remain combative and disruptive over a period of several years. …

Liberals and Leftists claim that confrontational actions scare away people from getting involved. But we find the opposite to be true. When people see a struggle is real; when there is skin in the game, something to fight for, and people are putting their bodies on the line, they often come out in droves. It is symbolic and legalistic protest which is pointless and doesn’t work and ends up turning many people away.

By definition, the antifa arguments are both radical and controversial. The unanswered question is whether liberals, moderates and others who oppose the radical right can learn something from the antifas’ confrontational stance. Or will the violent tactics advocated by the antifas only worsen tensions in a divided society and beget more violence?

 

Larry Wilmore Goes Off on Alt-Right Racist

The highly hyped appearance of alt-right racist troll Milo Yiannapolis went off with a bang last night…

The full go-round…