[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 11 October 2017 06:05.
NPR, “Tensions Rise Between Tillerson And Trump As The Threat Of War In N. Korea Looms”, 10 Oct 2017:
New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins describes Sec. of State Tillerson as frustrated amidst very scary negotiations with N. Korea and without sufficient support and staff - most Republicans with wherewithal have been purged from Trump’s administration. While Filkins describes General Mattis as a very well read, interesting and thoughtful man who prefers negotiation to his profession of war - which, in the case of war with North Korea, “would bring the worst casualties and the worst bloodshed that any of us have ever known in our lifetimes.”
New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins says Sec. of State Rex Tillerson is a diplomat in an administration that doesn’t value diplomacy: “Rex is a sober, steady guy, and the president is anything but that.”
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Ever since NBC reported last week that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called President Trump a moron, speculation has increased about whether Tillerson will last much longer in the job. My guest Dexter Filkins has a new article in The New Yorker titled “Rex Tillerson At The Breaking Point.” Filkins started researching the article months ago. It’s about the tensions between Trump and Tillerson, Tillerson’s legacy at Exxon, where he became CEO in 2006, his strategies today in dealing with North Korea and Iran and how he’s presiding over a State Department in which most key positions remain unfilled.
One of the things we’re going to focus on is North Korea and the possibility of the escalating rhetoric actually leading to a war. Filkins’s previous article for The New Yorker was about Secretary of Defense General James Mattis, who Filkins first met when he was reporting on the war in Iraq. Filkins covered the war for The New York Times. He’s now a staff writer at The New Yorker covering foreign affairs.
Dexter Filkins, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Can we just start by acknowledging that the secretary of state you’ve just written about may not be the secretary of state much longer, which means your piece may’ve been written at exactly the right or exactly the wrong time (laughter)?
DEXTER FILKINS: Yeah, yeah, well, it’s great if you’re a journalist to have, you know, perfect timing. And in this case, I had perfect timing. I started working on that piece a long time ago, not knowing that all of this was going to come to a head. But I think he’s - you know, he’s still in the job as we speak. And I think he’s pretty frustrated. But that is a chaotic administration on any day of the week. And so who knows what tomorrow will bring?
GROSS: What are you hearing about the relationship between Tillerson and Trump?
FILKINS: Well, it’s funny. I’m the - initially, when I started talking to people, and the people around him say, it’s great. You know, they talk all the time. They talk several times a day. Trump calls him, you know, middle of the night, whenever he wants. And I think that’s true. But I - you know, there’s an anecdote, which many of your listeners will have heard by now, which is, Tillerson was apparently in a meeting after one of - he was complaining about one of Trump’s speeches. And he called him a moron, and there was a - you know, there was another word attached to the word moron, which I won’t repeat.
But I think - you know, I think he’s frustrated. I think it’s difficult for - you know, Rex Tillerson is, I think - he’s a pretty sober and a pretty steady guy. And of course, the president is anything but that. And I think Tillerson in particular has been trying very hard in places like North Korea, where we have a - you know, a terrible crisis on our hands, to make a diplomatic solution to try to avert war. I think, you know, the possibility of war with North Korea right now is very real. And so he - you know, he flies out to China to try to make a deal and - to try to make a diplomatic deal to stave off war. And the president makes fun of him. And he undercuts him - Rex, you’re wasting your time. And I - you know, he’s the secretary of state of the United States. It’s - I think he’s pretty frustrated with that, that he feels like he can’t do his job.
GROSS: One official told you, the only reason why Tillerson has stayed this long is loyalty to the country.
FILKINS: Yeah, you know, he’s an Eagle Scout. And there’s a lot of Eagle Scouts in the president’s cabinet, and there’s a lot of generals around him. And somebody said to me, the only people left around the president are generals and Boy Scouts. And they’re hanging in there out of - not because they like it or not because they’re, you know, pleased to go into work every day but because they feel a responsibility to the country.
GROSS: What have you heard about the so-called suicide pact - that if Tillerson is let loose, then Secretary of Defense Mattis and Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin would leave as well? They would just - they would walk.
FILKINS: Well, I heard that. I - you know, Washington is - it’s such a chatterbox. And when you go down there, you know, it’s just an echo chamber, and everybody’s, like, gossiping. It’s hard to know what’s true. I do know that Tillerson and Mattis talk a lot, and they have a lot of respect for each other. And I think that they - you know, they talk a lot because it’s - they both deal with foreign affairs. And, you know, one is the carrot, and the other is the stick. And they’re trying to coordinate a lot. So they talk a lot. And so it wouldn’t surprise me if that were the case.
GROSS: Is Tillerson much of a carrot? Is he holding out many carrots?
FILKINS: Well, I think the carrot’s getting smaller. I mean - and I think that’s the concern. And the hammer or the stick is getting bigger. And so if you look at their respective budgets, the Office of Management and Budget, which has drawn up the proposed budget for 2018 - for next year - which is what they’re fighting about right now - they would cut the State Department’s budget by 30 percent. And that’s about - the State Department is - the budget’s about - right now about $55 billion a year. And they are proposing - at the same time that they’re cutting the State Department by 30 percent, they’re proposing a $50 billion increase for the Pentagon. So they’re - the proposal on the table right now is to increase spending on defense as much as, or nearly as much as, the entire budget for the State Department.
And so if you stand back and think about that, what does that mean for American foreign policy? You know, you’ve got the guns over here, and you’ve got the diplomats over here. And they are cutting the resources for the diplomats, and they’re giving more resources to the guys with guns. And so I think that’s what’s disturbing to a lot of people right now - that the balance is changing.
GROSS: But Tillerson seems to be one of the people leading the charge in dismantling the State Department. I mean, you write that there are, like, 48 ambassadorships that are vacant. Twenty-one out of 23 assistant secretary positions are vacant or occupied by provisional employees because Congress hasn’t confirmed appointees to the position. How much of this is intentional on Rex Tillerson’s part?
FILKINS: Well, I - that there - I think there’s two answers to that question. The first is - to answer your question - he has his marching orders, and it’s to cut the budget and to cut the number of people - cut the number of diplomats working for the United States. And he’s doing that. He’s doing that, and he’s - or he’s trying to do it. And, you know, Congress is actually pushing back. Remarkably, even the Republicans in Congress are saying, look, this is crazy. This is too much. These cuts are too deep. You know, we have to have a diplomatic presence abroad.
And at the same time, I think that Tillerson is having a very, very difficult time - very difficult time - filling jobs and filling - you know, typically at the State Department, you have the secretary of state, and then he’s surrounded by assistant secretaries of state. And there’s 25 of them or so. And what’s happened, in this case, is because so many Republican - let’s say senior Republicans who - with deep experience on foreign policy - so many of them during the campaign publicly spoke against the Trump candidacy or signed letters, which were, you know, published in newspapers, et cetera, saying, Donald Trump is not fit to be president.
And so the whole Republican bench that you would call on to bring in to a new Republican administration, they’re essentially blackballed. And if you go down those lists, that’s a really long list. It’s most of the real brain power in the Republican foreign policy establishment. So the result is, Tillerson can’t get anybody to work for him.
GROSS: Let’s talk about North Korea. I mean, President Trump has said, we could totally destroy North Korea. North Korea has vowed to develop a nuclear missile capable of hitting the U.S. and warned it can conduct a hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific. No ambassador to South Korea has been confirmed yet. Trump also warned recently that this is the calm before the storm. And nobody’s really sure what he means by that, and he’s declined to clarify. It’s kind of like, you’ll see.
So - and the president tweeted, presidents and their administrations have been talking to North Korea for 25 years. Agreements made and massive amounts of money paid hasn’t worked. Agreements violated before the ink was dry, making fools of U.S. negotiators - sorry, but only one thing will work.
And I think it’s kind of implied what that one thing is. But we don’t really know for sure what he means. So what’s your sense of how close we’re getting to an actual nuclear war with North Korea?
FILKINS: Well, I don’t know if it’d be a nuclear war, but it would be - it’d be a very terrible war. I remember Secretary Mattis - I was on his plane earlier this year. And he said if - and he’s really sober about this. And he said, if there is a war with North Korea, it will bring the worst casualties and the worst bloodshed that any of us have ever known in our lifetimes. You know, that’s pretty strong stuff. And I think the - I think here’s where we are.
The Trump administration has decided, I think - it’s pretty clear - that the prospect of North Korea getting a workable ICBM with a nuclear warhead is worse than the prospect of war. So, I mean - and I spoke to people inside the administration who told me that. They said, we will not allow them to have a working ICBM. It’s not going to happen. And we will go to war if we have to. So short of that, what can you do? You can make a deal.
And so the plan - and I think this is what Tillerson has been working very hard on - is to squeeze the North Koreans. And there’s basically one way to squeeze the North Koreans, and that’s to squeeze China - to squeeze the North Koreans, and that it - because the Chinese economy is kind of - it’s the main - it’s the only lever, really, to pressure the North Koreans. And so the Chinese have been very reluctant to do that. They’re - for a lot of reasons - I mean, the main one is, they don’t want to have the North Korean state collapse on their borders. They’re terrified of that. They don’t want North Korea to have a nuclear weapon, I don’t think, any more than we do.
But so that’s the challenge right now, but I think it’s also the one means that the White House sees to make a deal is working with China. And that’s what Tillerson has been trying to do. So he’s been, you know, flying to China. He’s made several trips out there, and he’s pushing them. We have channels open to the North Korean leadership. And so, you know, to get back to President Trump, so the - so at the same time that, you know, the diplomats were trying to make a deal to stave off war, the president is sending out these tweets saying, I’m going to - you know, I’m going to annihilate North Korea, et cetera. And I don’t think there’s any calculation involved in that. I think the - you know, the president is just, you know, firing.
GROSS: OK, well, let’s take a short break here. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Dexter Filkins, a New Yorker staff writer who covers foreign affairs. His new piece is called “Rex Tillerson At The Breaking Point.” We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you’re just joining us, my guest is Dexter Filkins, who is a staff writer at The New Yorker and covers foreign affairs. His new piece is about the secretary of state. It’s called “Rex Tillerson At The Breaking Point.”
Rex Tillerson told you - because you had a chance to speak with him - that he told China that if China and the U.S. don’t solve this - if he and his counterpart don’t solve this - these two guys - meaning Kim Jong Un and President Trump - these two guys get to fight, and we will fight.
FILKINS: Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty scary.
GROSS: Did he elaborate on that for you? Like, what…
FILKINS: Well, yeah, a little bit. I mean, he essentially meant, look, the way this is - the way diplomacy works and works best is if it’s backed up by a threat of force. So when I walk in the room and I sit down with the Chinese, I say, look, you and I can make a deal, and we can, like, sign it on paper. And if we don’t, if diplomacy fails, there’s going to be a war. And nobody wants a war, so let’s do the deal. And I think, you know, that sounds right. Theoretically, that’s - and it sounds right. It’s just terrifying.
GROSS: Well, it - there seems to really be a game of brinksmanship being played right now.
FILKINS: Yes.
GROSS: And when you say you were told - and I forget who told you this - that if we go to war with North Korea, there will be more casualties than - what? - than…
FILKINS: Any of us know - have seen in our lifetimes. And that was Secretary Mattis.
GROSS: Oh, right. And I can - and he’s…
FILKINS: And you know…
GROSS: He (laughter)...
FILKINS: He’s seen a lot of war, you know? I mean…
GROSS: He’s seen a lot of war, right. So do you have any idea what kind of war he’s envisioning if we do go to war with North Korea? And I hate to even utter those words.
FILKINS: Yeah, God forbid. I think there’s a lot of different options. And, I mean, I’ve had some discussions about what those options are. I think they’re all terrible. I think that the easy scenario to imagine - I mean, it’s a terrible scenario - is the moment the United States strikes North Korea, say. And we’re speaking only theoretically here. The North Koreans have at their disposal thousands of artillery rounds that are within striking range of Seoul. And I think, you know, metropolitan Seoul has how many people - 20 million people. And so you can imagine.
So if the leadership of North Korea is, you know, still alive and if every piece of its army is still functioning - any piece of its army’s - is still functioning after that initial exchange, then they will fire everything they have at Seoul. And I think that’s - you know, that’s what’s got everybody’s attention. The prospect of that is terrifying because the bloodshed would be immense.
GROSS: OK.
FILKINS: And, you know, the numbers that you see are just - they’re terrifying. I mean, it’s, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of casualties.
GROSS: I’m wondering if you feel any echoes of the eve of the Iraq War right now when President Bush and Saddam Hussein were threatened - threatening each other when President Bush decided to move forward not exactly unilaterally, but not really with the backing of the U.N. either. You know, we had some allies, but it wasn’t the full force of the U.N. Do - you covered the Iraq War. You covered it right from the start. So are you feeling any similarities now?
FILKINS: Well, the - I think the difference is, in Iraq, it was basically the United States. I mean, we’d - you know, Great Britain came along, but - and the United States was utterly determined to take down Saddam, you know? Come what may, we’re going to do it. And so there was this kind of, like, heedlessness involved. You know, we’re - we are going to do this. And the whole world was kind of freaking out.
It’s different in North Korea. I mean, I do feel like I have a - whenever I sit down and talk to somebody in Washington about - who knows the North Korean situation, I get these butterflies in my stomach because it feels like these are two - you know, North Korea and the United States, they’re both people who are - at the moment who are not willing to compromise. And that means, if that doesn’t - if they don’t reach a compromise, we’re going to go to war. And I think the prospect of war is very, very real.
And so in that sense, I’m feeling, like, pretty nervous about it. But I think that in - the difference between now and, say, in Iraq in 2003 was that I think the whole world is pretty worried about North Korea. You know, it’s a kind of crazy, unpredictable regime. And I think that the whole world is united in wanting to stop North Korea from acquiring an ICBM.
So to get back to what I had said earlier, I think the Trump administration - I spoke to somebody about this at some length - said that we - the reason why we cannot allow North Korea to acquire an ICBM is, think of the consequences. They would - they might use one. Oh, they’ll start threatening Japan. They’ll start threatening South Korea. They’ll threaten the United States. They - it will probably prompt, or could prompt, the Japanese to reversing, you know, decades of being a - having a very, very small defense force. They may have to go nuclear. So it could destabilize the whole region.
You - there’s no evidence that North Koreans would ever think twice about selling their nuclear technology to another country. So all of those things are terrifying as well. And so what the Trump administration has concluded is that this - or that scenario that I just painted - we cannot allow that, and we will not allow that under any circumstances.
GROSS: So if there is a war with North Korea, as it’s possible there will be, is there any scenario that you’ve heard in which the U.S. uses a nuclear weapon against North Korea?
FILKINS: Yes. Yes, I’ve had that conversation. It’s terrifying. I mean, it’s just not even something that you want to think about. But I will tell you about a conversation I had with a very senior person. He said, the problem, if the North Koreans, say, are 2 inches away from acquiring the capability - you know, a workable nuclear-armed ICBM - and we need to stop that, how do we do that? We kill the leadership, basically. We take out the whole leadership - Kim Jong Un, everyone around him.
Now, how do you do that? Because, you know, do we know where they are? Are they all scattered? And that’s where the nuclear weapon came in in the conversation that I had. So in other words, you decapitate the regime, and maybe you can avert the kind of horrible consequences that we’ve talked about with the North Koreans raining artillery shells down on greater Seoul. But that’s pretty terrifying. I think that option has been discussed. I think it’s on the table. That’s what was related to me. But, I mean, it’s pretty terrifying.
GROSS: How do you use a nuclear weapon to decapitate the regime?
FILKINS: God if I know. I don’t know. I mean, because - I don’t know. I mean, I think that the idea, at least in the discussion that I had, was that that would be the only way that you could guarantee that you would basically obliterate the leadership, wherever it was. The problem with that, obviously, is that you’re going to end up obliterating a lot of other things as well. And so I - you know, you - there’s no such thing as a surgical nuclear strike.
And so I think if - you know, if nuclear weapons came into play here, the consequences would be horrifying. And I don’t - you know, I don’t - this is what - I think this is what keeps people awake at nights. I mean, everybody’s thinking about these options, and there are no good options. They’re all bad - all of them. But the nuclear one, of course, is conceivably the worst.
GROSS: My guest is Dexter Filkins. His new article “Rex Tillerson At The Breaking Point” is in the current issue of The New Yorker. We’ll talk more after a break. And our jazz critic, Kevin Whitehead, will have an appreciation of pianist and composer, Thelonious Monk, who was born 100 years ago today. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross, back with Dexter Filkins, a staff writer for The New Yorker who covers foreign affairs. His new article is titled “Rex Tillerson At The Breaking Point: Will Donald Trump Let The Secretary Of State Do His Job?” Filkins covered the war in Iraq for The New York Times and is the author of the book, “The Forever War,” which won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.
After having written this piece about Rex Tillerson, for which you interviewed a lot of people in the State Department, and my impression is maybe some people in defense as well, people in the administration - what did you leave knowing that you didn’t know before, in terms of the larger story of where we’re going with North Korea and Iran?
FILKINS: Well, I think the most - you know, I’ve worked all around the globe, and I’ve been to, like, a zillion American embassies around the world. And, you know, they’re all kind of the same. You, you know, show your passport, and you go inside. And you meet the diplomats, and they’re all very competent. And they speak the language, and they know the history and the politics. And you kind of take it for granted.
You know, we have a really good State Department, and the embassies are filled with competent people. But you take it for granted. Like, what do they do in there? I think what I learned is that the world that we live in is governed by a very large kind of architecture of economic and political arrangements that have been, you know, whether by treaties or agreements - that have been kind of written, and orchestrated and erected since the second - the end of the Second World War.
And basically, if you go back to - I quoted Truman’s - President Truman’s secretary of state in my piece, Dean Acheson. If you go back that far, to the 19 - late ‘40s and early ‘50s, you know, Acheson says, we inherited a world that was in chaos and in ruins, and we wanted to, at - you know, at any cost, we wanted to avert another world war. And how can we do this? And so they came up with, you know, everything - all these institutions that we know today - The United Nations, NATO, you know, the European Union. And not - you know, this stuff was very ad hoc and, kind of - you know, this institution got formed in 1948 and the next one in 1950. And they kind of evolved over time.
But that - today, we’ve inherited this kind of vast architecture of arrangements, and relationships and treaties, and so that everything from bandwidth - computer bandwidth - to the number of bluefin tuna that you can take out of the water every year - just the number of things which are negotiated, and written down, and codified in treaties and which are managed every day by our diplomats because there’s disputes going on all the time and these arrangements have to be changed and altered - this is the world that we live in. And this is, you know, the world that we have - and, you know, for all of its problems.
But it’s - and I think the thing that is troubling is - and the thing it - which is worrying and which I think everybody needs to kind of think about is, if we - are we dismantling this? Is that what Secretary Tillerson and President Trump are doing when they say, we want to cut the budget of the State Department by 30 percent? If - I asked Secretary Tillerson, and he said no, that’s not what we want to do. But when you see what’s happening to our diplomatic corps and you see what’s the - what the budget cuts are potentially doing and the people who are leaving, the amount of expertise which is leaving, it’s scary. It’s scary.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 10 October 2017 11:26.
Luke Ford, “New Yorker: ‘Birth of a White Supremacist – Mike Enoch’s transformation from leftist contrarian to nationalist shock jock”, 9 Oct 2017 by Luke Ford
I have many Jewish friends who find gentile nationalisms, particularly white nationalism, terrifying.
Nationalism means that you are devoted to your people. Jews are devoted to their people. Why shouldn’t goyim be devoted to their people?
To me, it’s not scary that there are white supremacists. There’s no inherent connection between that ideology and violence, any more than there is an inherent connection between Christian supremacism, Jewish supremacism, Islamic supremacism, black supremacism, etc, and violence.
It’s not scary when people hate your group. At one time or another, I’ve felt fleeting hatred for almost every group I’ve known (though I do not remember feeling that way about Jews).
Genocide happens when there is a dramatic clash of interests. Just because someone hates Jews or blacks or Christians is not a reliable predictor that the person is going to become violent.
Negative feelings about Jews are called anti-Semitism yet the Jewish Bible is filled with negative sentiments about Jews and Jews still regard the book as holy.
Just as I don’t hate any particular group of people, I don’t hate the MSM. They’re probably my primary source of information about the world. I take into account their biases and read them anyway.
This summer, after a loose coalition of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Confederate apologists announced that they would hold a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, promotional flyers began to circulate on the Internet. The flyers included a list of names: the self-proclaimed thought leaders who planned to speak at the rally, arranged, Coachella-like, in order of prominence. At the top of the list was Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” almost a decade ago, and who has been so successful at making himself the poster boy of the movement that he was once sucker punched while standing on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C. Farther down the list were Jason Kessler, the Charlottesville resident who organized the rally; Matthew Heimbach, who has been called “the affable, youthful face of hate in America”; and Christopher Cantwell, who would later star in a Vice documentary about Charlottesville, unpacking a small arsenal of guns and saying, among other things, “We’re not nonviolent—we’ll fucking kill these people if we have to.”
The second person listed on the flyers, immediately below Spencer, was a white-nationalist shock jock named Mike Enoch. The name might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent neo-fascists, Enoch is an influential and divisive figure. In May, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted, “Hate him or love him—Mike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to.” Just three years ago, Enoch could be heard mocking Spencer (“talks like a fag”) and Cantwell (“a dickhead turtle”), criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before his radicalization was complete. These days, Enoch routinely refers to African-Americans as “animals” and “savages,” and expresses “skepticism” about how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Apart from interviews with Spencer and Cantwell, who are now his close friends and ideological allies, he largely eschews attention from the media. He prefers to speak—voluminously, articulately, and with an uncanny lack of emotion—on his own podcast, “The Daily Shoah.” (The title, a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central, reflects the overall tone of the show.) “The Daily Shoah” is the most popular of more than two dozen podcasts on the Right Stuff, a Web site that Enoch founded in 2012. Once an obscure blog about “post-libertarian” politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to “fashy memes,” songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, joking-but-not-joking tone. The podcasts—meandering, amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogers—are not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week.
The Charlottesville rally, on August 12th, immediately erupted in violence, and the police shut it down before any of the speakers could take the stage. A few of them reconvened in a park two miles away. Enoch, surrounded by small concentric circles of reporters, protesters, and counterprotesters, stood on a wooden riser in the shade of a dogwood tree. A tall, stout man with a husky voice and a grim, downturned mouth, he wore aviator sunglasses, a slight beard, and the unofficial uniform of the day: khakis and a white polo shirt. “We’re here to talk about white genocide, the deliberate and intentional displacement of the white race,” he said. “Have we heard this conspiracy theory of white privilege? This is a concept that was brought to us by Jewish intellectuals, to undermine our confidence in ourselves.” He finished his remarks and introduced the next speaker, David Duke. An hour later, James Alex Fields, Jr., wearing khakis and a white polo, drove a car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer, a local counterprotester.
Enoch’s father, who is also named Mike, spent that Saturday at home. He lives in an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb that is often listed among the most progressive towns in the country. “I made breakfast, and at some point I mowed the lawn,” he said recently. “Then, as I do every day, I sat down to read the New York Times.” He saw a photograph of a torch-wielding mob taken in Charlottesville the previous night. “I looked at the picture for a while, and I couldn’t find Mike anywhere,” he said. He scrutinized other photos online, and still didn’t see his son. “I said, ‘Thank God,’ and I went about my day.”
On Sunday, after he got home from church, he saw that a relative had e-mailed him a YouTube link. He clicked on it: his son and David Duke, standing shoulder to shoulder. “It turned my stomach,” he said. “Until that moment, I had imagined that, whatever had caused him to go down this path, it could somehow be reversed, and he could come home again.”
Most of the bloggers and commenters on the Right Stuff use pseudonyms—Sneering Imperialist, Toilet Law, Ebolamericana, Death. “Mike Enoch” is a pseudonym, too. Over the years, on “The Daily Shoah,” he occasionally dropped hints about his identity, though he was careful not to reveal too much. He said that he lived with his wife in New York City—“which narrows it down to me and eight million other people”—and that he worked at a “normie” day job, which he would surely lose if his employers ever learned about his alter ego. As a child, he had attended church camps and public schools, where he’d been “programmed” to believe in universalism and equality. Most members of his immediate family were still “shitlibs”—committed liberals who had not yet seen the error of their ways.
In January, a group of anti-fascist activists dug up his personal information and released it against his will—an Internet-specific form of retribution known as doxing. Mike Enoch was actually Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich, a thirty-nine-year-old computer programmer who worked at an e-publishing company and lived on the Upper East Side. As predicted, he lost his job. Someone printed out color photographs of his face and pasted them to telephone poles on the corner of Eighty-second Street and York Avenue: “Say Hi to Your Neo-Nazi Neighbor, Mike Peinovich!” The dox revealed that he had an older sister, a social worker who treated traumatized children, and an adopted younger brother, who was biracial and cognitively impaired. Perhaps most baffling of all, Mike’s wife, who was also identified in the dox, turned out to be Jewish.
At first, Enoch tried to insist that he wasn’t Peinovich, but he soon put up a post on the Right Stuff confirming his identity: “I won’t even bother denying it.” On white-nationalist message boards, including the Right Stuff itself, a few commenters accused Enoch of being “controlled opposition,” or demanded that he divorce his wife. (“I can’t believe all you fags still support this Jew fucker!”) Some held out for more information (“How Jewish? Because if 1/4 or less, I don’t give a shit”); others changed the subject (“I’m more disappointed by how fat he is than anything”).
A few days later on “The Daily Shoah,” Enoch and his co-hosts read dozens of notes from listeners who were remaining loyal to the podcast, some of whom had donated money to Enoch in his time of need. “My heart goes out to his wife,” one fan, a long-distance trucker, wrote. “If she is married to Mike, she must be a good individual.”
“That is a really nice thing to say,” Enoch said. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.” He didn’t mention that his wife had gone to stay with her mother in the Midwest.
Also included in the dox were two e-mail addresses, both purportedly belonging to Enoch. In general, I am opposed to doxing—I worry about vigilante mobs, false positives, slippery slopes—but not opposed enough, apparently, to overcome my curiosity. I e-mailed both addresses.
Enoch responded right away. He said that he didn’t want to talk—“I have a platform to tell my story that is bigger than yours”—and yet, every time I sent another e-mail, he sent one back. I made no secret of the fact that I found his views repugnant, but I added, truthfully, that I wanted to know how he’d ended up in this predicament and what he planned to do next. At one point, I wrote him a long note trying to persuade him to talk to me. His entire response was “You seem kinda mad.” We went back and forth for a while, but I had no real success in drawing him out, and eventually we both lost interest.
He later read our full exchange on “The Daily Shoah.” To his credit, he didn’t edit his responses to make them sound smarter, but he didn’t have to. According to the rules of online debate in the Right Stuff’s “Essential T.R.S. Troll Guide,” which I hadn’t read at the time, Enoch had won our exchange by default, because he had written fewer words and maintained his ironic detachment, whereas I had committed the greatest possible faux pas: letting myself be “triggered” into displaying emotion. After the podcast aired, a few of Enoch’s fans sent me nasty messages on Twitter. I figured that was the end of it.
Then I heard back from the other e-mail address. “I am not the Mike Peinovich to whom you addressed this email, but I am his father,” it read. “Until two days ago, I was totally unaware of his ‘alt-right’ activities. . . . I am struggling to understand how Mike E. (which is what we call him to distinguish him from me and my father who was also Mike Peinovich) could have said, posted or tweeted the things that are attributed to him.”
I called Mike, Sr., and we talked for a long time. It was the week of Donald Trump’s Inauguration, and he spoke in the tone that a lot of liberals were using then—weary and a bit dazed, as if struggling to shake a bad dream. “We tried to give our kids good values,” he said. “Mike E. went to good schools, and he loved being part of his church youth group. We knew that he was an outspoken Trump supporter, and he was very much the only one in the family, so we agreed, at a certain point, not to talk about politics.” He had listened to the podcast for long enough to recognize his son’s voice and profane sense of humor, but lasted only a few minutes before turning it off.
Four days after the rally in Charlottesville, I went to meet Mike, Sr., and his wife, Billie, in New Jersey. They live in an Arts and Crafts house on a tree-lined block near the center of town. Mike, Sr., answered the door. He was taller and thinner than his son, with silver hair and rimless glasses, but I saw the resemblance right away: the square jaw, the downturned mouth.
Billie and Mike are retired, and they spend several months a year travelling. They gave me a tour of the house, pointing out items they’d collected: Persian rugs, Mexican pottery, a floor-mounted globe. Mike was once a professor of Old English at the University of Pennsylvania, and his study contains several dictionaries and translations of “Beowulf,” along with contemporary books such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me.” We sat in armchairs in the living room, and he talked at length about his ancestors. “My grandfather helped drive the K.K.K. out of North Dakota,” he said. “My other grandfather came from Yugoslavia, fleeing religious persecution.”
I find less than 5% of the articled above unfair. Overall, it is an important read. It is a compelling read. It is a great read. My hats off to the author and to the people who participated in the profile. I sense that the author was generally fair and honest.
As an Orthodox Jew, I don’t lose any sleep over Mike Enoch and company. I don’t fear that they’re going to carry out mass violence. So far, the Alt Right has been a non-violent movement, as George Hawley notes in his new book. Rather than fearing the Alt Right, I think it is more important to understand the Alt Right and that requires not just articles about them by hostile parties such as the author above, but also by reading the best Alt Right intellectuals such as Richard Spencer, Kevin MacDonald, Gregory Hood, Greg Johnson, Andrew Joyce, etc.
I feel drawn to write about outlaws. In some ways, members of the Alt Right remind me of pornographers. Outwardly, most pornographers proclaim they have no interest in talking to the MSM and yet most yearn to talk for hours to reporters. They want to be listened to by people in prestigious positions and they want to be acknowledged in mainstream outlets. Most Alt Righters are the same way. Most proclaim they never talk to the press, but as the Mike Enoch example shows, once you get them going, they’ll talk to you for hours. They’ll spill their guts. They’ll even shed tears over broken family relationships.
If I were (((Luke Ford))) I would not be too worried about Mike Enoch (or those in his orbit) either.
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 09 October 2017 07:25.
The Mainichi, “Reports: Google uncovers ads by Russian operatives”, 9 Oct 2017:
NEW YORK (AP)—Russian operatives likely spent tens of thousands of dollars on ads across Google products, including YouTube and Google search, according to reports.
Accounts connected with the Russian government spent $4,700 on search and display ads, while another $53,000 was spent on ads with political material that were purchased from Russian territory, from Russian internet addresses, or with Russian currency, The New York Times reported . The Times cited an unnamed person familiar with the ongoing inquiry by the search giant.
The Washington Post earlier reported that the technology behemoth uncovered the Russian-backed disinformation campaign as it considers whether to testify before Congress next month, also citing anonymous sources familiar with the investigation. Social media companies Facebook and Twitter have already agreed to testify.
The reports said the company discovered the Russian presence by analyzing information shared by Twitter and Facebook, as well its own research and tips from outside researchers.
In a statement, Google said it has a “set of strict ads policies including limits on political ad targeting and prohibitions on targeting based on race and religion.”
“We are taking a deeper look to investigate attempts to abuse our systems, working with researchers and other companies, and will provide assistance to ongoing inquiries,” the statement continued.
Facebook recently shared about 3,000 Russian-backed ads with Congress.
The lack of turn out from Milwaukee voters is suspicious.
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed a disinformation campaign aimed at helping Donald Trump win the presidential election.
“Conservative” talk-show hosts Charilie Sykes and John Ziegler talk about their disillusionment with Trump and his supporters; how his campaign was facilitated by the influx of conspiratorial and other fringe right influences, particularly when the Drudge Report started linking to and thus mainstreaming and “normalizing” Alex Jones.
Active Measures is suspected of having had a significant impact on the Milwaukee area of Wisconsin in terms of voter turn out.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 29 September 2017 06:09.
ABC.Net.Au, “Twitter shuts down 201 accounts linked to Russian propaganda operatives who posted to Facebook”, 29 Sept 2017:
Twitter has shut down hundreds of accounts that were tied to the same Russian operatives who posted thousands of political ads to Facebook during the 2016 US election.
The company said it found 22 accounts which were directly linked to the 450 Facebook accounts, found earlier this month.
It also found a further 179 accounts related or linked to those Twitter accounts.
None of these accounts had been registered as advertisers, and all of them had already been or were immediately suspended, most for violating spam rules.
Twitter said Russian media outlet RT — which has strong links to the Kremlin — spent at least $274,100 on advertisements on the platform in 2016.
The three accounts — @RT_com, @RT_America, and @ActualidadRT — also promoted 1,823 tweets the company says “definitely or potentially targeted” the US market.
Those ad buys alone topped the $100,000 that Facebook had linked to a Russian propaganda operation, a revelation that prompted calls from some Democrats for new disclosure rules for online political ads.
Although Twitter’s disclosures in briefings to US congressional staff and a public blog post were its most detailed to date on the issue, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee called the company’s statements “deeply disappointing”.
Senator Mark Warner, whose panel is investigating alleged Russian interference in the election, said Twitter officials had not answered many questions about the Russian use of the platform and that it was still subject to foreign manipulation.
Twitter has been criticised as being too lax in policing fake or abusive accounts.
Technology companies including Twitter, Facebook and Google were asked by intelligence committees earlier this week to testify at a public hearing on November 1 about alleged Russian interference.
The pressure on the companies reflects growing concern among politicians in both parties that social networks may have played a key role in Moscow’s attempts to spread disinformation and propaganda to sow political discord in the United States and help elect President Donald Trump.
Moscow denies any such activity and Mr Trump has denied any talk of collusion.
In front of building at 55 Savushkina Street in St Petersburg, Russia, where the Kremlin has a workforce of hundreds patrolling the internet as trolls. Youtube video
ABC.Net.Au, “Inside Russia’s Troll Factory: Controlling debate and stifling dissent in internet forums and social media”, 12 Aug 2015 -
Inside an anonymous building in St Petersburg, the Kremlin commands a workforce of hundreds that patrol the internet as trolls — assuming false identities online.
Their task is to control debate and stifle dissent in forums and on social media.
The department at the centre of this effort is officially known as the Internet Research Agency.
But its reputation has earned it another name by which it is widely known: the Troll Factory.
Andrei Soshnikov is the investigative journalist who has led the efforts to expose the Troll Factory.
“Generally, they produce lies in a 24-hour regime, seven days a week,” said Andrei Soshnikov, the investigative journalist who has led the efforts to expose the Troll Factory.
“In the morning, in the day, at night, something going on in world, or in Russia or St Petersburg, you will always find the comments from the Troll Factory.”
Soshnikov started monitoring the activities at the Internet Research Agency a few years ago, not long after he graduated from journalism school.
After his first reports were published, he hit the jackpot.
He was contacted by activist Luda Savchuk, who had been hired to work as a troll.
“I spent two months there,” Ms Savchuk told 7.30.
Photo: Luda Savchuck said she accepts the consequences that come with shining the light on Russia’s trolls. (7.30)
“I saw that this is really a big factory to produce paid comments, posts, pictures, video, any content we face on the internet is produced there.
“There are four floors there, very many departments dealing with social networks, LiveJournal (the popular Russian online forum), YouTube, forums with the websites of different cities.”
Working together, Ms Savchuk and Soshnikov published details of the Troll Factory’s operations.
At least 300 employees are believed to work in the building.
Ms Savchuk managed to capture the only video ever filmed inside — a few shaky seconds of trolls at work.
Ms Savchuk managed to capture the only video ever filmed inside — a few shaky seconds of trolls at work.
“News is sent to your computer with instructions about how it should be presented,” she said.
“It is not just objective information that is required, but in which tone it should be presented, to which conclusion one should drive a reader.”
When opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead within sight of the Kremlin in March, suspicion immediately fell on those with links to Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Ms Savchuk said the orders at the Troll Factory were handed down quickly.
“They were just told: ‘Nemtsov is killed. Everyone should urgently concentrate on this job. We shall write this and that’,” she said.
“On that day they were writing that it was a provocation against the authorities, that he was killed by ‘his own people’.”
Kremlin moves focus to social networks
After smothering political dissent, the Kremlin is now targeting social networks.
They have been viewed as a threat since anti-Putin protests seemingly sprung up out of nowhere in late 2011.
The driving force behind the brief opposition surge was social media.
Journalist Andrei Soldatov writes about Russia’s security agencies and their extensive online surveillance.
“You don’t need any kind of organisations to do these things,” he told 7.30.
Andrei Soshnikov is the investigative journalist who has led the efforts to expose the Troll Factory
“And that frightened the Kremlin in 2011.
“They still believe social networks [are] a major tool that might, if you have any kind of crisis, help people to send people in the thousands to the streets.”
Right now, the priority topic for the Kremlin’s trolls is Ukraine.
As the war in eastern Ukraine has dragged on, the Troll Factory has played a key role in the huge Russian propaganda campaign to demonise the Ukrainian government.
“In Ukraine, you don’t have people, you don’t have someone you can talk to,” Soldatov said summing up the stereotypes reinforced by the Kremlin’s trolls.
“You have only fascists.”
The Troll Factory’s actual address is 55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg.
The building is surrounded by cameras, and employees do not appreciate being filmed.
Consequences for revealing secrecy behind trolls
“You have not just enemies, but someone who [is] completely unhuman.”
7.30 tried to speak with someone from the Internet Research Agency, but the request was denied.
All of the companies listed in the directory in the building’s foyer are fake.
Soshnikov said none of them could be found on St Petersburg’s corporate register.
The secrecy makes Ms Savchuk’s revelations about the work going on here all the more exceptional.
“I think Luda is a hero,” Soshnikov said.
“I had serious concerns about my safety and I still have them now.” - Luda Savchuk.
“Here in Russia is big atmosphere, strange atmosphere, of fear, of lies. And not everyone will act as a normal citizen, or patriot, in this situation.”
Ms Savchuk and others are prepared to fight back against the methodical re-establishment of the security state in Russia.
She accepts the consequences that come with shining the light on Russia’s trolls.
“I had serious concerns about my safety and I still have them now. Because the people who run this factory are quite serious,” she said.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 27 September 2017 06:32.
The Kaepernickan Revolution Not
As ethno-nationalists, we should bear accord with those who would hold that the American flag represents propositional liberalism and ever represents as such, an adversary to ethno-nationalism.
While it is theoretically valid for black football players to protest the history of slavery that is taken for granted in the anthem, it was not just any Whites who brought them to the Americas, it was right wing hubris that brought them to the Americas.
There was no bigger error in history than to bring African slaves to the Americas - a classic right wing hubris compounded ultimately in its disingenuous liberal expression of anti-racism that was not only disastrous for the human ecologies of the Americas both native American and White, but an economic short-cut that threw the world’s economy into a perilous imbalance in relation to Asia; an imbalance from which it has not recovered.
It is a hubris for which we, as ethnonatiolists, have little responsibility and deserve no penalty where we fight the right wing system that brought this about -
Nevertheless, the liberal system will continue to try to penalize us, and disingenuously wall paper our difference from these right wingers, will do all it can to associate our liberation with the right. Many Whites will take the bait - our “enemies” are trying to divide us from our “brothers”, the black Americans - so says the idiot, Father Francis.
It was a hubris, typical of the right wing, falsely and vainly comparing Africans to others - of course finding them “wanting and in need of help” - they are just misguided by the YKW, it is not that these right wingers are complicit with destroying the ethnonationalsm that never would have forcibly mixed Africans with Whites and Native Americans - as they did, in the cases of some tribes to virtual extinction.
Their idea of “inequality” is based on false comparison. In a world where Heidegger can only hope to guide Europeans to be at home in their skins, in their land, among their folk, in a world where the African is always at home, always comfortable, never at a loss and always ready to assert as much - there is no more self righteous, hyper-assertive, aggressive, no more alpha a male, than the black.
Madison Avenue knows this, knows that the puerile follow the alpha, that’s why it leads with it in marketing campaigns; the rest of Jewry knows this too, ready in its institutional positions to pander to the puerile, both male and female.
Thus, we must beware when blacks are upheld as making a revolutionary protest. We must be aware of black nature. Black nature is of Alpha R selection, and like a male lion, it will do nothing but be brought tribute and breed with supplicant females.
The talented tenth, mostly Mulattoes, who are able to function somewhat as leaders of their community, serve to articulate the narratives of how the system supposedly oppresses blacks: but the system does not oppress blacks, the system reacts to blacks and tries to placate them, pays tribute to them.
Blacks are natural compradors and henchmen of the system.
For this creature, “revolution” means solidifying its being imbued in the American power structure; its nature is right wing - whether it can rule or not, this is what it always aims for: “The honorable Elija Muhammad said the black man will rule” - Malcolm X - a Muslim, of course, not a left nationalist. The wish to “rule over others” or the belief in its destiny is right wing.
Blacks will not be revolutionaries of America - America will adjust to them in its puerile idolatry, enshrinement and institutionalization: not only paying them millions and lavishing them with adulation and women for their sports and entertainment, but making endless excuses to engraft them further in the power structure - as illustrated by sports reporter Bob Costas, saying that Kaepernick’s protest is an expression of true American patriotism; and indeed it is. Blacks, adulation of them, no matter how perverted, no matter how unjust, brutal and violent, no matter how lavished with undue reward as a pattern, they are to be adulated as a part of the American institution. And as the admired alpha R selection breeders that they are, they are free to go through women, including what probably should have been your wife, and leave litters of babies behind - everyone else’s social problem, while you wonder how you might pay for one of your own and give it a decent environment.
Their males and the females they impregnate and discard at their convenience are placed on US welfare - to the servitude of everyone else, not to mention that their less athletically capable brothers and sisters are to be set aside government programs, well paying government jobs with solid benefits; also affirmative action and special provisions in corporate America and academia as a result of civil rights court actions (the consent decrees) are to be given them ...not because they are revolutionaries, but because they are an integral part and parcel of feudal enforcement.
What revolution is going to come from these people? Their protest is the protest of consummate alpha pigs, whose tribute is not yet 1,0000 percent granted by the obsequious.
They are not motivated to overturn America; they are motivated to imbue themselves, engraft themselves inexorably within this most powerful right wing system in the world.
Colin Kaepernick, the Mulatto (who looks part Jewish) has a (Egyptian-Muslim) girlfriend who was taught by Jewish professors that America was founded by slave holders - and so it was. She pointed out that a part of the National Anthem - verses that nobody ever sings, knows or adheres-to, verses that were written hundreds of yeas ago by right wingers - can be used as a publicity stunt to further engraft themselves into America’s power structure; this, by pretending on the basis of these long ago verses that they are oppressed in their multi-million dollar football contracts.
She tells a story based on the Jewish wall papering of the White Class, that Whites put blacks in jail for the arbitrary racism of it, not because they want to defend themselves from violent criminals.
In truth, and at best, blacks might alert dissent from American patriotism in this protest, and finally disgust White Americans and others enough to disabuse them of their negrophelia.
But would-be ethnonationalists are not likely to suspend disbelief in the black liberation narrative, as the protest is allowed to proceed and is commended by the liberal, the right wing (they merge) powers that be - they know how to play and deepen the beholdenness of the puerile to the position of blacks as “leaders” of the so called vanguard. Blacks are the ultimate “Whitey be cool stick” for liberals, for the right wing, for puerile females who wish to retain undue privilege, to license.
There should be no enthusiasm from revolutionaries for this protest. Only cold analysis. The danger is to us, that in sympathy and admiration for blacks, as Madison Ave knows, it will only help them to become embedded in “a revolution” of the American system which is no revolution, it is its mere reconstruction, and has them only more privileged in their elite tenth, especially, which will be highly protective and ethnocentric of the rest of black Americans - which will have little concern for the pesky concerns of other’s rank and file.
The Kaepernickan revolution Not
Madison Ave. knows how stupid Whites can be in their right wing reaction, like those of Stormfront, the unbearably stupid “Father Francis” who says blacks should be grateful for having been brought to America for all the good its done them, and Whites should be proud for having liberated the slaves… how benign blacks are, their nature not really so destructive that Whites cannot live with them, they’re just a bit misguided by the YKW. Yet in truth it was the right wing that brought them upon us and unleashed these hyper assertive primitives upon us. They have done no White people a favor, least of all in the virtue signal of liberation and tolerance of a Father Francis - idiot.
Our admiration for their assertion in valid recognition of an ancient injustice of America must be cut short; for they are not liberators, they have been inflicted upon working class Whites and native Americans by right wingers. It is an alpha capacity known all too well to Madison ave and the rest of Jewry to create followers among those who would become assimilated to Mulatto supremacism.
Blacks are not revolutionaries because they are the descendants of alpha selection and alphas are not revolutionaries - blacks will only be bulwarks of the status quo.
One has but to watch the Vietnam documentaries to see that America’s liberal propositionalism is a dubious if not disingenuous and totally destructive prospect to support and export - viz., it illustrates why any conscientious person should be a revolutionary with regard to America.
Some Americans find this out when after signing up for wars in patriotic enthusiasm, they come to realize that they are being used in the most abject way:
Ironically, this is the case of Pat Tillman - the NFL player who left a lucrative contract in order to fight in Iraq - who President Trump invoked as a true patriot in contrast to the kneeling black footballers. If Tillman were alive, he’d be kneeling during the national anthem as well; he did not have opportunity for such widely publicized protest because he was apparently executed by “friendly fire”, when he exasperated fellow troops in Iraq by expressing strong denunciation of the war.
Yes, the mulatto Kaepernick got a tip that attention may be garnered by the liberal press looking for left cover where the National Anthem reveals America to have been on the wrong side side of ethno-nationalism, the workers, “the hirlings.”
But it is up to White ethnonationalism to take the exposure of those flagrantly dissatisfied with the American flag, even those who in economic terms perhaps should not be dissatisfied, as a point of departure to coordinate matters of ethnic genetic interests, ethnonational liberation with Indios, Amerindians and Asians.
Lyrics
O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
It is not valid for protests, which would be rightfully directed against right wingers, to be allowed to brush and wall paper all Whites as privileged implementors and beneficiaries across the board (talking about taking genetic interests, quality of life and stress or lack there-of into the equation, not just economic numbers) of that right wing hubris - as ethnonationalists, it is dubious to admire these blacks in their protests. Their assertion is right wing, and to wish to share in their assertiveness is the way of puerile females and right wing pandering to that powerful gate-keeping position in the disorder of modernity. Madison Ave knows this, Jews know this, that they can shepherd the sheep through the alpha….Stormfront and the unbearable “Father Francis” apparently are oblivious to this, the alpha nature of blacks that his techno-nerdom allows him to weasel around, to build psychological fire walls around and do calculative gymnastics to sympathize with the blacks who are being pushed-out by Mexican gangs - rather than saying “go Mexicans!” as we do, they sympathize with these blacks on multi-million dollars of collective welfare, government jobs and programs, multi million dollars in celebrity careers ... they protest their “oppression”.... for they are not revolutionaries, they are a part of their same right wing system, and seek only to engraft themselves more fully into its central governance.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 23 September 2017 08:07.
AltRight round table discussion on politics: Toward the end of the podcast Richard Spencer expresses his ideal that The US should have explicitly accepted imperialism as the way of the world; and upon the end of WWII and the Cold War acted upon it explicitly as they found themselves the lone super power - in his ideal they would oust Great Britain from NATO, foster Germany as the land power in Europe while Russia should be incorporated within NATO, should have been starting in that Yeltsin era to facilitate an Imperium from Lisbon to Vladivastok.
Now, speaking from a very personal standpoint of where I was coming from (circa 1992), I probably would not have been offended by the idea of a Russian expanse that went all the way to Vladivastok.
But knowing what I know now, I would raise a couple of serious objections to Richard Spencer’s ideal. First of all, it violates the principle of ethnonationalism, pretty much ensuring ongoing catastrophic wars - moreover, in which the friend/enemy lines are disastrously drawn.
- i.e., there is no way for European peoples to pursue this plan without the cooperation of Jews and Israel. Especially because you would be turning Asia into your enemy with such a plan - exactly a mass of people whom we don’t need as an enemy, a people we need on our side against Jewry and Islam.
Richard is not particularly concerned about the new US military base in Israel, nor does he seem unready to play Muslims off of Asians if need be, saying that Aung San Suu Kyi was “once the darling of ‘the left’ but now that her anti-Muslim stripes have shown, she has fallen into disfavor - of “leftists” as Richard and (((co.))) misdefine them, not as left nationalists are.
A recent piece of trash ‘journalism’ in The New York Times entitled “Undercover With the Alt-Right” features video footage of me that was obtained surreptitiously and under false pretenses. It has been deceptively edited to make it appear as if I am advocating genocidal extreme right-wing policies. The five minute clip has been spliced together from a two hour meeting in a pub. My nightmarish prediction of a future that would follow from Western policymakers’ failure to address the Muslim migrant crisis in the present has been taken out of context and made to appear as if it is advocacy for “concentration camps and expulsions and war… at the cost of a few hundred million people.” It is one thing for such a deceptive film clip to have been produced by the Antifa organization Help Not Hate, it is another altogether for it to be embedded into a New York Times article. Jesse Singal and the Times are responsible for libel – or worse. I had a long and heated conversation with Mr. Singal in the course of which I clarified the concealed context of my butchered statements, but he did not convey my clarification in a responsible fashion when reproducing Antifa’s slanderously spliced misquotes of me.
The article also suggests that the Alt-Right Corporation was created in a context that involved my dialogue with individuals in the Trump Administration, and that our aim was to become their policy advisement group (comparable to the Straussian think tank inside the Bush-Cheney Administration). In this context, the one-sentence parenthetical reference to my August 15th resignation from the Alt-Right Corporation and Arktos Media makes it appear as if I left the corporation only because lines of communication to people who had the ear of President Trump were cut off. It is true that my greater responsibilities to the Iranian opposition were not the sole cause of my departure. The formation of the Iranian United Front during the very same days as the Charlottesville disaster were only an opportunity to leave an organization with which I was already profoundly dissatisfied – an organization that I created. The New York Times hit piece did get one thing right, I was in fact “the architect of the Alt-Right Corporation.” I suggested it to Richard Spencer. I’m afraid the time has come to confess why I did that, and to explain what the organization was supposed to be as opposed to what it has become.
Just after a very warmly received speech on “Occult Science and the Organic State” at the Identitarian Ideas conference in Stockholm in October of 2016, Daniel Friberg hired me as the Editor-in-Chief of Arktos Media – the press that had published my first book, Prometheus and Atlas, which went on to win the 2016 Parapsychological Association Book Award (the PA is a serious scientific organization accredited by the AAAS). In November of 2016, on the heels of President Trump’s electoral victory, I attended the National Policy Institute conference in Washington DC in my capacity as a book distributor. In addition to being Editor-in-Chief, I was also the Head of Arktos US, so I was there manning the book stand. Richard Spencer and I had barely known each other for 24 hours when he called me up to the stage to present my vision for the future evolution of Arktos under my editorship. But subsequent events would draw us together.
You see, on account of the grossly distorted propaganda perpetrated by mainstream media infiltrators who lingered at our private dinner after the NPI press conference was dismissed, a mere handful of Roman saluting folks out of the more than 300 attendees cheering for Richard’s speech were used to tar the entire gathering as some kind of Neo-Nazi rally. Less than a month after #Hailgate, a very prominent academic Philosophy blogger ran a story branding me as a “Neo-Nazi”. The Leiter Report on me identified both my doctoral granting institution, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and my place of work, the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Shortly thereafter, at a SUNY Stony Brook faculty meeting, I was denounced as an “Aryan White Supremacist” and a review of my doctorate was suggested with a view to making a public statement that would, for all intents and purposes, invalidate my degree in the eyes of my present employer and any future employers. The faculty forgot that I was still subscribed to the department listserv, and I was afforded the possibility of preparing a preemptive response that warranted further media coverage within the academic sphere. Leiter, however, dug his heels in.
Even the community of rebel scientists who had embraced me just months earlier, by honoring Prometheus and Atlas with the highest award in their circles, turned on me with a vengeance. Fortunately, thanks to the intervention of two prominent scientists whose names I will not mention, but one of whom is a Nobel Laureate, discussions about expelling me from the Parapsychological Association (PA) and the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) ended with a decision to publicly uphold the apolitical character of these organizations. Privately, however, the damage was done. I became a heretic even among heretics.
When the post-Hailgate writing was on the wall for me in academia, Richard Spencer visited New York for a few days. His right hand man, former Radix journal editor ‘Hannibal Bateman’ (who I really respect), slept over in my apartment and Richard and I got to spend a lot of time together. Between a business lunch at my favorite Persian restaurant on one day, and a long evening that ended with a Dionysian, intoxicated hours-long discussion at my apartment, my idea for a corporatist unification of the major institutions of the Alt-Right movement was seeded in Richard’s psyche. But Richard did not know something about this act of inception, which I commemorated by leaving an Easter egg for the future in this picture that I suggested we take in front of Hermes, the Trickster, that evening.
What Richard did not know I disclosed to him about a month later during a late night dinner at the Hamilton restaurant in DC. After publishing Prometheus and Atlas with Arktos Media, I was approached by some people who had already been aware of my (entirely voluntary and unpaid) high-level advisement work with the (501c3 non-profit) Iranian Renaissance organization. These individuals facilitated some initially promising private meetings with incoming Trump Administration policy makers, with the aim of interesting them in our vision for an Iranian cultural revolution. They wanted to help build a new Persian Empire that would offer the West a staunch ally in the war against a nascent Islamic Caliphate. I was told that my book, Prometheus and Atlas, expressed exactly the kind of vision that they had for the future evolution of Man.
Hillary Clinton had given the so-called “Alt-Right” a great deal of unwarranted media attention, to the point where she helped to damn-near mainstream what she herself had described as a “fringe” movement. If the total mess that was then the Alt-Right could be unified, under my intellectual and ideological leadership, then it could be used to forward the aims that these backers claimed to share in common with me. This would have involved a course-correction that extricated the Alt-Right from the ghetto of “White Nationalism” – or as the mainstream media calls it, “White Supremacy” – toward a discourse of Indo-European identity. This inclusion of the Persian, Indian, and Buddhist traditions of the Eastern Aryan world was integral to another key aim: to transform divisive and defensively weak ethno-nationalism into a different vision for a new world order than the deracinating one of soulless globalist financiers. An inclusively identitarian Indo-European Community would be strong enough to take on China and Islam in the battle for planetary hegemony, as humanity faces existential threats from convergent advancements in technology that promise a superhuman future but could also yield a horrifyingly transhuman dystopia. My second book, World State of Emergency, basically lays out what we had in mind.
I corporatized the Alt-Right because a corporate structure allows for both outside investment and hierarchical governance. The key was to have a real brain installed at the pinnacle of the hierarchy. I was supposed to be the conduit for a major investment during the formative phase of the Alt-Right Corporation, and thereby assume its leadership – at least as far as fundamental questions of ideology were concerned. After listening to my explanation of who my potential backers were, and of what capabilities they had (which I urge him, even now, not to disclose for his own sake), Richard agreed that granted such an investment would be forthcoming I would be on point. What was especially compelling to him was the promise of direct engagement, through me, with people inside the White House such as Steve Bannon – something my backers suggested that I could, and should do, but that would not be possible with Richard at the helm. (Bannon, an avid reader of Julius Evola, is consequently familiar with Arktos, one of the only two English language publishers of Evola’s writings.) After this meeting with Richard, I went on to discuss this scenario with every single core board member of our company, including Arktos CEO Daniel Friberg. In February of 2017, during another Identitarian Ideas conference in Stockholm, where the lead-in to my speech on “The Failure of Democracy” hinted at my central role in forming the Alt-Right Corporation, Daniel and I even shook on this deal.
That policy speech, in February of 2017, just a few weeks after the formation of the Alt-Right Corporation in late January, was supposed to be a prelude to the investment that I was promised would come later the same month. Well, the investment did not come in February. I was told that the funds would certainly be available by March. Then it was explained to me why there would have to be another delay until May. Meanwhile, Daniel Friberg had moved from a 53% shareholding in Arktos Media to 82%. This was never supposed to happen. I was promised the funds to buy out troublesome shareholders at Arktos and become Daniel’s partner, rather than his employee.
I am afraid that I cannot disclose the reason for the repeated delays without also revealing the precise source of the funding and classified information about the particular persons involved in securing it. Suffice it to say, consulting open source material in the mainstream media will inform you that beginning in February of 2016, there was a sustained campaign by Neo-Cons and Neo-Liberals to derail the Trump Train. This began with the dismissal and threatened prosecution of General Michael Flynn, and continued with the sidelining of Steve Bannon. (Eventually this ended with the train-wreck of Bannon being forced out in August, the month I resigned from the Alt-Right.)
In addition to losing my opportunity to acquire a major shareholding in Arktos, Richard and Daniel increased their shares in the Alt-Right Corporation at my expense by making a deal involving what Richard admits was “monopoly money.” Richard “sold” his website altright.com to the corporation, while Daniel made his website Metapedia a joint holding as well. At a board meeting on May 9th, Richard and Daniel came up with arbitrary monetary values for their websites, $10K and $15K respectively, and gave themselves 25% and 30% of our corporate shares, reducing my shareholding to 10% in the process. Initially, we had a ‘knights of the round table’ share structure, with each partner as an equal shareholder, a provisional arrangement arrived at as we awaited the funding that would have established me as the majority shareholder. If I were to apply the same principle that they did with their “monopoly money” deal, the scale of investment that I was supposed to bring in to the Alt-Right Corporation would have left me with something like a 95% shareholding.
Moreover, once the ownership of altright.com was officially handed over to our board, during a board meeting Tor Westman, who I insisted be brought onto the board in the first place (against Richard’s objection), suggested that not everyone on the board should have access to the domain account information. Daniel added that not everyone on the Arktos Board had access to the Arktos website domain information (he meant me), and that it should be handled on a “need to know” basis. While this discussion, which took place with me present, was couched in terms of a suspicion of Henrik Palmgren of Red Ice, who was absent, Richard rightly understood Daniel’s remarks as aiming to exclude me and agreed by replying, “I don’t think Jason would go in and change anything, but…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence. He only added that after restricting the access to Richard, Daniel, and Tor, the passwords should be changed.
What is worse is that in the long months of the Spring of 2017, as I waited for funding to materialize, I watched the corporation that was my brainchild turn into a magnet for white trash. Exactly the kind of people who were supposed to be sidelined by my centralization and corporatization of the Alt-Right were cultivated by Richard as the populist base for ‘his’ movement. I was sorry to see Daniel’s Arktos affiliated and European-centered Right On journal, which had been in the business of publishing serious intellectual content when John Morgan was editing it, merged into an altright.com news and ‘perspective’ platform that has about as much perspective as a tabloid. The comments sections of our website devolved into a cesspool filled by the most despicable pond scum, former 4-chaners who would routinely pile on in trolling attacks against me every time I published something with a bit of intellectual content. “Iranians is brown poo-poo people” kind of sums it up. I decided to stop contributing until the investment came in and I could really clean things up. When Daniel and Richard agreed to lazily use Daniel’s “Points of Orientation” from his pamphlet, The Real Right Returns, as the basis for an ideological statement to appear on the website, consulting the serious philosopher on the board to help edit it was only an afterthought to them.
In May, at a meeting in London, I was assured by the investors that the obstacles had at last been cleared and I could expect our collaboration to begin in June. When I reported this to Richard at a New York lunch at the end of the same month, he thoughtlessly and angrily dismissed a plan that the investors had shared with me for creating an economic and security corridor from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and across to the Caucasus. This “Neo-Scythian” Ukraine-based approach to the long-term revitalization and liberation of Europe – linked to a future, post-Islamic Greater Iran via the Caucasus – offended the Russophilia that has been fostered by his wife.
So I cannot say I was surprised when the backers ultimately failed to follow through with their long-promised investment. By late June the movement was long past its embryonic stage. A deformed creature, a mindless Frankenstein’s monster had already entered the world. Of course this would not have happened if, between February and May, the angel investors had made good on their promises. Even though they are now responsible for my being libeled in the New York Times, potentially at the cost of my career in academia, I will not reveal their identities. It would catalyze a mainstream media scandal that none of us want to see. I am not interested in testifying before Congress, because the truth I would have to tell is stranger than fiction.