Former Vice President Joe Biden has made the argument that Donald Trump is a detour in America’s history. He is an aberration, Biden says, a speedbump—and as long as he is defeated in 2020 he will remain an exception rather than become part of the base fabric of our nation.
“Limit it to four years,” Mr. Biden pleaded with a ballroom crowd of 600 in the eastern Iowa city of Dubuque. “History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration.”
“This is not the Republican Party,” he added, citing his relationships with “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”
I have my doubts about that view. It’s more likely that Trump is not a detour in the Republican Party’s path, but more of a distillation of the GOP’s most base traits of nativism, xenophobia, paranoia, and authoritarianism, all of which have always been present.
Case in point: Taylor Dumpson, the first African-American woman to serve as American University's student body president, has sued the Daily Stormer for $1.5 million for setting up an online troll storm against her.
The first black woman to serve as American University’s student government president is seeking more than $1.5 million in court-ordered damages against a neo-Nazi website operator who orchestrated an online harassment campaign against her.
In a court filing Monday, Taylor Dumpson’s attorneys asked a federal judge in Washington for a default judgment against The Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin and a follower accused of racially harassing Dumpson on Twitter. Dumpson sued Anglin and the internet troll last April, but neither responded.
Dumpson seeks a total of more than $1.8 million in damages, fees and costs, including $1.5 million in punitive damages against Anglin and his company, Moonbase Holdings LLC.
This may become a landmark suit against organized online trolling depending on the outcome, but it’s certainly not a unique situation. The organization of online attacks against progressives is certainly not new, and is very much a grassroots phenomenon that is often sparked by monetized online schemes and also by political efforts from overseas. But it’s critically important that we recognize and develop counter-strategies for efforts such as these. They are organized by online professional and political trolls that have plowed the ground for Trumpism, as well as sowed dangers for 2020 and beyond.
I don’t think Trump invented the types of tactics as used by the Daily Stormer, but he may have made them more common and prevalent. Overt actions by white supremacists have grown dramatically in recent years, with the number of hate groups reaching a 20-year high in 2017 and 2018, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Although they are more commonly thought of as performing acts of violence, the truth is that except for vandalism they are in fact far more likely to commit acts of intimidation and harassment, according the FBI hate crimes report, which lists 2,283 incidents of hate-based intimidation out of 5,084 total reported hate crimes in 2017.
The story of Taylor Dumpson reminds me of case I discovered last year at Netroots Nation, when I met New Orleans activist Krista Bordelon, who also had been targeted and harassed online and off by right-wing trolls. At the time I offered her a chance to explain what her experience had been, and join us in the comments for that diary.
(Trigger warning: bullying, harassment, threats of violence)
[...]
It first started when I blogged about motherhood 7 years ago. When I said motherhood made me feel like I had super powers I literally received hundreds of hate messages in one hour (and that hadn’t even gone viral and was before blogging was really big). One woman - a mother with small children who was also pregnant at the time - sat outside my house watching me one afternoon, other women got every mom in every mom group they knew to message me and threaten me. People actually called CPS trying to get my children taken away. It was a solid 6 weeks of this. It was so overwhelming and terrifying that I actually had a miscarriage because of the stress on my body. That may be the last pregnancy experience I ever have. Some of these women weren’t even strangers, so I still see them around our little big town. It was devastating. But it isn’t just moms caught up in the “mommy wars” who do this, and to be honest they were “kind” in comparison.
I have lost count of how many times I have been told I should kill myself. How many times I’ve been told that I deserve to be raped. How many lies have been made up about me. How many times my pictures have been altered or memes made with my face on them. How many fake profiles with sexually explicit messaging using my name and face there are. There is even an entire coded language surrounding me because my name and identifying info has been banned legally in certain forums. I’ve sent wives private messages about their husbands threatening to rape me because, as a survivor of domestic violence, I felt it was important to reach out, instead I’ve been told that I would deserve it. Craigslist ads stating all the information anyone would need to stalk or even injure or kill me or to kidnap my children go up all the time. The problem is it doesn’t just stay online.
I get nervous to eat at a restaurant in case someone who hates me is working there and what they might do to my food or what they might put in my drink. I have 3 children with special needs, my youngest has ADHD and ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) which has made me scared to take him in public in case someone records his tantrums and out of spite for me shares it and puts his behavioral and emotional health at risk (he has already been involuntarily committed once). I’ve been followed so much that there are times I feel absolutely paranoid about it. At one critical point there were drones that would follow me as I walked my dog at night. I had to spend thousands of dollars on security cameras and have files open with the FBI, sheriff, and police department. But there’s nothing they can do.
Krista's experience is frankly not that different from what the Sandy Hook families endured from people like Alex Jones, who claimed their horrific tragedy was a hoax until he and others were finally shutdown by Facebook and Twitter for spreading their bile.
Facebook has banned “dangerous” extremists, such as far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and outspokenly anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan, from all its media platforms, the company announced Thursday.
“We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNN Business on Thursday. “The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.”
The social media giant also purged accounts belonging to far-right figures Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos and failed Senate candidate Paul Nehlen.
Trump has responded to Facebook’s action as you’d expect, by defending Jones and Infowars as being protected by “free speech,” even when most of what they peddle are deluded lies and hateful conspiracies.
For the president and his allies, all of this contributes to a familiar storyline. Republican leaders and right-wing media outlets have been loudly accusing social media giants of bias and censorship at the same time that the companies have been taking steps to reduce toxic content on their sites.
The president has repeatedly cherry-picked examples to make his case against the sites. On Friday night he claimed that "Diamond and Silk," a pro-Trump duo, have been "treated so horribly by Facebook" and "we're looking into" it.
"I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms," Trump said in a separate tweet. "This is the United States of America — and we have what's known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!"
Not surprisingly, he didn’t defend Farrakhan much.
As an aside, I have some experience with Louis Farrakhan. My very first girlfriend 30 years ago became a fan and follower of his (which largely ended that relationship) and as a result I had many chances to hear some of his sermons in full. I realized that he did say various inflammatory things that were not only anti-Semitic but also criticized Muslims, black people, and just about everyone in one way or another, but he would couch his criticism with some fairly reasonable points along the way. The truth is: Farrakhan is a conservative. He would make his arguments from the point of view that he was the only person who was willing to tell you the hard, unvarnished “truth” about everyone—black, white, Muslim, and Jewish. Because he was saying his “truth,” he predicted that the powers that be would attack and criticize him, they would mischaracterize and misquote him, and it was through their “false and unfair” attacks that you would know that he was right.
Yes, he’s said some pretty F-d up stuff in his time, but because he’s set up his followers to expect him to be attacked for it, the attacks and criticism actually increase their devotion and support.
Trump does the same thing. So does Alex Jones. It’s how cults are built: by isolating the faithful from the outside world.
Right-wing news outlet One America News Network has also railed against the “far-left corporate media censorship” that pushed Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos, and anti-SJW vlogger Paul Joseph Watson off of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Of course they ignore and deny that people like Jones, Loomer, and Yiannopoulos are all hate propagandists who’ve repeatedly attacked minorities and liberals with vicious rhetoric and spread crazed conspiracy theories, including the conspiracy theory that there is a “far-left corporate media” enemy out there targeting them for political retribution and censorship.
People like Watson have been proliferating quite a bit, and the “leftist” agenda has often been their target, particularly within popular media.
Arguing masterfully against this strain of rhetoric is a video by one of my new favorites, Cult of Dusty, who is hammering the anti-SJW videos on YouTube and manages to capture video of the head of the massively popular YouTube Channel Geeks and Gamers admitting that he’s only putting out anti-SJW videos because it’s profitable and he doesn’t really support what he’s been saying. (Note: this is extremely Not Safe For Work).
G&G: [At 6:17] Um, so again, these people [his fanbase] are nuts, their stupidity is out of control. You people are nuts and I’m going to continue to monetize your pain. Um, and your stupidity and your ignorance. It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
I would bet there is a high level of cross-over between the anti-SJW peddlers and Fox News viewers. According to a new NBC-WSJ Survey, Trump’s support comes almost entirely from Fox News viewers. 50 percent of Fox viewers believe that Mueller report completely cleared Trump, compared to 14 percent of CNN viewers, and 21 percent of others; 61 percent of Fox viewers believe Trump has been “honest” about the Russia probe, compared to 24 percent of CNN viewers and 29 percent of others; and only Fox viewers fully approve of Trump (73 percent), compared to only 34 percent of CNN viewers, and 38 percent of others.
That is some very effective propaganda considering the fact that the Mueller report specifically says that Trump is “not exonerated” when it comes to obstruction of justice.
Like Fox, Breitbart, and OANN, these YouTube stations have their audiences: people who are just ready to be told how SJWs, minorities, and progressives are the enemy—that they’re the problem and a threat. They are the ones who are pushing “real men” out of the picture and replacing them with “Soy Boys,” women, and minorities to prove how “woke” they are with forced, unearned diversity.
And of course the worst example of wokeness to these people is the dreaded “Mary Sue.”
From Rey in Star Wars, Michael Burnam in Star Trek Discovery, to the new female Dr. Who, and Captain Marvel in the MCU, each of these characters and actors have been attacked as “Mary Sues”: Women who are supposedly too perfect, too powerful and too capable to be believable characters, even though they are basically in exactly the same position as James Bond, Superman, Batman, Jason Bourne, almost every Tom Cruise movie ever made, and the other 13 male Doctor Whos who were somehow perfectly believable and acceptable, even though most of what they accomplished was essentially impossible.
Like Taylor Dumpson and Krista Bordelon, the actors playing some of these roles including Daisy Ridley, Kelly Marie Tran, and Leslie Jones have been harassed to the point of being completed forced off of social media, as I noted last year.
Additionally it appears that Russian trolls from the Internet Research Agency were also part of the attacks on the diversity of Star Wars in 2017.
The diversity in the casting of Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017 gave added buzz to the eighth film in the franchise, but it also drew racist and misogynist commentary online, and caused of the film's stars to shut down her social media.
Now, a researcher is arguing that rhetoric was in-part the product of organized Twitter campaigns by activists, bots and even Russian trolls trying to advance wider political agendas.
This year these efforts appear to have accelerated with fake videos produced in St. Petersburg, where an alleged “SJW” has been filmed going around supposedly pouring bleach onto the crotches of “manspreaders” on the subway.
A young woman walks up to a man in a subway train and pours liquid over him from a plastic bottle.
The scene is repeated a number of times with different men who all react with anger and bewilderment. We are told that they are being punished for “manspreading”, i.e. for sitting with their legs wide open.
The video went viral worldwide after it was published by In The Now – an English language social media channel owned by RT (Russia Today), which addresses international audiences. It has so far been seen 6,4 million times under the headline “FIGHTING MANSPREADING… WITH BLEACH!” and with the comment “This is a pretty extreme way to combat #manspreading.”
[...]
Aftenposten concludes that “the video was produced by the Russian production company My Duck’s Vision, which pumps out viral videos that combine conspiracies, anti-propaganda, humor and ridicule of Russian community critics”. My Duck’s Vision denied its involvement, in spite of a number of Russian commentators pointing at them as the producers, according to Bumaga.
This video has generated outrage across the globe, yet it’s a hoax created by RT precisely to generate this type of outrage against the progressive movement by portraying them as crazed, hateful women. It’s also fairly on-the-nose because Putin himself is a fairly notorious “man-spreader.”
Having us at each other’s throats over this sort of thing is exactly what Russia would like. So does Trump.
Brie Larson has become a special target among the anti-SJW and MRA (men’s rights advocate) crowds because she dared to say in a Marie Claire article, where she specifically chose to be interviewed by a disabled woman of color, that she supports more diversity in movies and in media in general.
I was thrilled you requested me to interview you. I thought, ‘This is game-changing’. It’s the biggest opportunity I’ve had. Nobody usually wants to take a chance on a disabled journalist. I’d love to know what your particular reasons were.
‘About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male. So, I spoke to Dr Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that. Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive. After speaking with you, the film critic Valerie Complex and a few other women of colour, it sounded like across the board they weren’t getting the same opportunities as others. When I talked to the facilities that weren’t providing it, they all had different excuses.’
Let’s talk about Captain Marvel. What do you think it means for young girls and people who identify as female to see this woman not need to be saved, but to do the saving and be the strong person in the face of so much adversity?
‘It’s so interesting, as it’s not something I thought about until I was in the cinema watching Wonder Woman. About two minutes in, I was sobbing and thought, “Why am I crying so much over this?” But it was seeing all of these warrior women who were so self-sufficient. That wasn’t something I identified with growing up – my hero was Indiana Jones. To have the chance to be one example of this is powerful and exciting.’
Larson also said very explicitly that she “doesn’t hate white men” and that she would be more than willing to invite more diverse interviewers to talk with her by extending her media availability, so she wasn't calling for white men to be shut out and pushed away: she was inviting in more people to the party.
Sitting down with FOX DC as part of doing the press rounds for Captain Marvel, Larson was asked about how her aforementioned statement about wanting to see a more diverse group of journalists doing junkets being taken out of context. While the actress didn't seem like she was in-the-know the her comment has been misconstrued online, she acknowledged it and reiterated that she's not trying to alienate any group, all she wants is for everyone to have the opportunity. "What I’m looking for is to bring more seats up to the table. No one is getting their chair taken away. There’s not less seats at the table, there’s just more seats at the table,” she said.
So she wasn’t man-hating, not even a little, but bringing this up hasn’t slowed or stopped any of the backlash.
Also, she was absolutely correct about diversity in films.
The USC Annenberg Center has documented that of 1,200 movies produced by major studios over the last decade, only 28 percent of them have had female leads or co-leads There are usually 20 to 30 female-led movies per year, up until 2018 when there was an uptick to 40. Only 4 percent had a solo female lead.
When it comes to race and ethnicity, it’s even worse than that.
Race/Ethnicity. Across 100 movies of 2018, a total of 28 featured an underrepresented lead or co lead driving the storyline. This is a gain of 7 percentage points from 2017 (21%) and a 15 percentage point gain from 2007 (13%). Though there is clearly an uptick in the percentage of underrepresented leads and co leads in 2018, the overall percentage is still below U.S. Census (39.3%) by 11.3 percentage points.7 Sample wide, only 15.5% of all 1,200 movies featured an underrepresented lead or co lead.
This means that almost 80 percent of all movies made in the last decade had a white male lead or co-lead character, when white males are only 36 percent of America and 9 percent of the population worldwide. Basic math would indicate that this is somewhat out of whack, but apparently if you dare to mention this imbalance, you are a white man-hating racist and sexist.
And it’s YouTubers like MechaRandom42 who’ve been leading the charge against these women and Larson in particular with, as of this moment, 115 videos complaining about Captain Marvel and Brie Larson.
None of this is accidental, and none of this is random. Just like Geeks and Gamers, Mecha is pandering to people who are enraged by the supposed “SJW menace” for monetary reasons. They claim diversity is being forced on us all by highlighting the fact that 80 percent of the film and media we see is still dominated by white men, but it’s not an attack on them to every once in a while have someone else be the focus of things. Having women (or minority and LGBT) characters be the lead or co-lead character in just 28 percent of films is not really a serious threat, because that means 72 percent is still an open playing field for white guys.
Isn’t that enough?
You might expect the worst of the SJW crowd to be the dreaded Antifa, which has been called a terrorist group by Fox and Trump. But here you can see where CNN’s W. Kamau Bell sat down an interviewed a member of Antifa. It turns out she really wasn’t anything like Tucker Carlson would expect.
Bell: Full disclosure: Tucker Carlson from Fox News in the not too distant past once labelled me a leader in Antifa.
(Ariel the Antifa Laughs)
Bell: Which was news to me.
Ariel: Wow.
Carlson: Kamau Bell is among other things a host on CNN, [...] he is a supporter of Antifa. They hate this country, they want to tear it down. None of that seems to matter to Kamau Bell. You are peddling hate, and Bell is.
Bell: It’s funny to me because I literally don’ t… I’ve never been to a meeting. How would you describe Antifa?
Ariel: The way I would describe Antifa is more like this. Do you approve of Fascism?
Bell: Uh, No.
Ariel: Then you could consider yourself Antifa if you chose too. So if you’re opposed to Fascism, then you are Antifa because it's Anti-Fascism. That can be a lot, a lot of things.
Ariel does go on to admit that she has participated in doxxing of fascists by putting up flyers indicating their links to neo-Nazi movements, and has even gotten into fights with the neo-Nazi Proud Boys using her actually very cute pink brass knuckles while trying to defend a pair of girls wearing hijabs from being attacked. One could debate whether this is crossing the line of violating someone’s personal privacy, and also threading the line between self-defense and assault.
Methods of addressing this vary.
Some of those methods have been adopted by Black LIves Matter, but also by People’s Action (peoplesaction.org), which claims to be “one of the largest and the fastest growing multiracial, progressive organizations in the country, with 48 member organizations in 32 states and more than a million people working for racial, gender, social and environmental justice.”
These would be the Social Justice Warriors that the alt-wrong has been looking for, but they are not exactly what they would expect.
In this video, Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza [starting at 00:34] and People’s Action director George Goehl [starting at 3:54] appeared with W. Kamau Bell and outlined a slightly different path than Antifa.
Garza: It’s interesting whenever black people declare unity in the midst of unmitigated chaos, somehow it is so threatening to White People. It’s like when Black people say “we love ourselves”, White people say “Oh so, you hate me?” Ok, so wait a minute now, isn’t the also an opportunity for you to declare that you also believe that Black Lives Matter?
It’s shows a lot about where we have left to go.
Bell: You get pointed at and accused of being anti-White.
Garza: Look, like my dad’s white. What are we doing right now?
Bell: Yeah.
[...]
Geohl: We’re not going to knock on a bunch of doors and say “Hey, do you want to come to an anti-racist meeting?" Those would be small meetings, or meetings of the people who are already with us. “Oh, we’re all here again...” That’s not what we’re doing.
[...]
We just finished knocking on 10,000 doors. Basically we ask people what are you upset about or what do you want to change, discover what ever the issue is and move people into a campaign to win. And then along the way we start to have conversations around race. "Did Muslims y’know like, crash the economy? Are black people pushing opiods into this part of the state? Did undocumented immigrants stash a bunch of money into corporate tax havens?” No. And we found the enemy is not each other, let’s focus on the real villain of this story. But we can only do that by working with people from where they’re at, build a foundation and a relationship and then we can start to have a different conversation.
Garza: What are the characteristics of white communities that people are missing? What’s actually going on?
Geohl: It’s really hard to imagine how bad it is until you go there. It’s a different kind of poverty, it’s ghost town poverty. It’s like the buildings have gotten knocked down but not taken away. It’s got a desperateness to it. Considering the conditions they’re living in a lot of these people are pretty darn woke, most of these communities are mixed-race...
Garza: Wait.. wait, wait. So you’re telling me that there are folks of all different races that are dealing with Ghost Town poverty?
Geohl: Yeah.
Garza: Because we don’t get that story.
Trump talks about it. He exploits it constantly and he usually blames people of color, immigrants, and foreign nations for it when the fact is that it’s largely corporate interests right here that have created these conditions.
Garza: What’s at stake when we miss that story?
Geohl: If the primary portrayal of poor white people is as backward Trump-loving Hillbillies, like, the people that are with us in these communities are gonna be like “Hey, If y’all don’t want me on the team I’m not gonna try out. I don’t feel like you want me on the Team.”
If we’re not there, somebody else is going to be. I’ve got flyers that say “Hey are you struggling with Opiod addiction? We can help you. Call the White Knights of the KKK, and there’s a local phone number...
And there you have it. If we’re not reaching out to these hearts and minds, if we’re not offering a positive alternative for people to place their energy into rather than negative self-destructive directions, the opposition is always out there recruiting.
They’re going to push their anti-SJW, anti-diversity agenda of hate even if they have to make up lies and create fake “SJW gone wild” videos. They’re going to criticize progressives for supporting or tolerating Antifa, but take no responsibility for white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys, Identity Evropa, or the Rise Above Movement and their links to the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter Robert Bowers.
In an earlier court filing, the authorities said they had been told by Clark family members that the brothers were heavily involved in the white supremacist movement and “that they were connected with the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooter through Gab,” the online forum favored by many neo-Nazis. The federal authorities had initially claimed that Jeffrey Clark had referred online to the synagogue killings as a “dry run” and suggested that might mean he had further information about the slaughter. In their filing Thursday, prosecutors appeared to amend that claim, saying it appeared Clark might have been referring to the failed bombing campaign directed at a number of liberal politicians. They make no claim either brother played a role in the planning of the attack.
When these people are shut out of Twitter, they move to Gab. When they’re thrown off YouTube, they move to Reddit, or 4chan or 8 chan. Alex Jones may be gone from Facebook, but he will turn up again somewhere soon: Mark my words on that.
Since 2016, the electoral map has shifted significantly and many of the swing voters in key states who cemented Trump's Electoral College victory have fallen away from him.
In a new examination of voter preference changes between 2016 and 2019, the Voter Study Group found a marked difference in the opinions of a much-discussed group in the electorate: voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and then Trump in 2016. Unsurprisingly, this group largely had a positive opinion of Trump in 2016 — 85 percent of these voters approved of him, the survey found.
But these opinions have significantly shifted. In 2019, only 66 percent of these voters still approved of Trump — a 19-point drop.
“Even small movement among these voters — who represented 9 percent of voters in 2016 — may prove significant heading into the 2020 presidential election,” wrote Robert Griffin of the Voter Study Group. “Obama-Trump voters are also disproportionately white, non-college educated and, as a result, are likely to be well distributed geographically for the purpose of electoral impact.”
[...]
State-by-state polling also supports this inference. Morning Consult presents data on Trump’s approval across the country and over time. In the key states where Trump won in 2016 — Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — the president started out in early 2017 with a net positive approval rating:
But by April 2019, he was significantly underwater in each of these states:
Without dominance among these voters, Trump is unlikely to repeat his 2016 electoral hat trick in 2020. However the warm, loving, wink-wink embrace he’s given to xenophobia and hatemongering is not likely to simply fade away. It would be a mistake to grow complacent just because some of the numbers seem to be shifting our way, particularly this early in the election cycle.
We can’t afford to wait until people reach the level of Rise Above or the Daily Stormer and Infowars, or until they’re propagandized to the point of violence, stalking, and harassment. Yelling at people isn’t going to change their minds, even though it can be satisfying and cathartic. Punching Nazis and Proud Boys might be fun, but is it productive since it gives them license, yet again, to claim that they are the beset “victim” of Antifa/SJW aggression? The hard job is actually reaching them and making them understand that we are not enemies, that they are being lied to and manipulated for profit and for power.
Yes, there are many people who are too far gone. They’re too far inside the machine, co-opted, and deluded to be convinced of anything other than what their trusted sources—Fox, Infowars, Geeks and Gamers, PewDePie, Trump, Farrakha—have been telling them. Many of them will see the banning of these people from online forums as confirmation that they, and only they, have been telling the “truth.” In some cases (like Antifa Ariel), we may need to resort to self-defense or even more direct tactics with some of these types of people in specific cases, where legally applicable. But even with that, there is a narrow window where some people can be reached and a broader consensus of purpose and direction can be forged,. Difficult though it may be, we have to reach into that window nonetheless.
We have to build the bridge based on trust and respect. I have to admit I have a hard time trusting and respecting a lot of these people., but it has to be done. Some of them are not too far gone yet. Just like George Goehl said: If we don’t invite them onto the team, they’re going to assume that they need to seek a spot on the other team.