"Alt-right" Still Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

[rainbow]

Looks like the poor Caucasians have been squeezed out again.

Meh, they all look the same to us.

[Brian Peacock]

[JimC]

Looks like the poor Caucasians have been squeezed out again.

The Iowa Caucus to the rescue!

[Brian Peacock]

Professional queerophobe, and proud defender of statues of slave owners, Larry Fox not only loses the defamation case brought against him for calling people paedos on Twitter after they called him a racist, he also lost the counter claim that being called a racist was damaging to his reputation. Oops.

Laurence Fox loses libel battle with Twitter users he called paedophiles

The actor and rightwing activist Laurence Fox has lost a high court libel battle with two men he called paedophiles after they called him a racist. The former actor defamed the men when he used the slur on social media, Mrs Justice Collins Rice has ruled.

The Reclaim party founder was sued by Simon Blake, a former Stonewall trustee, and Crystal, a drag artist, over a dispute on Twitter, now X, in October 2020.

Fox, 45, called Blake and the former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant, whose real name is Colin Seymour, paedophiles in an exchange about a decision by Sainsbury’s to provide a safe space for black employees during Black History Month.

Fox’s call for a boycott of the supermarket had prompted claims by Blake, Seymour and Nicola Thorp, a former Coronation Street actor, that he was a racist.

Fox countersued, telling the high court that being accused of racism was a “reputation-destroying allegation” and “career-ending”. His claims were dismissed on Monday.

Collins Rice said: “Mr Fox’s labelling of Mr Blake and Mr Seymour as paedophiles was, on the evidence, probabilities and facts of this case, seriously harmful, defamatory and baseless.

“The law affords few defences to defamation of this sort. Mr Fox did not attempt to show these allegations were true, and he was not able to bring himself on the facts within the terms of any other defence recognised in law.”

She added that the issue of damages and any other remedies would be discussed at a later date.

The judge did not make a ruling on whether describing Fox as “a racist” is “substantially true”, after finding that the three tweets cited in his counterclaim were unlikely to cause serious harm to his reputation...

[Tero]

Wired:
On Monday morning, the organizers of the Take Our Border Back convoy kicked off their road trip to the Texas–Mexico border in Virginia Beach. Though they claimed that up to 40,000 trucks would be joining, only 20 vehicles made up the convoy as it rolled into Jacksonville, Florida, 14 hours later. The promised support had not materialized—not a single truck showed up, tires were reportedly slashed, participants got lost, and paranoia struck the group. In short, the convoy was a complete mess.

The convoy was organized last week as a show of support for Texas governor Greg Abbott and his decision to defy the federal government and President Joe Biden about the installation of razor wire along the Texas–Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas. While at least one organizer initially said they planned to hunt down migrants along the border in collaboration with sympathetic members of law enforcement, the group appeared to walk back that assertion on Monday, issuing a statement that the convoy would not be heading to the border at all but instead going to Quemado, a tiny town in Catron County, Texas. The group’s website, however, still lists the route of the convoy as “Virginia Beach, VA, to Eagle Pass,” and members of the planning group on Telegram still say they are going to the Texas border.

https://www.wired.com/story/day-one-tak ... voy-texas/

[JimC]

They'll be chanting "Remember the Alamo!" next...

[Tero]

Border vigilantes
https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-arrested-sel ... 29521.html

[L'Emmerdeur]

Alt-right ideas have been melding with mainstream right wing rhetoric. Media outlets and politicians that push this hybrid would like to keep some distance from the violent actions of those who swallow their rubbish, and 'it was QAnon' is a convenient narrative to try to achieve that distance.

'QAnon Can’t Be the Scapegoat Anymore'

The Pennsylvania man accused of decapitating his father undoubtedly spent time in dark places on the internet. That became abundantly clear when news broke that the man, 32-year-old Justin Mohn, had been arrested after holding up a severed head in a YouTube video and calling for the execution of federal government employees, starting with his own father. In his ramblings, Mohn called on “patriots and militia members” to win their country back from “the globalist, communist takeover of America.”

It’s hard to get to the point of making manifestos on YouTube (let alone broadcasting lethal violence online) without some exposure to certain extreme digital spaces. So it’s easy to see how certain right-wing tabloids jumped to some conclusions in their coverage of this disturbing crime. “QAnon Believer Accused of Beheading Federal Worker Dad Smirks in New Mugshot,” a New York Post headline stated. The U.S. version of the Mirror similarly proclaimed him to be a QAnon adherent, as did the Daily Mail.

The problem is that there’s no evidence Mohn had any connection to QAnon. No reporters have dug up any mention in Mohn’s digital footprint of the group’s trademarks, like “the storm” (Donald Trump’s supposed great coming triumph over a vast pedophilic cabal) or Democrats committing child sacrifices. He used violent right-wing rhetoric, yes. But we can’t ascribe his beliefs to QAnon.

It might sound pedantic to split hairs about the conspiracy theories that drive extremists like Mohn to do despicable things. But as several experts in the world of online extremism told me, making that distinction is important beyond just understanding Mohn’s crime. It’s crucial to grasping and confronting the more expansive problem of political and social extremism in American society today.

To put it another way, it’s tempting to believe that right-wing conspiracy theorists don’t deserve our nuance, that their wackiness shouldn’t demand that we spend any of our precious time on this earth reading up on adrenochrome or frazzledrip. But experts say that labeling everything that reeks of right-wing brain rot as QAnon-affiliated risks obscuring just how much extreme right-wing rhetoric is now coming from much more mainstream sources—including politicians themselves.

...

Mohn, in the YouTube video, complained about the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and the Black Lives Matter movement. These groups, he said, were working with the federal government (“the deep state”) to allow a “globalist, communist takeover” of the country. His conclusion isn’t a rational one, but it’s also not as fantastical as QAnon’s satanic cabals; his violent act reeked of other, more basic forms of hatred-based conspiracy theories with broader appeal.

“Oftentimes with these violent actors, they just pick and choose from different ideologies and form franken-beliefs—some people call it ‘salad bar extremism,’ ” said Alex Mendela, an associate analyst for Alethea, a company that detects and mitigates mis- and disinformation.* “But by saying anyone in this soup of conspiracy theories is QAnon, you’re distorting the threat.”

...

Strangely, it’s QAnon’s very success that may have made it less relevant. The ideas Q promoted in the movement’s heyday—of the powerful deep state, of the stolen election, of rampant child trafficking—have themselves become standard Republican beliefs, even if the more bizarre details haven’t succeeded beyond the core QAnon community.

“In some ways, the Q people got everyone on their team and didn’t need the trappings of QAnon anymore,” Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory expert and the author of Jewish Space Lasers, wrote in an email.

...

In an environment in which the language of previously fringe beliefs is bleeding into the mainstream, it can be daunting to try to parse the coded extremist language now intermingling with political speech by popular and influential national politicians and media figures. So maybe that’s what happened with the New York Post and Daily Mail reports about Mohn.

Still, some extremism experts saw a more cynical maneuver. By labeling right-wing extremist violence a result of believing in QAnon, they said, the Post and the other right-wing tabloids were protecting the more conventional nativist ideas the publications often echo and help spread and that showed up in Mohn’s diatribes—in a sense, downplaying the culpability of the right-wing media and echo chamber.

...

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Rothschild said in his email. “Their readers don’t want to think this guy is someone like them, they want him to be one of those​ people who think lizards run the world and Hillary Clinton eats babies at dinner with JFK Jr. And the reality is that the Pennsylvania killer’s belief system wasn’t that far off the beaten path from many other right-wing media consumers.”

[Brian Peacock]

...
Mohn, in the YouTube video, complained about the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and the Black Lives Matter movement. These groups, he said, were working with the federal government (“the deep state”) to allow a “globalist, communist takeover” of the country. His conclusion isn’t a rational one, but it’s also not as fantastical as QAnon’s satanic cabals; his violent act reeked of other, more basic forms of hatred-based conspiracy theories with broader appeal.

It's extremism when put into action, but as our erstwhile friend from the the frozen North has oft bemoaned, these are just opinions, or views, or understandings about the world, and calling them 'extreme' is basically doing a hate speech on them.

As I've mentioned before, while those who complain about LGBTQ (but particularly the T), migrants, movements affirming minority rights, the deep state, the Left/Woke/Elites/Communists etc, are often looking for a simple causal link between the 'other' and the state of the world, their wittering often articulates frustrations borne out of a material reality: that the narratives and values they've been brought up to believe in and to uphold haven't, don't, or can't play out in real life in the ways they've been led to believe they will, or should.

These people have turned up on time and done everything asked of them, they've provided for their families, been self-reliant, affected an appropriate amount of stoicism and placed great store in their physical and mental resilience, and worked as hard as they can - all things which, according to the contemporary mythos, should automatically bring them material reward, social status, and personal respect. And yet life is still precarious, insecure, and stressful; they're still ignored by 'a system' which appears rigged against them; they're disempowered and disrespected and have little-to-no effective influence over the trajectory of their lives. It is any wonder then that many fall for the stories of those who, in acknowledging their experiences and frustrations, ascribe an over-simplistic cause and prescribe and all-to-easy solution - even when the people mobilising their #OUTRAGE to sell off-the-shelf quick-fixes are themselves a fundamental part of the problem?

[JimC]

[Brian Peacock]

You're obviously a woke, lefty, elitist communist Jim!

[Sean Hayden]

Well said. There’s also the problem of middle and upper class lunatics without a clue. That’s why I recommend all political types do social work first.

They might learn things like: the migrant community ain’t an art scene, and poverty isn’t a feel good Disney movie… useful stuff that can help them communicate with all kinds of people.

[Svartalf]

You're obviously a woke, lefty, elitist communist Jim!

we'll forgive him because of his love for gin

[JimC]