(For any concerned parties, since finishing my livetweet of The Reactionary Mind I have read Fascism Today by Shane Burley and Healing from Hate by Michael Kimmel, and am currently a few chapters into Terror, Love, and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein. I just didn't livetweet em.)
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(You can hear more on my Research Masterpost.)https://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/183630744222/research-masterpost …
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I'm going with Alt-America as the next livetweet because it's kinda big and daunting and I need your support to get me through it. Also it's the first proper history of the Alt-Right I've tackled and seems useful to share.
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CW: the very first sentence is about a racist shooting Black people, so just... be ready or mute this thread.
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Book opens with a coincidence: Dylann Roof murdered nine Black people in a church the day after Trump announced his candidacy. Roof was largely unaware of Trump as a person, but as portents of what was to come, it's pretty synchronous. Also that feels like 10 years ago.
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Neiwert's opening pages are about the shock much of America felt when overt white supremacy suddenly burst into public consciousness. How people had assumed these ideas were over and done with. (Cue John Mulaney: "And now there's Nazis again!")
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The reality was, white nationalists never went anywhere, they just hadn't attempted much public effort since the militia movements of the 90's, which similarly blew up its PR by committing a bunch of domestic terrorism.
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But they'd been getting quietly, steadily radicalized by a faucet of racist nonsense from Fox News while the liberal media more or less pretended they didn't exist.
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So 9/11 happened, when led the underground white nationalists into a bunch of New World Order conspiracy theorizing, while mainstream conservatism took on an openly anti-Muslim tone and denigrated liberals for any criticism of the War on Terror.
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Neiwert argues the forming of the Tea Party in response to the election of the first Black President as the moment where the mainstream Right and the underground white nationalists formed an alliance.
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Neiwert takes some time to define Right Wing Populism, the stoking of which was the Tea Party's bread n butter.pic.twitter.com/ORJ5pgu7oF
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(nice to have my video on conservatism's love of hierarchies validated)
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The Tea Party became a gateway into mainstream discourse for the wackier conspiracy theories of the Patriots and ancillary Far Right groups.
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Neiwert describes Patriots as living in an "alternate universe" where the Constitution says the government can't own land or have law enforcement. This intersects with conspiracy theories like Birthirism, the New World Order, and the environmentalist shadow government.
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Right Wing populists tend to think the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship, and usually champion "captains of industry" like Henry Ford. Trump openly characterized himself as such a person to the Tea Party in 2011.
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The reason Trump's success was so shocking was that he had been, well before announcing his candidacy, pitching himself to a large bloc of voters whom the conservative media machine had already made cozy with, but mainstream media had utterly ignored.
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As a personal note, I feel like this bewilderment is part of why so much media just goes into denial. This abiding assumption that he can't actually be saying what he's saying, he can't actually be succeeding because of it, these voters can't possibly matter this much.
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They just keep treating the situation like it's operating under normal rules because they cannot admit that they were so wrong, and that things actually are this dire.
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In the lead up to the Trump campaign, Ann Coulter was making the rounds supporting her anti-immigration book Adios America, where her usual nativist claptrap got more overtly vicious and racist. In it, she suggested the wall that Trump eventually made central to his campaign.
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Another early fan was Kyle Rogers, webmaster of the Council of Conservative Citizens, who started selling Trump 2016 shirts the day Trump announced his candidacy. The CCC is the site that spreads those false statistics about Black on white crime that radicalized Dylann Roof.
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Between the similar shooting in a Black church committed by Jim David Adkisson in 2008 - then in response to Obama's candidacy - there were 3 times as many acts of domestic terror as compared with the previous 8 years. Most were right-wing extremists.
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Despite this, mainstream discussion of terrorism continued to portray it as a Muslim threat. Neiwert shares the statistics of how domestic terrorism has always been predominantly white and right-wing, but I don't think my audience needs much convincing of that.
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Something Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians drove home for me is that, when people see the authorities tolerating one more type of violence than another, that type of violence increases.
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When a Black man faces worse consequences at a traffic stop than Dylann Roof does for shooting up a Black church, white nationalists get the message that shootings are viable. For a lot of racists, Adkisson was that message.
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Anyway, here's a neat stat: Not only did right-wing extremists make up over 50% of domestic terror during the Obama Presidency, but around 1/3 of them involved fatalities. Only 8% of Islamist domestic terror involve any deaths.
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Reminder what the stats were for 2018:https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds …
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Despite all this, in 2011, after Republicans took Congress, the chairperson overseeing hearings on domestic terror flatly said they would not investigate anything but Islamist terrorism. An attempted bombing of an MLK parade by a white supremacist had happened the day before.
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The SPLC reports a dramatic rise in hate groups through the first half of the Obama Presidency, and then a sudden, sharp decline. In 2013, there were 1360 active militia movements. In 2015, there were 874. Radicals were leaving organizations and taking their extremism online.
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"the advent of social media and other more dispersed means of sharing information had created a shift in how extremists shared their ideologies and how they recruited, too." Hey, kids, what's something that happened between 2013 and 2015? GamerGate.
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Mark Potok of the SPLC notes the social consequences of being affiliated with racist groups, as well as the lack of a charismatic leader to rally around. So, instead, extremists found each other online, where they could better control how much others knew about them.
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