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posted by martyb on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't dept.

Wired Magazine has an article that some might find interesting.

I was at what should have been a farmers’ market in Berkeley, California, last year when a throng of black-clad antifascists tried to scrap it out with far-right ralliers in the middle of a park named after Martin Luther King Jr. I watched scrawny college students get pummeled by hulking, be-swastika-ed ex-soldiers and ex-law enforcement officers in motorcycle gear. The antifascists’ one reprisal was setting off a homemade smoke bomb, which promptly blew back into their own faces, drawing raucous jeering from the white supremacists. It was as close to a war zone as I ever hope to be, and it was unequivocally a win for the racists.

But then,

It was easy to imagine the Bay Area becoming an extremist battleground—each weekend an opportunity for the next rally turned riot.

That vision has not come to pass. In the long arc of American racism, 2017 saw a sudden spike in visibility, but it was not the beginning of a new era in which people routinely walk the streets advertising their white supremacy. This year has brought the opposite trend: 2018 has been a year of pushing the alt-right and other white nationalist groups back underground, and punishing them for misdeeds committed during their brief moment in the sun. That’s a testament to the strength of the backlash against 2017’s naked racism, and evidence of how costly being openly racist has become—especially on the internet, where it has doomed entire social media platforms to obscurity. This must be counted as a good thing.

Goebbels said, allegedly, "Even if we lose we will win, because our enemies have adopted our methods." Looks like the alt-right is losing.

Regardless of what scaremonger reporters might espouse, the alt-right, as we have come to know it over the last two years, has failed—as extremism researchers always knew it would. But in its place has come something shadowier and far older: an underground white supremacist movement operating on society’s fringes, and a culture that disavows the racists while quietly mainstreaming their ideas.

So here's the point:

The issue, though, is that while there’s satisfaction and schadenfreude in watching these public flounderings, the alt-right doesn’t have to be visible to succeed. In fact, going underground is a return to the status quo for American white supremacy.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @07:21PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @07:21PM (#781629)

    The rightwing people you dislike so much would give you the same retort back in the day if you complained about abuses heaped on you.
    Are you really such a blind zealot? Do you have no sense of history? Are you just too stupid to imagine what happens when you jettison being a country of laws?

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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @09:11PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @09:11PM (#781693)

    Hey clueless person, no laws are being broken and going unpunished as far as I have seen. Are you too stupid to understand that? Come back when you have a valid complaint about laws being jettisoned, until then you are just a nazi apologist and therefore a piece of shit. No one is stopping the alt-right from spewing racist garbage, and any violence to do so is already illegal.

    You alt-right supporters and other adjacent positions are just so dumb. So so so dumb, and it is because you have a belief (racism) that simply does not mesh with reality so you end up being stupid stupid stupid trying to defend such beliefs.

    At this point in time the best complaint you've got is getting deplatformed by Twitter and web hosting companies. Maybe go ask some minorities if they would trade in their daily experiences with racism for getting banned by Twitter. The answer may surprise you!

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @11:05PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @11:05PM (#781753)

      No one is stopping the alt-right from spewing racist garbage, and any violence to do so is already illegal.

      At this point in time the best complaint you've got is getting deplatformed by Twitter and web hosting companies.

      An excellent example of doublethink - the ability to hold true two opposing ideas at the same time.

      • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @02:22AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @02:22AM (#781854)

        No dumbdumb that is the epitome of the conservative / libertarian "free market" ideal. Business will hurt if people associate their product/service with lite Nazis so they choose to not do business with the little racist jerks. I don't agree with that decision and think we need to roll back ISPs to being "dumb pipes" like you, but until that happens the racist fuckers are just gonna have to deal with the fact that no one wants to do business with them.

        Nice attempt at pushing a logical fallacy that doesn't exist, you do realize that such accusations have to be true in order to have any value right?

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by jbruchon on Saturday January 05 2019, @05:47PM

    by jbruchon (4473) on Saturday January 05 2019, @05:47PM (#782564) Homepage

    How quickly people forget about McCarthyism.

    --
    I'm just here to listen to the latest song about butts.