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from the keep-your-friends-close-and-your-enemies-closer? dept.
An article at vice.com reports The Number of U.S. Hate Groups Keeps Surging, Largely Thanks to Young, White men:
The number of hate groups nationwide reached a record high in 2018, driven partly by the persistent growth of white nationalist groups catering to young, college-aged men.
There are currently 1,020 active hate groups in America — up from 954 in 2017, and 917 the previous year, according to an annual tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The new, young face of hate emerged from the shadows during the 2016 election and organized through a shared language of memes and under the banner of the “alt-right.” Many hailed then-candidate Donald Trump, with his hard-line views on immigration, as a hero. In celebration of his election, the alt-right’s one-time de facto leader Richard Spencer led a room full of young men in suits to give Nazi salutes.
Since then, Spencer and other prominent actors, entangled in costly lawsuits and tired of being heckled by anti-fascist protesters, have faded into relative obscurity.
At the same time, groups like Identity Evropa — whose khaki-clad members were a formidable presence at the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017— have proliferated and expanded their reach by setting up new chapters across the country. Patriot Front also grew significantly in 2018 after splintering from Vanguard America, the group linked to the 19-year-old neo-Nazi who rammed his car into a crowd of protesters during the Charlottesville rally and killed Heather Heyer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Nuke on Friday February 22 2019, @11:42AM (8 children)
This (deimtee's post) is absolutely right.
I am a well-to-do straight white male, qualified with a good safe technical job, and I believe I am good at it. I have all the things I want. However I remain capable of recognising that a poor young white male can feel at the bottom of western society because in fact they are. TV, advertising and the media are constantly drumming in that white straight males are the villains of society, past and present, and surveys show that young white males are the least happy members of western society. It is axiomatic that TV dramas cast them as the losers in the plots with usually a loud black man scoring with the most attractive white girl and the white guy left looking like a geeky twisted incel who is eventually sent back to his basement computer, chess playing, or model railway building*.
Western politicians need to step back and look at what is going on. To ignore or (worse) to try to quash these efects is as dangerous for society as when French or Russion autocrats ignored or tried to quash the discontent of the people leading up to their revolutions. They need to make positive responses, otherwise they are sitting on a time bomb.
Even I, while I am not short of money or employment, feel somewhat like a social outcast. As an engineer keeping things running I am like a Morlock in H.G.Wells' story "The Time Machine". Wells portrayed the Morlocks as the villains but, working machinery underground, they gave a living to the Eloi, a beautiful but usless class of people who swanned around in luxury on the surface. We techies are the Morlocks.
* My advice is give black girls a try. There seem to plenty of them and many prefer white guys and culture over black, and don't have much good to say about the latter, based on experience. They don't have the feminist outlook that many white women have adopted. Many seem to have an illegitimate child or two though, having been dumped afterwards.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday February 22 2019, @07:19PM
The President of the United states going "wink-wink-nudge-nuge" every time he tells whitey to stop committing acts of terror isn't helping, either.
Why won't the President say "Radical Rightwing Terrorism?"
(Score: 2, Disagree) by julian on Friday February 22 2019, @08:43PM (6 children)
They are at the bottom of society because they are poor. The other things don't matter, and in fact, help them out. The problem is that poverty is much stronger than white privilege, so any benefit they get from being white or male is obliterated by being poor.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:23AM (5 children)
So why all the focus on being a white male if it is such a small effect?
Where are all the people clamoring for affirmative action for the poor?
Poor lives matter!!
(Score: 2) by julian on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:36AM (4 children)
My main point is that there is not very much focus on this at all. People falsely believe there is because they consume media which over-reports on fringe issues and rare events which play to the fear and paranoia of white conservatives. It is a combination of selection bias and the availability heuristic. Even the dreaded boogeyman of "affirmative action" barely exists in the real world in the pernicious form that conservatives bemoan. It's almost never the cause of a white/male individual's failure; it's just a convenient excuse and story used by the moneyed elites to direct blame away from themselves.
Black immigrant women didn't take their jobs; capitalists first outsourced it to Asia and then automated it out of existence entirely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @11:50AM (3 children)
I'm not talking measurable results in the real world, but the perceptions promulgated by the media. By that measure those poor white male bastards are under attack and are responding appropriately.
(Score: 2) by julian on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:07PM (2 children)
Then I suggest they find better sources of media. If they stopped watching Fox News, listening to right-wing radio, reading sites like Breitbart and The Daily Caller, then they'd stop feeling so attacked. The "white men are under attack!" coverage is coming from the far-right news sources because that drives traffic, clicks, and ad-revenue among their hypnotized audience.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 24 2019, @01:21AM
It is not solely the right-wing media. They are the ones pointing out and exagerating the attack, but the left-wing media and popular entertainment ares the ones carrying it out.
Take the script for almost any recent movie or TV show and do a search and replace on the characters. Swap black for white, and male for female.
Now reread the script and tell me that there won't be violent complaints about the treatment of the female black characters.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nuke on Sunday February 24 2019, @01:01PM
When in my OP I described a typical TV drama where a bitter and twisted young white incel guy ends up back in his basement while the socially-climbing black Jock hero scores it with the most attractive white girl(s) in the cast, I had in mind some recent BBC and ITV dramas. These are mainstream media, not alt-right - in fact they are often accused of left bias.
That is the point. The main stream media is trying to brainwash us into accepting that young white guys are crap and are fair game for every kicking in the teeth and every humiliation that they get. What I am saying is that while some white guys are rolling over and lapping it up in a kind of sado-masochism, this will eventually cause a major backlash, and the alt-right glimmerings are the first sign of that reaction. Despite, being in a comfortable position myself, I can understand it - it is an inversion of what blacks were complaining about 50 years ago in the civil rights movement. Politicians and the media need to be beware.