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Lovely timing, these people:
Racist Trump twitter has come up with a new coded way to share racial slurs w/ each other and avoid account suspension. pic.twitter.com/J4AmaHFVCd
— Alex Goldman (@AGoldmund) October 1, 2016
If Trump wins, it will be because neo-Nazis helped get out the vote. https://t.co/MY8BOQshjB pic.twitter.com/3tsg7wtYCZ
— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) September 29, 2016
From the LATimes story [warning: loud autoplay]:
… Trump’s surprise rise to become the GOP presidential nominee, built largely on a willingness to openly criticize minority groups and tap into long-simmering racial divisions, has reenergized white supremacist groups and drawn them into mainstream American politics like nothing seen in decades…
Members are showing up at his rallies, knocking on doors to get out the vote and organizing debate-watching parties. White supremacists are active on social media and their websites report a sharp rise in traffic and visitors, particularly when posting stories and chat forums about the New York businessman.
Stormfront, already one of the oldest and largest white nationalist websites, reported a 600% increase in readership since President Obama’s election, and now has more than one in five threads devoted to Trump. It reportedly had to upgrade its servers recently due to the increased traffic.
“Before Trump, our identity ideas, national ideas, they had no place to go,” said Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank based in Arlington, Va…
One California white nationalist leader dug into his own pockets to give $12,000 to launch a pro-Trump super PAC that made robocalls in seven primary states — with more promised before the Nov. 8 election.
“The idea that [Trump] is taking a wrecking ball to ‘political correctness’ excites them,” said Peter Montgomery, who has tracked far right groups as a senior fellow at People for the American Way, the Norman Lear-founded advocacy group. “They’ve been marginalized in our discourse, but he’s really made space for them…. He has energized these folks politically in a way that’s going to have damaging long-term consequences.”…
These are not just the doddering remnants of the Klan, though there are elements of that. It’s also a younger generation of tech-savvy millennials who have rebranded themselves as the “alt-right” —or alternative right— movement, a loose collection of white nationalist, anti-establishment groups…
We can only hope the vast majority of those “tech-savvy millenials” are arrested development cases like the Dickensianly-named Palmer Luckey, overaged little boys playing with matches in a shed full of flammables…
One reason every political hashtag on Twitter is filled with racist trolls? The founder of Oculus is funding them: https://t.co/i5fystRP3k
— Anil Dash (@anildash) September 23, 2016
Early Morning Open Thread: Inviting the Sewer-Dwellers into the KitchenPost + Comments (38)