By David Futrelle
On the neo-Nazi hate site The Daily Stormer, the ISIS-style car attack on a crowd of anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville yesterday has been the source of great hilarity from the moment it happened.
Site publisher Andrew Anglin mocks the attack, which killed 32-year-old activist Heather Heyer and left many injured, as a “Crashocaust” and jokes in one post that the “very nice car” used in the attack was “worth much more than the life of whoever died.”
Even before the driver of the car was identified as a young man who appears to be a Hitler-obsessed, meme-loving, Trump-supporting neo-Nazi much like them, Anglin’s readers embraced the attack as a great victory for their side.
“God is truly with us today,” someone calling himself AshinFurnacestein declared on the site’s forums. “HAHAHAHAHAHAHA”
“hahahaha YUGE win today for the home team!,” another commenter agreed, “and now they fumbeled in the end zone when a cop bird crashed and burned ahahahahaha 
God is speedy in his vengeance”
The Stormers quickly turned the attack into an excuse to post the most offensive memes they could imagine.
I’m going to post some of them here, but be warned: they are some of the most rancid, hateful images you will likely ever see, and, save one, I am posting them uncensored. Click away from this post now if the events of the last several days have left you feeling even a little bit fragile.
But this needs to be documented so we know exactly what sort of people we’re dealing with here.
Anglin himself got the meme contest going by posting this:
And things quickly went downhill from there:
Some of the Stormers happily appropriated whatever old memes they could think of.
The Stormers were especially excited to see that at least one of those hit by the car was black.
One memester borrowed the cover of a Cars album:
Another incorporated Anglin himself into his meme:
The worst meme posted? Probably this one, incorporating a famous image of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean after the overloaded boat containing him and his parents capsized.
There are more memes like this on the Daily Stormer forums, many more. You can find many of them in this forum thread. (This is an archived link that only shows a handful of comments; you will have to go to the direct link to see them all.)
And the Stormers aren’t the only ones turning the car attack that left Heather Heyer dead into what they think are hilarious memes.
On 4chan, one anon posted this:
And on Twitter, meanwhile, white supremacists and shitlords with names like Awakened Saxon and Dan From Kekistan are posting memes of their own:
These, I need hardly remind you, are the people Donald Trump refuses to explicitly denounce with his own big mouth.
@Dalillama
my bad
@Fabe
No worries; Alan’s made the reverse mistake in my presence before 🙂
Well either way both sound like pretty interesting places .
RE: Celiac/coeliac
I may or may not have it; my doctor wouldn’t run tests. Either way I’m *extremely* sensitive to gluten and so I have lots of problems eating out. I bought a little device that tests my food for me. It can detect >=20 ppm with 99% accuracy, so it helps catch it when the kitchen makes mistakes or is straight up malicious. Currently about 1/3 of the results where I'm told it's gluten free find gluten. The most recent discussions I've had with staff over gluten found:
"I'll talk to the chef about it; that should not have any gluten in it!" (sounded genuine)
"I checked with the cook and they used the gluten free sauce. There's nothing else we can do, it's just sauce and pepper!" (completely uninterested in learning about sources of cross-contamination)
"I looked into it and it turns out the server never put the allergy warning on your order so the cooks didn't take precautions." (very apologetic, also interested in device for family)
"It's just a gluten free wrap, I don't know what you want me to do about it." (this place was supposed to have all staff trained in allergies and supposed to be extremely accommodating if you have any issues; clearly their staff has different ideas than their corporate)
So that's my small sample of data. That 1/3 number I gave matches with the data the company has collected so far from others, as well. But I think it's clear from the reactions when I let staff know about gluten that some of them don't care or are hostile when I talk with them.
I LOVE WEIRDNESS!
….Well, “Fun” weirdness, not “Face-Gnawing Florida Man” weirdness.
@Scildfreja:
I’m surprised those forestry towers haven’t been replaced with camera masts and remote monitoring by now.
Tho, I’ve been known to use ‘spoons’ (from conversation here, I think I’ll stop), the physical/emotional/etc energy resource metaphor I’m most familiar with is ‘lightbulbs’. Related to ‘work life balance’, basically you’ve got some lightbulbs and a power source. It can light up 1 of the lightbulbs 100% but not all of them. 50/50, 40/30/20/10, whatevs. You can devote your energy to work and friends and projects and family, etc, but you gotta make some choices about what gets how much if any. That’s the one I know the most about ayway…
Anyone else annoyed at the fact that bagpipes don’t seem to have enough notes to get the melody right for either of those tunes?
“Keep Portland Weird”
“Keep Austin Weird”
“Keep Round Rock Mildly Unusual”
“Keep Waco …” (Comment Policy)
Re Fire Towers:
Cameras can’t smell smoke from barely smoldering fires nearby.
Plus they already built the towers, so adding cameras to existing ones works well enough.
Still have to make sure the cameras are working.
@JS
I have a gadget glued to the ceiling in the hallway 10 feet from where I am sitting that can.
I’m guessing there’s another reason for not automating, probably something an early responder on the scene can do rather than just something that can be detected.
I dunno, maybe the reason is to increase employment options for Canadian introverts who like forests.
Seems fair, but I’m an introvert who likes forests, so I might be biased.
@JS I’d love a job like that. 🙂 And I live in the right place, too. LOL!
“Firefox can’t find the server at (dailystormer URL)” Finally. Domestic terrorism recruiting and radicalization site down!
I’m an introvert who likes forests, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to live in the middle of one, swarmed continually by mosquitoes, without human contact for weeks at a time, hundreds of miles from the nearest stores, restaurants, and movie theaters, and undoubtedly saddled with very crappy, unreliable, and low-bandwidth internet service and unreliable power. 🙂
There’s a Spider Robinson story about a telepath who can’t control his powers, he just sometimes randomly reads the minds of people near him; the information dump is quite unpleasant, not to mention unethical. He gets a job in a fire tower precisely because it means he can spend months at a time without anyone near enough for him to read their mind.
I like to be alone without people (even without good internet), then i can write again some story or poem and not be distract. But in real life, when i am alone too long, soon i will feel like i am two people. Not two different people, but two of me – and i don’t like it because i don’t like myself. It is very unpleasant. I feel like i fall down inside my own body, and one of myself see another of myself from inside and i don’t like what i see. Then i need to speak to someone else or put on music or video. When i experience this sensation means i was alone too long time.
Such cowards.
@Surplus
If they had detectors that were as good at smelling as noses, they wouldn’t need dogs for sniffing out drugs, cadavers, melanoma, and whatever other interesting things they teach dogs to sniff for.
Edit: @Axe
When I say I don’t like spoons, I’m not saying it bothers me when other people use it. I just don’t like to use it.
Fire towers have to some degree been supplanted by satellites like MODIS.
https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov
A sat flying overhead can detect a hot spot in the forest. You only need “moderate” resolution because fires are so hot they’ll come up bright anyway.
You still need them sometimes for much more local spotting, or faster updates when tracking something. But I thought they weren’t staffed full-time anymore.
Ah yes, ‘Very Bad Things’ , A telepath,a Ex-hippy and a Vancouver cop have to try and stop a serial killer from murdering a entire family and posting the killings on the dark web.
@Fabe I have half a memory of that particular telepath being referenced by Mike Callaghan in one of the Callaghan books. Am I hallucinating? Referred to him as being ‘happy as a clam’ out in the forest.
Daily Stormer still down. Poooooor Nazis *spit* Muahahaha
@Alan, Fabe, Dalillama:
It doesn’t help that there are at least two fairly major Portlands within the U.S., either: Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine.
I seem to recall that the name ‘Springfield’ was chosen for the town in The Simpsons because it is one of the most common town names in the U.S. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_(toponym) :
And there are a huge number of English place names here in Ontario: London, Stratford (which is actually on the local Avon river as well), Cambridge, Waterloo…
Oh, heck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_locations_in_Canada_with_an_English_name#Ontario
@numerobis, we don’t use them much anymore, but in fire season they still staff the towers. At least, they did awhile ago, maybe they’ve stopped!
It makes me sad, though. It was a peaceful summer job that paid well and was a wonderful break between hectic university semesters. Being paid to be a forest wizard, sitting high up in your tower. Very nice.
It does sound kind of wonderful, though I don’t think I could do it for more than a couple of months at a time. Do you have to climb down ten floors to go to the loo? A waste disposal system in the sky would seem a little … unwieldy :-s
@Surplus to Requirements:
Your standard smoke detector doesn’t really smell smoke, though. What it detects is more along the lines of ‘there is particulate matter in the air higher than a certain percentage’. A smoke detector indoors is fine because the walls tend to concentrate the smoke; outdoors, the smoke detector will be a lot less reliable, because the smoke is more diffuse, and because other sources of particulate matter (such as pollen) can come up. It would be a lot harder to set up a smoke detector outdoors sensitive enough to give you advance warning without being so sensitive as to give you false alarms, too; indoor air is a lot more controlled.
(Of course, what your typical smoke detector really detects is ‘if I use a small radioactive source to ionize the air inside this chamber with a voltage differential between the two ends, how much current flows through it?’ Smoke will reduce the current flow because the large smoke particles move more slowly, and that’s what triggers the detector. However, this also means that the ionization of air caused by a lightning strike could overwhelm the smoke detector and blind it at exactly the point where you most would need it.)