By David Futrelle
Lefty media site Unicorn Riot, which is doing a bang-up job exposing the so-called alt-right — recently obtained a virtual treasure trove of chat logs and audio files in which members of Patriot Front, a self-described “American fascist” group that split off from Vanguard America last year, talk about how much they hate Jews and love guns and all the assorted other things that the shithead Nazis of today like to talk about.
Some of the most hair-raising discussions in this vast pile of terrible concern one group of human beings that the current generation of Nazis especially hate: women. Nazis and white supremacists have always been sexist, but in the past their sexism always had a paternalistic side to it. Nazis and Klansmen claimed to want to protect and even celebrate white women, and many women found this appealing. In the 1920s, the women’s auxilliary of the KKK had a half million members.
The alt-right of today, by contrast, is overwhelmingly male — and overwhelmingly misogynistic, with an anti-woman ideology not that far removed from your average incel.
Take a listen to how these guys talk about women when they think no one is paying attention. If anything, their comments are even worse than the descriptions below suggest.
(Content advisory: sexual assault)
Patriot Front members are told that in an American ethnostate, rape is OK "as long as you're raping.. your own race." "Ethnostate rape gangs" would target unmarried white women who didn't adhere to "traditional values" https://t.co/lEVX6Izuzn pic.twitter.com/nIoL9skbNn— UNICORN RIOT (@UR_Ninja) March 5, 2018
In the recorded Discord voice meeting, Patriot Front members expand on their vision of 'White Sharia' in America. They discuss a desire to return to gender roles from the 1890s & share their admiration for Hitler's family planning policies in Nazi Germany https://t.co/lEVX6Izuzn pic.twitter.com/f5dqQCFCyB
— UNICORN RIOT (@UR_Ninja) March 5, 2018
It’s probably not much of a surprise that these guys are also violently homophobic.
Patriot Front's vision of 'White Sharia' also involves an extremely homophobic component. The only gay people that would be allowed to live in their American ethnostate would be those who "don't ever speak about it" https://t.co/lEVX6Izuzn pic.twitter.com/VqsB3RSOSp
— UNICORN RIOT (@UR_Ninja) March 5, 2018
Check out the rest of this twitter thread to hear the Patriot Front boys’ thoughts on the relative merits of different guns, the alleged racist evil of Black Lives Matter, and their alt-right rivals The Traditionalist Workers Party.
For more on the brief but still pretty awful history of Patriot Front, check out Unicorn Riot’s feature on the group, which also contains links to UR’s archives of the 26,0000 Discord messages they, er, obtained from these lovely lady hating fascists.
As a Swede, I always point out that the Nordic countries have drifted pretty far to the right if you compare the situation now with the situation in, say, the 1980:s. Way more stuff is private owned nowadays, taxes are lower, welfare less extensive and so on. Unfortunately, I think extensive welfare states and high taxes are unstable as well. Not because they inhibit growth, because we’ve seen that economic growth do just fine under these circumstances. But since the capitalists get a smaller share of the cake than under more rightwing rule, and since the capitalist class is still really powerful under these conditions, they’re gonna keep pushing for lower taxes, less welfare and for more private ownership. And still, I don’t think there’s any better system that has actually been tried and shown to work.
You can imagine a system in which there are no capitalists because all businesses are owned by the workers, but there’s still a lot of areas in which the free market rules and in which the state doesn’t own businesses, and you still vote for a representative government. IDK if that might be pretty stable IF you could implement it? The tricky part would be how to get there I guess. AFAIK it’s never really been tried.
So, on topic. Anyone who saw my previous posts knows I’m naive in a lot of ways. I was raised upper middle class in The Village in NYC by my white mother and black father so until I got out of college I was sheltered in a lot of ways. The only thing I want to ask no one else has touched on is, is this surreal to anyone else?
In my teens in the late 90s and very early 00s, I really felt like things were moving forward, and we were making progress. I went to Stuyvesant high school in Tribeca, and it was common to see same sex couples holding hands, or kissing in the halls. LGBTQ students were treated like everybody else. Same for race. To be honest, I didn’t notice it at the time, but the most pervasive thing in that that way at Stuy was definitely toxic masculinity(the nerdy version)and male chauvinism.
How did we get here from there in such a short time? I’ve never spent over a month anywhere but NYC so it’s the only place I can speak on, but was I just blind? Things couldn’t have been this bad underneath all along, could they?
I just don’t understand what happened in a single decade to bring our society to this. This is what my breakdown was about in a way. Ok, I’m going to get some sleep. Hi again everybody, especially WWTH,(your name was too long for me to remember with my weed-addled memory, or I would have listed you)Goodnight?
Hi Katie – welcome back. We haven’t talked but I’ve read your posts 🙂
To be blunt, what happened was – You’re winning. Acceptance is up – to the stage now where many people are greeting the news that someone is gay, or trans, or sciencing while female with a smile and a “Good on you. Who’s round is it?” Accepting people as they are is so normal that a fuss isn’t made. It’s not needed (as much, OK, I’m generalising).
The ones David tracks though?
As anyone who’s worked in stables knows, if you corner a rat it will go for your face. They’re smart enough to know the only way to escape is attack your most sensitve organs, the ones you will protect automatically.
Nazis and assorted misogynists/ X-phobes also know this and they’d rather like to survive too. So they’re losing, they attack harder.
There’s not more of them. There’s less. They’re just louder and more dangerous precisely because there’s less of them.
I take it as a hopeful sign.
Sleep well.
(and that has burned out lightside me for several hours. 😛 )
Hey Katiekitten, it’s so nice to see you back. I’m so glad things seem to be picking up for you.
As to your query about what’s going on in the world, phew, wish I knew. There’s that obvious rise of populism. Many words have been written on what’s causing that. I think there’s some truth in what shadowplay says, it’s the pushback of a cornered animal. Things started to improve for formally oppressed people, and not everyone is happy with that. To use the language, they fear the loss of privilege, and they’re frightened. It’s definitely a more polarised and fractious public sphere across the west. I suppose the good thing about that is that battle lines have been drawn and people are fighting their corner. It won’t be an easy struggle. But there’s good grounds for hope. You make the very valid point that the shift to right wing populism seemed to occur quite quickly. But that could go the other way just as easily. I take heart from things like the Parkland kids. They represent a mobilisation of the people who will make a difference. They’re forcing a public discourse, and the fact they’re getting so much abuse seems to suggest they’re seen as a real threat; I hope so.
So there’s a long way to go, but it seems we’ve reached a crucial turning point in the struggle. To plagiarise Churchill: “This isn’t the end. It isn’t even the beginning of the end; but it may be the end of the beginning”
I’ll just have to echo my comrade from Sweden up there, the Nordic Model is currently being buried alive by the governments in power, and this has been going on for nearly two decades, with deregulation, privatization and the scourge of New Public Management seeping into every nook and cranny. Couple that with the Danish Social Democrats and Peoples’ Socialist Party joining the band-wagon of pushing racist, segregationist and impoverishing policies at every turn, and it’s looking particularly bleak here, as there seems to be no end to the scapegoating of (muslim) immigrants and refugees, in spite of all scientific evidence and human fucking decency. Sweden and Norway might be slightly less bad at the moment, though I must admit that I only really follow Swedish develpoments of the two.
On the topic, the same tendencies are becoming evident amongst nordic Nazis, the overlap with virulent misogynists is more pronounced than it used to be, and they are increasingly targeting women and LGBTQ+ people that speak up in public than they used to.
Some points. (I will go with the more harmless ones, because talking about monsters is not that great)
1. Christians: Here is one point were I have to point out a difference between the US and Germany. If someone says Christians I think of mainline Protestants or Catholics. (a little bit more the later, because I was raised Catholic and live in a mostly catholic area) So my opinion is not so negative than some others. They have their problems but a lot of Catholics are basicly decent people and there are only a few black sheep.
And the Protestants are more to the left normally.
We have some ultraconservative hardliners of course but christian theorists are rare.
Interesting there was one party that was anti-christian in the last election, it was the far-right AFD. So the enemy of my enemy…
(Okay the major parties, we have a lot of small parties that I don’t remember what the did, sorry in many cases I don’t remember that they exist)
2. Countrys between complete Capitalism and Communism: You can add Germany to the list. Here the ofical terme is “soziale Marktwirtschaft”. It is still mostly Capitalism. Not that like most european countrys we have a socialist partys who are pro-democracy: The SPD which is the oldest party in Germany. (Survived a certain time as forbidden underground party)
Our left party is former communist. (There is still a debate if they are completly democratic)
@Moggie,
Today’s Google has a lovely IWD home page. It was entertaining thinking of the “what about the menz?” crowd:
*need to Google something; avert eyes, don’t look at the abomination, ah god I saw a woman getting attention, it burns…*
@Katie,
I imagine you’re asleep by now (still a night owl?), but it’s great to see you, and I’m so glad you’re ok! For the record, I never tried to educate you – in fact, I agreed with you on a lot of stuff; plus, you’re far from having an “ignorant ass”. Hope to see you back soon ?
(sorry for rapid double post)
@Fluffy Spider
I can’t do anything to alleviate your fear, unfortunately, except to say that you’re welcome to vent here if you need to. Also, your cat avatar is gorgeous – one of your kittehs?
Hi, slightly OT but there was something in the comments that made me want to ask you folks about this
Someone has said to me that in the ‘more equal’ countries (specifically the different Scandinavian models) women gravitate towards more traditional female roles in the workplace, as opposed to countries with greater oppression of women where they go into STEM professions more. The point being made was that where women have greater independence and freedom of choice they ‘naturally’ gravitate towards ‘lady-jobs’. I pointed out legislative equality does not result in social equality (and this point comes up a lot because it seems people think ‘well that’s illegal’ somehow means we’ve done all we can to fix the problem and should not discuss the issue further because, apparently, all the people who are socially oppressed should just ‘stand up for themselves’ – it riles me so much, sorry, didn’t mean to digress)
It seems obvious to me from the world, and what I read, that social pressure would be the cause of those statistics that they cite but does anyone have any specific explanations that would help me understand better?
Starfury:
Perhaps it is more easy than that.
Society gives us a picture of what is “normal” for a woman or a man for the matter, when we grow up.
When their is less oppression the rebelion against society is perhaps less also.
So perhaps it is more subtil
And their are surly some women (and probably some men, too) that like those “lady-jobs”.
Nice observation. It should be noted that Sweden does have one of the highest rates of sexual assault in Europe. And, despite the fact that they have a broad and comprehensive definition of what constitutes sexual assault and/or rape, it’s still proof that Sweden has a lot of toxic masculinity.
Let us also remember that in 2011, the neonazi Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Norway. So, it’s not just Sweden, there seems to be a surge of far right extremism in Scandinavian countries and it would be disingenuous to say it just came straight out of the blue.
So, even though they may have a lot of pro-women legislation, that does not necessarily mitigate the impact of society’s expectations towards women, nor the way men view and/or treat women on a daily basis.
@Starfury: I’d really like to see credible statistics before I began theorizing. In Sweden, at least, women are under-represented in the STEM fields, but they’re not super rare or anything. If there are way more women in STEM in more conservative countries, bring on the numbers, THEN we can theorize.
Somewhat related I’m a philosopher, which is also a pretty male-dominated field. 🙂 (It’s pretty unique among the humanities in being heavily male-dominated.)
Agreed that I’d like to see the statistics first – that said, one possible thought is that countries in which women and men are socially segregated tend to require an equal number of male and female doctors as a result, because patients can only be treated by a doctor of their own gender – so that might boost the numbers of women in STEM jobs. Similarly, separate male and female classrooms require more teachers, etc.
@KatieKitten420
Regarding the rapid rise of regressive Rethuglican revanchism (yes, I do enjoy some good alliteration; why do you ask?), it’s actually been there all along. The Rethugs have spent literally decades undermining the concepts of expertise and truth, and many of their voters have been steeping in toxic racism, anti-intellectualism, and xenophobia their entire lives.
What’s different this time is that unlike for the last 40 years or so, they’ve completely chucked Lee Atwater’s advice about disguising their racism and hatred.
It sounds like you grew up in a wonderfully inclusive and liberal environment – I did too, being a native San Franciscan born in the 60s – but that’s an outlier on the American political spectrum. Fortunately, the deeply racist areas of the country (like the Idaho panhandle) are also outliers. Unfortunately, that means that there’s waaaaaay more stupid bullshit running through “normal” America that either one of us likes.
One final point: hatred is a great motivator, and motivated people are more likely to vote, which is one of the (many) reasons that Rethugs do better in elections than demographics indicate they should. The Boomers are dying off, though, and Millennials are the next largest cohort in American society and will soon be the largest…and Trump and the neo-Nazi crap really seems to be pissing most of them off. So there’s some hope on the horizon.
Personally, I take comfort in the knowledge that our species has been generally trending towards more inclusivity and acceptance when viewed over the course of millennia. That and the fact that only historians are likely to remember or care about any of this shit in a thousand years.
Personalpest and Scildfreja hit it on the head re: the white supremacist extremists sharing a lot of the same goals as Daesh and other Wahabists. At the same time, I think it’s also critical that the ones not this overt not use guys like this for cover.
I was on the Twitter machine yesterday and there was a thread about bearded git Carlgon of Benjamin being shoved a couple of times by some masked Antifa people where trans YouTuber Gwen_No_Fear pointed out that this is part of the alt-right victim narrative. My response was simple: Being /pol/ denizens, Carl and his ilk are the same people that celebrated violent convict Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman bashing unarmed protesters over the head, so clearly they have no qualms about engaging in violence with their political opponents.
Now, these people are immune to hypocrisy, so I don’t bring this up to think they can be shamed, but it’s important to draw a clear line on values. Carl is very careful not to put his arm around the Richard Spencer types in public, yet one cannot escape the fact that both Spencer and Benjamin hate the same people. Feminists, Muslims, the LGBT community, BLM, Antifa, opposition to all of these groups of people underpins their actions and ideology, being the pure reactionaries they all are. But the Spencer crew and these Patriot Front people are taking that opposition to its inevitable conclusion given the “threat” they’ve perceived exists to white people: violent extermination.
There’s a reason Spencer called Carl a gateway to the alt-right. And that gateway only opens up to reveal these “Patriotic Front” jokers.
@Starfury
Came across this article from Wired that offers a good example of these cultural factors that impact women going into STEM fields: recruiting sessions. Not exactly configured for gender balance, and this is first impression stuff.
I’ve been on a school trip to Prague this past week and today we visited the old Jewish Quarter and saw several Holocaust memorials. I just can’t deal with the fucking Nazi shit today.
@Shadowplay
NOT. REAL. COMMUNISM.
@EJ
They’d view me as a threat, though less of a threat than a Palestinian man. I’d still be disgusting and worthy of ethnic cleansing, but they wouldn’t hate me as a woman.
Sexism is designed in such a way in which women are viewed as having less agency than men. They need to be protected and cherished because they’re weak but they’re less dangerous because they’re weak.
Most Zionist propaganda features pictures of male Palesitnians are terrorists. Never women. Why? Because they think women are weaker. Not deserving of hatred, but weaker.
(It is worth noting that due to the fact women serve with distinction in the IDF and have a strong history in the Zionist project, most far-right Zionists are significantly less sexist than most American men. They still wage a religious war on women’s reproductive rights and think we should submit to them, but they don’t think women are intellectually inferior.)
Old nationalism is racism with a side of paternalistic sexism (not misogyny; they don’t hate women per se). Alt-rightism is burning misogyny amplified by racism and vice versa.
Old nationalism is traditional conservatism amplified by national mythos. Alt-rightism is just pure, unashamed hatred of anything that isn’t white, gentile and male for its own sake.
@everyone-defending-communism
Communism is an unsustainable ideology as it replicates the structures of the capitalist system except with shareholders being replaced with state planners and all the good aspects of competition removed.
It also has a history of being colossally racist and anti-semitic. Stalin purged Jews in the 50’s
Socialist anarchism and worker’s control might be the answer, but they have a strong history of failing miserably and careening out of control pretty quickly as the stupidest prole is viewed as equal to the smartest economist.
Let’s hope automation might create a different society.
Paternalistic sexism is just misogyny with a more civil tone. Underneath the whole “women are fragile and need to be oppressed for their own good” thing is a loathing of any woman who is noncompliant. Benevolent sexists are just virulently misogynistic. That comes out whenever a woman puts a toe out of line.
@chief manatee
It isn’t as much hatred as a sense of duty to enforce whatever sexist structure is being challenged. I’ve met some of the most far-right West Bank settlers. None of them seem to hate women.
Anyone who thinks women aren’t full citizens who deserve rights hates women. Anyone who uses violence to enforce the patriarchy hates women. They may deny it to themselves and others but you can be a misogynist without saying “I hate women.”
For fuck’s sake.
And my name isn’t chief manatee. That’s my title.
@WEIRWOODTREEHUGGER (emphasized because of the last sentence)
Believing women are inferior and hating them are two different things. The latter always implies the former, but not the other way around.
Many Ultra-Orthodox Jews love their wives and daughters and treat them superbly yet view them as ideally subordinate. They in fact have a lesser rate of domestic violence than all other groups.
Just because some patriarchal men treat their property (which is how they view us) well, doesn’t mean that the system isn’t misogynistic and doesn’t mean they aren’t. Bigots are often nice to the good ones. Women all around the world are beaten, raped, enslaved, denied access to education and healthcare everyday. All in the name of tradition. The fuck if that isn’t misogyny.
I’m very much side eyeing you for not labeling it as such. This is feminism 101 here.
Between this and Hexum’s pro suicide shit in the other thread I’m getting pissy.