By David Futrelle
Oh dear. It seems the Alt-Right is in a bit of a tizzy again, and this time the culprit is Christopher Cantwell, the gun-loving Nazi and former A Voice for Men contributor who gained a certain pathetic notoriety for posting a tearful, fearful video after learning he was wanted by the police for tear-gassing antifascist counterprotesters at the Unite the Right rally last summer in Charlottesville.
Now Cantwell, awaiting his trial, has pissed off a major portion of his former allies on the Alt-Right by admitting that he’s been talking to the feds. The controversy erupted several days ago after the infamous Nazi hacker known as Weev — the guy with the giant swastika tattoo on his chest — publicly accused Cantwell of an assortment of crimes against the Alt-Right movement, the most serious being snitching on his fellow Nazis and Nazi enthusiasts.
“Cantwell … has been run out of other movements for being an embarrassment,” Weev apparently wrote in a forum post Cantwell has reposted on his site, and now Cantwell
has some mythos about how his endless discussions with law enforcement are for the greater good. He’s taking down antifa, he swears!
In fact, that’s a pretty good summary of what Cantwell says he’s doing. In a post on his blog Radical Agenda several days ago, he declared that, yes, he has become a federal informant, and yes, he swears he’s doing it not only for himself but for the greater good of the Alt-Right.
As he sees it, refusing to talk to the feds would mean that he was “acting like a criminal,” and he’s pissed that Weev and other Alt-Nazis don’t understand his allegedly principled stance.
“We are being instructed to behave like criminals by a Jew in a foreign country,” he says of Weev, a vicious anti-Semite who indeed, his mother says, has Jewish blood “on both sides of his family.”
“There is ample evidence that the reds started and perpetuated the violence of Charlottesville,” Cantwell insists,
lied in court to frame me, and had the cooperation of local authorities in this criminal behavior. The feds are our only hope for lawful remedy, and I intend to cooperate fully with any effort to bring these criminals to justice.
My attorney has already spoken with the FBI on my behalf, and we are soon to meet. … While the authorities in Charlottesville and Albemarle have given license to masked thugs and terrorists to wage war on the streets, the FBI seems more interested in stopping the violence, which necessarily means leftists going to prison.
In a followup post, Cantwell insists that he couldn’t really snitch on his Alt-Right colleagues, no matter how many details he gives the feds, because the Alt-Right hasn’t committed any crimes. No, really, that’s his argument.
We are not criminals. If the FBI searched every electronic device I have ever owned and pumped me full of top secret truth drugs and extracted every letter of knowledge I had about the Alt Right, I literally couldn’t give them a single fucking criminal. … We’re not working with foreign governments. We didn’t come to our permitted demonstration intent on violence. All of the information and evidence that I have favors us, and condemns our enemies, and there is a significant amount of it.
Never mind the chat logs showing that many of his fellow Nazis went to Charlottesville not only ready but eager for violence. Never mind all that footage of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville attacking counterprotesters with sticks and fists and pepper spray. Never mind the white supremacist who drove his car at high speed into a crowd of antifascist protesters, killing activist Heather Heyer. Never mind the more than 100 other killings perpetrated by Nazis and others influenced by the Alt-Right in recent years.
Cantwell insists that, despite all the obvious evidence to the contrary, AntiFa were “the primary instigators and perpetrators of most of the Charlottesville violence,” and all he wants to do is to help send them, not his fellow Nazis, to prison.
Seeing as to how there is absolutely no chance I could snitch on our guys EVEN IF I WANTED TO, on account of our guys not having committed a crime, I don’t see how [talking to the feds] could be a bad thing.
More than a few of Cantwell’s fellow Alt-Nazis aren’t exactly convinced by this improbable argument. He’s currently taking quite a virtual beating on Gab — the Twitteresque social media site that’s become a haven for Nazis and other terrible people. Naturally, most of Cantwell’s Alt-Right critics are just as bad as he is.
I have to admit. “Jews spill guns and ammo on their desks” is an anti-Semitic stereotype I had not been previously aware of.
Cantwell does has his defenders.
Some seemed more interested in trashing Weev and his longtime buddy Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer than they did in defending Cantwell. One commenter posted this anti-Weev cartoon, which presumably began its life as a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda.
But Christopher Cantwell’s most enthusiastic defender has been, well, Christopher Cantwell. In one of his many Gab posts arguing with his critics he suggested that the Alt-Right has only two alternatives right now:
Despite the swirling controversy, Cantwell has somehow managed to find time to post a number of nasty things about trans folks, including this lovely sentiment
He also posted this horrendous meme, which seems to maybe sort of imply that shooting children who support gun control might be a good thing?
It took me a little while to realize it, but the dude in the upper left-hand corner of that lovely meme is Cantwell himself, with Dylann Roof-style bowl-cut hair pasted over his bald head. (Roof, you may recall, was the young white supremacist who murdered nine black parishoners in a Charleston Church; his bowl-cut haircut has become a popular Alt-Right meme. Alt-rightists have also developed very public and only partially ironic crushes on the mass killer’s sister.)
In conclusion, all these people are horrible in pretty much every respect.
I can only hope that everyone involved in the Cantwell controversy goes down in flames.
H/T — @NYCAntifa, whose tweet alerted me to this controversy, and from whom I snatched that last screenshot. (Hey, making screenshots of Gab posts with images is a royal pain.)
If the drugs are so top secret, talking about them publicly would probably ruin whatever deal he’s trying to make with them.
Or you know, he’s just making that up.
“Nobody on our side has anything to hide!”
*takes a break to fantasize about murdering small child*
I hope the g men interviewing this specimen are more serious about the rule of law than those nazi cops in Charlottesville were…
The heck is an “ancap”?
Anachro-capitalist.
Anarcho-capitalists. Basically, libertarians who call themselves anarchists because it sounds cooler. They also seem to be even more pretentious and insufferably long winded than people using the libertarian label. I’m not sure what the Nazi’s beef with them is though. You’d think they’d get along.
@Tony – anticapitalist, I guess.
So, yeah, these guys are up to their same old evil crap. Some things never seem to change.
Oops! I guessed that one wrong.
There are parts of this that make me want to say “oh you sweet summer child”, but the whole contains nothing approaching naïveté.
On anarchists seeming cool:
When my dad was having a political exploration in the 80’s, he attended meetings of both the Ecology Party (now, the Greens) and the Anarchists. He found it amusing that the former was more like a pub chat, whereas the latter had an agenda, minutes, rules strictly adhered to.
Somehow I suspect they’d be horrified by the Black Bloc.
@Tony
An oxymoron. (Also, I don’t think I’ve seen you here before, welcome to the Mammoth. There’s a discord linked in my nym too)
@Weatherwax
Nah, they’re mostly in favour IME. The Blac Bloc was a thing already then, it’s not new.
“We do it for white kids!” They say as they post memes about hoping a white kid gets shot.
“It’s going to be a maze.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wwDGm6JO4Lw
“We do it for the (cishet, non-disabled, middle class) white kids who we can brainwash into our hateful agenda!” FTFY.
These people don’t give a shit about human lives unless they’re somehow useable to them. The only “good” white girl is a white girl who they can force-feed their agenda of bigotry to, and then force her to pump out more white kids.
White girls who are asking for gun control and who don’t give a flying flippity about “white genocide” aren’t the “good girls” who deserve their backhanded “help”.
Wow. I can’t remember ever seeing a conflict where I’d be happier to see both sides lose.
can we just
fucking address the fact that not just these guys, but other people are whining about minors protesting to champion the cause of their own fucking safety
why
Axe, that’s the new
There’s even a Donald involved in both!
Honestly I’m just agog at the fact that some of these people are claiming “There were no criminal alt-righters at the Charlottesville rally!” when one of their own number purposefully committed vehicular homicide at that exact rally.
What do they claim that guy was? No True Scotsman? False flag? Are they under the impression that since they do not want it to be considered illegal to kill counter-protesters, that it wasn’t a criminal act? Do I even want to know, or would I just be more disgusted at the state of the world than I already am?
It looks like Cantwell’s posting of that Dylann Roof meme might have resulted in his bail being revoked–he is complaining on Gab that his bond changed so that he’s suddenly forbidden to leave his apartment.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow.
…so, popcorn?
David, you accidentally some words in that paragraph.
It’s a pretty open secret that the Russians have been funnelling money to far right groups in Europe like the National Front, so it wouldn’t be surprising if some similar US group is also getting some.
Anarcho-capitalism is the branch of libertarianism that literally wants everything privatised, including law enforcement and defense. The term was apparently coined by Murray Rothbard, a libertarian with fringe ideas even for libertarians, such as that parents have no obligation to care for their children, but child neglect wouldn’t be a problem if people could buy and sell them.
As always when Nazi Infighting is on full display:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA… HAH!
Anarcho Capitalists are, as others have stated, firstly an oxymoron, secondly, some of the most insufferable proponents for the handing over of all executive power directly to the wealthy elites, basically this exchange from Futurama rendered in human form:
Their ideas are usually exceedingly authoritarian, but they are willfully oblivious to this aspect.
As for Anarchists and meetings, I’ll admit that it’s what we do for an outrageously large amount of our activistic time-expenditure, that and sitting in busses to far-off cities and endless discussions about which of our Communist Comrades are going to shot us in the back the last, and wether Emma Goldman actually advocated dancing, or merely the opportunity and space for dancing at the revolution…
Cantwell is maybe aware of a few alt-nazis who are already convicted or likely to be convicted of something (like the car attacker) with regards to Charlottesville, and thinks he likely won’t incriminate any others, at least not blatantly enough to get in trouble for it. In other words, he’s just dismissing the car attack as irrelevant to his case.
IIRC, 19 others were injured, and this seems to be often omitted in mentions of the one dead victim. Without knowing the scene in detail, it seems likely the attacker had realistic chances and intentions of killing more than a few people, and likely several of the injured could’ve died without urgent medical attention.
Some alt-nazis have clung to the report (true or not) that Heyer’s proximate cause of death was heart failure – like this proves she wasn’t actually run over. Like maybe the young man was just maneuvering his vehicle among pedestrians recklessly running around, and when one overweight young woman had a heart attack, (((they))) blamed it on him.
Or maybe he did attempt a mass murder with his car, but it’s no big deal because he failed to actually hit anyone. Obviously, the 19 injured are glossed over here.
Of course, others say he did hit a number of people (or at least Heyer), but it was an accident resulting from panic driving and reckless pedestrian behavior. I presume yet others call it a false flag, or crisis acting, or no true Klansman.