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.)
I’m reminded of the Trumpists who’ve managed to convince themselves that Mueller and Trump are working together to take down The Black Man and The Woman and that all those warrants, indictments and plea deals are just part of the plan.
Hey, “libertarian” started out as a leftist term before it was stolen by the capitalist warlord crowd; it’s only natural they progress to stealing “anarchist” too.
I myself am a libertarian socialist. The first person to call himself a “libertarian” was French Anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque in 1857.
That’s a very good point, Lumipuna. Thank you.
Johnathan Swift: Damn it, ‘A Modest Proposal’ was supposed to be satire!
Regarding the buying and selling of ‘excess’ children, I wonder if there’s any connection between that attitude and the much earlier statement (like, at least a decade ago) from (I think) college ethics teacher Peter Singer that parents should be allowed to kill their newborns up to 27 days after birth, no questions asked. Because if that guy was serious about that idea (as opposed to doing a thought experiment), well, uhm…yeah. >.<
It’s weird because it’s not like people don’t already traffic children and they’re definitely not happy and healthy compared to the general child population. Even when child trafficking doesn’t have explicitly sinister motives, like the unofficial foreign adoptions that fundie Christians have become so proud of, those kids are very vulnerable to abuse in their adopted homes and can be rehomed all willy nilly. Remember that Arkansas state congressman who adopted a girl through the black market and rehomed her because he thought that girl, who was probably experiencing severe trauma symptoms was possessed by a demon and rehomed her with a friend who turned out to be a child rapist? I think it goes without saying he was a Republican. But I’ll say it. Of course he was a fucking Republican.
For fuck’s sake, we even recognize now that it’s best to adopt a dog from a rescue instead of buying one somewhere because puppy mills are just horrific. It boggles the mind that anyone could think child trafficking could ever be good for children.
And now I’m getting a bit worked up because my grandmother’s sweet, wonderful dog was puppy mill breeding stock before she was rescued in the wake of the big Joplin, MO tornado. She’s not fearful around humans, but she’s terrified of leaving the house. The longest walk she’s ever been on is around the block but she usually doesn’t make it to the end of the street before she drags you back home. Sometimes she won’t even go out to pee unless I bring Bailey over to accompany her out there. I don’t even let myself think about what her life used to be like before she was rescued. That anyone could advocate openly trading children just makes me want to hulk smash.
Where’s the popcorn?
Hmmm…
> Threatens violence on communists
> Openly fantasizes about violence on children who oppose ongoing gun violence
> Admires mass murderer currently sitting on death row
> Continues to insist they’re totally peaceful…???
I realize I’m wading into murky territory by trying to parse the neo-Nazi brain, but do they actually believe they’re peaceful or is this just a rhetorical trick they know that the media is dumb enough to regurgitate and play the “both sides” game with? It’s tough to tell which of this is legitimate cognitive dissonance and which is more of their bad faith sophistry.
In the previous thread I brought up William Lyon Mackenzie, who led the Upper Canada Rebellion, and while that kind of armed uprising is certainly an extreme action to take, Mackenzie wasn’t under any illusions about what he was about and what he was willing to do to achieve his ends. While Mackenzie successfully eluded the British colonial authorities, his supporters Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews were arrested and hanged for their role in it, and I doubt they were going to the gallows claiming “We’re totes peaceful, why you hangin’ us, bro?”
It’s like those self-styled “patriots” that defend the 2nd Amendment for the purposes of overthrowing the government:
“Blue Lives Matter, but if your fascist NWO government cops try to take my guns, then I’m going Richard Poplawski on your ass! Besides, Antifa are the real terrorists!”
@Redsilkphoenix
Rothbard got started with his shit ages ago, and was well dead a decade ago. He wrote the stuff about children in ’82, although that’s hardly the only awful position he takes. Singer is probably not much influenced by Rothbard, he’s a whole other kinda tire fire. And no, that wasn’t a thought experiment, nor is it his most reprehensible position.
I was thrown a little by the hashtag at the end of Danger’s (@Danger88) tweet defending Cantwell: #1433
I suspect that, similar to the original, it’s referring to the third letter of the alphabet: C. So it’s “Fourteen words, Christopher Cantwell”.
Anyone else have a better idea of what Danger is referring to?
Figured the same.
This headline made me so happy, you folks don’t even know. I love it when these people succumb to infighting.
If the white supremacists were educated, I might think that they meant 1433 as a reference to the year when China disbanded their fleet and forbade further exploration, thereby ceding control of the oceans to Europeans and ushering in the age of exploration and colonialism. This might be a good thing for a white supremacist to celebrate.
I doubt one white supremacist in a hundred knows about that, since the only history they know comes from Paradox grand strategy video games.
As such, I think you have the right of it, griffon8.
@EJ
That before-last paragraph cannot be stressed enough. Every white supremacist I know is an utter dunce when it comes to history and essentially repeats thought-terminating cliches.
This includes shamelessly lecturing me about African-American and Latin-American history by using only bigotry that looks like it came from the 17th century.
All this reminds me of the People’s Front of Judea.
Or was that the Judean People’s Front?
What ever happened to the Popular Front?
“Knows too much about Connecticut”?
How much does he know?
What does he know?
Dear Zeus, WHAT DOES HE KNOW????
More blatant lies from the fascists. They’ll claim that he didn’t actually hit anyone, but they sure do love sharing that picture showing all of those people being hit and flipped over the car. As with everything they do, expect self-serving lies at every turn.
Well, at least the name Cantwell suits him perfectly:
Definition of ‘cant’
1 hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature.
2.
language specific to a particular group or profession and regarded with disparagement.
Hummm … don’t snitches get stitches?
I foresee a long horrendous prison sentence in his near future.
One in which his bunk mate will call him Bubbalious because the Aryan Brotherhood, Nazis, white supremacist, etc will NOT protect him … but will want to introduce him the pointy end of their toothbrush!
I say to him … live long and suffer!
You know, one would think a valid response from Cantwell would be something along the lines of:
“Well, I wasn’t talking to them before, but now that you’ve accused me of it and guaranteed that I’m never going to be with the ‘in’ group again because of how we eat our own, I’ve got nothing left to lose if I talk to them now, do I?”
Alas, he doesn’t appear to have that much self-awareness. Or awareness of just how toxic the group is.
Is that meant to be glib or funny? Rape isn’t.
Though the guy does deserve to be treated like crap
Oh, I’m aware, it’s just hilarious to me how transparent their bullshit is, if they can’t keep up the pretense of being “for the white kids.”
He’s giving evidence against ANTIFA.
There’s literally nothing wrong with that.
Signed,
Alt right
The FBI doesn’t give out deals to people for informing on a group that they aren’t part of and have no insider knowledge of. That’s not how being an informant works.
Signed,
Person who doesn’t live in some weird cultish fantasy land