Propaganda watch

[Armonica_Templar]

Meanwhile, the trolls keep taking advantage of Twitter’s ineptitude or complicity. While I was writing this story, Cernovich used Twitter to accuse Vic Berger, a video producer and humorist who has taken to satirizing Cernovich after being harassed and slandered by the propagandist, of stalking children and trying to hurt Cernovich’s young daughter. He produced no evidence that this was true. But evidence doesn’t matter to Cernovich’s fans, some of whom responded to his Berger provocations with tweets about putting Berger in the hospital. After Berger reported Cernovich to Twitter, the company sent Berger an email about 16 hours later stating that Cernovich’s account had been suspended.


Vic Beger Twitter told video humorist Vic Berger it had suspended Cernovich for violating its rules.
But Cernovich was not suspended, and he continued to tweet about Berger stalking children. Three days later, Twitter sent Berger a second email, again saying Cernovich’s account had been suspended. Cernovich, though, was not suspended this time, either, and Twitter allowed him to keep accusing Berger of criminal behavior without any evidence.

Twitter has been far less permissive with journalists and researchers who cover extremism. Twitter recently suspended Elizabeth King, who covers white nationalists for various publications, after she called Eoin Lenihan, a far-right harasser who works with Spicci and is now trying to pass himself off as an extremism expert, a “cunt” for disseminating false information about journalists that increases the risk of extremist violence against them. (Twitter has suspended Lenihan three times since last year, but he remains on the platform.) In April, Twitter locked Michael Edison Hayden, a Southern Poverty Law Center investigator, out of his account after he accurately tweeted about a white power symbol found at the scene of an arson attack on a famous civil rights training center. Twitter locked me out last year for tweeting a pro wrestling joke at alt-lite propagandist Will Chamberlain amid a Twitter-enabled harassment campaign directed at me that Chamberlain amplified.

That Twitter facilitates vast amounts of libel, harassment and threats is no secret. If the company were treated as a news publisher ― and Dorsey certainly makes decisions like one when, for example, he cites “newsworthiness” to justify leaving up Trump’s abusive tweets ― it would have been sued out of existence long ago. But Twitter gets to hover above the harm it helps cause because, like Facebook and other social media companies, it is immune from liability under federal law. Which helps Twitter’s bottom line. The company just had an impressive first quarter of 2019, raking in more ad revenue and users than expected and inking premium content video deals. If banning white nationalists would outrage Trump supporters, it might also chip away at Twitter’s business metrics.

When contacted for comment, Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough refused to answer any of HuffPost’s specific questions about white nationalists and offered up only a boilerplate response.

“We are committed to combating abuse and improving the health of the public conversation,” Rosborough said. “As per our Hateful Conduct Policy, we prohibit behavior that targets individuals based on protected categories, including race, ethnicity, national origin or religious affiliation. We now take increasingly proactive action using our technology but always encourage account holders to report, block, and mute to protect their experience on the service.”

Almost two years after Twitter announced new rules to crack down on users associated with violent hate groups and abusive content, however, many prominent and known white nationalists and white nationalist groups operate openly on the platform. HuffPost identified more than 60 of them. We have listed them below. Many violate Twitter’s policies. Others have been banned but are still active. Some are violent. Others use Twitter to fuel stochastic terrorism by demonizing a group or a person who could then become a target for a fanatic. These are not anonymous Nazi trolls that a multibillion-dollar company can fool people into thinking it’s unable to catch. They are, by and large, some of the public leaders of an extremist movement predicated on violence.

Jack Dorsey gives them the run of the place.

WHITE NATIONALISTS ON TWITTER
Though these accounts are easily discoverable on Twitter, publishing their names could bring them more attention. For that reason, HuffPost is only publishing their user IDs, not the @ “handles” most commonly associated with Twitter accounts.

Since we began assembling this list last month, four of the 62 accounts have been suspended. Two were not suspended but appear to have self-deleted to evade oversight. We are leaving these accounts on the list because Twitter permitted the suspended users to repeatedly post extremist content before taking action and seemingly took no action against users that deactivated their accounts.

This list is far from comprehensive. We are excluding prominent anonymous white nationalists, who can have thousands of followers and go through dozens of accounts, and propagandists such as Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, who work with white nationalists. Nor are we including Islamophobes like Mekelburg and Pamela Geller, who do not identify as white nationalists but whose views often align with the ideology. The same holds for mainstream Republican pundits such as Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.

In the photos below, many white nationalists wear “Make America Great Again” caps or express support for Trump. During the 2016 election, white nationalists rallied around Trump en masse, accurately viewing the racist authoritarian as a means to seize a greater share of mainstream political power. Twitter was Trump’s medium of choice. So it was the medium of choice for far-right extremists. While their bigotry and propaganda is now echoed by much of the Republican base, several prominent white nationalists have since rejected Trump. He has done too much neoconservative saber-rattling for their taste or failed to deliver on issues like the border wall. Grotesquely, some now shun him for having too many close connections to Jews. But the damage these extremists ― and Twitter (and Trump) ― have done by spreading a message of hate and radicalization will linger for years.
 
Mike “Enoch” Peinovich => 985138702602133511

Facebook Mike Peinovich, aka Mike Enoch, is one of the most influential white nationalists in America.

The podcast panjandrum of the alt-right, Mike Peinovich, a former libertarian who now enjoys sieg heiling at book burnings, has been a central figure in radicalizing young men to white nationalism through his “The Right Stuff” platform. Peinovich participated in the deadly white supremacist riot in Charlottesville and has worked closely with many other leading far-right figures, such as Andrew Anglin and Richard Spencer.
 
Andrew Anglin => 1071550279529705472

Twitter Andrew Anglin was among the “Unite the Right” rally organizers in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Andrew Anglin runs The Daily Stormer, the world’s biggest neo-Nazi publication. A criminal, slanderer and serial harasser who was involved in organizing the Charlottesville riot, Anglin claims to be living abroad in a secret location out of fear for his safety. He has branded himself the “most censored person on the internet,” but he isn’t censored on Twitter, despite being banned from the platform in 2015 for spreading racist lies. Anglin is currently using an anonymous “sock” account to promote his neo-Nazi site and harass people. He told HuffPost that he operates several other sock accounts. ”What was the point of GAB in the first place?” he said. “Twitter is LIT.”

 
Richard Spencer => 402181258

Richard Spencer/Twitter An ardent supporter of Donald Trump during the 2016 election, Richard Spencer turned on the president over Trump’s foreign policy decisions and now regularly criticizes Trump on Twitter.

The closest thing to a figurehead in the alt-right movement, Richard Spencer has a more restrained presence on Twitter and knows how to tweet between the lines, sticking mainly to political commentary. For the past few years, however, Spencer has been in the middle of major white nationalist events that resulted in violence, including Charlottesville and a speech he gave in Gainesville, Florida, where one of his supporters tried to shoot a protester while two other Spencer fans urged on the shooter. One of the Spencer supporters, Colton Fears, who later pleaded guilty to the charge of accessory after the fact to attempted first-degree murder, spoke with HuffPost before the attempted murder. “Basically, I’m just fed up with the fact that I’m cis-gendered, I’m a white male, and I lean right, towards the Republican side,” Fears said, wearing a pin of the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf of the Waffen-SS. “And I get demonized if I don’t accept certain things.” 
 
Jason Kessler => 467620549

Jason Kessler Jason Kessler’s influence has waned since he organized the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

This violent white nationalist and onetime Daily Caller writer organized the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville during which hundreds of racists and fascists rioted in the streets and attacked counter-protesters, with one of them murdering Heather Heyer. “Heather Heyer was a fat disgusting Communist,” Kessler tweeted at the time. “Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time.” Twitter soon awarded Kessler a blue check mark to indicate his “verified” status on the platform. The designation, which most users understandably view as a status symbol, touched off a firestorm of criticism, after which Twitter announced it was suspending the verification program. But Twitter has secretly been verifying select users, including Dorsey’s parents (and, it would seem, this writer, who was given a blue check mark last summer after being threatened with violence on Twitter by Trump supporters). 
 
Nick Fuentes => 2442888666

Nick Fuentes/YouTube Nick Fuentes has called for the execution of CNN “globalists.”

Nick Fuentes is a popular coat-and-tie white nationalist and “Make America Great Again” propagandist with a big social media reach. He cut his teeth as a run-of-the-mill Trump cheerleader for Right Side Broadcasting Network, but made a splash when he called for the execution of CNN “globalists.” In 2017, clips of his racist rants behind the scenes were leaked on Twitter, and Fuentes split with RSBN after he attended the Unite the Right rally. He now makes a living demonizing immigrants, women and Jews on his YouTube show, ”America First,” and giving speeches at white nationalist gatherings. 
 

Matt Parrott => 21626308
A longtime white nationalist organizer and leader, Matt Parrott co-founded the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party, a major neo-Nazi organization involved in violence in Charlottesville and other rallies around the country. Like Spencer, Parrott strives to approach far-right extremism from an intellectual standpoint and keeps it mostly buttoned up on Twitter. “I’m really thankful that Jack [Dorsey] lets me on his website,” he recently tweeted.
 
David Duke => 72931184

Twitter

Although the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and convicted felon is approaching 70, Duke is still one of the most popular and influential figures in the modern white nationalist movement. While he has little to show for his years of anti-Semitic tirades, aside from a single term in the Louisiana House of Representatives and a daily radio program, he has successfully groomed a number of young people into a life of white supremacist activism. Duke was one of many well-known attendees at the Unite the Right rally in 2017.

 
Brad Griffin => 1061127626725736448
A member of the League of the South, Griffin literally married into the movement in 2014 when he wed Renee Baum, daughter of the late Council of Conservative Citizens founder Gordon Baum. His white supremacist worldview stretches back even further to when he founded the hate site Occidental Dissent, where he decries “black-run Amerika” and praises the likes of Anders Breivik. Since then, Griffin has made a name for himself as one of the alt-right’s most-skilled doxers. He also organized the white supremacist rally in Shelbyville, Tennessee, in 2017, which attracted several hundred racists and fascists.
 
Patrick Casey => 854868563311636480

Twitter Patrick Casey, the head of white nationalist organization Identity Evropa, worked the crowd at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference.

Casey got his start in the white power scene working for white nationalist media shop Red Ice under the pseudonym “Reinhard Wolff.” When Eli Mosley stepped down as the leader of the hate group Identity Evropa in late 2017, Casey shed his anonymity before taking the reins and attempting to steer the group away from its toxic “alt-right” label. It didn’t work. When IE’s Discord chats were leaked to the public early this year, revealing the type of racism and anti-Semitism Casey hoped to keep private, he once again did damage control by giving IE an even more banal name: the “American Identity Movement.”
 
Stefan Molyneux => 313038011
A popular YouTube crank and alleged cult leader, Molyneux has made a career out of howling about the injustices of feminism and government handouts before his hundreds of thousands of followers. His favorite pastime by far, however, is dusting off discredited race science and insisting to listeners that black and Hispanic people have lower average IQs than whites. Molyneux has been openly extolling the virtues of white nationalism since he visited Poland to make a documentary last year. In February, Molyneux tweeted, “When it came to slavery, blacks were the [drug] dealers. Whites were the users.” Donald Trump Jr. is a Molyneux fan and retweeted a video the white nationalist made with Mike Cernovich to spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. This month, Trump Jr. promoted Molyneux again on Twitter.
 
Kevin MacDonald => 87229781
The alt-right’s favorite academic, this retired California State University, Long Beach, professor authored an infamous book that posits that Jews undermine white societies as part of a group evolutionary strategy. MacDonald’s writing has brought untold numbers of people to the white nationalist cause. He currently edits The Occidental Quarterly, a publication of the Charles Martel Society, and rants about “white genocide” on popular white nationalist podcasts.

Just the fact that Trump Jr. retweeted him should bring a lot of attention to Kevin MacDonald’s work. Gabriel Sohier Chaput, a Canadian neo-Nazi contributor to The Daily Stormer

MacDonald is all but unknown outside far-right extremist circles, which is why it was shocking to see Trump Jr. promote the anti-Semite on Twitter in August 2016, a decision that delighted people like Gabriel Sohier Chaput, a Canadian neo-Nazi contributor to The Daily Stormer. “Just the fact that Trump Jr. retweeted him should bring a lot of attention to Kevin MacDonald’s work,” wrote Chaput, who supports the ultra-violent neo-Nazi terrorist organization Atomwaffen.
 

James Edwards => 763938568502775808
A neo-Confederate white nationalist radio host, James Edwards has written that for African Americans, “slavery is the greatest thing that ever happened to them.” In 2016, Edwards, who has given speeches at white nationalist conferences, sued The Detroit News over a column labeling him a Klan “leader.” A Republican-appointed judge rejected Edwards’ defamation claim, writing that Edwards “espoused views consistent with those associated with the Klan and... repeatedly and publicly embraced several individuals who are strongly associated with the Klan.” That same year, Trump Jr. appeared on Edwards’ radio show to discuss how the Trump campaign was changing the Republican Party. “It’s not a campaign anymore, it’s a movement,” Trump Jr. said. A few months later, Eric Trump went on Edwards’ show.
 
Steve King => 48117116

STEPHEN MATUREN VIA GETTY IMAGES
Possibly America’s most racist sitting congressman, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has spent years demeaning immigrants and people of color. Some of the lowlights that will eventually grace his obituary include claiming that some immigrant Dreamers developed ”calves the size of cantaloupes” from hauling drugs across the border, keeping a miniature Confederate flag at his desk (Iowa fought for the Union), questioning if any racial “subgroup” besides white people contributed to civilization, and wondering aloud why terms like “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” are so offensive.

King has retweeted prominent neo-Nazis and white nationalists on several occasions. In October 2017, Trump Jr. went pheasant hunting with King and killed several birds, which pleased King. “[T]he sky was so full of feathers that one could be convinced that the angels were having pillow fights,” the Republican congressman said.

TBC