Free Republic

The alt-right started singing the pie chain’s praises after CEO John Schnatter made a controversial statement last week during a conference call with ESPN. In it, he blamed the NFL’s handling of players’ protests of police brutality and racism for the chain’s recent dip in pizza sales. Writers at neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer quickly sided with Papa John’s, declaring it the official pizza of the alt-right, reports Newsweek. Soon afterward, people on Twitter created memes about the pizza chain’s affiliation with Nazis.

t feels strange writing about this topic, some 25 years after I had it completely settled in my mind. But nothing is ever really settled, I suppose. The claim that I had long ago concluded was a basic historical and economic fallacy is back in a big way. The claim is that society needs homogeneity to be orderly and free. It is a core claim of the alt-right and its sympathizers (and, in a different way, of the alt-left). It is what leads them to reject freedom as a path forward and embrace state control of demographics. It’s completely wrong....

Swedish student Patrik Hermansson, 25, talks to The Local about what he learned when he went undercover for a year with the international alt-right movement. Hermansson spent a whole year with far-right extremist groups in the UK and US on behalf of anti-racism organization Hope Not Hate. Pretending to be a Swedish student writing about the suppression of right-wing speech in Sweden, he met and spoke with alt-right members, while wearing a hidden camera. He recorded one founding member claiming he had links all the way to the Donald Trump White House Administration. His work forms part of a new...

1. I've written about this before, but IT'S IMPORTANT & I want it to stick. MSM journos MUST follow AP standards. Here's the Altright one.pic.twitter.com/DFSWXUPDTr 1:37 PM - 1 Sep 2017

The illustrator behind Pepe the Frog, a cartoon frog initially created in the 2000s as a fun-loving post-college grad but eventually designated as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League, has forced the removal of a children’s book from distribution that featured the frog. snip As The Washington Post has noted, the villain in the book is an alligator named Alkah, which many took as a reference to Muslims, and the farm where the story takes place is Wishington, a play on Washington. In recent years, the protagonist, Pepe, became a symbol of the so-called alt-right and white supremacy.

There is no thread. It's a video.

They’ve represented gun owners in some of the highest-profile cases to hit the courts in recent years, but the Second Amendment Foundation won’t defend groups that hold public armed protests, saying that crosses a line. “We are not a fan of armed protests and highly discourage that,” said Alan Gottlieb, the founder and executive vice president of the SAF. “Firearms serve a purpose, and the purpose is not a mouthpiece. It’s to defend yourself. If you are carrying it to make a political point, we are not going to support that.” In the wake of recent public protests by neo-Nazis,...

The Nazi LARPers and Confederate cosplayers at Charlottesville, along with their alt-right supporters, frequently justify themselves by claiming to be defenders of white culture and heritage. However, it is unclear how a Nazi Tiki-torch parade accomplishes this. Nonetheless, let us consider the merits of the claim, which is, in part at least, a response to leftwing identity politics that relentlessly racialize everything. Unsurprisingly, endlessly essentializing and demonizing whiteness helped produce some whites who accept the premise of racial identity but ditch the conclusion of white guilt in favor of white supremacy. Are they correct that there is a distinct white...

The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, are an opportunity to take another look at our terminology around "alt-right" and the way that we describe the various racist, neo-Nazi, white nationalist, and white supremacist groups out there. At AP, we have taken the position that the term "alt-right" should be avoided because it is meant as a euphemism to disguise racist aims.

In followup to my piece from earlier this morning, I want to focus very specifically on the one question - which was really an accusation - that reporters kept shouting at President Trump during his presser yesterday. Whenever Trump pointed out that the alt-left bore some responsibility for what happened in Charlottesville, reporters demanded to know: “Are you putting the alt-left on the same moral plane as the alt-right?” The president replied that he wasn’t looking to put anyone on any moral plane. He was simply stating an obvious truth about what happened in Charlottesville.

NARAL Pro-Choice America launched a Twitter thread Wednesday equating white supremacy with the GOP and pro-life movement. NARAL’s thread initially criticized two attendees of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, James Allsup and Matthew Heimbach, but then depicted Heimbach as an organizer for the pro-life movement. NARAL claimed that Heimbach’s support of the pro-life movement was enough to prove that all members of the alt-right are anti-choice, and that pro-life supporters naturally support white supremacists.

Even the left-wing Mother Jones article in which Bannon was quoted explicitly noted that “exactly who and what defines the alt-right is hotly debated in conservative circles.” The piece also emphasized that Bannon “describes its ideology as ‘nationalist.'” In other words, Bannon’s “alt-right” comment indicates he apparently thought it consisted mainly of computer gamers and blue-collar voters who hated the GOP brand associated with George W. Bush’s brand of “conservatism” or “Bushism” that sought nation-building adventures abroad while allowing crony capitalism to fester in D.C. And as he explained to the Wall Street Journal in 2016, Bannon explicitly rejected and...

I hope the Washington Post will either confirm or debunk these statements by the Southern Poverty Law Center about Jason Kessler, the organizer of the alt-right rally in Charlottesville Jason Kessler is the organizer of the alt-right rally that recently took place in Charlottesville, Virginia.The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote of Kessler:Rumors abound on white nationalist forums that Kessler’s ideological pedigree before 2016 was less than pure and seem to point to involvement in the Occupy movement and past support for President Obama.At one recent speech in favor of Charlottesville’s status as a sanctuary city, Kessler live-streamed himself as an attendee...

It was inevitable that President Trump’s brief news conference on Tuesday concerning national infrastructure would, instead, be redirected to a discussion of the violent protest in Charlottesville this past weekend and his delayed criticism of the racist and pro-Nazi groups that were central to it. It did not seem inevitable, though, that Trump’s responses to questions about those protests would cement as correct the general interpretation of his first comments on the matter: He’s sympathetic to the goals of the men who marched Saturday night carrying Confederate and Nazi flags — and even to the “peaceful” torchlight protest on Friday...

The tragic events in Charlottesville, VA last week provided a flash point for the nation to have a discussion that we’ve been putting off for too long. The past few years of extremist politics have turned fringe ideas into mainstream ones, with Antifa communists and Alt Right Nazis getting plenty of the attention they crave, but don’t deserve. But why is this happening? Antifa activists have been gathering steam for some time now, with a major incident that brought them into the public eye being the riots at Berkeley over the appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos, himself a figure who was...

President Trump’s planned infrastructure announcement unraveled into chaos as he all but erased any credit he got on Monday for condemning white supremacists for the deadly confrontation in Charlottesville, Va. Trump said it was “a horrible day” but said several times that counter-protesters were not getting enough scrutiny for their role in the confrontation and emphasized his belief that many of the protesters who joined with white nationalists were innocent. “What about the 'alt-left' that came charging at, as you say, the 'alt-right'? Do they have any semblance of guilt?” Trump said. “They came charging with clubs in their hands,”...

For those who’ve forgotten one of the worst elements of the 2016 election, a short refresher is in order. Almost from the moment that Donald Trump descended on the lobby of Trump Tower to make his campaign announcement, an army of online trolls leapt to his defense. They cheered his denunciation of Mexicans as “rapists,” they relished his attacks on so-called globalism, and heaven help anyone who dared attack their populist hero. I’m speaking, of course, about the alt-right, that motley crew of white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and outright Nazis who share a common belief that culture is inseparable from ethnicity....

The left has figured out several methods that successfully work to divide the left and the right. One of their cleverest ways is stirring up race wars, because it has the extra benefit of making the right look bad. The playbook goes like this: Spread the word nonstop that Democrats help minorities and Republicans are racist (never mind that it was mostly Democrats in Congress who opposed ending segregation —  people don’t pay close attention to history). Once this false mantra has been established, label a broad range of normal behavior by conservatives as racist (it doesn’t matter if some...

Was “Unite the Right” a Soros-funded Psychological Operation? Was the goal to employ the “Pied Piper” strategy to damage the Republican brand by insinuating that Antifa goons disguised as Nazis represent the views of the entire Right Wing in America? (Is this what Creamer and Democracy Partners have been up to lately?) This whole event feels staged.Lets look at a few things: The protesters show up with all the same TIKI torches.All the same, brand new flags fresh out the wrapper. Still with the packaging folds.The Mainstream Media is there and many Antifa protesters are there yet Trump supporters haven’t...

Good morning people, A few of things to keep in mind about the violence yesterday: 1) The NAZI / KKK / Alt Right / White Supremacists / Trump Supporters (whatever you want to call them) had a legal permit to march in Charlottesville. 2) The march was peaceful until the 'counter protesters', the people without permits (the Bernie people), showed up. 3) The police were ordered to stand-down, by the government - hence the violence was intentional. One Leftist that I know says that the easy way to avoid the violence is to not permit the NAZIs (and similar groups)...