American white nationalist Richard Spencer (SPLC profile) gave an address (YouTube) at the white-nationalist conference put on by his own white-nationalist organization. And he did so on Hallowe’en.
There Spencer gave us the most white supremacist sentence of the 21st century: “We’ve swallowed the red pill whole. We abandoned our illusions of democracy, race, class, Jews, religion, America, und so weiter.” Gratuitously deploying the German for “and so on” was the vanilla icing on the angel-food cake.
(Previously, Spencer made a half-assed linguistics joke in suggesting white nationalists audibly differentiate “white” and “White.” They could pronounce the latter with the old-timey initial phoneme that sounds like hw and is written [ʍ] in IPA. Then maybe they could also say “hwJews” and “hwBlacks,” Spencer proposed, which made as much sense in speech as it does here. In any event, capitalizing racial or ethnic group names does not automatically connote fascism; Ebony, for example, has written “White” and “Black” that way for decades.)
Keeping track of those pesky white supremacists
I had previously decried young downtown-progressive hacks too lazy to investigate hate groups, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists, accusing them of being unable even to read those groups’ blogs without becoming so politically nauseated and triggered they had to find a campus safe space to hyperventilate in. No Stieg Larssons they, these young kids will get up your nose the minute you misgender a tranny on Twitter, or write the preceding clause, but can’t be bothered keeping tabs on actual racists.
I tried asking an academic for some help on which hacks really are doing that legwork and writing that coverage, but that didn’t work. This is not necessarily the sort of thing one can Google, which in itself is the too-often-used “research” method preferred by downtown progressives, who think journalism is Gmail and Twitter. As with Larsson, who knew Swedish racists personally, this is the sort of thing that requires personal connections.
Still, Anti-Racist Canada is a punchy and enjoyable blog, if badly-copy-edited and literally unreadable, that really does cover racists and anti-Semites. They could spend less time posting screenshots of Facebook (the wrong archival method, among other things) and more time actually talking to these people, but it’s something. (Again, I doubt they’d have the stomach to even talk to them on the phone.) And there are countless Blogger templates one can actually read.
Meanwhile, the Wolves of Vinland, previously mentioned here, if in a largely unrelated context, is amusingly parodied by Fools of Vinland, which models the Wolves as furries with cutoff sleeves and runic tattoos.
I do think this would be a rich vein of ongoing investigative journalism, again with a tone of half-bemused mockery, for the content farm a highly credible Jew from Halifax runs, namely BuzzFeed Canada and Craig Silverman. But he doesn’t answer my mail.
Bonus question: Is it a contradiction to oppose white nationalists and anti-Semites but also oppose militant Islam and defend the legitimately constituted gay and lesbian community? Let’s crowdsource the answer – surely Twitter can decide that for us forever.