Boston man with anti-government ‘sovereign citizen’ ideology had chemicals to make explosives, feds say

Steph Solis

Mass Live

November 27, 2020

Federal authorities say they arrested a Boston man with extremist views who they say bought a gun, body armor and chemicals to make a bomb.

Pepo Herd El, 47, of Dorchester, was arrested Thursday night at the Ruggles Station after he got off an MBTA bus. Police found a loaded pistol, three spare magazines that were loaded, a knife and a bullet-proof vest.

El is is barred from carrying guns and ammunition because of a 2004 state conviction for possessing firearms without permits.

When he was detained, El had on a security jacket even though he’s not a security guard, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

El was charged by criminal complaint by one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition. He was detained after an initial appearance until his next hearing, which is set for Dec. 2.

Authorities also linked El, who has been under police surveillance, to purchases of chemicals and four rifle-rated hard body armor plates, according to court records.

El was tied to a series of other Amazon purchases made between Jan. 5, 2019 and Oct. 20, just over a month ago. They include a pinhole security camera, spy cameras, a velcro police patch and beanies with logos from Home Depot, Amtrak and AT&T, court records say.

Authorities said he adheres to a “sovereign citizen extremist ideology.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, the “sovereign citizen” movement refers to a loosely organized collection of groups with a right-wing anarchist ideology that seeks to implement a minimalist government. The movement dates back to the 1970s.

The FBI defines “sovereign citizens” as those who “claim to have special knowledge or heritage rendering them immune from government authority and laws,” according to court documents. While authorities not the ideology isn’t illegal, they say sovereign citizens have sometimes expressed their views through physical force or used their belief to justify fraud or theft.

Federal agents who searched El’s homes also found chemicals that were bought from Amazon or eBay, according to in court documents. On their own, the chemicals can be used for cleaning, but they could also be combined together to make a bomb.

Special agent bomb technicians who identified several chemicals didn’t immediately see any explosives or black powder. Authorities said it was difficult to immediately determine whether there was any contraband in the home, blaming El’s clutter.

“The residence is also disorganized and cluttered, making the search difficult and time-consuming, especially considering the added safety precautions that have to be taken where agents are concerned about the possibility of explosives,” the affidavit states.

https://www.masslive.com/police-fire/2020/11/boston-man-with-anti-government-sovereign-citizen-ideology-had-chemicals-to-make-explosives-feds-say.html

Exclusive: Major neo-Nazi figure recruiting in Montreal

One of the most influential white supremacists in North America is organizing small meetings in city bars and apartments.

JON MILTON
SHANNON CARRANCO
CHRISTOPHER CURTIS

MONTREAL GAZETTE
May 4, 2018

One of North America’s most influential neo-Nazis lives in Montreal and is organizing a white supremacist network on the island.

“Zeiger” is the pseudonym for the second-most prolific writer on the Daily Stormer, an extreme right-wing news website that attracts upwards of 80,000 unique visitors a month.

The site traffics in conspiracy theories, refers to African-Americans as “nogs,” to gay men as “f***ots” and devotes coverage to what it calls the “Race War” and the “Jewish Problem.” Along with the Daily Stormer’s other authors, Zeiger has helped spread this ideology to a new generation of young white men across North America.

Since emerging as a key figure in the movement four years ago, Zeiger’s identity has been a closely guarded secret. But an investigation by the Montreal Gazette has linked Zeiger to a local IT consultant in his early 30s.

Gabriel Sohier Chaput lives in an apartment in Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie. That same apartment was listed by Zeiger as his home and as a rendezvous point for a local neo-Nazi group, according to documents obtained by the Montreal Gazette.

The group also met at downtown bars, apartments and a hotel between August 2016 and January 2018. At various points, members self-identified as alt-right, alt-reich, Nazis, fascists and white supremacists.

They acted on the instructions of a man referring to himself as Zeiger from the Daily Stormer. Zeiger co-ordinated the time and place of most meetings.

“Zeiger is probably second to only Andrew Anglin, the Daily Stormer’s founder and chief propagandist,” said Keegan Hankis, the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s senior analyst. “[Zeiger] has been very influential in the strategies behind it.”

The SPLC monitors the online presence of hate groups throughout North America.

Zeiger used his infamy as a recruiting tool, sharing a manifesto he authored as well as hyperlinks to his Daily Stormer articles and podcast appearances with the local group.

They first met at an Irish pub on Prince Arthur St. in August 2016. Shortly afterward, he introduced them to another Montreal-based fascist group.

Over a one-and-a-half-year period, a core of between 10 and 15 members gathered in bars and apartments around the city. Only men were allowed to attend their official meetings, but they opened up some events to women and “normies” — a term they use to describe people outside the movement.

The information that links Zeiger to Sohier Chaput comes from anti-fascist activists who monitor neo-Nazi and other far-right groups online.

The anti-fascists cross-referenced Zeiger’s profiles on white supremacist websites like Iron March, the Right Stuff and the Daily Stormer with information Zeiger provided to a closed Montreal-based chat room.

A home address Zeiger shared with the chat group matches the corporate listing for GSC Gestion, a consulting firm whose owner and sole employee is Sohier Chaput.

Ironically, two key pieces of information linking both men came from Zeiger himself, who, during a March 11 appearance on a white supremacist podcast, revealed that he attended high school in Outremont. Although Zeiger did not name the school, it narrowed the activists’ search down.

They also believed his real first name was Gabriel after digging into Zeiger’s profile on the neo-Nazi website Iron March. The profile was connected to a Skype account registered under the name “gabriel_zeiger.”

The anti-fascists then found and combed through a small library of yearbooks from Outremont high schools. They were searching for someone whose first name, age and appearance matched Zeiger’s.

They found a 2002 yearbook from Paul-Gérin-Lajoie-d’Outremont, which Sohier Chaput attended in Grade 10. They saw a resemblance between the 2002 photo of Sohier Chaput and Zeiger’s online profiles.

Compared to Zeiger’s enormous digital footprint, there are only traces of Sohier Chaput online.

He was an IT manager at a UPS store before branching out as an independent contractor in 2016, according to his profile on a job networking site.

A Google search for his name yields a Soundcloud account and an entry noting his second-place finish in the 2012 St. Lawrence Toastmasters public-speaking competition.

He does not appear to have public profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media.

Instead, the anti-fascists claim, he exists under a Nazi alter ego: Zeiger.

Neither Sohier Chaput nor Zeiger responded to the Montreal Gazette’s request for comment.

Sohier Chaput’s brother hung up the phone twice when called by the Montreal Gazette. His father did not respond to email and telephone requests to pass along contact information to Sohier Chaput.

The Montreal Gazette also sent a letter to Sohier Chaput’s apartment by courier and rang his doorbell twice to no avail. His landlord agreed to pass along a message but as of Wednesday, he has not replied.

On white nationalist forums, Zeiger and other Montreal users brag about beating anti-fascist protesters and pasting Nazi stickers on the métro and co-ordinate their attendance at far-right rallies.

Montreal users brag about beating anti-fascist protesters and pasting Nazi stickers on the métro.

They also refer to a 2016 meeting with a representative from Students for Western Civilization, which led a campaign in 2015 for the creation of white student unions on Toronto university campuses.

One of the Montreal group members claims to have hosted a lecture by Ricardo Duschene, a University of New Brunswick professor who believes mass immigration is causing the ethnocide of European Canadians, in the summer of 2017.

Duschene denies any association with the group.

“I spoke at a meeting in Montreal last summer but it was for another group that does not identify as ‘alt right,’ ” he wrote in an email to the Montreal Gazette. “I don’t identify myself as ‘alt right’, and less so would I ever speak at a meeting organized by Daily Stormer.

“I am aware that someone by the name ‘Charles Zeiger’ posted one of my talks, but this was done without my knowledge, and I have no idea who he is.”

Zeiger’s reach extends beyond the North American movement. When the British government disbanded the neo-Nazi terrorist group National Action, the group’s final communiqué
personally thanked Zeiger and Andrew Anglin for their work in spreading propaganda.

“(It) gradually breaks down their inhibitions toward the most despicable forms of violence.” — Alexander Reid Ross

Anglin and Zeiger have repeatedly claimed their goal is to use internet culture as a way of making extremist ideas more palatable to a mainstream audience.

“(Young men) can go onto these forums and … they’ll be immersed in fascist culture, Nazi jokes, meme culture and (it) gradually breaks down their inhibitions toward the most despicable forms of violence,” says Alexander Reid Ross, a lecturer at Portland State University. “Forum culture in general has helped to draw people into this fever swamp of fascist ideas.”

Reid Ross is the author of Against the Fascist Creep, a sweeping history of post-Second World War fascist ideology.

Before founding the Montreal group, Zeiger claimed responsibility for the resurgence of Siege, a 1980s manifesto that calls for individual acts of terrorism as a means to create a white ethno-state. Posting on the forum the Right Stuff, Zeiger wrote that he digitized the book to help it reach a wider audience.

Siege’s resurgence within white supremacist circles is mostly “self-marginalizing,” Reid Ross said, adding that the book is “a thing 14-year-old boys read when they’re angry at their moms.”

“However, for those few people who do pick it up … it is definitely extremely dangerous. It points to a movement of leaderless resistance that’s been growing since Charlottesville.”

Zeiger attended the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last summer with a small group of Quebecers. At the end of the march, a right-wing extremist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

The rally in Charlottesville marked a turning point for the neo-Nazi movement in the United States. Before Heyer’s death, white supremacist ideology had been creeping its way into mainstream politics.

But the violence from that day triggered a backlash that forced the movement back underground, according to Reid Ross.

“It showed that you can’t get a (large) group of Nazis together in one place without there being some kind of murder, attempted murder, assault or things like that.”

After Charlottesville, the Daily Stormer published an article titled “Heather Heyer: A Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident Was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut.” They were subsequently removed from web hosting by GoDaddy, Google and a series of international domains.

The site was hosted on the dark web for a brief period, but has re-emerged on the open internet through Eranet International Limited, a web hosting service based in China.

Hankis says there’s a link between the ideology espoused on sites like the Daily Stormer and acts of mass violence in the United States.

After murdering nine people at a predominantly African-American church in South Carolina, Dylann Roof released a manifesto outlining his racist views. Verbatim sections of the manifesto appeared in the Daily Stormer’s message boards in the months leading up to the 2015 massacre.

James Harris Jackson, who was charged with murdering a black man in New York City with a sword last year, told reporters he was an avid reader of the Daily Stormer.

Andrew Anglin and Zeiger did not respond to the Montreal Gazette’s email request for comment.

However a disclaimer on the website says it opposes violence and seeks “revolution through the education of the masses.” Further, it adds, “anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned.”

One expert cautions that while Quebec’s extremist movement is still relatively small, it is attracting a growing number of angry, disillusioned young men.

Maxime Fiset is a reformed neo-Nazi who now does outreach work for the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence. He estimates that active support for “alt-right” groups in Quebec numbers in the hundreds or thousands.

Quebec’s extremist movement is still relatively small, but it is attracting a growing number of angry, disillusioned young men.

While the rise of far-right groups like La Meute and Storm Alliance have made waves in local media, Fiset says Zeiger’s movement targets a much different demographic.

“La Meute is an older crowd, between 40 and 65 years old,” he said. “With the alt-right, it’s more like between 15 and 35. They’re not as structured and organized but they’re becoming more and more visible.”

Fiset’s job is to try to understand how young men are indoctrinated with hateful ideology in hopes that they can be rehabilitated.

He said that the process of radicalization often begins with a feeling of injustice and sense of isolation. This leads to the person questioning why they are unhappy, and then either coming to terms with their situation, or seeking retribution for their distress.

“The person usually begins a path of questioning, which is legitimate, because injustices are corrected by some of those who challenge them at first,” Fiset said. “But it may become something much more dark when the person eventually arrives to more violent answers. That could be as common as hate speech or as dire as terrorism.”

For Zeiger, the “path of questioning” began early. In a white supremacist podcast, he describes his process of radicalization.

“I think I was about 14 when I was reading about the Holocaust and realized that it was a hoax,” he said. Later, he was exposed to a blog post that was “anti-semitic from a liberal perspective,” in that it described Jewish people as racist.

“This resonated with me, because my sister she had dated a Jew for a while, but his family forbade him from marrying her.”

“They’re living in the very dark corners of the web, without any boundaries” — Maxime Fiset

From there, Zeiger fell deeper into the online rabbit hole of anti-Semitic propaganda, binge-consuming hundreds of hours of white nationalist radio shows and YouTube videos.

“I saw a video … and I wasn’t that right-wing at that point so I thought ‘Oh my God, this is so extreme, this is racist.’ But I thought it was interesting,” he said, on a December 2016 podcast. “So after that I listened to (hours of these) radio shows, one after the other.

“It took like a few weeks but I listened to all like 300 of them. After that I was like, ‘Gas the k****, race war now.’ ”

Fiset says he doesn’t believe that radicalized youth are irredeemable. He is living proof that a person can be drawn away from the extremist fringe.

But he worries that, left unchecked, the spaces that Zeiger inhabits can move beyond internet hate speech and into real-world violence.

“We need to address this because they’re living in very dark corners of the web, without any boundaries, without any limits, without any structure or counter narrative,” Fiset said. “These guys are just alone, evolving together, in what becomes more and more violent ideologies, and it’s not getting any better. We’re just starting to realize that we have a ticking time bomb on our hands.”

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/major-neo-nazi-figure-recruiting-in-montreal

The Best Anti-Nazi Strategy Is to Let Them Speak

Tom Mullen
FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION
August 18, 2017

While the country is still reeling from shocking images of the violence in Charlottesville, VA last weekend, CNN reports the so-called “Alt Right” is planning nine events for this weekend, including a “free speech rally” in Boston. As expected, counter-protests are being planned, although local police in most areas are planning to take measures to keep the adversarial groups apart to avoid violence.

I’m sure this strategy will be criticized because it will give White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis and others of their ilk a safe space to “spew hate.” That’s right; it will. And that’s precisely why it’s the right strategy, for a number of reasons. It should have been employed in Charlottesville. Everyone involved would have been both freer and safer.

The ACLU Is Right on This

A wise man once said, “We don’t have the First Amendment so we can talk about the weather. We have it so we can say very controversial things.” No reasonable person believes the attorneys for the ACLU have any sympathy for what the speakers at the Unite the Right rally were going to say last weekend. But they recognized how important it was to defend their right to assemble and exercise their rights, even to say things the overwhelming majority of Americans find offensive. So, the ACLU went into federal court to get a local decision to revoke the group’s permit overturned.

The pertinent question isn’t “Why let them speak?” It’s “Why not let them speak?” The answer to the latter question is fear. Well-meaning people are genuinely afraid of these people growing their movement. After all, it happened before, right? And it didn’t happen in some Third World backwater, but in one of the leading industrial nations of the world. There are still people alive today who survived that horror.

It comes down to whether Americans are going to trust each other with freedom or not. The media has used all its cinematic arts to paint last weekend’s march as the bellwether of a dark political movement that could sweep the country. Really? Does anyone really believe that a few hundred losers looking and sounding like the Illinois Nazis from the Blues Brothers movie are going to persuade a significant percentage of Americans they’re right? “The Jew is using the black as muscle against you.” That’s literally what they were saying in Charlottesville. We used to lampoon this stuff.

Mockery, Not Muscle

For all the criticism President Trump has absorbed for his statements about last week, there were some surprising moments of clarity. It’s true that not all the people who showed up to protest removing the statue were White Supremacists or Nazis. And it’s also true not all the counter-protestors were peaceful. It takes quite a bit of self-righteous denial to not see Antifa seizing an opportunity to do what they always do – assault people and destroy property – just as the Nazis seized the opportunity of the statue’s removal to preach their idiotic message. Americans don’t need to take a side in that fight.

But we should take the First Amendment’s side regarding similar events in the future. If we’ve lost trust in our neighbors even to reject the arguments of Nazis, we’ve acquiesced to giving up freedom itself. We may as well accept the rest of the arguments of central planners looking to rule over every aspect of our social and economic lives. Theirs is the same reasoning: we rubes can’t be trusted with freedom.

The Nazis should be allowed to speak and have video of their events widely disseminated by the media. Had that approach been taken last weekend, we might all be laughing at them now instead of mourning the death of an innocent woman.

https://fee.org/articles/the-best-anti-nazi-strategy-is-to-let-them-speak/

I Lost My Son to the Alt-Right Movement

Anonymous As Told To Alexa Tsoulis-Reay
The Cut
August 18, 2017

My son was in Charlottesville. He probably went with his friends, but I don’t know for sure because I haven’t talked to him in about three years.




Maybe some alt-righters were born into racist families and then they just follow along, but we weren’t like that. He grew up in a big, multicultural city. When he was a kid, he was very accepting — his friend group was ethnically diverse, we often hosted overseas exchange students. He was dating someone who wasn’t white. He was a responsible kid. I mean, he would occasionally drink and smoke pot and stuff like that, but he wasn’t getting into trouble or anything. He had a few close friends, but he was not that great with getting girlfriends.

He was a good student, smart, sweet, and we were close. He always told me he loved me. But over time he began to change. I was worried it was drugs or depression. He started treating me like shit. I remember one time I went to hug him and he nearly ripped me a new one just for touching him. He said, “We have nothing in common.” I was hurt. That was just the beginning.

When he was in his late teens, he started listening to this podcast FreeDomain Radio. After he told me about it, I googled it, and from that point forward, my life was never the same. It was founded by this guy Stefan Molyneux, who I later learned is a major figure on the alt-right. He spews horrible things. I heard him listening to the podcasts in his bedroom. My son started saying things like, If we could just get the Asians out of here it wouldn’t be so crowded. I realized he was getting into really dangerous stuff. He was beyond the point where we could have a rational discussion. Not long after, I told him I thought he should move out.

After he left, we stopped talking and he pretty much alienated his closest friends. The only way I could keep track of him was by watching his online presence on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (I remembered his nicknames from when he lived at home). I saw that he was questioning the Holocaust, and tweeting about Trump, white supremacy, and all this horrible stuff about women. On his YouTube account, people were commenting that women don’t need to have education because their place is at home having babies. I panicked and approached a local religious group that’s very knowledgeable about cults and they said, Just wait it out and take care of yourself.

These days, I check up on him whenever I’m on the computer — it’s constant. I’ve got all his social-media pages pinned on Google Chrome. Sometimes he removes posts quickly and sometimes he makes things public and leaves them there. Maybe he wants me to see? I make sure I’m not logged in when I look at his accounts because I don’t want him to block me.

I recently saw him on a video, he looks healthy. Taking good care of yourself is all part of the white-supremacy thing, right? They have to be in good shape in case there’s violence, and they have to be fit so they can make good white babies. My thinking these days is God forbid he should have kids.

I knew from his tweets that he was going to Charlottesville and I was nervous because I know these things can turn violent. And throughout the day I was anxious, waiting for him to tweet so I knew he was okay. I’m horrified that he was there. From his tweets, it sounds like he was hanging around with neo-Nazis. It’s hard for me to believe. And then there’s a part of me that hopes he does something and gets caught because that’s one way to get him reformed.

I think the biggest thing with him is he needed a father figure. His dad really disappointed him. The alt-right is definitely a group that people are recruited into. I really do believe that. They take a “normal” level of fear of difference to the extreme. And I think that time of life — after school, when you are in your early 20s, is a real period of transition, of finding yourself. These kids think they have found the answer in these alt-right groups, you know? Like, I can be a part of something that’s bigger than me … and then they feel like they’re really going to make a difference, they even have a passion for making a difference.

All parents look back at how they raised their children and think they could have done something different, but I did the best I could. I raised him alone for a big part of his life. When he was younger, I had more control, but you can’t be with them 24/7. You don’t know what they’re listening to. They take their laptops to school. You can’t know everything that’s on the internet. Once they find it and feel like it speaks to them, they’re not going to listen to you.

These days the only way I can reach him is email. I sometimes send him videos of our dog. I have an extension on email that shows me if he reads it. The last thing I sent him was a video of our dog, but you could hear my voice … I secretly hope he felt something when he heard my voice, because deep inside I know he must miss me.

*Some names and details have been changed.

https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/charlottesville-white-supremacy-parenting-alt-right.html

To Understand Pizzagate, It Helps to Understand Cults

Edgar Maddison Welch

New York Magazine
By Jesse Singal
December 14, 2016

How could anyone possibly believe a conspiracy theory as crazy as Pizzagate? It’s a question many people have asked since the meme first popped up about a month ago. Pizzagate, if you haven’t heard, is a bizarre and far-flung conspiracy stitched together from very flimsy evidence — here’s a written explainer and here’s one from the internet-culture podcast Reply All — but the short version is that adherents believe Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and other big names in the Democratic Party have been running a child-sex-trafficking ring, and that one of the epicenters of that ring is the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a pizza place and all-ages music venue in a wealthy and leafy part of northwest Washington, D.C., as well as various other businesses (it doesn’t even have a basement).

The rumor began right before the election, and has been helped along greatly by 4chan, Reddit, and a boatload of alt-right outlets and personalities serving up tendentious “evidence” to a ravenous group of trolls and paranoid, suggestible internet sleuths. Since the rumor went viral, the businesses “implicated” have faced a wave of online and phone threats and creepy in-person protests from Pizzagate believers. Things came to a disturbing head December 4, when 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch of North Carolina walked into Comet with an assault rifle and a .38 in an attempt to “investigate” Pizzagate, eventually firing the rifle inside the establishment. No one was hurt and he eventually surrendered to police, but it was a terrifying reminder of the power of fake news and conspiracy theories.

How does someone like Welch fall into a fake-news vortex, eventually coming to believe things that most people would reject as too crazy to be true? There’s been a lot of talk lately about the widespread decline in trust in institutions like political parties and the media, and surely that’s part of it. But in terms of the social and psychological dynamics underpinning this type of depressing personal tailspin, it’s also useful to look into some research about how people join cults and become violent religious extremists. That’s not to say coming to believe in a theory like Pizzagate is the same as uprooting one’s life to join a fringe movement, of course, but there are surprising similarities — particularly when it comes to how people find meaning in strange beliefs and are gradually socialized into believing them.

So let’s run down some of what we know about cults and terror groups, and then cycle back to Pizzagate to explain the connections. Marion Goldman, a sociologist at the University of Oregon who studies new religious movements (researchers try to stay away from the word cult, since the boundary line between cult and religion is fuzzier than most people think), told Science of Us that one of the “truisms” of her field is that “anybody can believe anything at any time.” That is, there’s a tendency to think that only “crazy” people can believe far-fetched things, but belief is actually a lot more complicated than that: Otherwise normal people, who have no clinical indicators of any sort of mental distress or cognitive impairment, can be induced, fairly easily under the right circumstances, to embrace truly bizarre and sometimes dangerous beliefs.

BuzzFeed Helped Spread Far-Fetched Conspiracy Theories About Sandra Bland’s DeathReza Aslan on What the New Atheists Get Wrong About Islam

Usually, Goldman explained, people who end up joining cults are dealing with some sort of struggle or sense that they are missing a full-flung identity or purpose. Sometimes, this is because of the stuff we traditionally associate with lostness and aimlessness — addiction or family strife, and so on. But a lot of the time, it can be vaguer and less well-defined, just a niggling sense that you’re missing out on something bigger. Oftentimes, for the people most susceptible to the appeals of cults, “there’s a real disconnect between the life they wanted to and possibly expected to lead compared to their current lives.” What cults offer is “the idea that you’ve come to a turning point in your life,” she said, and have a chance to make things better for yourself. Key to that concept of better is a social identity. “I think belonging to a group is very important,” she said.

Lorne Dawson, a sociologist at the University of Waterloo who studies how people are radicalized into joining jihadist groups like ISIS, emphasized the risk factor posed by identity struggles, by people seeking a firmer, more meaningful sense of self. “As the literature shows, but as our interviews [with former extremists] are showing too, there is some kind of preceding really significant identity struggle, and it almost always involves a person feeling out of control in their environment and not feeling comfortable with the options available,” he said. “And I think the guys who end up becoming foreign fighters are able to articulate all this and find a more sophisticated, though bizarre, way out of it.”

It’s almost always young people who get radicalized, Dawson explained. “All the individuals we deal with, they all point somewhat to an adolescent struggle, they all point to their early turn to religion and how they made sense of their lives and how that put them on the right track.”

When young people who feel uncertain about their identities encounter radical material online, Dawson said, they also encounter the community propagating that message — a community that can offer them a sense of belonging. The young person in question might not believe the radical material they are seeing at first, but it doesn’t matter: They have found a place online to hang out, to vent their frustrations, to spend time with people who seem to understand or identify with what they’re going through.

Gradually, they’ll spend more and more time in these online communities, Dawson explained, and as they do, their access to outside information will get more and more cut off. They may not really believe Israel secretly controls the world when they begin frequenting the jihadist forum, but over time the social dynamics of their environment will make it harder and harder for them to not believe such conspiracy theories. “You’re being fed all this stuff now because you enter into certain social networks and those networks become your primary source of self-worth and identity,” said Dawson, “and then of course you’re self-censoring like crazy.” That is, you don’t want to question what you’re hearing because it could threaten your important burgeoning new social identity as a member of the online group in question. So “any info that comes in that’s contrary, you have lots of reasons to rationalize it away — and then you have a supportive network that’s immediately dismissing any contrary info” as well.

There’s also an important slippery-slope aspect, said Dawson. Here he turned to the example of gruesome ISIS beheading videos. If they were the first things a potential recruit were shown, he explained, that recruit would likely be horrified and want nothing to do with ISIS. But that isn’t what usually happens. Instead, “You start with videos that are about the terrible things that U.S. forces did to Iraqi citizens,” he said. “They don’t start by watching beheading videos — they get drawn into the worldview that Muslims are being victimized, are being systematically persecuted, that it’s a plot to undermine all Muslims’ situations, that it’s Satanic.” Then and only then, after they’ve been exposed to a great deal of such programming, might the recruit be sufficiently morally reoriented (or disoriented, perhaps) to accept ISIS’s more gruesome practices. If you truly believe Muslims everywhere are being slaughtered indiscriminately by infidels, beheading the informers and spies supposedly assisting those evildoers suddenly doesn’t seem like such a stretch.

More broadly, said Dawson, it’s usually the case that the lure of group membership comes first, and full embrace of the belief comes second. You find a group that seems to accept and understand you, and then, after hanging out with them a bunch and getting more and more cut off from alternate information sources, you realize that their ideology explains your own struggles, your own inability to fit in or find meaning. There’s usually “Something from their background that tips it one way or another in terms of which kind of ideology appeals to them,” Dawson explained. A frustrated young Muslim is more likely to find his way to ISIS, while a young white man in the American South is more likely to find his way to a white-supremacist organization. But overall, it really is that sense of group identity that sparks and solidifies the belief. Again, social belonging matters a huge amount to human beings.

That’s a key point: The same dynamics are at play regardless of the specific ideology in question. “Both politics and religion seem to have similar effects,” said Nathaniel Wade, a psychologist at Iowa State who studies religion and spirituality. “They induce strong passions. They are often framed as ‘us against them’ (which, by the way, such thinking patterns have a series of psychological correlates that are mostly not healthy). They attempt to solve basic problems in living. They occur in groups that often reinforce those beliefs and shelter against alternate views.”

So how much of this applies to Welch and other true believers in Pizzagate and other conspiracy theories? There certainly appear to be similarities. “In many ways what makes fake news possible are the same things that make people believe (and act) in ways that many people think is downright ridiculous,” said Wade.

All this becomes clearer when you understand that Pizzagate sits in a wider ecosystem of beliefs and conspiracies propagated by the alt-right. Key to all these beliefs and conspiracies is mistrust in the Establishment. The media are lying to you, politicians are lying you, and it takes brave truth-sayers — Alex Jones or Mike Cernovich or whoever — to tell it to you how it is. The media and political elites are just so corrupt you can’t believe anything they say.

Imagine what it must be like to be a confused or frustrated or identity-lacking young person who stumbles upon the alt-right and its ideas about how the world works. Those ideas offer a lot of clarity. They offer, through social media, at least something of a sense of social identity, and no shortage of culprits — elites and feminists and minorities and globalists and (in some corners of the alt-right) Jews — to explain why you have been held down and prevented from leading a meaningful or successful life. And the alt-right, by dint of its operating theory about the corruptness of the Establishment, has a built-in mechanism to slowly cut you off from traditional news sources. What’s going to happen if you post a Washington Post article debunking the latest conspiracy theory? “It’s the Post — they’re lying.”

But it’s the alt-right concept of so-called red-pilling where this subculture appears more similar to “traditional” cults and extremist groups. Adapted from The Matrix, “taking the red pill” or “getting red-pilled” simply means seeing the world as it really is. In the online subcultures that gave rise to the alt-right, its most famous meaning is in reference to feminism: After you take the red pill, the scales fall from your eyes and you can see that feminism is really just an attempt to emasculate and bully men, to allow social-justice warriors to run rampant over masculine (and traditional) values and ideals in favor of a shrill and judgmental far-left radicalism. Recently, the definition has expanded a bit — these days, in an alt-right context “getting red-pilled” probably means something more like “understanding that progressivism is a lie and part of a large-scale effort to hurt you and people like you.” But the basic point is the same: This is the moment at which you start to see things as they really are.

This is exactly the sort of transformative experience offered by cults and extremist movements: After this, things won’t ever be the same for you. After this, you will have a role to play in an important battle that will determine the fate of the world. Your life will take on an enhanced meaning. Whether or not Welch explicitly thought he had been “red-pilled,” Goldman says that “what’s really interesting is he fits [extant ideas about radicalization] perfectly, because what he felt was ‘this is a turning point in my life and I have to do something.’” Reading the text messages Welch sent to a friend that were released as part of the criminal complaint against him, as reported by the Daily Beast, it’s hard to disagree with Goldman’s assessment. Welch wrote that he was planning on “Raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing [sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many. Standing up against a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard … defending the next generation of kids, our kids, from ever having to experience this kind of evil themselves[.]” It was clear he saw himself in somewhat heroic terms: “I’m sorry bro, but I’m tired of turning the channel and hoping someone does something and being thankful it’s not my family. One day it will be our families. The world is too afraid to act and I’m too stubborn not to[.]”

It’s important to note that only a tiny fraction of believers in conspiracy theories go on to commit bad acts. But there is a point, said Wade, at which certain beliefs take on a dangerous momentum. “Of course, the seriousness of the action varies,” he explained. “If religion or politics makes people scream, wail, and faint, well, that is odd behavior to some people, but nobody is really getting hurt. But when it means shooting off a gun in a family pizza shop, or blowing up abortion clinics, or firebombing a black church, or any number of political/religiously motivated violence, then it gets very serious and there needs to be some sort of check on the processes that are encouraging such behavior.” That’s all the more reason to better understand how people come to believe these ridiculous, sometimes dangerous conspiracy theories.

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/to-understand-pizzagate-it-helps-to-understand-cults.html

Ku Klux Klan embraces Trump — but mistrusts the alt-right’s lack of Christianity

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
December 2, 2016

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In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory and the recent rise of the white nationalist “alt-right,” a 150-year-old racist group has been spreading its wings: the Ku Klux Klan, which on Saturday is planning its first post-election rally.

“Our membership grows by the day,” said Gary Munker, who identifies himself as a spokesman for the group. The Klan, since its creation in 1866, has called for a white and Christian America; historically, it has resorted to lynchings and racial violence as the means to its end.

Like the former KKK leader David Duke, who supported Trump’s candidacy — and was eventually disavowed by the New York billionaire — Munker says he was drawn by the Republican candidate’s language, particularly his attacks against immigrants and his talk of deporting millions.

The movement was born in the devastated states of the South in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, just three years after President Abraham Lincoln ordered all slaves in the South to be freed.

Munker, wearing one of the group’s emblematic hooded white robes, claimed that his branch of the KKK — the Loyal White Knights — has 700 members on Long Island, where he lives, and an additional 500 in the rest of New York state.

Munker, 36, who calls himself a family man, said people were beginning to “wake up” to what is happening in the country.

He said that he joined the Loyal White Knights — one of 40 local or regional groups making up the Klan — five years ago after seeing his quiet and “essentially white” neighborhood change seemingly overnight with the arrival of subsidized housing units and a much more diverse population.

– No resurgence –

Munker, who was vague about his full-time profession for fear he might lose his job, is an active member of the Klan: a native of a rural part of Long Island, he regularly distributes tracts in nearby cities in an effort to draw new members.

The last time he did this was on November 17, in a parking lot in the village of Patchogue, which entered the dark annals of American racism after a group of high school students taunted and punched and then murdered an Ecuadoran immigrant in 2008.

The discovery of Munker’s leaflets prompted some 200 local residents to organize a rally against racism the following Sunday.

Far from the killings or the burning crosses that made the Klan’s grim reputation, leafleting is now the Klan’s chief activity in 14 states and “gives them an extensive geographical reach,” said Carla Hill, an investigative researcher with the Center on Extremism of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish group dedicated to fighting intolerance.

The latest available data, she said, does not point to a resurgence of the movement, whatever Gary Munker might say: 74 instances of KKK leafleting have been counted so far this year, compared to 86 in 2015.

The Loyal White Knights have announced plans for a rally Saturday in North Carolina, without confirming the exact time or place.

But even if it does take place, Carla Hill said, it is unlikely to attract much more of a crowd than the Klan’s last several demonstrations, which rarely drew more than a few dozen participants.

– ‘Political space’ –

For Mark Potok, a specialist at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism in the US, even if so-called white nationalism has undeniably gained prominence since the arrival of Barack Obama as the first black US president, the movement appears unlikely to take on significant momentum.

Klan membership is no more than 6,000 today, he noted, compared to 40,000 in the 1960s and several million in the 1920s.

Still, proponents of white superiority feel that Trump’s election has given them “a political space to present their views as legitimate,” Potok said, adding that “they have not been taken that seriously in 50 years.”

Thus, a conference November 20 in the federally owned Ronald Reagan Building in Washington gathered some 250 white supremacists, some of whom raised their arms in a Nazi-like salute to their far-right leader Richard Spencer — and to Trump’s victory.

But these “intellectual” extremists, who refer to their movement as the alt-right,” “look down on the Klan,” Potok said.

For the Klan, with its dark history of violence, “can’t make the claim like Richard Spencer that ‘we are standing up for the rights of white people (but) we don’t hate anybody,'” said Potok.

But Munker said he mistrusts the smooth talkers of the alt-right:

“We are Christians (while) they let anybody in — and just that makes me wonder about their integrity,” he said.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/ku-klux-klan-embraces-trump-but-mistrusts-the-alt-rights-lack-of-christianity/

'Call me a racist, but don't say I'm a Buddhist': meet America's alt right

They present themselves as modern thinkers of extremism. But the US far right, discovers Sanjiv Bhattacharya, have the same white supremacist obsessions

 

The Guardian

Sanjiv Bhattacharya

Sunday 9 October 2016 

Every few weeks, William Johnson, the chairman of the white nationalist American Freedom Party (AFP), holds a lunch for members, the goal being to make America a white ethnostate, a project that begins with electing Donald Trump. This week, it’s at a grand old French restaurant called Taix, in Echo Park, Los Angeles – an odd choice on the face of it. Echo Park is a trendy hood. It’s hipster and heavily Hispanic. In fact, given the predominance of Latino kitchen staff in this city, it may be wise to hold off on the Trump talk until the food arrives.

“About three months ago,” Johnson begins, “I was talking to Richard Spencer about how we need to plan for a Trump victory.” Spencer is another prominent white nationalist – he heads the generic-sounding National Policy Institute. “I said: ‘I want Jared Taylor [of American Renaissance] as UN Ambassador, and Kevin MacDonald [an evolutionary psychologist] as secretary of health and Ann Coulter as homeland security!’ And Spencer said: ‘Oh Johnson, that’s a pipe dream!’ But today, he’d no longer say that, because if Trump wins, all the establishment Republicans, they’re gone… They hate him! So who’s left? If we can lobby, we can put our people in there.”

Around the table five young men, roughly half Johnson’s age (he’s 61), nod and lean in. They all wear suits and ties, address the waiter as “sir” and identify as the “alt right”, the much-discussed nouvelle vague of racism. “Are you guys familiar with the Plum Book?” Johnson asks. “It’s plum because of the colour, but also because of the plum positions – there are 20,000 jobs in that book that are open to a new administration.”

“So we need to identify our top people!” says Eric, one of the men at the table.

“Just anyone with a college degree!” Johnson says.

“Right.” Eric is practically bouncing in his seat with excitement. “We need to get the word out. We are the new GOP!”

It’s not every day that a brown journalist gets to sit in on a white-nationalist strategy meeting. But these are strange times. Racism is trending. Like Brexit, Trump has normalised views that were once beyond the pale, and groups like the AFP have grown bold. Their man’s stubby orange fingers are within reach of actual power, so maybe it’s time to emerge from the shadows at last.

I first met Johnson in May after he signed up as a Trump delegate before being swiftly struck off by the campaign when the press found out. He’s a surprising figure. An avid environmentalist, fluent in Japanese and, in person, not the bitter old racist I’d expected but rather a jolly Mormon grandfather, bright eyed and chuckling, a Wind in the Willows character. Eric is even more unexpected. Tall and impassioned, he came to racism via hypnotherapy, of all things. He sells solar panels for a living and practises yoga. Together with his friends Matt and Nathan, who are also here at lunch, he runs an alt-right fraternity in Manhattan Beach – “a beer and barbecues thing”. They’re called the Beach Goys. “We’re starting a parody band,” he beams. “We’ve found a drummer!”

Between them they represent two poles of a racist spectrum, young and old. And judging from this lunch, it’s the millennials who are the more extreme. Johnson wants white nationalists to appear less mean and he finds the “JQ”, the Jewish Question, archaic. But Eric loves the meanness of the alt right. “We’re the troll army!” he says. “We’re here to win. We’re savage!” And antisemitism is non-negotiable. In fact, he’d like to clear up a misnomer about the alt right, propagated by the Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos, who is often described, mistakenly, as the movement’s leader. Milo casts the alt right as principally a trolling enterprise, dedicated to attacking liberal shibboleths for the “lulz”– there’s precious little actual bigotry. But Eric insists otherwise. Yes, they like to joke, they have memes, they’re just as funny as liberals – have I heard of their satirical news podcasts, the Daily Shoah and Fash the Nation? But make no mistake, the racism is real. Eric especially enjoys The Daily Stormer, a leading alt-right news site, which is unashamedly pro-Hitler.

What unites Johnson and Eric is what they describe as “the systematic browbeating of the white male” – namely all this talk of privilege, the Confederate flag, Black Lives Matter and mansplaining. But beyond that, it’s the “looming extinction of the white race”. This is the language they use. Also: “Diversity equals white genocide.” The alt right loves to evoke genocide while harbouring Holocaust deniers. Their point is that white people are melting away like the icecaps, and they have a primal drive to stop it. In 2044, non-Hispanic whites will drop below 50% of the US population. “The generation of the white minority has already been born,” Eric says. “Look at South Africa and Rhodesia. That’s where we’re headed. Total disenfranchisement.”

I want to reassure him that his Brown Rulers will be gentle and that slavery isn’t so bad when you get used to it. But it’s not me they want to hear from, it’s white people. This is the white nationalist’s burden – the very people they’re trying to save are the ones who most fiercely oppose them. “The only group I cannot get along with is white people,” says Johnson. “Because white people hate white people who like white people.”

A couple of days later, Johnson is at his cluttered desk in downtown LA, nattering merrily in Japanese to a woman in Tokyo. He gets lots of media requests these days, but especially from Japan. There’s an uncanny connection between Japan and white nationalism in America. Jared Taylor, white nationalism’s foremost intellectual, is another fluent speaker. “It’s an ethnostate and it’s deeply nationalist,” he says. “And they have resisted the pressure to admit refugees. I say: ‘God bless them!’”

For his part, Johnson’s racism was shaped in Japan. He grew up in Eugene, Oregon, a state founded as a white utopia, in a modest Mormon home, back before the LDS church gave black people the priesthood in 1978. But it was his two-year mission to Tohoku, Japan, that turned him. As he went from door to door, locals would opine on the greatness of white America. “They had an inferiority complex after the war, so we were treated like celebrities,” he says. “Oh, it was just the funnest time!” A few years later, while working in Japan as an attorney, he wrote a book advocating the repatriation of all non-whites with appropriate reparations, because “I thought America was going to collapse unless I did something.” When he returned to LA, he sent a copy to every congressman. He was 32.

Clearly things didn’t work out as planned. His forays into politics floundered and then his offices were bombed. So he retreated from activism for nearly 15 years, only returning in 2009 to form the AFP – just in time for the rise of the alt right.

We head to his 67-acre ranch near Pasadena, a hilly lot backing on to a national forest. I asked to meet his family, but his wife refused, so we tour the farm instead – his persimmon orchard, his horses and ducks. And there on his pick-up truck is a stencil of Jimi Hendrix. “My daughter likes to paint,” he says proudly. None of his five children are white nationalists, though they have promised to marry within the race.

“You’re a white supremacist with a black artist painted on your truck,” I tell him. And he flinches. “That’s the meanest, most hurtful swearword there is. Just because I say different races have different strengths doesn’t mean I think I’m superior.” He doesn’t like “racist” either. “It’s a pejorative. I prefer ‘race realist’.”

“But it’s not my reality, Bill. I’m sticking with racist.”

“Well, OK. But people who embrace ‘racist’ are mad at everybody. I get along with people. You cannot function in Los Angeles without encountering other races, so I look for areas of similarity and agreement. It’s important to treat everyone with the highest respect on a micro level.”

On a macro level, however, darkness falls – multiculturalism is doomed, the different races will never get along, and our only hope is Balkanisation: separate territories for separate tribes. And whatever accelerates that transition is welcome, even racial strife. “I don’t think friction is a good thing,” he says, “but it would help facilitate the split that is necessary.”

We stop to feed his alpacas. There’s a brown one, a black one and a white one, standing peacefully together against the chicken wire fence.

“See Bill, they’re getting along.”

He laughs. “I wish people were like alpacas.”

I’m with Eric at a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan Beach where he lives, an upscale, white neighbourhood in the South Bay. He clears space on the table and grins. “OK, you ready? Your first tarot card reading with the Hitler Youth!”

It’s been an odd afternoon. We walked along the beach and I asked about his gmail address which includes the number 1488, a potent number for white supremacists. The “14” stands for the 14 words coined by the late David Lane of the group The Order: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” And the 88 refers to HH (H being eighth in the alphabet) – or Heil Hitler. Eric sighed. “OK, but this stuff’s hard to talk about,” he said. “It depends how red-pilled you are.”

Alt-righters love talking about the red pill. It’s a reference to The Matrix – blue-pilled people bumble through a life of illusion, while the red-pilled have seen the truth and there’s no turning back. Like all conspiracy theorists they see the hidden hand that guides all things, but for the alt right that hand is Jewish. The red pill is classic antisemitism, rebooted for a younger generation. As we walked, he laid it out – the banking, the media, the globalism. We passed games of beach volleyball and family picnics, while he explained why the Holocaust was exaggerated and Hitler got a bad rap.

“Have you noticed that kombucha isn’t as fizzy as it used to be?” he asks, along the way, because Eric isn’t your average Nazi. He trained as a spiritualist. He has taught meditation. He brought his tarot cards in case I wanted a reading.

“Don’t tell me – it’s the Jews,” I tell him. He laughs. “You said it, not me!”

In the late 70s, the Klansman David Duke swapped his hood and robes for a suit and tie, and took white supremacy out of the cross-burning fields and into the boardroom. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center describes the alt right in similar terms, as Racism 2.0, “a rebranding for the digital generation”. It’s a trendy reboot – “alt right” makes white supremacy sound like an art collective. And Eric, the kombucha Nazi, just takes it a step further – into the aisles of Whole Foods. He’s a locally sourced, wild-caught bigot high in omega-3s and antisemitism. It makes him more sinister in some ways, and more harmless in others. As Nazis go.

“Hmm, Nazi.” Like Johnson, he’s squeamish about terms. Warriors against political correctness can be awfully sensitive. “It’s such a slur,” he says. But come on – he’s a Hitler apologist. “OK, fine,” he says. “Just don’t say I’m a Buddhist, because I’m actually more into Norse and Celtic mysticism now.”

It’ll come as no surprise that someone who’d rather be called a Nazi than a Buddhist has a strange story to tell. Originally from a well-off white suburb of Chicago, he moved to Las Vegas to pursue music. Then one day, in the gym of his condo building, he met a guru figure we’ll call Frank. A spiritualist and businessman, Frank introduced Eric to New Age mysticism and Japanese Buddhism. And it was under Frank’s guidance that Eric moved to LA to study hypnotherapy and began a career giving readings and tarot shows at a psychic bookshop. Frank, he says, was his “mentor and best friend”. But then Eric took a turn. He radicalised himself. He left the New Age life, finding it too feminine, and spiralled down a sinkhole of conspiracy theory. He and Frank have been estranged ever since. Frank is black.

Today, Eric still meditates and practises yoga. His weeks are spent like David Brent, as a travelling salesman, driving around meeting his solar energy clients. His weekends, however, are all about the Beach Goys, which now has 15 members. Last week, they went on a hike to the Murphy Ranch in the Pacific Palisades, a decrepit old property that was originally built as a refuge for Hitler after the war. Next week is their first band rehearsal. Eric’s going to play guitar and sing. And this is the future he wants – not a plum job with the Trump administration. “I don’t see myself as a bureaucrat,” he says. “I want to take the Beach Goys national. I want to inspire people.”

It could happen. Trump has unleashed something in America. Johnson won’t reveal the AFP’s membership numbers – “Maybe we want to appear bigger than we are?” – but Eric insists the alt right is on the march. “We’re growing with every hashtag, every BLM protest, every city that becomes a Detroit, or a London,” he says. “We’re everywhere! We’re the guy next to you at yoga, the barista at Starbucks...” It’s like Fight Club for supremacists, a deeply unsettling thought (which is why Eric loves it).

But his delight in being a secret Nazi detracts from the seriousness of it all, the white genocide stuff. He’s having too much fun. And I wonder, as we finish our beers, if it will pass for Eric, this Nazi phase. He just doesn’t seem that threatening. Then he starts up about a race war, that old white-supremacist chestnut. Because behind the trolling veneer, the alt right is more traditional than alt. What Eric believes is vintage racism, the same old wine in a new ironic cask. And Tony Benn’s words ring as true as ever: “Every generation must fight the same battles again and again.”

“Our civilisation is at war and we need to secure our people,” Eric says. “We must seize power and take control. And the idea that we can do this peacefully is probably not realistic.”

We get along well enough, Eric and I, but he has the same micro/macro discrepancy as Johnson. And at a macro level, there is only despair and division. “I do not advocate violence, but I will give my life for my blood… and for the honour of my ancestors.”

He thrums the tarot cards in his hands, his voice getting more animated. “We accept the game that’s being played. We accept that the lion and the gazelle are competition. But they don’t have to hate each other. That’s just how we view it.”

He shrugs. “It’s scary. The world is scary. This is not a game for children.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/09/call-me-a-racist-but-dont-say-im-a-buddhist-meet-the-alt-right?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Facebook