#THREAD "Fast forward three years after Unite the Right and it seems that everything that we had in 2017 and prior is gone."
INCREDIBLY revealing fascist conversation on 8kun.
It's also the 1st time I've *ever* seen chan posters explicitly mention 4th Generation Warfare.
INCREDIBLY revealing fascist conversation on 8kun.
It's also the 1st time I've *ever* seen chan posters explicitly mention 4th Generation Warfare.
Some notes:
Slurs are blacked out.
Thread is from 8kun's /pnd/ (politics, news and debate)
Here's an archive of the thread if you want the primary source. Every kind of content warning applies obviously. archive.is/wYCRQ
Slurs are blacked out.
Thread is from 8kun's /pnd/ (politics, news and debate)
Here's an archive of the thread if you want the primary source. Every kind of content warning applies obviously. archive.is/wYCRQ
For this thread, I'm summarizing and analyzing the highlights. The point of this exercise is to take the temperature of the fascist movement. They are speaking candidly here. How do they see themselves and the conflict they're fighting? Where do they think it's going?
One more quick note: OP has two meanings on a lot of chan threads. It can mean "original poster" or the author of the 1st post in a thread, or "operation" as in a honeypot, usually by federal law enforcement. Context will make which is which obvious.
1. "[I]t seems that everything that we had in 2017 and prior is gone."
OP laments the post-Unite the Right collapse of the alt-right, particularly fascists being censored online & moving to smaller social media platforms– "aka echo chambers where we won't be noticed by anyone."
OP laments the post-Unite the Right collapse of the alt-right, particularly fascists being censored online & moving to smaller social media platforms– "aka echo chambers where we won't be noticed by anyone."
2. OP says the Base was promising for the kind of "nationalist" politics they want, but alas it was a honeypot.
The Base was a terrorist network whose members were arrested after they were infiltrated by antifascists and the FBI.
More here: informant.news/p/cracking-ope…
The Base was a terrorist network whose members were arrested after they were infiltrated by antifascists and the FBI.
More here: informant.news/p/cracking-ope…
3. OP thinks that "other than [white nationalist live-streamer Nick Fuentes's] fanclub, nobody's really doing or saying anything."
More background on Fuentes and the "Groyper Army" here: irehr.org/reports/alt-ri…
More background on Fuentes and the "Groyper Army" here: irehr.org/reports/alt-ri…
OP thinks that 1)They used to have a mainstream movement but UtR blew it. After Unite the Right, they couldn't rally openly and publicly anymore. Some of them turned to terror networks like the Base. But they started getting arrested.
OP says the only thing that's filled the vacuum is a whittled-down version of the alt-right in Nick Fuentes' cult of personality. It's not enough for them. They're essentially asking "Where do we go from here?"
Richard Spencer and other fascist thought-leaders "only believed in what they were saying so far as they were allowed to say it without having to defend it against those that set out to silence them," one commenter says.
The comment about Spencer et al is important. There's always been a tension with white nationalists between those that want to infiltrate and push fascist policies from inside the U.S. government (entryists) and those that want to attack the system from the outside (vanguardists)
Fascists want to exercise violent power over others. Here's a few ways you can do that with the aegis of the state:
1) Be Steven Miller and claw your way into office & run concentration camps.
1) Be Steven Miller and claw your way into office & run concentration camps.
2)Be like Milo or any of a number of right wing e-celebs & choose stochastic terror–whipping up followers into a frenzy and letting them do whatever they want to their enemies.
3)Be like Joey Gibson or the Proud Boys or George Lincoln Rockwell: Show up somewhere you're not wanted to provoke people into throwing the first punch, get in a quick brawl and let the cops handle the rest.
Now, those are all ways to exercise violent power *with* state permission. If you do it without state permission, you get what most people think of as terrorism: networks of cells like the Base or Atomwaffen who plot destruction, murder and mayhem and sometimes carry it out.
The basic idea of groups like the Base is to sow discord and mayhem and thereby weaken and overwhelm the state so you can topple it. "Accelerationism" some call it. More here: splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018…
After UtR, fascists doubled down on entryism–trying to infiltrate campus organizations like Identity Evropa did, or embraced vanguardist terror like former Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen did. splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…
The people on this 8kun thread aren't satisfied with entryism, but they see groups like the Base as a dead end with nothing but a jail cell waiting for you. This makes one of them groan that Trump made them complacent.
"It was a false victory that left the right in a content state when they should've pushed the advantage harder than ever. Their enemies still held all forms of media and social media firmly in their grasps and have only tightened that grasps since," one commenter says.
So what's left to do?
"lol the only option is to start blowing up buildings but whatever," one poster writes.
We're only four posts into this fucking thread.
"lol the only option is to start blowing up buildings but whatever," one poster writes.
We're only four posts into this fucking thread.
I'm going to skip a lot of the posts where these idiots say the alt-right was controlled opposition by the Jewish cabal or whatever. Frankly, I don't even want to give them the bullshit sleight of hand of distinguishing themselves from the alt-right. But that's another debate
A lot of them talk about Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian fascist philosopher and political strategist. One posts photos of Dugin with David Duke, Lauren Southern and Brittany Pettibone. Below is their portrayal of Dugin's book on geopolitics.
I haven't personally read enough Dugin to know how accurate this is.I'll have to get back to it, but from this post and a few others, some of them are pinning their hopes on Russia destabilizing the U.S. and balkanizing it so they can carve out little ethnostates from the remains
Of course, these are fascists, so a lot of the geopolitics discourse here is about blaming the Jews. One quotes a Duginist who says "America is the problem" and replies essentially saying "No, Israel is the problem. Look at how much they're profiting off our conflicts, etc."
There's a lot more chatter about the "ZOG" or "Zionist-Occupied Government" conspiracy. I personally didn't find it that interesting or informative, but the archive link is up if you want to try to parse it. I wouldn't recommend it. It's always kind of the same bullshit
So let's get back to OP's argument. This response says a lot about the mentality of vanguardist terror. More on leaderless resistance and its originator here: splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…
Alright, so the post I really wanted to get to advocates for using Fourth Generational Warfare strategies. Before I get into that, I need to tell you it is a weird post and there is a LOT of shit to parse in it. The whole thing is wrapped in chan irony.
The post is also a fucking rabbithole I don't know if I'll be able to fully parse. There's a link to a thread on a My Little Pony-themed 4chan clone website's /pol/ board where the OP is advocating using Pennsylvania's Department of State's complaint-filing system for harassment.
In the thread, they were planning to use the state government complaint system to target Jewish businesses in Philadelphia. They called themselves "Safety Squad."
They appear to have also been coordinating zoom-bombings. This meme was posted on the thread.
They appear to have also been coordinating zoom-bombings. This meme was posted on the thread.
"Clearly it is time to resort to asymmetrical 4th generation warfare. We must do what we can to stem the tide of ideological subversion and deny the enemy financial resources," the 8kun post reads.
Targeting businesses is a prime example of 4GW. You'll see why.
Targeting businesses is a prime example of 4GW. You'll see why.
Fourth Generational Warfare, otherwise known as 4GW, is a complex conflict strategy where the lines between who is a soldier and a civilian and the lines between what is war and what is politics are blurred.
In conflicts framed through 4GW, combatants' objectives are political and political objectives are always framed in terms of conflict. The online fascist right thinks like this to a certain extent already, as does the militia/patriot movement and the Christian right.
This means at least one fascist on 8kun is explicitly framing their actions in terms of 4GW. This to me is significant because it means a potential closer convergence of the online vanguardist fascist right and the much broader, much more politically successful religious right.
There's a really good bit in this episode of @WorstYearPod about how 4GW works in modern America in the context of the giant gun rally in Virginia that happened in January. iheart.com/podcast/1119-w…
If you want a good crash course on why 4GW is relevant to modern U.S. politics, read this thread by @brucewilson. I'll be citing it in bits and pieces.
The gist of it is William S. Lind, the father of 4GW, gave Trump a copy of his book "The Next Conservatism" which has a proposal to let Sheriffs deputize militias.
Lind also wrote his own version of 'The Turner Diaries,' spelling out his vision of 4GW.
Here's the long and short of it all: Much of the former alt-right/online fascist movement fantasizes about collapsing the U.S. and carving out little ethnostates. William S. Lind wants county sheriffs to have their own private armies and deputize militias. Do the math.
Now, I *did* do a search on the 4plebs archive and the term does come up on /pol/ now and again. "Meme wars," the "Groyper Wars," etc all fit the academic definition of 4GW and /pol/ posters do have a history of thinking in 4GW terms. The post I highlighted isn't novel.
I don't think there's a clear-cut answer for where the fascist movement goes from here, but I do know one thing: their move is always to try to blur the lines to get their way.
Anyways, this thread was kind of dense & a little bit inside baseball, but I hope it was informative.
Anyways, this thread was kind of dense & a little bit inside baseball, but I hope it was informative.
@threadreaderapp unroll
Anyways if you thought this was useful reporting and analysis, pleas consider contributing to the work LCRW does. Every little bit gives me more time to do this work instead of stupid gig economy bullshit
Hey! The expert I was gonna reach out to about the Dugin parts of this thread is here! Everyone give @areidross’s thread a read!
okay so I thought I was done but there’s been some more interesting stuff about militias in this thread since I last looked at it. Stay tuned.
