NEW #THREAD: A few days ago I analyzed a thread on 8kun where online fascists were talking about the future of their movement.
The thread continued on. There's some interesting stuff in it I'll cover here.
Original thread here:
The thread continued on. There's some interesting stuff in it I'll cover here.
Original thread here:
The thread started with original poster (OP) complaining the alt-right had fizzled out after Unite the Right in 2017 that caused a backlash of fascists being de-platformed, fired, arrested, outed. The OP was mostly complaining about online censorship and less ability to outreach.
The Base, a terrorist network OP thought promising, was taken down. OP wasn't impressed with the alt-right's continuation through Nick Fuentes & his "Groyper Army" & wondered aloud what's next. Someone replied "lol the only option is to start blowing up buildings but whatever"
The thread's about that question: "What comes next?" As you can tell by now, I'm summarizing it in the next few tweets to bring everyone up to speed and I'll be continuing analyzing the discussion from there.
Some fascists talked about placing their hopes in Alexsandr Dugin, the Russian fascist political strategist who strategized about sowing discord and balkanizing the U.S. More on that here:
With or without Russian help, a lot of fascists want to break the U.S. into a bunch of little fiefdoms they can control and make into ethnostates. They call themselves "balk-right" from the term "Balkanization." It's the point of the kind of terrorism groups like the Base plotted
What made me worried was a fascist calling for using 4th Generation Warfare strategy. 4GW is a pervasive conflict strategy being successfully used by the Christian supremacist right and the overlapping Patriot movement and "Constitutionalist" sheriffs movements
4GW is essentially about blurring the lines between politics and war, soldier and civilian. In a prime example of 4GW, the poster arguing this linked to a plot on another chan board to target Jewish businesses with complaint filings with local government
Here's what I said as the TL;DR of it all. This is where I left off. Anyways, now on to what's new in the thread.
I think it's important to address the persecution complex fascists, and to a large extent the rest of the right wing, have. Framing yourself as both the victim and the strongest there is is a tenet of fascists of every stripe. 
I won't go over in detail over the long history of using Jewish people as the metaphysical 'other' behind all their woes. I'm guessing most of you are at least passingly familiar with blood libel conspiracies, etc.
By the way, (((this))) is code for Jewish.
By the way, (((this))) is code for Jewish.
The way to read that post is to first go "okay, they're blaming the Jews for everything, think the Jews control the world and say everyone is out to get them to justify their violence." That framework gives these fascists leeway in what they say in a bunch of different weird ways
The poster says that the entire alt-right movement "was all scripted" & "demoralization controlled opposition." Ignore how absurd that is. This fascist blames the Jews so they don't have to admit their ideology is part of why their movement failed.
When you filter the highlighted section through that lens, what this fascist is really saying is "our movement is too toxic to gain power right now. people know who we are and what we're about and we have to wait until people forget and then rebrand ourselves to try again."
This post is interesting because it's completely mask-off and shows what these guys really think. They want to create networks that will collapse the U.S. government and be there to take its place. They assume whites who didn't follow before will flock to them when that happens.
This one's really fascinating to me because it talks about specific groups like the Traditionalist Workers' Party, Rise Above Movement, Proud Boys that I've covered.
I've blurred out a lot of slurs and stuff and I'll make notes about them as I break down the post.
I've blurred out a lot of slurs and stuff and I'll make notes about them as I break down the post.
First, I'm not really sure why this fascist thinks Spencer and the Traditionalist Workers' party were controlled opposition or federal government collaborators but the Proud Boys and Rise Above Movement weren't. More on TWP here: splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…
Here's the thing about both the Proud Boys and Rise Above Movement: they function at least partially as fight clubs and their legal trouble pretty much all stems from that. More on RAM here: propublica.org/article/white-…
The "fight club" type groups that this poster is calling the "militant wing" of the alt-right took advantage of one of the ways you can execute fascist power with the help of state violence
After Unite the Right, there was a fracture between entryist groups, who were called "optics cucks" for trying to look clean-cut and work within the system to get their goals, and the vanguardists who wanted to attack the system from the outside.
The Proud Boys essentially try to have it both ways––occupying this political space where they can travel to "liberal" cities for protests and have quick brawls with antifascists and then spend time networking with politicians and enter the Republican party.
These days the Proud Boys are at least kind of in the "big tent" that is the Groyper movement. If you look at who's paying lip service to Fuentes, it's pretty much the same people from 2017.
When the fascist poster talks about Fuentes's movement being a "maybe too big tent" because of "prowhite" people (I blacked out the slurs for Latinx people and Afrodescendant people), they're talking about nonwhite fascists like Malkin who will spread their message.
The poster suggesting that Groypers are "maybe too big tent" because they allow nonwhite fascists in is interesting. These groups never really live up to their own idealized white standards but this is an example of how they have their own internal optics to adhere to as well.
Another note before I leave this post and go to the next: glow[slur]s or "glow-in-the-darks" are feds. I don't know exactly how that term came about, but I know I first saw it on some terror groups' telegram channels.
Another side-note about "glow-in-the-darks": The term came from Terry A. Davis, who's most well-known for Temple OS. (h/t @nezumi_ningen) @QanonAnonymous has an episode on him I'd recommend if you want the context for the term. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._…
Now, fascists are not what we in the journalism business call "reliable narrators." You have to take everything they say with a grain of salt for a lot of reasons. Even so, seeing them describe the history of their movement to each other is informative. Hence this post.
Poster says the alt-right "Started out as a lite 3rd position ideology with the likes of Alain De Benoist, Kevin Macdonald, and Tomaslav Sunic."
Names are important if you wanna understand postwar fascism and antisemitism but I don't have time to get into it all lol. Google em!
Names are important if you wanna understand postwar fascism and antisemitism but I don't have time to get into it all lol. Google em!
But what is Third Positionism you might ask? This article's a good primer on it. Basically think "Socialism but only for the fascists' in-group." A lot of the stuff Matt Heimbach got into advocating for was along this axis. splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…
This poster thinks the alt-right "turned into a shit show when it became a blanket statement for white nationalists."
In other words, the mistake was to try to "unite the right."
In other words, the mistake was to try to "unite the right."
They continue. "A white nationalist alone could be trad," "libertarian," or even a "tankie" (slang for authoritarian communist.) The movement, this fascist says, was "Inherently destined for being fractured, divided, and now conquered as everything is pretty much irrelevant now".
There are indeed white nationalist impulses that fit the bill for these different political tendencies. National Bolshevism, which Dugin was influential in, is kind of a tankie white nationalism. "Trad" is short for "traditional." There's a LOT of flavors of that.
Libertarian white nationalists? Well, there's a pretty well documented pipeline between a certain kind of macho libertarianism and the alt-right. Chris Cantwell is an example of that. I'm sure there's people who try to synthesize white nationalism and libertarian economics too.
So uniting all these tendencies is a dead end and they think the movement cliques the right has––they name The Right Stuff podcast network, the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front, and The Daily Stormer, the infamous neo-Nazi propaganda outlet––are all dead ends to this poster.
So how does this fascist answer "Where do we go from here?"
"Most of the guys I still talk to, National Socialists and Fascists, pretty much Metzger pilled. Have networks not movements, infiltrate establishment institutions, and focus on the self. Can't pour from an empty cup."
"Most of the guys I still talk to, National Socialists and Fascists, pretty much Metzger pilled. Have networks not movements, infiltrate establishment institutions, and focus on the self. Can't pour from an empty cup."
Who's Tom Metzger? He's one of the most influential figures in the American white nationalist movement. splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…
In the 80s, Metzger ran for office, lead Klansmen in fights with antiracists, organized racist rock festivals & pioneered using cable access and telephone hotlines to spread his message. The SPLC called him "a kind of ideologue and godfather figure for the racist skinhead scene."
Metzger's disciples murdered Ethiopian grad student Mulugeta Seraw in 1988. Metzger was sued by the ADL and SPLC and lost, severely weakening his organization, but he continues writing and broadcasting. In 2009, two adherents of his mail bombed a university's diversity center.
The thing about Metzger's publications is a lot of them had practical information on how to do the kind of violence his followers did. Screenshot below from the SPLC article linked above.
Metzger is an advocate of Louis Beam's concept of leaderless resistance. Leaderless resistance is the idea that white nationalists act in small groups or alone to avoid detection from the law. It's the flipside of the coin of stochastic terrorism. splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…
"Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.
In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf."
stochasticterrorism.blogspot.com
In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf."
stochasticterrorism.blogspot.com
So what does "Metzger-pilled" mean in this context? And what does this have to do with the future of the fascist movement? Well, for all the in-groups and different philosophies and all of that shit that fascists and white nationalists have, they're a movement with a continuity.
Metzger's still doing the same thing to this day. If you see the violence he inspired as returns on that work, he's absolutely a successful stochastic terrorist. At least two known attacks 20 years apart and a hell of a lot of propaganda in between. He just keeps going.
Although other actors outpaced him in terms of using the internet to disseminate and push the movement forward, Metzger did a lot to build up the networks that got white nationalism to where it was by the time the internet caught on.
I personally think the most dangerous white nationalists are the ones that don't give a shit about creating or continuing a specific ideology; they're the ones that instead throw shit at a wall and see what sticks, who build networks, who try to keep the movement overall growing.
In conclusion, I think the poster's making kind of a meta-point: it doesn't matter which trend in the movement starts getting traction. It matters that there's people willing to hunker down and do the hard, boring work of expanding it and laying the groundwork for it to get there
Before I forget, here's the updated archive link to the thread: archive.is/Wbcen
There's still a lot more to the thread. I also could be missing a lot of the picture here. Anyways, I'll keep analyzing this one. Feel free to give me feedback, more references etc. Will delete this tweet and keep digging up anything else worth noting I find on the thread.
