Daily Archives: November 17, 2020

Here, Isayamas convoluted racial coding comes to the foreground, because Isayama does construct many symbolic parallels between the Eldians and an ideal Nazi state. Eldian society is ethnically homogeneous, with the exception of a single Asian woman, and all the named Eldians have European names. (It is not clear if they are intended to be white. The pale mukokuseki or stateless default character design template used in most Japanese anime is often interpreted as Japanese in Japan and white in the U.S.) The coup against the state could be read as an anticolonial revolution, but the alt-right interprets it as a nationalist putsch against a pacifist state. The opening theme music of the show is even sung in German.

There are also parallels to Imperial Japan. Isayama explicitly based one heroic general on Imperial Japanese Army General Akiyama Yoshifuru, while fans on both the left and the right see close parallels between another character and Nazi General Erwin Rommel. Another character, Mikasa, shares her name with an Imperial Japanese battleship. Given these aesthetic decisions, perhaps it is unsurprising that one poster opened their thread, When did you realize this was fascist propaganda and that its commentary on how the good guys lost WW2?

Theres fodder for many other, sometimes contradictory, racist interpretations of the show. The Marleyan state is controlled secretly by an Eldian family, reminiscent of right-wing conspiracy theories around Jewish cabals and financiers. On the chan boards, alt-right Attack on Titan fans who detest the Eldians tend to think of the walled city as Israel and consider their expulsion and ghettoization well-deserved punishments.

A contingent of liberal commentators also identified the series as careless at best, and intentional at worst, in its invocation of antisemitic tropes. As one user tweeted, This boneheaded metaphor has the people analogous to holocaust victims literally turning into giant horrid man-eating monsters. As another observed, Attack on Titans whole Jews used to rule and brutally oppress the world and fled after losing a war and are the only people who can turn into Titans and literally eat people thing is, yknow, pretty gross and maybe a reason not to buy/read/watch it, just FYI.

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Why "Attack on Titan" Is the Alt-Right's Favorite Manga - The New Republic

Two main crises increasingly characterize the twenty-first century. The first is the climate crisis, which is leading to a dangerous and destabilized world. The second is the crisis of democracy, which is driving the rise of the authoritarian far right. The way in which these two crises intersect will have profound implications for the future of our species. For those of us on the Left, this raises uncomfortable questions that must be taken very seriously.

From Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro, right-wing politicians have repeatedly rejected the scientific consensus on climate change, spread deliberate misinformation, and opposed policies to reduce emissions. This pattern of denial and delay creates a negative feedback loop between these two crises: as trust in democracy is eroded, the climate and ecological emergency grows ever more dangerous.

Climate denial may have started as a far-right conspiracy theory, but today it is a mainstream political project, promoted by opaquely funded conservative think tanks, disseminated online by big tech companies, and written into law by paid lobbyists for the oil and gas industry. Capitalists have tied themselves to this far-right project because their short-term goals increasingly align with those of the far right. Both groups want to protect the profits of big business and shift the blame away from the rich and the powerful.

As the Right attempts to block action on climate change, it is tempting to think of environmental issues as an exclusively left-wing concern. We know that in order to meaningfully address the climate and ecological emergency, we must democratize the economy, redistribute wealth, and ensure decent living standards for all people. Surely, then, it follows that any real attempt to combat climate change will have much more in common with international socialism than with neoliberal capitalism or indeed modern-day fascism.

However, there is also a long history of right-wing environmentalism, which we ignore at our peril. Right-wing activists are now cultivating their own ecological philosophies. To conserve the environment, they argue, is a naturally conservative idea. It is therefore quite possible that a right-wing movement will emerge in the years to come that not only acknowledges the severity of the crisis, but also uses the reality of climate change to justify an increasingly authoritarian and reactionary response.

Climate change is an opportunity as much as a challenge, and the authoritarian right has always found it helpful to manufacture a crisis. Is it then so difficult to imagine that climate change, the ultimate threat to civilization, will one day be used to justify conservative politics? When resources are limited and huge portions of the globe are rendered uninhabitable, do we really think that capitalism is going to just give up and admit defeat?

It is not hard to see how environmental concerns can be incorporated into a right-wing ideology. Throughout history, capitalists have pointed to the natural world, which they claim is based upon competition and survival, to justify the systems that we, as humans, have created. This tradition also tends to emphasize the natural hierarchy of any society, contending that the strong will always outcompete the weak.

Thus, the right-wing imagination sees the natural world as a key part of our national identity that we, as patriots, are called upon to protect. In this worldview, the degradation of the living world is inextricably bound to the degradation of modern society. It perceives anything that is considered foreign or alien to be unnatural and unnecessary. This racist philosophy, also used to explain eugenics, is currently experiencing a deadly resurgence.

Last year, a white supremacist carried out a terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. He killed fifty-one people in a barbaric shooting that targeted two nearby mosques. Before carrying out this attack, the killer published a manifesto online proudly referring to himself as an eco-fascist. His manifesto railed against water pollution, plastic waste, and a society that is creating a massive burden for future generations.

This apocalyptic vision of collapse was intended to gain maximum attention online and should, therefore, be regarded with some skepticism. The alt-right has memeified modern-day fascism, and this so-called manifesto is littered with references to video games, social media, and popular culture. It is possible that the references to climate change are another deliberate distraction, but that is not how his supporters interpreted it.

Months later, there was another shooting in El Paso, Texas, directly inspired by the first shooting in Christchurch. The killer referenced similar ecological themes in his own manifesto and declared himself a supporter of the Christchurch shooter. Just one week later, another white supremacist launched afailed attack on a mosque in Norway. He described the Christchurch shooter as a saint and called on others to emulate the attacks.

For now, proponents of eco-fascism are mostly organizing online. However, there have been concerted attempts to take this movement off the internet and onto the streets. Richard Spencer, the man who popularized the term alt-right, does not deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. In fact, he sees it as an important part of his politics.

Spencer once tweeted that population control was the obvious solution to the ravages of climate change, and wrote a manifesto for the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, arguing that European countries should invest in national parks, wilderness preserves, and wildlife refuges, as well as productive and sustainable farms. The protesters in Charlottesville picked up this theme, marching through the streets chanting an old Nazi slogan, blood and soil.

Fascism is not a new ideology, of course and neither, for that matter, is eco-fascism. The slogan blood and soil was originally coined by Richard Walter Darr, a high-ranking functionary in theNazi Party, to create a mystical link between the German people and their sacred homeland. This ideology stressed that ethnic identity was based on blood and thereby sought to portray Jews, whom Darr referred to as weeds, as a rootless race, unable to forge a true relationship with the land.

Fascists have, in the past, been able to synthesize far-right ideology with a kind of basic, unnuanced environmentalism. Indeed, many people in the Nazi Party thought of themselves as environmentalists. In their book Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier reject the notion that the green wing of the Nazi Party were a group of innocents, confused and manipulated idealists, or reformers from within:

They were conscious promoters and executors of a vile program explicitly dedicated to inhuman racist violence, massive political repression and worldwide military domination.

The Nazi green wing had, at one point, a significant sway over the movement. Hitler could extoll the virtues of renewable energy in detail, once declaring that water, winds and tides were the energy path of the future. The youth movement was also an important recruiting tool: by synthesizing their love of nature with the violent doctrine of white supremacy, the Nazis were able to indoctrinate a new generation of young, patriotic fascists.

The term eco-fascist is now used so frequently that it has been rendered almost meaningless. It is, for example, often used by right-wing climate deniers in an attempt to smear all environmentalists as authoritarian zealots. In Britain, James Delingpole is the author of The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism, which frames environmental concerns as a left-wing plot to frighten your kids, drive up energy costs and hike your taxes.

Delingpole has previously described climate activist Greta Thunberg as a 16-year old autistic kid and stated that hanging is far too good for climate scientists. According to Delingpole, climate activists want to usher in the eco-fascist New World Order, while actual fascists like the El Paso shooter are not quite the right-wing, Trump-voting, white nationalists that they have been played up to be in the media.

On the other end of the political spectrum, many left-wing commentators now see eco-fascism as one of only two choices ultimately facing us. Rosa Luxemburg once popularized the slogan socialism or barbarism. Today, many eco-socialists speak of a choice between eco-socialism or eco-barbarism. There is, therefore, an unhelpful tendency on the Left to categorize any right-wing response to the climate crisis as a direct product of eco-fascism. Often, what they are actually referring to is a natural product of capitalism. Environmental racism is, after all, not the preserve of fascists.

However, we shouldnt allow ourselves to be derailed by a futile terminological debate about what constitutes eco-fascism. The contemporary far right is not a homogenous entity. It is a complex alliance of individuals, groups, and parties with a wide range of beliefs. Their ideology is constantly in flux, and fascism is just one part of a wider political ecology, which has a way of attaching itself to other movements.

Today, the most pressing concern is not a small subculture of online eco-fascists. It is the various ways in which eco-fascist ideas are taking root in mainstream right-wing politics.

Last year, right-wing populist parties won almost a quarter of the seats in the European Parliament. These parties are generally united on the issues of immigration, defense, and international security, but they increasingly diverge on the question of climate change.

While many parties still engage in the right-wing project of climate denial, others have started taking an altogether different approach. In France, Marine Le Pen claims to believe in climate change. In fact, she says that she wants to turn France into the worlds leading ecological civilization.

This is a very sudden shift in the politics of the far right, which should be approached with great caution. Le Pen supports nuclear power as the energy source of the future and talks about the natural world in a distinctly nationalistic tone. She refuses to engage with other countries in issues of international diplomacy and has nothing substantial to say on the greatest issues of our age. When her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, led the party, the National Front denied that anthropogenic climate change even existed. Today, his daughter is desperate to detoxify the party.

In Britain, a similar pattern is emerging. While far-right parties in the United Kingdom tend to downplay the scientific consensus on climate change, they often speak confidently about protecting the English countryside. The United Kingdom Independence Party has a vision of England rooted in a pastoral vision of old Albion. The British National Party peddles a similar line, but spells it out more explicitly, claiming to be the only party to recognize that overpopulation whose primary driver is immigration, as revealed by the governments own figures is the cause of the destruction of our environment.

Right-wing parties frequently present an array of contradictory beliefs about the environment. An older generation often still supports the project of climate denial, while younger activists are much more likely to accept that anthropogenic climate change is real and are keen to use it to their advantage. In a similar way, the alt-right movement is made up of both climate deniers and eco-fascists, two seemingly disparate groups that happily coexist online. When push comes to shove, they are fascists first and foremost, with any environmental sensibilities distinctly secondary.

Right-wing leaders also understand that the world we live in is increasingly divided. Different messages work on different people and can be individually tailored to distinct subcultures, thanks in part to the internet. It is a strategic advantage if your ideology is adaptable and ambiguous enough to accommodate as many people as possible.

Recently, the QAnon conspiracy theory has undergone a deadly resurgence. Right-wing activists have mobilized their networks to spread disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, targeting groups that one might not naturally associate with the far right. A recent survey concluded that one in four Britons now believe in the QAnon conspiracy theory.

There are fears that this brand of conspiracism has become particularly widespread among the well-being and wellness community, a subculture that one might expect to lean toward the left-wing politics of the green movement. Could the same thing happen to climate activists? Or is it already happening?

In March, an account that claimed to represent a local branch of Extinction Rebellion posted a photograph of a sticker with a dangerous slogan: corona is the cure humans are the disease. A white supremacist group known as the Hundred-Handers produced the stickers and disseminated them. However, many people assumed that it was the work of genuine climate activists. The fact that it seemed credible was a huge part of the problem. In Britain, the climate movement has openly struggled with issues of racial and economic justice.

Indeed, the environmental movement has always had a somewhat confused relationship with the far right. Many of the first people to call themselves conservationists were also white supremacists. Madison Grant, for example, was an American zoologist who was a staunch supporter of race science as well. In 1916, he published The Passing of the Great Race, a pseudoscientific work that lamented the loss of the Nordic people. This racist tract inspired Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist.

Decades later, Dave Foreman became a controversial figure in the American climate movement. Foreman once said that the worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve. His colleague Christopher Manes welcomed the AIDS epidemic as a necessary solution to the population problem.

Foremans most recent book, Man Swarm, argues that human overpopulation is the primary cause of the climate and ecological emergency. He describes the United States as an overflow pond for reckless overbreeding in Central America and Mexico.

The vast majority of environmentalists would, thankfully, find these views abhorrent. However, concerns about population growth and immigration have often been foundational to the modern green movement. To ignore that history would be a dangerous mistake.

In Britain, for example, the modern Green Party, originally known as the PEOPLE Party, was founded by a right-wing councilor, Tony Whittaker, and his wife Lesley after they read an interview in Playboywith Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. Ehrlichs book sounded the alarm about the growing population of the Global South and presented population control as the most important component of climate action.

Ehrlich recounted his experience of emotionally understanding the concept of overpopulation while looking out across a Delhi slum through the window of a taxi, and seeing people, people, people, people who were begging and defecating at every turn.

The European climate movement has always had a problem with racism. In the 1970s, Herbert Gruhl was a key early player in the German Greens, the most successful ecological party in Europe. Gruhl had previously been involved in far-right groups and called for an end to immigration for ecological reasons. He eventually left the party, claiming that the Greens had given up their concern for ecology in favour of a leftist ideology of emancipation, and went to establish a right-wing party instead, but his views remained influential in the European climate movement.

The dissident East German Marxist Rudolf Bahro expressed similar concerns. In his 1987 book The Logic of Salvation, he wrote: The ecology and peace movement is the first popular German movement since the Nazi movement. It must co-redeem Hitler. The opportunity, according to Bahro, was that today, there is a call in the depths of the Volk for a Green Adolf.

There is something about the enormity of climate change that can change people. Just ten years earlier, Bahro had identified himself as an eco-socialist, saying red and green, green and red, go well together. In Socialism and Survival, a book written nearly forty years ago with a very contemporary feel, Bahro put forward a persuasive argument on the need to combine socialism and environmentalism.

Murray Bookchin publicly debated Bahro and Dave Foreman, reproaching both men for their authoritarian approach to climate change. Bookchin argued that environmentalism without socialism was sure to end in disaster. When Bahro accused him of ignoring the dark side of humanity, Bookchin replied that the dark side of human nature emerges from a social foundation that we choose to indulge. A would-be ecological dictatorship, Bookchin told Bahro, would not be ecological it would finally finish off the planet altogether.

Today, there are still some environmentalists who turn toward authoritarianism as a solution to ecological breakdown. James Lovelock, the scientist who developed the Gaia theory, has argued that democracy must be suspended to deal with climate change:

Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war.

Another scientist, Mayer Hillman agrees:

Can you see everyone in a democracy volunteering to give up flying? Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan? Can you see the majority agreeing to restrict the size of their families?

This worrying trend of thought appears to be growing. It is, we should note, particularly prevalent among old white men living in wealthy Western countries.

This is what happens when environmentalism gives up. In the years to come, the Right are going to offer more pragmatic and realistic solutions to climate change, based on piecemeal change and fantasy solutions. They are going to demonize climate refugees and tell us that left-wing environmentalists want the citizens of rich, developed countries to give up everything they now possess.

One of the dreadful solutions they offer will surely be population control. Right now, it is something they only dare whisper about, but this idea will inevitably spill out into the public sphere in the not too distant future. Unlike other solutions to climate change, this one has been a part of far-right ecological politics from the start.

Any modern history of population control could start with Pentti Linkola, another proponent of eco-fascism. Pentti Linkola called for a severe reduction in the human population in order to tackle climate change. He developed his own ethical framework, which he dubbed lifeboat ethics:

When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ships axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

Demography is obviously a factor in the climate change calculation, but it is by no means the most important one. Population growth is now flattening out, while other, more important parts of the calculation are growing exponentially. Consumption and inequality are far more pressing concerns. Even taking into account the current trend in population growth, we have enough wealth and resources to provide a decent standard of living for every person on Earth while still reducing emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.

The Right has managed to successfully depoliticize the climate crisis. It was reportedly Herbert Gruhl who coined the slogan we are neither left nor right we are in front. Environmental movements elsewhere have taken up this slogan; Andrew Yang even used it in his bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee. For too long, the mainstream environmental movement has thought of climate change as something beyond politics. History shows that this approach can lead to devastating and barbaric consequences.

Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier give us a stark comparison with the youth movement in Nazi Germany:

The various strands of the youth movement shared a common self-conception: they were a purportedly non-political response to a deep cultural crisis, stressing the primacy of direct emotional experience over social critique and action. This posture lent itself all too readily to a very different kind of political mobilization: the unpolitical zealotry of fascism. Its countercultural energies and its dreams of harmony with nature bore the bitterest fruit. This is, perhaps, the unavoidable trajectory of any movement which acknowledges and opposes social and ecological problems but does not recognize their systemic roots or actively resist the political and economic structures which generate them. Eschewing societal transformation in favour of personal change, an ostensibly apolitical disaffection can, in times of crisis, yield barbaric results.

The dangerous and violent philosophy of far-right environmentalism is slowly being normalized. After the El Paso massacre, Jeet Heer noted how banal much of the killers manifesto now seemed, echoing many of the nativist passions of mainstream Trumpism.

Fascism has often been described as capitalism in decay. The ecological emergency is surely the clearest proof of this. Our political and economic elites either do not understand the ramifications of their actions, which have driven the climate crisis, or simply do not care enough to stop it.

Take the Conservative Party in Britain. Just five years ago, Boris Johnson openly engaged in climate denial. Today, Johnson is prime minister, and like many right wing-leaders across Europe, he has been forced to accept the scientific consensus on climate change. The Tory politician now claims that he wants the United Kingdom to become the Saudi Arabia of wind power, and calls himself a complete evangelist for as yet unproven technologies such as carbon capture and storage.

The British government is betting on technological fixes to solve the climate crisis. Thus, one form of extractive industry will simply be replaced by another. We will continue to extract minerals from the Global South and turn a blind eye to human rights abuses in the global supply chain, pursuing infinite growth on a finite planet. At the same time, we will continue to drift ever more rightward.

Over the last year, the Conservatives have stepped up their racist rhetoric on immigration, demonizing refugees and threatening to deploy warships in the English Channel. They have considered sending asylum seekers to offshore detention centers while pushing legislation through parliament to limit the prosecution of British soldiers for war crimes and allow state agents to commit crimes like murder and torture. The British authorities have classified climate protesters as domestic extremists and banned books that are critical of capitalism from schools.

These violent and barbaric policies, pursued by the dominant political forces throughout Europe and North America, will ultimately lead to the death or displacement of hundreds of millions of people. Therefore, the struggle for climate justice must also be a struggle for economic and racial emancipation.

The two great crises of our age the climate emergency and the decline of democracy stem from a much bigger crisis: the ongoing crisis of capitalism. In order to address that, we need to oppose far-right environmentalism and build a climate movement that is both anti-fascist and anti-capitalist. We have to be ever vigilant against the threat of eco-fascism, and ensure the climate movement is not susceptible to the violent and dangerous solutions of the Right.

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The Climate Movement Must Be Ready To Challenge Rising Right-Wing Environmentalism - Jacobin magazine

Demonstrations promoted by right-wing conspiracy theorists and white nationalists are expected downtown Saturday. Will people come by the thousands, or dozens?

WASHINGTON There was intense trepidation that the 2018 Unite the Right 2 rally could live up to its namesake, serving as a sequel to Charlottesville and unleashing violence in the nations capital. Police prepared for hundreds of alt-right protesters, as the event garnered attention on social media channels and in the global press.

But ultimately, only a few dozen provocateurs boarded a train at the Vienna / Fairfax-GMU Metro station to begin their pilgrimage. When they alighted in Foggy Bottom, their bullhorns were drowned out by the jeers of a city that knew they were coming.

Far-right protesters were dwarfed in size and spirit on Aug. 12, 2018. What was supposed to conclude in a crescendo in Lafayette Park ended awkwardly without ceremony, in a whimper.

Could the same dynamic unfold on Saturday, when events promoted by conservative conspiracy theorists and white nationalists converge in Freedom Plaza?

The reason that was such a small number of people in 2018, versus the year before in Charlottesville, was the lawsuits and criminal charges that were pending related to the homicide of counter-protester Heather Heyer, retired FBI special agent Tom OConnor said. The people organizing the Unite the Right 2 rally were being sued civilly, and there was also internal strife within the organizations that brought the event together, which happens very often in extremist activity.

OConnor served for 23 years on the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force in the Washington field office, and now serves as principal consultant with FEDSquared Consulting LLC.

Faced with the preliminary details of the weekend events and a far-right social media ecosystem seemingly unwilling to accept President Trumps defeat, OConnor said the outcome of this weekend's demonstrations will be far more difficult to predict than the events of August 2018.

My fear is that, as we go forward through this cycle, moving towards the inaugural, the side that feels like theyve had this election stolen from them, youre going to have extremist elements in these groups, that could act out in lone offender violence, O'Connor said. That would be unfortunate for the country, but it is far from unlikely.

O'Connor stressed the careful balancing act federal and District law enforcement will be undertaking - protecting First Amendment assemblies while monitoring the main events and peripheries for potential violence.

"On the outsides of these protected activities, you're going to have fringe elements that have violence in their nature," he said. "And some of these groups you're hearing about have had individuals who pare off to do violent actions."

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Could MAGA protests in DC end like Unite the Right 2 rally, in a whimper? - WUSA9.com

Amongst all the talk of the 2020 election, its easy to forget everything that led up to Donald Trump winning the presidency in 2016. But if you keep your eyes shut and concentrate you might remember a few things: heated debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton, a chaotic Twitter landscape, and an otherwise cute frog that became the mascot of internet-savvy 4chan users who were trying to meme Trump into the presidency.

Back in 2016, Pepe the Frog was added to the Anti-Defamation Leagues database of hate symbols. But before that, he was just a part of a layabout group of friends in Matt Furies comic series Boys Club. He was never intended for anything but a good time. But when the internet got ahold of him, he became a face of the NEET 4chan masses and ultimately a symbol of the so-called alt-right.

The documentary Feels Good Man, which is currently available on PBS and several streaming services, traces that journey. It also chronicles how Furie, a mild-mannered San Francisco artist, attempted to reclaim Pepe and turn him back into a symbol of love. Its a formidable task, but perhaps not impossible. As filmmakers Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini show in their doc, Pepe actually became a symbol of resistance to authoritarian rule during the protests in Hong Kong just last year.

In this weeks episode of the Get WIRED podcast, senior editor Angela Watercutter talks to Jones and Angelini about the journey they went on with the creator of Pepeand what the little green frog means now.

How to Listen

You can listen to Get WIRED through the audio player on this page, and subscribe for free wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Can Pepe the Frog Ever Be Redeemed? - WIRED

They call him Marshal Tweeto.

Janez Jansa, the right-wing prime minister of Slovenia, used Twitter to declare Donald J. Trump the winner of the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 4, saying, Its pretty clear that American people have elected @realDonaldTrump @Mike_Pence for #4moreyears.

Alas, this turned out to be, as Jansas hero likes to say, fake newsalthough Jansa has doubled down on it since. But the tweet was nothing new for the Slovenian prime minister. Jansa has moved from left to far-right over the years. He was once one of the founders of an independent Slovenia who had made his name in the 1980s as a journalist, writing for the left-leaning magazine Mladina. In 1988, he was arrested by the Yugoslavian authorities for publishing a stream of military leaks. After popular protests for his release, he joined the political movement that won the first democratic elections in Slovenia in 1990.

In 1993 he became the president of the right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), and he still holds the title to this day. He is also a three-time prime ministerbut after a vote of no confidence in 2013, he was sentenced to two years in prison on corruption charges. The sentence was confirmed by the Higher Court in Ljubljana in April 2014, but subsequently unanimously overturned by the Constitutional Court of Slovenia a year later.

Jansa is a avid Twitter user, using social media to insult journalists, political opponents, the general public, and anybody who does not agree with him. Peddling misinformation on his Twitter profile is pretty usual for the prime minister. In July, he retweeted a video from the QAnon series The Fall of Cabal, which details an ugly conspiracy theory, and invited people to join him on the Parler social network, where he follows far-right figures such as Paul Joseph Watson, Katie Hopkins, Jack Posobiec, and Alex Jones conspiracy network Infowars.

He also likes to attack journalists and public figures, insulting them and spreading falsehoods about them. According to the SparkToro Fake Followers Audit, nearly 75 percent of his Twitter followers are fake, but his tweets are regularly picked up by mainstream media outlets in Slovenia, extending their reach.

Jansa has a two-prong approach to media relations, said Andraz Zorko, a public opinion expert, where he uses Twitter to form outrageous statements that agitate the general public and his opponents, and at the same time appears perfectly rational in traditional media outlets.

In the summer of 2015, Jansa and his colleagues from the SDS funded and launched a media outlet called Nova24TV. Its slogan is First in the service of truth, but the reality is anything but. The party-linked propaganda outlet spews regular falsehoods on the refugee crisis, Muslims, and the LGBTQ community, spinning and twisting the truth in order to fit the right-wing party agenda. Left-wing parties have labeled it a hate factory.

Like Trump, Jansa ended up with nothing but yes men around himself, effectively starting to drink his own Kool-Aid, dispensed by the very media apparatus he created in order to disrupt the liberal democratic consensus, explained Aljaz Bitenc Pengov, a political analyst.

I am not surprised that the prime minister running a fake-news government would publicly endorse the fake-news electoral victory of incumbent Donald Trump, said Anuska Delic, editor in chief at Ostro, a center for investigative journalism in the Adriatic region. In a year and a half since the launch of Ostros media fact-checking project, the media controlled by the SDS and majority-owned by members of the inner circle of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have been the main sources of fake news, disinformation, and misinformation in Slovenia.

Our findings indicate a symbiotic relationship between the party, its policies and goals, and the content that is being churned out by this media, Delic explained. At publication, the content is usually disseminated on social media by the partys members (many of them current public officials), its sympathizers, and possibly trolls to exert pressure on opponents and skew the public debate. The same methods are also used on unruly journalists who receive questions from one of these media which usually concern their professional or personal activities, or those of their family members. That content is further used to smear, harass, and attack reporters online.

In 2016, Hungarian investors joined the Nova24TV media venture with an investment of 800,000 euros that turned out to be connected to the Orban regime. They invested again in 2018, bringing a total sum of Hungarian investments into the SDS-related propaganda outlets to more than 3.5 million euros.

Nova24TVs other income is sourced from advertising contracts with partially state-owned companies such as Telekom Slovenije, insurance company Triglav, the Petrol Group, and others which, when publicly called out, could not explain the market reasoning behind them. Critics say they fund the channel to suck up to the party in power.

According to Primoz Cirman, editor of media outlet necenzurirano.si, The Orban-Jansa alliance formed after the so-called migrant crisis in 2015. Bothsaw the opportunity to establish themselves as defenders of Christian Europe. Jansas motives were logical. In 2014, the SDS lost a parliamentary election while he was in jail. As a result, the party needed a new platform, and Jansa found one in anti-globalism. There was only one problem: SDS needed channels for spreading its new ideas, so it started to establish its own media outlets. Since 2017, a huge influx of Hungarian capital has come into media companies, established by prominent SDS members or the party itself.

Nova24TVs website and TV station of the same name are just the central parts of Jansas propaganda empire in Slovenia. His party is also connected to more than 20 local online media outlets that are used to anneal the messages of party propaganda, which are further distributed by a network of Twitter and Facebook accounts.

By analyzing his Twitter behavior, we can note that the prime minister is spending more and more time on Twitter, said Maja Cimerman of Today Is a New Day, a Slovenian nongovernmental organization. During the U.S. elections, we calculate he spent at least three full hours a day on Twitter, with tweets appearing even at 4:30 in the morning. His behavior often indicates a form of escapism from the actual issues in the country, connected with the second pandemic wave where government policies are sorely lacking effectiveness, she adds.

Jansa owes more than just his media network to the neighboring Hungarian autocrat. He won the general election in the summer of 2018 but was unable to form a coalition, since other major parties denounced his hard-right stance. A New York Times article from June 2018 drew connections between Orban and Jansa, claiming that Jansa was following Orbans footsteps. Orban praised Jansa on Nova24TV during the election campaign in 2018, saying, Jansa is exactly the kind of leader Slovenia needs.

From 2018 until the spring of 2020, Jansas party was busy developing a relationship with Orban and other leaders of countries in the Visegrad Group. The COVID-19 pandemic offered a new window of opportunity.

In March, the countrys center-left coalition fell apart, and Jansa was able to form a center-right coalition with him at the helm and other right-wing and centrist parties playing second fiddle to his regime. He immediately went to work, proposing legislation to gut the public media outlet RTV Slovenija, shift more public money into funding his propaganda outlets, and repress NGOs.

At the same time, Orban and Jansa started forging long-term strategic cooperation, including efforts to tie the two countries power grids together and potentially build a new joint oil pipeline. Also in the talks were military contracts between the two countries, since the Slovenian government recently approved a military investment budget of a staggering 780 million euros over the next six years.

The alliance grew stronger and expanded to North Macedonia, where the same Hungarian proxies bought several media outlets that support right-wing party VMRO-DPMNE, Cirman explained. SDS and [Orbans party] Fidesz are virtually synchronized in European Parliament voting. Jansa was one of the few European leaders that opposed the rule of law as a condition for any EU member to be eligible for EU coronavirus funds. The alliance presents a new challenge for Slovenia, as Hungary has strong economic, cultural, and political interests in our country, especially in the field of infrastructure, energy, and banking.

Beyond Orban, Jansa favors the global alt-right. Jansa is no stranger to retweeting other outlets such as the Daily Caller, Project Veritas, Breitbart, PragerU, and other far-right Twitter accounts. Media outlets connected with Jansa and the SDS feature interviews with controversial guests from the global alt-right universe such as Kevin MacDonald, Daniel Friberg, Martin Sellner, and Renaud Camus, all of whom Jansa regularly retweets.

Jansas affection for the global neo-Nazi movement is simply an extension of his right-wing politics,explained Boris Vezjak, a philosopher and professor at the University of Maribor. These [shared] feelings are then reflected in the connections of the SDS party with the Generation Identity movement or in supporting local neo-Nazi groups to break up anti-government protests, he added.

As with Slovenian paramilitary units, Serbia has also seen the formation of anti-migration self-organized groups, said Katja Lihtenvalner, a researcher at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability. In Bosnia we followed the formation of vigilantes and groups who were increasingly taking matters in their own hands, under the pretext of protecting the safety of others and public order. Generally, the impression is that authorities themselves are not able or willing to prevent the formation of such groups, the most radical of which are in Slovenia, where self-appointed ultranationalist groups were patrolling the border with fake guns and military uniforms.

Jansa has many political enemies, but his politics are a grim reminder of the turn things have taken in Slovenia.

Barbara Rajgelj, an assistant professor of law at the University of Ljubljana, explained: For the past 30 years, we were convinced Slovenian society was autocracy-resistant, but we are now seeing that isnt true. Part of this irresponsible public media tolerance was that Jansa was never confronted about his statements made on Twitter, even though his attacks towards the public media are well documented.

The future, however, looks bright for Jansa right now.

With a parliamentary majority in which Jansas party is calling the shots, while weaker coalition partners tremble in silence , the pandemic allows him to repress anti-government protests, a general culture of fear which makes people afraid to speak out because of fear of retribution, Slovenians are walking down the path of failed states. Despite Jansas having promoted far-right figures and built a propaganda network funded by a foreign regime, many Slovenians are still attracted to his maverick way of constructing his own reality, which is slowly sucking the air out of Sloveniaone tweet at a time.

More:

Slovenia's Prime Minister Is a Far-Right Conspiracy Theorist and Twitter Addict Who Won't Admit Trump Lost - Foreign Policy

Reading the pages ofThe Atlanticthis morning, David Frum opines that the Republican Party has two choices before it.

Simply put, Republicans caneither retrench into Trumpism or they can become more like Democrats or as Frum puts it, become more secular, more diverse, more accepting of female leadership which seems like odd advice from a party that just finished eviscerating Justice Amy Coney Barrett for the better part of a month.

With the death of Virginias mainstream media, the opinion columns have by and large moved online. Most of them have chimed in with varying degrees of value, but a quick summary will run as follows:

Lowell Feldover at the Democratic flagshipBlue Virginiaprognosticates thatDemocrats enjoy the latitude for infightingmoving into 2021 while Republicans continue to be in a three-way civil war (one of whose factions actually uses Civil War imagery).

Meanwhile over atBacons Rebellion,writerJames Sherlockstates facts pretty plainly:

Until there is a Republican Party of Virginia, not the current Republican Party of me, the party candidates will remain eclectic to the point of statewide incoherence. Not sure who has the juice to pull that together.

The inestimableJames A. Baconwhoshepherds what has to be one of the more informative bastions of intellectual policy thought in Virginiaobserves that the polarization of power in Virginia is much larger than Trump. With Democrats holding every statewide office, the question at large is whether Republicans (and specifically conservatives) can still muster a challenge?

Once the mainstay of conservative thought and opinion in Virginia, the old flagship ofBearing Driftseems to enjoy more left-of-center commentators than conservatives ones. Former Republican DelegateChris Saxmanbemoans the current state of affairson Grace Street;Steve Brodie Tuckerwrites on howthe Republican Party is irreparably damagedand calls for a third party;D.J. McGuire formerly a hard nosed anti-Communist until recently and now a hard nosed progressive Democrat points towards what moves behind the curtain an effort to build a third party.

This does not make their erstwhile rivals atThe Bull Elephantany more friendly, as their flirtation as the mouthpiece of the the alt-right in Virginia dithers from embarrassing to absolutely outrageous at any given moment.

Cathy McNicklewrites on howthe strategy of terror oscillating between COVID and BLM/Antifa workedto grind down Republicans who otherwise might have re-elected Trump in a landslide.Mark Jaworowskiwonders aloud onhow the alt-right can be coalesced into a wider coalition of smart right leadershipwith alt-right energy.

Yes, these voicesactuallyexistin the Republican Party of Virginia.

NewcomerKerry Dougherty(formerly of theVirginan Pilot) andBrian Kirwinrespectively have not chimed in with their prognostications, thoughDougherty sure does wag a finger towards the Biden campaignfor being sore winners.

Ouch.

Last but not least,Robert Zullowith the left-leaning (and dark money funded)Virginia Mercuryhas some basic and well-intended truths to lay on the table, namely the nature and feature of that all encompassing term: GRIFT.

For example, the Republican Party of Virginia launched an election integrity fund in attempt to siphon more money out of its voters ostensibly on behalf of the guy who has helped lose the Virginia GOP every statewide election, control of the General Assembly and three House of Representative seats since he took office.

Needless to say, I think we can distill the wisdom of the blogerati as such:

Virginia Republicans simply arent tacking into this headwind well, if at all.

Typically in any sort of After Action Report, you have four considerations: objectives, results, pathways, and goals.

The objective and the result should be self-evident at this rate. The pathways our processes, causes, what-happened, what worked, what broke apart, and most importantlywhy are where we have been stuck since the Jeff Frederick era.

Everyone knows what is broken; no one wants to fix it.

As it stands now, the Republican Party of Virginia is about to engage in a five-way civil war of its own and the winner take what few spoils remain.

This is not to say that anyone who hails from one of these camps is 100% on board in each. Some candidates will be able to unite the various camps.

Rare candidates will be able to unite them all (one thinks of Jim Gilmores campaign for governor in 1997 as an example of such quality).

The great task of Rich Anderson as chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia is to get all these camps to work together against a wider opposition, one where all the voices get a seat at the table in any future majority/administrationandwhere all five camps (and various candidates) believe the nomination contest was adjudicated fairly, evenly, and without bias or pressure.

This will still require the discipline to weed out those who are poisonous to that essential unity. The alt-right cannot be part of this coalition; racial and ethnic sentiment cannot be part of this coalition; religious intolerance cannot be part of this equation.

The larger point is that unlike the emotional attachment Democrats gave to Obama and Clinton the left misses the fact that most Republicans viewed Trump as a vehicle for ideas, not as a cause unto himself.

That Republicans are not burning down our cities or behaving like BLM/Antifa shocks most observers on the left who were hoping for a similar temper tantrum.

Sorry. Not happening.

But we have to be considerate moving forward that we will require candidates and qualities that remain sensitive to the idea that we will only recapture majorities and statewide offices in Virginia by speaking the languages, hopes and fears of the broader Republican coalition in Virginia which means we go back into the suburbs, find our inner Jack Kemp, and start presenting an alternative to socialism that is uniquely American.

Above all else? Republicans need to start deeply considering whether our party infrastructure requires an update.If the RPV Advance actually comes off this year(and I think it will), the presentation of an After Action Report with recommendations to State Central on how it can effectively reform into a membership-driven party is critical.

We have great difficulties to surmount in 2021. The good news is that most difficulties are surmounted by leadership. The great news is that Virginia Republicans have never lacked for great leadership.

Read the original:

So Now What, Virginia? - The Republican Standard