Daily Archives: January 19, 2021

In an eloquent defense of life, marriage, and religious liberty known as The Manhattan Declaration, authors Chuck Colson, Professor Robert George, and Dr. Timothy George wrote, There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Recently, new allegations from biographer and historian Dr. David Garrow have escalated concerns about Dr. Kings moral failings, especially his sexual exploits and mistreatment of women. Many Christians are also rightly troubled by Dr. Kings unorthodox theological views, especially his views about the resurrection of Christ and salvation that are outside of historic Christianity.

At the same time, as a work of moral philosophy, Colson and the Georges are absolutely correct about their assessment of Dr. Kings Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It is unparalleled in its clarity about the nature of law, what constitutes an unjust law, and our responsibility to respond to unjust laws.

Twenty years ago, Chuck Colson reflected on Dr. Kings legacy, and the most important contributions from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: Here is Chuck Colson:

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is out of harmony with the moral law.

It was with these very words, in his memorable Letter from the Birmingham Jail, that Martin Luther King, Jr., threw down the gauntlet in his great Civil Rights crusade. King refused to obey what he regarded as an immoral law that did not square with the law of God.

All across America today, millions of people are celebrating the birthday of this courageous man, and deservedly so. He was a fearless battler for truth, and all of us are in his debt because he remedied past wrongs and brought millions of Americans into the full riches of citizenship.

In schools and on courthouse steps, people will be quoting his I Have a Dream speech today. It is an elegant and powerful classic. But I would suggest that one of Dr. Kings greatest accomplishments, one which will be little mentioned today because it has suddenly become politically incorrect, is his advocacy of the true moral foundations of law.

King defended the transcendent source of the laws authority. In doing so he took a conservative Christian view of law. In fact, he was perhaps the most eloquent advocate of this viewpoint in his time, as, interestingly, Justice Clarence Thomas may be today.

Writing from a jail cell, King declared that the code of justice is not mans law: It is Gods law. Imagine a politician making such a comment today. We all remember the controversy that erupted weeks ago when George W. Bush made reference to his Christian faith in a televised national debate.

But King built his whole case on the argument, set forth by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that An unjust law is no law at all. To be just, King argued, our laws must always reflect Gods Law.

This is the great issue today in the public square: Is the law rooted in truth? Is it transcendent, immutable, and morally binding? Or is it, as liberal interpreters have suggested, simply what courts say it is? Do we discover the law, or do we create it?

Ever since Dr. Kings day, the United States Supreme Court has been moving us step-by-step away from the positions of this great Civil Rights leader. To continue in this direction, as I have written, can only lead to disastrous consequencesindeed, the loss of self-governing democracy.

So, I would challenge each of us today to use this occasion to reflect not just on his great crusade for Civil Rights but also on Martin Luther Kings wisdom in bringing law back to its moral foundations.

Many think of King as some kind of liberal firebrand, but when it comes to the law he was a great conservative who stood on the shoulders of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, striving without apology to restore our heritage of justice.

This is a story I tell in my book, How Now Shall We Live?: a great moment in history when a courageous man applied the law of God to the unjust laws of our time, and made a difference.

And that is the lesson we should teach our kids on this holiday. It is not just another day off from school or a day to go to the mall.

That was Chuck Colson. Read through Kings letter today. Discuss it with your kids. I think you will find it to be an incredibly important civics lesson.

This commentary by Chuck Colsons first aired February 18, 1998.

Publication date: January 18, 2020

Photo courtesy: Minnesota Historical Society/Wikimedia Commons

BreakPointis a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.

John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN),and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.

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Dr. King and the Nature of Law - Christianheadlines.com

I still remember brimming with excitement when my parents announced the imminent arrival of a brand-new scooter. Although I was just six years old, the idea of a new vehicle coming home was enough to send me into a frenzy. Every day, Id frantically enquire about its arrival and, more importantly, if I could ride it. The reply to this was always, Beta, youre just six. All in good time. That cemented the TVS Scootys appeal in my mind forever. I knew that when I turned 18 (or maybe 17), it would be the machine Id learn to ride on.

The Scooty arrived in June of 1998, the same year this magazine was formed. My mom was the most excited because she would be the one riding it around the streets of Chennai. At the time, my father was stationed in the city due to work, and so the Scootys registration is from Tamil Nadu. It arrived in a dark green colour scheme, and those guardrails all around were optional extras.

What I did not know at the time was just how popular the Scooty was. Its production began in 1996, and by the time we got ours, most small scooters were generically referred to as a Scooty. This, of course, was before the days of the Honda Activa. None of this information mattered to me, though. All I remember from that time was sitting on the pillion seat, holding onto my mum for dear life as she got us to our badminton practice in time. There was no question about it the Scooty was a sprightly little thing, and I couldnt wait to be old enough to ride it.

Before I could, though, it was my sister who would first have a go, and it became her mode of transport during her college days in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Sadly, my sister didnt really have any great affection for the old girl, and there were many times when she left it on the streets of Gandhinagar, simply because it ran out of (2T-mixed) petrol. I vividly remember the time when we were visiting my sister and found the Scooty parked outside someone elses house, with plants growing out of it. As far as I was concerned, this was the last straw. I felt so sorry for our little scooter that I walked it to the petrol pump in the pouring rain to get it fixed enough to be sent back home to Gurugram. I was 17 years old and raring to have a go on it. Finally, it was finally my turn.

The Scootys lightweight body and easy handling were the first things that struck me. The second was the acceleration from the 59.9cc air-cooled two-stroke engine which produced 3.5 bhp and 0.45 kgm. Not earth-shattering numbers, I agree, but did they need to be? As far as I was concerned, all that mattered was the fact that I had to simply hit the big yellow button on the right-hand side to get up and go. The starter motor sounds like a classroom bell gone horribly wrong, but who cares?

Even today, I get that same feeling I did 10 years ago theres a spirit of adventure every time I climb aboard the Scooty. Granted that the adventure was only till the nearest park or the market, but at that age, it was an adventure nonetheless. Sure, the fuel tank is just 3.5 litres and two-stroke engines are now considered politically incorrect, but for us, this Scooty is more than just a vehicle. Its a look into our past, a simple two-wheeler from a simpler (and arguably happier) time. Everyone in my family from my grandfather to me has ridden it, and hopefully the chain will continue.

After doing up the engine completely, and with new rims and starter motor, our Scooty has gotten a new lease of life, but its still far from complete. Theres a lot to be done to make it like new again, and I, for one, couldnt be more excited. In that regard, its like falling in love with your high-school sweetheart all over again. Imagine that puppy love from all those years ago turning into a loving relationship. Quite the dream, isnt it? Thankfully, for all of us at the Jakhar household, its a reality.

PHOTOS Jassi Singh

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Close Encounters Of The First Kind 1998 TVS Scooty ES - Motoring World

WASHINGTON The owners of Stewarts Shops, big donors to U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, have decided to pause all political contributions for "further review" after pressure from individuals calling and threatening on social media to boycott the chain over their support for the congresswoman.

Stewarts started logging Twitter and Facebook comments denouncing the contributions to Stefanik from Stewarts President Gary Dake and his family on Monday, emails obtained by the Albany Times Union show.

In response to Stewart's Shops' decision, local conservatives encouraged supporters Saturday to call or email the family-owned chain to register their opposition and tell them "not to bow down to cancel culture."

Dake and his family gave $34,800 to Stefanik's campaign and her joint fundraising committee in the 2020 election cycle, Federal Election Commission records show. Dake and individuals affiliated with Stewart's Shops are one of the largest contributors to hercommittee.

"Individual contributions are given to various political parties, in this case, they were given to the Stefanik campaign due to her immense support of local dairy farmers," a spokeswoman for Stewart's Shops said. "Stewarts Shops was founded as a dairy company and 100 years later, Stewarts remains a dairy company, supporting 20-plus local dairy farms. All political contributions will be paused for the time being for further review."

Stefanik may take another fundraising hit after at least 14 major companies that gave nearly $100,000 to her in 2020 announced this week they will suspend giving to Republicans who objected to certifying the election results.

Stefaniks senior advisor Alex DeGrasse expressed confidence that her campaigns would weather these developments just fine.

Congresswoman Stefanik shattered records as the top Republican fundraiser in New York State and she will continue to do so, he said. Congresswoman Stefanik's strength as a candidate is her strong support from the people in NY-21 across party lines who re-elected her with the most total votes of any Congressional candidate in the history of the North Country, despite facing millions in attack ads.

American Express, AT&T, Dow Inc., Amazon, General Electric, Comcast Corp., Marriott International Inc., Verizon Communications, Airbnb Inc., Nike Inc. and Walmart have all announced in recent days that they will halt contributions to lawmakers who voted against certifying 2020 Electoral College votes. Blue Cross Blue Shield said it would suspend contributions to those lawmakers who voted to undermine our democracy; and State Street Corp. said it will not support lawmakers or candidates who undermine legitimate election outcomes.

In the 2019-2020 election cycle, these companies collectively gave $99,643 to Stefaniks campaign committee or her leadership PAC, which supports Republican women running for Congress, an Albany Times Union analysis found. They contributed to Stefanik through their political action committees or donations from their owners or employees.

Blue Cross Blue Shield was the largest contributor to her campaign and leadership PAC, while Comcast Corp. was the sixth-largest and AT&T was the ninth-largest this cycle, according to the database maintained by Open Secrets.

Stefanik proved to be a prolific fundraiser in 2020. If she can keep it up, shell feel very little impact from these losses. Moreover, many of these companies have not specified how long they will suspend contributions for. Theres almost two years before the next Congressional elections.

In 2020, Stefanik raised over $14.1 million for her campaign, her leadership PAC, called E-PAC, and her joint fundraising committee (which supports her campaign, E-PAC, New York Republicans and the National Republican Congressional Committee), Federal Election Commission records show.

The majority of the campaign's funding comes from small-dollar donors who have donated over $6 million to her campaign, DeGrasse said. Elise for Congress has $2 million in the bank and her re-election campaign has never been in a stronger position politically.

A host of other companies have said they will temporarily suspend political contributions to lawmakers of both parties or will otherwise re-evaluate their giving. Some of these companies, including Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, United Parcel Service and Alphabet Inc (the owner of Google), are also among Stefaniks top contributors. Democrats and Republicans may both feel an impact from the decisions of these companies, however.

Stefanik was one of 147 Republicans who voted to object to certifying the 2020 electoral votes last week, the same day that the U.S. Capitol was invaded by supporters of President Donald J. Trump seeking to keep him in office.

From New York, Republican Reps. Lee Zeldin of Shirley, Nicole Malliotakis of Staten Island and Chris Jacobs of Orchard Park also voted to object. No Democrats objected, and Republican Reps. Tom Reed of Corning, John Katko of Syracuse and Andrew Garbarino of Sayville did not.

Stefanik said she objected because tens of millions of Americans are concerned that the 2020 election featured unconstitutional overreach by unelected state officials and judges ignoring state election laws. We can and we should peacefully discuss these concerns.

After she objected, Harvard Universitys Kennedy School decided to remove Stefanik from the advisory board of it Institute of Politics because its dean determined she has made public assertions about voter fraud in Novembers presidential election that have no basis in evidence, and she has made public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect.

Stefanik blasted the decision from Harvard, saying it was caving to the woke left and creating a monoculture of liberal views.

See the original post here:
Stewart's pauses political giving after outcry over Stefanik donations - Times Union

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal's radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson: Hey, hey, hey. It's Al, and I have some exciting news. Okay, so in July, we brought you American Rehab. That was our eight-episode series that uncovered tens of thousands of people desperately in need of help for their addictions, but instead of getting treatment, they were sent to work without pay, sometimes at big corporations. The New Yorker called it riveting, urgent, and mind-bending. Now we're making it available for your binging pleasure. You can find it by subscribing to Reveal Presents: American Rehab wherever you get your podcasts. Again, that's Reveal Presents: American Rehab. All right, get to binging.

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Al Letson: From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. The morning of January 6, before the storming of the halls of Congress, reporter David Neiwert tweeted a prediction, "Today is likely to be a historically violent day in the nation's capital."

David Neiwert: Yeah. No, that wound up being an understatement, didn't it?

Al Letson: David wasn't surprised that pro-Trump extremists did what they did. In fact, he linked to a video from the night before shot on the streets of D.C. in which a middle-aged white man in a Trump hat tells a young white nationalist livestreamer-

Speaker 4: In fact, tomorrow, I don't even like to say because I'll be arrested-

Speaker 5: Well, let's not say it.

Speaker 4: I'll say it.

Speaker 5: All right.

Speaker 4: We need to go into the Capitol.

Speaker 5: Let's go!

David Neiwert: It certainly wasn't a surprise for any of the people who've been reporting on and researching the radical right here in the United States in the past year, because they've been pretty upfront about it. They were saying they were going to do this.

Al Letson: David has been following the radical right for decades. A few years back, he and the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations teamed up with Reveal to start tracking what looked to him like an uptick in far right terrorism. We put together a database of every single domestic terror event starting in 2008.

Al Letson: In 2017, that data showed that right-wing extremists had become the biggest threat, while law enforcement under President Obama was focused on those acting in the name of Islam. Last summer, we ran the numbers for terrorism under President Trump, and we found that far right terror had grown and become more lethal, responsible for almost the same number of deaths during Trump's first three years as during all eight years under Obama. The men, it's almost always men, who are responsible for many of those deaths were driven by the same ideology.

David Neiwert: There's a very specific stripe of white nationalism that we're seeing run through, especially, these more recent mass killings.

Al Letson: Today, we're bringing back a show we first aired last June. We're going to connect the dots to show how extremist ideas and extremist violence spread online, and we'll ask why law enforcement is still struggling to catch up. Reveal reporters Stan Alcorn and Priska Neely dug into this for months. Priska starts us off with the story of a man who witnessed the deadliest domestic terror attack of 2019.

Priska Neely: Guillermo Glenn is well-known in El Paso's Mexican-American community. He's 79 now, and he's been a community organizer and labor rights activist for most of his life.

Guillermo Glenn: We conducted a lot of protests. We blocked a bridge. We went to jail.

Priska Neely: On August 3, 2019, he was just going about his weekend routine.

Guillermo Glenn: It was a Saturday morning around 10:00. I had gone to Walmart to buy some pet food. I was way in the back, and I heard this great big noise.

Priska Neely: A warning, Guillermo is going to share graphic details about what happened that day.

Guillermo Glenn: A large number of families, women and men were running towards me from the front of the building, and then I noticed at least one of the women was dripping blood. I said, "Well, there's something really wrong." I ran into the woman who was... Both her legs had received some type, either shrapnel or bullet wounds, and she was bleeding. So I stopped there to help her, and I grabbed a first-aid kit and tried to at least tend to her wounds in her legs. One of the firemen or paramedic came and told, "You have to get her out. We're getting everybody out of the store." So we put her in one of those grocery baskets.

Priska Neely: When he wheeled the woman to the front, he saw what had happened.

Guillermo Glenn: Right at the front door, there was a lot of blood. I knew then that there'd been a shooter. It was a very traumatic scene. I saw the body of a man with half his head shot off. There was a lady laying on the pavement across from where we're loading the people. I didn't know exactly who he'd taken out. I didn't have that information that he was actually shooting Mexicans.

Priska Neely: The suspected gunman, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, drove roughly 10 hours from outside Dallas to the El Paso Walmart right near the Mexican border. Police say he opened fire, 23 people were killed and many were wounded, and then he drove off.

Speaker 8: Minutes later, Patrick Crusius stopped his car at an intersection near the Walmart. He came out with his hands raised in the air and stated out loud to the Texas Rangers, "I'm the shooter."

Priska Neely: He's facing 90 federal charges, including 45 hate crimes.

Priska Neely: After Guillermo witnessed what happened that day, he got in his car and went to the restaurant where his friends always gather on Saturdays.

Guillermo Glenn: Several of my friends came up and hugged me and said, "Oh, you're okay. We're so glad. We've been looking for you. We thought you might be there." Then they showed me the manifesto.

Priska Neely: The manifesto. Minutes before the attack, the shooter had posted a document filled with anti-immigrant rhetoric to the online message board 8chan. Some of Guillermo's friends showed him a copy.

Guillermo Glenn: I sat down. I had some food, had some of my regular Saturday menudo. Then I finally realized what had happened, right after I read the manifesto.

Priska Neely: The Crusius manifesto reads kind of like a corporate website. It has an About Me section and parts where he outlines his warped vision for America. He matter-of-factly explains how his attack will preserve a world where white people have the political and economic power. He says peaceful means will no longer achieve his goal.

Priska Neely: Reporter David Neiwert says this alleged shooter is the quintessential Trump-era terrorist, a man largely radicalized online, entrenched in white nationalist ideology, and fueled by the belief that white men like himself are being replaced by Latino immigrants. Crusius wrote that the media would blame President Trump for inspiring him, but he claimed that his ideas predated the Trump campaign. Here's David.

David Neiwert: Patrick Crusius, especially, was so filled with loathing for Latino people that he didn't see them as human.

Priska Neely: When David reads the manifesto, he can immediately see the fingerprints of other white nationalists.

David Neiwert: Here's how Crusius opens his manifesto. "In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion."

Priska Neely: That opening line is a direct signal back to a previous act of terrorism, the shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, just months before. David says this is part of a trend. One terrorist inspires another, and the cycle continues. Guillermo says he didn't understand all of the references at first, but it was clear to him that the manifesto had ties to a larger movement.

Guillermo Glenn: I think he was trying to show that somebody had to take action, and that really angered me at that point. Why would somebody come and shoot innocent people like that?

Priska Neely: David say Crusius started doing online research because of the anger he felt over how the country was changing demographically.

David Neiwert: But in the process of doing this research, he came across multiple white genocide theories, including The Great Replacement.

Priska Neely: The Great Replacement, or replacement theory, unites many acts of hate that we see across the country, around the world.

David Neiwert: That's this idea that comes out of white nationalism that white Europeans face a global genocide at the hands of brown people and that they're being slowly rubbed out of existence.

Priska Neely: Only a few terrorists in recent years have referenced replacement theory by name, but it's widely popular among right-wing extremists. It's linked to ideas that are many decades old, but one attack in Europe showed how those ideas can be weaponized.

David Neiwert: Anders Breivik's terrorism attack in Oslo and Utya Island, Norway, in 2011.

Priska Neely: Breivik killed 77 people in a bombing and mass shooting. Before the attack, he sent out a 1,500-page manifesto about how he planned to lead white supremacists on a crusade against the "Islamification of Europe." Around the same time, a French writer named Renaud Camus refined and popularized the ideology in a book. The title translates to The Great Replacement.

David Neiwert: The Great Replacement essentially is this idea that brown people, particularly refugees and immigrants from Arab countries in Europe, are being deliberately brought into the country in order to replace white people as the chief demographic.

Priska Neely: The conspiracy theory claims all this is orchestrated by a cabal of nefarious globalists. That's code for Jews.

Speaker 9: You will not replace us!

Speaker 10: You will not replace us! You will not replace us! You will not replace us!

Priska Neely: In August 2017, white supremacists in the U.S. took up this concept as a rallying cry at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Speaker 10: Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!

Priska Neely: The next day, a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer. This incident had an immediate impact on the public perception of terrorism, making it clear that white nationalists violence is a serious threat.

Speaker 11: Today, the nightmare has hit home here in the city of Pittsburgh.

Priska Neely: At a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, Robert Bowers is accused of killing 11 people.

David Neiwert: He went to a Jewish synagogue because he was angry about the Latin American caravans. The caravans had been in all the news in the weeks prior to that synagogue attack. He blamed Jews and went to a Jewish synagogue to take revenge for Latino immigration.

Priska Neely: These are the ideologies that are zigzagging across the globe. In March 2019, the gunman who livestreamed his mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Facebook also wrote a manifesto. The title, The Great Replacement. The New Zealand manifesto inspired the El Paso shooter to target the people he felt were replacing him. Recent manifestos and books put a new spin on violent, hateful acts, but David traces these sentiments back much further.

David Neiwert: What's remarkable in a lot of ways when I read these manifestos is so many of them are expressing ideas that I read in the 1920s coming from eugenicists. Look, I would even take it back to the 1890s, when we first started seeing the wave of lynchings in the South as a form of social control. This was very clearly a form of terrorism.

Priska Neely: After the El Paso shooting, activist Guillermo Glenn says white supremacist ideology was barely part of the conversation. There were brief efforts to unite the community against hate, a few events held under the banner El Paso Strong.

Guillermo Glenn: The politicians, the businessmen, the mayor, everybody was pushing this idea that we had to survive, but they weren't really talking about who caused it or why.

Priska Neely: Before we talked for this story, Guillermo says he didn't identify as part of this larger group of survivors that includes Jewish and Muslim communities.

Guillermo Glenn: You say, well, it's the Jewish people that they attacked, it's the Muslim people that they attacked, and here on the border it's the Mexican and Central Americans. But nobody talks about, what does the Great Replacement mean? Nobody put all these incidences together and say, "Hey, this is something that we should be aware of nationally."

Priska Neely: And he says that's part of the failure, part of the reason these attacks keep happening.

Al Letson: That story from Reveal's Priska Neely.

Al Letson: As we've been saying, these extremist groups are using online communities to spread their messages and find new recruits. When we come back, we'll hear how it works.

Josh Bates: It's a conditioning process, it's a grooming process, and I let myself fall into that.

Al Letson: The evolution of the white supremacist internet, next on Reveal.

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Al Letson: From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. We're continuing with our show we first broadcast last summer about domestic terrorism during the Trump administration.

Al Letson: The FBI and academic researchers say there's no such thing as a terrorist profile. You can't tell who's going to become a terrorist with a personality test or a demographic checklist. But the young white men who attacked the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway and the Walmart in El Paso, they had a lot in common. Not only were they motivated by the same conspiracy theory about white people being replaced, they developed those ideas in some of the same spaces online. Two of them even posted their manifestos to the same website, 8chan.

Al Letson: Now, you can't blame today's white supremacist terrorism on the internet, but you also can't understand it without talking about the way the white supremacist movement uses the internet and how it's changed over the last decade. Reveal's Stan Alcorn is going to tell that story through the eyes of a man who lived it. Here's Stan.

Stan Alcorn: Josh Bates's decade as a white supremacist started in his mid-20s, with a YouTube video about the presidential candidate he says he supported at the time, Barack Obama.

Josh Bates: I was scrolling through the comments section, "He's a Muslim," "He wasn't born here," things of that nature, and somebody said, "You guys sound like those Stormfront (beep)." I was like, "What in the world is Stormfront?"

Stan Alcorn: Stormfront is a message board that a former KKK leader set up in the '90s. Josh says he went there at first because he was curious, then to argue. But then the middle-aged message-board neo-Nazis started winning him over.

Stan Alcorn: How could they be convincing in these arguments? Can you help me understand that?

Josh Bates: Well, I wish I could answer that question, because I still ask myself that a lot. How could I end up falling for something like that? But I guess it's probably similar to how we look at people who fall into cults. It's a conditioning process, it's a grooming process, and I let myself fall into that.

Stan Alcorn: The experts I talked to say that first step is more about the person than what they're stepping into. Josh had just left the Marines, where he used to have a team and a mission. Now all he had was a computer.

Shannon Martine...: It's pretty concurrent with a whole lot of people, where they felt really deeply disempowered in their lives.

Stan Alcorn: Shannon Martinez is a former white supremacist who's helped people, including Josh, leave the movement.

Shannon Martine...: When you encounter information that's presented that this is the real truth, the true truth people don't want you to have because, if you did, it would be too empowering for you and too disempowering for them, that's an incredibly powerful, toxic drug.

Stan Alcorn: That drug, widely available on the internet, is, at its heart, a conspiracy theory. It says your problems aren't your fault; it's immigrants, Black people, Jews.

Josh Bates: They talk about, oh, Hollywood and the media and all these Jews that are in these positions of power. When you google that kind of stuff and you see it and you consume it, eventually after a few months you kind of get desensitized to it. Everybody's agreeing with everyone for the most part. You get along. There's that online community. Stormfront was my first one.

Stan Alcorn: He didn't know their names, but they were his team now. He'd spend the next 10 years as what he calls a keyboard warrior for the white supremacist movement. He'd be there for every step in its evolution, from joining the KKK and the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement to more diffuse groups and websites that called themselves alt-right and identitarian.

Stan Alcorn: Some of these groups would go to some lengths to appear respectable and say, "We're not racists. We're not Nazis. We're not the KKK." Then some of those groups were Nazis; they were the KKK. You were in all of them. Does that tell you that the differences between these groups are more about the image and the tactics than the core ideas or who they attract?

Josh Bates: Absolutely. We've been using the terms white nationalism 1.0 and white nationalism 2.0 for a few years now. 1.0 is your early groups, Ku Klux Klan. They're very explicit, National Socialist Movement, walking around with swastikas on their uniforms and their flags. Your 2.0 guys, they're your Identity Evropas, where they're dressing in khakis and collared shirts and dock shoes, and they've got these nice cropped haircuts. They call that good optics. But anybody who was in the early 1.0 movements like myself, I could see right through it. They just put lipstick on a pig. That's all they did.

Stan Alcorn: But people who followed the white supremacist movement for decades, like Type Investigations reporter David Neiwert, they say that this alt-right makeover of the old racist right, it was transformative.

David Neiwert: That radical right was very backward-looking, very stiff and formal. They didn't have any... Humor was not part of their repertoire. In fact, their primary recruitment demographic really was men between the ages of 40 and 60. With the advent of the alt-right, what we saw was this very tech-savvy, very agile movement that, instead of running away from the culturally savvy aspects of the internet, rather embraced them wholly.

Stan Alcorn: Instead of writing racist newsletters that people had to sign up for, they were making memes and jokes in places like Reddit and 4chan. These forums that celebrated being politically incorrect, they were the perfect place for those ideas to take root, hybridize with other fringe ideas, and grow into something that could be shared on more mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

David Neiwert: It was very brilliant because it meant that suddenly their recruitment demographic was much larger and had a lot more political activist energy. They were younger people.

Stan Alcorn: Josh Bates says that energy got a huge boost in 2016 with the rise of a new presidential candidate.

Donald Trump: They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. Some, I assume, are good people.

Josh Bates: Because Trump was spouting off a lot of the same talking points as general white nationalists, he breathed new life into that movement. The thought leaders of the movement just took full advantage, thinking that they could take it even further, and they did.

Stan Alcorn: They started to take their ideas into the real world.

Megan Squire: They were being emboldened by Trump and really acting out.

Stan Alcorn: After Trump's election in 2017, computer scientist Megan Squire set up software to track extremists on Facebook. She'd started out studying the misogynist Gamergate movement, but that had led her to all of these different anti-Muslim and neo-Confederate and white supremacist groups.

Megan Squire: At the time, Facebook was a central player, if not the central player, and it was the place where these guys all wanted to be. I was looking for ideological crossover, group membership crossover, just trying to, I guess, map the ecosystem of hate on Facebook.

Stan Alcorn: She watched this ecosystem plan what one neo-Nazi website would call the Summer of Hate, anti-Muslim marches, misogynist Proud Boy rallies, and what was shaping up to be this real-world meetup of all these different mostly online hate groups, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This is where she came across Josh Bates.

Megan Squire: There was a person who was talking about they didn't have enough money to go to Charlottesville, and someone else suggested, "Hey, we have this crowdfunding site. Why don't you set up a fundraiser?"

Originally posted here:
The Evolution of All-American Terrorism - Reveal