By family history and his own early bona fides, Derek Black was slated to have a successful career in white nationalism, as far as those things go. Black’s father, Don, is the founder of the oldest neo-Nazi website, the now-shuttered Stormfront; and was a grand wizard in the KKK; a member of the American Nazi Party; and was convicted in 1981 for attempting to overthrow the government of the Caribbean island of Dominica, part of a long dream for white nationalists to establish their own government. Derek Black’s mother, Chloe, was once married to David Duke.
As a child, Black, gifted as a coder, created a version of Stormfront for kids, and as a young man, hosted a talk show on the website. In 2008, as a 19-year-old, Black won a seat on the Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee, although he was ultimately denied the position after the party learned of his background. According to reporter Eli Saslow, who wrote the book Rising Out of Hatred about Black, the young white nationalist had a serious influence on his father:
“One of Derek’s most lasting and damaging impacts on this white nationalist movement is that he convinced his father to scrub Stormfront of all racial slurs, all Nazi insignia … Derek thought the way [they were] going to reach more people is, instead of of using this kind of language, [they] need to play to this false, but unfortunately, very widely spread sense of white grievance that still exists in big parts of this country.”
But at the age of 24, Black disavowed white nationalism, writing in a letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center that he had abandoned the movement, citing experiences in college and extended conversations with Jewish friends as factors that led him from his former beliefs: “I acknowledge that things I have said as well as my actions have been harmful to people of color, people of Jewish descent, activists striving for opportunity and fairness for all, and others affected.”
All this to say, Black knows a thing or two about the rhetoric and long-term planning of the white-nationalist movement in America. And in a segment on The Van Jones Show this weekend, Black claimed that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is doing a better job at promoting whitenationalist rhetoric than SPLC–bona fide white nationalists are:
“It’s really, really alarming that my family watches Tucker Carlson show once and then watches it on the replay because they feel that he is making the white nationalist talking points better than they have and they’re trying to get some tips on how to advance it.”
Carlson has been accused of forwarding the agenda of white nationalists before: In August 2018, the Fox News host ran an erroneous segment about white farmers in South Africa pushed off their land, a conspiracy theory widely circulated in far-right circles. Carlson has objected to the removal of Confederate statues; defended the social network Gab, which has been described as “Twitter for Racists;” and in December 2018, he claimed that immigrants are making America “dirtier.” In February, the white nationalist site VDARE thanked Carlson for name-checking them in a segment about deplatforming — the Fox News host simply referred to the site as a “publication” — and in March, leaked chat messages of the white-nationalist group Identity Evropa showed that members believe “Tuck” is “our guy” and has “done more for our people than most of us could ever hope to.”
Whether or not it’s intentional, Carlson’s status as a megaphone for white-nationalist ideas comes in tandem with a rise in far-right violence in the United States: According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s most recent accounting, there are now 112 neo-Nazi groups, 148 white-nationalist groups, 63 racist skinhead groups, and 36 neo-Confederate organizations active in America. Nor is the phenomenon limited to the U.S.: The New Zealand mosque shooter that killed 50 consumed a media diet loaded with white-nationalist rhetoric.
White Nationalist Richard Spencer Exposed by Leaked Audio
–White nationalist Richard Spencer is exposed by audio leaked by Milo Yiannopoulos, and there is actually nothing hugely surprising about the content of the vile and disgusting audio recordings
‘Game of Thrones’ was an imperfect show that was perfect for its era
In the beginning, it could have been mistaken for a conventional fairy tale about a virtuous man battling the corruption in his kingdom — until Ned Stark (Sean Bean) lost his head.
.. Characters shifted from victims to protagonists to antiheroes in a way that gave some viewers whiplash, a dynamic that came to a head when Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and her dragon burned a city in the show’s penultimate episode. “Game of Thrones” was a show about trauma and the consequences of treating women as sexual objects — yet the series had a bad tendency to ogle bits and pieces of minor female characters rather than treat them as people.
..Whether you think “Game of Thrones” was a success or a failure largely depends on what you thought the show was trying to do.
.. “Game of Thrones” debuted in 2011, at an inflection point for American television and American politics. Later-stage Golden Age antihero dramas such as “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” were heading toward their conclusions and the idea of a Republican “war on women” was taking hold on the left. During the series’ run, Hillary Clinton suffered a shocking loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election; white nationalism surged back into public life; the #MeToo movement exposed the prevalence and impact of sexual violence; climate change took on a new and apocalyptic urgency; and a spike in television production splintered the water-cooler conversation possibly beyond repair.As a result, “Game of Thrones” took on a prismatic quality. Turn it one way and the series was an argument that trauma gave its female characters moral authority; shift it just slightly, and the show suggested that they couldn’t transcend the damage that had been inflicted on them
.. The White Walkers, the show’s uber-supernatural villains, stood in for the perils of climate change — until they were vanquished with a single blow. The slaves Daenerys liberated in the early seasons of the show were props in a white-savior narrative until they were invoked as proof that she would never break bad. The show’s cultural footprint suggested that rolling out a television show week by week was still the best way to create community around art. Or its viewership numbers, modest by historical standards, could be evidence for an argument that our culture has fragmented beyond repair.
.. And our struggles to figure out whether men such as Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) deserve forgiveness for their past bad acts are a lower-stakes version of the questions raised by the early stages of our national reckoning with sexual assault.
.. Another version of “Game of Thrones” might have offered more decisive arguments about the subjects it raised, or avoided ogling and other artistic pitfalls. That show might have become a cult favorite, but without its intellectual ambiguities and spots of bad taste, it never would have become a phenomenon. “Game of Thrones” caught viewers by surprise when it eliminated its supernatural Big Bad so early in its final season and left the characters to work out their messy, entirely human differences. When the credits roll on Sunday, “Game of Thrones” will leave viewers with the same challenge: tackling some of the hardest problems before us without a unifying magical distraction.
The Trump Prophecy and the Evangelical Vote | Renegade Cut
White Evangelicalism as a political movement is as much about white nativism, nationalism and traditionalism as it is about religion. Donald Trump stokes the fire of the evangelicals with lies and his own brand of fraud.