For years, the most unpleasant characters on the internet have been using the cry of “free speech!” as an unrestricted, unquestioned privilege that must be respected over all others. It’s magic. No compromise is allowed; all you have to do is invoke “free speech”, and you can bulldoze all over other people’s expectations of privacy, or safety, or even of their right of free speech. I think free speech is a good thing, and we shouldn’t tolerate government dictating what we’re allowed to say, and people should be able to freely discuss their opinions and ideas in a participatory democracy, but that needs to be balanced with other rights as well (“what other rights?”, I can imagine the basement-dwelling trolls of the internet asking, “there are no other rights but my right to spew the sewage floating in my brain everywhere.”)

So we should appreciate the free speech that allows someone to say, “I believe I have the right to own an M16,” even though I personally disagree with that and I think there ought to be a heck of a lot more gun control, but that right to free speech ends when they add, “and I think I have the right to track down your address and blow your brains out if you disagree.” That changes everything from a good if annoying discussion to a threat and a danger. Likewise if they try a lesser threat, “and I think I have the right to force you to argue with me and I’m going to harass you until you agree.”

There is an argument going on right now between fascist white nationalists and universities in which administrators and centrists are caving in before the magical mantra of “free speech!” This is what happens when you lose perspective and decide that one right trumps all the others. In the name of Free Speech, people who believe millions of other people should lose all of their rights and be deported, deprived of recourse to legal redress, be kicked out of school, or even imprisoned or murdered, get to further incite these gross violations of liberty on college campuses.

In a grotesque parody of the Berkeley students who stood up for civil rights on Sproul Plaza in 1964, the far right has made free speech on campus a shield for hate groups as it recruits and organizes. College administrators’ knee-jerk defenses for free speech avoid addressing legitimate concerns regarding safety and academic freedom for faculty and students.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ quoted John Stuart Mill in defense of free speech, but conspicuously left out the context. Mill firmly believed speech that advocated harm to others is an abuse of the right to speak. In 1969 the Supreme Court agreed, ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio that there is no free speech right to advocate violence when violence is likely to occur. There are, in fact, solid legal reasons, particularly after Charlottesville, why campuses can and should deny a platform to far-right speakers, precisely because they encourage violence against specific groups and enable situations of imminent danger.

“Free speech” is an all-purpose slogan disingenuously used to mask violent threats and an outright take-over of, ironically enough, the right of free speech. You don’t really believe that Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon, and Milo Yiannopoulos are making a principled defense of socialists, communists, academics, artists, and progressives to discuss their ideas, do you? They hate those guys! They want to intimidate and suppress liberals, and have found that mouthing the words “free speech” are a great way to do it, since moderates tend to cave before it.

The threat of white-supremacist violence is real. Leaked threads from an alt-right message board reveal the sadistic aspirations of self-identified Freikorps who gathered online in hopes that their “Day of the Rope”—referring to a Kristallnacht-inspired mass lynching and genocide depicted in the white-nationalist novel The Turner Diaries—would kick off at Berkeley on April 27 when Ann Coulter had been scheduled to speak.

No altercations materialized that day, but determination to provoke violence and justify a state crackdown on antifascist resistance motivates far-right groups to keep coming back to Berkeley. Breaking this iconic “commie” stronghold, in their eyes, would achieve a major milestone on their path to power.

Right-wing speaking events—including the “Free Speech Week” scheduled for late September at Berkeley, featuring the odious trifecta of Yiannopoulos, Coulter, and Steve Bannon—are part of an increasingly coordinated nationwide effort among far-right groups to recruit on college campuses. Using free speech as a wedge to silence dissent and discredit opposition, they intend to radicalize white youth by waging psychological warfare on academic leftists, social-justice organizations, and minorities. It should be no surprise that Jeremy Christian, white-supremacist murderer of two men in Portland, cried out “Free speech or die!” during his day in court. For white supremacists, the push for free speech is directly connected to their campaigns of terror.

We also mustn’t forget that these “free speech” advocates are using it as a tool to do harm to minorities and women — and behind their strategy is an appeal to the comfortably privileged to sit back and let them do the dirty work of securing their sheltered nice ideals at the expense of the life and liberty of the underclasses.

Tone-deaf campus administrators continue to ignore the warnings of students and faculty, and prioritize making campuses “safe for free speech” by militarizing university spaces with a heavy police presence—unsurprisingly, with disproportionately detrimental effects on students of color. Violent confrontations can be avoided entirely if responsible decision-makers acknowledge that fascist gatherings by their very presence pose a threat to our spaces of work and learning. Trump’s repeal of DACA this week makes this imperative even more urgent; we must not forget that what is being contested at Berkeley is not just “free speech” for racists but the enforcement of sanctuary-campus policies against ICE.

It cannot be the sole responsibility of communities facing white-supremacist violence to be suitably respectable victims for public consumption. Commentators, politicians, and campus administrators must reject the alt-right’s framing of this as a battle over free speech. Regardless of the far right’s strategies to divide us, we must prioritize the safety of students and amplify the voices of the vulnerable—not promote narratives that serve racist ideologies.

Laurie Penny has some vigorous words for the Nazis — and that’s free speech, too. When all you’re fighting for is the right to be a shitlord, you don’t get to claim the mantle of Hero of Free Speech. There is a whole interlinked network of sometimes conflicting rights, and picking the easiest one to defend because it doesn’t compromise your lifestyle of blaming the less privileged for your failings isn’t heroic.

So let’s be clear: getting fired because you hate women is not an equivalent hardship to getting fired because you happen to be one. People who have been disowned by their parents for being gay or transgender aren’t going to have sympathy when your mum and dad find your stash of homophobic murder fantasies and change the locks. Getting attacked for being a racist is not the same as getting attacked because you are black. The definition of oppression is not “failure to see your disgusting opinions about the relative human value of other living breathing people reflected in society at large.” Being shamed, including in public, for holding intolerant, bigoted opinions is not an infringement of your free speech. You are not fighting oppression. You are, at best, fighting criticism. If that’s the hill you really want to die on, fine, but don’t kid yourself it’s the moral high ground. I repeat: You cannot be a rebel for the status quo. It would be physically easier to go and fuck yourself, and I suggest you try.

The fact that some people—the women, people of color, immigrants and queer people you want put back in their proper place—disapprove of you does not make you edgy. A bag of cotton wool is edgier than you lot. Fighting for things to go back to the way they were twenty or thirty or fifty years ago does not constitute a bold resistance movement. It constitutes the militant arm of the Daily Mail comments section. Fighting real oppression involves risk, and before you start, I’m talking about real risk, not some girl on the internet calling you a cowardly subliterate waste of human skin, like I just did.

I’ll support your call for free speech when you stop using it to marginalize the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone else, and when it stops being a proxy for defending the status quo and your privileged status rather than the right that allows the oppressed to have a voice.

Once again, shallow YouTube Personality PewDiePie has blurted out a racist slur in a video. Hey, it was just a heated gaming moment, says notoriously dimwitted Breitbart apologist Ian Miles Cheong. He has 57 million subscribers. He made $1.4 million a month for squealing in gaming videos. He is the very definition of the superficial, lightweight, know-nothing and contribute-nothing pinnacle of internet vapidity. And he’s very good at it.

So he puked out hate in a heated gaming moment. That apparently excuses everything. I guess my gaming moments have never been sufficiently heated to prompt me to shout out bigotry against other people…or maybe I don’t feel that degree of bias. I think I might say the usual swears — damn, shit, fuck — in those heated moments, but I’m not sure why you’d suddenly spit against a whole people. Filthy Norwegians! Gosh, I lost my game, I suddenly hate Saxons. Whoops, blame that one on the Luxembourgians.

But despite being appalled at this talentless ass, you have to recognize that there’s not much to be done. How many of his subscribers will drop his account because he’s prone to racist outbursts? None. I predict he’ll gain some. Contrarians, alt-righters, channers, Nazis, members of the KKK will sign up just to show solidarity. YouTube will do nothing, because that’s their core constituency.

Stupid triumphs.

Still, he hasn’t been entirely silent: His most recent video, which argues that this year’s hurricane season is nothing out of the ordinary and shouldn’t be politicized, was posted earlier Sunday. It already has more than two million views.

Here come the climate change deniers, the anti-science brigade, the Republicans, all ready to sign up and swell his legion of assholes.

This video is profane and loud, so don’t play it at work. Wait, it’s Sunday morning — it’s perfectly OK to play it in church, if you find yourself wasting time there.

Anyway, a cop pulls someone over for failure to use his turn signal, and walks up to the driver with his gun drawn…because you know that someone who forgets to signal when driving on an empty street is one badass renegade wild thing who is likely to be on his way to a bank robbery or a murder or, I don’t know, a shoplifting spree. Only this guy turns out to be worse: he’s a man with a cell phone camera and a righteous rant.

Cop pulls over a black man for failure to signal, walks to his car with his gun drawn… Black dude is my fucking hero💯💯💯💯💯🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆😂😂😂😂👍👍👍👍👍👍👍 pic.twitter.com/S8ef8Mx4Kk

— SIX_FOOT_5 (@Choco_Optimus) September 10, 2017

I wish I could say I’d do the same, except the cops look at the color of my skin and see me as an agent of the status quo, so they would never come up to my door with their gun in hand. I’d probably be terrified into silence if they did.

Kudos to this man standing up to The Man.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed this: white nationalism is commonly characterized by the media as a primarily economic issue. This is the party line from the New York Times; they’re constantly banging on about how Trump voters are just desperately poor (not true), and reporting on interviews and focus groups with disaffected moderates where they hear them complaining about employment and regulations and immigrants competing for their jobs (because, apparently, young Republicans dream of someday working in a poultry slaughterhouse).

Another victim of this desperate aversion to actually pointing out endemic racism is the New Statesman. Writing about some new right wing scheme called The Anglosphere Project in 2000, you might get the impression that this movement is defined by its stance on free trade, entrepreneuralism, and market policy — it’s all very wonky.

For the moment, it remains semi-subterranean, new, a little shocking – like the ideas of rolling back the power of trade unions which the Tories were rehearsing in the mid-1970s; or the attack on comprehensive welfare systems which the US policy-thinker Charles Murray was testing out around the same time; or the foretelling of the collapse of the Soviet Union which analysts such as Zbigniew Brzezinski were putting into public debate, to general disbelief, a little later.

This idea, or rather cluster of ideas, has similar origins – in the Anglo-American intellectual right, a milieu at once self- confident, vengeful, well funded and very sharp. It is based on the belief that the transatlantic right needs some kind of coherent internationalist vision to set against the corporatist European Union. The answer is what the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson has called the Anglosphere. The US, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and much of the West Indies, it is pointed out, enjoy a common language, a common culture, common legal traditions and, above all, common entrepreneurial instincts. Can these countries create a loose association of some kind? Mexico, though it does not meet all the criteria, would have to fit in, since it is already part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) – which is central to the Anglosphere project, both economically and politically. Norway might fit in, given that it is negotiating with Nafta. Japan, backward-looking and over-regulated, would not.

You should be suspicious, though. The Anglosphere Project was founded by John O’Sullivan, a Thatcherite, Conrad Black, the Canadian version of Rupert Murdoch, and Robert Conquest, a right-wing historian, now deceased.

I don’t know whether it has evolved in the last 17 years, or whether the real motivation was lurking beneath the capitalist veneer all along, but if you check out Project Anglosphere right now, it’s a hotbed of seething racist buzzwords. They are all about our “heritage”. We must defeat “diversity” and “multiethnicity”. Repeal “multiculturalism” now.

In this turbulent era an amoral, ruthless Globalism and it’s resulting pathologies threaten the very existence of the Anglosphere. In response nationalists are on the march. Our principles guarantee social stability, cultural coherence and genuine unity – unlike globalist ideologies such as Multiculturalism which guarantee intractable social conflict. It is becoming increasingly apparent that ethnic, religious, political and sexual violence are the toxic fruits of ‘Diversity’ extremism. Only Nationalism has the necessary antidotes and political will to heal the deliberately induced polarisation and fragmentation of the Western world.

It’s an anti-immigrant white nationalist organization. I suspect that that’s what it was all along. But gosh, whining about the North American Free Trade Agreement is a nice distraction from the underlying motivation of the group.

It also has something in common with other far right groups: it’s primary business seems to be churning out propaganda, especially internet-digestible memes. Oh, look, they have black friends!

It’s even more blatant on the @ProjectAnglo twitter feed. Nothing but memes. They follow Ann Coulter, VDARE, Paul Joseph Watson, Katie Hopkins, James Delingpole, and a few cartoon frogs. You want to see the ugly underbelly of the internet, though, all you have to do is look at who is following them. Here’s a sampling of the profiles of typical pro Anglo Project supporters.

ᚹᚺᛁᛏᛖ᛫ᛈᚱᛁᛞᛖ, Nationalist,ProLife,Protector of Western Civilization’s EuroCentric Heritage, Identity & Traditions, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ,ᛟPutinᛟLePenᛟCharles Martel

Right Wing Meme Squad. Supporter of ethnic cleansing- pls no bully meh.

🐸 Alt-Right. American Nationalist. Pro-White. Reactionary. #HailVictory

Rising sea levels can be attributed to Libtard tears, not global warming! I follow back to any Trump supporting patriots. I fully support Obama for prison!

Trigger the tards!! Wish my dad’s were Joe Rogan, Lawrence Krauss, and uncle Jordan b Peterson, aunt Camille Paglia, Princess Kenny. Kekistani Sith Lord

I really hope Krauss is embarrassed by the company he’s keeping there.

But the main point is that the economic jibber-jabber is just a mask over the real reason these people are pro-Trump and pro-America and pro-Britain — the truth is that they’re really just xenophobic, hate-mongering bigots who’ve found that complaining about free trade (not that there aren’t good arguments on that matter) is a sneaky way to virtue-signal to their fellow jingoists and start a racist asshat club. That’s what they are.

The major social media sites have been making some weak, token efforts to clean up the racism and sexism endemic to places like Twitter and Facebook, but so far it’s been feeble. They’ll occasionally boot someone who gets as obnoxious as Andrew Anglin or Chuck C. Johnson, but it takes months or years of complaints (which I think is usually totally ineffective) or that they do something that is high profile and starts making the service look bad. But meanwhile, it’s fine for Joe Sixpack with 50 followers to scribble about how women should be happy to be raped, or that Jews belong in ovens, with no repercussions at all. We know, however, that Twitter and Facebook could prohibit hate speech, because they already do in France and Germany. It’s a conscious plan to allow Nazis to flourish in American social media. Why?

In an article about alternative social media, there’s a hint. The white nationalists, the Nazis, the MRAs, the general bottom-feeding trash of the internet, are getting worried about the few examples of evicted Nazis, and so are building their own new brands: a chat network called Gab, and there’s something that is an alternative to Patreon that is, amusingly, openly called Hatreon, for people who want to get paid for hating. If you’re wondering why American companies are so reluctant to block online hatred, one answer is that American tech workers have a high proportion of haters.

The early iterations of whatever Gab’s movement produces may very well be funded by its builders, many of whom purportedly have high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley. Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the Daily Stormer, told Mother Jones in March that the majority of his site’s traffic comes from Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley. “The average alt-right-ist,” the white supremacist Richard Spencer told the magazine, “is probably a 28-year-old tech-savvy guy working in IT.”

But why? Why would American computer programmers drift towards Naziism? I think there’s an answer to that, too. They’re saturated in triumphal capitalism, and in particular, Libertarianism, which is the gateway drug to full-blown greed, which they’ve branded as “liberty”.

Since Google fired Damore and Gab lost its spot in the Google app store, the effort to found an alt-right internet has taken on a new urgency. Dickinson released a slide deck on Friday to try to appeal to investors and new entrants who wish to join the budding movement. “Alt-Tech promises to restore and revive the old libertarian ethos of technology as a leveler and tool for increasing liberty,” read his slides, which proclaim that the movement doesn’t care about race, gender, or pedigree and that its motto is “Shut up and code.” The plan promises to revitalize rural and small-town America by providing engineering jobs to people who will build the new “anti-Marxist” internet. “The first VCs to fund these alternatives will be the ground floor profit-makers of the Alt-Tech revolution,” reads one of his slides.

In the past two weeks, a handful of far-right video bloggers have jumped onboard to promote the nascent movement, including Styxhexenhammer666, a popular libertarian video blogger, whose two videos about the effort have notched almost 70,000 views. Others have posted “call to action” videos, rallying technologists to join the movement to build “new ‘free speech’ platforms,” which have also attracted thousands of viewers. While these might not read as huge numbers, they suggest a movement with a groundswell of grassroots support.

They don’t care about race or gender. That usually means they don’t care about the inequities constructed around race and gender, because they’re mostly white men who have got theirs already. They also claim to not believe in ideology, even to be ideology-free, while not noticing that they’re soaking in a particularly ugly ideology.

“Most of the people that I see migrating to alternative social platforms identify as either Conservative or Libertarian,” one member of Gab who asked not to be named told me in an email. “They see how there is a double-standard when it comes to enforcing so-called ‘hate-speech’ by Google, Facebook & Twitter. Much of what is being censored or shadow-banned is not hate filled. It is often simply an idea that the loudest do not agree with.” Unlike legacy white supremacist sites, Gab isn’t centered on any one political ideology, even if many hate-filled ideologies gravitated there. Rather, it’s ostensibly a place that values free speech first, no matter how offensive it is.

Oh, right. “Free speech”. I like free speech, I think it’s an important value to have, because I want to be able to loudly declare these people to be rancid, hate-filled, selfish assholes. I also recognize that there’s a difference between openly detesting an ideology and inciting the torture and murder of whole peoples, a distinction they fail to acknowledge. “I hate Jews” is an opinion that labels the speaker as a bigot; “We need to organize to do something about the Jewish Problem” is encouraging people to do physical harm.

But how can they say they aren’t centered on any one political ideology when they also admit that they’re full of conservatives and Libertarians? If Google and Apple wander very slightly from the far right (it’s insane that anyone thinks a major American corporation is actually liberal), they get blamed for being a gang of SJWs. But Gab specifically and intentionally appeals to far-right fascists, and they get to claim they’re relatively non-ideological.

“If Google and Apple are straight-up corporations for their political sides, they should openly declare their discriminatory behavior. They should be proud of it,” said Gab’s Sanduja. “They should not be mendacious and talk about change and be different. Stop engaging in sophistry. Come out to us as the major SJW platforms you are.”

It’s always revealing to see them using the same buzzwords my personal haters are fond of. I’m not black, I’m not Jewish, I’m not a woman, I should be safe, right? My privilege is sky high. But they’ve found a way to target me, too, so it’s more than just an empathy for others, they’d like to kill me, too. After all, I am one of those hated Social Justice Warriors.

So now I have to be a white Nordic male with Libertarian leanings to be part of this in-group? Keep on narrowing your requirements until no one meets them. I guess this is the point where I’m supposed to quote Reinhold Niebuhr or Martin Niemöller, but you already know what they said, it’s obvious. Except to Nazis.

I barely remember it myself, but I do remember a machine that kills fascists. And now here’s a statement from the family of Johnny Cash.

I swear, if I hear Melvin Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA one more time, I’m gonna have to puke in someone’s face. But I can listen to Cash all the time.