Using ‘lulz’ to recruit white nationalists and neo-Nazis

That we are witnessing a resurgence of white nationalist and neo-Nazi sentiment is indisputable. A noticeable feature is that while in the past members of these groups were distinctive because they were heavily tattooed, skinheads , and wore leather jackets and all the other accoutrements that signified that they were tough and not to be messed with, the current members forego all that and look like regular college students or young executives, as I wrote in my earlier post That nice young neo-Nazi next door. This change has not been achieved by the former group removing their tattoos, growing their hair, and buying a new wardrobe. Instead we are seeing a new kind of member.
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LulzSec ‘retires’

The anarchic hacker group LulzSec that I wrote about just a few days ago announces that it is disbanding. Whether this is a temporary or permanent move is unclear but it is inevitable that similar loose confederations of hackers will form and reform.

The Daily Show looks at the hacking issue.

The ghouls who feast on mass murder

As if having to deal with the senseless slaughter of their children by someone who has easy access to high-powered military style weapons is not enough, the bereaved parents frequently have to then deal with people on the internet who will say that the whole thing did not happen and was staged by gun control groups. The gun lobby and their supporters clearly fear that so many mass shootings, especially of schoolchildren, will result in at least some action being taken and so they will unleash these conspiracy theorists who will accuse the parents of being ‘crisis actors’ and will proceed to put their names and addresses and other contact information on the internet to encourage others to target and harass these parents individually, making their lives an even greater hell than it has become. Those parents who speak out publicly against the lack of gun control, in an effort to try and prevent other parents from having to endure what they are experiencing, will be particularly targeted for this treatment.
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Ricky Gervais is being himself again: a mean-spirited, transphobic jerk

Gervais has a new Netflix special. I will not watch it (or indeed watch anything by him anymore) because I was so disgusted with his earlier one with its rampant transphobia and the smug, preening, overweening sense that he was being ever so edgy and clever. But according to what I read, rather than learn from feedback from that first show, he seems to have doubled down.

Aja Romano writes about all that is wrong with Gervais and others of his ilk like Dave Chappelle who seem to think that making the trans community the target of ridicule is somehow acceptable.
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Watch out! Dark MAGA is coming for you!

When Madison Cawthorn was elected to Congress from North Carolina for the first time in 2020 at the age of 26, he was hailed as a future leader of the Republican party. But during his first term he has been involved in all manner of things that have generated negative publicity.

Those included intra-party blowback over his cocaine-orgy podcast comments, twice carrying a firearm while going through airport security, driving with a revoked license, and the various news reports featuring sexually-suggestive photos and videos of Cawthorn.

That claim that senior members of the Republican party were engaged in drug-fueled sex orgies was a bridge too far for the party establishment and they pulled out all the stops in favor of his opponent so that Cawthorn lost his primary race on Tuesday.

If the party leaders thought that they had got rid of a troublesome nuisance and that Cawthorn would simply go away, they were mistaken. He seems to be hopping mad at what he sees as a betrayal by the party and is vowing vengeance on those whom he feels stabbed him in the back, saying that he is going to unleash the ‘Dark MAGA’ on them.
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Jesse Watters may be stupid and juvenile but he is dangerous

Fox News personality Jesse Watters has a juvenile sense of humor that he should long have outgrown. He is the kind of grown person who still thinks that childish pranks are funny.

At a gathering of young right-wingers organized by the group Turning Point, he took aim at Anthony Fauci, the highly respected infectious disease specialist who has become a prime target of anti-vaxxers because of his relentless urging of people to take safety precautions such as getting vaccinated, wearing masks, and avoiding large gatherings.

Speaking on Monday at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference, Watters encouraged attendees to rhetorically “ambush” Fauci with dubious questions about the National Institutes of Health allegedly funding “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Now you go in for the kill shot. The kill shot? With an ambush? Deadly. Because he doesn’t see it coming,” Watters said.

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Zoom bombing: Another example of why we cannot have nice things

The use of Zoom videoconferencing technology has exploded now that people have to stay at home but still need to communicate with people as part of their work or to stay connected with friends and family. Educational institutions especially have begun to use Zoom extensively to teach online. But along with that new popularity, Zoom has also become the target of hackers who are exploiting its security flaws and taken up the practice now being called ‘Zoom bombing’.
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8chan and the issue of speech on the internet

The website known as 8chan has served as a cesspool of bigoted and racist hate mongering for a long time in which posters seemed to be competing to see who could come up with the most offensive stuff, all while arguing that they were doing it ironically, ‘for the lulz’ as the kids say these days. They operated with impunity under the shield of free speech and things were going well for them (in terms of reaching their target audience) until three mass shooters in Christchurch (targeting Muslims), Poway, California (targeting Jews), and at a Texas Walmart (targeting Hispanics) posted their hateful manifestos on the website.

This proved to be too much for those companies that had been at least indirectly supporting the site and the internet security firm Cloudflare withdrew its support, thus enabling hackers to invade the site, overwhelm it, and shut it down. The creator of 8chan, an American who lives in the Philippines and seems to covet notoriety, vows to bring the site back in some form with a new name 8kun and different security firm backing it.

The NPR radio program On the Media had a fascinating 17-minute segment tying together 8chan, the people behind it, as well as Q and the QAnon conspiracy theories that spread its message via that site, and the problem of balancing free speech and deplatforming on the internet.

It raises some crucial questions: should tech companies stymie sites like 8chan? Can 8chan stay dead? And what happens to the dark content that flourished on the site — content like the QAnon conspiracy, whose purveyor vowed to only release definitive content on 8chan, lest his narrative gets drowned out by that of impersonators?

The alliance between anti-vaxxers and white nationalists

The anti-vaccination groups in the US seem to be not fazed at all by the outbreaks of measles in parts of the US and elsewhere in the world. They seem to have developed a deep-rooted belief in the rightness of their cause and no amount of scientific evidence to the contrary is going to change their minds, unless perhaps their own children fall sick. They think that those who believe in the safety of vaccines are part of a deep conspiracy to harm them and their children. In this, they are not unlike the right wing climate change deniers and Trump cultists who refuse to hear anything bad about their hero and so it should not be a surprise that there seems to be a burgeoning alliance between the two groups, as Kelly Weill reports.
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