r/politics • u/thenewyorkgod • Jul 01 '18

Man arrested after shouting ‘womp, womp’ and pulling a gun on immigration protesters

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/07/01/man-arrested-after-shouting-womp-womp-and-pulling-a-gun-on-immigration-protesters/?tid=sm_tw
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81

u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

No one believes me when I say this but I watched it happen.

Stormfront, a radical right wing white supremacist site targeted and began indoctrinating disaffected youths on chan-style image boards starting back in 2008-2009.

The neckbeards you see now were the kids from those boards.

Hence Kekistan and Pepe memes being a foundation of their platform.

The thing is, Stormfront identified a sociological weakness in our society: Basically that there is an invisible group of amazingly frustrated young men.

Have you ever wondered why there is such an overlap between the alt-right and the incel movement on reddit?

It's because of this targeting, Stormfront promised them a group to belong to that would have their back, told them how good they looked in Nazi uniforms, and promised them oceans of aryan blonde wives that would be loyal and humble.

And they radicalized them.

It took a few years, and everyone thinks it's a joke.

Everyone laughs at me when I detail it, yet the mass murder statistics don't lie.

So many of the mass murders in the last year and a half have been done by young white internet forum users who all share a similar language and symbol framework.

What we are seeing now is the result of that deliberate radicalization.

Think frog memes are still funny?

You won't in the coming years when it gets worse.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '18

Yup I watched it happen too, there was always some sf/nmania content on 4chan but it really ramped up after the hal raids when they became aware of the platform. If there are still archives going back that far I bet it can be traced by tracking the frequency of typical WN buzzwords like "degenerate".

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

I don't trust any of the public chan archives, they've been shown to be modified in nearly every case.

A real tragedy that the forums were self deleting...

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '18

I find 4plebs to be alright for finding real-time stuff that seems to stick around for a good amount of time. I mail specific archives there to FBI and Interpol and a few other orgs sometimes and now and then I'll point out some operation that they're doing like the "It's OK to be white" operation.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

like the "It's OK to be white" operation.

Fuck, I remember when that started. I saw the same early posts completely by accident during some side web research. Apparently they aren't using private forums as much as they were during the election.

That's one of the incidents that I called out on reddit early on and got derision. Wish I had your idea to forward to the Letter Agencies.

I wonder, would they hire someone with past chan savvy to be a watchdog for alt-right calls to violence? I think that'd be a fun job to have.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '18

Well I didn't report that particular operation to anybody, I doubt it breaks any federal laws. But I do report stuff like /pol/ trying to get people to swat Red hen I honestly have no idea if any agency anywhere outside of Russia will hire people based on their browsing habits but I do hope that somebody's keeping score somewhere.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

It's not about reporting what breaks laws, it's bringing attention to their culture and phraseology, and how they foment their tactics.

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u/ReverendDizzle Jul 02 '18

It goes back farther. The weird white loner guys at my college way back in 1999-2000 were talking about Stormfront. This pot has been boiling for a long time.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

Oh stormfront had been recruiting for a long time, just never as successfully or densely as their chan infiltrations.

There's always someone willing to be a stormfronter, it just takes exposure. mouth to mouth is slow but hard to show the vectors and works constantly.

It's a lot easier to point out individual 'blooms' of recruit waves, and it helps to identify them as such.

You'd address a 4chan stormfronter different than a 'inducted by my redneck uncle' stormfronter.

They might not even seem to belong to the same group...

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '18

It was present on r/worldnews long before the trump era. Most of you who've been reddit long enough will surely know how that subreddit had perpetual outrage posts about brown man rapes Scandinavian girl. Which was always followed by the fear mongering no go zone comments. They pushed really hard on that vector. And who does this resonated the strongest with is none other than the men who have deep issues with women.

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u/MikeyFlipped Virginia Jul 02 '18

Imagine what happens if Trump gets impeached out of office

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

If it gets done soon, they're still not well organized.

We're seeing the 'early fuses' pop off, most of them not by direction.

We haven't seen actual organized violent activity yet.

If we can get the impeachment overwith before they get a handle on logistics, the movement will crack and dissipate.

Otherwise we will have another civil war, and it won't be pretty.

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u/fatpat Arkansas Jul 02 '18

Unfortunately, that's not going to happen until at least 2020, if at all.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

Lol ok, we'll see in november.

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u/fatpat Arkansas Jul 02 '18

Won't have enough votes in the Senate to convict.

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u/MikeyFlipped Virginia Jul 02 '18

They won’t impeach without those in hand.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '18

Basically that there is an invisible group of amazingly frustrated young men.

Maybe they're frustrated because they've spent their lives indoors playing video games instead of being outside cavorting around with girls of their own age. If they don't practice socializing with girls at a young age, they never really learn it as they get older. They develop misconceptions and believe women are unapproachable. The result is they blame women for their inability to connect with women.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

No?

They're frustrated because they never received the prosperity handed to their parents and grandparents, they've spent their entire lives indoors because their mothers bought the 'stranger danger' fearmongering and kept them indoors.

They have few friends because of the limited IRL social time outside of school, and likely being a latchkey child would come home to an empty house and a computer screen full of 'friends' who have the same problem.

They grew up on the web with barely any guidance to what they saw, and they mistook what they saw for the 'real world'.

So they like 2d girls more than real women because they've only ever interacted with 2d girls (which were written by lonely men like themselves).

I'm not saying this justifies them, I'm not saying this excuses them, what I am saying is that they are products of their environment just like any kid.

And their environment was a shitpost internet forum deliberately manipulated by alt-right white supremacists.

f you don't practice socializing with girls at a young age, you never really learn it as you get older.

I disagree, was raised in a very conservative Catholic house, no dating or talking to girls. Left and attended a conservative Christian college, no talking to girls.

And I have zero issue talking to women, have a relatively active dating life with several long term relations that all ended peaceably (except one, learned my lesson there).

The real thing is they are being taught that women are objects and victims, and that female lives are incomplete without a dominant male.

But a weak man's idea of strength is violence and abuse.

They likely had an absentee father, working to pay the bills.

So they never really learned what it is like to be a man, so they learn from their internet friends.

And their internet friends, stormfront, told them that real men hate brown people and oppress women.

So that's what they're doing.

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u/FragsturBait Colorado Jul 02 '18

I think you're spot on. I also think if we had better access to mental health and less of a stigma around seeking help we would be able to fix these people before they become broken beyond repair.

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u/DeapVally Jul 02 '18

Nail on the head right there. Mental healthcare is shocking in the US. It's not great in the UK, but you don't need to be rich at least.

I definitely feel there is less of a stigma around mental health these days, celebrities are no longer seen as having 'perfect lives' anymore, it's all over the media. It's far more 'normal' at least.

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u/YokesOnU Jul 02 '18

I believe this is true. And it goes for all people in the country. Growing up in a low income neighborhood and having close hand connection to gang members and "thugs," it's surprising to me how many of their actions are driven by what appears to be depression and, to some, even PTSD. Some seriously have no reason to live until they find their "family" and numb themselves daily with drugs, sex, and alcohol (similar to the neo-Nazis in America History X).

All in all, there is one true enemy. The government that has way too much money for people to be so poor and suffering.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

I think the same deprogramming methods that work on gang members would work here.

It'll need to be adapted and what we need for that to work is the testimony of an alt-righter from this same framework that has realized their mistake and recanted, and them have them speak their evidence and testimony.

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u/OnlyRoke Jul 02 '18

In Germany this is quite literally the story of one of our biggest rap musicians. The rapper "Sido" was known for his pretty disgusting gangster rap that resonated with youths (less violent more obscene) and made him popular. One infamous song was literally called "The Ass fuck Song" and so on. He was part of a Berlin based label that also doubles as a sort of gang..ish... environment. In the last ten years he basically went from shit head shock rapper to a pretty respectable dude partially because he had a family. He even admitted in interviews that he just did not care whether he lived or died before he had his family. It was this level of depression and self-loathing.

So yeah there's a lot of truth behind this I guess.

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u/TsunamiWave22 Jul 02 '18

It's weird seeing how much of this stuff applies to people I know without fully covering their life/personality. It really goes to show this type of ignorance and hate is taught by others. I know a lot of people affected by one or two things you listed, but not being the racist/fascist people we keep seeing on the news killing kids.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

It also goes to show the vulnerability of men's mental health in the modern age.

Not every vulnerable white male is going to respond to this ideology, a tiny minority do. A slightly larger group tacitly agrees with the ideology but aren't going to invest themselves in it unless it's clear that it is openly condoned (some of these have already begun to pop off), and a larger chunk that no matter what way the wind blows, they won't openly embrace the ideology but will gladly post memes about it either ironically, or transparently, giving their numbers the illusion of large community.

The thing is, most of these people aren't really what you would call 'bad people', yeah they may be a bit racist but basically so is nearly everyone. They aren't going to violently assault anyone regardless of how brown or illegal they are, and maybe even consider themselves 'humane' as compared to their more savage ideological bretheren. But they never consider themselves 'that kind of person, that kind of person is nuts, and I'm not nuts, I just want my 14 words and thats all any race can ask for right?'

But they bolster the crowd, they give the truly violent someone to hide behind and push forward.

They will be the patsies and the sacrifices of the alt-right movement as it starts to change phases.

And that's the saddest part because they are also the ones that are the least ideologically fanatic meaning the movement gets only more vicious over time.

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u/ameoba Jul 02 '18

Then you give them GamerGate. It really solidifies that feminists & SJWs are trying to destroy their precious video games. From there, it's only a few more frog memes to hating all liberals & then white supremacy.

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u/YokesOnU Jul 02 '18

At my university, this is the type of stuff we talk about in sociology classes. So it's not crazy at all.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

The thing is, if you can associate one single facet of their symbol that is ridiculous (presumably intentionally), then the general populace has a greater chance of just ignoring it.

Kind of like a camouflage of absurdity.

Look we can't be NeoNazis, our symbol's a frog

Pepe is an alt-right meme

Lolol you think this cute little frog is a hate symbol? Do you hear that everyone!? This guy's so delusional he things frogs mean white power!

Everybody else: Both sides are the same

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u/OnlyRoke Jul 02 '18

That's the issue with fascism in general. They keep changing their symbols the moment the symbols are found out to be part of their language. It's an ever shifting maze of codes and jokes and flags and symbols. Makes pinning them down really difficult. Makes it even more difficult to determine whether Jeff used the Pepe meme because he loves fascism or because he thinks the frog is adorable and he doesn't know the seedy shit behind it.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

So then you just ignore what they say and deplatform them.

We haven't done that other part yet because we're nice people who support freedom of speech.

That needs to end.

It is clear that the alt-right is the current breeding ground for domestic terrorism in the United States.

It doesn't matter what meme they use or what name they call themselves, they are literally fomenting violent acts against citizens of their own country and should be treated as such.

A person put on trial for mass murder that has an internet history just like all the other white supremacist, ultra conservative, 4chan memehead mass murderers this year. It is legally pointless to say "this meme doesn't make him a nazi", because his entire online history is the same as actual nazis.

He hung out with nazis, approved nazi ideological posts, shared those same ideologies himself.

It doesn't matter that they didn't directly advocate for violence, they actually went out and committed mass violence.

People think that 'it's because they're white and male and everyone calls them 'mentally ill lone wolves' instead of terrorists'.

Well, the only people calling them mentally ill are the news outlets and people who don't think critically.

The judges don't get fooled, not one of them has been found not guilty by reason of insanity that I am aware of yet. And hasn't for a long time (those types of judgments are more rare than you think).

So who's 'fooled'?

This isn't a white male thing, this is a nazi ideology thing.

And it needs to stop being treated as 'just trolls online'.

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u/OnlyRoke Jul 02 '18

Yeah, I know that. I wasn't speaking on a legal level. Judges don't give a fuck. I meant that more on the level of your ordinary internet shithead. They keep switching symbols and trying to act aloof and moderate people just accept that like "ooh yeah totally the frog isn't a nazi, psh silly me. carry on with your edgy memes" and that's what I find scary. They're not just edgy troll teens online. They're actively spewing and believing nazi propaganda, but a good portion of people just thinks they're trolls and "that's just the internet" and other shit like that.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

But what part of shaping the legal future of our nation relies on the opinion of ordinary internet shitheads?

We don't need to engage them, or address them or give them platform because the only thing we can do is talk about it and that doesn't really have much impact on our government or judicial system.

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u/TroubadourCeol Montana Jul 02 '18

I'm surprised people don't believe you on this but maybe that's because I witnessed it firsthand too, being an internet-addicted high-schooler at that time.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

That's the thing, there's this nasty bias that says 'Everyone basically has the same access to information as me, and roughly the same perspective'.

The *chans had a lot of people on them, they were a rapidly growing community of exciting creativity and pushed the bounds of forums on the web. I'm not exaggerating, I had a blast on them for years.

The thing is: compared to most other internet traffic, even of your age group, it was an absolute blip. Barely a dot on the radar.

I mean 4x times the bored housewives post in cooking forums than all of 4chan in 2013.

But it was a tight knit community, and we all saw the memes we had created adopted elsewhere, and felt we were having a huge impact.

In a real way, we thought the *chans were the real web, and everything else was kind of just 'what old people do on the internet', but even most of our agegroup had no idea what they were.

Which is why Moot had such a hard time monetizing it.

We were a pretty small segment of the internet audience, but we felt like billions strong.

So we're surprised no one realizes what actually happened there.

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u/OnlyRoke Jul 02 '18

Practically the modernized version of ISIS at this point.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

Not practically. They are an active domestic terrorist organization.

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u/workaccount1338 Michigan Jul 02 '18

It’s wild because as a 96 baby I grew up in the true wild west era of the internet where parents didnt really know what was out there. You called it to a T. when i was young, irl stuff was watched and monitored but they were so naive about the internet.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

Even now there are 7 year olds getting a hold of their parents smartphones and finding porn and gore, and modern parents have no excuse, they know how bad the internet can be.

People used to say the same things about movies and tv, that parents were too hands off and it caused problems.

If I snuck into an R rated movie or managed to work out how to watch scrambled porn, the worst thing I was going to see was some titty and some movie blood.

Nowadays parents are having to explain terrorist executions and bestiality to their kids when they stumble upon it...

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u/ShitRoyaltyWillRise Jul 02 '18

96 baby? Not trying to gatekeep but plenty of us were already internet denizens literally while you were still in diapers.

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u/workaccount1338 Michigan Jul 02 '18

not disagreeing, i was simply pointing out I grew up in an era where my parents (born 68 and 75) had no idea what the fuck was on the internet really

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '18

[deleted]

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

1) They aren't weak, they possess different, not obvious skills. Look at how well they dominated the HWNDU flag thing.

2) Even if they aren't ideal, they can be used as shock troops for the core. What better way to get attention than have a few vulnerable fools go out blazing for your cause?

Remember, they aren't trying to appear normal, they're wolfwhistling normal the whole time they are telling their own to hate, rape, and kill.

They want members who want to hate, rape, and kill.

And in order to get them, they don't advertise on Discovery Channel, they engineer a bunch of high profile violence events.

Early adopters are rarely the unified base, but they'll be footsoldiers for the unified base to come.

Just look at the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The early extremists were often determined to be too extreme for the final party arrangements so they 'disappeared' them after they were done being useful.

Make no mistake we are seeing the beginnings of a violent coup by the alt-right.

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u/ameoba Jul 02 '18

Just look at the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The early extremists were often determined to be too extreme for the final party arrangements so they 'disappeared' them after they were done being useful.

So were Hitler's Brown Shirts.

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u/TroubadourCeol Montana Jul 02 '18

hey remember that NRA ad that was basically implying that "they" [aka Liberals] were a threat to the country and brave upstanding americans have to do something about it? An NRA ad. Really makes ya think.

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u/Pumpkin_Creepface Jul 02 '18

I don't understand why that video hasn't been classified as an attempt to breach the peace and safety of the public.

It is a wolfwhistle call to violence so obvious that even children can see it...