"Normies now feel what we feel all the time. Alone, bored, sad, aimless, horny, empty, desolate..."

"... disconnected from the rest of humanity — the endless drone of whining and moaning I’m seeing on the social media timelines is the hellscape we have to endure constantly all the time during ‘normal times’, I can’t help but have a huge dose of schadenfreude over this — welcome to our world normiescum."

Wrote somebody on an incel website, quoted in a NYT article titled "Who Goes Alt-Right in a Lockdown?/Mass anxiety, political instability, and isolation are a pretty good combination for warping peoples’ world views," by Annie Kelly, who is identified as "a Ph.D. student [at t the University of East Anglia in England] researching the impact of digital cultures on anti-feminism and the far right."

Kelly goes on to opine:

It is undeniable that crises like a pandemic demand radical solutions.... But my research finds that the subcultural aspects of the internet... can make us feel less lonely in the short term but often end up entrenching us further into certain fatalistic and misanthropic ways of thinking....  In fact, the internet — for good and for ill — is a collaborative and imaginative space, rather than somewhere one group of people talks and another listens.... In this age of isolation, we need to be aware of how far-right actors will attempt to exploit this unprecedented situation....

"The idea that [Steven] Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face..."

"... so it might be tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this blowup as just another instance of social media doing what it does best: generating outrage. But it’s actually a worthwhile episode to unpack, because it highlights a disturbing, worsening tendency in social media in which tribal allegiances are replacing shared empirical understandings of the world. Or maybe 'subtribal' is the more precise, fitting term to use here. It’s one thing to say that left and right disagree on simple facts about the world — this sort of informational Balkanization has been going on for a while and long predates Twitter. What social media is doing is slicing the salami thinner and thinner, as it were, making it harder even for people who are otherwise in general ideological agreement to agree on basic facts about news events."

Writes Jesse Singal in "Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A" (NYT).

I think this is the 8 minute version of the talk from which the viral video clip was made:

"Readers Accuse Us of Normalizing a Nazi Sympathizer; We Respond."

The NYT has a third article about that one Nazi/"Nazi" it found in Dayton, Ohio. We're already talking about the first 2 articles, the first one, which didn't make much sense, and the second one, in which the author said the editors challenged him to make some sense, but he couldn't. I said:

But why was he important enough to drag into the spotlight in the first place?.... The answer must be that he serves a purpose for you and the NYT. You could put some effort into self-examination: Why are you using him?

In the comments, Matthew Sablan — anticipating the subject matter of the third NYT article — said:

I don't understand. The NYT takes someone everyone thinks is an extremist and does everything they can to make him seem evil and wrong, and people STILL think the NYT is trying to make him look like a regular Joe? They go out of their way to try and downplay his every day Joe-ness, even burying the fact he wasn't even AT Charlottesville.* Anyone who thinks the NYT is defending or promoting Nazis needs to re-read the piece and figure out how they misread it so epicly bad.

So the readers over at the NYT — according to the third article —  found the story offensive:

“How to normalize Nazis 101!” one reader wrote on Twitter. “I’m both shocked and disgusted by this article,” wrote another. “Attempting to ‘normalize’ white supremacist groups – should Never have been printed!”...

But far more were outraged by the article. “You know who had nice manners?” Bess Kalb, a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live, said on Twitter. “The Nazi who shaved my uncle Willie’s head before escorting him into a cement chamber where he locked eyes with children as their lungs filled with poison and they suffocated to death in agony. Too much? Exactly. That’s how you write about Nazis.”

One reader characterized the profile of Hovater as "glowing." Why didn't the NYT pick a more obviously evil American Nazi to profile? It says it didn't intend to "normalize" Hovater but to show how "hate and extremism have become more normal" than we want to think. That is, the NYT claims to be showing what is, and the readers are saying Don't do that. You're helping them. You must keep them as monsters, make them toxic.

The NYT says the idea of the article was to figure out "Who were those people" who marched in Charlottesville last August:

"Mr. Hovater’s face is narrow and punctuated with sharply peaked eyebrows, like a pair of air quotes, and he tends to deliver his favorite adjective, 'edgy'... "

"... with a flat affect and maximum sarcastic intent. It is a sort of implicit running assertion that the edges of acceptable American political discourse — edges set by previous generations, like the one that fought the Nazis — are laughable. 'I don’t want you to think I’m some "edgy" Republican,' he says, while flatly denouncing the concept of democracy. 'I don’t even think those things should be "edgy,"' he says, while defending his assertion that Jews run the worlds of finance and the media, and 'appear to be working more in line with their own interests than everybody else’s.'"

This guy says a lot of things "while" saying other things. How is this even done?*

The text is from "A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland" by Richard Fausset in the NYT.

Before white nationalism, his world was heavy metal. He played drums in two bands, and his embrace of fascism, on the surface, shares some traits with the hipster’s cooler-than-thou quest for the most extreme of musical subgenres. Online, he and his allies can also give the impression that their movement is one big laugh — an enormous trolling event put on by self-mocking, politically incorrect kids playing around on the ash heap of history.

On the party’s website, the swastika armband is formally listed as a “NSDAP LARP Armband.” NSDAP was the abbreviation for Hitler’s Nazi Party. LARP stands for “Live-Action Role Playing,” a term originally meant to describe fantasy fans who dress up as wizards and warlocks.

But the movement is no joke. The party, Mr. Hovater said, is now approaching 1,000 people. He said that it has held food and school-supply drives in Appalachia. “These are people that the establishment doesn’t care about,” he said.

The story seemed to need a second story to explain it. Published on the same day at the NYT is "I Interviewed a White Nationalist and Fascist. What Was I Left With?":

And yet what, of any of this, explained Mr. Hovater’s radical turn?... After I had filed an early version of the article, an editor at The Times told me he felt like the question had not been sufficiently addressed. So I went back to Mr. Hovater in search of answers. I still don’t think I really found them...

Sometimes a soul, and its shape, remain obscure to both writer and reader. I beat myself up about all of this for a while, until I decided that the unfilled hole would have to serve as both feature and defect....

These are people that the establishment doesn’t care about.... You're already writing him off as an enigma. But why was he important enough to drag into the spotlight in the first place? You're ending your mini-opus in the style of "Citizen Kane,"** but the Kane character was undeniably an important man. Why not leave Tony Hovater alone? The answer must be that he serves a purpose for you and the NYT. You could put some effort into self-examination: Why are you using him?
___________________

* Is it like Tuvan throat singing?



I was walking along the Lake Mendota shoreline the other day, and I said "What is that sound?" Nearby was a man standing on a short pier facing the lake, and as I walked closer I realized all that sound was coming out of him. Unearthly and beautiful, just like in that video clip. I felt very strongly at that moment, yes, that is what human beings should be doing with the lake. There should be a person every 50 feet or so along the shoreline, facing the lake, speaking to it in celestial sound.

**

"Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire who has come under media scrutiny for his role in helping elect Donald Trump, announced today he would step down from his role as co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies."

"The decision, announced in a memo to Renaissance employees, followed a BuzzFeed News exposé revealing the connections of Breitbart News — partially owned by Mercer — to white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Sources familiar with Renaissance informed BuzzFeed News in recent days of significant anger within the company about the report, which revealed that former Breitbart News tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos had cultivated white nationalists and used them to generate ideas and help edit stories on the site."

Buzzfeed.

ADDED: Here's a useful New Yorker article from last March: "The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency/How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency," by Jane Mayer. Excerpt:

Mercer is the co-C.E.O. of Renaissance Technologies, which is among the most profitable hedge funds in the country. A brilliant computer scientist, he helped transform the financial industry through the innovative use of trading algorithms. But he has never given an interview explaining his political views. Although Mercer has recently become an object of media speculation, Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, who formerly served as the chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said, “I have no idea what his political views are—they’re unknown, not just to the public but also to most people who’ve been active in politics for the past thirty years.”...

Through a spokesman, Mercer declined to discuss his role in launching Trump. People who know him say that he is painfully awkward socially, and rarely speaks. “He can barely look you in the eye when he talks,” an acquaintance said. “It’s probably helpful to be highly introverted when getting lost in code, but in politics you have to talk to people, in order to find out how the real world works.” In 2010, when the Wall Street Journal wrote about Mercer assuming a top role at Renaissance, he issued a terse statement: “I’m happy going through my life without saying anything to anybody.” According to the paper, he once told a colleague that he preferred the company of cats to humans.

I can see why a man like that would withdraw. 

Thomas Chatterton Williams explains "How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power."

A NYT op-ed.

In the study of German history, there is the notion of sonderweg, literally the “special path,” down which the German people are fated to wander....

A similar unifying theory has been taking hold in America. Its roots lie in the national triple sin of slavery, land theft and genocide. In this view, the conditions at the core of the country’s founding don’t just reverberate through the ages — they determine the present. No matter what we might hope, that original sin — white supremacy — explains everything, an all-American sonderweg.

No one today has done more to push this theory in the mainstream than the 42-year-old author Ta-Nehisi Coates....

I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.....

Thomas Chatterton Williams comes very close to calling Ta-Nehisi Coates a white supremacist.

"Even talking about this… Men get so mad when they hear women talk about them this way. They get so defensive."

I watched that video a few days ago, and it's haunting me. Something about the demeanor of the 2 women — Amanda Marcotte and Fiona Helmsley — is just so weirdly enervated as they bemoan the deplorable energy ("fragility") of men.

More transcript here, at Salon:

I think the single greatest threat, and I’ll say to humanity, at the moment is male fragility, and men just not being able to process their feelings of insecurity, their feelings of anger....

What they were chanting in Charlottesville: ‘You will not replace us.’ Who is trying? Who is trying to replace you?...

I think it’s just the way that society raises them. Women are raised to have some concern about the way that they look, and they’re encouraged to be more sensitive. A lot of men aren’t....

So they're taking the nurture side of the old nature-or-nurture argument. And they're happier with women because they've been nurtured to care about how they look? Shouldn't a feminist oppose the nurturing of women to care about how they look and whether they're "more sensitive"? That sounds as though low-level vanity is meritorious.

And oddly enough those Charlottesville Alt-Right guys were concerned about how they look. There's this (in Vice):

... Andrew Anglin, who runs the popular hate site the Daily Stormer, published a truly astounding blog post... that explains how the movement he helped build should market itself [at the Charlottesville rally]....

"Trump tells aides he has decided to remove Bannon."

According to my TV screen, set to CNN.

ADDED: Here's the NYT article, "Stephen Bannon Out at the White House After Turbulent Run." Excerpt:

Mr. Bannon’s dismissal followed an Aug. 16 interview he initiated with a writer with whom he had never spoken, with the progressive publication The American Prospect. In it, Mr. Bannon mockingly played down the American military threat to North Korea as nonsensical: “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

He also bad-mouthed his colleagues in the Trump administration, vowed to oust a diplomat at the State Department and mocked officials as “wetting themselves” over the consequences of radically changing trade policy. Of the far right, he said, “These guys are a collection of clowns,” and he called it a “fringe element” of “losers.” “We gotta help crush it,” he said in the interview, which people close to Mr. Bannon said he believed was off the record....

"You need violence in order to protect nonviolence. That’s what’s very obviously necessary right now. It’s full-on war, basically."

Said Emily Rose Nauert, "a 20-year-old antifa member who became a symbol of the movement in April when a white nationalist leader punched her in the face during a melee near the University of California, Berkeley," quoted in the NYT in "‘Antifa’ Grows as Left-Wing Faction Set to, Literally, Fight the Far Right."

Antifa adherents — some armed with sticks and masked in bandannas — played a visible role in the running street battles in Charlottesville, but it is impossible to know how many people count themselves as members of the movement. Its followers acknowledge it is secretive, without official leaders and organized into autonomous local cells. It is also only one in a constellation of activist movements that have come together in the past several months to the fight the far right....

That makes me think about that NYT article 2 days ago —  "Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist Language" (blogged here) — that relied on the characterizations of Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, who deemed “alt-left" "just a made-up epithet" and "antifa" an "old left-wing extremist movement."

The new article today seems to acknowledge the inadequacy of the 2-day-old article. The older article seemed intent on pushing back Donald Trump for talking about the "alt-left" as well as the "alt-right." The term "false equivalence" — which was a big media talking point earlier in the week — appears in the older article. I thought "false equivalence" was being used to say, essentially: When one side is worse than the other side, you're not even allowed to compare them.

There was something false about saying "false equivalence." Strictly speaking, the label applies only when 2 things are said to be the same. It shouldn't work to exclude all comparisons when people are being clear about the similarities and differences.

In the case of Charlottesville, there was no logical fallacy in saying there were 2 opposing factions that arrived on scene ready to rumble as long as you're also clear that the 2 sides were different. One side wanted to exercise its free speech rights to express bad, ugly ideas. The other side wanted to interfere with the exercise of free speech rights and was motivated by hostility to ideas that deserved hostility.

In the new article, there's less concern about stepping on the "false equivalence" talking point. There's a recognition that people like Nauert are headed in a violent direction and are gaining adherents. Maybe acting like they're nothing (or nothing any good people dare speak about) is dangerous. Right after that quote from Nauert, there's this subtle discarding of the "false equivalence" talking point:

Others on the left disagree, saying antifa’s methods harm the fight against right-wing extremism and have allowed Mr. Trump to argue that the two sides are equivalent....

Now, Trump never said "the 2 sides are equivalent." He didn't say "equivalent" and he didn't even say "2 sides." He said "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides." But those who were pushing the "false equivalence" idea needed to rely on the idea that one side is bad and the other is good, and they needed to minimize antifa. Now, the NYT admits the left has a violence problem. Good!

"Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority..."

"... who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled. It also probably helps them recruit. And more broadly, if violence against minorities is what you find repugnant in neo-Nazi rhetoric, then 'you are using the very force you’re trying to overcome'...."

From "How to Make Fun of Nazis," a NYT op-ed by Moises Velasquez-Manoff.

Quite aside from "their narrative of victimhood," there's their desire to be regarded as staunchly masculine and powerful. If you respond with fear and violence, you're reinforcing their self-image and helping them recruit more lost souls and losers.

But humor is hard. It takes some brains. Violence is easy.

ADDED: This post made me think about the courage it took to make fun of the real Nazis, in Germany, in the Nazi era, which was the subject of an August 9th post. Excerpt:

I found this article in Spiegel from 2006 about a book by Rudolph Herzog called "Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead" (published in English as "Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler's Germany"). From the article:

"I’ve been struck by the similarity between recent calls for suppressing white supremacist speech and past calls for suppressing Communist speech."

"Of course, there are differences as well — there always are for any analogy — but I thought I’d note some likenesses...."

Writes Eugene Volokh, offering a chart showing 9 points of correspondence.

"In some ways, Trump would rather have people calling him racist than say he backed down the minute he was wrong."

“This may turn into the biggest mess of his presidency because he is stubborn and doesn't realize how bad this is getting.”

Said "one adviser to the White House," according to Politico.

An "adviser to the White House" is presumably someone who doesn't work in the White House, and the comment is something just about anybody could say. It's the most banal and obvious observation about Trump.

So let me say something unconventional — not because I know anything but just as a hypothesis — and that is: It's not that Trump "doesn't realize how bad this is getting." He realizes everything everybody else realizes and more. He's playing a different game, in a different way, and all along it's looked bad to almost everyone. But he's the President, and 17 opponents went down trying to play against him. He's looking ahead and strategizing and we're the ones with inadequate perception. We don't realize how good this is getting.

Just a hypothesis! I'm just inviting you into the old what-if-you-had-to-argue game. What if you had to argue that it's Trump who is seeing things clearly and making correct decisions?

And to help you get started: The media are so heavy-handed with the Charlottesville story. They're showing so much ugliness and stirring up so much anxiety, but it's not really sensible to think that neo-Nazis are making any headway in our culture. Quite the opposite. Some people are getting afraid and angry, and these people may go too far, making more and more demands. Ordinary people will seek peace. They may get disgusted with the media that won't stop giving air time to unimportant loser clowns who nobody decent supports. Ordinary people may think that the media are giving too much attention to the destruction of monuments, and it's time to build up. Construction! A Trump specialty.

By the way, we haven't heard about the Mueller investigation much later. Is the Charlottesville story blotting out all the other news because the other new is good for Trump? There's one new story about the investigation:

Longtime FBI investigator Peter Strzok has stepped away from the investigation that seemed to be hitting a new stride in recent weeks.... It's not clear what motivated the departure.... Strzok has previously led the FBI's counter-espionage section, and also worked on the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

The NYT gives its readers definitions for "alt-right" and "alt-left."

In the transcript (NYT) of yesterday's press conference, we see Trump talking about the "alt-right" and the "alt-left" and challenging a reporter to give a definition:

REPORTER: Senator McCain said that the alt-right is behind these and he linked that same group to those that perpetrated the attack in Charlottesville.

TRUMP: Well, I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I’m sure Senator McCain must know what he is talking about. When you say the alt-right. Define alt-right to me. You define it. Go ahead. No, define it for me. Come on. Let’s go.

REPORTER: Senator McCain defined them as the same group —

[cross talk]

TRUMP: What about the alt-left that came charging at — Excuse me — What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? [cross talk] Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. So, you know, as far as I’m concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.

Define your terms — it's a way of slowing down an interlocutor who's letting labels do too much of the work. Trump combines the demand for a definition of one thing that is said with calling attention to what is unsaid: You've got a label for one side but not for the other side.

Perhaps reacting to that demand for definition, the NYT has "Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist Language" (by Liam Stack).

First up is the definition of "Alt-Right," and I think this definition pushes the word into a much uglier zone than some of the people who have popularized the term deserve:

"Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death/How a rally of white nationalists and supremacists at the University of Virginia turned into a 'tragic, tragic weekend.'"

This is the kind of newspaper article I'm looking for, detailing what happened in Charlottesville, and I wish I felt more confidence that The Washington Post would tell it straight. Maybe this is straight, but how can I know? What trust has been shot to hell in the last few years of journalism! I'm still reading this, because it's the closest I've come to the kind of careful report I want.

Excerpt:

What do we know about James Alex Fields Jr.?

I'll link to the Google news search on his name. He's been arrested and accused of driving the car that drove into a crowd of people on the street in Charlottesville yesterday. I can see that he's from Ohio.

NPR has a quote from his mother:

"I thought it had something to do with Trump. Trump's not a white supremacist," said Bloom, who became visibly upset as she learned of the injuries and deaths at the rally.

"He had an African-American friend so ...," she said before her voice trailed off. She added that she'd be surprised if her son's views were that far right, according to the AP.

NPR writes "she knew he was attending a rally in Virginia" but "didn't know it was a white supremacist rally." Notice the assumption that it's simply a fact that it was "a white supremacist rally." I'm not sure that's established. I don't think you can assume that everyone who attended that rally has a "white supremacist" ideology, but I think there's a big effort right now to lump the entire alt-right into that category. I think it's better to treat people as individuals and not throw them into stereotypes (especially if the stereotypes are going to be big and crude). To be carefully factually accurate, you shouldn't assume that a person from out of town who is driving a car is attending the rally.

More from NPR:

In a photo posted to Twitter by the Anti-Defamation League and reported by BuzzFeed, a man who appears to be Fields Jr. can be seen brandishing a black shield handed out by the self-proclaimed fascist group Vanguard America.

Are these 2 pictures of the same man?



I don't know. The second picture seems to have a sharply over-shaved space between the eyebrows. In the first picture, it's hard to see past the sunglasses, but the eyebrows may be more natural. The hair in photo #1 seems more squared off . The ears seem closer to the head in photo #2. Would he really have changed shirts? And don't men usually stick to one style of undershirt and not switch between a high and low necklines?

Those black shields may make people look like they're in the same group, but if the shields were being "handed out," then any lost soul might end up carrying something without knowing what the group that handed it out says it means. And it's just stupid cardboard held in a hand. Is "brandishing" really a sensibly journalistic word?

Plainly, no. To "brandish" is "To flourish, wave about (a sword, spear, dart, club, or other manual weapon) by way of threat or display, or in preparation for action" (OED). Even if it were a real shield and not a cardboard "mock up," a shield is not a weapon.

Let's carefully collect and examine evidence about James Alex Fields Jr. and about what happened in Charlottesville on Saturday. If you hate violence and hatred, don't take the kinds of mental shortcuts that are the machinery of violence and hatred. Let's be better than that.

ADDED: If the crowd had been right wing and the driver of the car could be connected to the left, I think the media would be imposing the mental illness template as quickly as it could.

"After the [white nationalist] rally at a city park was dispersed, a car plowed into a crowd near the city’s downtown mall, killing at 32-year-old woman..."

"Some 35 were injured; at least 19 in the car crash, according to a spokeswoman for the University of Virginia Medical Center. The authorities did not immediately say whether the episode was related to the white nationalists’ demonstration, but several witnesses and video of the scene suggested that it might have been intentional. Chief Thomas said that a suspect had been taken into custody and that police were treating the episode as a criminal homicide. Witnesses said a crowd of counterdemonstrators, jubilant because the white nationalists had left, was moving up Fourth Street, near the mall, when a gray sports car came down the road and accelerated, mowing down several people and hurling at least two in the air."

The NYT reports.

President Trump said (NYT):

"We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides... It’s been going on for a long time in our country. It’s not Donald Trump, it’s not Barack Obama."

After calling for the “swift restoration of law and order,” Mr. Trump offered a call for unity among Americans of “all races, creeds and colors.”

And:

“We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!”

Some people think this "on many sides" nonspecificity is a problem. For example, Chuck Schumer: “Until @POTUS specifically condemns alt-right action in Charlottesville, he hasn’t done his job.”

"You are all Goebbels! Goebbels would be proud!" shouts Jack Posobiec at the players and audience at the "Julius Caesar" performance in Central Park last night.

We see him at the end of the video he is making of his partner-in-protest Laura Loomer, who barged up onto the stage yelling about "political violence against the right." "It's unacceptable!" she instructs. She gets 6 seconds before the voice on the loudspeaker takes control, announcing "Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to pause," and after half a minute security has hustled her off the stage.

The "Julius Caesar" performance is the one with a Trump lookalike playing Caesar and getting stabbed to death on stage.

Here's some more information about about Prosobiec and Loomer. They both work at The Rebel. She's been a reporter for Project Veritas. He got a lot of attention in this New Yorker piece, "The Far-Right American Nationalist Who Tweeted #MacronLeaks" (May 7, 2017):

Jack Posobiec is the bureau chief and sole employee of the Washington, D.C., office of the Rebel, a Canadian media outlet that specializes in far-right video commentary. Last weekend, I met him at a Peet’s Coffee a few blocks from the White House. He told me, “As a journalist, I use all the tools at my disposal”—mostly YouTube, Periscope, and Twitter—“to seek the truth and disseminate the truth. That’s the purpose of journalism, right? At the same time, I also do what I call 4-D journalism, meaning that I’m willing to break the fourth wall. I’m willing to walk into an anti-Trump march and start chanting anti-Clinton stuff—to make something happen, and then cover what happens. So, activism tactics mixed with traditional journalism tactics.”

They broke the 4th wall* last night.

When is it acceptable to disrupt a performance and appropriate an audience that did not assemble to hear your message?

And who, if anyone, was "like Goebbels" last night? (We've seen so much of the left calling the right Nazis, and this shows Nazi-calling goes both ways.)

ADDED: Interrupting the players and even getting on stage with them is traditional:

Since most theatre performances were often three hours long... the behavior of the audience became very rowdy, the audiences did not keep quiet, or arrive on time, or remain for the whole performance they would simply get up and leave whenever they felt like it. They joined in on the action occurring on stage, interrupted the actors, and even sometimes got on the stage. They also talked during dull moments, and threw rotting vegetables, especially tomatoes at the actors...

___________________

* "Breaking the 4th wall" normally refers to the actors deviating from the theatrical convention of behaving as if they're in a 4-sided box and the audience isn't there. It's something the playwright or the director chooses to make part of the show. It's presumptuous for someone not connected with the show to take it upon himself (or herself) to break the wall. I've seen plays where it looks like that's happening, where one of the actors is seated in the audience and he starts heckling the play and getting a response from the actors on stage and it takes a little while to realize that's part of the play.

"Madison police investigating possible ambush of 'Proud Boy' by anti-fascists."

The Cap Times reports:

On May 13... a group of young men known as the Proud Boys from Wisconsin and possibly other states gathered to confer on their alt-right agenda. A South Chicago anti-fascist group, aware of the Proud Boys meeting at the Irish Pub on State Street, arrived at the bar that same night, waited until the Proud Boys group left, then ambushed one of them.

Madison police have not verified this account, which was posted by an anti-fascist — or "antifa" — group from south Chicago....

Initiated only last year, the Proud Boys, a quirky far-right association of young men, espouses “Western” values, decries Islam and immigration, extols housewives and entrepreneurs, and bans masturbation. In addition, initiation rites include a ritual beating, a requirement for a “Proud Boys” tattoo and a physical confrontation with anti-fascists.

"Free speech or die, Portland. You got no safe place. This is America, get out if you don’t like free speech."

"Death to the enemies of America. Leave this country if you hate our freedom.... You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism. You hear me? Die.”

Those are 2 statements by Jeremy Christian, from his appearance in the courtroom as he was arraigned after the murders on the MAX Green Line train in Portland. I read those statements first "in the NYT, which uses the verb "shouted" and a photograph of Christian with his mouth wide open to convey the tone of his speech. I was unsatisfied with the NYT because it shifted to the subject of Mayor Tom Wheeler's rejection of permits for "alt-right" events in Portland.

Looking for more detail about the arraignment, I switched to The Washington Post, which has video of Christian making the above-quoted statements. The video makes a different impression:


I was surprised how scripted Christian sounded, as if he were delivering a memorized speech. I also heard an additional sentence, after "Leave this country if you hate our freedom": "Death to Antifa." I'd been inclined to think of Christian as a ranting lunatic, but the delivery of these lines makes him seem more controlled in his structure of beliefs — not that the beliefs are cogent.

Christian leaps from the love of freedom of speech to a sentence of death to those who don't like freedom of speech. "Free speech or die" seems like a variation on "Live free or die," but you have to misunderstand "Live free or die," which is supposed to express willingness to die for the cause of freedom, not a desire for other people to drop dead if they don't value freedom above everything else.

Perhaps it's disgusting to analyze the words of a person who has done something so evil, but Christian's words are being quoted and used. He's not being hidden away and denied a voice, so it's not as if I can close the door and say don't listen to the rants of a madman.

He's being quoted and used as a jumping off point for things people want to say, and what's particularly irritating — aside from the rank sensationalism of bloody murder — is the blithe assumption that Christian's agenda is racism. You can see that the arraignment quotes have no racist content at all. The statements from the murder scene (and in a recording made of him on a train on an earlier occasion) were anti-religion (and not just anti-Muslim). Where's the racism?

The WaPo article proceeds to talk about the "long and violent history of white supremacist and other racist activities" in the Pacific Northwest. It gives us a quote from a professor of urban studies at Portland State University, Karen Gibson: “The idea that Portland is so liberal supersedes this dark, hidden secret about racism.” Maybe so, but the article never establishes that Christian is a racist.

WaPo drags in Donald Trump:

Some residents said President Donald Trump has caused those racist demons to stir again....

“I don’t have that feeling like it can’t happen here — the way people talk about Portland — because we’ve got racism. We’ve got all kinds of things,” said Murr Brewster, who came to see a memorial at the city’s transit center. “It’s everywhere and the trouble is, it’s getting more and more prevalent.”

Primed, we hear next about Mayor Wheeler's effort to stop the planned rally, which, we're told, is billed on Facebook as "a Trump Free Speech Rally." Then this paragraph galumphs in:

Christian attended a similar rally in late April wearing an American flag around his neck and carrying a baseball bat. Police confiscated the bat, and he was then caught on camera clashing with counter-protesters.

That might put him on the pro-Trump side. But where's the racism? Was he armed with a bat because he wanted to fight the counter-protesters? That fits with "Leave this country if you hate our freedom. Death to Antifa."

Elsewhere, I'm seeing assertions that Christian was actually for Bernie Sanders. And here's a piece in The Oregonian, premised on a deep read of Christian's Facebook page: "His posts reveal a comic book collector with nebulous political affiliations who above all else seemed to hate circumcision and Hillary Clinton." And:

The question of whether Christian was a Trump supporter or a Sanders supporter, doesn't have an either/or answer, except: he definitely was not a Clinton supporter.

"Bernie Sanders was the President I wanted," wrote Christian in December. "He voiced my heart and mind. The one who spoke about the way America should gone. Away from the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes. The Trump is who America needs now that Bernie got ripped off."

But on Nov. 11, he posted that he was unable to bring himself to vote for Trump.

"I've had it!!! I gonna kill everybody who voted for Trump or Hillary!!!" he said in another post in early January. "It's all your fault!!! You're what's wrong with this country!!! Reveal yourselves immediately and face your DOOM!!!"

I'd say that sounds like a Bernie Sanders supporter. After Sanders dropped out and endorsed Hillary, he had nowhere to go. I don't know why white supremacists are getting blamed for Christian's insanely murderous rage. It would make more sense to blame the those who've been inflaming anger on the far left.

But back to the NYT, where this post began, because after reading The Washington Post, I did see more reason in the shift from what Christian said at the arraignment to Tom Wheeler's rejection of pro-free-speech rallies. Christian made free speech sound like an ugly, evil cause related to murder. Now, you should see that the violence Wheeler uses to justify repressing a free-speech rally is violence from those who oppose the rally, the counter-protesters. But Christian's extolling of free speech may obscure that. His jumbled, awful remarks at the arraignment are useful to anyone who would like to shape our brains to think: Free speech = Violence. And: To suppress speech is to suppress violence.

And who doesn't wish that the police could have arrested Jeremy Christian when they had him speaking and carrying a baseball bat at a rally?

The Washington Post writes an ambiguous headline.

"Georgetown professor confronts white nationalist Richard Spencer at the gym — which terminates his membership."

When I opened the tag for that article (hours ago) I assumed that the professor got his membership terminated, but now I see I am wrong.

An Alexandria gym terminated the membership of white nationalist Richard Spencer last week after he was confronted by a Georgetown University professor who recognized him and lambasted him over his alt-right views.

Why was the person who got confronted terminated?

The professor, C. Christine Fair, of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, asked Spencer if he was Richard Spencer, and when he denied it (because he didn't want trouble, she said: "Of course you are, so not only are you a Nazi — you are a cowardly Nazi." And: "I just want to say to you, I’m sick of your crap... As a woman, I find your statements to be particularly odious; moreover, I find your presence in this gym to be unacceptable, your presence in this town to be unacceptable."

Finally, as the professor tells it, the general manager told her she was creating a "hostile environment" at the gym, and "Fair responded that Spencer’s views create a 'hostile environment' for gym employees who are women and people of color." But later:

Fair said she was contacted by a corporate representative for the gym last week, who informed her that Spencer’s membership had been terminated. The gym wanted her to come in to provide more information about the incident.“I’d do it again,” she said of the episode. “I told the fellow, ‘I think we can have a deal here: You don’t let any more Nazis in, and I won’t be making a scene.’ ”