ALT-RIGHT SCENES -- A STRANGE LINK EXISTS ON THE RIGHT BETWEEN THE EFFETE AND THE ELITE
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
AUGUST 11, 2017


THESE ARTICLES ARE DISTURBING, BUT ENLIGHTENING ON WHAT OUR WORLD IS MOVING TOWARD. THIS IS THE WORLD FROM WHICH TRUMP GETS HIS SUPPORT, AND I BELIEVE, HIS INSPIRATION. HE IS MORE AND MORE FRIGHTENING AS TIME GOES ON. EMOTIONAL CONFLICTS AROUND SEX AND GENDER IS A BASIC PART OF THIS 2017 RIGHTIST TURN OF MIND, AND ONE ARTICLE POINTS TO IT IN HITLER’S REGIME. VIOLENCE AND TESTOSTERONE ARE VERY CLOSELY LINKED. WOMEN COMMIT VIOLENT CRIMES ALSO, OF COURSE, BUT NOT NEARLY SO OFTEN.

SEE BOTH ARTICLES HERE ON THE GOOGLE FOOFARAW BETWEEN A RADICAL MALE SEXIST/MISOGYNIST EX-EMPLOYEE, THE CEO OF GOOGLE AND SOME FEMALE FELLOW EMPLOYEES. GOOGLE WAS THREATENED WITH A LAWSUIT FROM 60 WOMEN FOR FAILING TO PAY COMPARABLE WAGES TO WOMEN NOT LONG AGO. THERE WAS ALSO AN ARTICLE ON COMPUTER TECHS IN GENERAL AROUND THE COUNTRY AS BEING VERY ANTI-FEMINIST.

IT SEEMS THE BOYS JUST AREN’T “SPECIAL” ENOUGH WHERE THEY HAVE TO WORK ON A LEVEL WITH WOMEN. THE FAR-RIGHT FACTION HAS JUMPED UP IN SUPPORT OF THE FIRED ENGINEER, ALSO. THERE IS ALSO DISCUSSION BELOW OF A TREND IN THE ALT-RIGHT, NEO-NAZI MOVEMENTS TO ADD GAYS TO THEIR MEMBERSHIP IN AN EFFORT TO INCREASE THEIR POLITICAL POWER. WHENEVER I SEE A MAN WHO IS AS OVERTLY AND EXTREMELY HOSTILE TO WOMEN AS DAMORE IS, I TEND TO SUSPECT HE MAY ALSO BE GAY – JUST MAYBE.

MY MAIN INTEREST IN THESE STORIES, BESIDES THE CREEPING NAZISM ISSUE, IS THAT WOMEN HAVE BEEN CONSISTENTLY HIRED LESS FREQUENTLY AND PAID LESS THAN MEN IN THE IT FIELD IN OTHER PLACES THAN JUST GOOGLE. THERE WAS A STRING OF ARTICLES A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO ABOUT A FEMALE CREATOR OF VIDEO GAME APPS WHO WAS HOUNDED BY MALE DESIGNERS; SHE EVEN HAD HER LIFE THREATENED. WHAT LEVEL OF SICKNESS AROUND GENDER ROLES COULD BE OCCURRING HERE? I THINK IT IS PURE JEALOUSY OF A FEMALE’S DARING TO ASPIRE TO A HIGH ROLE IN THE WORLD, RATHER THAN KNEELING AT THE FEET OF MEN.

ANOTHER CONTRIBUTING FACTOR AT THE GOOGLE OFFICE TO DAMORE’S FURY AT THEIR “UNFAIRNESS” IS THAT OF GOOGLE PROHIBITING -- SUBJECT TO DISMISSAL – THE USE OF CERTAIN DISGUSTING OR INSULTING WORDS. “THE GUYS” WANT TO HANG OUT AND TRASH TALK ABOUT WOMEN, IN FRONT OF WOMEN, AND NOT BE PUNISHED FOR IT. THAT’S UNDERSTANDABLE AND ONLY FAIR, RIGHT? BOYS WILL BE BOYS!

FINALLY, THIS ENGINEER NAMED JAMES DAMORE HAS COMPLAINED THAT GOOGLE ACTUALLY MANDATED MEETINGS TO DISCUSS WHAT A SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS WAY OF THINKING AND BEHAVING TOWARD WOMEN, AND PERHAPS OTHER THINGS ALSO, WOULD BE LIKE – IN OTHER WORDS, “CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING,” AS WE HAD IT IN THE 1970’S WOMEN’S MOVEMENT. IT’S A SPECIALIZED AND UNSUPERVISED FORM OF GROUP THERAPY, IN SOME CASES. AA AND NA ALSO USE IT. DAMORE CLAIMS THAT THE GOOGLE HIERARCHY ARE HOSTILE TO “CONSERVATIVE” VIEWS – BY WHICH HE APPARENTLY MEANS WHITE SUPREMACY, ETC. SEE THE ARTICLES BELOW FOR DETAILS. SINCE BEING FIRED, DAMORE HAS GONE TO A WHITE NATIONALIST TALK SHOW TO DISCUSS HIS EXPERIENCES AT GOOGLE. HE’S TRYING TO SHOW HIMSELF AS THE ONE WHO IS ENDURING DISCRIMINATION. OH, POOR ME! I DO END WITH A HAPPY NOTE: THE MALE-FEMALE RELATIONSHIPS IN THE CARTOONS OF JAMES THURBER. ANY OF YOU WHO ARE MY AGE WILL KNOW THEM VERY WELL.

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-cancels-diversity-town-hall-over-concerns-employee-safety-n791501
TECH AUG 10 2017, 7:30 PM ET
Google Cancels Diversity Town Hall Over Concerns for Employee Safety
by ALYSSA NEWCOMB and JO LING KENT

Google CEO Sundar Pichai canceled a town hall event about diversity shortly before it was to begin on Thursday, after he said some employees expressed concerns for their safety.

"Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be 'outed' publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall," Pichai wrote in an email. "In recognition of Googlers' concerns, we need to step back and create a better set of conditions for us to have the discussion."

News of the cancelation was first reported by Recode.

Some Google employees were said to have been named personally on social media and various websites, prompting concern about whether they could candidly ask questions at the town hall.

Pichai had cut his vacation short for the town hall, where he planned to bring together employees to discuss the tensions ignited by a memo circulated inside the company that claimed to explain why more women are not engineers.

Instead of the company-wide format, Google will now hold several smaller forums "to gather and engage with Googlers, where people can feel comfortable to speak freely," Pichai wrote.

"We’ll find a better way to help our employees connect and discuss these important issues further," a Google representative said in a statement.

Image: Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice President for Products, delivers his keynote address during the Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco

Sundar Pichai delivers his keynote address during the Google I/O developers conference on May 28, 2015 in San Francisco. file Robert Galbraith / Reuters file

Earlier this week, Pichai told employees in an email that it's been a "difficult" few days for many people at Google and said he's committed to finding a way "to debate issues on which we might disagree — while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct."

"I'd encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own," he said. "I will be doing the same."

Related: ‘Google Manifesto’ Firing Highlights What You Can and Can’t Say at Work

The Guardian reported this week that as many as 60 women are considering filing a class action lawsuit against Google, alleging sexism and wage disparity.

Google is currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor over claims it did not fairly pay some female employees. The allegations stem from a January lawsuit in which the Department of Labor asked Google to hand over compensation data.

In an April blog post, Eileen Naughton, vice president of people operations at Google, wrote the company was "quite surprised" at the allegations and that they came "without any supporting data or methodology."

Google may also potentially face a legal challenge from James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, and who was fired on Monday.

Damore told NBC News he was "wrongfully terminated" for "perpetuating gender stereotypes" and said he believed his firing was "for political reasons."

VIDEO -- Fired Google engineer James Damore defends his manifesto about diversity 2:34

"The culture is very left-leaning and just intolerant of anyone that holds a differing opinion," he said in an interview over Skype.

He added: "I'm not just attacking diversity, I'm just attacking the fact that we can't honestly discuss any of these issues and that is actually hurting the problem."

While the consensus within Google is that some portions of the memo are acceptable to discuss and are protected speech, portions of it violated Google's code of conduct and crossed the line by advancing gender stereotypes in the workplace.

"To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK," Pichai wrote.



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/09/sacked-google-worker-threatens-legal-action-anti-diversity-row/
Sacked Google worker gives first interviews to right-wing YouTube hosts and threatens legal action
Cara McGoogan
10 AUGUST 2017 • 8:46AM

Photograph -- Google fired James Damore for his "offensive" memo that perpetuated gender stereotypes CREDIT: AP

A former Google employee who was fired for writing a 3,000-word internal memo about gender differences has responded to the company in YouTube interviews with right-wing hosts.

James Damore, whose divisive open letter to Google employees caused a storm in Silicon Valley, said he has formally complained about his treatment and is exploring further legal action.

The 28-year-old engineer was fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes" in a memo that accused Google of "political bias" against conservatives and called on the company to end "unfair" gender diversity programmes.

Google said it supports freedom of expression but condemned Damore's language in the letter, titled "Google's ideological echo chamber",* as "harmful" and "offensive".

Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, said: "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK."

Pichai said he would return from holiday to address staff on Thursday.

James Damore
Damore had worked at Google for four years CREDIT: FACEBOOK

Damore, a Harvard University graduate who had worked at Google for four years, claimed he had filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board prior to publishing the memo and that it is "illegal to retaliate against an NLRB charge". Google said it was unaware of the complaint when it terminated his employment.

The incident has provoked a heated row that reaches beyond Google's offices between critics of Damore's post and those in support, who have raised $19,000 (£14,600) to help him.

Damore, who denied he believes in gender stereotypes, said he wrote the post for people at the company who felt "isolated and alienated" by Google's culture, in a 45 minute interview on YouTube with Stefan Molyneux.

Molyneux, who has more than 650,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, is a vocal supporter of Donald Trump. His most popular videos include "the story of your enslavement" and "Why feminists hate men".

"A lot of this came from me seeing some of the problems with our culture at Google, where a lot of people who weren't in this group-think just felt totally isolated and alienated," Damore said.

Sundar Pichai’s rise to fame in 90 seconds
01:33

He added that he wasn't alone in his beliefs and that employees told him they were considering leaving the company over the problem. Damore said he wrote the post following a diversity meeting he disagreed with, in which Google outlined "sexist" things employees "can't say".

"I really thought this was a problem Google had to fix," he said.

He followed up with a second interview with Jordan Peterson, who has rejected the idea of white privilege.

It comes as the US Department of Labor is investigating Google for gender discrimination after it secured evidence of "systemic" and "extreme" pay inequality at the firm.

Google's diversity most recent diversity report revealed 31 per cent of its employees are women, who make up 25 per cent of its leadership roles and 20 per cent of its technical positions.

Major technology companies have been struggling to address gender imbalance and sexist behaviour in Silicon Valley. Uber's chief executive Travis Kalanick was forced to resign in June after an investigation found evidence of widespread sexual harassment.



IS THERE A STATISTICAL CONNECTION BETWEEN MISOGYNY AND/OR GAYNESS AND BEING RIGHTIST POLITICALLY? SEE THE FOLLOWING STORIES ON THE TWO CHARACTERISTICS. ALSO, I JUST LOVE THE PHRASE THAT THE NEO-NAZI VOX DAY IN THE ARTICLE BELOW CALLS MY VIEW ON LIFE: “SOCIAL JUSTICE CULTURE.” APPARENTLY SUPPORTING “SOCIAL JUSTICE” IS UNPATRIOTIC.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/7/16107954/google-diversity-memo-antifeminist-manifesto-alt-right-4chan
Google's infamous manifesto author is already a hero to the online right
by Russell Brandom@russellbrandom Aug 7, 2017, 3:53pm EDT

IMAGE – [A little disguised image of Martin Luther in his cowl nailing his famous Manifesto against the Catholic Church on the door of a building. Cute.]

Over the weekend, an anti-diversity manifesto written by a Google employee went viral both within the company and outside of it, drawing harsh criticism from both present and former Googlers. But some agreed with the document, and alongside muted agreement from pockets within the company, the author seems to have found louder supporters in a more familiar place: the online right.

The author’s name first surfaced in right-wing blogs early this morning. (The Verge has decided not to publish the employee's name; Recode reported he has been the subject of online threats.) The person identified by those blogs is a Google employee, and sources within the company indicate that his name is included on the circulated manifesto.

The Verge has not been able to contact the employee directly, despite multiple attempts. Google has not yet responded to a request for comment or confirmation of the employee's name and title.

But as executives within Google have rushed to criticize the document, a number of online outlets have come to the author’s defense, often praising him by name. One outlet described him as “the only set of balls left” at the company, while another said he deserved a bonus for calling attention to the situation.

Novelist and anti-feminist pundit Vox Day* has also applauded the manifesto as a corrective to social justice culture at Google, describing the company’s relatively muted response as “reasonable.”

On 4chan’s /pol/ board, one user summarized the situation by adopting the language of Men’s Rights, describing the author as a “red-pilled” programmer “complaining about the blue-pills in the company.”

An image circulating on Twitter photoshopped the author into a modern-day Martin Luther, nailing up his comments in the public square.

The original posting of the manifesto has been taken down, although it remained live as recently as Saturday afternoon.

It’s not the first time a pushback against the tech industry’s focus on diversity has spilled over into the broader right-wing. In September 2013, Business Insider CTO Pax Dickinson was forced to resign after a string of racist and anti-feminist tweets, which many believed put the company at risk of anti-discrimination lawsuits. In the wake of that firing, Dickinson joined with right-wing blogger Chuck Johnson to build information bounty service WeSearchr, before falling out with Johnson. Dickinson was banned from Twitter in 2016 alongside a number of alt-right and white nationalist accounts; he has yet to return to the platform.

It still remains to be seen what will happen to the manifesto author. Google’s vice president of diversity, Danielle Brown, sent out a mass email condemning the document on Saturday, saying it “advanced incorrect assumptions about gender.”

VOX DAY* -- Theodore Robert Beale (born August 21, 1968), professionally known as Vox Day, is an American writer, video game designer, blogger and alt-right activist.

Born Theodore Beale
August 21, 1968 (age 48)
Minnesota, United States
Education Bucknell University

Genre – Science Fiction


http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/06/05/how_alt_right_leaders_jack_donovan_and_james_o_meara_attract_gay_men_to.html
How the Alt-Right Is Using Sex and Camp to Attract Gay Men to Fascism
By Donna Minkowitz
JUNE 5 2017 4:01 PM

Photo illustration by Slate -- Queer people are not immune to fascist impulses. Photos by Michael Stewart/WireImage, FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

At the National Policy Institute’s 2015 conference, alt-right star Richard Spencer’s annual Nazi-fest, a speaker named Jack Donovan exhorted the crowd "to leave the world the way you entered it, kicking and screaming and covered in somebody else’s blood." The same year, in the pages of the The Occidental Observer, one of the most prominent white nationalist webzines, another alt-righter, James J. O’Meara, held forth about how "behind the Negro, hidden away, as always, is the darker, more sinister figure of the Judeo. The Negro is the shock troop. The Jew is the ultimate beneficiary.” Aside from being open fascists and “white racialists,” Donovan and O’Meara have another thing in common: They’re both out gay men.

In his book The Homo and the Negro, O’Meara says that gay white men represent the best of what Western culture has to offer because of their "intelligence" and "beauty," and that "Negroes" represent the worst, being incapable of "achievement." Donovan calls women "whores" and "bitches," and, when a questioner on Reddit asked him his views of the Holocaust, responded, "What is this Holocaust thing? I’m drawing a blank."

Gay men have been influenced by two white nationalist ideas: the "threat" posed by Islam and the "danger" posed by immigrants.

Both have become influential figures in the alt-right; horribly, they are not the only gay men to respond to an olive branch lately offered by white nationalism. The opening of this movement to cisgender gay men is a radical change, "one of the biggest changes I’ve seen on the right in 40 years," says Chip Berlet, co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America. In the United States, unlike in Europe, out gay men have never been welcome in white supremacist groups. The Klan and neo-Nazi groups, the main previous incarnations of white hate in this country, were and still are violently anti-queer. And while a subset of openly gay men has always been conservative (or, as in all populations, casually racist), they never sought to join the racist right.

That was before groups like NPI, Counter-Currents Publishing, and American Renaissance started putting out the welcome mat. Since around 2010, some (though by no means all) groups in the leadership of the white nationalist movement have been inviting out cis gay men to speak at their conferences, write for their magazines, and be interviewed in their journals. Donovan and O'Meara, far to the right of disgraced provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, are the white nationalist movement's actual queer stars. But there are others in the ranks, like Douglas Pearce of the popular neofolk band Death in June. And there are many more gay men (and some trans women) who have been profoundly influenced by two white nationalist ideas: the "threat" posed by Islam and the "danger" posed by immigrants.

Donovan tries to sugarcoat his own racist beliefs when speaking to his main fan base, gay men who like his macho looks and straight men from the "pickup artist" culture and the manosphere who are desperately trying to learn from him how to be manly. Instead, reverting to the other half of the Nazi playbook, he prefers to highlight his hatred for "effeminacy," feminism, and "weakness." A beautifully muscular man of 42 who has perfected a masculine scowl in the many photographs of himself he releases on his website and Facebook page, he functions as beefcake for the neofascist cause. He’s parlayed his butch allure into a brand, earning money from a line of T-shirts and wrist guards that say things like BARBARIAN and a series of books that seek to instruct both straight and gay men in how to become more masculine and in particular, more "violent."

One of my Facebook friends, a politically liberal gay man I'll call Frank, is a fan of Donovan's Facebook page "because of the visuals. I like his looks—I mean, he's bald with tattoos. He really exudes a lot of sex." Frank also likes that Donovan "trashes that whole gay club scene," which Frank finds conformist and alienating.

But when Donovan says violence, he means violence. This is not BDSM. "The ability to use violence effectively is the highest value of masters," Donovan said in a 2017 speech at a fascist think tank in Germany. "It is the primary value of those who create order, who create worlds. Violence is a golden value. Violence rules. Violence is not evil–it is elemental." Though Donovan tries to mine the latent sexiness in violence for all it’s worth, he is, in fact, against consensual BDSM, condemning it in a 2010 essay as part of a long list of evils that he feels has been perpetuated by gay culture: the "extreme promiscuity, sadomasochism, transvestism, transsexuality, and flamboyant effeminacy" promoted by "the pink-haired, punk rock stepchildren of feminism," gay activists. No, it's straight-up people hurting and killing other people he's endorsing.

And what is all this violence for? Creating small, decentralized "homelands" in this country separated by—surprise!—race. He enthusiastically embraces an idea the alt-right calls "pan-secessionism," under which, as Donovan says in his book A Sky Without Eagles, "gangs" of white men would form "autonomous zones" for themselves and white women, where women "would not be permitted to rule or take part in … political life." The gangs would enforce racial boundary lines, because, as Donovan puts it, whites have "radically different values [and] cultures" than other people, and "loyalty requires preference. It requires discrimination."


In a 2011 essay, “Mighty White,” Donovan says, “race is not my favorite issue to write about” because “I know too well that it distracts people from the bulk of my work" on the sexiness of violent masculinity. (If people associated him more with white nationalism than machismo, it could impede sales of his clothing line, books, patches, and the tattoos he sells out of a Portland-area gym.) And indeed, at the end of May, Donovan wrote a long, rambling post on his website trying to dissociate himself from white nationalism. The post may have been a response to the enormous public anger in Portland, Oregon (where Donovan lives), following white nationalist Jeremy Christian's murder of two men for defending women of color on a commuter train on May 26. In the essay, Donovan claimed he doesn't want to organize anyone politically, rather "I just want to hang out in the woods with … the people who I am oathed to, my tribe, the Wolves of Vinland"—a white, "neopagan" quasi-military brotherhood recognized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Wolves of Vinland member Maurice Michaely recently spent two years in prison for burning down a black church in Virginia.)

But Donovan’s recent hand-wringing does not erase the fact that on his website he’s repeatedly said real men want to "control our borders," decried the “black-on-white crime rate,” denounced “the deeply entrenched anti-white bias” of our culture, and said, "I support White Nationalists," who "I call … 'The Mighty Whites.' " Recently, he admiringly interviewed the two young men who lead Germany's anti-African, anti-Arab identitarian movement. On his podcast, the men, one of whom used to belong to a neo-Nazi group in Austria, boast about attacking a mosque and disrupting refugee theater. He also has begun whispering praise for Julius Evola, the Italian anti-Semite and fascist who joined Hitler's SS.

If Donovan is a caricature of the gay Nazi strongman—almost a personification of the phrase "body fascism" (which was originally used by gay men to critique other gay men's obsession with perfect gym bodies)—his counterpart, James O'Meara, is an embodiment of something that could barely be imagined until now: Nazi camp. I hesitate to write that phrase, because it's almost painful to acknowledge that camp—that subversive, gay "turning" of seriousness into playfulness and straight narratives into gay ones—could be deployed by a Nazi. But of course it can: If the emergence of out gay white nationalists shows anything, it's that LGBTQ people truly are everywhere, for good and for ill. And that we no longer have the luxury of assuming that queer tropes are inherently, and trans-historically, progressive.

omearabook

Far femmier than Donovan in both looks and tone, O'Meara writes alternately smirking and playful essays for Counter-Currents about men's clothing, the closeted Cardinal Spellman, the "homoromanticism" of the Boy Scouts, and the political economy of The Gilmore Girls. O'Meara openly loves Hitler, but he also grooves to the socialist Oscar Wilde, and, in an interview with the webzine Alternative Right, admiringly quotes "Bunny" Roger, the gay British dandy and World War II hero, as saying: "Now that I've killed so many Nazis Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat." But his "fun" paragraphs always end up at the same un-playful conclusion: "the Judaic is always there, blocking the way" and spreading "rot" throughout American culture. "The Jew" is deliberately destroying the country by building up "Negroes" and promoting "the alien, dissolute, demonic culture of the Africans." In a podcast, O'Meara said, "The blacks get their chicks pregnant as soon as they turn 15, and have 30 different children with 10 different women" because of Jewish scheming: "the poison that the Jewish mentality introduces" promotes heterosexual sex and "girl-craziness" instead of the glorious gayness that would dominate "if the Jews hadn't taken over Hollywood."

Of course, neither O’Meara nor Donovan actually support gay rights. This is partly because they don't believe in "civil rights." Although O'Meara wants to be part of an imagined elite band of men who love each other and rule society—his version of an Aryan fantasy called the Männerbund—he doesn't want to support, as he put it in the interview with Alternative Right, "some sniveling queen demanding 'my rights!' … 'The plight of the homosexual' … is a Leftist myth." Donovan says explicitly that straight people should be given more power and privileges than gay folks, because their "reproductive sexuality" is superior to ours. Both men openly detest lesbians and trans and genderqueer people: Donovan calls the trans movement "men who want to cut their dicks off and women who want to cut their tits off." And of course, no white nationalist organization anywhere supports LGBTQ rights on a social or legislative level. Their new "support" is limited to allowing cis gay men who are white racists to join them.

We no longer have the luxury of assuming that queer tropes are inherently or trans-historically progressive.

So why are white nationalists smiling in our direction? Most importantly, because it worked in Europe. In Holland, France, Germany, and Sweden, white nationalists have deliberately used LGBTQ people and Muslims as a wedge against one another. Polls show that over one third of French gay men supported Le Pen in the recent election despite her promise to end same-sex marriage, and in Germany, the far-right AfD recently tapped an out lesbian banker to run for chancellor. (The AfD is even more hostile to actual pro-gay policies than France's National Front is.) Sweden's fascist party organized an LGBTQ pride parade through Muslim neighborhoods, and of course, in Holland, Pim Fortuyn and later Geert Wilders tried to make "Islam" synonymous with "hatred of gays." Their ultimate goal was to make hatred of immigrants "progressive."

Bringing queer people in, in both Europe and America, is a way to grow the neo-fascist movement. It is also a way to court millennials, who are consistently supportive of gay rights even when they swing conservative on other issues. It's a testament to the fact that, in some ways, the queer movement has already won the battle for public opinion. The far right could not beat us, so they decided to join us—in the most superficial way possible. Ultimately, it's a form of pinkwashing, which YourDictionary defines as “the practice of representing something … as gay-friendly in order to soften or downplay aspects of its reputation considered negative.” How could Le Pen, or Wilders, or other open racists be so bad when they like queer people?

There is another potential benefit: If white supremacists can equate "Muslims" with attacks on LGBTQ people—and women—they might be able to attract liberals and moderates into a kind of anti-immigrant "big tent." This would complement their effort to portray racism as “pro-worker.” It’s hardly incidental that both Donovan and O’Meara see themselves as anti-capitalist. Like the many gay men who joined Hitler’s SA (the unit led by the out Ernst Röhm), they see a Nazi-like movement as somehow offering salvation from both antigay and economic oppression. (Of course, Hitler ultimately slaughtered Röhm and other SA gay men in the Night of the Long Knives.)

Donald-Trump-Campaigns-In-Colorado-Ahead-Of-Presidential-Election
Donald Trump holds a rainbow flag at a rally on October 30, 2016 in Greeley, Colorado.
Getty Images

The far right is attempting to seduce gay men in some of the same ways the early Nazi movement reached out to them, before mowing queers down in the name of fascist ideals. Only two days after the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last year, white-nationalist meme producer (and proud homophobe) Butch Leghorn wrote on the alt-right website The Right Stuff, "This shooting [is] a very valuable wedge issue. … We simply need to hammer this issue … Spread this meeting. Drive this wedge. Smash their coalition. Make it cool to be anti-Muslim because Liberalism." Butch and his co-activists put out a plethora of memes for the occasion with, for example, a rainbow flag and the words FUCK ISLAM, and the phrases, "To be pro-Islam is to be anti-Gay … Daddy's gonna build a wall and keep you safe." Said Leghorn on The Right Stuff: "We are currently driving this wedge as deeply as possible to break off the Pro-Gay coalition into the Trump camp."

One of the many gay people who received, and began avidly sending out, such memes was Peter Boykin, a 39-year-old, married, white Virginian who had eight years earlier been suspicious of Obama because, as he told me in a phone interview, "His name is like Osama bin Laden. We don't have his birth certificate, and he came out of nowhere." Boykin, who grew up with conservative Catholic parents who had campaigned for Ronald Reagan, founded an organization called "Gays for Trump" after he attended a party of the same name at the Republican convention last July. After the Pulse shooting, he says, "People came pouring into the group. It was like Boom!" Boykin said he isn't afraid of attorney general Jeff Sessions' antigay record: "When I met him, he shook my hand, and he put my business card in his actual jacket. He was very nice to me. I don't think he's antigay at all." But Boykin is profoundly worried about Muslim immigrants (who, according to a recent Pew poll, are actually more likely to believe in tolerance of homosexuality than evangelical Christians) wanting to hurt him: "I keep seeing videos people send me where they're beheading these 13-year-old boys and throwing people off of roofs."

Longtime LGBTQ organizer Scot Nakagawa has been fighting white nationalist movements for over 30 years, now as a senior partner at ChangeLab, a think tank on racial justice. Says Nakagawa, "We have to remember that even racist white gay men are still very vulnerable to discrimination" because they're gay. "When one is under attack"—not by phantom Muslims, but by real, neighborhood gaybashers—"one picks up whatever shields one can," even shields like racism that will not fight the true threat. In Donovan's writing, it's clear that what he's terrified of most is "weakness," especially male weakness. (He notes that he feels "disgusting" if he doesn't train in a gym "for more than a few days.") It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to guess that, at bottom, he feels profoundly weak and vulnerable. O'Meara, for his part, fears that he will be destroyed by African-American and Jewish "rot" and pollution. It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to guess that he feels dirty, and at risk of decaying from within.

Rather than simply writing off the gay men who may be attracted to white nationalism, Nakagawa says: "It is really important to think about who those people are, and to try to reach out to them. Which means having compassion for them, as difficult as that may be." Nakagawa feels that the left has too often behaved as though racism and sexism are primarily matters of personal character, rather than deep social structures that elites—the 1 percent—use to consolidate their power.

“It’s a bad choice to imagine that all these men are incredibly rich,” he adds. Rather than demonizing men who may long for a strong brotherhood to protect them in a society that is increasingly unsafe and un-nourishing for all of us, we should counter-organize among them and have the searching and committed conversations about racism and sexism that have too often eluded the gay community. In this time of great danger for both LGBTQ people and the entire country, the only real way to fight fascism is to offer a competing vision, for a society that will meet everyone’s needs rather than, as Donovan would have it, the needs of “the wolves” who seek to assert “dominance and control.” For at the end of the day, none of us is a wolf—or to say it another way, even wolves are vulnerable.

Donna Minkowitz is the author of the memoir Growing Up Golem, which was a finalist for the Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me about Sex, God, and Fury, which won a Lambda Literary Award. She has written for the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Salon, and the Village Voice.


“GOOGLE’S IDEOLOGICAL ECHO CHAMBER” MEANS WHAT??
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=echo%20chamber

ECHO CHAMBER

an insular communication space where everyone agrees with the information and no outside input is allowed

ECHO CHAMBER

A person who totally, obsequiously agrees with everything another person says.

#sychophant #apple polisher [THERE ARE TWO OTHERS AS WELL, BUT THEY WERE NOT “FIT TO PRINT.”]


http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/946/
James Thurber's Little Man and the Battle of the Sexes: The Humor of Gender and Conflict
Andrew S. Jorgensen, Brigham Young University - Provo

James Thurber, along with others who wrote for The New Yorker magazine, developed the 'little man' comic figure. The little man as a central character was a shift from earlier nineteenth-century traditions in humor. This twentieth-century protagonist was a comic antihero whose function was to create sympathy rather than scorn and bring into question the values and behaviors of society rather than affirm them, as earlier comic figures did. The little man was urban, inept, frustrated, childlike, suspicious, and stubborn. His female counterpart was often a foil: confident and controlling enough to highlight his most pitiable and funniest features. Contradictory gender roles and stereotypes are essential to Thurber's humor. This thesis thus reads Thurber's work as critical of gender roles. Thurber's humor demonstrates that expectations for men and women to be socially masculine and feminine are often incongruous with their capabilities and natures. Often his work is funny because of the way it portrays gender as performance and as expectations imposed upon people instead of as inherent qualities in men and women. These roles create conflicted characters as well as conflict between the characters that Thurber draws in his stories, often a quarreling husband and wife. Also characteristic in Thurber's humor is the element of neurosis. Thurber often played with the vernacular concepts of neurosis, and he capitalized on public obsession with Freudian psychology with his satires and with fiction and essays about various anxieties and daydreaming. Neurosis works well as comic material because it also catalyzes the battle of the sexes. To support my interpretation of Thurber as a critic of societal gender roles, Freud's book The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious is useful at illuminating a deeper 'tendency' in Thurber's humor. Thurber is often thought of as a misogynist, for his personal behavior and for his unflattering literary portrayal of women as unimaginative nags. This thesis also examines the complexities and developments of Thurber's attitudes toward women. Most importantly for Thurber, his little man figure and the battle of the sexes was a way to express the importance and power of the liberated human imagination.

Degree
MA

College and Department
Humanities; English

Rights
http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Jorgensen, Andrew S., "James Thurber's Little Man and the Battle of the Sexes: The Humor of Gender and Conflict" (2006). All Theses and Dissertations. 946.
http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/946



https://jimsworldandwelcometoit.com/2012/12/07/thurbers-cartoons/
Jim’s Nature Corner: Know Your Moths, Part 2
Thurber’s Cartoons
December 7, 2012

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4104
Thurber and the sexes: the cartoons
July 30, 2012 @ 7:27 pm