Alt-America

What Hacker News says

1. wpietriSep 2022
   > > people who advocate for exterminating Jews and returning Black people to slavery

   > Literally no one does that. You are imagining things.

   You are obviously not a serious participant here. These people exist. They existed before the internet, and the internet has, to my great disappointment, only enabled their spread.

   There's a ton you could read, but maybe start with Neiwert's "God's Country" and "Alt-America", which document the pre- and post-Internet versions of America's white supremacist movement.

   > Abusive is a relative and in this context meaningless word.

   That is also embarrassingly ignorant. If you'd like to learn something, maybe try Citron's "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace", Warren's "Targeted and Trolled", Jeong's "The Internet of Garbage", and Bancroft's "Why Does He Do That".

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2. hhas01Nov 2020
   https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/27/donald-tru...

   https://www.epi.org/indicators/state-unemployment-race-ethni...

   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/14/the-pr...

   https://www.scientificamerican.com/report/the-black-lives-ma...

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

   https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Radical-Right-Trump/dp/17...

   Really, dude. The Republican party shucked off all moral rights to Lincoln’s name after 1965, when it chose to sell out its principles in exchange for naked power. There’s nothing left now but a cancerous soup of proto fascists, theocrats, oligarch bootboys, and full-time professional liars, lying to the millions of Americans who want to be lied to. Which I’m not, so you can cram your GOP beer goggles where the sun don’t shine, because you’re just not that good at it.

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3. wpietriMay 2019
   This is definitely incorrect:

   > The hate isn't "spreading through social media" the hate and the fear were already there.

   If extremism couldn't be effectively spread, extremists wouldn't bother trying. But they put quite a lot of effort into recruiting and propaganda.

   For those interested, I strongly recommend Neiwart's "Alt-America": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MT2KCB2/

   He's a journalist who in the 80s and 90s was covering extremists (e.g. violent white supremacists, "patriot" militias). He makes a very good case that the Internet has been an enormous boon, enabling significant growth and normalization.

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4. wpietriMay 2019
   That's a common claim, but I've seen precious little evidence for it. For decades US Nazis and other loons were justifiably obscure. But the rise of the Internet, which enabled all sorts of connection, also enabled our country's worst to more easily connect, network, and recruit. A good book on the topic is Neiwart's "Alt-America", written by a journalist who studied American white supremacists starting in the 1980s.

   As a counterpoint, just recently we saw Tommy Robinson, far right activist and repeat felon, get crushed in the European elections. Why did fail? He himself says social media bans were the reason: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/european-elec...

   Deplatforming works. If we need people to understand awful people and awful ideas, history provides us with plenty of examples. Similarly, if we want people to understand tigers, we don't just turn tigers loose in the classroom. We read books, we see videos, maybe we visit a zoo.

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5. wpietriMay 2019
   Your handwaving on the Rodney King riots is unpersuasive. I already pointed people at an expert: David Neiwert, and in particular his book Alt-America. And your logic is very poor. By it, we could also prove that vaccines don't do anything, because clearly we had diseases both before and after their invention.

   So as mentioned in my bio, I think you've used up your ration of my time. You'll have to carry on in your support of violent white supremacists without me.

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6. wpietriNov 2018
   I guess they'll have to return to sharing their desire to kill black people the old fashioned way, in person.

   Something you aren't grappling with here is the way the Internet has enabled previously-scattered terrible people to connect and self-radicalize. David Neiwart, who tracked various "patriot", white supremacist, and other fringe groups since the 90s, wrote a very readable book about how things have changed since then: https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Rise-Radical-Right-Trump/...

   I definitely appreciate the early ethos of the Internet. It's a good founding myth, and I would like to work to keep things open by default. But if the worse 0.1% of humankind ends up not being able to host anything because otherwise they will work together to murder people, I am 100% ok with bending my "anything goes" bias a bit.

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