White Jihad: The Derp State Takes Aim

Stratfor is one of the more visible nodes in the byzantine realm of security state institutions, part of the alphabet soup of Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations that wield more power than our voters or elected officials could ever hope for. Its “experts” on “intelligence” help guide America’s intelligence community’s internal debate. So, naturally, an article from their VP of Tactical Analysis on how we White Nationalists are pretty much jihadi extremists, is cause for alarm. Having ignominiously concluded their recent snipe hunt for Russian Collusion, they’re now turning their attention toward “domestic terrorists;” (read: all politically frustrated white guys).

In last week’s On Security column about the Christchurch attack in New Zealand, I noted that white supremacists adopted the leaderless resistance model of terrorism before jihadists did.

I call this process “jihadification.” Essentially, United States policies actively create comic book villains by applying consistent hormetic pressure to otherwise benign factions. North Korea has necessarily invested heavily in its military and become the “hermit kingdom” because America’s been sitting at the border for generations, waiting to pounce at the first sign of weakness. Sometimes steady pressure works, as it did in Libya. Gaddafi redirected resources from his military and police state toward economic and social development, agreed to cooperate with and trust NATO forces, and effectively “blinked.” He was sodomized to death by American-backed jihadis while Hillary Clinton and the Stratfor community cackled gleefully. Kim Jong-un, Bashir Assad, and Nicolas Maduro are cognizant of this prospect, and plan accordingly.

A similar process is occurring in America, where our attempt to host a peaceful, permitted event in Charlottesville was met with a deliberate conspiracy to deprive us of both our public protection and our civil liberties. In the aftermath of the event, egregious prosecution of only one side of the entirely avoidable melee violence and overreaching civil lawsuits against the organizations which walked into the trap set by the city council have largely disabled the “above ground” White Nationalist community in the United States. Naturally, underground and radical voices are thriving in the aftermath, as those voices have been proven correct by the State. We will not be permitted the civil liberties guaranteed by Skokie v. NSPA and must necessarily either forfeit or transition to more secretive and secure activist models.

Two people were unfairly and unjustly condemned to death in Charlottesville. Heather Heyer, a leftist protester, died because the police refused to restore order. They leveraged their order to disperse to only disperse the nationalists, encouraging and allowing the leftists to swarm around with rifles blocking traffic and hunting down “Nazis” for hours after they should have been disbanded. Even if one adopts the conspiracy theory that James Fields executed a secret premeditated plot to kill protesters with his car a couple hours after the event, there should have been no large mobs of people for him to run over. James has also been condemned to death, and it’s only a matter of time before the verdict is rendered and this innocent young man is officially condemned to death, strapped to a chair, and poisoned by the very institution truly accountable for the original loss of life.

Both the left and the right who showed up for Charlottesville showed up with the assumption that the State of Virginia would make an attempt to uphold law and order. The recent Netflix: Age of Rage documentary features people from both the left and the right alike bewildered by the government’s decision to not only refuse to intervene in the confrontation, but their multiple decisions to provoke and exacerbate violence where activists on both sides were merely trying to escape the violence. Were the same kettling and escalation tactics leveraged by the state on a college football game, Virginia could have as easily provoked a lethally riotous confrontation between their Cavaliers and Hokies fans. There were enough local, state, and National Guard officers on hand to assign a personal minder to every single nationalist in attendance, guaranteeing an event where both sides could express themselves with neither side risking death or injury.

Mr. Stewart inhabits the bizarro realm where the Heaphy Report never happened, where the organizers of Charlottesville premeditated Tarantino-style gonzo nazi terrorism. I call it the “Maddow Zone,” a left-wing complement to the hothouse conspiracy theory chambers of the talk radio right. I was one of the organizers of Charlottesville, and I know that their claims are false. I have happily participated in the discovery process and am confident that the plain truth will exonerate both myself and my political project. Nothing I say will satisfy these people, as they know with all of their hearts that Donald Trump colluded with Putin, Fields actively plotted vehicular homicide, and I’m a racist bogeyman who helped orchestrate a paramilitary attack on a random college town.

Facts are beside the point for men like Mr. Stewart. He sees himself as engaged in an existential battle against an encroaching evil.

The numerous distinct strains of the white supremacist and white separatist ideology range from Klansmen who consider themselves Christians to pagan Odinists, from National Socialists (aka neo-Nazis) who seek to overturn the current political order to patriotic nationalists who seek to return to some imagined golden age.

This is a decidedly eighties synopsis of the movement. It reminds me of the recent film Imperium, which pitched itself as a very gritty and accurate look inside White Nationalism, missing the mark by a couple decades. These people don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, but are in a position to control the conversation about how the state is going to respond to our steady growth.

Despite their differences, most of these strains view their local efforts as belonging to a wider global struggle, making them similar to jihadists.

What ideologues don’t believe their cause is part of some overarching struggle for truth and justice? Is Obama perhaps “similar to jihadists” for believing that advocating for gay rights belongs to a wider global struggle for human rights? The Sunni radicals being referenced (who hardly speak for all jihadis, many of whom are just protecting their homeland) are explicitly fighting to impose Islam on every single country. Perhaps there are some White Nationalists out there who want to make the entire world White. I haven’t met a single one in my rather extensive travels within the movement.

Like jihadists, many white supremacists and nationalists also see themselves as engaged in an existential battle against an encroaching evil.

Seriously, Scott. This is embarrassing, especially for Stratfor. You guys have a long, storied record of hunting for dragons to slay. It’s your profit model.

Jihadism and white supremacism also tend to be dualistic in the sense that a person is either a member of the ideological in-group or is considered an enemy; they recognize no innocent bystanders.

You’re literally just making stuff up. You’ve identified no commonalities between jihadism and nationalism which couldn’t readily be applied to just about any two arbitrary political factions. Environmentalists believe we’re pitted in an existential global struggle to stop corporate pollution, and everybody who’s not with them is part of the problem. Tap their fucking phones.

Most white supremacists/nationalists view themselves as a vanguard seeking to use terrorism to waken the masses who are not racially aware in order to precipitate an apocalyptic final battle […]

Re-read that sentence a couple of times if the gravity of its absurdity didn’t strike you on the first read. According to him, most of us are seeking to use terrorism. This is disqualifyingly irresponsible language for a man in his position. What all American White Nationalists want are dignity, representation, and self-determination for our ethnic identity. A very small fraction are plotting or promoting terrorism to precipitate “Ragnarok.” Per capita, a competent and credible analysis of the statistical data confirms that White Nationalists are, by and large, no more dangerous a political faction than Islamic immigrants, Black Nationalists, incels, or YouTube content creators.

The attackers behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 Olympic Park bombing, the 2011 Norway attacks and the recent Christchurch mass shootings all articulated this desire to spark a final battle.

Breivik’s attack was almost a decade ago, and neither it nor the Christchurch incidents involved American White Nationalists. The 1996 Olympic Park Bombing was committed by a Catholic anti-abortion radical who was categorically not a White Nationalist. This error will not be corrected by Stratfor.

Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, however, have proved far more successful at attracting people to the jihadist cause than white supremacists and nationalists recently have.

This rhetorical dirtbag is doubling down, now carelessly conflating White Nationalism and “jihad” as if we’re junior partners of Wahhabism now.

Moreover, the pull of Ukraine for white supremacists has been lessened by the fact that, like Nazi Germany, some white supremacists consider Slavic people racially inferior.

[citation needed]

These successors were often at odds with each other as they competed for a relatively small pool of funding and recruits.

Behold the eternal conundrum of the neoliberal writing a hit piece on White Nationalism: Do we wildly exaggerate their power and reach for sensational virality, or do we mock their impotence and irrelevance? Scott’s trying to pull off both at the same time.

When about 1,000 counterdemonstrators met these white supremacists in the absence of an inadequate police presence, the situation descended into violence and the rally was canceled.

What’s “the absence of an inadequate police presence?” Do the paragons of privatized intelligence and national security not have an editor? Are you alarmed that their editorial standards are below that of Hunter Wallace’s personal hobby blog? I am. I want to quibble with how he drifts into declaring that the Charlottesville attendees were all “white supremacists.” Were the several non-white UTR attendees white supremacists? Were the black guys flanking Jason Kessler at UTR2 white supremacists? Am I a white supremacist?

We’re in the Maddow Zone here, where Trump and the GOP are probably “white supremacist,” too.

In a show of power on Aug. 8, 1925, 50,000 robed Klansmen paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, an event Spencer consciously sought to replicate with the Unite the Right march.

Richard Spencer wasn’t the organizer of UTR, of course. And I am quite confident that Richard Spencer isn’t eager to duplicate Klan optics.

Not only did white supremacist groups garner significant law enforcement attention many decades before jihadists did, they also were far easier for European and U.S. law enforcement agencies to monitor and infiltrate because there were no ethnic or language barriers to overcome. Western law enforcement agencies and their personnel also better understood the ideology of white supremacy than that of jihadism. (Some would argue they still do.)

White Nationalism has been decidedly overpoliced in the past few decades, to the point that perfectly civil and peaceful pro-White activities are often necessarily conducted with the secrecy and care one might employ to order a brick of heroin off of the dark web or join ISIS. There’s an aggravating inversion in place here, where the security state forces us to behave like criminals and then pivots around and points at that behavior as proof that we’re indeed dangerous criminals.

I recently had to put my phone, bluetooth headset, and smartwatch in the freezer before discussing fundraising strategies for a podcasting project. And the caution was definitely not misplaced. Scott Stewart and most of the rest of this intelligence community quite literally believe that I’m a white supremacist jihadi super-terrorist hellbent on killing every last non-White in the world. That’s what they actually think. I am not exaggerating. These people have lost their damn minds.

Indeed, attention to the white supremacist threat became so heavy that deconfliction became a serious problem for U.S. law enforcement. In some Klan or neo-Nazi meetings — and later in IRC channels, Usenet chat rooms and websites on the internet — there were more undercover law enforcement officers and informants than there were white supremacists. Organizations that monitored white supremacists such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center added to the many eyes on the white supremacist movement.

The terrorist attack in Christchurch is what happens when a large and growing political faction is systematically deprived of any means of peaceful political expression. There will surely be more similar incidents, each of which will provoke outfits like Stratfor to double down even further on promoting the very repression which breeds this sort of response. Quoting John F. Kennedy, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” That is not a threat, but an “analysis,” to borrow their favorite word. I have neither the aptitude nor the appetite for guerrilla warfare or insurgency. I would like to broker amicable and equitable solutions which respect the dignity and welfare of everybody trapped in this multicult cage match.

I don’t know whether civil liberties and some semblance of traditional jurisprudence will prevail or whether the reciprocal dehumanization spiral will carry on unabated and spill over into the bloody conflict Scott Stewart and Brenton Tarrant are banking on. All I know is that my people have a right to dignity, representation, and self-determination, and I will not be intimidated into silence or submission by these half-baked, hysterical busy-bodies, spooks, and neoliberal corporate censors. If that makes me a “White Jihadi” to these self-important clown world imbeciles, then ALLAHU AKBAR!