— Anonymous (@YourAnonGlobal) August 14, 2017
Over the weekend, white supremacist rallies resulted in violence and death, and Donald Trump played “both sides” (“many sides,” in his words) about it for some reason. (The only reasons we can think of for someone to equate racist violence to pushback against it is either that they, themselves, support racist violence, or they desire the support of violent racists.) Meanwhile, some people—including web hosts and hackers—are actually doing something about it.
Web hosting company/domain name provider GoDaddy, in reaction to the violence in Charlottesville Virginia, finally decided that neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer had violated their terms of service. The excuse GoDaddy gave for suddenly coming to this decision was that a horrible article the Daily Stormer published about Heather Heyer—the woman who was murdered when one of the rally attendees drove his car into a crowd of counter protestors—was inflammatory and could incite further violence.
Really, the whole incident was probably just a wakeup call to GoDaddy that internet Nazis and real Nazis are the same, and dangerous, and their stoking of hatred should’ve been seen as an incitement to violence, as well as a terms of service violation, long ago. GoDaddy only provides the site’s domain name, though, and doesn’t actually host any of its content on the company’s servers. As of now, the site still exists, and its top post claims it was taken over by the hacking group Anonymous, but all of the site’s content is still live, so that seems a bit suspect:
We have no confirmation that “Anonymous” is involved yet. Looks more like a DS stunt. Wonder if they are having issues finding a new host. https://t.co/ikXXRBfC5p
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) August 14, 2017
Please Retweet The Following:
DAILY STORMER HACK IS A FALSE FLAG OP BY OWNER ANDREW ANGLIN TO IMPLICATE ANONYMOUS IN HIS WEBSITE’S SHUTDOWN
— TheAnonJournal (@TheAnonJournal) August 14, 2017
But the group did put out a threatening message to those who engage in white supremacist terrorism. That’s exactly what this was, which is why it was so horrible to for Donald Trump to dance around the issue and play “both sides” here, although it wasn’t entirely surprising for a man whose administration has defunded investigation into exactly that kind of terrorism. Meanwhile, we kind of wish other web-based entities would do more to curb this kind of thing:
Twitter HQ right now pic.twitter.com/vQzfKlW4lg
— Don Neufeld (@dnf) August 12, 2017
No matter how Trump’s team chooses to explain it away, his lack of explicit condemnation speaks for itself. If anyone still doesn’t quite hear the message it sends, maybe the support his words are getting from the neo-Nazis and white supremacists will make it clearer. Or maybe we can glean the message from the fact that Trump miraculously found the time to explicitly call out Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, who left a Trump administration advisory panel specifically due to the lack of white supremacy condemnation.
The “both sides” tactic used to confuse the issue and normalize the hate groups is an age-old strategy:
When you read history of Nazi Germany, one of the chief arguments Hitler made was he was standing up to “violent leftists”
— Gabriel Sherman (@gabrielsherman) August 13, 2017
This is all coming out of a playbook that we should really be more familiar with. Here’s a video from 1947 that might seem eerily familiar:
VIDEO: We shared this video a year ago and we’ll share it again. This is a govt-funded video that came out in 1947. pic.twitter.com/BzOwutcxVA
— TheAnonJournal (@TheAnonJournal) August 13, 2017
Even now, the members of this movement are trying to find a way to confuse the issue and get “normies” back on their side. They’re suddenly going to dial things back and try to appear reasonable, but a lack of immediate violence doesn’t make them any less repugnant.
Nazi strategy: “Leftists will recognize dog whistles and know we’re crypto, but normies won’t listen to them.” pic.twitter.com/YSkLp1J95C
— Contra 🌸 (@ContraPoints) August 13, 2017
We can’t let them confuse people. Anyone who aligns themselves with white supremacy must be called out and denounced, and even that’s not enough. Right now, politicians—even in his own party—are expressing discontent with Trump’s reaction to the events and hate groups involved, but that’s meaningless unless they stand up against the policies of his administration that play on the same bigotry, like anti-immigrant efforts and longstanding voter disenfranchisement by Republicans.
Denouncing white supremacist rallies and violence by citizens while writing white supremacy into law is doing less than nothing to squash these disgusting hate movements. It’s actively participating in them. There’s much more our lawmakers can do to stand up to hate (here’s a handy list of things to demand of them), and they’re going to have to do it for their words to have any meaning at all.
(featured image: shutterstock)
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