Monthly Archives: August 2017

CHARLOTTESVILLE After using his blog and Wes Bellamys Twitter history to make a name for himself last fall, those platforms are now being used against Jason Kessler, the pro-white activist who organized the Unite the Right rally that turned deadly on Saturday.

Articles and conspiracy theories about Kesslers past as a supporter of President Barack Obama and wannabe liberal activist who participated in the Occupy movement abound now as President Donald Trump continues facing backlash for his response to the rally that resulted in one woman, as well as two state police officers in a separate incident, dying.

On Monday, Kessler uploaded a video hoping to dispel rumors that he intentionally organized a violent rally that would reflect poorly on the so-called alt-right movement of white nationalists. He accused the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as less extreme nationalists, of spreading misinformation about him.

Earlier this summer, the SPLC labeled Kessler a white nationalist, and wrote a profile about him that included assertions that some people on white nationalist forums have been questioning his ideological pedigree.

I grew up in Charlottesville. Anybody whos seen the way Charlottesville was this weekend understands that its an incredibly left-wing, commie town, Kessler, 33, said in a video he posted online Monday.

Kessler said that he used to align himself with the citys politically left-leaning residents, but went on to say he was red-pilled about three years ago.

The term is a reference to the film The Matrix, and has been used by alt-right followers as a way to describe someone who has taken to white identitarian issues and now rejects ideas such as multiculturalism, feminism and political correctness. Critics argue that attachment to white identitarianism is nothing more than a veil for white supremacist beliefs.

But old tweets, a neighbor, a liberal activist and some of Kesslers old friends attest that he held strong liberal convictions just a few years ago.

In a series of tweets in November, Kessler said many alt-right followers are former liberals, and that he previously voted for Democrats. He said he voted for Trump in the primary and the general election.

I like Trump more than I did Obama, he wrote on Nov. 6. My Trump enthusiasm is through the roof. I like people who push the edge.

In an interview last month, one of Kesslers childhood friends, David Caron, said Kessler previously had identified as a Democrat, but became disillusioned when he started thinking that there was no place for him in a party that has focused its efforts on embracing diversity and minority issues. He said the two of them had started supporting Trump last summer and attended one of his rallies in Richmond.

He was a Democrat until last year. The main thing is, he said he felt like the party didnt want him, Caron said.

Laura Kleiner, a Democratic activist who lives in Staunton, said she dated Kessler for several months in 2013. She said Kessler was very dedicated to his liberal principles, and that he was a strict vegetarian, abstained from alcohol and drugs, embraced friends of different ethnicities and was an atheist.

He broke up with me, and a lot of it was because I was not liberal enough, she said. I am a very progressive Democrat but he didnt like that I ate fish and that Im a Christian.

Kleiner said Kessler was well aware that she was of Jewish heritage, and that he showed no signs of being anti-Semitic. She also said he had a roommate for several years who was an African immigrant.

In an interview earlier this week, one of Kesslers neighbors, Zoe Wheeler, said she knew of two different African roommates who lived with him, and never thought Kessler was a racist, even after he started to make waves in the local news late last year.

I met him 12 years ago, before he got really obsessed with white identity issues, Wheeler said. I think he went off the deep end There was no stopping it, and then he was fueled by being an enemy and having something to stand for.

If you spend too much time on the web and youre alone, youve got a lot of guys plying you with all kinds of ideas, she said. You want to grab hold of something. He wants to stand for something I get that. But I feel like hes all over the place.

I celebrate a diversity of cultures, and that was something that seemed to have been a part of his life, too, Kleiner said. I was really surprised to hear the stories that hes changed and is now far-right. Its really shocking and disappointing.

Hes an extremist in whatever he decides to do. Thats all I can really say.

Kesslers ties to Emancipation Park and the statue of Robert E. Lee go beyond the past year, when he decided to target Charlottesville City Councilor Bellamy for his effort to remove the statue of the Confederate general. The rally Saturday was ostensibly intended to be a protest of the councils decision to remove the statue.

According to a woman (who wished to remain anonymous) who was part of the Occupy movement camp in what was then called Lee Park, Kessler was present there for several weeks in late 2011. She said Kessler ultimately removed himself from the camp after activists there started to make it known that his presence was not welcomed.

He was just so disagreeable that hed start fights between other people. He was very manipulative and very aggressive, the woman said.

He wanted people to be more violent and aggressive. He wanted to be the leader of things. ... Even if his politics had been good, I dont think people would have liked him, she said.

The former occupier said Kessler also tried to attach himself to other leftist groups around that time, such as Food Not Bombs and an atheist social club. She said Kessler had attempted to insert himself in those groups and radicalize them.

I dont think he knew what they really did. They just feed people thats it, she said. Its like he got the idea that he could make it into some more militant group.

I dont think he actually has any central beliefs at all not that that makes what hes doing any less dangerous.

Kessler did not reply to messages seeking comment for this story. But essays he published on his blog through late 2015 seemed to demonstrate a shift in thinking. (The blog, Jason Kessler, American Author, recently was taken down. It remains unclear why.)

Last fall, The Daily Progress reported that Kessler published a blog post in February 2016 in which he reflected on the potential of war between different racial groups in the future. He argued that white people would need to fight to avoid becoming a minority in America a phenomenon hes described in recent months as white genocide.

Cultures, tribes and civilizations are meant to clash just as we always have in the past, just like it is with nearly every other beast in the animal kingdom, Kessler wrote last year.

Kessler used his blog to excoriate Bellamy in November. After uncovering a trove of offensive and inappropriate tweets Bellamy had written between 2009 and 2014, before he was elected to office, Kessler used his blog to expose the city councilor and call for his removal.

In his other blog posts that have been archived and shared with The Daily Progress, Kessler seemed to foreshadow his future role in the community and the events that took place at the Unite the Right rally.

I cant think of any occupation that I admire more than the professional provocateur, who has the courage and self-determination to court controversy despite all slings and arrows of the world, he wrote in December 2015 as part of a blog post he updated a few times over a span of about two months his running thoughts.

Also that December, he published his historical perspective on mass violence.

We get so caught up in the emotion of the violence that we dont consider the long-term, historical consequences, he said.

Perhaps wed be happier if we made peace with the fact that rabid animals are going to dwindle the herd from time to time (as they have in much greater volume throughout history) and thats not really a bad thing in the long run.

Regarding large-scale attacks, he said, I dont think the zeitgeist should have an aneurysm every time one occurs either. I think wed be served to draw some historical perspective on how difficult the human condition has always been and how that is something of a blessing in disguise.

Read the original post:

Kessler described as onetime wannabe liberal activist - Richmond.com

A still from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. Alongside Amitabh Bachchans rise in the 1970 and 80s, a group of filmmakers and actors, graduates from Delhis National School of Drama and the Film and Television Institute of India, solidified the parallel cinema movement. Photo: Picasa

Eight years ago, I had called up Dev Anand for an interview. I know him through television, and through laboured, sanitized pop culture nostalgia. The man picked up the phone and introduced himself before I could say a word, in crisp, lilting English, Dev Anand here. I met him a few days later at his office in the clean, affluent neighbourhood of Pali Hill. At 86, he was pompous, as Id expected, but in an elegant way. He seemed like the perfect misfit in the corporate studio era of the Hindi film industry of the time. Aamir Khans calculated, politically correct crispness was the movie star zeitgeist in Mumbai. A star of 1950s and 1960s Hindi cinema, Devsaab talked about nostalgia, stardom and independence, and why he believed 1950s Hindi cinema wouldve been better if the hero wasnt so weepy.

The Dev Anand hero was optimistic and wily, in a stylized way. He projected the optimism of newly independent, Jawaharlal Nehrus India with relish. In the films of the other two stars of the time, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor, the city was often a menacing place, devouring the poor and the sensitive. It was a world view repeatedly and beautifully evoked in the films also of actor Balraj Sahni and director Bimal Roy. In Anands films, like one of his first hits, Taxi Driver, Bombay is a cruel city, but the hero is tenacious and canny. He was a minor aberration in Nehruvian cinema of the time, in which filmmaking was the stomping ground of poetry and Leftism. Balraj Sahni, Sahir Ludhianvi, Mehboob Khantheir works were as much about entertainment as about social commentary. The Progressive Writers Association and Indian Peoples Theatre Association marshalled the talent pool that mattered. The look of a production house such as Devika Ranis Bombay Talkies and Navketan Films, which Anand set up with his director brothers Vijay Anand and Chetan Anand, reflected the ambitions and fantasies of the men who ran them, the film genres they cultivated and the writers, directors, and craftsmen they hired.

The influence of Hollywood on cinemas all over the world was solidifying by then, and a decade later it had started becoming prominent in Bombays cinema. Ramesh Sippys Sholay (1975), one of the most celebrated Hindi films of all timein movie memory as well as cultural studies classroomswas written by Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan like a Western, with Indian characters and provincial North Indian wit. Born a year before its release, Ive never watched Sholay on the big screen, in its 70mm grandeur. But Ive inherited a 3-LPs set of the film. If you must know, listening to Sholay, and not just its music but the entire film, is a Hindi film worship ritual.

In Zanjeer, Deewar and Coolie, one of Sholays stars, Amitabh Bachchan, unleashed the vigilante on screens across India who took the idea of social justice embedded in the movies of Dev Anands era to the streets. Soon, Hindi cinema was Bollywood, a portmanteau derived from Bombay and Hollywood (or Tollywood in West Bengal, from Tollygunj and Hollywood). By the late 1970s and 1980s, Bollywood became a mass machine, and formula became a safety valve for screenwriters. Alongside Bachchans rise, a group of filmmakers and actors, graduates from Delhis National School of Drama and the Film and Television Institute of India, and heavily trained in the stage repositories of Ebrahim Alkazi and Satyadev Dubey, solidified the parallel cinema movement. Realism had no pop or formulaic filter in the early films of directors like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Ketan Mehta and others.

For the post-liberalization, over-the-wedge generation like mine, these arthouse movies were Doordarshan staples. As children, we went to watch Bachchan in the theatres, and watched Ketan Mehtas Mirch Masala and Shyam Benegals Ankur at home, sipping Campa Cola. There was great comfort in knowing and understanding these binary oppositesit shaped in some of us, a kind of movie love that can embrace cinema as an art form, which depends on artistry, craft, moral ambivalence and individualism, and also sink into the song-and-dance, melodramatic pap in numerous and delightfully shocking derivatives of the formula. Its a gift to be this ideal movie loverdisturbed and thrilled by the unusual picture, and cossetted and babied by movies with bubble-wrapped stories in which generations of stars, often from the same families, are in leading roles.

In 1995, Shah Rukh Khan, a Delhi theatre actor and already seasoned in the outsiders struggles in Mumbais film world, appeared in Aditya Chopras Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge drinking Strohs beer, and wearing frumpy international labels. Despite all his flaws, he was an aspirational hero. He was ordinary, capable of the extraordinarythis is what liberalization also promised us. The rise of the Khans in the next decade reinforced the joy and pain of the formula film, but at the same time, the Mumbai gangster film was born through the films of Ram Gopal Varma (Satya, Company, D), taking gangster violence to the citys streets. Since then, the edges of the Mumbai film world, which officially became an industry in 2001, have been soulfully alive with directors who have swerved off the formula even as the centre has mostly remained an algorithm for making money.

As with Hollywood, alls not well with todays Bollywood.

The Hindi movie-making industry is more than 100 years old. It operates out of two or three suburbs of the over-bloated city of Mumbai. It is also a splendid, exasperating clich which transcends class, caste and language. One Direction fans pale in comparison to the Amitabh Bachchan fans who congregate outside his home every other Sunday to get a glimpse of the still prolific, ageing star.

Just like the fate of Hollywoods multi-billion, digitally-engineered franchise films, theres a dull sameness in the way most expensive Hindi movies release with the roar of publicity, and slips into oblivion after a couple of weeks. The Bollywood signature is the choreographed song: sometimes sublime, sometimes just a sorry excuse to swell up emotions. But unlike Hollywood, our producers make money outside of India only from its huge diaspora audienceA Shah Rukh Khan film will rarely not run housefull in theatres of central New Jersey. The success of PK and Dangal, both Aamir Khan films, in China suggests Bollywood could well be our most dependable soft power if consistently interesting films are made and distributed across the world. While Hollywood is spending less and less on stories with complex characters, wit and drama and more on digital wizardry that ensures sensory excitement, in Bollywood reigning stars and a few families producing films and making stars are dictating filmmaking more and more.

Seventy years of films, around 1,400 movies a year, is a lot of cinema. Every corner of India, and now even China, watches Bollywood. We are still a nation of the family movie. In most likelihood, Bollywood will survive beyond 200 years if there are enough upstarts, enough rough edges to balance out its safely walled centre. Defiance, not nostalgia, will make it survive.

Read more:

The binary pleasures of Hindi cinema - Livemint