Monthly Archives: August 2020

White nationalist Richard Spencer has said he will be backing Democratic candidate Joe Biden in November's election after previously distancing himself from Donald Trump.

Spencer, who was one of the key figureheads of the alt-right movement, tweeted how he is "on Team Joe" on Monday, adding in a self-made campaign slogan, "Liberals are clearly more competent."

In a series of tweets, Spencer further explained his reasoning for backing Biden.

"The MAGA/Alt-Right moment is over. I made mistakes; Trump is an obvious disaster; but mainly the paradigm contained flaws that we now are able to perceive. And it needs to end," Spencer wrote. "So be patient. We'll have another day in the sun. We need to recover and return in a new form."

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In another tweet, Spencer added: "I will never flip on my fundamental principles. (My principles were never voting for the supposed 'the lesser or two evils' or 'stopping big government.')

"Walking into certain defeat, even death, is not heroic. It's foolhardy. I have no sympathy for martyrs. I admire winners."

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Spencer as "a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old."

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Spencer first rose to prominence in 2016 after shouting "Hail Trump!" and being greeted with Nazi salutes at an event in Washington shortly after Trump was elected.

However, Spencer said earlier this year that he regrets voting for Trump, following the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.

Spencer feared that Trump's approved airstrike which resulted in the death of Soleimani brought the U.S. to the brink of war with Iran.

"I deeply regret voting for and promoting Donald Trump in 2016," Spencer tweeted. "To the people of Iran, there are millions of Americans who do not want war, who do not hate you, and who respect your nation and its history.

"After our traitorous elite is brought to justice, we hope to achieve peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness," he added.

Spencer also led a protest against the Trump administration launching an airstrike on a Syrian airbase in 2017.

Credited with creating the term "alt-right," Spencer was also one of the main organizers of the neo-Nazi "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 at which counter-protester Heather Heyer died after being struck by a car driven by white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr.

In a statement released on the third anniversary of the deady rally, Biden said: "Three years ago today, the world watched in horror as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and far-right extremists with torches in hand descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, spewing the same anti-Semitic bile that was heard in Hitler's Germany in the 1930s.

"It was a moment of testing for our country, and a wake-up call to the fact that hate never diesit only hides. And when our leaders give it oxygen, it can come roaring back to life.

"And then our president claimed that there were 'very fine people on both sides.' Donald Trump had the audacity to assign moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those who stood against it.

"I knew then that we were in a battle for the soul of this nation. And I knew then that I could not stand by and let Donald Trump destroy the core values of this nation. Now, three years later, we can see even more clearly that everything that has made America, America, is at stake."

Spencer and Biden's campaign team have been contacted for comment.

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Richard Spencer Backs Joe Biden, Says 'MAGA/Alt-Right Moment is Over' - Newsweek

A middle-aged lawyer recently sat down at a pok restaurant in a North Georgia town. He was sniffling and dabbing his eyes with a napkin. Dont think its corona, he said, pulling up a Web site on his phone with statistics on diagnoses worldwide. Then he looked at Twitter and began talking about a different sort of virus. When Donald Trump first announced his Presidential bid, I told my wife, immediately, Hes going to be the President, he said. The lawyer welcomed the candidacy. How to put this and not sound fifteen? he said. I like chaos. I thrive in it.

For years, the lawyer, who asked not to be identified, worked in Washington, D.C., for the Republican Party. He moved his family south a few years ago, having realized, he said, that D.C. is just Hollywood for ugly people. He found that he had time on his hands. Id never been interested in social media, he said. I cant stand Facebook. But he became intrigued by the power of Twitter. Really repulsive meme-ing, the stuff that makes you laugh, makes you remember, he said. The right, he went on, is great at it instinctively. Whether its a 4chan board or basement neckbeards, they nail it. They can distill a huge talking paragraph into a cat picture. He considers Trumps digital facility absolutely genius, and believes that his frequent Twitter misspellings (Barrack Obama, covfefe) are intentional. In 2015, while the lawyers young children napped, he began trolling. Id have a glass of wine, talk to my wife, watch Netflix, and see what kinds of things we could do, he said. He would sometimes pass four or five hours a day this way.

The lawyer is not a mainstream Republican; he likes Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders. He was also unbothered by the recent Senate report on Russias election meddling. (If youre not interfering with elections, he said, youre not doing it right.) Out of curiosity, he attended a far-right gathering, where he found the younger attendees to be maybe a little misguided, but well intended. He began creating fake Twitter accounts, he said, to see whether I could get more interactions, more retweets, by being a little more radical. The Confederate flag was often his avatar, or the Bonnie Blue, a lesser-known Confederate banner. For his handles, he made up acronyms with a nationalistic tinge, such as FFK: Faith Folk and Kin. He fashioned the accounts ersatz users as boomers or gun-rights activists. The latter, he said, were easy: Just follow Dana Loesch and interact with those crazy girls who stay up all night tweeting Second Amendment stuff. He added, Id get them to retweet me and then my following would blow up. By the time the 2016 race was under way, he had about twenty accounts, each with a few thousand followers. His fake alt-right accounts amplified Trumps messaging and distorted Hillary Clintons. (Something about her makes me nervous, he said.) His fake Antifa ones spread what he called disinformation and false stories to benefit Trump.

He pulled up an old account with the handle Ruthless Lessruth. This was supposed to be a girl who was married to an alt-right guy, he said. He explained how hed used the account to trick an Antifa group into protesting an alt-right rally that didnt exist: I P.M.d the head of the Atlanta Antifa and told him that my husband was alt-right and that I was repulsed by it. Then, in the guise of the wife, he directed the Atlanta Antifa group to a would-be rally at a Marriott Marquis. A bunch of people showed up. That was hard to do, to pose as a girl with political views that Im not familiar with. Some of his Antifa accounts also pushed veganism. You have to find some community to exploit, he said. Id find an approved vegan account with Antifa leanings and interact with them a bit. It was really tedious. But Im a lawyerI get into the minutiae. Manning accounts on both sides of the political spectrum had its risks. There was always the fear of tweeting something out of the wrong account, he said. Like praising immigration to my alt-right followers or something.

The lawyers trolling dropped off in 2017. Hed become disillusioned by Trump. He hasnt done anything he said he was going to do, the lawyer said. But Id vote for him over Biden. No one is excited about Biden. (I would have pulled for Bernie, he said.) He recently opened a new Twitter account. I just dicked around on it, he said. I watched some of the trending tags. Im not a conspiracy theorist. Theres nothing I think is being hidden from us that I care a lot about. He sighed. Maybe Ive just gotten old.

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Confessions of a Trump Troll - The New Yorker

Red Pill Hari Kunzru

Knopf

September 2020

"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe," Morpheus tells Neo in the Wachowski Bros.' 1999 film, The Matrix. "You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

It is with The Matrix that the term "red pill" entered our vocabulary and later memedom as we grew into our collective, online consciousness, but the dilemma between living in blissful ignorance and confronting the truth about reality is nothing new. Neither is the idea that our reality might be simulated, or at least manipulated. From Ren Descartes' Evil Demon to Gilbert Harman's Brain in a Vat, thought experiments have often sought to tease out whether it is possible to trust our perception of reality, to determine whether we can know with certainty that what we seem to experience with our senses is an accurate assessment of some larger truth.

It is this larger truth that the far-right, emboldened by the emergence of a reactionary political class all too willing to stoke the flames of panic and prejudice, have laid claim to in recent years, claiming also, in the process, the term "red pill" to describe their process of awakening to uncomfortable realities they accuse the left-leaning of not wanting to come face to face with. British-Indian novelist Hari Kunzru, author of five previous novels and PEN/Jean Stein Book Award finalist, addresses the intersection of such existential quandaries in his latest novel, aptly titled Red Pill.

The premise of Red Pill is simple enough; clichd, almost. The unnamed narrator, a struggling writer suffering a dry spell, embarks on a retreat to clear his mind and restore his creative faculties. Any overused tropes end here, though, as Kunzru weaves an intricate fabric from a multitude of seemingly disparate elements German romanticism, the legacy of the Third Reich, the Stasi, the European migrant crisis, the 2016 US presidential election all of which come together to create this haunted tale that merges questions of privacy, transhumanism, the political ascendency of the Right in Europe and the US, and moral responsibility, among others.

Water drop by qimono (Pixabay License / Pixabay)

Kunzru's protagonist a man of Indian heritage, married and father to a young daughter is awarded a fellowship at the Deuter Center in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. If that latter name sounds familiar, it is because it served as the location of the eponymous 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was discussed a tragic and macabre past that weighs on the setting in much the same way the cold, stark, unforgiving weather does. Rather than use his fellowship to any industrious effect and develop his work on the concept of the self in lyric poetry, however, the narrator finds he is unable to fall in step with the center's rather aggressive communal work policy, which dictates that he must research and write in the presence of others.

In between calls with his wife back in Brooklyn and visits to the grave of Romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist, he binge-watches Blue Lives, a disturbingly violent police show that peppers its scenes of torture with obscure quotes, which the narrator believes might be intended as subtext.

Interestingly, the fictional Blue Lives airs at a time in which another nihilistic group fixated with the brutalization of the body is filming its own horrors for the world to see. Although ISIS is not explicitly mentioned by name, the footage from "jihadi propaganda" videos is referenced in one of several instances in which the narrator juxtaposes death with spectacle, the dignity (and what he assumes to be the inherent human right) of privacy with violent and humiliating invasiveness. Meanwhile, his initial topic of investigation the lyric "I" suffers from his frustrated attempts to secure for himself isolation and, if he is being honest with himself, plain old disinterest.

"Deep down I had no real desire to understand how lyric poets had historically experienced their subjectivity. I wasn't that interested," he admits. "It was a piece of wishfulness, an expression of my own desire to be raised above the pleasures and pains of my life, to be free from the reigning coercions of a toddler, the relentless financial pressure of living in New York. I wanted to remain alone with myself as inwardness. I wanted, in short, to take a break."

Photo by Advait Jayant on Unsplash

His desire for solitude and clarity is inexorably thwarted, and he happens upon surveillance footage that leads him to believe that residents at the center are being watched, even in (what ought to be) the privacy of their own rooms. It is thus that his paranoia at being spied upon and his preoccupation with the creator of Blue Lives, Anton, and the show's underlying meaning converge to form the catalyst for his own descent into madness, mirrored, no less, by the poet Kleist, who also "had a crisis, brought about by reading Kant, who taught that the human senses are unreliable, and so we are unable to apprehend the truth that lies beneath the surface of things."

He begs his cleaning lady, Monika, to tell him the truth about whether the center is spying on its residents, which leads to a rather long aside in the novel in which she recounts her terrible experiences at the hands of the Stasi, little assuaging his general sense of malaise and imminent doom.

The world events that unfold around the narrator are no more helpful at staying this spiral into psychosis. At the very outset of the novel, he acknowledges the role of chance in determining whether one is born into wealth or war, comfort or mortal struggle, also acknowledging the fragility of one's current circumstances, tenuous and unpredictable. "Our very happiness made me uneasy," he confesses. "It was a time when the media was full of images of children hurt and displaced by war. I frequently found myself hunched over my laptop, my eyes welling with tears. I was distressed by what I saw, but also haunted by a more selfish question: if the world changed, would I be able to protect my family? Could I scale the fence with my little girl on my shoulders? Would I be able to keep hold of my wife's hand as the rubber boat overturned? Our life together was fragile. One day something would break."

His position as a member of an ethnic minority in a white man's world compounds this anxiety, which he sees reflected in a refugee father and daughter duo he meets at different intervals in the novel and desperately longs to help in some way. "It's always people like us who go first," he tells his wife.

When the narrator at last meets Anton, he is finally afforded the opportunity to ask the burning questions that have been consuming his thoughts only the answers he receives are far from placating. His obsession becomes manic, and he follows the mind behind the show across countries, refusing to accept the man's destructive vision of a future in which humankind is divided into two groups: one that fuses with technology to transcend animal limitations an updated version of the Nazi take on Nietzsche's bermensch and the other that is destined to slavery in service of the first.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Kunzru accomplishes several noteworthy things with Red Pill, not the least of which is following nihilistic philosophies (even those that do not designate themselves as such but instead, claim to hold a utopian vision for the future that involves culling 'undesirable' elements) to their logical endpoint. In striving to fabricate an artificial, 'perfectionist' version of ourselves, we ironically (or predictably, for anyone who is familiar with history) expose the very worst in our nature.

Kunzru also addresses the bedrock humanity hits in stretching philosophy that questions reality to the extent it renders any cooperation based on that reality impossible to its snapping point. If we cannot agree on basic premises and inalienable rights, what then?

The mental crisis that ensues from having the foundations of one's belief system shattered is likewise accurately depicted: the world becomes unrecognizable, a simulation as it were. "The streetscape wasn't real. The sidewalk, the passers-by, the cars, the clouds in the sky, all were elements in a giant simulation. The sunlight was not sunlight but code."

The author excels in capturing the geist in alt-right circles, down to the language used. "Cultural Marxism has filled your brain with worms," Anton tells the narrator, after the latter confronts the Blue Lives creator and accuses him of being on the wrong side of history with his morbid masterplan for the future. Using a term favored by conspiracy theorists who allege that progressives are using psychological manipulation to topple the natural order of the world, Anton essentially equates the narrator's opposition to the erosion of basic human values with erosion of the values he personally believes to be enlightened. For that is what cultural Marxists do, according to the alt-right: They promote atheism, gay rights, feminism, all through the humanities faculties in universities and the media and all at the expense of the status quo.

Noteworthy is the Nazi preoccupation with the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, most of whom were Jewish. Another gem of an exchange between narrator and Anton: "Why are you promoting a future in which some people are treated like raw material? That's a disgusting vision," the narrator says, to which Anton responds, laughing: "I'm sorry it gives you sad feels."

Perhaps the most remarkable features of this novel are its relevance to current events and the questions it raises with regard to the ethical frameworks we take for granted and within which we operate. If "privacy is the exclusive property of the gods," as the narrator posits, is the impending class struggle between spies and those who are spied upon? Where will our steady handover of privacy in exchange for security lead to down the road?

If, again, privacy is the demarcating factor between the ruling and subordinate classes, what does it say about refugees on dinghies in the Mediterranean, whose lives and bodies are battlegrounds for political figures to build their platforms on? Is little Alan Kurdi, lying face down on a beach in Turkey, the ultimate spectacle, the ultimate "mockery of human dignity" that is simultaneously relished as a symbol, as the sacrificial animal on which humanity's sins may be pinned, and disdained for its inconvenience?

In the novel, as in reality, the very real flesh-and-blood human lives of refugee father and daughter occupy a space in the background as the theoretical tug of war between Anton and the narrator occupies the foreground, and the parallels between a past that is never too far behind and a present that threatens to rouse those ugly ghosts are all too evident.

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog [By Caspar David Friedrich - The photographic reproduction was done by Cybershot800i. (Diff). Public Domain / Wikipedia]

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Privacy and Alt-Right Transhumanism in Hari Kunzru's 'Red Pill' - PopMatters

After Donald Trump won the U.S. election in November 2016, some Republicans hoped that the new President would mellow in office and moderate his hardline campaign positions. Steve Bannon saw it as his job to make sure that didnt happen.

Bannon, a former investment banker and right-wing documentary filmmaker who served as one of Trumps principal advisers during the final months of his campaign, moved into the West Wing in January 2017, taking over an office at a crucial hallway intersection steps from the Oval Office. His perch allowed him to see nearly everyone visiting then-chief of staff Reince Priebus on one side, and Trumps son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner on the other.

Bannons official new title was chief strategist, and he saw himself as besieged by ideological rivals trying to slow-walk Trumps controversial campaign promises to build a border wall, gut trade deals, and ban Muslims from entering the country. His ascent was seen by many as bringing the fringe voices of white nationalists and the alt-right directly into the West Wing. He spent hours on calls with GOP donors and reporters painting Priebus as beholden to the old Republican establishment and Kushner as a Democrat in Trumps house. He lasted seven months, before being pushed out for leaking about palace intrigue and refusing to cede access and control to Trumps second chief of staff, John Kelly.

Bannons time in the White House may have been short, but it was influential. Within a few weeks of moving in, Bannon helped launch Trump on the hardline policy path he has rarely deviated from since. Bannon, along with senior advisor Stephen Miller, pushed for the hasty freeze of the U.S. refugee program and the halt in immigration from seven majority Muslim countries, moves that were later challenged in court and required revisions. He kept a white board on the wall next to his desk and put green check marks next to actions that weakened international trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and North American Free Trade Agreement.

It is quite a fall, then, to go from viewing himself as keeper of the Presidents to-do list to being arrested by federal agents three years later. Bannon was taken into custody on Thursday, accused of helping orchestrate a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of donors who contributed $25 million to an online crowdfunding campaign to build a privately funded wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York alleged that Bannon had falsely told donors he would not be compensated for his work on the We Build the Wall project, and charged him with counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Bannon was reportedly arrested off the coast of Connecticut aboard the yacht of Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese businessman.

Bannon pleaded not guilty on Thursday and was released on a $5 million bond. He wont be allowed to board private jets or boats without permission from a federal judge and must restrict his travel to New York and Washington, D.C. Bannon and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

On Friday morning, Bannon was back on the air of his podcast, War Room: Pandemic, saying that his arrest was a political hit job and an attempt to silence proponents of building a border wall. He did not address directly the charge that he defrauded donors. All these charges are nonsense, Bannon said into a large radio microphone, wearing his signature costume: two black collared shirts. This is to stop and intimidate people who want to talk about the wall.

Trump distanced himself from Bannons wall project on Thursday, saying he didnt like the project and thought it was being done for showboating reasons. Trump said he feels very badly for his former adviser, but added, I havent been dealing with him for a very long period of time. It was inappropriate to be trying to fund a wall with private funds, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during a visit of Iraqs Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi.

A White House statement sought to further distance the President from Bannon. President Trump has not been involved with Steve Bannon since the campaign and the early part of the Administration, and he does not know the people involved with this project, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement. One advisory board member of the private wall project, Kris Kobach, the former secretary of state of Kansas, told the New York Times last year that the effort had Trumps blessing.

Bannons path to a desk down the hall from the Oval Office was as circuitous as one of his lengthy tangents that often veer into the history of Nazi propaganda or the Roman Empire. Bannon grew up in a family of Irish-Catholic Democrats in Richmond, Virginia. His father was a telephone lineman who later moved into management. Bannon served as a Navy officer and later got a degree in national security studies from Georgetown and an M.B.A. from Harvard. He eventually went to work for Goldman Sachs before breaking out to start a boutique investment firm in Beverly Hills that specialized in entertainment deals. In the early 2000s, he began producing documentaries that lashed out at political and financial elites and eventually took over Breitbart News, a website that Bannon once described as a platform for the alt-right, a movement that has embraced racist views and anti-semitism.

It was a tweet that brought Bannon and Trump together. In July 2015, weeks after Donald Trump announced he would run for President, Steve Bannon wrote on Breitbart that Trumps book, Time to Get Tough, was a blockbuster policy manifesto. Trump tweeted a link to the story. After that, Bannon repeatedly interviewed Trump on his radio show, and a year later, Bannon was hired as chief executive of the campaign.

Bannon didnt have to bring Trump his ideas on trade imbalances, harsh immigration policies and stripping away environmental regulations Trump already had them. The two men found each other, and Bannon brought a propagandists sensibility to the fight. They both embraced a tactic in Washington of not backing down in the face of flaming criticism and not apologizing if they landed on the wrong side of the truth. Bannon was fond of likening himself and Trump to honey badgers who dont relent even after being stung by bees or bitten by snakes.

When Trump won, Bannon asked to be named chief strategist in the White House and for the first few months of the Trump administration, Bannon had broad privileges to attend meetings in the Oval Office. The Anti-Defamation League called Bannons promotion a sad day and described his tenure at Breitbart as presiding over the premier website of the alt-right a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate-crimes, described Bannon at the time as the main driver behind Breitbart becoming a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill. Former Ohio governor John Kasichs chief of staff John Weaver said Bannon would be footsteps from the Oval Office and represents the racist, fascist extreme right.

In the White House, Bannon was one of the few in Trumps orbit who rarely wore a suit and tie, often opting for a rumpled blazer and layers of dark collared shirts. Bannon left the white House in August 2017, in the wake of a firestorm over Trump saying both sides had responsibility for deadly violence during clashes over the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, VA. Former White House aide Cliff Sims wrote in his book Team of Vipers that Bannon was the only one in the White House entirely comfortable and thrilled, really with Trumps remarks. Bannon clashed with Trumps second chief of staff John Kelly over Trumps response and other issues, and Trump had come to believe Bannon was regularly leaking to reporters about policy fights inside the West Wing.

Most presidents have an early ideological cheerleader like Bannon, says Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University and author of Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party. Bannon played a role for Trump that was similar to how David Axelrod was able to help Barack Obama define a new Democratic coalition, and how Karl Rove helped George W. Bush expand on his base in Texas to win the White House, says Zelizer. Bannon saw how Trump fit into the Republican party and was able to articulate how Trumps anti-establishment populism and his restrictionist ideas on trade and immigration, once seen as fringe movements, could be the new GOP orthodoxy.

He had a feel for the Republican party and how it had changed over time, Zelizer says.He played an important role in not just helping Trump, but in helping Republicans see why Trump was the right candidate for the party at that moment, says Zelizer.

But one way Bannon was different than those close advisors, Zelizer says, was his active desire to sow chaos in government and erode the administrative state. Bannons arrest comes on the same day that a federal judge blocked Trumps latest effort to protect his tax returns from being handed over to prosecutors in New York as part of an investigation into Trumps business practices. Trumps lawyers are expected to appeal the decision. Ultimately it isnt surprising that another person in Trumps orbit would find themselves in legal trouble, Zelizer notes. This is someone who was comfortable in the world of Trump where the lines of ethics are beyond blurry, he says.

Once outside the White House, Bannon continued to take aim at the Republican establishment. He has long seen himself as a revolutionary wanting to crash the existing political order and undermine the clubby circle of elites, with targets ranging from the Clintons to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Over the past few years, his support from major Republican donors waned and his direct influence over Trump dropped off. Bannon started a podcast about the COVID-19 pandemic that focused on Chinas initial coverup of the virus, and hes been a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party. Trump has said Bannons been a more effective advocate for him since he left the White House. Actually, Steve Bannons been much better not being involved. He says, the greatest president ever. Trump told Fox Newss Chris Wallace during an interview on July 19.

But even Bannon knows he lost sway and influence the moment he stepped out of the West Wing. Trump is always influenced by the last guy he talks to, Bannon told TIME during an interview at the dining table in his Capitol Hill townhouse in January. If you want to influence Trump, you got to be the last guy he talks to, Bannon said. That hasnt been Bannon for years.

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You Got to Be the Last Guy He Talks To.' The Rise and Fall of Trump Adviser Steve Bannon - TIME

A recent VICE article described Warhammer 40k fans who have taken issue with the direction the game is being taken by Games Workshop as both an alt-right minority and a far-right faction.

On August 12th, VICE author Paulie Doyle published an article titled The Warhammer 40k Community Is Trying to Weed Out Its Far-Right Faction.

In the article, Doyle claims that the creation of a meme depicting then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump as The God-Emperor of Mankind led to closed 40k Facebook groups becoming a repository of racism and far-right content, filled with Warhammer-themed memes mocking everything from specific ethnic minorities to gender equality.

Related: YouTuber Arch Details Next Steps In His Warhammer Is For Everyone Campaign To Save Warhammer!

Doyle proceeds to promote the feminist No More Damsels charity, which seeks to create a more inclusive atmosphere in the London wargaming scene.

The charity had previously penned a letter to Games Workshop that demanded the company further elaborate on their plans to make Warhammer for everyone.

The discussion then turns to Arch Warhammer and his ongoing campaign to push back against Games Workshops divisive statement.

Related: Warhammer Fan Pens Open Letter Criticizing Games Workshops Divisive Diversity Statement

While Doyle notes that Arch says he does not identify as a member of the far-right, this is narratively undercut by the immediate attempt that follows to hold Arch responsible for the behavior of people in his Discord server.

Doyle writes, Two months ago, screenshots from Archs Discord server were posted on /r/Sigmarxism, a left-wing Warhammer subreddit. Multiple people had used racial slurs, while Arch himself referred to Smi people (an indigenous people of northern Scandinavia) as gypsy but worse.

He added, Another poster used the term field exercises a term understood in far-right circles as referring to the activities of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, which murdered thousands of Romani people, Jewish people and communists in German-occupied territories during the Second World War as a suggested way of dealing with the group.

Doyle also notes that Arch had made a video in which he referred to the fictional Gnoblar race from the Warhammer fantasy series as house n*****s, and another in which he defended the use of the term White Lives Matter.

When asked for comment, Arch responded that he doesnt really concern himself with how extremists interpret his speech, and that he will continue to allow jokes.

Related: Warhammer Creator Games Workshop Accused Of Being Vicariously Racist To Community Members

If you are the most extreme tankie, or even the most extreme fascist, if you simply want to play a game of 40k, not talk about your politics, simply collect the miniatures I do not view that as Games Workshops duty to stop it, Arch explains.

I view that as the rest of societys duty to debate against these people and to prevent them via public discourse, and the public opinion.

Related: Marvel Comics Reveals Details On Their Upcoming Warhammer 40,000 Comic

Arch recently claimed that sources inside Games Workshop have informed him that the campaigns message had been received and asserted that We did everything we wanted to do. We have achieved our goals. And now we can sit back a bit and observe. If GW just continues doing what we wanted them to do in the first place which is just keep making miniatures, preferably something other than Primaris Marines.

If they just continue making miniatures, they continue making the lore, the hobby that we all enjoy, then we can get back to whinging about ludicrous prices or too many Primaris Marines, you know, hobby related stuff. And we can all be happy, he stated.

Arch responded in full to Doyles article in a recent video, wherein the dedicated Warhammer fan breaks down each of Doyles statements in great deal:

What do you make of Vices labeling of Warhammer 40k fans? What about Archs response to their article?

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Vice Labels Critics of Proposed Warhammer 40k Direction As Alt-Right Minority - Bounding Into Comics

The House voted on a bill Saturday to provide $25 billion to the U.S. Postal Service and halt any planned changes amid growing fears that Trump is attempting to hinder the delivery of mail-in ballots ahead of Novembers election. The vote came one day after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy a Trump megadonor testified before the Senate about recent changes at the Postal Service. This is Michigan Senator Gary Peters questioning DeJoy.

Sen. Gary Peters: Will you be bringing back any mail sorting machines that have been removed since youve become postmaster general? Will any of those come back?

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy: Theres no intention to do that. Theyre not needed, sir.

Sen. Gary Peters: So, you will not bring back any processors?

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy: Theyre not needed, sir.

Postal workers in Washington state and Dallas, Texas, said they have ignored orders from above and reinstalled high-speed mail sorting machines. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports over 534,000 mail-in ballots were rejected across 23 states during this years primaries nearly a quarter of those in battlegrounds states. DeJoy is testifying before the House Oversight Committee today.

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House Passes Bill to Halt Changes at USPS as Fears Mount over Mail-in Ballots - Democracy Now!