right-wing extremists inject hateful rhetoric

AS I HAVE MENTIONED over and over again, the preva­lence (that’s a bit of un­der­state­ment there) and vir­u­lence of rightwingnuts on var­ious so­cial media on the Internet—how they in­ject hate and fear here, there, and every­where. I thought I’d let someone with a bigger pulpit re­it­erate some of my points: in Oc­tober 2017, Right Wing Watch fea­tured “White Su­premacy Fig­ured Out How To Be­come YouTube Fa­mous” by Jared Holt.

The ar­ticle opens by in­forming the readers what the reader should al­ready know by now: that ex­tremist rightwingnuts—and there’s a redundancy!—are all over the in­ternet, es­pe­cially YouTube:

“YouTube is home to a seem­ingly end­less va­riety of videos that reach all kinds of viewers and is creeping up on TV as the most watched video plat­form in the United States. But as John Her­rman doc­u­mented in The New York Times Mag­a­zine last month, po­lit­ical pun­ditry on YouTube is vastly dom­i­nated by right-wing talkers.”

Right Wing Watch pro­vided a table of con­tents to the ar­ti­cle’s four sections:

1. Ex­trem­ists Are Using YouTube To Spread Hate
2. Ten­sions Rise, Blog­gers Flee As YouTube’s Ef­forts To Combat Ex­tremism Begin
3. The Ex­trem­ists Using YouTube To Get Famous
4. People Who En­able The Hate

Car­toon by Adam Zyglis for The Buf­falo News.

To inject hateful rhetoric

The point of this ar­ticle here is to get you to go there! So I will add nothing more than a few para­graphs from Holt’s piece as a teaser:

“As a plat­form, YouTube has served as an al­ter­na­tive media ecosystem apart from the main­stream where any person can con­tribute to na­tional con­ver­sa­tion and reach thou­sands of people overnight. But the Right’s overt dom­i­na­tion of the plat­form, in ad­di­tion to po­lit­ical fo­rums on Reddit and 4chan, has cre­ated an en­vi­ron­ment where white na­tion­al­ists and right-wing ex­trem­ists can easily in­ject hateful rhetoric and con­spiracy the­o­ries into na­tional po­lit­ical dis­course by po­si­tioning them­selves along­side less overtly hateful rising right-wing media personalities.

These ex­trem­ists role­play as modern-day shock-jock radio hosts as they in­sert their sexist, racist, big­oted rhetoric—which they ex­cuse by saying they are trying to ‘trigger’ lib­erals and fight for ‘free speech’—into the ex­isting stream of right-wing com­men­tary on YouTube.”

Of course that t’s why they’re posting all these racist, misog­y­nist, ho­mo­phobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim re­marks: to pro­tect free speech for the good of America, if not all mankind …

Readers should know that white na­tion­al­ists and ex­trem­ists are all over YouTube. Click To Tweet

FEATURED IMAGE: “The scene that drew res­i­dents of Cen­tral Park Av­enue just south of Foster Av­enue [in Chicago] to their front porches on Au­gust 16, 1921, was eerily rem­i­nis­cent of The Birth of a Na­tion, the film that cel­e­brated the night-riding vig­i­lantes who re­stored white su­premacy to the post-Civil War South: Thou­sands of men in white gowns and hoods ex­changed ritual hand­shakes and piled into a long line of cars headed for a se­cret des­ti­na­tion in the northern sub­urbs.” (Chicago Tri­bune)

It seems like they have been with us for­ever, and at times it seems like they will be with us for­ever. It also seems like we need to be alert to their covert pres­ence in the media more than we do their overt pres­ence on the streets.