gschmidl posted:

The 3%ers is also some nazi dogwhistle, isn't it?

Macdeo Lurjtux posted:

No, that's 1%ers. Some government official 40 years ago said '99% of motorcyclists are thoughtful law abiding citizens' so all the nazi/white supremacist clubs starting calling themselves 1%ers.

Then a bunch of non white supremacists/nazi clubs started doing it too, cargo culting those beefy tough boys.

kazil posted:

Avirosb posted:

Does free speech still require one easy payment of $8?

Radio Paranoia posted:

Yacc doesn't get a cool X icon like Elon? Even though she's the CEO?

Actually does anybody else have that particular piece of flair or is only the specialest boy allowed??

kazil posted:

she has one

also


"I have all the evidence but I can't show it to you now"

Hardcastlemccormik posted:

Censorship industry

kazil posted:

she has one

also


"I have all the evidence but I can't show it to you now"

quote:

Michael Benz, a former Trump State Department official whose work has been cited in congressional hearings and promoted by Elon Musk, has become a go-to voice for Republican criticism of government and social media censorship in the past year.

But before his stints in government and as a pundit, Benz appears to have been a pseudonymous alt-right content creator who courted and interacted with white nationalists and posted videos espousing racist conspiracy theories, according to recordings, livestreams and blog posts reviewed by NBC News.

The pseudonym, Frame Game, posted videos and participated in podcasts and livestreams during the rise of the alt-right following Donald Trump’s election. Frame Game avoided showing his face in his videos or appearances, during which he pushed a variety of far-right narratives including the “Great Replacement Theory” that posits the white race is being eradicated in America for politics and profits. In others, Frame Game said he was a white identitarian, railed against the idea of diversity and made montages urging white viewers to unite under the banner of race.

In interviews with white nationalists, Frame Game blamed Jews for “controlling the media” and for the decline of the white race. “If you were to remove the Jewish influence on the West,” he said in one video, “white people would not face the threat of white genocide that they currently do.”

Frame Game stopped posting in 2018. A review of his content revealed various details that match Benz’s appearance and life story. Benz, in his public posts and appearances, has not espoused the same racist views as Frame Game.

[...]

In a blog post from 2017, Frame Game described himself as “a Jew who is deeply sympathetic to the AltRight’s accurate depiction of the double-edged nature of Jewish influence on Europe and America.” A former self-described libertarian, Frame Game credited alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos as “putting the puzzle together” and opening his eyes.

In the same 2017 blog, Frame Game railed against the censorship of his channel and of alt right ideas. Frame Game specifically mentioned Reddit banning the alt right community and quarantining a pro-Donald Trump community, Facebook’s fact-checking efforts, and Twitter’s Trust and Safety Counsel and its consultation with “the Jewish censorship squad Anti-Defamation League.”

The Anti-Defamation League has been a frequent target of Benz’s ire in recent livestreams.

“The fight for white identity would mean a battle for the soul of the internet itself,” Frame Game wrote in 2017. Frame Game sometimes referred to himself as “alt-lite,” a play on alt-right, a community that was resistant even to Jewish people who sympathized with them.

Frame Game was promoted by alt-right leaders including Richard Spencer, who led torch-carrying white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and has appeared often on podcasts of white supremacists including Patrick Casey of the group then known as Identity Evropa, which helped plan the deadly Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville. On Canadian white-supremacist Jean-François Gariépy’s podcast, Frame Game discussed his views that whites are being systematically replaced by nonwhites — which he claimed Jews were responsible for.

“If I, a Jew, a member of the Tribe, Hebrew Schooled, can read Mein Kampf & think ‘holy poo poo, Hitler actually had some decent points.’ Then NO ONE is safe from hating you once they find out who is behind the White genocide happening all over the world,” he wrote in another post.

In interviews with white nationalists, Frame Game said that he doesn’t share the same end goals, such as a white ethnostate.

“I want white identity politics to grow like wildfire,” he said in an interview with a white nationalist publication in 2018, adding that his goals weren’t a white ethnostate, but a stop to “ethnic identity politics in America” and to reverse “white demographic suicide.”

“Look, we’re in different movements, but there’s overlap” Frame Game told the interviewer, an avowed white nationalist. “I just want white positivity to be normal instead of white toxicity. If you want something more than that, cool.”

Frame Game’s online persona began to run into some of the same issues that Benz would later rail against: social media moderation. The rise of the alt-right online and the proliferation of hate speech triggered calls from civil society organizations and politicians for companies to take action. Many did, instituting new policies and punishments that began to limit the kind of content that Frame Game propagated.

By 2018, Frame Game had received multiple warnings and strikes on his YouTube videos. He posted that titles like “How White People Turned Alt-Right” were being censored. Sometime in the fall of 2018, Frame Game made his videos private and seemingly stepped away from the channel altogether. Many of his videos have been archived or republished on alternative platforms. Frame Game also disappeared from Twitter.

kazil posted:

she has one

also


"I have all the evidence but I can't show it to you now"

mannerup posted:

this is an aside, but Billboard Chris is a complete piece of poo poo who I have had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting in person recently on my campus while he was wearing some sandwich board about giving hormones to children in a very ugly salmon blazer. he's also someone who is quick to cry to campus security when you get in his face to tell him to go gently caress himself, not realizing they aren't going to tell faculty to leave their own campus

IBroughttheFunk posted:

You actually have options now apparently - a $3 per month plan, an $8 per month plan, and Premium+ for $16. It really depends on how much you want to waste your money free speech you want.

kazil posted:

she has one

also


"I have all the evidence but I can't show it to you now"

rotinaj posted:

Who the gently caress is the Federal Register? LinkedIn has TWO employees there, the CEO and a student at the uni of virginia.

IBroughttheFunk posted:

mannerup posted:

the Federal Register is the official journal for the United States Government, that LinkedIn is a dud

IBroughttheFunk posted:

Just the best, most thoughtful commentary.

Avirosb posted:

"We tried various ways to replicate Media Matters' research and couldn't."

I get ya bro I'm not very good at my job either.

Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:

Oh he doubled down

https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1726245629926817814?s=20

rotinaj posted:

My bad, it was the federal newswire

Not an official thing at all

mannerup posted:

Mike Benz is an alt-right influencer who made a bunch of videos about white replacement theory being plotted by jews and ended up in 2018 turning all his videos private and tried to scrub his online identity after being offered a job in the Trump administration to work for HUD's Ben Carson as a speechwriter and then moved to the State Department shortly after for a position as "deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information technology" for less than a year.

he used that credential to re-brand himself post-Trump administration as a expert on cybersecurity and online information campaigns, which got amplified by people like Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger who promoted him as someone who was the head of the cyber division of the State Department during their Twitter spaces, which got him into the view of Elon Musk.