Tag: neo nazism
Instagram Permits Nick Fuentes' 'Groypers' To Promote Neo-Nazism

Instagram Permits Nick Fuentes' 'Groypers' To Promote Neo-Nazism

Instagram is allowing groypers, followers of white nationalist Nick Fuentes, to promote Fuentes’ white Christian nationalist ideology on its platform, despite policies that seemingly prohibit such content.

Media Matters has identified at least 18 Instagram accounts associated with Fuentes or the groypers, along with at least 29 additional accounts that promote Fuentes and his America First groyper movement by sharing memes, clips, and links. Many of these accounts feature references to “groypers” or “America First” in their handles, and some are exclusively dedicated to posting clips from groyper livestreams.

We also found that Fuentes’ groypers often use Instagram’s link sticker feature, which allows users to link to content off the platform, to direct their followers to Cozy.TV, as well as other platforms like Twitter or YouTube. Cozy.TV is a streaming platform that Fuentes launched in 2021, which he describes as “anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Black, antisemitic.” Fourteen of the accounts Media Matters identified link directly to Cozy.TV in their bios.

Fuentes is a 24-year-old streamer who advocates for the mainstream political right in the U.S. to embrace “white nationalist concerns within the shifting consensus that defines movement conservatism.” He has openly expressed antisemitic, sexist, racist, and homophobic views. He also participated in the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and was subpoenaed for his participation in the protests that led to the January 6 insurrection.

Fuentes and his groypers strategically use internet spaces to market their racist messages and coordinate harassment campaigns. They have also used social media to organize events that seek to radicalize conservatives into backing their far-right beliefs.

Fuentes says he has been removed from several mainstream social media platforms, including Instagram, and also claims to have been blacklisted from several banks, airlines, payment processors, and Airbnb. Twitter banned Fuentes from its platform in 2021 — long after many other platforms had removed him. Fuentes repeatedly tried to evade the ban and return to Twitter, including shortly after Elon Musk took over, but on January 24, Fuentes’ original Twitter account was seemingly reinstated. Fuentes’ grievances about being blacklisted from mainstream institutions have recently helped him gain traction among more mainstream figures on the right, even though he has also praised Twitter in the past for helping him stay connected with his audience. At the time of publication, Fuentes does not appear to have an Instagram account that he identifies as his.

Meta, which owns Instagram, explicitly prohibits “praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism on Facebook and Instagram.” Under the company’s dangerous individuals and organizations policy, Meta claims to ban such content and remove individuals and organizations that ascribe to those hateful ideologies.

One of the accounts identified by Media Matters claims to be the official account of Fuentes' Cozy.TV, and it promotes new streamers, special events, donation requests, and merchandise.

Kai Schwemmer, a 20-year-old groyper influencer, currently has over 12,000 followers on Instagram. Schwemmer uses stylized editing and memes to make his far-right content appeal to younger audiences. Schwemmer also maintains active accounts on other mainstream social media platforms and gained traction on TikTok as a member of the Republican Hype House. Schwemmer also has a notable offline presence, speaking at college campuses and conservative events, which he often promotes on his Instagram account.

Paul Escandon, who recently produced a movie about Fuentes, uses his Instagram to promote Fuentes and America First content. Escandon also hosts a show streamed on Cozy.TV, which also has an Instagram account.

Many of the groyper accounts Media Matters identified also use Instagram to post content that seemingly violates the platform's hate speech policy. While some posts explicitly promote racist content, Nazi imagery, and antisemitic rhetoric, others use coded language and dog whistles to send signals to an in-group audience — a phenomenon Media Matters has previously documented.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

It Has Always Been About Slavery

It Has Always Been About Slavery

“Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
— Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, 1861

As if he had not already dumped enough fuel on a raging inferno, President Donald Trump has now taken up common cause with the Lost Cause: the historically inaccurate, myth-driven campaign to sanctify the Confederacy. The president was apparently not satisfied with merely showing his sympathy for white supremacists, insisting that their ranks include some “very fine people.”

A day or so later, he went on Twitter to bash the movement to take down Confederate monuments and statues — though he had previously said those decisions should be left to local authorities. Trump tweeted that he was “sad” to see the “history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

That is nonsense — sanitized blather that is widely repeated among Confederate sympathizers and apologists for Southern secession. As a Southerner born and bred, I’ve heard those arguments my entire life. And I’ve walked past elaborate memorials to men who preferred a broken, war-scarred land to a nation where black men and women could be free to own their bodies and their labor.

Neither history nor culture would be “ripped apart” by the removal of Confederate statues to museums, where they belong. Instead, the civic fabric can begin to mend when memorials to secessionists are removed from public spaces.

The mythology that honors those Confederate icons is as elaborate as it is false, with tentacles that extend through generations. There are, indeed, many “very fine people” among those who wish to keep such memorials in place, who continue to defend Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis as patriots. They don’t wish to wrest citizenship away from black and Jewish Americans, but they cannot admit that their ancestors supported the horrific institution of slavery.

But those who insist on honoring the mythology of the Lost Cause should consider this: White supremacists see the Confederacy for what it was. They know that Lee and Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest and P.G.T. Beauregard fought to preserve an institution that kept black men and women in bondage — never paid for their labor, whipped and beaten at the whim of their masters, their children and spouses sold off for profit.

That’s why so many rebel flags hover over white nationalist rallies; that’s why neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, the Traditionalist Worker Party and other hate groups gathered at Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue of Lee. They weren’t there just to defend a piece of bronze. They were there to defend the ideology for which Lee was prepared to give his life — the South’s right to enslave men and women of African heritage.

Since Reconstruction, Confederate sympathizers have been about the business of constructing a competing narrative about the Civil War built on “alternative facts” — otherwise known as lies. They claim that the secessionists wanted to protect the South against “Northern aggression.” They insist the war was waged to defend states’ rights. (The states’ right to do what?)

According to Vice News, there are more than 1,500 Confederate memorials scattered throughout the country, most of them, as you might expect, in the 11 states of the Old Confederacy or border states such as Kentucky. A few, however, are in the Northeast, the Midwest and even the Far West.

Most of those memorials were erected long after the war ended — between 1890 and 1940, according to historians. That’s no coincidence: Those statues began to rise after Union troops pulled out of the South and white supremacists began to assume power once again. The KKK was created, Jim Crow laws were passed, and the lynching of innocent black people became commonplace. That’s what those statues commemorate.

If we are going to honor history, let’s do that. Let’s honor the facts, the sordid truth, the ugly reality: The Confederacy was built on a defense of the institution of slavery — an insistence that the white race was morally and intellectually superior and ordained by God to rule over the black race.
David Duke knows that. That’s why he was in Charlottesville.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

#EndorseThis: Colbert Likens Trump To Your Racist Grandpa

#EndorseThis: Colbert Likens Trump To Your Racist Grandpa

President Trump’s impromptu presser in the Trump Tower lobby in Manhattan on Tuesday — during which he went off-script and explicitly suggested that some of the TIKI torch-wielding white supremacists marching in the weekend’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, weren’t neo-Nazis —  was “one for the ages,” says Stephen Colbert: “Specifically 1939 to 1945.”

To the president’s claim to “have no doubt” about his both-sides-ism, the Late Show host responded, “There is one thing I no longer have any doubt about: You showed us who you were.”

‘Unite The Right’ Rally Had Nothing To Do With Statues

‘Unite The Right’ Rally Had Nothing To Do With Statues

Watching the Charlottesville spectacle from halfway across the country, I confess that my first instinct was to raillery. Vanilla ISIS, somebody called this mob of would-be Nazis. A parade of love-deprived nerds marching bravely out of their parents’ basements carrying TIKI torches from Home Depot.

The odor of citronella must have been overpowering. Was this an attack on the campus left or on mosquitoes?

“Blood and soil!” they chanted. “Jews will not replace us!”

Jews?

Had Jews somehow prevented these dorks from getting laid?

Deeply offensive, but also deeply ridiculous. The iconography of the torch-lit parade was straight out of Triumph of the Will, Leni Reifenstahl’s epic film glorifying Hitler. Deliberately so. These Stormfront geeks get off on trying to frighten normal people with Nazi imagery.

Hogan’s Heroes is more like it. I mean Confederate flags are one thing, but swastikas? Politically, nothing could be dumber. Why not just have “Besiegte” tattooed on your forehead? That’s German for “loser.”

Speaking for the overwhelming majority of Americans, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah tweeted: “My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.”

Then things went from laughable to tragic overnight.

The University of Virginia has always been hallowed ground to me. When I first arrived, the sheer, serene beauty of Thomas Jefferson’s architecture affected me almost viscerally. Was the orderly life it implied even possible in this world? Well, certainly not in Jefferson’s own life, but art is art.

I was first introduced to my wife in a serpentine-walled garden maybe 50 yards from where the would-be Nazis assembled around Jefferson’s statue. If I close my eyes, I can still see her standing there in her little shirtwaist dress—an Arkansas girl more exotic to me than anybody I’d known. A coach’s daughter, she’d applied to study history at UVa entirely unaware that there were no women undergraduates back then.

The dean asked if I’d ever heard of Hendrix College, her Arkansas alma mater—a potentially embarrassing question.

“No Sir,” I said. “They must not play football.”

She laughed because I was right; also because it was a cheeky way to talk to the graduate school dean. I’ve done my best to keep her laughing ever since.

For that matter, I played several seasons worth of rugby games on Nameless Field, where the would-be SS-men lit their little torches. We got married in Charlottesville two years later. Indeed, we’ve sometimes regretted ever leaving. So, yes, it’s doubly distressing to see the university and city turned into a stage set for fascist street theater.

“Charlottesville,” wrote UVa professor Siva Vaidhyanathan “is an ideal stage for them to perform acts of terrorism. This was the home of Thomas Jefferson, the man who codified religious tolerance in colonial Virginia and who declared ‘all men are created equal.’ It’s also the home of Thomas Jefferson, the man who owned, sold, raped and had whipped people he considered racially inferior to him. It’s the site of the University of Virginia, an institution steeped in conservative traditions that echo the Old South. And it’s the site of the University of Virginia, an elite, global research university with a cosmopolitan faculty and student body.”

It’s definitely all that. Old South or not, Charlottesville is also a liberal college town that voted to remove an equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee from its courthouse square and relocate it to a park on its outskirts. Like many of the thousand or so Confederate monuments across the South, it was erected long after the Civil War, in 1924—hence more an expression of white supremacy than Virginian ancestor worship, precisely as Stormfront wants to use it today.

Lee himself steadfastly refused to be so memorialized in his lifetime. He would not contribute to the building of Confederate monuments and steadfastly advised white Southerners to leave it all behind. To an embittered Confederate widow, Lee once wrote “Madam, do not train up your children in hostility to the government of the United States. Remember, we are all one country now. … Bring them up to be Americans.”

Prof. Vaidhyanathan regrets that he and his wife stayed away on Saturday for fear of precisely what happened: a mad act of violence by a deranged young man. He vows to bear peaceful witness when the would-be Storm Troopers march again. Maybe he can help to calm campus hotheads as well. The last thing Americans need is anybody romanticizing violence.

Meanwhile, if Virginians need monuments, and they do, the state’s covered with Civil War battlefields. The Lawn at UVa remains; also Jefferson’s Monticello. For all the terrible ambiguity of his life, the man was the great genius of his age. The Washington and Lee campus in Lexington memorializes Robert E. Lee as he’d have preferred to be remembered.

For that matter, Appomattox Courthouse isn’t far away.

Header image: Wikimedia Commons.