Showing posts with label Center on Extremism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Center on Extremism. Show all posts

Thursday, August 3, 2017

YouTube's New ADL Thought Police Punish Conservatives While Giving Far-Left Extremists A Pass

YouTube recently teamed up with the ultra-liberal Anti Defamation League (ADL) for their "Trusted Flaggers Program" to determine what people should and shouldn"t be allowed to watch, as we continue the march towards a nanny state supported by the technocratic left.



Originally organized to combat anti-Semitism, the ADL - with it"s Soros-linked National director who last worked in the Obama admin, now spouts hyperbolic propaganda against conservatives - while failing to apply the same nebulous standards to the left. For example, their recent push to lump all Trump supporters in with white supremacists, while insulating progressives from far-left organizations such as the anti-Semitic black nationalist hate group New Black Panthers, and the increasingly violent Antifa.


Of late, the ADL has published hit-pieces on several conservatives, including Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Gavin McInnes, and Lucian Wintrich - offering little to no evidence of any actual wrongdoing aside from milquetoast "thought crimes" deemed beyond the pale by their mollycoddled staff. Shouldn"t liberal bigots Linda Sarsour, Luke Kuhn, the New Black Panthers, and the horse-stabbers of Antifa receive the same treatment for their actual advocacy and participation in violence towards those they disagree with?


And now, the liberal propagandist group has been given free reign to censor content on YouTube - such as politically incorrect University of Toronto professor Jordan B. Peterson, who found himself locked out of his YouTube account yesterday with no explanation (Peterson has since regained access).


To that end, Far Left Watch is out with a another report on more selective Orwellian bias from the ADL... 


reprinted with permission


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On Tuesday, August 1st, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) issued a press release announcing that they have become a “select contributing member of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program, created in 2012 to enable organizations to notify the platform of content that violates their community guidelines.” It goes on to say:


“The fight against terrorist use of online resources and cyberhate has become one of the most daunting challenges in modern history,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “Google has been a leader in this area from the beginning. The reality is extremists and terrorists continue to migrate to and exploit various other social media platforms. We hope that those platforms can learn from and emulate what YouTube is doing to proactively identify and remove extremist content.”


What criteria does the ADL use to define “extremism”? Their Center On Extremism (COE) provides this overview of their efforts but does not discuss the process that they use to distinguish “extremism” or “hate” from protected speech:


ADL’s Center on Extremism is the agency’s research and investigative arm, and a clearinghouse of valuable, up-to-the minute information about extremism of all types—from white supremacists to Islamic extremists.


This announcement is especially concerning considering their recent profile on the Alt-Lite and Alt-Right that lumped in several popular mainstream conservatives with actual neo-nazis and white supremacists.  As a response, many prominent conservative personalities took to Twitter and YouTube to criticize the ADL’s hypocrisy and point out how they broadly apply terms like “extremist”, “racist”, “bigot”, etc. to people who simply advocate for conservative political positions. So far, much of the focus has been on the people and organizations that the ADL has labeled as extremists. I want to instead highlight a few violent far left organization that they have not reported on.


Redneck Revolt


We recently reported on the far left militia group, Redneck Revolt. They are a self described “above ground militant formation” founded in June of 2016 that claims to have 30+ vetted branches nationwide. Since their inception, Redneck Revolt has been very busy recruiting at gun shows and community events, advocating for class war, contributing to the far left anarchist website It’s Going Down, and conducting armed anti-Trump demonstrations. But what’s most alarming are the resources they provide on their website. They promote several PDFs that endorse “armed struggle” and even offer a 36 page “Mini-Manual Of The Urban Guerrilla” (bottom right of resource page) which pictures left-wing militants using RPGs and outlines tactics for guerrilla warfare including sections on “sabotage”, “kidnapping”, “executions”, “armed propaganda”, and “terrorism”.


REDNECKREVOLT


Guerrilla Warfare


Has Redneck Revolt been labeled an extremist organization by the ADL? Has a lengthy profile on their members been circulated through legacy media? Should they worry their YouTube content will be removed as part of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program? Well, according to the ADL, the answer is no.



Red Guards Austin


Red Guards Austin is an autonomous Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective based in Austin, TX. Their website contains multiple reports on their confrontational and often armed demonstrations:


Austin Red Guard 1


Austin Red Guard 2


They also openly advocate for violent revolution against capitalism:


Austin Red Guard 3


“we must seriously take up the task not only of self-defense on the personal and community level, but we must also struggle to unite all genuine antifascists behind the necessity of revolution.  Revolution means the long fight for communism and nothing less.”


I’ll ask the same questions. Has this organization been labeled an extremist hate group by the ADL? Has a lengthy profile on their members been circulated through legacy media? Should they worry their YouTube content will be removed as part of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program? The answer again is a resounding no.




It is unclear what criteria the ADL uses to define “extremism” but considering that they include the numbers “11”, “12”, “13”, and “14”, as well as “Pepe the frog memes” in their Online Hate Symbols Database the bar appears to be incredibly low. So why are the violent far left organizations outlined in this article not mentioned by the ADL? Perhaps we should ask them. Please share this article via Twitter, Facebook, etc. and tag the ADL. Maybe they can offer some clarification.


If you have any tips on far left activities please submit them here.

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

The "Extremism Experts" Who Used To Fear The Right, Are Now Worried About The Left

Authored by Daniel Lang via SHTFplan.com,


For most of the past 30 years, violent extremism has been most closely associated with the far-right in America. The media, the government, and watchdog groups like the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation league have railed against the far-right for a generation, and used scaremongering to convince the masses that conservative rhetoric was becoming more violent, and that right-wing groups pose a serious and growing threat to our society.


Of course, they often neglected to mention that the far-left has a long history of violence, especially when you consider the wave of domestic terror attacks that occurred throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s. Perhaps these institutions should have been paying more attention to the Left, because while they were screaming about right-wing groups all these years, far-left radical groups like BAMN and ANTIFA have been riding under the radar.



However, “extremism experts” are finally starting to take note. Vice News recently interviewed Brian Levin, a former member of the NYPD who studies domestic extremism. He started focusing his efforts on the Left when he attended a public KKK rally last year to study the group, but found himself protecting one of the Klansman from a violent member of ANTIFA. “At that point,” he revealed “I said we have something coalescing on the hard left.”





The evidence is so far largely anecdotal. Levin says that since December 2015, he’s documented nearly two-dozen episodes in California where political events turned violent because of agitation on both sides, something he says he hardly ever saw before.



Now, there are violent clashes on college campuses involving groups like Antifa, the anti-fascist group, taking on the alt-right; and aggressive anti-Trump rallies attended by members of the Redneck Revolt, a new pro-minority, anti-supremacist group that encourages its members to train with rifles.



Online, hard leftists increasingly discuss politics in dire terms, and rationalize violence as a necessity -  even the true inheritor of traditional progressive activism. (Or, in the case of the “Punch a Nazi” meme, a fun game.)



And Levin isn’t alone. Other watchdog groups that typically focused their attention on the Right, are now taking a second look at far-left radicals.





“I think we’re in a time when we can’t ignore the extremism from the Left,” said Oren Segal, the director of the Center on Extremism, an arm of the Anti-Defamation League.



Over the past few months, the ADL, which hosts regular seminars on homegrown extremism for law enforcement officials, has begun warning of the rising threat posed by far-left groups, most recently at a seminar just this past Sunday.



“When we have anti-fascist counterprotests - not that they are the same as white supremacists - that can ratchet up the violence at these events, and it means we can see people who are violent on their own be attracted to that,” Segal said. “I hate to say it, but it feels inevitable.”



The fact that Vice, a very liberal media outlet, is wincing at the sight of violence among liberals, is very telling. The fact that these organizations are taking a look at the Left speaks volumes. Liberals can’t ignore or encourage this behavior any longer, because even the groups that are typically hyperventilating about conservatives, are beginning to admit that there’s a problem on the Left.


And that problem has wider implications. As leftist rhetoric and actions become more violent, and as the police in urban areas fail to rein in leftist counter-protesters time and time again, it won’t be long before right-wing protesters begin to retaliate. You can’t expect anyone, regardless of their political beliefs, to keep taking it on the nose indefinitely, without fighting back. When that retaliation becomes commonplace, the results will be unbelievably ugly.