What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right ‘Deity’ Behind Their ‘Meme Magic’

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Who, or what, is Kek?

You may have seen the name bandied about on social media, especially in political circles where alt-right activists and avid Donald Trump supporters lurk. Usually it is brandished as a kind of epithet, seemingly to ward off the effects of liberal arguments, and it often is conveyed in memes that use the image of the alt-right mascot, Pepe the Frog: “Kek!”

Kek, in the alt-right’s telling, is the “deity” of the semi-ironic “religion” the white nationalist movement has created for itself online – partly for amusement, as a way to troll liberals and self-righteous conservatives both, and to make a kind of political point. He is a god of chaos and darkness, with the head of a frog, the source of their memetic “magic,” to whom the alt-right and Donald Trump owe their success, according to their own explanations.

In many ways, Kek is the apotheosis of the bizarre alternative reality of the alt-right: at once absurdly juvenile, transgressive, and racist, as well as reflecting a deeper, pseudo-intellectual purpose that lends it an appeal to young ideologues who fancy themselves deep thinkers. It dwells in that murky area they often occupy, between satire, irony, mockery, and serious ideology; Kek can be both a big joke to pull on liberals and a reflection of the alt-right’s own self-image as serious agents of chaos in modern society.

Most of all, Kek has become a kind of tribal marker of the alt-right: Its meaning obscure and unavailable to ordinary people – “normies,” in their lingo – referencing Kek is most often just a way of signaling to fellow conversants online that the writer embraces the principles of chaos and destruction that are central to alt-right thinking, as it were.

The name, usage, and ultimately the ideas around it originated in gaming culture, particularly on chat boards devoted to the World of Warcraft online computer games, according to Know Your Meme. In those games, participants can chat only with members of their own faction in the “war” (either Alliance or Horde fighters), while opposing players’ chats are rendered in a cryptic form based on Korean; thus, the common chat phrase “LOL” (laugh out loud) was read by opposing players as “KEK.” The phrase caught on as a variation on “LOL” in game chat rooms, as well as at open forums dedicated to gaming, animation, and popular culture, such as 4chan and Reddit – also dens of the alt-right, where the Pepe the Frog meme also has its origins, and similarly hijacked as a symbol of white nationalism.

A popular meme explaining the Cult of Kek.

At some point, someone at 4chan happened to seize on a coincidence: There was, in fact, an Egyptian god named Kek. An androgynous god who could take either male or female form, Kek originally was depicted in female form as possessing the head of a frog or a cat and a serpent when male; but during the Greco-Roman period, the male form was depicted as a frog-headed man.

More importantly, Kek was portrayed as a bringer of chaos and darkness, which happened to fit perfectly with the alt-right’s self-image as being primarily devoted to destroying the existing world order.

In the febrile imaginations at play on 4chan’s image boards and other alt-right gathering spaces, this coincidence took on a life of its own, leading to wide-ranging speculation that Pepe – who, by then, had not only become closely associated with the alt-right, but also with the candidacy of Donald Trump – was actually the living embodiment of Kek. And so the Cult of Kek was born.

Constructed to reflect alt-right politics, the online acolytes of the “religion” in short order constructed a whole panoply of artifacts of the satirical church, including a detailed theology, discussions about creating “meme magick,” books and audio tapes, even a common prayer:

Our Kek who art in memetics

Hallowed by thy memes

Thy Trumpdom come

Thy will be done

In real life as it is on /pol/

Give us this day our daily dubs

And forgive us of our baiting

As we forgive those who bait against us

And lead us not into cuckoldry

But deliver us from shills

For thine is the memetic kingdom, and the shitposting, and the winning, for ever and ever.

Praise KEK

Kek “adherents” created a whole cultural mythology around the idea, describing an ancient kingdom called “Kekistan” that was eventually overwhelmed by “Normistan” and “Cuckistan.” They created not only a logo representing Kek – four Ks surrounding an E – but promptly deployed it in a green-and-black banner, which they call the “national flag of Kekistan.”

The banner’s design, in fact, perfectly mimics a German Nazi war flag, with the Kek logo replacing the swastika and the green replacing the infamous German red. Alt-righters are particularly fond of the way the banner trolls liberals who recognize its origins.

In recent weeks, alt-right marchers at public events planned to create violent scenes with leftist antifacist counterprotesters have appeared carrying Kekistan banners. Others have worn patches adorned with the Kek logo.

A Kekistan Banner was part of the scene at the
alt-right "free speech" rally April 15 in Berkeley, CA.

Besides its entertainment value, the “religion” is mainly useful to the alt-right as a trolling device for making fun of liberals and “political correctness.” A recent alt-right rally in support of adviser Stephen Bannon in front of the White House, posted on YouTube by alt-right maven Cassandra Fairbanks, featured a Kekistan banner and a man announcing to the crowd a “Free Kekistan” campaign.

One of the leaders of the group offered a satirical speech: “The Kekistani people are here, they stand with the oppressed minorities, the oppressed people of Kekistan. They will be heard, they will be set free. Reparations for Kekistan now! Reparations for Kekistan right now!”

“We have lived under normie oppression for too long!” chimed in a cohort.

“The oppression will end!” declared the speaker.

The main point of the whole exercise is to mock “political correctness,” an alt-right shibboleth, and deeply reflective of the ironic, often deadpan style of online trolling in general, and alt-right “troll storms” especially. Certainly, if any “normies” were to make the mistake of taking their “religion” seriously and suggesting that their “deity” was something they actually worshipped, they would receive the usual mocking treatment reserved for anyone foolish enough to take their words at face value.

Yet at the same time, lurking behind all the clownery is an idea that alt-righters actually seem to take seriously: Namely, that by spreading their often cryptic memes far and wide on social media and every other corner of the Internet, they are infecting the popular discourse with their ideas. For the alt-right, those core ideas all revolve around white males, the patriarchy, nationalism, and race, especially the underlying belief that white males and masculinity are under siege – from feminists, from liberals, from racial, ethnic, and sexual/gender minorities.

In such alt-right haunts as Andrew Anglin’s neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, references to the Kek “religion” have become commonplace, and Kek as the “god of chaos” has been credited at the site with, besides electing Trump, killing over 30 people in a fire at an Oakland artists’ collective. A very early Stormer disquisition on Kek by “Atlantic Centurion,” published in August 2015, explores the many dimensions of the Kek phenomenon in extensive theological detail, connecting their belief system to Buddhism and other religions.

It is the Kek the Bodhisattva who can teach our people these truths, if we are willing to listen and to commit ourselves to the generation of meme magick through karmic morality and through the mantra of memes. By refusing to cuck and by rejecting the foul mindsets of our invaders and terrorizers, we will move the nation away from its suffering under the pains of hostile occupation, and closer and closer to its final rebirth. If instead, our people cuck and adopt the foul mindsets, they will generate not Aryan karma but further mosaic samsara.

The trve power of skillful memes is to meme the karmic nation into reality, the process of meme magick. By spreading and repeating the meme mantra, it is possible to generate the karma needed for the rebirth of the nation.

Anglin himself makes frequent references to Kek, making clear that he too subscribes to the underlying meme-spreading strategy that the “religion” represents. Describing a black artist’s piece showing a crucified frog – which appeared to Anglin to be a kind of blasphemy of the Kek deity – he declared that “there’s some cosmic-tier stuff going on out there.” Another post, published in March, was headlined: “Meme Magic: White House Boy Summoned Spirit of Kek to Protect His Prophet Donald Trump.”

Anglin devoted the post to explaining a teenager’s use of an alt-right hand signal while meeting Trump, concluding that “the only possibility here is that this is an example of Carl Jung’s synchronicity – seemingly acausal factors culminating to create an event based on its meaning. But it is not really acausal – it merely appears that way to the non-believer. It is our spiritual energies, channeled through the internet, that caused this event to manifest,” he wrote. “It is meme magic.”

Whether they really believe any of this or not, the thrust of the entire enterprise is to mock everything “politically correct” so loudly and obtusely – and divertingly – that legitimate issues about the vicious core of white male nationalism they embrace never need to be confronted directly. The alt-right’s “meme war” is ultimately another name for far-right propaganda, polished and rewired for 21st-century consumers. The ironic pose that Kek represents, and accompanying claims that the racism they promote is just innocently meant to provoke, in the end are just a façade fronting a very old and very ugly enterprise: hatemongering of the xenophobic and misogynistic kind.

Husband And Wife Accused of Planning Violence in Shooting at UW Milo Protest

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]



After a three-month investigation that entailed combing through hours’ worth of video recordings, the King County Prosecutor’s office in Seattle announced this week that it was filing felony charges against a married couple accused of shooting a man involved in the Jan. 20 protests outside a Milo Yiannopoulos speech on the University of Washington campus.

Elizabeth Hokoana and her husband, Marc Hokoana, both 29, were charged with first-degree assault in the shooting of Joshua Dukes, a 31-year-old computer programmer who had been acting as a peacekeeper during the protest, which featured multiple violent melees. Marc Hokoana had been a participant in several of them, and according to the charging papers, had been dosing protesters with squirts from a small pepper-spray gun.

During one of these brawls, authorities say, Elizabeth “Lily” Hokoana pulled a Glock semiautomatic pistol from her coat and shot Dukes once. Dukes spent several weeks in the hospital recovering from the wound, which damaged several internal organs.

The charging papers claim that, the day before the event, Marc Hokoana had messaged a friend on Facebook: “I can’t wait for tomorrow. I’m going to the milo event and if the snowflakes get out off hand I’m going to wade through their ranks and start cracking skulls.”

The friend asked him whether he was “going to carry.” Hokoana replied: “Nah, I’m going full melee.” He then added: “Lily … is.”

Marc Hokoana had messaged Yiannopoulos via Facebook from the protest, saying his “Make America Great Again” hat had been stolen. He also asked Yiannopoulos for a new hat, but the alt-right provocateur never replied.

Video recorded by Hatewatch during the protests showed Hokoana acting as a provocateur throughout the evening, egging protesters on and trying to provoke them by demanding his hat back.

The charging papers say a witness identified as “B.F.” described his activities throughout the evening: “B.F. stated that the individual kept going over to the group of protesters and agitating the group by calling them snowflakes, libtards and saying that (Trump) was their president. B.F. stated that the man seemed to be there only to provoke the crowd.”

In a still taken from the video (about 2:00), Elizabeth Hokoana
 can be seen reaching inside the back of her coat.

A key portion of the Hatewatch video proved important in establishing the charges against Elizabeth Hokoana. Recorded nearly 30 minutes before the shooting, she can be seen, wearing a two-toned winter coat and pigtails, approaching the scene where a young Milo supporter had been hit with a blue paint ball by black-clad protesters. As the young man’s father pulls him away, she can be seen opening her coat and reaching behind her inside it, appearing to stand guard as her husband confronts the protesters. (He shortly afterward emerged, spoke briefly with his wife, and embraced the young man with the paint on his face.)

A detective cited in the charging papers said the movement “was consistent with a person who was attempting to pull a concealed pistol from a holster.”

Later in the Hatewatch video, Marc Hokoana, now wearing a bright yellow ballcap, can be seen chanting with a crowd of Yiannopoulos fans waving a banner bearing the image of Pepe the Frog, the hate-symbol mascot of the alt-right, and then briefly conferring with friends wearing red "Make America Great Again" ballcaps. In the final frame of that video — taken less than a minute before the shooting — the victim, Josh Dukes, is comes into view.

The Seattle Times reports that further video evidence found Marc Hokoana attempting to keep his wife in check, telling her to “calm down” and “don’t shoot anyone.”

An audio analyst told the Times: “Marc Hokoana can then be heard telling Elizabeth Hokoana that others in the crowd, ‘They have to start this. They have to start it.’ ”

The Hokoanas’ lawyers maintained their innocence. “We have provided the police and the prosecution evidence showing that our clients acted lawfully in defense of others,” a joint statement said. “The accuser, Joshua Dukes, has repeatedly stated that he does not want this to go through the criminal-justice system. We are disappointed that the prosecution has decided otherwise. We look forward to presenting our case to a jury and we anticipate an acquittal.”

Joshua Dukes, who was eventually released after weeks in the hospital since the bullet entered his stomach, traveled up his chest and lodged in his back, has been pleading for “restorative justice” in the case.

“Being shot was devastating for Mr. Dukes, his family, and his community,” his attorney, Sarah Lippek, told reporters. “The Hokoanas harmed many people by their violent actions. Mr. Dukes hopes that the defendants will take accountability for shooting him, for taking guns and other weapons into already unstable circumstances, and for their involvement in escalating violence in the situation. It is crucial for the Hokoanas to understand the damage they caused, in order to reach accountability and resolution for this violence.”

Yianniopoulos attempted to claim in his speech inside the hall that the roles were reversed — that it had been one of his alt-right fans who had been shot by an antifascist. Breitbart News and the Daily Caller both reported the same. The Daily Caller wound up writing a story that corrected the facts but, notably, did not explain that it was a correction of the site's previous reportage. Breitbart, meanwhile, not only never bothered to correct its reportage, it instead (without a hint of irony) accused the UW president of changing her story about the event, and left the shooting utterly unmentioned in its subsequent reportage.

Chobani Bites Back, Sues InfoWars For Smearing Idaho Operation, Refugees

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]


To hear the conspiracy-spawning hosts at Alex Jones’ InfoWars operation describe it, Chobani Yogurt and its Turkish-born owner are part of a vast plot to populate rural areas with disease-bearing and rape-prone criminal refugees from war-torn nations, driven out by the machinations of “globalists” who want to destroy America. Or something like that.

This, more or less, is the conspiracy theory that InfoWars contributors have been spinning for the past year or more, reaching hyperbolic stages in the past month as the site has produced segments with videos titled “MSM Covers For Globalist's Refugee Import Program After Child Rape Case” and “Idaho Yogurt Maker Caught Importing Migrant Rapists.”

This week, Chobani chose to fight back—in the courts.

Pointedly observing that Jones “is no stranger to spurious statements,” Chobani filed a lawsuit in Idaho District Court this week demanding $10,000 in attorney fees, full corrections on its false reportage and an apology from Jones and his InfoWars operation.

“The defendants’ conduct in this matter was extreme, outrageous and warrants punitive damages,” the lawsuit said.

The focus of the conspiracists’ fearmongering was Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya, a native of Turkey who has donated heavily to liberal causes and is well known as an advocate for refugee resettlement in the United States and elsewhere. It opened its Idaho plant near Twin Falls, the nation’s second-largest such operation, in 2012. InfoWars and its army of true believers—who descended upon Ulukaya and other Chobani officials with a deluge of threats and hate mail through social media—claim that this is part of a nefarious scheme to drive “ordinary Americans” out of rural districts and replace them with brown-skinned foreign refugees dependent on their benefactors.

According to InfoWars, Ulukaya not only is bringing in crime in the form of child rapists to Twin Falls, he’s bringing disease in the form of tuberculosis.

The anti-refugee contingent had already been whipped into high dudgeon in the Magic Valley in preceding years over its longtime refugee program by a steady drumbeat of Islamophobia engendered with the help of various extremist anti-Muslim organizations, culminating in the open involvement of armed “III Percent” militiamen in anti-refugee protests.

However, the hysteria whipped into high gear in the summer of 2016 when three refugee boys sexually assaulted a five-year-old in an apartment-complex laundry room, and the story hit local news media, and then went viral. The ensuing sensational news reports—amplified by screeching headlines at right-wing outlets such as Drudge Report and Breitbart News—described the assault as a “rape” and the boys as rapists. Some of the accounts claimed that the boys pulled a knife on the girl; others claimed they were from Syria.

However, as Michelle Goldberg explored in a definitive report on the case for Slate, the facts are much more complicated. There was no rape involved; one boy inappropriately touched the girl’s genitals. There were reportedly other acts involved in the assault that were similarly appalling but did not constitute rape. The boys were from Eritrea and Iraq, not Syria. And there was no knife.

Nonetheless, InfoWars’ reports on the case consistently described it as “the Idaho rape case” and described the boys as rapists. Contributor LeeAnn McAdoo also described Chobani as “the target of a lot of anti-refugee anger. People say that the factory there and other local businesses are linked to the refugee program, because the existence of the refugees as labor is needed to fuel Chobani.”

The three boys, ages 14, 10 and 7, pleaded guilty to committing felonies in the assault earlier this month.

Host David Knight kicked off the reportage on the case in 2016 by describing it as “a story of an unbelievable takeover of our country. It’s not just refugees coming in and taking blue-class factory jobs, or middle-class jobs with H1-B visas. No, they’re coming in and they’re taking over our entrepreneurship. They’re taking over American businesses. They’re taking that role and shutting us down, using their connections in Washington.”

The attacks on Chobani led to a deluge of threats against the company and its founder. Social-media sites were flooded with calls for a Chobani boycott, as well as memes attacking Ulukaya, claiming he was “going to drown the United States in Muslims and is importing them to Idaho 300 at a time to work in his factory.” Twin Falls Mayor Shawn Barigar was subjected to death threats when InfoWars and other sites began suggesting he was part of a “government coverup.”

Knight later repeatedly claimed the refugees were responsible for a rise in disease in the area: “They have a five hundred percent increase in tuberculosis,” he told the InfoWars audience. “That is another one of the costs, along with $54 million dollars from the local and state community. That’s the cost to the taxpayers.”

Knight’s claim was based on a wildly distorted report from Breitbart News that “TB Spiked 500 Percent In Twin Falls in 2012, As Chobani Yogurt Opened Plant.” The Idaho Department of Health shortly thereafter explained that, while seven refugees with tuberculosis had indeed been admitted to the program, none of them had a contagious form of the disease.

Nonetheless, Knight repeated the charge last week, after CBS’s 60 Minutes had featured an interview with Ulukaya: “So the report from the hill said that Breitbart at the time had said that the plant had brought not only refugees but crime and tuberculosis—but of course, [sardonically] that was just fake news. Remember when we heard the reports of that five-year-old special-needs girl who was raped? Everybody said, ‘Aw, that was just fake news. That’s false.’ But now of course we have seen them admit to sexually assaulting five-year-old girl, getting their plea deal done last week.

“And so now it’s time for CBS’ 60 Minutes to let’s sweep all that under the carpet and let’s revitalize the image of Chobani Yogurt.”

As Jennifer Patterson, project director for the federal Partnership for Refugees, explained to the Idaho Statesman, Chobani and similar companies working with refugees are not exploiting them.

“It’s the exact opposite,” Patterson said. “These companies are looking to provide resettled refuges with the ability to live happy and productive lives. There’s never any malicious talk about getting them on the cheap.”

Washington Anti-LGBT Seminars Begin Organizing For Another 'Bathroom Bill' Initiative

Joseph Backholm of the Family Policy Institute of Washington.

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

In the bigger scheme of things, Joseph Backholm sees the fight over bathrooms and transgender rights as something of a short-term battle in what he calls a “war” against LGBT rights—but, he predicts, it will prove to be the decisive one.

“Same-sex marriage is temporary,” he recently told participants in a “Gender Revolution” seminar in Tacoma, Washington. “It cannot endure because it’s not true. Now, same-sex marriage might survive America, but it won’t survive.”

He continued: “There is no chance that, 300 years from now, we’ll look back and man will realize gender doesn’t matter. That’s not because we’re smarter. Eventually humanity will discover that is a broken model, it doesn’t work. It is going to go away.”

The ostensible purpose of the seminars—organized by the Family Policy Institute of Washington, founded and overseen by Backholm, who lives in suburban Lynnwood—was to discuss the so-called “gender revolution.” Most of the 90-minute talk given by Backholm in the seminars, held in locations around Washington state, was devoted to attacking the transgender movement by ridiculing claims and assertions about gender identity common among people who choose to identify with a gender other than that which they are born with.

The larger purpose of the seminars, however, became clear as the talk wound on and Backholm began describing the “cultural” part of how people could combat the “gender revolution”—namely, to encourage participants to engage in the political battle over gender by supporting and helping to promote the FPIW’s new anti-transgender “bathroom bill,” Initiative 1552.

The new version goes beyond similar legislation in other states. For example, it provides for civil penalties against school districts that allow minors to be exposed to transgender persons.

This is not FPIW’s first go-round with a “bathroom bill.” It attempted to pass an earlier version of the same legislation, dubbed Initiative 1515, in 2016 during the general election. The measure, however, failed when FPIW was unable to gather enough signatures to make it onto the ballot.

Indeed, the organization has a long history of sponsoring anti-LGBT legislation and policies. It also has a long track record of failure when it comes to persuading voters.

Backholm appears on local newscasts as an anti-LGBT
spokesperson frequently.

Founded in 2008 by Backholm, the group is the only organization listed by the anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council as its affiliated “family policy council” for Washington. Backholm and his group are warmly listed as “alliance” members for another anti-LGBT hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, which describes how Backholm “is drawing on all of his [ADF] resources and contacts to generate a strong response to the legislature’s new marriage law.”

• In 2009, Backholm and his group helped lead the charge against same-sex “domestic partnerships,” which were then legal in Washington. The FPIW’s initiative to outlaw the status failed, 53% - 47%. 
• After the Washington Legislature voted in 2012 to legalize same-sex marriage, Backholm’s spinoff organization Preserve Marriage Washington campaign led another initiative attempt to have the law overturned. Instead, voters upheld the law by a similar 54% - 46% margin. 
• In 2016, FPIW led the campaign for Initiative 1551, a “bathroom bill” which it titled “Just Want Privacy.” That one didn’t even make it onto the ballot. 

Backholm’s FPIW has also led the charge on a number of religious-right fronts in the state, including:

• Support for anti-abortion legislation to define life as beginning at conception. 
• Campaigning to require parental consent for anyone under 18 seeking an abortion. There were no exceptions for rape or incest in the legislation, and Backholm dismissed claims that teens’ lives could be put at risk by the requirement. 
• Opposition to legislation expanding access to birth control for poor women; FPIW claimed that access to contraception was already adequate. 
• Lobbying against a telemedicine bill, providing for health care services delivered through video and interactive audio. FPIW claimed it would allow "webcam abortions." 
• FPIW also lobbied against a bill requiring insurance companies that cover maternity care to also cover abortions. 
• Campaigning in support of a bill about "informed decision making" for Washington state's Death with Dignity Act, which permits people to choose doctor-assisted suicide. The FPIW-supported bill would have required doctors, as with anti-abortion “informed consent” laws, to inform patients about "feasible alternatives" before they could access drugs for assisted suicide.

Backholm has a history of outrageous and bigoted remarks in support of his agenda as well. He contends that gay relations in general are in violation of “natural and moral laws”: "The idea that all sex is good sex, so long as it involves adults, will not survive because it cannot survive,” he writes at the FPIW site. “The natural and moral laws of the universe are not subject to court ruling or UN resolution. While many within the tolerance movement will go to the grave convinced of the justness of their cause, history will inevitably see it differently.”

Arguing against same-sex marriage, Backholm compared it to the medieval practice of bloodletting:

Redefining marriage in this way, saying that there is no difference between men and women, that it’s not important for children to have both a mother and a father, that’s not just bad policy, it’s wrong in the eternal sense. So because it’s untrue, it will ultimately be proven as untrue and we will come around to recognize the error of our ways. We used to believe in bloodletting as good medical practice, culture has embraced a lot of things temporarily until they realized it’s based on things that are not true. This is one of those, it has to be temporary, not just because I want it to be temporary, but because it’s untrue in the eternal sense.

While organizing for Initiative 1515 in 2016, Backholm quipped to an audience he was preparing for signature gathering: “For the gentlemen, what I would encourage you to do, if you want to be so bold and to make the point, take your petition and stand outside the women's restroom at the mall, and if any of the women don't want to sign it, just go ahead and follow 'em on in,” he said, to laughter. “Maybe this will be a better time to sign our little petition.”

Last year, FPIW was sued by Planned Parenthood to prevent the release of names of people from the University of Washington who had become embroiled in the widely disproven claims about the health-care organization’s purported sale of fetal tissue. FPIW had worked to support the claims of the Center for Medical Progress and its leader, David Daleiden, concocted through spuriously edited video recordings, that fetal tissue sales were being promoted by PP; Daleiden and one of his cohorts is currently under indictment in California for conspiracy to invade privacy.

For now, Backholm’s focus is entirely about passing I-1552, dubbed once again the “Just Want Privacy” initiative, though the rhetoric is once again charged and bigoted. While campaigning for the bill in 2016, Backholm compared trans people to the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

"I once thought that story was useful as an illustration but patently absurd," Backholm said. "No parade would gather to celebrate the new clothes of a naked emperor—until Bruce Jenner. And we now have a nation celebrating the fiction that a man is now a woman."

The FPIW's "Gender Revolution" seminars were held in eight locations around the state, including Bothell, Bellingham, Sequim, Spokane and Pasco. The Tacoma seminar featured a discursion on a component of FPIW’s campaign against transgender acceptance in the state’s schools, attacking the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction over new learning standardssaying that kindergarten students should "understand there are many ways to express gender," third graders should learn that "gender roles can vary considerably" and "understand [the] importance of treating others with respect regarding gender identity," and fourth graders will learn the definition of sexual orientation.

As Backholm made clear, the FPIW believes that this constitutes an attack on conservative students: "It is frightening to think that students who hold traditional beliefs about gender and sexual identity may have to choose between accepting politically correct talking points or failing assignments and being ostracized by school administrators."

FPIW promoted the seminars with provocative taglines: “We celebrate ‘Women’s Day’, but no one can define what a woman—or a man—actually is anymore” and “[W]hy is my child’s school working so hard to convince them there are 56 genders and you can be any gender you want?”

During the seminar, Backholm suggested a common conspiratorial explanation of the progression of LGBT rights to feature transgender concerns. He described how, once same-sex marriage became the law of the land with the Supreme Court’s 2014 Obergfell v. Hodges ruling, LGBT organizers immediately began moving toward “comprehensive federal LGBT non-discrimination protections,” and the cause of transgender rights became a central player in their agenda. “They needed a new victim class,” Backholm said.

All this, he argued, was simply the product of a long moral slide: “The thing that binds this all together is the desire to create an environment in which there are no rules,” he told the audiuence.

Backholm also proffered his views on the nature of transgender identification, claiming that LGBT people have simply slapped a trendy new label on something mundane: “All of this begins to make sense when you realize that when they use the word gender, what they really mean is personality,” he said. “The discussion about gender is really a conversation about personality.”

He urged seminar-goers to get involved on three levels—interpersonally, at their churches, and politically. He described the churches as being “at war, for sure,” and urged everyone at the seminar to help organize support for the drive to gather signatures for I-1552.

“Our kids are just flat-out being lied to, about stuff that’s going to destroy their mind, spirit, soul and body,” he warned. “We should be a place equipped to patch that up when it happens, but we should also be a place that’s involved on the front end of that, so that we can prevent the harm from happening in the first place.”

The larger enemy, as Backholm acknowledged, was the “LGBT agenda,” but added: “That’s not our primary objective right now. There’s hotter irons in the fire. It’s not the root, it’s the fruit of the tree.”

Far Right Descends On Berkeley For 'Free Speech' And Planned Violence

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

BERKELEY, Calif. – The American far right – alt-right figures, antigovernment movement leaders, and a conglomeration of conspiracists and extremists ranging from anti-feminists to nativists, all angrily voicing their support for Donald Trump – came here Saturday itching for a fight. They found it.

On social media, the organizers and supporters called it “the Next Battle of Berkeley,” a chance to gain revenge for an earlier event on the University of California campus that they believed had infringed on conservatives’ free speech rights: In February, a scheduled appearance by alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was shut down by rock-throwing “antifascist” protesters.

So when several hundred of them gathered at a downtown park for a “Free Speech” event Saturday – most from out of town, many from all around the country – they came prepared to do battle with the same black-clad protesters, many of them wearing helmets, pads, and face masks of their own. The result was an inevitable free-for-all, with organized phalanxes on both sides lining up, occasionally erupting into fistfights, and then breaking down in a series of running melees that ran up Center Street into the heart of downtown.


By the day’s end, 11 people were injured and six hospitalized. Police arrested 21 people on a variety of charges.

The rally had drawn wide attention among various right-wing factions leading up to the event. Perhaps the most noteworthy of them were the Oath Keepers, the antigovernment “Patriot” movement group closely associated with the Bundy standoff and various far-right conspiracist activities.

Stewart Rhodes speaks at the rally.

“We’re going [to Berkeley] because people are having their rights violated,” Oath Keepers president Steward Rhodes told a North Carolina gathering the week before. “So it could be argued that with the full support of the local politicians, thugs in the streets are beating people up and suppressing their rights to free speech and assembly. It could be argued that California is in a state of insurrection.”

Various alt-right figures also became involved. Kyle Chapman, an Alameda County man who has gained recent notoriety as “Based Stickman,” the stick-and-shield-wielding defender of right-wing speech, came and was reportedly arrested. Canadian Lauren Southern, an alt-right pundit who came to notoriety by denying the existence of rape culture and by demonizing minorities, arrived wearing a helmet boasting a “MAGA” (Make America Great Again) sticker.

Nathan Damigo taunts protesters

Nathan Damigo, one of the key figures in the student-oriented white-nationalist “Identity Evropa” organization, was not only present, but acted as a provocateur throughout much of the day, egging on protesters and leading a group of young white men with “fascy” haircuts in confrontations on the street. Damigo was videotaped sucker-punching a young woman in black who was embroiled in the street brawls.

The rally was scheduled to begin at noon, but by 11 a.m. both sides were out in force, and the right-wing speakers, including Southern and Rhodes, began addressing the crowd from a tree-covered portion of the park. Meanwhile, hundreds of protesters gathered, separated from the “Patriots” by orange police cordons, enforced by some 250 officers. By around noon, the protesters began to march around the park.

Groups of right-wing activists formed lines to prevent black-clad antifascists from entering their space, even as the protest moved around the east end of the park and then congealed on Center Street, on its west side. It was there that the police cordons finally started breaking down, the two sides were milling as a mob, and fights began to break out. Objects ranging from plastic bottles to large rock to bagels were flying through the air. A trash bin was rolled down the street, and several bins of garbage were set afire.

The Pepe banners come out

Banners came out, including some featuring Pepe the Frog, the notorious alt-right mascot. One sign featured the anti-Semitic meme, “Goyim Know.” Eventually, the mass of people moved a half-block to the intersection of Center and Milvia streets, where the two sides again faced off for the better part of an hour.

Insults were shouted and chanted, threats were made, skirmishes erupted. Both sides appeared to be evenly matched. That mob broke up when someone lit a large smoke bomb that obscured everyone’s vision for several minutes. In the fog, melees began breaking out, several of them running east up Center. Eventually the mob moved up the block to the intersection of Center with Shattuck, the main downtown boulevard.

The right-wing militants appeared to be attempting to head toward the Cal-Berkeley campus a few blocks further east, but the protesters stiffened their resistance and prevented them from getting much further beyond Shattuck. As participants began drifting away, the combatants remained mostly within a small half-block on Shattuck. Eventually, an organized phalanx of police moved in and broke up the crowd, and most participants went home.

Afterward, the alt-right was exultant, claiming “victory”: Chapman claimed that “Berkeley got sacked,” while the rally’s original organizers, a far-right group called the Proud Boys, boasted: “Today was an enormous victory! I could not be more proud or grateful for every one who attended the event! This was the turning point!”

Post-election pro-Trump rallies in late February held around the country similarly provoked scenes of mob violence.

More photos from the rally below.

A Trump supporter is arrested by police.

Anti-Semitic and racist themes were common.

Protesters traded insults with the rallygoers.

Another Pepe sign.

Oath Keepers leader Gerald DeLemus, a Bundy Ranch figure.

When this rallygoer wasn't wearing his Spartan helmet, he was showing off
his 'white pride' tattoos.

There were a number of injuries on both sides.

A Trump supporter screams at the protesters.

The 'Identity Evropa' crowd in action.

Nathan Damigo, center, and his pals threaten protesters.

A couple of rallygoers recover from the effects of pepper spray.

Canadian alt-right pundit Lauren Southern was there with a contingent.

Alex Jones' Defense of Trump Unleashes Obscene, Homophobic Attack on Congressman

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]


Alex Jones keeps saying he has nothing against gay people and thinks they’re wonderful. But then he keeps saying hateful and ultimately insane things about LGBT folk.

The most recent outburst came Wednesday, when Jones posted a video featuring the latest of his wildly obscene and homophobic rants directed at Rep. Adam Schiff—this time with a bug-eyed outburst worthy of Dr. Strangelove, urging President Trump to hit China with nuclear weapons pre-emptively and claiming: “The United States is preparing to nuke China!”


The video, posted to Jones’ YouTube channel, features an increasingly unhinged disquisition warning that China planned to engage the U.S. in a nuclear showdown—and then blaming liberals in Congress, particularly Rep. Schiff, for causing the problems:

JONES: This is what Communism delivers. This is what Venezuela delivers. This what all you people that want collectivism, and hate prosperity. Because you’re socially envious, and hate the prosperity because it makes you feel bad. And now you nihilistically want to start World War III, you assholes. If I wasn’t totally committed to stopping this, I would be getting out of the country with my family and getting to the Southern Hemisphere two years ago.

The world’s in the greatest danger ever, and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are lined up, showing weakness in the face of all this garbage. And that’s why the Communist Chinese, the biggest mass murderers in history, don’t respect us. Because the Democratic Party and snot-nosed people like the intel deputy head, Adam Schiff over there, are scumbags.

You think having all those fairies and pansies up there, little chicken-necks, running around attacking our president all day, makes us strong? It makes us look weak. It doesn’t matter we’ve got ten to one nuclear weapons against China. Those crazy people have proven they’ll go to war. They’re completely psycho, like Kim Jong Un on power trips.

So if China keeps pushing, the only option is full commitment to hit China pre-emptively. That’s the only way to survive this nuclear and Trump knows it. And Russia has already been told they better stand down. The United States is preparing to nuke China! So get ready, assholes! You wanted it, you’re gonna get it! Turn that off! Goddamn it!

Jones is no stranger to hysterical vitriol; during the 2016 campaign, he worked himself up into a red-faced frenzy making the bizarre claim that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were literally possessed by demons. But if recent broadcasts are anything to judge by, nothing gets Jones quite as agitated as potential political threats to President Trump, the object of Jones’ furiously ardent admiration.

Jones has been on a mission attacking Schiff, D-CA, recently, fueled primarily by the congressman’s work as the Democrats’ leader on the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Donald Trump’s campaign ties to Russia. In a March 29 interview with Trump adviser/operative Roger Stone, he unleashed a tide of vitriol unusual even by Jones’ standards, particularly for its unapologetic obscenity:

STONE: What we’re hearing from the Democrats both in the House and Senate is red-baiting --

ALEX JONES: That’s on Drudge.

STONE: -- fear-mongering -- It is well beyond the point of recklessness, whether it is Adam Schiff who has maligned me or whether it is Senator Mark Warner or whether it is Senator John McCain. But let me tell you something, Alex, these guys are pussies. They talk a tough game. “We’re going to get Roger Stone in front of the committee.” Gentlemen, ladies, I am ready, I am more than ready --

JONES: In fact, let me say this right now. Let me tell -- I’m not against gay people. OK. I love them, they’re great folks. But Schiff looks like the archetypal cocksucker with those little deer-in-the-headlight eyes and all his stuff. And there’s something about this fairy, hopping around, bossing everybody around, trying to intimidate people like me and you, I want to tell Congressman Schiff and all the rest of them, “Hey listen asshole, quit saying Roger and I” -- and I’ve never used cussing in 22 years but the gloves are off -- “listen you son of a bitch, what the fuck’s your problem? You want to sit here and say that I’m a goddamn, fucking Russian. You get in my face with that I’ll beat your goddamn ass, you son of a bitch. You piece of shit. You fucking goddamn fucker. Listen fuckhead, you have fucking crossed a line. Get that through your goddamn fucking head. Stop pushing your shit. You’re the people that have fucked this country over and gangraped the shit out of it and lost an election. So stop shooting your mouth off claiming I’m the enemy. You got that you goddamn son of a bitch? Fill your hand.”

I’m sorry, but I’m done. You start calling me a foreign agent, those are fucking fighting words. Excuse me.

STONE: Yeah, I don’t think I have ever been in a campaign in which we disparage the patriotism of our opponents. Now, I’m not going to go there. But I think Adam Schiff has acted irresponsibly and I think he needs to be confronted with his exact words.

JONES: He’s sucking globalist dick.

Newsweek noted that some legal experts viewed Jones’ threat against Schiff as a potential violation of federal law prohibiting direct threats to elected federal officials. Rep. Schiff is married and has two daughters.

As with Jones’s declaimer at the outset of his rant saying he “loves” gay people, he has frequently claimed that, because he is a “libertarian,” he is ardently neutral on the issue of whether or not homosexuality is acceptable.

Meanwhile, out the other side of his mouth, Jones has blamed the gay community for the Orlando Pulse massacre in which 49 people, most of them LGBT, were killed and 53 wounded. (He first claimed the murders were “a false flag” event.) He has claimed the United Nations is ‘space cult’ plotting to make our children gay, or more precisely, “an asexual humanoid.” He claims that toxins introduced to Americans’ diets have been responsible for turning children gay.

Jones, the nation’s most prolific conspiracy theorist, has been an ardent Trump supporter since the spring of 2016. One of his favorite theories before and after the election has revolved around his claims that liberals and the intelligence community are plotting to assassinate Trump.

Pro-Trump Rallies Attract Opposition, anPro-Trump Rallies Attract Opposition, and Violence Again Ensuesd Violence Again Ensues

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Hundreds of Donald Trump supporters in dozens of cities around the nation held local pro-Trump rallies this weekend, but not all were peaceful.

The rallies—originally organized to celebrate an anticipated repeal of the American Care Act that did not come about when the House canceled its vote on repeal legislation—went ahead anyway “as a show of support for the administration’s fast-moving agenda,” as Breitbart News put it.

Most of the rallies—in places such as New York, Philadelphia, Washington, San Diego, Nashville, and Lansing, Michigan—drew only medium-sized crowds. Opponents showed up to counter-protest, and in some locales such as Philadelphia, outnumbered pro-Trump protesters.

And there was the inevitable friction, especially where members of the anarchist “Black Bloc” became involved. The masked, black-clad “anti-fascists” led chants to interrupt the rallies and began scuffling with the red-hatted objects of their protest.

At rallies in Huntington Beach, California, Seaside Heights, New Jersey, and Salem, Oregon, fights broke out, though police quickly intervened in each case and prevented the violence from spreading. The scene at Huntington Beach very nearly descended into a running melee, with one of its organizers getting hit with pepper spray.

Four counter-protesters were arrested, three for illegal use of pepper spray and one for assault and battery, according to a spokesman for the California State Parks Police.

Some of the self-described “Patriots” who showed up to support Trump also were seen wearing masks of their own, notably at the rally in Salem led by antigovernment organizations such as the militia-oriented “3 Percenters.”


One of these “Patriots” approached and surrounded a black man from Portland named Cameron Whitten, who had come to the rally, he said, to ask people questions. Some of the pro-Trump bloc apparently misidentified Whitten as Micah Rhodes, a Portland black man arrested as a sex offender for sex with underage girls.

They wound up haranguing and threatening Whitten. “I suggest you get back over on that side right now,” a masked man told him, “before I fucking kick your ass for fucking raping little kids, you son of a bitch.” He claimed “we have done a shit-ton of research on you.”

Whitten kept asking the man to identify him, if in fact he knew who he was. The man, joined by several of his friends, continued to threaten him until they were distracted by reports of a flag burning.

One man, Matthew Heagy of Terrebonne, was arrested for pepper-spraying a police officer. Another pro-Trump supporter was briefly detained for having a gun at the rally, but was released, police said.

Violence trailed President Trump’s rallies all during the 2016 campaign, encouraged by the then-candidate’s own rhetoric. Trump openly told participants at one rally to “beat the hell out of” protesters, told them he’d like to “punch [a protester] in the face,” and later described for his rally-goers the violent fate that “back in the old days” was expected for such protesters.

Trump's ICE Bulletin Aims To Shame 'Sanctuary Cities,' But Its Numbers Are Skewed

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

`The bulletin is long, detailed, and intimidating, as it is apparently intended to be: The Trump administration’s first weekly list of suspected crimes by immigrants in “sanctuary cities,” issued by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seemingly details some 206 cases where suspected illegal immigrants were involved in crimes in jurisdictions where local officials have declined to cooperate with ICE’s detainer requests.

There’s a problem, though: The numbers listed in the bulletin are not what they seem.

The bulletin’s stated intent is to call out the sanctuary cities. “In uncooperative jurisdictions like Cook County, Illinois, and the City of Philadelphia, ICE is barred from interviewing arrestees in local custody. Therefore, in these communities a large number of criminals who have yet to be encountered by ICE are arrested by local authorities and released in these communities without any notification to ICE,” the report said.

“When law enforcement agencies fail to honor immigration detainers and release serious criminal offenders, it undermines ICE’s ability to protect the public safety and carry out its mission,” Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan said in a statement.

Conservative sites promptly picked up on the bulletin’s fearmongering context, running headlines like: “ALERT: Trump Releases Terrifying List Of Cities With Extremely Unsafe Illegals… Do You Live Here?”

However, ICE’s numbers are not quite what they appear to be. In the report, titled the "Weekly and Declined Detainer Outcome Report," 206 declined “detainers” are listed: immigrants marked by ICE for possible deportation but who instead were released by law enforcement between January 28, 2017, and February 3, 2017. ICE typically requests that these individuals be detained by local law enforcement for about 48 hours in order “to allow DHS to assume custody for removal purposes.”

More than half the cases listed by ICE, however, involve people who have only been charged with violations but have not been convicted. Out of those 206 on the list, 116 cases involve pending charges.

The detainers, moreover, are only a tiny portion of the total 3,083 detainers issued throughout the country during that same period. That represents about 15 percent.

Finally, not only is it unclear what period the number cited in the report covers, the figure itself is somewhat murky, since it does not represent all the cases in which immigration authorities sought custody of people facing criminal charges. As a result of this, major cities like New York and Los Angeles are underrepresented on the list.

The large majority of the immigrants on the list, nearly 70 percent, are from Mexico. All told more than 95 percent are from Latin American countries.

The most common charges listed are assault, driving under the influence of alcohol, domestic violence, robbery and sexual assault. Some of the immigrants on the list have been charged with drug possession, resisting an officer and prostitution.

Thanks to one county – Travis County, home of the state capital, Austin – Texas is the most frequently listed state. Travis County accounted for nearly 70 percent, with 142 of detainer cases listed.

State politicians promptly made hay with the bulletin. Governor Greg Abbott called the report “deeply disturbing,” saying it highlighted the “urgent need for a statewide sanctuary city ban in Texas.” Abbott pulled state funding for Travis County programs last month after Democratic Sheriff Sally Hernandez said that she would only honor detainer requests from ICE agents on a limited basis.

“Texas will act to put an end to sanctuary policies that put the lives of our citizens at risk,” Abbott wrote response to the bulletin.

President Trump created the weekly list as part of his first executive order, issued Jan. 25 and titled Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, a section of which instructed the ICE Director to make such a report public.

The executive order represented Trump’s first steps to make good on campaign promises not only to build a “wall” along the U.S.–Mexico border, but also to crack down on sanctuary cities for shielding undocumented immigrants from federal officials. The order included a plan to publish a weekly list of crimes ostensibly committed by undocumented immigrants.

The section, titled “Sanctuary Jurisdictions,” calls for the Homeland Security secretary to “utilize the Declined Detainer Outcome Report or its equivalent and, on a weekly basis, make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens.”

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump was fond of citing various crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. He often invited family members of those who were victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants to appear onstage with him at campaign events.

Trump’s opening campaign statement in June 2015 had set this tone: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some I assume are good people,” Trump said of undocumented Mexican immigrants.

According to the Declined Detainer Outcome Report, the aim of the new order is “to better inform the public regarding the public safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions.” The report also calls for the secretary of state to “make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens.” an Office for Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens is scheduled to be established, and it will direct the Justice Department to prioritize those immigration prosecutions.

Local officials around the country voiced dismay with the bulletin.

“They cast a very broad net in who they included in this list. We’re all still trying to figure out what is accomplished by this list, and also how it’s going to be used,” said Jorge Elorza, mayor of Providence, R.I., which was included in the list.

Elorza noted that Rhode Island generally does not honor most ICE detainer requests, but the mayor said Providence appeared to have been singled out because of a non-binding resolution passed by city councilors in 2011, which Elorza says wasn’t about detainers.

In Oregon, Washington County Sheriff Pat Garrett said the report does not accurately describe the difficulties or potential legal ramifications associated with honoring ICE detainer requests." He noted that 2014 Oregon federal court ruling determined that law enforcement could be held liable for keeping someone in jail for immigration agents without probable cause.

ICE’s aggressive tactics against sanctuary cities reflects deeper problems with its approach to enforcing immigration laws – namely, that the threat of deportation arising out of any contact with the legal system is undermining the ability of law enforcement to pursue real crime. In some ICE jurisdictions, women who have been victims of domestic abuse have been dropping their cases out of fear they might be picked up by ICE agents merely for showing up at the courthouse.

Their fears are not groundless. An NPR report showed a video, circulated widely among immigrants, of ICE agents standing outside a Denver courthouse as they waited to make arrests. Subsequently, four women dropped cases in which they were victims of “physical and violent assault,” according to Denver City Attorney Kristin Bronson, who said they feared they risked deportation if they showed up for a hearing:

“We had pending cases that we were prosecuting on their behalf and since January 25, the date of the president’s executive order [on immigration], those four women have let our office know they were not willing to proceed with the case for fear that they would be spotted in the courthouse and deported.”

In February, an undocumented immigrant was arrested at a courthouse in El Paso, Texas, by ICE agents moments after a hearing at which she had been granted a protective order against her abusive ex-husband.

Donald Trump, the Authoritarian Master of Alt-America

Below is an excerpt from the penultimate chapter of my forthcoming book, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, due out this summer from Verso Books. It seemed especially relevant right now.

---

From the first day that Trump assumed the presidency, the White House was embroiled in some kind of chaos – some of it internal wrangling, some of it a product of the press responding to his provocations. Longtime Beltway observers were shocked by all the turmoil, believing it signaled an administration already in distress early in its tenure.

But the chaos was by design, something Trump positively cultivated, following the pattern set by dozens of other authoritarian leaders throughout history – using the turmoil to create so much general uncertainty that his rigid, unyielding positions eventually come to define the general consensus. Wielding his Twitter account – which he described as his way of “speaking directly to the people” – like a combat veteran with a grenade launcher, Trump also demonstrated that he was masterful at creating distractions that kept his critics and the press hopping from one “outrage” to another, paying little attention while he quietly enacted his agenda on a broad array of policy fronts.

Trump’s first real foray into asserting an authoritarian style in enacting his agenda came when he followed through on his campaign promises to sign a Muslim immigration ban when he became president. His first attempt at doing this came with one of his first executive orders, issued Jan. 27, banning all travel from seven Muslim-majority nations: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

When the order came before the courts after several states sued to block it, Trump’s legal team attempted to argue that the order was not a “Muslim ban” – that is, a religious-based ban that would have run afoul of the Constitution on several counts, notably the Establishment Clause – but in short order, ran aground on the shoals of Trump’s own campaign rhetoric. The federal judges who reviewed the case all cited the candidate’s vows to institute a “Muslim ban” as evidence the order was intended to apply a religious test and therefore likely unconstitutional, and ordered it blocked.

The judges’ rulings infuriated the president, who tweeted after the ruling February 4: “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!”

Yet when the case went before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Trump’s legal arguments again foundered. “Are you arguing,” queried Judge Michelle Friedland, “that the president’s decision is not reviewable?”

After much obfuscation, Department of Justice lawyer August Flentje said: “Uh, yes.” The appellate court upheld the order blocking Trump’s order.

That weekend, the Trump team sent out Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old “senior adviser” who was a onetime Jeff Sessions staffer closely associated with Stephen Bannon, and himself had a background of dalliances with white nationalists, out to act as the administration’s spokesman on the news talk programs. And he made an indelible impression.

“The president’s powers here are beyond question,” he told Fox News Sunday. “We don’t have judicial supremacy in this country. We have three co-equal branches of government.” He also criticized the appellate court. “The 9th Circuit has a long history of being overturned and the 9th Circuit has a long history of overreaching,” he said. “This is a judicial usurpation of power.”

A week later, on Feb. 21, Miller told Fox that any replacement order would follow the same template: “Fundamentally, you’re still going to have the same basic policy outcome for the country, but you’re going to be responsive to a lot of very technical issues that were brought up by the court and those will be addressed. But in terms of protecting the country, those basic policies are still going to be in effect.'"

So when Trump filed a second executive order banning travel from Muslim nations – reduced to six nations, with Iraq dropped from the list – that, in order to bolster its case, claimed erroneously that Islamist terrorists posed the greatest domestic threat to Americans, and that those six nations had a history of producing immigrants who later committed terror crimes. That order, too was struck down by a federal judge, who ruled that Miller’s Feb. 21 comments were evidence that the order’s intent had not changed.

Floundering displays of incompetence amid assertions of authoritarian certainty such as this became part of the daily White House circus. In mid-February, it emerged that National Security Adviser Mike Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russian officials during a November meeting, and after a weekend of turmoil, Flynn was fired. Trump eventually replaced him with a vastly more respected national-security figure, retired Gen. H.R. McMaster.

The chaos became ceaseless. Sean Spicer banned outlets from press briefings. Another cabinet pick, would-be Labor Secretary Andrew Pudzer, was forced to withdraw after allegations of abuse by his ex-wife emerged. Thousands of open government jobs went unfilled because, Trump explained, the administration wasn’t even trying to fill them.

Tension with the press became intense, especially as Trump attempted to control the message to the public. He did this by regularly asserting the Alt-America version of reality, making himself the final authority of what was “factual” in that universe. True to that reality, he inverted the concept of “fake news” on its head by labeling the mainstream press “fake.” While the press scrambled to make sense of his seemingly open dissembling, his real audience – his red-capped Alt-America followers – received the message clearly: Don’t believe the lying press. The only person you can believe is Trump.

Thus, Trump’s response to the increasing blizzard of stories detailing his incompetence was to blame the institutions recording it, rather than addressing the chaos and floundering. At his contentious February 16 press conference, he went to open war with the media.

“The press has become so dishonest that if we don't talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people, tremendous disservice,” he said. “We have to talk about it, to find out what's going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.”

The next morning, he tweeted:

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

Trump’s Twitter account, indeed, became his chief agent of chaos, whipping up storms of media and diplomatic controversies that became the focus of much of the daily news reportage around the White House. On March 4, he launched what became his most notorious tweetstorm.

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wire tapping" a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!

I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

It later emerged that Trump was inspired to send out these tweets after reading a Bretibart News story, based on anonymous sources, alleging that Obama had tapped Trump’s phones during the campaign. Fact-checkers found the story to be utterly groundless.

Obama adamantly denied the allegation, as did everyone in the intelligence community. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence under Obama, told NBC’s Meet the Press that in the national intelligence activity he oversaw, “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, as a candidate or against his campaign.” FBI director James Comey asked the Justice Department to issue a statement refuting Trump’s claim.

In reality, Trump’s tweets had put his own manifest incompetence on public display: Anyone even remotely acquainted with American surveillance knows that wiretapping is an extremely limited practice legally, permitted only after evidence is presented to a federal surveillance court panel that then approves or disapproves the warrant. If Trump really had been surveilled by the Obama administration, as he claimed, that meant there was enough evidence for a court to approve it. He either was making clueless and reckless allegations, or he was in reality in deep trouble.

Nonetheless, the White House continued to insist that other evidence was going to emerge demonstrating that Trump had been right. Sean Spicer spun Trump’s tweets for reporters, using “air quotes” to claim that he hadn’t been referring to wiretapping specifically: "The President used the word wiretaps in quotes to mean, broadly, surveillance and other activities."

Spicer then berated reporters for not picking up on news reports that vindicated Trump, notably a report the night before from Fox News pundit Andrew Napolitano, who claimed that the surveillance had actually been conducted by the British intelligence agency GHCQ: "Judge Andrew Napolitano made the following statement, quote, 'Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command (to spy on Trump). He didn't use the NSA, he didn't use the CIA ... he used GCHQ.’”

Intelligence officials in the UK were outraged, dismissing the allegation as “utterly ridiculous.” Fox News backed away from Napolitano’s claims, and shortly afterward suspended him from appearing on the network. But Trump adamantly refused to apologize, claiming that Spicer had only read the news story to reporters.

As the media tried to make sense of it all, Kellyanne Conway’s delicious turn of phrase, “alternative facts,” was heard often. Pundits and late-night comics had enjoyed a field day with the term, using it to scornfully refer to the administration’s growing record of spinning a spurious version of reality.

Conway herself had grown weary of being the butt of their jokes. “Excuse me, I’ve spoken 1.2 million words on TV, okay?” she told an interviewer. “You wanna focus on two here and two there, it’s on you, you’re a f—ing miserable person, P.S., just whoever you are.”

What Conway’s critics missed was that, despite their derision – and to some extent, because of it – the gambit worked.

Overall, Trump’s travails seemed to hurt him badly in the polls. By mid-March, according to Gallup, only 37 percent of Americans approved of his performance, while 58 percent disapproved. Those were shockingly low numbers, especially compared to other first-term presidents at similar junctures in their tenures, who were generally in high-approval zones: 62 percent for Obama, 58 percent for George W. Bush, 60 percent for Ronald Reagan.

And yet in the places where it really mattered – that is, in the congressional districts of Republican Trump-backing lawmakers – Trump’s ratings remained high, well over 50 percent. Conservative-oriented polls by Rasmussen put his approval rating at 55 percent. Among Republicans over, 81 percent found Trump “honest and trustworthy.”

"I think he's doing good," Gary Pelletier, a Buffalo, N.Y., retiree told a local reporter. "People are complaining that he's not doing enough, but I'm all for whatever he's doing."

"He's doing everything he said he was going to do," said another Buffalo resident named Phil Pantano, 60.

This was always the role that Alt-America has played: a refuge for people who reject factual reality, a place where they can convene and reassure one another in the facticity of their fabricated version of how the world works. From its beginnings in the 1990s as an alternative universe with its own set of “facts,” to its growth during the early part of the new century through the spread of antigovernment conspiracism, through its evolution into the mainstream of conservatism through the Tea Party, and finally its ultimate realization as a political force through the ascension of Donald Trump, Alt-America’s primarily usefulness was as a ready tool for right-wing authoritarianism. The army of followers was already fully prepared by 2015, when Trump picked up their waiting scepter.

It was also the real-life manifestation of Robert Altemeyer’s “lethal union” of right-wing authoritarian followers with a social-dominance-oriented authoritarian leader: that moment, as Altemeyer says, when “the two can then become locked in a cyclonic death spiral that can take a whole nation down with them.”

Other experts on authoritarianism similarly fear the outcome of Trump’s authoritarianism. “You submit to tyranny,” writes Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”

Accepting untruth, Snyder warns, is a precondition of tyranny. “Post-truth is pre-fascism,” he writes, and “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”

Snyder sees Trump’s insistence on setting the terms of reality as a classic ploy: “This whole idea we're dealing with now about the alternative facts and post-factuality is pretty familiar to the 1920s,” he told Vox’s Sean Illing. “It’s a vision that's very similar to the central premise of the fascist vision. It's important because if you don't have the facts, you don't have the rule of law. If you don't have the rule of law, you can't have democracy.

“And people who want to get rid of democracy and the rule of law understand this because they actively propose an alternative vision. The everyday is boring, they say. Forget about the facts. Experts are boring. Let's instead attach ourselves to a much more attractive and basically fictional world.”

The political reality on the ground, however, will depend on how Trump responds to challenges to his authority. His history so far, particularly his manifest incompetence, points to a bleak outcome.

A longtime Democratic presidential adviser warned Ron Klain told Ezra Klein: “If Trump became a full-fledged autocrat, it will not be because he succeeds in running the state. It’s not going to be like Julius Caesar, where we thank him and here’s a crown.

“It’ll be that he fails, and he has to find a narrative for that failure. And it will not be a narrative of self-criticism. It will not be that he let you down. He will figure out who the villains are, and he will focus the public’s anger at them.”