LibertyProject

What Is Antifa? The Truth Behind the Tweets

Donald Trump clearly hates antifa. But what actually is antifa and why does it matter?

President-Elect Donald Trump makes a proud gesture during his speech at a "Thank You" Tour rally held at the Giant Center.

Photo by: Evan El-Amin/ Shutterstock

If you've watched Fox News recently, you have almost certainly heard the term "antifa" uttered with an air of sinister mystery and more than a hint of contempt, but what actually is it?

Antifa, pronounced "AN-tee-fuh," is short for antifascists. Antifa is not really an organization, as they have no leader, no hierarchy, and no regular meetings or gatherings. It is instead a left-wing political ideology that aims to eradicate fascism and white nationalism through the use of both nonviolent and violent direct action rather than policy reform. Essentially, they are a group characterized entirely by opposition to one thing: fascism.

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Culture Feature

The Strange Intersections of K-Pop, Korean Culture, and American Fascism

In 2016 the Alt-Right co-opted elements of Korean culture, now K-Pop Fans are fighting back.

American Fascist

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra (Unsplash)

In 2016, young and extremely online white men began simping hard for Donald Trump's presidential candidacy on sites like 4chan, Reddit, and (for the particularly hateful/socially maladjusted) 8chan.

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CULTURE

My Hero Academia Backlash and the Art of the Bad Faith Take

#WeSupportYouHorikoshi is a nice sentiment, but the threat is mostly imaginary.

Shueisha

The My Hero Academia Twitter fandom is up in arms against the evil SJW portion of the My Hero Academia fandom over their brazen attempts to cancel the popular manga series' creator, Kohei Horikoshi...Or at least that's what some bad faith actors want you to believe.

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MUSIC

Cult Leader, Mass Murderer, Alt-Right Hero, Folk Singer: Charles Manson and His Failed Music Career

On the 50th anniversary of the Manson Murders, a look back in time at the sonic inspirations and frustrated desire for glory that inspired Manson's killing spree.

Charles Manson's first prison interview | 60 Minutes Australia

Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is preparing to take modern-day Hollywood by storm.

The film's release is timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the infamous Manson Family murders, when Charles Manson and his coterie of villains gruesomely took the lives of Sharon Tate and eight others.

Manson's legacy has persisted for half a decade, and Tarantino's movie reestablishes another gruesome truth: Hollywood can't get enough of its supervillains, especially when their mythologies involve young women, movie stars, and ambition that crashed and burned and left bloodlust in its wake.

All this recognition raises the question: When is it acceptable to revisit the legacy—and, in this case, the music—of a serial killer?

Hollywood Hallucinations

Before he became a cult leader, Manson actually wanted to be a folk musician.

From 1966-67, Manson recorded his compositions onto a mixtape called Lie: The Love and Terror Cult. Because Manson is a white supremacist and serial killer, we don't actually encourage you to waste the time or energy to listen to his album. Instead, according to other sources, the album's fourteen songs belie a troubled spirit with a (possibly subconscious) awareness of his own true nature—particularly on "People Say I'm No Good" and "Garbage Dump." Apparently, his music is also laden with counterculture tropes, from a hatred of cops to a bevy of lines about birds.

However, Manson's guiding mantras were in no way aligned with the starry-eyed, peace-and-love ethos of the average counter-culture hippie. Manson was motivated by racist ideas that led him towards the belief that an ensuing, super-apocalyptic race war was on its way, meant to annihilate both blacks and whites, thereby creating space for Manson and his (maybe "disturbed") 'Family' to take over the world.

Though his music never broke into the mainstream on its own, Manson did make some promising industry connections before initiating his final rampage. In 1968, two of Manson's female followers—Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey—were hitchhiking when they were picked up by the Beach Boys' drummer, Dennis Wilson. Once he learned about this, Manson leapt on the connection, eventually ingratiating himself into the Beach Boys' social circle. He and some of his Family moved into the Beach Boys' mansion that summer, where they dropped acid and participated in group sex.

Soon enough, it seemed like Manson might've made a powerful connection with the Beach Boys, as Dennis Wilson eventually took Manson to a studio to record. However, everything came crashing down when Manson pulled a knife on Wilson's producers after a disagreement, and from there, things spiraled out of control.

That fall, the Beach Boys recorded a poppier version of Manson's original song, the forebodingly named "Cease to Exist," renamed "Never Learn Not to Love," with Brian Wilson credited as the sole songwriter. Afterwards, Manson presented Dennis Wilson with a single bullet, and said, "It's important to keep your children safe." This was the final straw; Wilson beat him up and sent him home.

Until he drowned off the coast of Marina del Rey in 1983, Dennis Wilson refused to talk about his relationship with the Manson Family. It is known that the Mansons wrecked the Wilson's car, blew $100,000 in cash, passed along STDs, and trashed his home. According to fellow Beach Boys member Mike Love, Wilson saw Manson shoot someone and throw him down a well. The psychological impact of a visit from the Manson family certainly did nothing to help with Dennis Wilson's battle with addiction, which would continue for the remainder of his life.

That was Charles Manson for you, though. He was a man whose fetid, twisted nature found a shell in the hectic abandon of the late 1960s counterculture movement, and whose ability to cast a spell over others enabled him to pull many innocent people into his twisted influence. As it turned out, the drug-addled, guru-worshiping, love-is-all-you-need ethos of the hippie age was the perfect guise under which to hide murderous impulses.

Interestingly, Manson's actions were partly inspired by some of the most famous music of the era. He claimed that the Beatles' White Album was the reason he committed all of his murders in the first place; specifically, he believed that several songs on the White Album foreshadowed a forthcoming race war. He believed that the song "Helter Skelter" referred to the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and that "Revolution 9" and "Piggies" predicted the vanquishment of the white man.

Chillingly, during one of the Manson murders, one of the killers wrote "Helter Skelter" in blood on a door in Sharon Tate's house.

Posthumous Glory

Since Manson's conviction, his music has gained controversial levels of recognition. The Lemonheads covered Manson's "Home is What Makes You Happy" in 1988, and Guns N' Roses put their spin on "Look at Your Game Girl," released as a secret bonus track at the end of their covers album The Spaghetti Incident?

Most famously, the boundary-pushing goth rocker Marilyn Manson created his name by smashing together "Charles Manson" and "Marilyn Monroe" to form a moniker that combines two of the most glorified objects of Hollywood tragedy. Marilyn Manson even covered Charles'"Sick City," and Nine Inch Nails recorded their 1992 EP, Broken, at the house where Sharon Tate was murdered.

All this posthumous recognition raises the question of when, and if, it's appropriate to recognize and interpret the art of a serial killer and white supremacist. This is the more extreme angle to a very common question—can we separate the art from the artist?

While contemporary "cancel culture" can sometimes go too far, in Manson's case, there is no separating his work from who he was as a person. Every consideration of what art we morally should or should not listen to needs to happen on a case-by-case basis, wherein we weigh the extremity of the person's offenses with the time period and extenuating circumstances surrounding their actions; and Manson can never be extricated from who he was as a person or from the lives he stole.

Things get especially hairy when examining the tremendous amount of art and pop cultural products inspired by Manson's legacy. From Joan Didion to Marilyn Manson, Mad Men to the Ramones, Manson has been a constant muse for everyone from punk rockers to political commentators. Sometimes, these products can be genuinely thoughtful—for example, Emma Cline's The Girls explored the brainwashing inherent in 60s California mythology and the effect of patriarchal aggression on the adolescent female psyche; and other outlets like Psychic TV have used Manson's story to explore the connection between cults and fanbases.

Still, other interpretations have been less nuanced, to say the least. Buried within the countercultural forces that motivated Manson was a stunning super-individualism, a belief that he was totally enlightened and free, to the point of total liberation from any form of consequence. It was a patriarchal, white supremacist, pack-mentality-created hatred that is very much alive today. (There are obvious parallels between the central ideas that fueled Charles Manson and fuel the alt-right today, and Manson is a frequent object of idealization on alt-right forums). In a way, attention—be it positive or negative—is exactly what Charles Manson wanted. The fact that he transitioned from an aspiring musician to drug-addled guru to murderous cult leader reveals that his number one love was not music, nor adoration. It was power and attention of any kind.

Therefore, Manson's music and life deserves no glory and no idealization. The only positive consequences of exploring his story and legacy are a potentially deeper understanding of the forces that created someone like him, if only to locate and address those forces when they reappear.

Tellingly, after Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor recorded in Sharon Tate's old home, he happened to run into her sister.

According to Reznor, "She said,'Are you exploiting my sister's my sister's death by living in her house?' For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said: 'No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred.' I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realised for the first time: 'What if it was my sister?' I thought: 'Fuck Charlie Manson.' I don't want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bullshit."

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD - Official Trailer (HD)www.youtube.com


CULTURE

Are Memes the Key to a Revolution?

Memes can elect presidents and spark mass revolts. Why shouldn't they determine the fate of the world?

Most of us know that there's something up with Washington and the military-industrial complex that's running our world, which together are ignoring the very real threat of impending disaster due to the amount of carbon we're belching into the atmosphere.

The U.S. military is the number one burner of carbon in the world, after all.

Yet, though there have been significant pockets of protest, in general, activism has not taken off on the level required to spark change on the necessary scale. Part of this could be because there's just so much to protest, as every single day seems to bring another racist attack, another horrific report from the border, another apocalyptic headline. With the 24/7 news cycle constantly screaming or beeping out informational toxic waste, it's become too much information to bear.

Fortunately, memes have leapt in to provide an outlet for existential despair, suicidal ideation, hate, and other feelings too dark to express in the day-lit realm of seriousness. If reality is like the sun, impossible to look at straight-on, then memes have become like sunglasses for certain subsects of the online sphere—ways to comprehend events or express views without fully acknowledging their implications. This is visible in the rise of memes about mental illness and of course, politics.



The Area 51 Raid Could Be a Blueprint for a Revolt

In recent times, memes—or rather, a single meme, which blossomed into a Facebook group and spawned posts and tweets—have successfully persuaded one million people to RSVP that they are "going" to invade Area 51, the U.S. military base that has long been the subject of conspiracy theories. This is a clear example of how quick and effective memes are at mass mobilization.

Soon enough, people began to understand the implications of this spontaneous unification. Critics began questioning why people were rallying around an impossible and pointless Area 51 attack (sorry—I wish it were possible as much as the next guy, believe me) instead of a raid on, say, the ICE prisons at the border where people are actively dying in U.S. custody.

The truth is, though, it's becoming clear that serious, genuine attempts at changing the world have difficulty catching on in today's nihilistic, fragmented society. Fifty years after the summer of '69, hope doesn't hold the sway it used to; we don't believe that anything like 'give peace a chance' will work. We've watched too many optimists fail. We've seen too many cult leaders carted off to prison, too many men we thought were great exposed for who they really are.

We've seen the explosive production that defined the 20th century launch globalization in the 21st century, which has resulted in mass ecological crisis and waves of displacement that we know will only worsen as the earth warms. We've been told to turn off our lights as carbon companies churn out more pollution every year.

We've seen lies infiltrate our television screens from both sides of the political spectrum. We've watched pundits say the world will end in ten years because of climate change, then we've switched to FOX to see other pundits saying that climate change is a conspiracy.

Really, there's not much else to do except fall into complete depression and/or anxiety, or laugh it off. Perhaps merely incidentally, memes help us to do the latter, allowing us to alchemize those two polarized reactions into something unified, if only in its distortedness.


Memes as Tools of Social Change—Or Alt-Right Solidarity

After all, for all their flaws, memes do something vital for any healthy social movement, something that few digital users would care to admit. Memes foster community, presenting an alternative to the lonely echo chamber of the social media sphere and the capitalist system at large, which thrives on competition and the cult of the individual.

There is revolutionary potential in this resilient unification. Imagine, for example, if someone could shape climate change into a contagious meme. Imagine if "storm the Exxon Mobil factory" could collect the number of comments and RSVPs that this event has. Could it be that memes are the best hope for humanity?

Memes are perfect revolutionary devices because they allow us to connect and unify in the most anonymous of senses, permitting secret or radical thoughts to catch on like wildfire. Sometimes, this can have horrible consequences. Being implicitly neutral, memes are just as useful at fostering the rise of the alt-right and electing Trump as they could be in unifying protestors against climate change, or around the next Democratic presidential candidate.

But while memes can fuel hate, they can also fuel—to quote presidential candidate and meme Marianne Williamson—love. Perhaps the rise of memes says something about love; perhaps it proves that while we (as Gen-Z and millennials, to make a sweeping generalization) can't tolerate the intimacy of real, genuine bonds anymore—while ideas like "love will save us" feel antithetical—we can tolerate intimacy through the synthetic, chemical bonding that occurs through internet friendships, which allow us to remove ourselves from the equation, to strip away our public personas and instead to distill ourselves to something fluid, changeable at will.

In that anonymity, we feel the freedom to be ourselves, outside of the cage of the 'self' we perform in the real world. We can admit our flawed natures and fears; we can admit that we are "in shambles," while still preserving a self-effacing detachment. Always, there's the oddly comforting possibility that it's all a joke.

Needless to say, we need some new climate change memes


If Revolution Were a Meme

More and more, memes are becoming one of the primary ways to comprehend the truth of ourselves and our world, a truth so submerged in layers of complexity and misinformation that sometimes it only feels possible to discuss it in the liminal space of half-seriousness, half-absurdity that defines the memetic sphere.

Memes allow us to address what's breaking us down—such as the unchecked greed and corruption that began way back in the early stages of global colonization and is now causing climate change—without risking the kind of vulnerability that genuine emotion (be it hope or anger) requires. Memes allow us to commit to traveling across the country to rally and protest not because we think it will work, but because we think it will fail.

That's the kind of abandon it's going to take to protest climate change, or its forefather—late-stage capitalism—both of which can feel so overwhelming that it's hard to act at all. To really fight climate change and the capitalist systems that created it, maybe we need to stop taking everything so damn seriously. Maybe we need to lighten up—to rage against the apocalypse—to do something utterly absurd, like hold a collective dance-off at the site of the next pipeline in the Pacific Northwest, or a mass juuling session, or all throw tide pods at ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods' house—or something else, something that could only come from the belly of the Interwebs. Something that will flicker on cell phone screens across the country and across the world, provoking smiles or raised eyebrows, calling people to action in spite of themselves, pulling Americans out of their inclination towards apathy.

Maybe the Area 51 revolt could be a lesson. It's proof that today's Americans can and are willing to rally around specific causes. It's proof that memes are extraordinarily powerful weapons or tools, depending how they're used. It's all this, and it's none of this, because memes elude serious scrutiny, existing in a space that looks something like freedom.

Image via CBC


CULTURE

Why We Deserved That Abysmal Jordan Peterson v. Slavoj Žižek Debate

From presidential debates to masturbatory stand-offs between self-aggrandizing personalities, we only tune in to public discourse to sate voyeuristic impulses, not intellectual ones.

Jordan Peterson

Photo by Tony Norkus (Shutterstock)

What we know as debate today is a Trumpian debacle of factual errors and logical fallacies that affronts common sense but makes an excellent drinking game.

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