iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

FBI Director Christopher Wray, interviewed yesterday on 60 Minutes, on the idea of pardoning the Capitol stormers:

Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

When you try to argue w/someone who's studied/monitored right-wing extremists for 31 years, 28 of them professionally, you really ought to have a command of the facts. There are plenty of neo-Nazis who believe the Holocaust happened--and celebrate it--which is why they get tattoos like these.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

You don't even have to go the courthouse. People excitedly post on social media all the time when they get their U.S. citizenship (see example below). It's up to us to make sure that the future U.S. remains a place people get excited to be a part of. No small task.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

The next time you change your sheets and comforters on Bluesky, you might want to pay attention to people like this:

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

J. Wellington Wimply was the original troll.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

It was par for the course for the Constitutional Education League, which also went after the YWCA. I'm afraid to know what the lotions of love pamphlet was about. Kamp spent 4 months in prison for refusing to reveal his funding sources to Congress.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

Government programs aiding education and the elderly were simply preludes to Nazism, in the writer's mind.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

It was an early example of the far right fixation on the word "socialist" in "National Socialist."

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

Enjoy this free bit of extremist history. "Hitler Was A Liberal," 1949 pamphlet by Joseph P. Kamp, published by the Constitutional Educational League, an early attempt by the far right to "switch" Hitler to the left.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

In 2020 (see below), I outlined the history of military efforts to deal with extremism, which often involved patchwork efforts following some embarrassing act of violence or scandal involving extremists, often during a surge of extremism in the U.S. docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/...

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

Hoping Santa brings me a neck! 😉 Happy holidays to all! Peace and good will to all--we sure need it! ❤️

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

His earlier conviction, back in 2003, stemmed from a plot to attack the FBI. I have a lot of materials from that incident, including letters he wrote from jail. Here's a summary I wrote at the time:

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

Not surprisingly, his posts also contain anti-LGBTQ+ content.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

His oldest (thus first) post, from 22 days ago, features a meme of the mosque shooter. Bluesky did not catch this in three weeks.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

They also feature a snippet of the video of the mosque shooting attack itself (which the shooter livestreamed).

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

His posts also feature an image of the mosque shooter.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

His top post is an animation featuring a mass shooting attack with someone with a decorated guns (like the mosque shooter) attacking and killing "Fat Shaniquahs," which probably makes the animation a reference to the Buffalo supermarket mass shooting targeting black people.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

Note that the person's Bluesky address references the name of the shooter and the number of his victims. The background pic on the platform also references the shooter.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

As my old twitter posts are copied to this platform, I received this reply to one of them, saying that white supremacist terrorist who launched deadly shooting attacks at mosques in New Zealand had done "nothing wrong."

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

The next reference I found (and the last I'll came from a 1957 article in the Chicago Tribune, featuring someone calling Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a sundown town.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

My next find did not come until 1952, in an article in the Bartlesville (OK) Record, in which a college student asserts that the University of Oklahoma was accepting of black students, despite Norman, OK, where it was situated, being a sundown town. Perhaps an optimistic portrayal? I don't know.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

in the context of black people, as opposed to other groups. For example, it was occasionally used in the context of keeping "tramps" out (and in fact, to my surprise, the town of Beattie, Kansas, was mentioned in that capacity as well!).

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

I didn't expect my first find to come as late as that (though note it is referencing an earlier time). Now, note that I wasn't looking for any reference to a sundown town (like the one below, from 1942: Taft, California), but to the specific phrase "sundown town." I was also looking for the term

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

One great thing about having access to a big digitized newspaper collection is that you can satisfy your curiosity about anything. Tonight I wondered what was the earliest reference I could find to the phrase "sundown town." I found it in a 1936 piece in the Beattie (KS; pop 434 in 1930) Journal.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

White supremacist Jared Taylor himself has long described himself as a "race realist."

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

One example of a self-described "race realist" was psychologist Chris Brand (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_B...), who had many racist and misogynistic views--as well as ties to Jared Taylor, at whose conference Amy Wax spoke.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

I'm going to have to start posting posters from the 1970s.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

When the film American History X came out in the late 1990s, white supremacists embraced it, despite its anti-racist message. Might they do the same thing with this film? I guess we'll see.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

They also have incorporated the group into their subculture, naming events after them or creating joke "toys" based on them.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

They will do the same for individual members of the order, who are/were viewed as "prisoners of war" or martyrs.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

White supremacists tattoo the group's symbol on themselves and wear it as clothing.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Bluesky Only Thread Tomorrow a film about the 1980s white supremacist terror group The Order (aka Bruder Schweigen) will debut. I have my doubts I will like it, based on the history of films about white supremacists. Of no doubt is the fact that modern white supremacists view The Order as heroes.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

I for one welcome our new ferocious flapjack overlords.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Congresswoman calls Kamala Harris a "republican-lite." Being on the far left or far right is like viewing people through the wrong end of a telescope: they look very far away and very close together, even though the reality is often quite different.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Preparing for the perhaps inevitable: bsky.app/profile/markpitcavage.bsky…. Feel free to let people know, here or there.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Does a reptilian have these magnificent baby-blues?

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Alex Jones claiming today that The Onion buying Infowars is the top story in the country right now, or even the world. Umm, no.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Some years ago I wrote an article about the attraction that ricin held for extremists: www.adl.org/media/15081/download

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

I will have to settle, once again, for Sexiest Bald No-Necked Man Alive.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 09/11/2024

Pretty irritated at the baseless conspiracy theories spouting up from the left all over this platform.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

If you have to begin your tweet with "I'm not a conspiracy theorist," you're a conspiracy theorist.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

The 25th Amendment is almost impossible to invoke against the will of a president. To do so requires the VP, the majority of key cabinet members all appointed by Trump, and a 2/3 majority of both houses of Congress to be on board.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

I'm not even sold yet on terrestrial life.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 06/11/2024

According to this person, I am responsible for the re-election of TFG, because I criticized J. K. Rowling. Obviously, that logic is impeccable, so I humbly apologize for the results of the election. I did not realize it rested on my shoulders.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 04/11/2024

The "conservative influencer" mentioned in this headline is one of the most notorious white supremacists and antisemites in the country.

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Mark Pitcavage @markpitcavage.bsky.social · 04/11/2024

If you ever want a perfect example of a clickbait headline, you need look no further than this. When you read the details, you discover he'd already endorsed her, had spoken on an Evangelicals for Harris call, and had also endorsed Clinton in 2016. "Shock," indeed.

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