I haven't done it in a while, but after yesterday I will officially no longer be linking to X on this blog. For reasons which are beyond obvious after yesterday.
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In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
A quote from Captain Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials.
I was reminded of this quote from this Reddit comment.
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"How Concerned Citizens Ran a Neo-Nazi Out of Rural Maine"
This is a good read about how a citizen journalist & podcaster helped expel a burgeoning neo-nazi group in Maine be expelled and brought to heel. The articles focuses on a fuckhead calling himself 'Hammer' and a podcaster dedicated to taking down far right idiots named 'Crash.'
Crash isn't an armchair reporter. He isn't content to merely gather information online—though he does plenty of that, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. When he can he tails people, sometimes in disguise, and reports what he learns in his newsletter, The Crash Report; on social media; and on his podcast, The Crash Program. He focuses his energies on bad guys in his own backyard. "If I didn't limit myself to Maine, I would never get anything done," Crash told me. "There are just so many of them."
Later in describing Hammer:
Hammer is different from Crash's other subjects: He is a virulent white supremacist in the vein of onetime [World Church of the Creator] acolytes. In 2020, while living in San Antonio, Hammer burst onto the right-wing scene when he created an Instagram account that mainly shared hateful memes; it was eventually banned. He created another Instagram account, which was also banned, then another, and so on. Eventually he pivoted to Telegram, then Odysee, BitChute, Gab, and other dark corners of the internet that tolerate neo-Nazi chatter. He launched a Web-based talk show, Hammerstream, in which he exhorted the dominance of whiteness and the importance of physical fitness. He summoned white people to a "last stand, a righteous war" against those who "call for the destruction of their birthright and posterity." He also peddled propaganda and swag: books by or about Hitler, swastika flags and fitted caps, and "Hammer Shades"—Oakley knockoffs available for $25.95 a pop.
This passage which examines Maine's history has me digging into the topic about other state histories (including Washington, Oregon, etc.), but that will come later:
Maine's whiteness isn't accidental. It was intended, orchestrated. To understand this history I spoke to Samuel James, a journalist and the creator of the podcast 99 Years, which he describes as "a Black exploration of the deliberate creation of the whitest state in the nation." James is tall and tattooed, with large brown eyes and a goatee. He is the descendant of a slave and grew up in Biddeford, Maine, "in cornrows and Rollerblades." His father was a Black session musician, and his mother was a white dancer, the daughter of a church pianist.
To make his point about Maine's racist history, James cited Malaga Island, a fishing community settled by free Blacks around the time of the Civil War. "The Great Migration begins in 1910, and powerful Northern racists freak out," James wrote to me in an email. "Maine's then governor Frederick W. Plaisted was one of those racists, and the following year he began the ethnic cleansing." The state forcibly removed people from Malaga Island, committed many of them to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, and even dug up the graves of their dead. "This made national news and gave all the right and wrong signals to all the right and wrong people," James explained . Signals, that is, about the kind of state Maine was and wanted to be. (It wasn't the only state outside the South to embark on such an openly racist path. In 1859, Oregon entered the union with a law excluding Black people from moving there; though rendered moot by the 14th Amendment, the legislation wasn't formally repealed until 1926.)
...
Given the state's white-supremacist history, James isn't surprised that Hammer set his sights on Maine. "In 2020, there were still three islands with the word 'nigger' in their names, and when the state finally redesignated them, the Press Herald said it acted 'swiftly,' " James told me, referring to Portland's daily newspaper.
Later in the article they delve into what Crash did, in addition to discussing Hammer on his podcast:
On March 22, Crash reached out to state authorities to report that he suspected Hammer was running an illegal tattoo operation, and he provided the latitude and longitude coordinates of the property (45.371120°N, 68.155465°W). White supremacists are often brought to heel by the government not because of violent acts but because they violate basic laws and regulations. "They got Al Capone on tax evasion," Crash reminded me.
As the community began rejecting the neonazis, there is this passage that discusses how it happens as the narrative escalates to state news:
In early August, Kathleen Phalen Tomaselli of the Bangor Daily News published a story about Hammer. A seasoned reporter with a Stevie Nicks haircut and a nose ring, Phalen Tomaselli had written for papers in New York and Pennsylvania before buying an old farmhouse in Maine and relocating with her husband. She brought unique experience to the Hammer story: She'd once investigated the East Coast contingent of Aryan Nations.
Phalen Tomaselli is bold and wanted to see Hammer's land for herself, so she drove down from her home near Maine's border with New Brunswick, Canada. The people of Springfield were eager to assist. "Town officials were really helpful in showing me exactly where it was, helping me find the registry of deeds. And people gave me information like, 'If you pass this thing that looks like this particular landmark, you've gone too far,' " she said. She went into the woods with her camera to document what was there, which wasn't much. Hammer's construction plans appeared to be moving at a glacial pace.
The article then diverts into explaining the paradox of tolerance, admittedly through a Christian minister's sermon. Then it turns back to the local Spingfield Maine community and its response:
By late summer 2023, it seemed like everyone in and around Springfield was talking about Hammer. There were community meetings about confronting the rising tide of white supremacy. Papers ran articles that shined a light on Hammer and op-eds that condemned him. "I am not pleased at all with this presence in the community. My grandfather and uncle fought the Nazis…. My other grandfather milled steel for the war effort, and my grandmother on that side worked in a munitions factory. We did not fight that war for nothing!" one local man told the Bangor Daily News. "They are unwelcome here and will not find support from anyone who still believes in what America is really supposed to be about." The paper's editorial board stated its view succinctly: "The welcome mat has limits."
According to Zac Chickering, some Springfield residents were more aggressively intolerant than others and went straight to the source of the problem. "We have a bunch of 80-year-old men that went up to that dickhead's face and threatened to backhoe his body into a grave. And that's nothin'. That's just the flake on the potato plate," Chickering told me. When Hammer started handing out pamphlets promoting his views, residents told him, as Chickering put it, that "nobody gives a thin shit what you think."
This all culminated in April of 2024:
The bill banning paramilitary training was signed into law by Maine's governor, Janet Mills, in April 2024. "This bill is about us saying we are going to draw the line," Joe Baldacci said in a speech on the senate floor. "We are not going to allow people to flout the law and intimidate others." But the new law, it turned out, would have to be used on Hammer's successors, the next neo-Nazis who decide that Maine is their promised land. By the time Mills approved it, Hammer was long gone.
As the article closes, the author brings a heavy handed but apt simile from his time on Crash's own homestead:
With the election around the corner, Crash was thinking a lot about ways the average person can help to curb the antidemocratic forces gaining ground in the United States. He'd recently reminded readers of his newsletter that they weren't powerless in the face of Hammer and his ilk. "We CAN fight fascists without fisticuffs or violence. Voting, and encouraging other non-chuds to vote, is an important first step," he wrote. "So is keeping an eye on your local polling place on election day. Maybe even sticking around after the polls close to watch the vote counting—and democracy—in action. Hopefully, though, you'll want to do more, before votes are cast, to ensure your candidates for the Legislature, school board and other municipal offices aren't chuds, chud-adjacent or chud-sympathetic."
Before leaving Crash's homestead, we helped with the morning chores. We brought feed to the chickens and slop to a trio of pigs named Larry, Curly, and Moe. My kids stood next to Crash in the swine enclosure as he demonstrated how to administer a medicinal tincture—one of the Stooges had contracted a cold while being transported to the homestead from a factory farm. "That's our job, you see," Crash explained. "Our job is to give them the best life possible."
He squeezed the medicine into the pig's mouth with a giant syringe. At first the pig wouldn't swallow, but Crash held its jaw shut, encouraging the animal to follow its instincts. Finally, the pig swallowed and gave a snort, then went back to rooting in the weeds.
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"Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members"
Earlier this month, while the rest of the country was celebrating the achievements of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., parents and children in the "Dissident Homeschool" network opened a lesson plan and were greeted with the words: "As Adolf Hitler wrote…"
The contents of the MLK lesson plan would be shocking for almost anyone, but for members of the 2,400-member "Dissident Homeschool" Telegram channel, this was a regular Monday at school.
"It is up to us to ensure our children know him for the deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro he actually was," the administrator of the network's Telegram channel wrote, alongside a downloadable lesson plan for elementary school children. "He is the face of a movement which ethnically cleansed whites out of urban areas and precipitated the anti-white regime that we are now fighting to free ourselves from."
Since the group began in October 2021 it has openly embraced Nazi ideology and promoted white supremacy, while proudly discouraging parents from letting their white children play with or have any contact with people of any other race. Admins and members use racist, homophobic, and antisemitic slurs without shame, and quote Hitler and other Nazi leaders daily in a channel open to the public.
The "Dissident Homeschool" network is run by a husband and wife team who use the aliases "Mr. and Mrs. Saxon." This week the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective published a detailed report that unmasked the Saxons as Logan and Katja Lawrence, who live in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, with their four young children.
The researchers were able to identify the Lawrences through biographical details they shared in the Telegram channel's group chat and on podcast appearances. One of the key clues to identifying them came when they revealed that they owned a German Shepherd called Blondi—the same name as Hitler's dog.
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Julius Streicher is an important reminder from World War 2 - executed for crimes against humanity despite never having killed anyone
Julius Streicher (12 February 1885 – 16 October 1946) was a member of the Nazi Party, the Gauleiter (regional leader) of Franconia and a member of the Reichstag, the national legislature. He was the founder and publisher of the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine. The publishing firm was financially very successful and made Streicher a multi-millionaire.
After the war, Streicher was convicted of crimes against humanity at the end of the Nuremberg trials. Specifically, he was found to have continued his vitriolic antisemitic propaganda when he was well aware that Jews were being murdered. For this, he was executed by hanging. Streicher was the first member of the Nazi regime held accountable for inciting genocide by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Fomenting hate is still a violent action.
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A fascinating thread of an antifascist researcher looking at the bonkers "Nazi" list circulating on Twitter
The person's summary for what to do if you find yourself in possession of a "Nazi list."
- as a general rule of thumb, don't post even edited Nazi content unless you know what you're doing or have talked to someone who does
- warn privately. Don't post Nazi lists to Twitter don't tag people for them, don't amplify lists. Warn via mutuals if you must
- practice humility (researchers, this is for us). No one gets it right 100% of the time, not even the pros. Be real about your experience level, ask more experienced folks to vet your work regularly.
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