CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: With YouTuber Line-up, American Renaissance Supposedly Places its Bets on ‘Optics’  Thu Jan 31, 2019 2:51 am | |
| American Renaissance, a decades-old white nationalist organization, appears to be placing its bets on YouTube when it comes to recruiting a new generation of youth to the white nationalist movement.
A white nationalist organization founded by Jared Taylor in 1990 and designed to resemble a legitimate think tank, American Renaissance eschews the kind of racial slurs traditionally spouted by white nationalists for junk science presented as serious academic scholarship in order to grant their agenda an air of intellectual legitimacy.
Yesterday, American Renaissance announced its 2019 conference lineup. The annual conference is set to take place at the Montgomery Bell Inn and Conference Center in Burns, Tennessee, as it has for the past seven years. The lineup features most prominently a handful of YouTube personalities active in the white nationalist movement. This year’s lineup includes Patrick Casey, Nicholas Fuentes, Faith Goldy, Lana Lokteff, and Ayla Stewart as its headliners, in addition to Taylor and Sam Dickson, who speak at the conference every year.
Leaders in the white nationalist movement have exploited tech platforms and, since early 2015, infiltrated online communities in hopes of recruiting young people to their cause as part of an arduous struggle to recruit and maintain a fresh batch of activists. President Trump’s campaign-trail rhetoric on immigration and nationalism and his status as a frontrunner during the primaries aided the movement’s efforts in ways that were beyond its leaders’ wildest dreams. After the movement assembled at the 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a display of vitriol and violence that resulted in a murder, white nationalists’ recruiting efforts stalled. Soon, the movement’s success online was facing a rapid fracturing.
The “alt-right” movement as it exists in America today manifests on a spectrum ranging from digital propagandists to murderous gangs. The white nationalist movement, on the other hand, essentially exists as a collection of cliques, many of which publicly bicker and rhetorically snipe at each other. The announced YouTube personalities headlining the conference, in addition to American Renaissance as a whole, belong to a sector of the white nationalist movement whose public figures seek to obscure the movement’s bigotry under layers of professional presentation and pseudo-intellectualism.
American Renaissance boasted at last year’s conference that it had experienced some success reaching youth audiences and included a couple of sympathetic YouTube personalities meant to provide examples of that success. This year, it appears that the organization is going all-in on their digital propagandists, filling the keynote lineup almost entirely with YouTube personalities. The move seems to suggest that Taylor and his colleagues at American Renaissance believe that the YouTube platform holds opportunities for bringing the white nationalist ideology to a new generation. One reason for this could be that compared to online spaces like Twitter, which has stepped up content moderation efforts against hate speech, YouTube has been reluctant to ban white nationalists, allowing many of them to use the platform freely and fundraise through use of the platform’s “Super Chat” program.
AmRen’s YouTube Stars
Here’s who will be headlining this year’s American Renaissance conference: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/with-youtuber-line-up-american-renaissance-places-its-bets-on-optics/ |
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