One key factor drives White nationalism — and it’s probably not what you think: expert

Stephan: 

Here is an insight into one of the major dynamics driving White Nationalism. White men so unattractive in their attitudes and behavior that they can’t find a woman willing to have sex with them. The Incel movement and White Nationalism have merged, and become a major part of the MAGAt Party that seeks to put rapist and felon Trump back into office. And the polls say they are going to succeed unless some very significant changes occur and produce a majority of American voters who want to preserve democracy and treat women as equals.

“Aryan Nations (AN) was once a powerful organizing force for white supremacists that cultivated a wide spectrum of racist and anti-Semitic ideas,” according to the SPLC. Credit: SPLC

Lonely, sexless straight men have become a larger force in the White nationalist movement.

That’s according to Ellee Reeve, author of the book “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.”

Reeve talked with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday to discuss her findings, saying straight men who struggle to find a romantic partner can be drawn to alt-right communities.

“That’s a big entryway into this,” she said. “A big entry point is, ‘Why won’t women be with me?’”

The so-called “new white nationalist movement” is highly influenced by “incel” culture, she said, referring to men who are involuntarily celibate.

“It means that feminism has doomed them to be virgins forever because in the natural order of things, less attractive women would marry them,” said Reeve. […]

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‘I was handed to a complete stranger’: the survivors fighting to end child marriage in 37 US states — and the people who want to keep it legal

Stephan: 

Child marriage, which really means young girl marriage, even barely pubescent girls, is an issue that, in my view is not getting anywhere near the attention it should be getting. Look at the number of such marriages in the U.S. As this article explains, this practice is supported by a very strange consortium who have some very ill-conceived ideas why it should be legal. It shouldn’t be.

Nine-year-old Eunice Winstead Johns and her husband, Charlie Johns, 22, at their home in Sneedville, Tennessee, in 1937. Credit: AP

Courtney Kosnik was 16 when she met the man who would become her husband in a Detroit coffee shop. She thought she’d met her savior. She was living in poverty, under the care of an alcoholic mother who struggled to hold down jobs. He promised her stability. Two months later, he proposed.

No one in Kosnik’s life seemed bothered by the fact that the man was 28, more than a decade older than his bride-to-be, and he had a plan to get around her status as a legal minor: They just needed her mother’s permission to wed, and if she didn’t give it, they could always drive down to Ohio, where the rules around marriage were less strict.

Kosnik’s mother didn’t need much convincing. The man seemed polished and friendly, and he said that he could provide a “better moral upbringing” for her daughter. “Isn’t it crazy that someone wanted to give their wife a ‘moral upbringing’?” Kosnik, now 47, said. “I […]

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‘Yacht trip to Russia’: Senators publish list of Clarence Thomas’ gifts from benefactors

Stephan: 

Clarence Thomas is the most corrupt Justice of the Supreme Court in two centuries. And yet there he sits, untouched and held to no accountability for his corruption, one of the six christofacists who are taking our democracy apart and affecting the lives of over 300 million Americans in a negative way.

Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. Credit: Drew Angerer / Getty

Two Senate Democrats have published a list of roughly three dozen lavish gifts Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas received from right-wing billionaires during his time on the Court.

On the eve of the Independence Day holiday, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Thomas for “possible violations of ethics and tax laws” in his “repeated and willful omissions” of gifts from wealthy benefactors.

“The scale of the potential ethics violations by Justice Thomas, and the willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws, exceeds the conduct of other government officials investigated by the Department of Justice for similar violations,” Whitehouse and Wyden wrote. “The breadth of the omissions uncovered to date, and the serious possibility of additional tax fraud and false statement violations by Justice Thomas and […]

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How the IRS went soft on billionaires and corporate tax cheats

Stephan: 

Yet another story about the vast corruption of the U.S. government, this story one about how the rich and big corporations get special treatment from the IRS. What this country needs is a revolution. It is a disgusting tale of the real facts. The revolution we need is not the kind criminal Trump and the MAGAts have in mind. We need a revolution in which all government policies and agency actions have the fostering of wellbeing as their first priority. We aren’t going to get it with this election even if Biden wins, but over the next four years if enough of us are committed to it, and work to make it clear that is what we want perhaps in the 2028 election a new generation of leadership may make it happen.

The Internal Revenue Service building in Washington, D.C. Credit: Tada Images / Shutterstock

Michael Welu worked at the IRS for decades as a specialist in helping agents identify and investigate possible tax crimes. In an agency known for offices working in their own silos, Welu had the rare ability to move between divisions, dissecting and learning each office’s particular customs and procedures. But that experience had its own consequence for Welu: Seeing disparities in how the separate divisions treated different tiers of taxpayers left him exasperated and helped drive him into early retirement.

For more than 30 years, Welu watched the agency struggle with budget cuts and dwindling staff. What troubled Welu, he says, went deeper than just resource constraints.

During his time at the IRS, he says, upper management in the division tasked with auditing large corporations and ultrawealthy people — the Large Business and International Division — was quick to dismiss any suggestion that a powerful taxpayer may have committed […]

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The future is all bot vs. bot

Stephan: 

The more I learn about AI the more it seems to me to be a very mixed bag. For one thing, I think bots may be one of the reasons SR gets so many hacks. What really concerns me is the amount of misinformation being spewed out by bots that influence human perceptions and thinking. I believe it is affecting governments all over the world, particularly democracies because they are based on human consensus.

Illustration by: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios

A new kind of turf war is breaking out on the web, with AI bots battling other AI bots to seize or defend stockpiles of the AI era’s most valuable commodity: data.

The big picture: AI makers hungry for more data to train their language models are grabbing everything they can, while information owners are increasingly fighting fire with fire by turning to AI-powered tools to protect their intellectual property.

Driving the news: Cloudflare, the infrastructure and security firm used by 1 in 5 websites, introduced a new service last week that protects clients’ content from poaching by data-harvesting bots.

  • “We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots,” Cloudflare said in a blog post.

Catch up quick: Since the ’90s, websites have used a simple file on their sites —called “robots.txt” — […]

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