White nationalists get religion: On the far-right fringe, Catholics and racists forge a movement

[Nevilledog]

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Kathryn Joyce
@kathrynajoyce
The man recorded in two viral videos Sunday—both praying & taunting pro-choice protesters “Your body is mine”—represents a larger effort to unite right-wing Catholics w/ the far-right white nationalist “groyper” movement. Pt 1 of @BenLorber8's & my report:

salon.com
White nationalists get religion: On the far-right fringe, Catholics and racists forge a movement
Nick Fuentes' racist "groyper" movement is building a coalition with far-right Catholics. They have a plan
5:06 AM · May 12, 2022

https://www.salon.com/2022/05/12/nationalists-get-religion-on-the-far-right-fringe-catholics-and-forge-a-movement/

Last Sunday, as pro-choice supporters reacted to the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that will likely overturn Roe v. Wade, a series of videos shot in lower Manhattan went viral. In one, a group of young men stood before an arched wooden doorway at the Basilica of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, reciting the Rosary while protesters demonstrated outside the church gates. In their center was a young man wearing an America First hat and an FDNY fleece, closing his eyes as he prayed. By that afternoon, the video had been shared on social media by far-right Republican Reps. Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who praised the men as "heroes" "defending their churches against the abortionist horde."

In two other videos taken the same day at the same location, the man in the America First hat heckled protesters, shouting from the church steps, "I am the people. The people have decided, the court has decided. You lose. You have no choice. Not your body, your choice. Your body is mine and you're having my baby."

The man was not, as the New York City Fire Department quickly pointed out, a firefighter. Nor was he merely a devout Catholic. Rather, he was a right-wing activist affiliated with white nationalist wunderkind Nick Fuentes' gleefully racist and antisemitic America First/"groyper" movement, which at its third annual America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) this February drew widespread condemnation for its glorification of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Fuentes' praise of Hitler and the call by one speaker, a state senator from Arizona, to build "gallows" to hang political enemies.

On a popular groyper livestream show Sunday night, host and movement leader Dalton Clodfelter said he recognized the man in the videos and called him to join the show. As journalist and Western States Center senior fellow Nick Martin reported, Clodfelter said the man had made "a really bold statement today and it's going to be heard by a lot of people." The man claimed that many of the other praying men who assembled that afternoon were also groypers, described the demonstrators he'd been heckling as "demonic creatures" and "animals" and said that one Black protester should be "enslaved" or "shot." "Whatever church they're going to attack next," he pledged, "we'll be there, and we'll crush them."

*snip*

[nycbos]

1. Bloody Catholics, filling up the world with bloody people, they can't afford to bloody feed.

[pnwmom]

5. Overall Catholics are more progressive than American protestants,

including more likely to use birth control and to support abortion.

[Historic NY]

2. Milo former Bannon house boy isn't an American citizen

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[BlueIdaho]

4. ChristoFascists are the scum of the earth

And they are taking all those Bible bangers that remain silent straight to hell with them.

[Cerridwen]

6. "The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement's Links to White Supremacists"

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/anti-abortion-white-supremacy/

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The anti-abortion movement in the United States has long been complicit with white supremacy. In recent decades, the movement mainstream has been careful to protect its public image by distancing itself from overt white nationalists in its ranks. Last year, anti-abortion leader Kristen Hatten was ousted from her position as vice president of the anti-choice group New Wave Feminists after identifying as an “ethnonationalist” and sharing white supremacist alt-right content.

-snip-

Militant anti-abortion and explicit white nationalist groups came together prominently in the 1990s when a wing of the anti-abortion movement, frustrated with a lack of legislative progress, took on a more violent character fed by relationships with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

-snip-

White supremacists were already participants in the anti-abortion cause, as Loretta Ross wrote in the 1990s. In 1985, the KKK began creating wanted posters listing personal information for abortion providers (doxing before the Internet age). Randall Terry, founder of the anti-choice group Operation Rescue, and John Burt, regional director of the anti-abortion group Rescue America in the 1990s, adopted this tactic in the 1990s. Terry’s first wanted poster targeted Dr. David Gunn, who was murdered in 1993 in Pensacola, Florida. Gunn’s successor, Dr. John Britton, targeted by a Rescue America wanted poser, was killed in 1994.

The Florida-based KKK organized a rally in support of Dr. Britton’s killer, Paul Hill, and Tom Metzger, founder of the racist group White Aryan Resistance (WAR), condoned the killing if it “protected Aryan women and children.” Burt himself was a Florida Klansman prior to becoming Christian and an associate of both killers. “Fundamentalist Christians and those people [the Klan] are pretty close, scary close, fighting for God and country,” Burt told The New York Times in 1994. “Some day we may all be in the trenches together in the fight against the slaughter of unborn children.” Members of the Portland-based skinhead group American Front regularly joined Operation Rescue to protest abortion clinics. Tim Bishop, a representative of the white nationalist Aryan Nations, said, “Lots of our people join [the anti-abortion movement]…. It’s part of our Holy War for the pure Aryan race.”

-snip to much more at link posted above-

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[Wounded Bear]

8. Frankly, I consider myself a part of that "abortionist horde"...