Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: alt-right

May 21, 2018

The Milo Story, Nazi Prevention, and A Simple Hope – by David Lillie of Dreamkeepers

by Patch O'Furr

Welcome to David Lillie, artist of Dreamkeepers, a comic with a connection to here via Fred Patten’s reviews. A fantasy comic doesn’t need to tie to current events, but that changes when it embraces controversy.

Dreamkeepers did that by hitching their marketing to Milo Yiannopoulos in 2016, buying an ad on his show and giving him a fan art fursona. Milo was known as a demagogic celebrity who rose with Gamergate and the alt-right, and fell by condoning pedophilia. He addressed furries by bashing them on Breitbart, as I mentioned in this article about looking at conservatives before Trump was elected. But the topic here isn’t really Milo, it’s the things he rode in on, and they need to be clearly defined.

Regular readers will be familiar with reactionary groups aligned with the alt-right, like Altfurry. An honest look will find them inseparable from racism. Despite their claims to be defenders of free speech, I think they aren’t motivated by limitations being imposed on freedom, but the opposite; they’re reacting to society getting too free for the targets of their hate, who they consider lesser humans. Their leaders want unaccountability for it, and many of their collaborators simply don’t understand the greater context, or don’t care as long as they personally come out ahead.

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March 21, 2018

Discord bans Altfurry hate speech – see what they’re hiding with a leaked organizer phone call.

by Patch O'Furr

(Content warning: antisemitic hate)

Altfurry and the Furry Raiders are toxic trolls on the fringes of fandom. These tiny groups claim to be furries, but they align with alt-right hate groups in the larger culture. Their harassment of a subculture comes disguised with bad-faith claims to support “freedom” and oppose “SJW’s.” Here’s a look behind the false front and a reminder that their hate is like oil and water to this community.

Racist hostility can’t coexist with a group full of queer nerds that’s based on tolerance and creativity. This makes altfurries uncomfortable about their alt-right associations, especially when they try to recruit – making them do two-faced, propagandistic denials that they’re “diverse” and not actually hateful. The denials are contradicted by how they look, talk, and act.

The denials are also contradicted by ban after ban for abuse on the platforms that they use for organizing. From early 2017 to February 2018, altfurries relied on Discord servers that hid behind layers of secrecy. Then on February 28, Discord kicked them out along with numerous other alt-right servers. I’ve been in contact with company reps about their investigation. What they found was as extreme as groups being responsible for murders – but Altfurry and the Furry Raiders weren’t let off the hook for the coordinated bans. They were all violating terms of service against hate.

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March 12, 2018

How I Ended Up in the Alt-Lite, and How I Got Out

by Patch O'Furr

From wikipedia:

The alt-right, or alternative right, is a loosely-connected grouping of white supremacists, neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, and other far-right fringe hate groups.

The “alt-lite” is frequently contrasted with and compared to the political alt-right, with which it shares some features, but the alt-lite remains distinct from the alt-right in that it claims to reject identity politics—including the white nationalism and racialism of the alt-right—though they share other key features and beliefs.

Learn more from the Anti-Defamation League – From Alt Right to Alt Lite: Naming the Hate.

Below is a guest story sent in by an unnamed furry, shared for awareness about how hate groups gain influence in a subculture like furry fandom.

– Patch

A springboard into the alt-right.

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March 9, 2018

Ever hear that Altfurries are just trolls? A real Nazi leader is taking them seriously.

by Summercat

Founder of Neo-nazi website The Daily Stormer praises Nazifurs and Altfurs as good examples for his wider movement.

One defense of Nazifurs I’ve heard over the years is that they’re just adopting fascist fashion to get a rise out of you, or even that they’re mocking real Nazis. This doesn’t hold up well to me, as ones I knew in 2005 who said they were joking are mostly taking their act seriously now.

Something about staring into the void, I guess. Or maybe I was a shitty judge of character when I spent time with them as a naive 20 year old? It could be a bit of both. Friends of mine have looked on former mutuals with horror when I’ve pointed out how far some have gone.

But people still claim that we’re being ridiculous if we take this seriously. They say that real Nazis could never be – or accept – Furries.

That denialism gets weaker and weaker when real Nazis look at nazifurs and love what they see.

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November 29, 2017

How low can they go? Altfurry is grooming kids to retaliate against critics.

by Patch O'Furr

Last week was a very bad week to be a nazi furry. (Every week is bad for that, but this one was exceptional). Call them the Incel ISIS, or just a bunch of trolls, but the week kept bringing reminders that the furry fandom is past the limit of tolerance for their hate. There was a wave of critical attention:

  • Newsweek published a deep look at the racist alt-right origins of alt-furry.
  • Dogpatch Press posted an expose by a mole inside the Furry Raiders, and their hate group activity led former members to repudiate it.
  • @Deotasdevil posted an essay about neo-nazis recruiting in nerd groups. It reached far outside of fandom, including 41,000 watchers of Sonicfox5000.
  • More evidence was found in a video from Casey Hoerth/”Len Gilbert”, an altfurry recruiter/bottom-feeder. He soon regretted his words in the video and tried to bury it with a whack-a-mole game of DMCA claims. His rare moment of candor was too revealing about their private narrative.

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November 22, 2017

What I learned from lurking the Furry Raiders chat – guest post by Aristide

by Patch O'Furr

Update: Foxler, founder of the Furry Raiders, was arrested for sex offenses in April 2019.

What I learned from lurking the Furry Raiders chat

Hi, I’m Aristide, and I’m a narc. For the past several months, I’ve had a sockpuppet account in the Furry Raiders Telegram, Skype, and Discord groups and periodically leaked screenshots of them to @edgedestroys. I chose Edge in order to protect the credibility of my sockpuppet account, and because I work in a sensitive workplace and worry about being doxxed. Most speculation about the Raiders – that they’re Nazis, they’re Alt-Right, they’re losers – is generally correct. I want to provide a better picture of what we, as a community, are dealing with.

Same Losers, New Politics

The general population of the Raiders community is a combination of old-school 4Chan racists, conspiracy theorists, new wave white supremacists, and impressionable but misled minors. Racist memes from a long-forgotten era of /b/ populate the chat in equal measure to WorldNetDaily or YourNewsWire links. Several dozen in the chat subscribe to the Daily Stormer and similar neo-Nazi websites, while a refrain against “fake news” rings against any news source that is not part of the alt-right media ecosystem. Lost in this mix are impressionable minors, 13 to 17 year old kids that found their way to the Raiders one way or another. Some of them joined because they hated SJWs – (the GamerGate to Alt-Right pipeline is well documented) – others were actively recruited by Foxler, Kody, and other de-facto leaders in the Raiders.

The first commenter left the group with a statement at bottom of article.

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September 1, 2017

Charlottesville marcher linked to furry fandom and neo-nazi organizing.

by Patch O'Furr

Here’s a followup to previous coverage of the tiny alt-right fringe of furry fandom (Altfurry).  See: 1) Altfurry supports neo-nazi violence, with member Nathan Gate on camera in Charlottesville. And 2) Furries resist hate, Altfurry Discord logs go public, Casey Hoerth removed by employers. Hate isn’t being welcomed, and this is the third furry name in a headline about it here.

UPDATE AND STATEMENT 3/20/18:

The article subject, Andrew, passed away on 3/9/18. The contents have been removed and archived at this link.

This article uncovered very sensitive information that added to coverage about him in mainstream media. This was the original source to identify him in a video of actively participating in a violent neo-nazi march.

After September 2017, Andrew appeared to want to escape public exposure. He made efforts to claim he had a change of heart or was a victim himself. That wasn’t supported with evidence of insincerity and continuing negative behavior (both published and confidential).

For that reason the archive link is provided. It’s a very serious issue for a news source to remove published records. There needs to be public discussion about hate groups and their deadly consequences, without coverup or historical revisionism. It’s sad that such groups attract people who want belonging, but an adult’s decisions are their own. All readers are asked to leave family and friends of Andrew alone and allow them privacy.

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August 23, 2017

Furries resist hate, Altfurry Discord logs go public, Casey Hoerth removed by employers.

by Patch O'Furr

Last week, Dogpatch Press linked the alt-right of furry fandom with a violent neo-nazi rally in Charlottesville. It came on a wave of fandom news, synched with the even bigger one in the mainstream.  There’s too much for one update (more is coming.)

Open neo-nazi marching led to nationwide pushback.  It included hate groups being kicked off of many services, from Paypal to Discord. The Altfurries saw it coming in their own Discord group, and soon their group was gone. (Keep in mind that’s not a government act, it’s a company choosing to refuse service.)

That was a signal for inside leaks to be exposed.  I had access to their secret chats for months but couldn’t talk about it before.  Months of altfurry private communications are now here for anyone to see; what we’ve been saying all along wasn’t exaggeration.  Altfurry really does represent neo-nazi activism and recruiting they are trying to push into the fandom. It’s a huge blow to their pretense of just having different opinions.  The dust will be settling for a long time.

Altfurrydiscord logs get viral sharing and media coverage.

Flayrah covered some of the happenings: ‘Alt-Furry’ suffers blowback after Alt-Right rally leads to death of citizen.

Newsweek interviewed some involved people including Deo, and from the altfurries, Casey Hoerth and Nathan Gate. The journalist is a freelancer who did a previous piece on the alt-right, whose previous experience was writing for Heat Street (a conservative site that recently shut down). I spoke to his editor about reporting with false equivalency. And I spoke to another media source for coverage that isn’t open to talk about yet. Articles are forthcoming. (Update: Newsweek published theirs.)

Work begins for sorting info.

Confidential volunteers are tracing connections and identities in the altfurry logs. A few sample contents include:

“Echoes” ((())) is a code used to target jews for hate.

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August 14, 2017

Altfurry supports neo-nazi violence, with member Nathan Gate on camera in Charlottesville.

by Patch O'Furr

Altfurry is the term used by a tiny fringe of hateful bigots in the furry fandom.  (It’s accurate to replace “alt” with “anti”, as you can see below).  Last week they encouraged members to attend the “Unite the Right” rally where neo-nazis attacked and killed protesters. (archive)

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April 19, 2017

A Brief History of Cartoon Animals Punching Nazis

by Arrkay

Dogpatch Press welcomes Arrkay of furry channel Culturally F’d.

Nazi-panic got you down? It seems these days everywhere you look there seems to be some sour racists ruining someone’s day. Don’t worry, we’re here to help.

Working on Culturally F’d gives me a great outlet to explore anthropomorphic animals throughout history and media. So after the public twitter discussions about whether or not it’s ok to punch nazis, I recalled some historical examples that helped. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, there was a huge push in propaganda on all fronts. They encouraged spending money on war-bonds, saving fats and scrap metals, starting community “victory” gardens, empowering a new female workforce, perpetuating false-optimism of a short war, warning against spies listening in, and attempting to shape public opinion and spark a sense of national identity. The military’s of the world commissioned animators to help influence public opinion during a time when Nazi Germany was beginning it’s invasions, and it was becoming clear to more and more governments that the Axis powers were not slowing down or stopping.

Propaganda like these were created to help sway public opinion, and to paint a caricature of the enemies. This was at times, incredibly offensive and racist, and it’s important we don’t forget that and that we don’t repeat it again.

We’re going to start with Animated Shorts, which were created to precede or follow newsreels of current events, often part of a pre-show for a larger, longer feature presentation in the movie theatre.

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