If you’re a white person who resents the work of Black Lives Matter activists, you might first vomit-type, “AllLives Matter!!!1!” somewhere on your Facebook timeline. You might find this doesn’t express your indignation to the degree you want it to, despite some satisfyingly angry rebuttals from your nieces and nephews. That’s when you escalate to “WHITE LIVES MATTER” and before you know it, you’re sharing hyper-racist memes littered with spelling errors, meeting like-minded individuals who also think “blue” is a race, and forming a club that has been officially designated a hate group. That seems to be the story of White Lives Matter, who are finally getting the recognition they crave.
The New York Times reports that the Southern Law Poverty Center, which tracks hate groups in the U.S., has clarified that this white supremacist club is definitely a hate group, if you weren’t sure:
“The White Lives Matter website says their movement is dedicated to the preservation of the white race. That tells you all you need to know,” said Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. “They’re against integration, immigration. This is standard white supremacist stuff.”
Blah blah, the usual. White Lives Matter members also think immigration and intermarriage between different races and white people (they absolutely differentiate between white Christian and Jews) is causing a white genocide. That for sure sounds like a very hateful belief! But how do you pin a meme upon the sand?
Beirich says the SLPC is focusing on a branch in Nashville that is led by Rebecca Barnette. Barnette is also a member of the Aryan Strikeforce and the National Socialist Movement, which are skinhead and neo-Nazi groups, respectively. Barnette apparently has an active social life on Russia’s answer to Facebook, Vk.com, which is more lenient about hate speech staying up. According to the NYT, while Barnette didn’t respond to comment, she did post angry diatribes about White Lives Matter being labeled “domestic terrorists,” and wrote, “We do not live by the code of the nonwhites…Our forefathers built the nation that is being allowed to be destroyed,” and “I wish Hitler were here alive and well today.”
Sure sounds like it’s a hate group.
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