#alt is uglier now

[my-personal-enigma]

I literally fucked alts shit up

[sciderman]

Now that we are remembering mercenary Spiderman in the alternate timeline, I do have some questions.

1) Even Wade knew that their relationship would be SOOOO TOXIC AND DOOMED TO FAIL, my horny ass need to ask this. Would the sex would be worse with the morally dark Peter?, cause I think he would be a super selfish lover (I don't do this question in the askblog, cause I might add more emotional turmoil into poor Wade.)

2) is that Peter gonna be ok in his lonely timeline?, or is something that we better not to worry about.

3) this is not a question, but I think it is fun to add. I do remember when after Peter died in Civil War, Wade shows two intersecting factors about him. (Although I might be wrong in some

A) Although Peter is always angry and bitter, Wade is scarier, when he is actually angry.

B) While Peter is a creator and protector (cause he's is a genius scientist super hero), it seems Wade is a man that gets things done, he is actually really good at fixing stuff (not for the greater good and more for his own and loved ones gains). Yeah he kinda messed up the time stream, but no one's seems brothered about it., both of them bring the best of each other even though it is not perfect is cute and healthy.

C) Wade has healed a lot, he recognized unhealthy behaviours from himself and others ( one reason he denied edgy hot Peter), and choose the healthiest option

D) Wade is so hot

I really loved what you gift us with these two boys

hooh man, hooh man. okay. 1) good question! there is many a fic for that. i didn't write anything, but xenospider on AO3 put the time in. 9319 shades of grey - tl;dr - you're right. alt!peter is selfish in bed. selfish in life. selfish in just about everything. the opposite of the peter we know and love. that's not to say the sex is worse - this peter is more experienced - but all of the freak that lives in nasty, dirty, twisted peter also lives within our timid wallflower too. one just has to unlock it. similarly, nasty, dirty, twisted peter also has the same generous, romantic heart that beats under that heartless facade. one just has to unlock it. so after a warming-up period, you'll find that they're both equally good lovers. they're both peter parker, after all.

2) this timeline doesn't exist no mo! rest assured - in this universe, it's not the whole - two universes existing concurrently, no sir. this peter is our peter. they aren't two separate peters who can meet in the multiverse, no sir. the only way wade can visit that peter again is if he alters history again. this peter is fortunately not lonely. he's head-over-heels! in love with his boyfriend who has thighs like a tree, and he has a job at the bugle, and has never made a kill, (as far as we know).

3) to your point B – deadpool's kind of the embodiment of second chances, to me. he's just – that's his real mutant ability. always, somehow, managing to get a second chance. even if he thinks he doesn't deserve it - he always makes it happen. that's his origin - and he just keeps finding a way, over and over. to your point C - really, i don't know if any option is ever healthy for one wade wilson but - his decision to decline edgy hot peter was less about what's good for him and more about what's good for the world. the world is uglier without a hero like spider-man to make it brighter. he could stay with this peter and make a lot of freaky sex and win over his heart all over again - he did it once, he can do it twice - but - he didn't pick the selfish option. he didn't indulge - because he knows the world is better with heroes in it. he knows it isn't right.

for once, this was a decision wade didn't make for him. he made it for the world. he did it so the world would be a better place. he's a selfless hero. kisses him.

and to point d, you're so right. kissing him again.

thank you!!

[influenzalake]

Damian x Reader- Letter To You part 1

Letter to you part 1  ( Alt Title: Broken Inner Thoughts)

damian spies on his partner while he is off on a mission, reader finds out and says enough is enough. 

- - - 

*reader POV*

it was like your bones had been remade out of cement. you've had your rough patches before but you could feel this one would be different. Did he not trust you? Had he no faith in your relationship? How could you look at him the same knowing this distrust behind every gesture? How eyes don't look at you in love, they look at you in suspicion. 

this mission was supposed to take 3 days to a week, but these long term absences don't phase you anymore. You decided to take some time off for yourself. A self-care spa day to let go of the last few weeks. No soap or salt will ever get this feeling off your skin. 

He set up multiple microphones and cameras while he was away. In your OWN HOME. They were "generously" placed, as he put it. Only cameras in common areas, only microphones in sensitive areas. 

How did you find out? Well, that story is uglier than you would like to admit. 

You spent this time with others, in person and not. You spent this time enjoying yourself, openly and shamelessly. That, apparently, was enough to make Damian think you were having an affair. Yes, affair. The exact word Damian used to describe anything that happened while he was away. 

you noticed when the air all around was like swimming in syrup. you believed it would pass and that it was due to the stress taken on from the mission. How naive you were. 

The tension broke eventually and it exploded like a balloon full of locusts. Infecting and infesting the entire room. Anything you had before was lost in that moment. 

Damian accused you of cheating, having an "affair" while he was gone. You renounced this accusation and he referenced a few specific dates and their associated times. All of those which you spent, alone. 

You were an adult, of course.

The truth of the situation could do nothing to convince Damian. He had never seen your personal stash of course, but at this point it was just petty. You have nothing to prove! You promised yourself and your future to this man and he broke that promise by believing you could be swayed the minute he turned his back. 

it was beyond heartbreaking. it was stupid. you could not believed he would allow something so unfounded and cruel to between you two. 

This all seemed so familiar, yet x10 times worse than the (many) last times. So sickeningly familiar.

so here you are now. sulking in your room privacy violating and relationship volatile. 

And for the first time you refuse to go back.

[adelle-ein]

mean feh thoughts

lucina always gets such lame and ugly alts in feh....(except maybe valentine's). and now they've stolen her pants. people like "but it's great knight!" great knight is ugly. so what.

it's genuinely funny to me that the plot of the last book hinged on "all of these identical women are the same character except one who is the clone-daughter of that character" because like. yoshiku is so fucking bad at art that you can't even tell. all the fairies look exactly like that too. those cartoonishly hourglass figures and bland empty faces. and guillveig's awful little baby hands lol just such a hideous book

that being said i'm glad to have kozaki back but why are the only options him vs just terrible terrible art and designs. why can't mayo or someone do a book

and these designs are still quite ugly. all feh designs have trended on the uglier side at best. it's just not AS bad as last book and at least the art is skillfully done even if the outfits are just awful

can't wait for one of the big tiddy oc ladies we barely know to win cyl again. seriously i'm expecting freyja to get UP there. i'm so tired of people insisting gullveig won bc of any other reason when like she'd only appeared briefly and had no character or backstory yet??? but yeah cyl is a wash all the options suck at this point. brave avatars and other boring fan favorites for the boys, brave Fanservice Ladies for the girls til the end of time or until a new game i guess. idk if engage can sweep but even if it does the frontrunners are the brodian princes, ivy, alears, and yunaka which. bleh

it is very funny how for the last solid month the feh subreddit has been "male ocs where are they why do they die so much IS are misandrists waaaa" interspersed with gullveig and co hornyposting. the self awareness is just gone lol

as usual the rewards are shit especially if you don't want whoever the freebie is

anyway yeah idk these new book celebrations haven't been any fun since...3? i liked 4 too only bc i got fairy sprite assets to play with but that's about it. ultimately i know a lot of people loooove the feh ocs and stories but i'm one of the ones who's just started hitting skip constantly so i don't have to see uwu make babies with me summoner anymore. the game is just so...tired at this point. i wish they'd ever do something genuinely fun again.

[tothedarkdarkseas]

Since you like Will Wood, how about "Vampire Culture" as a working-class or suburban vampire Stu song since it uses vampires as a class metaphor? Some lines are Murdoc, but I think that makes it stronger because Murdoc would be participating in the "vampire culture" by serving as Stu's Renfield. (I'm no Will Wood expert; I just stumbled upon this song.)

I continuously wanted to return to this but kept getting sidetracked; and as of this evening, Will Wood's announced that after his upcoming album he'll be going in an indefinite hiatus. I really do seem to have the death-touch for everything I like. (Ask me how many of my favorite podcasts are defunct or have had at least one host leave!) So I'd better answer it now, and grieve later!

This song has so many alt titles that I genuinely blanked out on which one you were referring to at first, haha. I notice now that I default to thinking of it as Greetings From Mary Bell Township. I do quite enjoy it though! As with all Will Wood songs, at least on The Normal Album, it's difficult to ascribe a hyperspecific character meaning to the entire track as they are so lyrically dense, cover so much ground, break from the schema for quips and have their own hyperspecific visions-- that said, there are definitely verses of this that I can absolutely see a warped reflection of Stu (and Murdoc) in! Personal picks would be:

Home is where the heart is You ain’t homeless, but you’re heartless It’s the safest on the market But you still gotta watch where you park it So give me your half-life crisis I can tell that you know where paradise is Where parasites don’t care what your blood type is Only pheromones and serotonin decide

It’s only culture, it’s only culture It’s only ah, ah, ah- Culture’s not your friend Hey, fuck your culture, I ain’t got no culture It’s only culture, and it's more afraid of you than you are of it Go on, drink that

Vampirism as a class metaphor is the kind of thing early Gorillaz could've taken a swing at, really; there's definitely a parallel to the "zombies and celebrity/pop culture" theming they ultimately went with, and both would be beyond welcome to explore in the future. (With the current mapping it's not necessarily on the course, I recognize, but... imagine a Gorillaz comic with original Hewlett vampire designs and iconic underclass British backdrops. What a treat!) Special mention on the Murdocian side of things goes to the bit about "culture" being a hungry fire and "culture" teaching one to torture housecats, which harkens to the uglier, perhaps self-fabricated writing for Murdoc's misspent youth.

Thanks for mentioning it! I do love this song, and it can be a fun challenge to apply the fandom lens onto less intuitive and yielding sorts of songs.

[breezeinmonochromenight]

"You feed off other people?" You talk about your skin care but you probably look worse than Steve Bannon's inflamed asshole, you ugly disgusting cunt. I hope you get shot in the street, or a prick you start dating abuses the shit out of you.

I do! (; Your anger makes me feel so...m o t i v a t e d.It’s delicious.

Oh hunny buns, you try so hard but fail so spectacularly. Please hire a writer, your digs are legitimately so silly that I feel bad for you. I am assuming you just pick your fav alt-right buzzwords each day + a few expletives that stopped actually being insulting a decade ago. You have my pity.Oh, yeah! I actually come in several variations, even a holiday red and autumn brunette. I’d love to see what you look like - not that it matters though. With an ugly mind and an even uglier heart, an ugly appearance is inevitable.

Now show ur tits or delete ur shit. 💖

[desertwhisperings]

The Reformer Prince

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has long held an unenviable record on human rights. Its young Crown Prince, ruthless, zealous and careless, invites further crisis and controversy to this country. Mohammad bin Salman, like the Bashar al Assad of the early 2000’s, has won many friends and supporters in the West with his talk of reform and moderation. His carefully manufactured soundbites have made headlines across London, Paris and Washington, earning praise and plaudits from pundits and politicians alike. The fresh-faced prince has wined and dined his way through the elite circles of Europe and America, drawing investments and support for his various pet projects in the kingdom, yet beneath the glamour and youthful smile is a far uglier reality.

The disappearance, and likely murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist and well known critic of bin Salman, is the latest in an escalating series of actions undertaken by an increasingly despotic regime in Riyadh. Appointed Crown Prince in June 2017, bin Salman is now widely recognised as the defacto ruler in Saudi Arabia, even as his ailing father clings to the throne. The prince has shown himself to be a reckless warmonger, having launched a devastating arial campaign in Yemen, months after he was appointed Defence Minister in 2015. The Saudi Coalition campaign in Yemen has led to the deaths of thousands of civilians and bought untold suffering and hardship to the millions that remain trapped in the country. His intolerance of criticism, and callous purging of rivals within the royal family, have allowed him to strengthen his grip over the kingdom. Every action he has taken has proven more risky and escalatory than the last, with a largely unilateral and bloody intervention in Yemen, the harsh blockade and planned invasion of Qatar, the bizarre kidnapping of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, the mass illegal detention of dozens of relatives and business leaders in the kingdom last year, crackdowns on women’s and human rights activists, dismissals and arrests of clerics who oppose the prince’s reform agenda, and now finally to the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi in the Istanbul consulate; who knows what the young authoritarian will do next.

Pro-Saudi commentators have sought to portray Khashoggi as a dangerous Islamist, or a traitorous U.S asset (two claims which seem fairly mutually exclusive, at least for those of us who don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theories floating around alt-right spaces online), yet the journalist has largely spent his career encouraging minor reforms in the Kingdom and supporting efforts for greater accountability in the region, until even that became too much and he was chased out of the country early last year. Targeting a figure as well known, respected and connected as Khashoggi exposes the immense arrogance of bin Salman, and the gross and vicious nature of his regime. Khashoggi will leave behind a legacy of moderation, patriotism and bravery, bin Salman’s legacy on the other hand, looks to echo that of the many despised Arab dictators that have preceded him. The Arab Spring caused panic and terror in the palaces of al-watan al-Arabiyya, and we are currently living through the revenge of the tyrants, as any credible opposition to secular dictatorship in the region is gradually extinguished.

[newsmanmdgn]

Today’s Top Stories: April 3, 2020

Coronavirus update:

1,056,077 infected, up from 962,977 yesterday. 55,781 deaths, up from 49,180 yesterday.

Relevant COVID-19 stories:

Coronavirus Vaccine Race Gets Unlikely Partner: Cigarette Makers

Experts tell White House coronavirus can spread through talking or even just breathing

Coronavirus at beaches? Surfers, swimmers should stay away, scientist says

Economy Update:

DJIA is down about 400 in the very low 21k range. More bad news yesterday. Official unemployment rate is up to 4.4 percent.

10 percent is not far off. Economists are predicting as much as 30 percent unemployment, which would surpass the depths we sunk to in the Great Depression.

Relevant Economy stories:

Coronavirus stimulus checks: When to expect up to $1,200, what you need to do, and more

The companies that are pledging not to lay off workers amid the coronavirus unemployment crisis

Politics:

All is quiet on the political front, except for COVID-19 related stories. So let’s go with that.

Some things Trump has said about coronavirus (a timeline from the CBS News):

President Trump says he has always taken the coronavirus very seriously from early on, pushing back at reporters who cite statements he’s made in the recent past dismissing the severity of the virus.

“No, I’ve always viewed it as very serious,” Mr. Trump said on March 16. “There was no difference yesterday from days before. I feel the tone is similar, but some people said it wasn’t.”

January 22, 2020: “We do have a plan”

January 30, 2020: “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five — and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us … that I can assure you.”

February 23, 2020: Situation is “very much under control.”

February 26, 2020: The 15 cases in U.S. “within a couple days is going to be down close to zero.”

February 29, 2020: “Everything is really under control.”

March 6, 2020: “Anybody that wants a test can get a test.”

March 10, 2020: “Just stay calm. It will go away.”

March 24, 2020: Wants country and economy “raring to go by Easter.”

March 24, 2020: “We begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

March 31, 2020: “This is going to be three weeks like we haven’t seen before.”

Does any of that sound like he’s got this “under control?” US death toll is now at 6,786 and cases of infections are at 265,506, highest of any country. Deaths rank #3 and are doubling every few days. We haven’t even peaked here yet.

And wait for the Southern states to be blasted by this. It’s going to get really really ugly (well, way uglier than it is now).

Relevant Politics stories:

A timeline of what Trump has said on coronavirus

Trump sows uncertainty and seeks to cast blame in coronavirus crisis

Navy expected to relieve captain who raised alarm about COVID-19 on ship

Cooking Tip from Alton Brown:

A different way of making rice. Hopefully, tastier, too.

Alton Brown on rice

Offbeat Story of the Day:

I don’t feel like reporting one today. Isn’t the “regular” new offbeat enough? Offbeat Story of the Day will be back on Monday.

…IF we’re still here…

Sponsored by the Drive Thru Jesus Show.

Today’s Top Stories is brought to you by My Daily Grind News.

Subscribe to the MyDailyGrind.news YouTube channel.

The article was originally published here! Today’s Top Stories: April 3, 2020

[stopkingobama]

I Went to Charlottesville During the Protests. Here’s What I Saw.

Photo: CC0

I picked quite a time to go on a weekend trip to Charlottesville.

What was supposed to be a nice getaway with my wife turned into a journey through the eye of a national media storm.

On Saturday, clashes between “Unite the Right” protestors and “anti-fascist” counterprotesters at the foot of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue—which the City Council had voted to remove from a local park—turned violent.

One woman was killed when an Ohio man allegedly associated with the white nationalist marchers rammed his car through a wave of people. He has been charged with second-degree murder.

The clash between Nazis and leftists in the streets was an ugly and surreal scene one would associate with 1930s Germany, not a sleepy American town in the heart of central Virginia.

A City, and Country, in Shock

The attitude of people around Charlottesville—the silent majority—deserves to be noted. They were almost universally upset, blindsided, and resentful that these groups showed up in their community to drag down its reputation and fight their ideological proxy wars.

Albemarle County, which includes Charlottesville and a few other small towns, is deeply blue in its most populated centers around the University of Virginia and dark red on the outskirts. It’s politically purple. Yet everywhere I went, the attitude toward the protests was similar.

As a thunderstorm rolled in on Saturday evening, a waitress at a restaurant I ate at said, “Let’s hope this washes the day away.”

A local gas station attendant told my wife: “These people from out of town, Nazis, [Black Lives Matter], they’re all hate groups to me.”

In the aftermath of the events, most townsfolk walking in the Charlottesville downtown area appeared stunned and shaken. The overall feeling in the area was resentment—certainly not sympathy for any of the groups involved.

It would be a mistake to blow the events in Charlottesville too far out of proportion by linking either side to a mainstream political movement. In the grand scheme of things, it was a small-scale clash between groups who clearly represent an extreme minority in this country.

Even calling the gathering of a couple hundred people a “movement” would be a stretch. The overwhelming media attention given to these fascist, racist groups even before violence took place served as a conduit for the views of this handful of people.

The media’s role in blowing this event out of proportion is lamentable and predictable, but it doesn’t excuse what took place.

What the event does demonstrate is the looming danger of identity politics run amok. This is what is in store if we are consumed by the tribal politics that have destroyed so many other countries.

In June, I wrote about why I think politically incorrect historical monuments—even Confederate ones like the Lee statue in Charlottesville—should stay.

>>> Why Cities Shouldn’t Take Down Confederate Statues

At the time I wrote:

In our iconoclastic efforts to erase the past, we rob ourselves of knowing the men who forged our national identity, and the events that made us who we are. This nation, of almost incomprehensible wealth, power, and prosperity, was created by the decisions of men like Lincoln—and Lee, too.

The zealous march to obliterate America’s past, even parts we dislike, will leave us a diminished civilization.

Though many have now jumped to conclude that the events in Charlottesville show the need to give in to the desire of people to tear down statues, this will only serve to strengthen and embolden the radicals—on both sides—to step up their efforts to plunge the nation into constant social unrest and civil war.

Identity Over Individuals

In a sense, the “alt-right” and leftist agitators want the same thing. They both seek to redefine the battle over American history in racial and tribal terms in direct opposition to the most basic ideas of our national existence.

Such was the case in the unsightly scene in front of Charlottesville’s Lee statue.

The real individuals whom these statues represent simply ceased to matter.

It was telling that a counterprotest erupted in Washington, D.C., in front of the Albert Pike memorial. Pike had been a Confederate general, but the memorial itself was simply dedicated to his work as a freemason and not his military career.

That fact was irrelevant.

Only the war over identity mattered. Pike must be plucked out and purged.

In a country of 320 million people of stunningly diverse ethnic backgrounds and philosophies, this is a fire bell in the night for complete cultural disintegration. The end result will be uglier than the already sickening events that took place this weekend.

The Federalist’s publisher, Ben Domenech, rightly noted what this means for the direction of the country: “[I]t is the open conflict of a nation at war with itself over its own character. This war will end badly, no matter how it plays out. And the way this story ends is in demolishing [Thomas Jefferson’s] Monticello brick by brick.”

There is no arc of history bending perpetually on its own toward justice. History is instead a series of twists and turns, influenced by cultural and social forces as well as individuals and communities.

America has never been a perfect nation. It has benefitted from great ideas advanced by imperfect men, and almost miraculously formed a great and good national community out of widely disparate elements.

This history is worth remembering and even celebrating. It shouldn’t be buried because a few evil men have twisted it to serve their causes. Nor should it be used to attack and haunt the living.

As the late 19th-century poet Henry Van Dyke wrote:

I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack: The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back. But the glory of the present is to make our future free — We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.

This is the spirit of our country, and it won’t change because a few thugs wish to turn our most fundamental principles on their head. We have a duty to repudiate them through a stronger dedication to the founding principles that have made this country great.

Commentary by Jarrett Stepman. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

[americanlibertypac]

I Went to Charlottesville During the Protests. Here’s What I Saw.

Photo: CC0

I picked quite a time to go on a weekend trip to Charlottesville.

What was supposed to be a nice getaway with my wife turned into a journey through the eye of a national media storm.

On Saturday, clashes between “Unite the Right” protestors and “anti-fascist” counterprotesters at the foot of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue—which the City Council had voted to remove from a local park—turned violent.

One woman was killed when an Ohio man allegedly associated with the white nationalist marchers rammed his car through a wave of people. He has been charged with second-degree murder.

The clash between Nazis and leftists in the streets was an ugly and surreal scene one would associate with 1930s Germany, not a sleepy American town in the heart of central Virginia.

A City, and Country, in Shock

The attitude of people around Charlottesville—the silent majority—deserves to be noted. They were almost universally upset, blindsided, and resentful that these groups showed up in their community to drag down its reputation and fight their ideological proxy wars.

Albemarle County, which includes Charlottesville and a few other small towns, is deeply blue in its most populated centers around the University of Virginia and dark red on the outskirts. It’s politically purple. Yet everywhere I went, the attitude toward the protests was similar.

As a thunderstorm rolled in on Saturday evening, a waitress at a restaurant I ate at said, “Let’s hope this washes the day away.”

A local gas station attendant told my wife: “These people from out of town, Nazis, [Black Lives Matter], they’re all hate groups to me.”

In the aftermath of the events, most townsfolk walking in the Charlottesville downtown area appeared stunned and shaken. The overall feeling in the area was resentment—certainly not sympathy for any of the groups involved.

It would be a mistake to blow the events in Charlottesville too far out of proportion by linking either side to a mainstream political movement. In the grand scheme of things, it was a small-scale clash between groups who clearly represent an extreme minority in this country.

Even calling the gathering of a couple hundred people a “movement” would be a stretch. The overwhelming media attention given to these fascist, racist groups even before violence took place served as a conduit for the views of this handful of people.

The media’s role in blowing this event out of proportion is lamentable and predictable, but it doesn’t excuse what took place.

What the event does demonstrate is the looming danger of identity politics run amok. This is what is in store if we are consumed by the tribal politics that have destroyed so many other countries.

In June, I wrote about why I think politically incorrect historical monuments—even Confederate ones like the Lee statue in Charlottesville—should stay.

>>> Why Cities Shouldn’t Take Down Confederate Statues

At the time I wrote:

In our iconoclastic efforts to erase the past, we rob ourselves of knowing the men who forged our national identity, and the events that made us who we are. This nation, of almost incomprehensible wealth, power, and prosperity, was created by the decisions of men like Lincoln—and Lee, too.

The zealous march to obliterate America’s past, even parts we dislike, will leave us a diminished civilization.

Though many have now jumped to conclude that the events in Charlottesville show the need to give in to the desire of people to tear down statues, this will only serve to strengthen and embolden the radicals—on both sides—to step up their efforts to plunge the nation into constant social unrest and civil war.

Identity Over Individuals

In a sense, the “alt-right” and leftist agitators want the same thing. They both seek to redefine the battle over American history in racial and tribal terms in direct opposition to the most basic ideas of our national existence.

Such was the case in the unsightly scene in front of Charlottesville’s Lee statue.

The real individuals whom these statues represent simply ceased to matter.

It was telling that a counterprotest erupted in Washington, D.C., in front of the Albert Pike memorial. Pike had been a Confederate general, but the memorial itself was simply dedicated to his work as a freemason and not his military career.

That fact was irrelevant.

Only the war over identity mattered. Pike must be plucked out and purged.

In a country of 320 million people of stunningly diverse ethnic backgrounds and philosophies, this is a fire bell in the night for complete cultural disintegration. The end result will be uglier than the already sickening events that took place this weekend.

The Federalist’s publisher, Ben Domenech, rightly noted what this means for the direction of the country: “[I]t is the open conflict of a nation at war with itself over its own character. This war will end badly, no matter how it plays out. And the way this story ends is in demolishing [Thomas Jefferson’s] Monticello brick by brick.”

There is no arc of history bending perpetually on its own toward justice. History is instead a series of twists and turns, influenced by cultural and social forces as well as individuals and communities.

America has never been a perfect nation. It has benefitted from great ideas advanced by imperfect men, and almost miraculously formed a great and good national community out of widely disparate elements.

This history is worth remembering and even celebrating. It shouldn’t be buried because a few evil men have twisted it to serve their causes. Nor should it be used to attack and haunt the living.

As the late 19th-century poet Henry Van Dyke wrote:

I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack: The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back. But the glory of the present is to make our future free — We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.

This is the spirit of our country, and it won’t change because a few thugs wish to turn our most fundamental principles on their head. We have a duty to repudiate them through a stronger dedication to the founding principles that have made this country great.

Commentary by Jarrett Stepman. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

[nothingman]

Earlier this week, YouTube streamer PewDiePie lost a contract with Disney because of some Nazi references in his videos and one absurdly ill-considered attempt to make a joke out of genocide. But as a variety of people have pointed out, this controversy is only the latest example of a pushback against “political correctness,” often centered around the “manosphere,” the “alt-right,” and the uglier parts of video game culture.

In a well-argued BuzzFeed essay, writer and Screener editor Jacob Clifton described PewDiePie’s actions as representative of a larger masculine identity crisis, and urged readers to engage with rather than demonize the people caught up in it. “The whiny self-importance and self-indulgence of white male rage,” writes Clifton, “is so repugnant that it’s nearly impossible to see through. But we won’t heal, and they won’t heal, if we don’t try.” There’s merit in all this. But after a point, it's tiresome to constantly hear the same revelation about how we need to understand white male rage — when it feels as though that’s all we talk about.

Weird, edgy monsters

Clifton is talking largely about confronting people you know in real life, not getting into the heads of random internet users. But over the past few years, we’ve gotten a great deal of the latter. Anthropological dives into reactionary horror are a subgenre of internet writing: no meme goes un-analyzed, no men’s rights activist un-interviewed, no racist logic unexplained.

There are meaningful points to make about these things. For example, it’s useful to know that someone like PewDiePie is almost certainly not a Nazi, but his jokes end up giving cover to actual bigots, while creating an environment in which bigotry feels increasingly normal. We know that the internet’s ability to create self-contained, self-reinforcing spaces makes that whole process easier.

What we think of as internet counterculture is just culture

But after a certain point, raising awareness risks presenting reactionary internet spaces as an endlessly fascinating linchpin of online culture, a hip countercultural rebellion against present-day norms. Even if people in them are presented as misguided, they’re also implicitly depicted as weird and edgy and pushing boundaries, and definitely not just posting variations of “Hitler did nothing wrong” and other warmed-over slogans from some particularly bad Cards Against Humanity deck.

This is why people end up calling Donald Trump — a real estate tycoon — and Milo Yiannopoulos — a younger Rush Limbaugh with better hair — punk rock, because they’re crudely transgressing social boundaries and creating chaos in the process. But Nazi symbolism, semi-ironic misogyny, and nihilistic misanthropy are no longer meaningfully transgressive; in fact, they’ve been in perennial rotation for decades. We don’t look back on the birth of punk rock fondly just because it made people angry, but because it produced something the world had never seen.

Meanwhile, the people who seem to be most genuinely alien to older generations (including me, sometimes) aren't the “edgelords” picking up the dusty banner of the '70s punk swastika. They're the much-derided "special snowflakes" that have college professors and pundits doomsaying about the rising threat of trigger warnings and safe spaces. They're the aggressively cute proponents of "cybertwee," the soft and socially aware reaction to three decades of increasingly tired '80s chrome-and-circuits loners. We've had several decades of young men trying to replicate a 20th century ideal of rebellion, but the strangest and most extreme thing that a group can be right now is radically, intensely dedicated to emotional intelligence and the notion of inclusivity.

Every meme, under a microscope

There’s interesting coverage of these spaces, including both their beneficial sides and their toxic ones: The Daily Dot takes things like Tumblr and fan fiction culture seriously, and The New Republic dived into “relatable” teen blogs last year. But lefty Tumblr blogs don’t get as many serious deep-dive profiles as men’s rights advocates or reactionary subreddits, and their minor memes don’t get the same wide-ranging publicity — like the massive news cycle dedicated to the alt-right triple parenthesis, a nasty in-joke that got presented to the world as a diabolically clever harassment scheme.

When people in non-stereotypically masculine spaces come under criticism, warranted or not, the reaction is often as chiding and dismissive as it is horrified. Take, for example, the many articles about left-wing campus activism. The people involved are often presumed to be privileged pseudo-intellectuals looking for something to complain about, not people who deal with things like racism or misogyny on top of feeling like they're being ignored or left behind by modern capitalism. (Never mind that plenty of right-wing reactionaries are financially comfortable.)

“Coastal elites,” one argument goes, need to understand white male rage in order to put liberalism and media coverage back in touch with ordinary people. Kindness and awareness can certainly be helpful. But there’s no shortage of people explaining this phenomenon, and talking about people isn’t the same as talking to them. They’re not the only ones who feel disenfranchised, either — just the ones whose voices we’re most inclined to hear.

Radical inclusivity is more alien than hate

Media outlets and groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center monitor online forums for hate group activity that could appear online before breaking into real-world violence. But this doesn’t necessitate producing blanket coverage of alt-right cultural quirks. It's useful to know about these spaces, but I'm not convinced that constantly putting them on display is much of a disinfectant. If anything, it makes it easy to romanticize them or paint their inhabitants as brilliant masterminds, fueling their sense of self-importance and persecution complex.

To be clear, I'm as responsible for doing this as anyone else. I've spent a lot of time consuming stereotypically white male rage-y culture, and I'm more primed to treat it as more worthy of exposure and analysis. (I’m also quite fond of cyberpunk and ‘70s punk bands.) But increasingly, all of this feels redundant — the sort of cultural bubble I should do more to break out of. It’s like hearing a cover band play a Sex Pistols song; the lyrics might still offend, but I’ve heard them all before. While it might be easy to forget right now, it wasn't even deliberate edginess that first made PewDiePie’s name as a game streamer. It was an enthusiastic willingness to do things like scream himself silly at horror games — to make a joke out of his own vulnerabilities, not lash out at the world.

via The Verge

[yellowgh0st]

Tw: mentions of breast/chest size

I fucking hate my body type

My breasts are too fucking big and they get in the way of the things I want to do

I also need a better fucking bra

But when I was trying on bras and I said that I didn’t know if one of them fit right, my mom got mad at me and asked HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW IF IT FIT but it’s like I’m so fucking sorry that I’ve never had a proper bra in my life and you take out the cups and stuff because you don’t like them when you never ask me for my fucking opinion on things

There was also another bra that fit kind of eh but my mom liked it and she was like go put a shirt over it so I did and I looked in the mirror and I cried cuz it made my body look..weird like it was too feminine and not me and I told her it made my body look uglier than it already is and she just did nothing about that

So I don’t even have a proper fitting bra which probably would help with me not hating myself

It was getting bad tonight so I went ahead and googled how to deal with large breasts cuz I’m like a 42 DD or something

all of them said to basically get better bras and it’s like bruh I tried

they also kept using a lot of feminine terms and god those made me so fucking uncomfortable

I’ve been kind of going yea I’m a she but now I don’t know if I want to be associated with being a woman at all

also most of them were saying stuff like wear low necklines and 3/4 sleeves

BUT THOSE ARE SO FUCKING DULL AND BORING TO ME

PLUS THEY MAKE ME THINK OH LOOK THERE’S A WOMAN WHO’S PROBABLY BORING AS SHIT CUZ MY MOM WEARS THOSE CLOTHES AND SHE’S BORING AS SHIT (sorry to anyone who actually wears that I’m just really fucking upset)

You might be like oh well what do you want to wear

I DONT FUCKING KNOW

sometimes I wanna wear alt/e-girl clothes and sometimes I wanna wear soft girl clothes

BUT MOST OF THOSE OUTFITS ONLY LOOK GOOD ON FUCKING SKINNY SMALL CHEST PEOPLE

IVE SEEN NOBODY WHO LOOKS LIKE ME WEARING THOSE CLOTHES

AND ITS NOT LIKE I CAN WEAR THEM BECAUSE MY MOM PROBABLY WOULDNT BUY THEM FOR ME OR THEY WONT EVEN FIT ME OR THEY’D JUST LOOK PLAIN BAD ON ME

“Oh but what do I wear now” you may be asking

T-shirts and leggings

I just spent 4 days wearing a hoodie and now I never want to wear a t-shirt again

They don’t look good with my breasts and they make me look fat and weird

BUT IVE BEEN WEARING THEM FOR THE PAST 4 YEARS AND ITS ALL I FUCKING HAVE

MOST OF THEM ARE FUCKING ANIME ONES

I BARELY FUCKING WATCH ANIME NOWADAYS

MY MOM WONT BUY ME NEW PANTS OR NEW CLOTHES BECAUSE “You already have a lot of shirts/leggings”

Some of you might be oh use your own money to buy your own clothes

WHO’D TAKE ME TO BUY THEM

MY. FUCKING. MOM.

PLUS ITS NOT LIKE I HAVE A SOURCE OF INCOME

MY PARENTS OWE ME AND MY SISTER HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS BECAUSE THEY SAID WE’D GET $10 DOLLARS EACH MONTH FOR HELPING PAINT A RENT HOUSE

THAT ONLY LASTED LIKE HALF A YEAR

EVERYTIME I BRING THAT UP MY MOM’S LIKE YOU OWE ME A LOT OF MONEY FOR GIVING YOU FOOD AND RAISING YOU

BITCH I DIDNT ASK TO BE RAISED

I FUCKING HATE MY LIFE

SOME OF YOU MIGHT BE LIKE OH BUT THESE ARENT THAT BIG OF PROBLEMS WHEN YOU HAVE THIS AND THIS

but they are when your mom doesn’t accept they/them pronouns (found out cuz a friend)

and your dad said people who need anxiety medication just don’t know how to deal with it

I really really want new clothes and to have a different body

I’m so fucking sorry

I feel like I’m going to puke

[brianobrienny]

Web Development Hacks to Increase Your Traffic Organically

Guest post by Sheryl Jones

Are you looking for a way to boost your traffic organically? Web development is one of the best ways to do that! 

From looking after its design to maintaining all the web pages, web development is undoubtedly a lot of work. Different websites are built differently, but there are three components of web development, which are commonly required to create them all. 

‘The Client’ is the first component used for frontend purposes, ‘Server’ is another component used for the backend, and the last component is ‘the Database.’ When these three components are combined, it adds life to your ordinary web page. The process of web development includes languages such as HTML, Python, Java, and CSS. 

The ranking of a web page is influenced by the number of people attracted to it. The more attention it grabs, the better search engine ranking it will have. 

You want your webpage to be visible right on top of the results for relevant keywords. That’s why SEO is fundamental to every site’s growth. Why? Because if people don’t reach your website, they would not get more information on your product range, your services, and you. Your website helps you start communication with a new lead.

It helps in increasing the popularity of your business. This is why every business needs a website. 

Be it a small or a large business, your website needs a good web developer because 48% of people cited website design as the first factor when it comes to deciding the credibility of a business. There are 4.4 billion active internet users, and 2 out of every 3users prefer visiting a well-designed website. 

Looking at these numbers, you would be sure by now that you need quality web development. If so, you should only consult professionals, who have a proven track record of serving thousands of clients, not just with web development but digital marketing too.

However, web development is not a one-time job. Once your website has been created, there is still room for more web development. You would need to check it and better it from time to time since web development can also better your search results. To help you gain organic traffic on your website, here are 7 web development hacks you should not miss on.

User-friendly URL

For many website owners, a user-friendly URL is not the utmost priority. They do not see the importance of a simple URL when it comes to increasing organic traffic, but it’s one of the most important factors. Your website link needs to be easy to spell, easy to recall, and also, relevant for your brand.

For example, if your web page is about a cake but your URL is ‘Cobblermania.com’, it will be irrelevant for your bakery. However, if you keep it simple and relevant, something like “Caked.com”, it will be user-friendly, sensible, precise, and will also do the SEO deed. 

SEO Friendly

Making your website SEO friendly is where you should invest most of your time and efforts, once your website is live and churning out regular blogs. SEO comprises the right usage of keywords, images, backlinks, outbound links, and more. According to research, websites that get SEO right soon find their pages on the top of the search results and get 90% of their total traffic through search engines.

Optimize your images

Optimizing your images is the only way of reducing their file size without compromising on the quality. A large-sized file increases the load time of the website, which is one of the biggest reasons for losing traffic. The motive is to attain the best design results in the least of Megabytes. Try reducing to kilobytes to save more space. Saving the images in the right dimensions is the best way to optimize your images.

Image naming

Images shan’t be overlooked. You not only want to make sure that your images are light and proper, but you also want to name them right. You should not leave the “Alt-text” or “Image Title” space blank, as this can do your SEO a great favour. So, you should use captions that match your images and do not look out of context. Plus, if you want to do image naming for SEO purposes, saving it in the right format is very important.

Responsive Design

In today’s era, internet surfing through mobile phones has increased. So, to drive success to your website, make sure you create it in a responsive design to build a connection with the mobile users. The responsive design will ensure that your website develops the right interface for whichever platform your visitors use, be it a mobile, tablet, or desktop. Your website should be able to adapt to all screens. 

Minimal CSS

We know that you love how much can your CSS knowledge do to your website. It can give your website a beautiful exterior, however, too many codes and files could make your website uglier, messier, and slower from the insides. However, you can not just remove the codes and lose the features, so why not compress them! You can not just reduce the volume but also filter out the duplicate or broken codes by doing so. This will improve your website’s overall performance 

Good UX

Only if the user’s needs are fulfilled, it will be recognized as a good user experience (UX). There are many ways to improve the UX but the best ones are customer surveys and compatible design to make it more interactive. Increasing the readability quotient is also a way of ensuring a good user experience, which can be done via white spaces and well-written headlines. 

Well, congratulations because you just cracked the seven best web development hacks that will organically increase your engagement. 

As a business owner, getting organic traffic to a website is the most important way of ensuring growth. So, if all this time you have been looking for ways to improve your business visibility, look no more! 

Author Bio:

Sheryl is the Sr. Marketing Specialist at Uplers who has a great experience in designing well-defined user journeys across the digital marketing domain. She leverages her digital marketing expertise to help businesses draw significant ROIs.

The post Web Development Hacks to Increase Your Traffic Organically appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

Web Development Hacks to Increase Your Traffic Organically published first on http://rssmix.com/u/11592782/rss.xml

[dallasareaopinion]

The world goes to bed…

The world wakes up. Sooner or later information from the Mueller Report will come out. Both sides will claim victory, neither may be right, or both could be right.

 Either way the hate will increase, the finger pointing will increase, the lies will increase, the falsities will increase, and Americans will suffer a cruel fate as the fanatics on both sides spin this report into more weaves and webs than a normal person can handle. Unless there is something so concrete it stops people in their tracks this is going to continue. Anything alluding to collusion or conspiracy will not be enough for Trump’s supporters and will fight it. Anything less than collusion or conspiracy will bring out the people who do not support Trump saying it was rushed or short changed and more investigations are needed.

 Americans lose. Hillary versus Donald was the worst election choice possible and we are going to pay for this for years. It didn’t matter who won, the hate from the other side is not going to let go. The Dems and the Reps at the national level are so out of touch with the rest of the country it is scary and yes, I have said this before, but the truth is always worth repeating.

 The way forward is with new leadership and new representation. A group or individual who can focus on a few very basic issues that most need attention in this country and work out solutions. Someone to refocus the middle and middle class back to accepting the government has a role in our society and we should manage it. For decades the two parties have failed to do this and now we have declining public education, declining infrastructure, declining society, declining healthcare, declining social security, a burdensome government that regulates too much, but gets nothing productive accomplished, consumers are an afterthought, workers are serfs, and these are just a few of the most apparent problems we face. Trump cannot make America great again. America is made great by its people. And right now, the people are sick of everything and inspired to do nothing. The alt right and the pretentious left want to tell us how right they are, and only their opinions matter, but instead our government should be listening to the vast majority of this country and working on their issues.

 We could go forward; the extremes will not let us. Bannon wants the world destroyed and still hopes Trump will deliver. Putin wants the US destroyed and still hopes Trump will deliver. Trump just wants everyone to like him and because they don’t, he is destroying the very fabric of civility. The pretentious left wants to tell us how bad the deplorables are, to tell us we must live in their world no matter how uncomfortable people may be, yet no one is focusing on the most important issues.

 Trump may or may not be guilty. That is the least of our problems right now. Removing the hate from our lives is the bigger problem and is necessary for our great country to continue. If Trump is guilty, then eventually he should go to trial. If Trump is innocent, then I pray he takes the high road. Unfortunately based on past performance I doubt that will happen. I hope though.

 Russians conspiring to affect our election is a heinous crime. If Trump was involved, then he should go to jail. If not, he doesn’t, but the Russians need to be called out by him and especially by him or way too many people will hold onto the idea he is guilty no matter what the Mueller Report’s findings say. The longer Trump drags this out, the uglier it gets.

 If the report has something jaw dropping, then we deal with it. If the report has ketchup stains on it and nothing of substance, then we deal with it. Either way we need to move forward if we love our country. Instead I fear hate will rule.

 Honestly the collusion or conspiracy possibility is just one arrow against him as a person, albeit a grand one, that adds up to the fact I do not like him as a person, nor trust him, nor have confidence in him as the President, nor have confidence that he hasn’t committed money laundering for the Russians, or treats people with disrespect, that he cannot be told no, that he feels he is blameless for all that is wrong around him, and a host of other personality defects that make me ill, but if he is found innocent of the collusion or conspiracy then many of us will have to accept we have him for two more years give or take and better get our butts out of our seats and find someone better for 2020.

 Sleep tight my friends, soon there is work to be done.

[heromngmnt]

A month passed by very quickly. It’s high time to continue what was left off. After a very welcomed part one, it is high time to produce another bunch of Funko Pop! ugliness. So without further delay – let’s go! (If you haven’t seen part 1, everything written there applies to the whole series, so please check!)

  1. Alan and Carlos – Hangover

I am very much aware, it doesn’t look a bit as bad as most I’m sharing here. I am aware of this. The thing I’m concerned about is actually little Carlos. Look in his deep black eyes. They want a sacrifice in blood. Look at his huge fists on these tiny and lengthy arms. They want to make the sacrifice out of your face. Be careful out there. You’ll never know.

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  2. Bad Ape – War of the Planet of the Apes

The resemblance is uncanny! All the details are on the Pop but then… It seems more and more creepy the longer you’re looking at him. It seems like Funko tried to make his head look… smaller? His body is quite big for a Pop from 2017 and comparing to the on-screen version. And then we get all these wrinkles which even though accurate, doesn’t give the figurine any good looks. And… Am I the only one who thinks that hair on his head looks like worms?!

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  3. Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetle… Maybe not this time, shall we? I’d rather avoid summoning the Pop! that kills my favourite Keaton’s role. Tim Burton’s imaginary over Beetlejuice is more unnatural and plastic than necessary. In the 80s not many CGIs were available but Burton made his film look even more cringy (of sorts) with the masks, ghosts and such. But I don’t believe he intended the title character being such himself in his future version of the Funko Pop! Head longer than usual and very symbolic painting don’t give Beetlejuice any justice.

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  4. Wizard of Oz

Timeless classic. I’m assuming it is the oldest work of culture that came by Funko (correct me if I’m wrong). The Wizard of Oz was released in 1939 and it seems that Funko went back in time to make their figurines, too. These Pop!s are not only the “older version” but also “creepier version”. The lion looks like a mouse with a beard and his posture is crooked. The witch on the other hand… Has barely anything to do with actual Glinda. They could at least make her hair more curly (even though it isn’t a marvellous idea looking at the Lion). Well, the beginnings are tough and Funko is no exception.

For the record. The lion graphic on the box is my favourite.

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  5. Minions

Who doesn’t love these small, yellow creatures these days?! Yes, me. Or at least not in the Pop! form. Despicable Me stole hearts of children and adults immediately. The hype went to the moon and back and Minions lived to see their own film made up. Now there’re four films and a lot more of minions to see, but the ugliest ones are ones that opened the door to the rest. Meet Carl and Dave. Carl’s eye may be creeping out in the dark, but when you double it and put together Dave is creeping even more. The sole shape of the Pop!s is okay, but eyes look terrible nonetheless. Confession? Once upon a time, I bought Carl and he’s in my boyfriend’s family house.

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  6. Fifth Element

This 90’s classic is not so guilty pleasure of every science fiction fan. It is comedic and ironic so nobody actually has anything against Ruby Rhod’s crazy appearance and an alien singer that looks like a humanoid fish tank. But Funko designers definitely had their own idea in mind. Most of the Pop!s look fine considering the early times of figurines but there’s one that makes my head blow. Diva Plavalaguna was weird but BEARABLY strange. Funko decided to make her unbearable.

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  7. Doghan Daguis – Valerian and the City of the Thousand Planets

You know Chase figurines, eh? The ones highly valuable, usually one out of six, a different variant of the character? Let’s welcome the least valuable in the history of Funko Pop! making.

Valerian and the City of the Thousand Planets, being by the same director as the one above, shown us yet another bunch of very creative aliens in so many species, you won’t be able to count. It was a flop, sadly, because the story and terribly written romance made the film unwatchable. Nonetheless, I have to admit that the visuals and creativity were on their highest levels. And since Luc Besson was highly sure of his new production, the deal with Funko was obvious. And what happened? Out of all these aliens we got only TWO species made. And they weren’t Funko’s pride and joy.

Doghan Daguis wasn’t very pleasant species for the eye at the first place. Looking like pterodactyls with hair problems and having a pissing off personality, they only appeared as figurines because they had a pretty unnecessary but important situation with main characters. Their Pop!s sadly became even uglier than the original, having a wider and shorter beak and creepy eye. Moreover, this is only one figurine I’m acknowledged of that actually has TWO chase variants. Well, they had to do something to contain three of them, aye? Well, I don’t think so.

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  8. Doomsday – Batman v Superman

Erm… I don’t even know what to say about this. For the record, I hated the film. I hated Doomsday design there, so I’m not sure I’m entitled to say anything about Funko redesigning it. I don’t see the resemblance, I just enjoy his lovely yellow teeth. Let’s just leave it without further comment.

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  9. Gollum – The Hobbit

Gollum may be the trickiest character to actually make Pop! of. This peculiar appearance in both Peter Jackson trilogies makes him an icon unable to transfer into any other shape. Huge ears on a very round head, only 10 hair on his bald head, huge and narrow legs and arms… That’s only some features that make Gollum one of a kind. Funko did try their best. Both in old The Hobbit version and 2018’s LOTR one. Both are OKAY but they don’t give justice to our dear Smeagol. They decided to choose some of his features and skip on other to keep Pop style and try their best to keep the character’s similarities.

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  10. V – V for Vendetta

I don’t care, I LOVE this film. Alan Moore’s original, too. But I’ll never love this nightmare of a Pop. This was still the time when Funko constrained Pop!s eyes to be round. So all the not-circle eyes got the same treatment in sculpture but different in painting. Another problem is that V’s mask lost its iconic shape because the head had to be rectangular. I may agree to this if the top of the head was simply WIDER than the bottom. And the hat – more like what we had in the film. In here, the only thing coming to my mind is stoned V is going to start a revolution!

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  BONUS – Donald Trump

This list bonus is the world’s favourite president. Just for the record that his Pop! actually exists. It’s actually not that bad but I think actual Trump is way heavier. Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders exist, too!

  Also, I want to thank everyone for raising my post so high on Google Search! Every click counts and I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed it!

First part was so popular I can't even comprehend! So thank you again and let's get to another bunch of the ugliest Funko Pop!s A month passed by very quickly. It's high time to continue what was left off. After…

[deniscollins]

A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland

If you owned a welding company, what would you do if informed that one of the welders was a committed organizer for the Traditionalist Worker Party, a Nazi-group, who did podcasts for Radio Aryan, and posted Nazi support material on his Facebook page: (1) do nothing and respect his freedom of speech, (2) speak with him about restricting his political viewpoints, (3) fire him, or (4) something else (if so, what)? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall. They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.

Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.

But Mr. Hovater, in the days leading up to the wedding, was somewhat less anxious. There are times when it can feel toxic to openly identify as a far-right extremist in the Ohio of 2017. But not always. He said the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him, demonstrating that it is not the end of the world to be attacked as the bigot he surely is: “You can just say, ‘Yeah, so?’ And move on.”

It was a weeknight at Applebee’s in Huber Heights, a suburb of Dayton, a few weeks before the wedding. The couple, who live in nearby New Carlisle, were shoulder to shoulder at a table, young and in love. He was in a plain T-shirt, she in a sleeveless jean jacket. She ordered the boneless wings. Her parents had met him, she said, and approved of the match. The wedding would be small. Some of her best friends were going to be there. “A lot of girls are not really into politics,” she said.

In Ohio, amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes, Mr. Hovater’s presence can make hardly a ripple. He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key at a time the old boundaries of accepted political activity can seem alarmingly in flux. Most Americans would be disgusted and baffled by his casually approving remarks about Hitler, disdain for democracy and belief that the races are better off separate. But his tattoos are innocuous pop-culture references: a slice of cherry pie adorns one arm, a homage to the TV show “Twin Peaks.” He says he prefers to spread the gospel of white nationalism with satire. He is a big “Seinfeld” fan.

“I guess it seems weird when talking about these type of things,” he says. “You know, I’m coming at it in a mid-90s, Jewish, New York, observational-humor way.”

Mr. Hovater, 29, is a welder by trade. He is not a star among the resurgent radical American right so much as a committed foot soldier — an organizer, an occasional podcast guest on a website called Radio Aryan, and a self-described “social media villain,” although, in person, his Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother. In 2015, he helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, one of the extreme right-wing groups that marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August, and again at a “White Lives Matter” rally last month in Tennessee. The group’s stated mission is to “fight for the interests of White Americans.’’

Its leaders claim to oppose racism, though the Anti-Defamation League says the group “has participated in white supremacist events all over the country.” On its website, a swastika armband goes for $20.

If the Charlottesville rally came as a shock, with hundreds of white Americans marching in support of ideologies many have long considered too vile, dangerous or stupid to enter the political mainstream, it obscured the fact that some in the small, loosely defined alt-right movement are hoping to make those ideas seem less than shocking for the “normies,” or normal people, that its sympathizers have tended to mock online.

And to go from mocking to wooing, the movement will be looking to make use of people like the Hovaters and their trappings of normie life — their fondness for National Public Radio, their four cats, their bridal registry.

“We need to have more families. We need to be able to just be normal,” said Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, in a podcast conversation with Mr. Hovater. Why, he asked self-mockingly, were so many followers “abnormal”?

Mr. Hovater replied: “I mean honestly, it takes people with, like, sort of an odd view of life, at first, to come this way. Because most people are pacified really easy, you know. Like, here’s some money, here’s a nice TV, go watch your sports, you know?”

He added: “The fact that we’re seeing more and more normal people come is because things have gotten so bad. And if they keep getting worse, we’ll keep getting more, just, normal people.”

Flattening the Edges

Mr. Hovater’s face is narrow and punctuated with sharply peaked eyebrows, like a pair of air quotes, and he tends to deliver his favorite adjective, “edgy,” with a flat affect and maximum sarcastic intent. It is a sort of implicit running assertion that the edges of acceptable American political discourse — edges set by previous generations, like the one that fought the Nazis — are laughable.

“I don’t want you to think I’m some ‘edgy’ Republican,” he says, while flatly denouncing the concept of democracy.

“I don’t even think those things should be ‘edgy,’” he says, while defending his assertion that Jews run the worlds of finance and the media, and “appear to be working more in line with their own interests than everybody else’s.”

His political evolution — from vaguely leftist rock musician to ardent libertarian to fascist activist — was largely fueled by the kinds of frustrations that would not seem exotic to most American conservatives. He believes the federal government is too big, the news media is biased, and that affirmative action programs for minorities are fundamentally unfair.

Ask him how he moved so far right, and he declares that public discourse has become “so toxic that there’s no way to effectively lobby for interests that involve white people.” He name-drops Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, architects of “anarcho-capitalism,” with its idea that free markets serve as better societal regulators than the state. And he refers to the 2013 science-fiction movie “Pacific Rim,” in which society is attacked by massive monsters that emerge from beneath the Pacific Ocean.

“So the people, they don’t ask the monsters to stop,” he says. “They build a giant robot to try to stop them. And that’s essentially what fascism is. It’s like our version of centrally coming together to try to stop another already centralized force.”

Mr. Hovater grew up on integrated Army bases and attended a mostly white Ohio high school. He did not want for anything. He experienced no scarring racial episodes. His parents, he says, were the kinds of people who “always assume things aren’t going well. But they don’t necessarily know why.”

He is adamant that the races are probably better off separated, but he insists he is not racist. He is a white nationalist, he says, not a white supremacist. There were mixed-race couples at the wedding. Mr. Hovater said he was fine with it.

“That’s their thing, man,” he said.

Online it is uglier. On Facebook, Mr. Hovater posted a picture purporting to show what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II: a streetscape full of happy white people, a bustling American-style diner and swastikas everywhere.

“What part is supposed to look unappealing?” he wrote.

In an essay lamenting libertarianism’s leftward drift, he wrote: “At this rate I’m sure the presidential candidate they’ll put up in a few cycles will be an overweight, black, crippled dyke with dyslexia.”

After he attended the Charlottesville rally, in which a white nationalist plowed his car into a group of left-wing protesters, killing one of them, Mr. Hovater wrote that he was proud of the comrades who joined him there: “We made history. Hail victory.”

In German, “Hail victory” is “Sieg heil.”

A Growing Movement

Before white nationalism, his world was heavy metal. He played drums in two bands, and his embrace of fascism, on the surface, shares some traits with the hipster’s cooler-than-thou quest for the most extreme of musical subgenres. Online, he and his allies can also give the impression that their movement is one big laugh — an enormous trolling event put on by self-mocking, politically incorrect kids playing around on the ash heap of history.

On the party’s website, the swastika armband is formally listed as a “NSDAP LARP Armband.” NSDAP was the abbreviation for Hitler’s Nazi Party. LARP stands for “Live-Action Role Playing,” a term originally meant to describe fantasy fans who dress up as wizards and warlocks.

But the movement is no joke. The party, Mr. Hovater said, is now approaching 1,000 people. He said that it has held food and school-supply drives in Appalachia. “These are people that the establishment doesn’t care about,” he said.

Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, estimated that the Traditionalist Worker Party had a few hundred members at most, while Americans who identify as “alt-right” could number in the tens of thousands.

“It is small in the grand scheme of things, but it’s one of the segments of the white supremacist movement that’s grown over the last two years,” she said.

It was midday at a Panera Bread, and Mr. Hovater was describing his political awakening over a turkey sandwich. He mentioned books by Charles Murray and Pat Buchanan. He talked about his presence on 4chan, the online message board and alt-right breeding ground (“That’s where the scary memes come from,” he deadpanned). He spoke dispassionately about the injustice of affirmative action, about the “malice directed toward white people” in popular media, about how the cartoon comedy “King of the Hill” was the last TV show to portray “a straight white male patriarch” in a positive light.

He declared the widely accepted estimate that six million Jews died in the Holocaust “overblown.” He said that while the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler wanted to exterminate groups like Slavs and homosexuals, Hitler “was a lot more kind of chill on those subjects.”

“I think he was a guy who really believed in his cause,” he said of Hitler. “He really believed he was fighting for his people and doing what he thought was right.”

He said he wanted to see the United States become “an actually fair, meritocratic society.” Absent that, he would settle for a white ethno-state “where things are fair, because there’s no competing demographics for government power or for resources.”

His fascist ideal, he said, would resemble the early days in the United States, when power was reserved for landowners “and, you know, normies didn’t really have a whole hell of a lot to say.”

His faith in mainstream solutions slipped as he toured the country with one of the metal bands. “I got to see people who were genuinely hurting,” he said. “We played coast to coast, but specifically places in Appalachia, and a lot of the Eastern Seaboard had really been hurt.”

Friendships Made and Lost

In 2012, Mr. Hovater was incensed by the media coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, believing the story had been distorted to make a villain of George Zimmerman, the white man who shot the black teenager. By that time, he and Ms. Hovater had been dating for a year or two. She was a small-town girl who had fallen away from the Catholic Church (“It was just really boring”), and once considered herself liberal.

But in the aftermath of the shooting, Ms. Hovater found herself on social media “questioning the official story,” taking Mr. Zimmerman’s side and finding herself blocked by some of her friends. Today, she says, she and Mr. Hovater are “pretty lined up” politically.

As they let their views be known, friends left and friends stayed.

“His views are horrible and repugnant and hate-filled,” said Ethan Reynolds, a Republican and city councilman in New Carlisle, Ohio, who said he had befriended Mr. Hovater without knowing his extremism. “He was an acquaintance I regret knowing.”

Jake Nolan, a guitarist in one of the bands Mr. Hovater played in, stuck with him. “There are people who literally go around Sieg Heiling,” he said. “Then you have the people who just want the right to be proud of their heritage” — people, he said, who are standing up against “what appears to be an increasingly anti-white America.”

Mr. Hovater befriended Mr. Heimbach in February 2015 at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Mr. Heimbach, who two years earlier had founded a White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland, was holding a protest outside the proceedings and praising Vladimir Putin. The pair founded the Traditionalist Worker Party in the spring.

Soon Mr. Hovater was telling people that he would be running for a council seat in his hometown, New Carlisle, population 5,600. The announcement caught the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the heavy metal press. But he never filed papers.

On a recent weekday evening, Mr. Hovater was at home, sautéing minced garlic with chili flakes and waiting for his pasta to boil. The cats were wandering in and out of their tidy little rental house. Books about Mussolini and Hitler shared shelf space with a stack of Nintendo Wii games. A day earlier, a next-door neighbor, whom Mr. Hovater doesn’t know very well, had hung a Confederate flag in front of his house.

“This is kind of brackish territory here,” Mr. Hovater said. “A lot of people consider Cincinnati the most northern Southern city.”

The pasta was ready. Ms. Hovater talked about how frightening it was this summer to watch from home as the Charlottesville rally spun out of control. Mr. Hovater said he was glad the movement had grown.

They spoke about their future — about moving to a bigger place, about their honeymoon, about having kids.