Last Updated on September 19, 2019
Deeply concerning video shows a panel of alleged experts on white supremacy calling for censorship and corporate overreach to shut down “hate speech” on anonymous forums, social media, and multiplayer voice chat.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee convened on Wednesday to hold a hearing on “Meeting the Challenge of White Nationalist Terrorism at Home and Abroad.”
The panel of expert witnesses gathered by the subcommittee consisted of professor and left-wing activist Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Anti-Defamation League employee Sharon Navarian, and a man named Christian Picciolini who claims to have been a skinhead in the 1980s.
As could be expected from a group of elderly career politicians and political activists pontificating about social issues and the internet, the entire range of questions asked and answers given was nauseatingly cringe-inducing.
Navarian repeatedly castigated 8chan, 4chan, Gab.ai and online gaming as sources of far-right terrorism, to the delight of hearing chairman Ted Deutch (D-Pennsylvania).
Navarian also called for big tech platforms to expand censorship policies and turn over user data to the government and left-wing activist organizations like the ADL.
Rep. Deutch added his own prescient commentary about the dangers of online radicalization: “The sense that people go to the Facebook page and get radicalized, that’s not how it works… it’s through the social media that [they] get access, and then they’re given the link to get to the dark web, the 8chan… where they can watch people out screaming horrible things, shooting off their AR-15s, talking about what they wanna do to blacks and Jews and Muslims.”
The Pennsylvania Democrat went on to imply that voice chat in online games played a role in supremacist recruitment in a question directed at Picciolini: “I want to talk about the actual conversations that are taking place, that presumably those online gaming companies have some access to, how does that work?”
Picciolini rose to the occasion and demonstrated his expert knowledge on the issue, claiming he has personally witnessed white nationalist recruiters “say something like the ‘n word’ or make a joke, and gauge who laughs, who pushes up against it, and who says nothing.”
“They know they can go after the people who laughed,” Picciolini said, “even if it was a nervous laugh from a 10-year-old, they know they have an in there, and they send them down that spiral.”
Picciolini also claimed “autism forums” and “depression forums” played a key role in radicalization.
Middle-aged men in ill-fitting suits were not the only ones offering their perspective on the evils of white nationalism, as intellectual titans Al Green and Ilhan Abdullahi “some people did something” Omar also bloviated about the subject in great detail.
