Hate Merchandise: Still Readily Available At Mainstream Online Websites, RW Extremist T-Shirts, More
'Hate merchandise still readily available at mainstream online websites, excuses notwithstanding.' Daily Kos, 12/26/20.
One of the more interesting facets of the spread of far-right extremism in the American political landscape is how neatly it meshes with the profit motive—particularly for companies who stand to tap into the market for hate. Matthew Foresta recently explored for The Progressive how online companies continue to profit from right-wing extremists spreading their ideology through clothing with symbols and text promoting their memes—and how they keep claiming they’re trying to eradicate such merchants, and keep finding excuses for their failures to do so.
- T-shirts such as these worn by Proud Boys, celebrating the torture and murder tactics of Chilean dictator Augusto *Pinochet, are easily found through mainstream websites.
As Foresta notes, this kind of merchandise can be found not in some obscure corners of the Dark Web, but is for sale at the click of a button at mainstream sites such as Amazon, Zazzle, Redbubble, Teespring, and TeePublic.“Often using jargon, in-jokes, and irony, these retail items communicate antisemitism, celebrate fascism, hype dangerous conspiracy theories, and call for violence,” Foresta notes. The examples abound.
Online retailer Redbubble sells a T-shirt featuring a helicopter bearing a Kek color scheme throwing out avatars for communists, Black Lives Matter activists, Muslims, and feminists.
Among the far-right, the “helicopter rides” meme admiringly recalls the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of throwing his leftist opponents from helicopters.
Militias have gotten in on the t-shirt action as well. Three percenter merchandise is easy enough to get on Amazon, TeeSpring, Redbubble, and Zazzle. Often showing up armed to protests and having one self-proclaimed supporter (who the organization has claimed to renounce and tried to gain distance from) connected to a bomb plot, the group claims to be about the Constitution. In truth they are “anti-government extremists who are part of the militia movement,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.
And the websites’ excuses for failing to yank these goods from their virtual shelves do not fly with analysts who understand how the industry operates: Nandini Jammi, a marketing industry consultant who has criticized companies whose websites are used by hate groups, is skeptical about claims of self-policing. “These are companies that work at scale,” Jammi says. “They don’t know who’s in their networks, who’s on their platforms, who their customers are, so when folks on Twitter or on social media give them the heads up there should be some kind of a review process.”
“It’s infuriating,” [researcher Gwen] Snyder says. “They wouldn’t be selling ISIS merchandise. But because white supremacism is so accepted in the United States, they just treat it as normal and acceptable to retail.” - End.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/12/26/2003604/-Hate-merchandise-still-readily-available-at-mainstream-online-websites-excuses-notwithstanding
- The Economy of Hate, How Online Retailers Profit Off Of Right Wing Extremists, The Progressive, Dec. 3, 2020
https://progressive.org/dispatches/the-economy-of-hate-how-online-retailers-profit-foresta-201203/
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