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There's evidence to suggest the events in Charlottesville have motivated numerous individuals to join or actively reengage in dark web white supremacist forums.

Trump has faced a wave of bipartisan backlash in the wake of a jaw-dropping press conference Tuesday at Trump Tower in which he blamed the violence that led to the killing of counterprotester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville on both sides of the conflict, not solely on the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who instigated the rally.

"You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now," Trump said during a contentious back-and-forth with reporters in the lobby of his midtown Manhattan building.

The mixed messages coming from the White House have only fueled the escalating rhetoric from "alt-right" figures and notable white supremacists -- many of whom cheered Trump's statements Tuesday. Law enforcement officials have indicated they are worried about more violence ahead of the widespread alt-right rallies planned in coming weeks across the US.

"I just think the rhetoric has really brought this to a different level, and that's what we're worried about," Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans said Friday when asked about an event planned in his city. "I've never seen so many people looking, almost looking for confrontation, and we've gotta knock it down."

James Norton, a former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, said he thinks the President's remarks "obviously reignited the issue in a not-productive way."

"It is incumbent on the President to tone down the rhetoric and be clear that the US government has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to racially charged hate group organizations that's mission is to commit violence, spread fear and divide the country," he said.

Several organizers of the upcoming "alt-right" rallies have pledged that their events are about free speech, but that reasoning has done little to mitigate concerns.

"What they're doing is choosing flashpoints around the country to try to rally their people around," said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.

"They do it under guise of free speech or security," he said. "But really what it is is an opportunity for them to express their hatred in the communities."

The uptick of white supremacist online activity taking place within these secure chat rooms reflects "a new sense of motivation to either actively re-engage or get started in this community," according to Alex Kassirer, Flashpoint's director of counterterrorism.

And that renewed motivation has spawned a number of posts that echo the comments made by one subscriber to the white nationalist site Stormfront on Tuesday.

"Just want to say I've been a long time lurker, but with the events in Charlottesville I feel more supportive/compelled than ever. I want to join the fight for a White nation that rules as it was ..." the post said.

The decision of several online hosting providers to deny service to alt-right websites in the wake of the events in Charlottesville has resulted in the migration of such communities to the dark web, according to Flashpoint's analysis.

"Individuals with alt-right sympathies are actively seeking out spaces for interaction with like-minded individuals," which will "likely result in sustained surges of activity on deep dark web white supremacist forums," according to their recent report.

For the most part, local and federal law enforcement agencies said they will prepare for the upcoming rallies the same way they do for all public protests and rallies.

One law enforcement source at the Boston Police Department told CNN that they anticipate large crowds, but there is no indication of an uptick in white supremacist threats.

Officers "expect good behavior but will be prepared should it go bad," the source said.

The Department of Homeland Security said it continues to work with federal and local partners "to assess threats and analyze trends in activity from all violent extremist movements, regardless of ideology."

While law enforcement agencies may not be changing their approach following the violence in Charlottesville, CNN has previously reported that the threat from far-right groups has been on their radar for months, as noted by an internal DHS and FBI memo from May.

The authors of the memo predicted that attacks from white supremacist groups in the coming year would be mostly "spontaneous and involve targets of opportunity."

But despite monitoring efforts by law enforcement, alt-right and white supremacist organizers have been clear that they have no interest in deescalating the situation after Charlottesville.

"I think a lot more people are going to die here before we're done here, frankly," said Chris Cantwell, a white nationalist and speaker for "Unite the Right" in an interview with Vice News.

Former Ku Klux Klan Wizard David Duke called the deadly protests in Charlottesville "a turning point for the people of this country."

"We are determined to take our country back. We're going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump," Duke said in an interview while attending the rally on Saturday.

Duke also praised Trump's comments on Tuesday, thanking the President for his "honesty and courage" in a tweet.

"Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa," read the full tweet from an account that is not verified by Twitter but appears to represent Duke and features videos apparently posted by and of him.

CNN's Jessica Schneider and Rene Marsh contributed to this report.

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Trump's mixed messaging sparks concerns of 'emboldened' alt-right - CNN

Stephen K. Bannon thought hed only serve a year as the presidents chief political strategist. Rumors of his imminent sacking arose every few weeks. In April, the rumor that hed be plucked off the National Security Council actually proved true.

But even with the news Friday that the key Trump adviser was out of the White House , the leaders of the alt-right, which Bannon elevated and then denounced, predicted that their movement would continue.

Im sad to see Bannon go, but I was never sure who Bannon was ideologically and politically, said Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who popularized the term alt-right to rebrand the white nationalist movement. Hes a fighter, to be sure, and a populist in a basic sense, but what he actually believed was never clear.

Bannons detractors thought they knew what he believed. They pored over books he praised, especially the 1973 anti-refugee book The Camp of the Saints. They shuddered at how he called the news site he will return to lead, Breitbart, a platform for the alt-right, with verticals on black crime and paranoia about unchecked immigration.

Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart editor whom Bannon helped turn into a transgressive campus celebrity, said time will tell whether the Trump administration will drift into turpitude without Steve around.

[Steve Bannon says rivals wetting themselves, calls supremacists clowns, contradicts Trump on N. Korea]

Steve is far more dangerous and powerful outside of the White House now. And I think he will be happier, too. I cant wait to see Bannon the Barbarian viciously crush his enemies from whatever perch he believes he will be most effective from, Yiannopoulos said.

For Democrats, the removal of Bannon isnt enough. In statements Friday, Democratic lawmakers were sure to bring up the presidents comments on the violence in Charlottesville, and mention that the Trump administration still included Attorney General Jeff Sessions and immigration policy adviser Stephen Miller.

Steve Bannons firing is welcome news, but it doesnt disguise where President Trump himself stands on white supremacists and the bigoted beliefs they advance, said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Its good news that hes not in the White House, said Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.), who has sought Bannons firing since November. But I dont think anyone should have any illusions that now that Steve Bannon is gone, the president is going to take very different positions. These are the presidents positions. These are the presidents policies. They remain.

A Nazi sympathizer, Klan defender, and supremacist protector should not be President of the greatest country in the world, said Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) in a statement, who was first to introduce articles of impeachment against Trump.

No member of Trumps administration worried liberals as much as Bannon. They shared photos of the strategist looking particularly unkempt. The Onion portrayed Bannon as a ghoulish fairy tale villain, with a headline announcing that he had burst into millions of spores upon his departure.

Anthony Atamanuik, a Trump impersonator who hosts the weekly Comedy Central satire The President Show, cast the actor John Gemberling to play Bannon as a shambling, wide-eyed slob.

I conceived him as your friend who breaks out the Ouija board at the seance, Atamanuik said. He was the guy who came up with theories about aliens building the pyramids, because he could not entertain the possibility that they were built by black or brown people. I think we did something accurate without knowing it we had Trump being scared of him.

Progressive activists were genuinely scared of him. The first #FireBannon signs appeared at rallies the day after Trumps presidential victory. At some rallies, the chant No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA was altered to squeeze in a mention of Bannon. The chants never went away, and this week, many of the post-Charlottesville protests and vigils featured calls for Trump to fireBannon.

The progressive group Daily Action organized at least 44,000 calls to the White House demanding Bannon be removed; Color of Change, which has organized advertiser boycotts of Breitbart and other news sites, got close to 100,000 people to sign anti-Bannon petitions.

His record made him such a clear figure of what Trumps policies would mean for people, explained Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change. We wanted to say to members of Congress, who were seeking to treat this administration as normal, that theyd be held accountable for doing business with people like this.

The success of those left-wing protests left a bitter taste for Bannons alt-right defenders. As the Bannon news circulated on Reddit and 4chan forums, Trump fans veered between rationalization (He will return to Breitbart in a civilian capacity in order to fight in the culture war) and depression (Why would you contact a leftist columnist and give an unsolicited interview in which you kill your reputation and give the media an angle on you?).

Vox Day, an alt-right activist and science fiction author, argued that Bannons enemies had missed the real reason he was terminated. Bannons nationalism, for all the hate it drew, put him on the opposing side of neoconservatives the war hawks that the left used to hate.

Hes not a bureaucrat, and the kind of strategic advice he offers Trump can just as easily be provided from outside, Day said. My one concern is that this could mean that the military interventionists are going to get their way in Syria, Venezuela and North Korea. I suppose well find out soon enough.

Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost

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Steve Bannon may be out, but the 'alt-right' says their movement will continue - Washington Post

You probably have a good idea of who the so-called alt-right are: a group of white supremacists and nationalists, bound up by a fiery loathing of political correctness, cultural Marxism, and those pesky social-justice warriors. You might have also seen the articles that tell us to stop using that term and call them out for the fascist, neo-Nazis they are. In the wake of the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville last weekend, these calls have only become more urgent. The phrase has become a catch-all for people like Richard Spencer, the head of the white supremacist National Policy Institute, and Milo Yiannopoulos, the online troll and provocateur who recently fell from mainstream conservative grace. But theres a lot more people it catches in its (inter)net.

The alt-right isnt one group. They dont have one coherent identity. Rather, theyre a loose collection of people from disparate backgrounds who would never normally interact: bored teenagers, gamers, mens rights activists, conspiracy theorists and, yes, white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But thanks to the internet, theyre beginning to form a cohesive group identity. And I have the data to prove it.

The_Donald is a Reddit community with over 450,000 subscribers. Its the breeding ground for the alt-right, and the fermenting vat in which this identity is being formed. According to data analysis by FiveThirtyEight, its US president Donald Trumps most rabid online following, and Reddit itself now claims it is the fourth most visited site in the US, behind only Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

As part of the Alt-Right Open Intelligence Initiative at the University of Amsterdam, Ive been working to understand the language of the alt-right and what it can tell us about its members. Working with the UK Home Offices Extremism Analysis Unit, I used Googles BigQuery tool, which lets you trawl through massive datasets in seconds, to interrogate a collection of every Reddit comment ever madeall 3 billion of them.

Focusing on The_Donald, I used a script that lets you see which words are most likely to occur in the same comment. Combining this with a tool that allows you to look at the overlap in commenters between different parts of Reddit, I found that the alt-right isnt just one voice: Its made up by distinct constituencies that share different opinions and ways to express them, identifiable by the language they use and the other communities they post in.

In other words, theres a taxonomy of trolls. So who are they, and what language do they use?

The 4chan shitposters. These men and boys (and they are almost exclusively male) come from 4chan, an image board in the deepest bowels of the internet. Youre most likely to see them deliberately provoking offense and outrage, often using the most extreme racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic slurs, but without necessarily fully buying into racist ideology. Theyre the people you cant argue with, because any attempt to engage them in a serious conversation will provoke an only joking! plea. Other users of The_Donald affectionately refer to them as weaponized autists, named for the orchestration of numerous hacks and leaks through the hacker collective Anonymous. Youll see them talking about memes such as Pepe the Frog, Kekistan, and the normies they despise. Elsewhere on Reddit, youre most likely to find them on /r/ImGoingToHellForThis, /r/CringeAnarchy, or any other deliberately offensive subreddit.

Anti-progressive gamers. Closely related to the above, these trolls were radicalized over the course of the #GamerGate hate movement. They really like video games, and they really hate social-justice warriors, gay people, and feminists, all of whom theyre pretty sure major movie and game studios are pandering to with things like all-female screenings of Wonder Woman. Youre likely to see them talking about the trans community a lot (and repeating the words there are only two genders constantly). Elsewhere on Reddit, youll find them in gaming subreddits, or /r/KotakuinAction, which was the home of GamerGate.

Mens rights activists. This group consists of those who explicitly campaign for mens rights (custody battles and workplace deaths are their favorite talking points) and also includes anti-feminists and misogynists of all stripes. Youll find them at /r/Incels (short for involuntary celibates, who want to have sex or find a partner but cantand blame women for this), /r/MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way, who believe that they can only find true liberation in a female-dominated world by refusing to interact with women completely), the infamous /r/TheRedPill, and a few less popular Manosphere subreddits as well as misogynistic sites like Return of Kings. Youll find them referring to women as females, and men they perceive as weak as cucks (more on that later).

Anti-globalists. These people like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Sean Hannity, and conspiracy theoriesand they talk about them an awful lot. They are far less enamored (yet still mildly obsessed) with George Soros, who funds everyone they hate, as well as Emmanuel Macron, John McCain, and Paul Ryan. Elsewhere, they can be seen on /r/uncensorednews (primarily news about bad things perpetrated by members of minority groups and left-wing people), and /r/conspiracy. Their hyperbolic conspiratorial language might sound absurd, but its become an increasingly coherent and important part of The_Donald since the subreddit began.

White supremacists. It might seem surprising, but the language of white supremacy is actually quite uncommon in The_Donald. Thats because explicit racism is banned. Implicit or coded racism is very common, for example displaying Islamophobic sentiment and passing it off as criticizing Islamism, or claiming Islam is not compatible with Western culture. They also populate other subreddits like the now-banned /r/CoonTown and /r/GreatApes, as well as sites like Stormfront and the now defunct The Daily Stormer.

For a long time, these people would have very limited reason to interact with one another. There wasnt much in common between meme aficionados, gamers, sexists, conspiracy theorists, and racists. Because the very nature of Reddit is to subdivide and find your own specific corner of the internet, these communities didnt tend to run into each other all that much. But thats now changed.

Over the last year and a half, these types of trolls have formed a central identity around Trumpism and have started to coalesce. Bored teenagers and gamers are becoming indoctrinated into hard-line anti-globalism, conspiracy theories, and Islamophobia, and its happening right before our eyes, on a publicly accessible forum.

The_Donald contains all of these different groups, marked out by their overlapping community memberships and the words that they (and only they) use. Theyve created an in-group language consisting of words like MAGA (Make America Great Again) and based, a word appropriated from rap culture. The latter is taken to mean being yourself and originated in the crack era. Then there is centipede (usually shortened to pede), a self-referential term originating from the viral video series Cant Stump the Trump, which was popularized when the linked video was tweeted by Trump himself.

But the keystone of this vernacular is cuck. A shortening of cuckold, an old word used to refer to men who allow their partners to sleep with other men (and often find sexual gratification in the humiliation of it), its use has become the sine qua non of alt-right group membership.

The word cuck is everywhere, and its story can tell us a lot about the different groups described above.Youll find cuck used in multiple senses. First, theres cuckservative, used against conservatives who are seen as being too soft and allowing their countries (primarily European) to be invaded by Islam and Muslims. The racial connotations of the word were attached during a period when the word was incredibly popular in the now-banned /r/CoonTown, an explicitly racist subreddit.

Then, theres the use of cuck in a more patriarchal sense. The GamerGate movement popularized the word on Reddit when they were banned from 4chan and migrated over to /r/KotakuInAction. They used it first to describe the jilted ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, a games developer they ran a hate campaign against, before turning it against Christopher moot Poole, the administrator of 4chan, when he kicked them off his site.

Thirdly, you have what might now be the most standard usage of the word, which is to refer to those seen as liberal. You can see this in the popularization of words like libcuck, cuckbook, starcucks, and cuck Schumer in The_Donald. In the wider digital world, you might see it in below-the-line comments of articles on Facebook.

This leads us to the final type of usage, which is when anyone who isnt the alt-right uses it to mock those who do use it, flipping its meaning entirely. As a result, its everywhere, and its story can tell us a lot about the different groups described above.

The_Donald and other alt-right spaces are acting as meeting places for disaffected white men from all walks of life to share a communal hatred. They start out in different corners of the internet with different interests and different lexicons. They remain separate when theyre outside of The_Donald, but the more time they spend in there, the more pernicious views of the world they are likely to pick up by osmosis. They are forming a coherent group identity, represented in the language they have begun to speak, which coalesces around their common hatred of liberalism and their love of Donald Trump.

Were witnessing the radicalization of young white men through the medium of frog memes. In order to see it, all you need to do is look at the words coming out of their mouths. The alt-right isnt yet united, but it soon will be.

Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Linguistic data analysis of 3 billion Reddit comments shows the alt-right is getting stronger - Quartz

Demonstrators in New York march against the Charlottesville nationalist protests. Photograph: ddp USA/REX/Shutterstock

The left-right spectrum of political speech is getting increasingly crowded. The rise of Donald Trump has popularised the term alt-right, which sounds more indie and cool than far right. Meanwhile, those on the alt-right have recently begun to describe their opponents as the alt-left a coinage that, asymmetrically, seems to be an attempt to rhetorically downgrade them to a fringe group of eccentrics, rather than a broad coalition of people who dont like racism much. What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Trump asked, Solomonically, after the clashes in Charlottesville. Do they have any semblance of guilt?

Some of the people who actually protest against alt-right protesters in the US are from a group called Antifa, short for anti-fascist. Their opponents happily adopt the term, aiming to paint any and all anti-racist liberals as a small militant conspiracy, but their acquiescence in such language seems a bit peculiar when you think about it. American shock-babbler Ann Coulter, for example, tweeted that she hoped Trump would denounce the violent left-wing Antifa that shut down my Berkeley speech! IfCoulter agrees to call her opponents Antifa, does it logically follow that she is happy to identify as a fascist?

Fascist, of course, has long been a term of abuse on the left that has not, historically, been restricted to actual fascists, but applied liberally to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George W Bush and many others before Trump. As Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell, wrote in 2004: Fascism unlike communism, socialism, capitalism, or conservatism is a smear word more often used to brand ones foes than it is a descriptor used to shed light on them. We may suspect that the same is increasingly true of almost all political descriptors applied to other groups these days.

If Coulter agrees to call her opponents Antifa, does it logically follow that she is happy to identify as a fascist?

The angry white men who congregated in Charlottesville were widely described as Nazis, a usage for which there are arguments both for and against. On the one hand, these people love swastikas, chant things like blood and soil, and hate Jews and black people, which definitely seems pretty Nazi. On the other hand, tocall them Nazis is a convenient othering that refuses to acknowledge their identity as Americans, standing in the USs own proud tradition of violent racism. The first of the three groups calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan formed in the mid-19th century, after all, and US eugenics and investigations into the science of racial cleansing in the early 20th century were themselves taken as inspiration for the Nazis murderous programme.

To resist calling them Nazis is not somehow to make excuses for savage paranoiacs who claim that liberal policies amount to genocide of their group. A similar point can be made about the term neo-Nazi, which was already in use in the 1940s when actual Nazis were still around, and probably ought to be limited to groups that explicitly want to reconstitute something very like the National Socialist German Workers Party. The unfortunate truth is that nazism does not exhaust the scope of possible human evil.

What, then, about white nationalists or white supremacists? Such terms certainly seem more coolly analytical than fascists or Nazis, though it might be seen as a problem that they both contain the word white, and so implicitly acquiesce in the underlying idea that skin colour is really important. And white supremacist itself (from 1896) was formed from the earlier phrase white supremacy (1824), and thus carries within it the exact noxious ideology that opponents wish to denounce. It might seem that the simple term racists would suffice, were it not for the unfortunate fact that there are so many racists in the world that its just not specific enough to pick out this particular rump of morons.

If you are not a Nazi or a fascist or on the alt-right, but not a paid up member of Antifa or really feeling the Bern either, what are you? You may be a member of the roundly despised group of centrists. That is now a term of outright contempt among fans of Jeremy Corbyn, for example, but the very first citation of the word in the OED is hardly complimentary either: in 1872, the Daily News reported on a group of French parliamentarians: That weak-kneed congregation who sit in the middle of the House, and call themselves Centrists. To employ the term centrist as abuse, of course, is to imply a Manichean worldview in which everything is pure good or pure evil, and politics boils down to a simple binary choice. Its a fantasy world in which complicated decisions are easy, and you can be sure the Nazis would agree.

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'Alt-right', 'alt-left' the rhetoric of hate after Charlottesville - The Guardian

Last Friday night, the white nationalists who marched on Charlottesvilles Emancipation Park all looked strikingly similar. They were almost exclusively white, of course. But they were also relatively young. And with a handful of exceptions, they were men.

The Unite the Right rally brought together white nationalists of all stripes, including traditional white supremacists like Neo-Nazis and the KKK, and other racist groups that have united under the banner of the new, internet-oriented alt-right. The rally was violent and bloodyone of the white supremacist attendees is being charged with deliberately ramming his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others.

Bannon's Exit Leaves Trump Untethered

Its hard to determine just how many women identify with the alt-right, because many of the movements members keep a low profile. George Hawley, author of Making Sense of the Alt-Right, estimates that 20 percent of alt-right supporters are women. But in Charlottesville, a far smaller portion of the crowd was female. All 10 speakers at the rally were men.

There has been a lot of theorizing on why the white nationalism of the alt-right is more popular among men than women. The prevailing theory is that women are turned off by its stark anti-women rhetoric. But their lack of presence at the rally shouldnt be read as an absence of women in the white nationalist movement overall.

There are a lot of white women who buy into this movement, theyre just doing it in private, said Kelly Baker, an author who specializes in gender and white extremist groups. Theyre not vocal, but they are supporters of the men in their lives who are.

I talked to a few alt-right supporters after the Charlottesville rally. All of them gave the same explanation for the protests missing women: biology. There is no official alt-right platformmembers are generally anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and see themselves as defenders of the white race. Most also maintain that there are certain characteristics inherent to each gender. Men are risk-takers, multiple alt-right supporters told me. Women are nurturers. Risk-takers belong at nationally televised protests. Nurturers dont.

By and large, alt-right men dont seem to be forcing these traditional gender roles on the women of their movementthe alt-right women are doing it themselves. The women share a profound disdain for the feminist movement, and are eager to claim the supportive, behind-the-scenes roles.

As for female empowerment, theres nothing that has made me feel more empowered in my life than supporting and being supported by a strong man, Claudia Davenport, an alt-right activist, said in an interview with The Economist. I think that men and women are better off when we stop fighting nature and allow our distinct identities to shine through.

In our conversations, multiple alt-right supporters referred to the movements men as protectors.

Its not the role of women to protect the borders, the nation, or the family. So we do not expect this of women, nor do we find it strange that they are less represented in something that we view as an innately male occupation: guarding territory, said Tara McCarthy, a female alt-right blogger.

White supremacy movements have used the language of protection since the height of the KKK in the 1920s. The KKK rallied to defend white supremacy from the forces it perceived as threateningnamely immigrants and recently enfranchised African Americans.

The KKK made it its mission to defend the spaces it saw as its own: white women, the home, the schools, the nation. They thought, This is our job as knights, protection is what we do, said Baker.

Unlike the alt-right, however, Klanswomen were on the front lines of the movement. There were fewer of themat the Klans peak, half a million, compared to four million menbut they didnt confine themselves to supporting roles. The vast majority wore robes, marched in parades, and participated in highly visible picnics. They were involved in the fight for female suffrage, arguing that only white women should get the vote.

So why are todays white nationalist women less visible than the 1920s Klanswomen? Today, visibility entails significantly more risk. When the KKK marched in the early 20th century, it was powerful and influential in the South. When the white nationalists marched through Charlottesville, they knew they would face social media backlash and counter-protests across the country.

In this way, white-nationalist protestand protectionhas become a more traditionally masculine act in the view of its proponents. Its more dangerous, and requires more risk, than it did 100 years ago.

The alt-right is divided on how visibleand vocalthey want women to be. On one hand, there are organizations like Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), a gender separatist group that cautions men against relationships with women, that bar women from membership. On the other, there is a growing contingent of alt-right men who encourage the women in their community to speak out and become leaders themselves.

Many alt-right men like it when they have women who are contributing content, recording podcasts, making YouTube channels. Thats because women in this movement have an easier time amassing followers, said Hawley.

According to Hawley, outspoken women on the alt-right are particularly effective mechanisms for recruitment. Because there arent many of them, a female alt-right blogger, YouTube star, or Twitter enthusiast attracts more attention than a young white man who fits the alt-right stereotype. Women make the movement seem more normal, Hawley said.

There are only a few alt-right women interested in claiming leadership roles within the movement. As the alt-right develops, these women will likely continue to be a source of tension. During a live-streamed video chat in 2015, Colin Robertson, a popular Scottish alt-right blogger, discussed U.S. politics, among other things, with two of the most prominent female personalities on the alt-right, Lana Lokteff and Ayla Stewart. As soon as Robertson opened the conversation up to the audience , misogynistic comments started rolling in. One viewer wrote, These women are the same old tainted, fucked-up strong womyn, using a spelling of women some feminists use to mock Lokteff and Stewart as feminists in disguise.

To fit into the movement, alt-right women must be visible in the right way. They have to prove they arent threatening traditional gender roles: both through what they say, and how they look. The majority of well-known, female alt-right personalities are young, attractive women.

When women do appear in alt-right journals or online discussions, its as objects of attraction, said Baker. They need to appear as victims or passive objects of male desire.

Above all, women on the alt-right must accept the movements dogma on biology: the idea that men are meant for certain roles, and women are meant for others.

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The Women Behind the 'Alt-Right' - The Atlantic