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The story of Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Sde Rnkk, and Luke Turners He Will Not Divide Us art project has taken another, weirdly summer camp-y turn. The projectwhich initially consisted of a webcam streaming from outside a museum in New York, where people were encouraged to say He Will Not Divide Us for the benefit of online watchersquickly became a lightning rod for the bored, attention-seeking impulses of the faux-but-not-really racists whove labeled themselves the alt right. Bombarding the project with weird poses, shouted anti-Semitism, and a lot of chugged milk, the group basically drove LaBeoufs protest project out of New York, forcing it to reestablish itself in New Mexico.

But even then, the twin lures of an open camera and the chance to nebulously stick it to Shia LaBeouf were too powerful, and the project was forced to move again. This time, LaBeouf and company attempted to buy their exercise in public awareness a little anonymity, setting up a He Will Not Divide Us flag in an unknown location and leaving it to film.

But of course, nothing is truly unknown on the internet; not the depths and lengths that trolls will go to in order to amuse themselves with their edgy attempts to troll a college freshman-level art project, and definitely not a camera left pointing at a sky that sometimes has planes flying across it. In a display of incredibly depressing enthusiasm and mis-applied industriousness, it took the denizens of 4chanand those of its even-less reputable brethren like 8chanroughly a day to use flight-plan data to narrow down the city where LaBeouf had hidden his camera. At which point, they started driving around Greenville, Tennessee, honking car horns and listening to their echo on the stream, in order to pinpoint the house where the flag was flying. Then, they stole it and replaced it with a picture of Pepe, thus transforming this whole thing into the worlds most infuriatingly elaborate game of capture the flag.

Said flag has since been taken down, and the webstream continues to run on an empty flagpole. Theres no word on where LaBeouf might move it next, or how online racists next plan to waste their lives in order to bring someone passively disagreeing with them down.

[via The Daily Dot]

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Alt-right internet detectives have captured Shia LaBeouf's secret flag - A.V. Club

The similarities between Gamergate and the current so called alt-right movement are huge, startling, and in no way a coincidence. Photograph: Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF

Its understandable that the world didnt much care about Gamergate. The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect. Sure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasnt why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.

Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something? If youre just discovering the world of angry, anonymous online dudes masquerading as victims hi, come in. Some of us have been here for a while.

The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the alt-right, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence. After all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.

Lest we forget, Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry. Game developer Zoe Quinn was the original target. Anita Sarkeesians videos applying basic feminist theory to video games had already made her a target (because so many people have a difficulty differentiating cultural criticism from censorship) but this hate was powerfully amplified by Gamergate leading to death threats, rape threats, and the public leaking of personal information. Other notable targets included developer Brianna Wu, actor Felicia Day, and prominent tech-culture writer Leigh Alexander, whose provocative article on the tyranny of game culture offered stark warnings that still resonate powerfully: When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, youre responsible for what spawns in the vacuum.

Other than harassment, very little was achieved, with tiny changes held aloft as great victories: media publications felt the need to publicly clarify pre-existing ethical measures, others implemented small new additions to account for shifts in the ethical landscape caused by modern funding tools such as Patreon and Kickstarter; games writers were duty bound to declare their support for projects they financially aided in these ways. But it quickly became clear that the GamerGate movement was a mess an undefined mission to Make Video Games Great Again via undecided means.

Many had embraced Gamergate because they felt it wholly matched their ideals, and yet quite consistently no one in the movement was willing to be associated with the abuse being carried out in its name. Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies. Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online.

In 2014, the medias reaction was often weak or overtly conciliatory some sites went out of their way to see both sides, to reassure people that openly choosing to be affiliated with a hate group did not make them in any way responsible for that hate. Olive branches were extended, but professional lives continued to be ruined while lukewarm op-eds asked for us to come together so we could start healing. The motivations may have been sound, but its the language Trump and his supporters have used post-election to obliterate dissenting voices.

In 2016, new wave conservative media outlets like Breitbart have gained trust with their audience by painting traditional news sources as snooty and aloof. In 2014, video game YouTube stars, seeking to appear in touch with online gaming communities, unscrupulously proclaimed that traditional old-media sources were corrupt.

Everything were seeing now, had its precedent two years ago.

The stark parallels between Gamergate and the political atmosphere of 2016 may come as a surprise, but it shouldnt: both saw their impact and reach amplified by self-interested parties who underplayed the obvious nastiness they were also promoting. With 2014s Gamergate, Breitbart seized the opportunity to harness the pre-existing ignorance and anger among disaffected young white dudes. With Trumps movement in 2016, the outlet was effectively running his campaign: Steve Bannon took leave of his role at the company in August 2016 when he was hired as chief executive of Trumps presidential campaign. Despite Bannons distance from Breitbart in an official capacity, the outlets ideology and relentless support of Trump remained unchanged with editor-in-chief Joel Pollak notably sending an internal memo to staff that ordered them not to support Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields after allegations she was attacked by Trumps campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Breitbarts aspirations to directly influence politics extend a long way into Europe, too Bannon is openly keen to collaborate with the far-right Marine Le Pen in France, and hired UKIPs Raheem Hassam to co-run the Breitbart London office. These movements are gaining ground by finding political figures who will legitimise them in return for the support of their swollen online communities. The young men converted via 2014s Gamergate, are being more widely courted now. By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergates most prominent voices characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos drew power and influence from its chaos. These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything. The same voices moved into other geek communities, especially comics, where Marvel and DC were criticised for progressive storylines and decisions. They moved into science fiction with the controversy over the Hugo awards. They moved into cinema with the revolting kickback against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot. Despite colonising the world with pointless tech and plastering modern film and TV with fan-pleasing adaptations of niche comic books, nerds still had a taste for revenge. They saw the culture they considered theirs being ripped away from them. In their zero sum mindset, they read growing artistic equality as a threat.

For a long time, we didnt take these characters seriously. Breitbarts Milo Yiannopoulos in particular seemed such a desperate opportunist that we never predicted his rise to prominence, having explicitly stereotyped gamers in the past as overweight and embarrassing. A disgraced journalist and entrepreneur who had to close his tech site The Kernel due to unpaid debts, leaving staff uncertain if they would ever be paid, hed then spent the next few years spouting insincere hateful ideas to a burgeoning Twitter audience who responded to his anti-feminist, anti-establishment invectives. He was eventually banned from the platform after finally abusing a woman who was apparently just famous enough for Twitter to respond.

Using 4chan (and then the more sympathetic offshoot 8Chan) to plan their subversions and attacks made Gamergate a terribly sloppy operation, leaving a trail of evidence that made it quite clear the whole thing was purposefully, plainly nasty. But the video game industry didnt have the spine to react, and allowed the movement to coagulate forming a mass of spiteful disappointment that Breitbart was only more than happy to coddle. Historically, that seems to be Breitbarts trick - strongly represent a single issue in order to earn trust, and then gradually indoctrinate to suit wider purposes. With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016s batch of fresh converts the white extremists came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.

The greatest strength of Gamergate, though, was that it actually appeared to represent many left-leaning ideals: stamping out corruption in the press, pushing for better ethical practices, battling for openness. There are similarities here with many who support Trump because of his promises to put an end to broken neo-liberalism, to drain the swamp of establishment corruption. Many left-leaning supporters of Gamergate sought to intellectualise their alignment with the hashtag, adopting familiar and acceptable labels of dissent identifying as libertarian, egalitarian, humanist. At best they unknowingly facilitated abuse, defending their own freedom of expression while those who actually needed support were threatened and attacked. Genuine discussions over criticism, identity and censorship were paralysed and waylaid by Twitter voices obsessed with rhetorical fallacies and pedantic debating practices. While the core of these movements make peoples lives hell, the outer shell knowingly or otherwise protect abusers by insisting that the real problem is that you dont want to talk, or wont provide the ever-shifting evidence they politely require.

The beauty of this anti-establishment standpoint is, when any mainstream media source seeks to challenge the collective beliefs of the movement, its merely used as further evidence that journalists are untrustworthy and aloof. This is a challenge the press must be ready to face in todays political climate: confronting these movements comes with a cost it has never been possible to write openly about Gamergate without attracting a wave of online abuse. In 2017, the tactics used to discredit progressive game critics and developers will be used to discredit Trump and Bannons critics. There will be gaslighting, there will be attempts to make victims look as though they are losing their grip on reality, to the point that they gradually even start to believe it. The post-truth reality is not simply an accident it is a concerted assault on the rational psyche.

The strangest aspect of Gamergate is that it consistently didnt make any sense: people chose to align with it, and yet refused responsibility. It was constantly demanded that we debate the issues, but explanations and facts were treated with scorn. Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down. This movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with, encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trumps own Twitter feed.

Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called eternal fascism, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts a fascism built on frustration and machismo. The requirement of this formless fascism would above all else be to remain in an endless state of conflict, a fight against a foe who must always be portrayed as impossibly strong and laughably weak. This was the methodology of Gamergate, and it now forms the basis of the contemporary far-right movement.

We have no idea where this will lead, but our continued insistence on shrugging off the problems of the internet as not real as something we can just log out of is increasingly misled. 2016 has presented us with a world in which our reality is being wilfully manipulated. Fake news, divisive algorithms, misleading social media campaigns. The majority of people who voted for Trump will never take responsibility for his racist, totalitarian policies, but theyll provide useful cover and legitimacy for those who demand the very worst from the President Elect. Trump himself may have disavowed the alt-right, but his rhetoric has led to them feeling legitimised. As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesnt really exist.

Prominent critics of the Trump administration need to learn from Gamergate. They need to be prepared for abuse, for falsified concerns, invented grassroots campaigns designed specifically to break, belittle, or disgrace. Words and concepts will be twisted, repackaged and shared across forums, stripping them of meaning. Gamergate painted critics as censors, the far-right movement claims critics are the real racists.

Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.

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What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right ...

Back in 1993, Depeche Mode singer Dave Gahan suffered a minor heart attack onstage during a show in New Orleans brought on by an exhausting touring schedule and heavy drug and alcohol use.

But just a month ago, Gahans heart skipped a beat for an entirely different reason.

As the Brit band (who have sold more than 100 million albums during the past 37 years) was beginning to promote its new album, Spirit, white supremacist and self-professed Mode mega-fan Richard Spencer said that the electro-pioneers were the official band of the alt-right, in an interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, before being kicked out by CPAC organizers.

My phone kept ringing and ringing, Gahan, 54, tells The Post, still incredulous at the thought. I had to tell everyone, No, were not the official band of the alt-right. Hes recounting the story during an interview at the Avatar Studios in Hells Kitchen (formerly the Power Station) where Madonna recorded Like a Virgin, and artists such as Springsteen and The Rolling Stones also made classic albums.

I could understand some commie jumping on us because of our history and working-class background, Gahan says. But this was ridiculous.

The band said as much in a polite but firmly worded statement distancing themselves from Spencer and his extremist politics. In person, Gahan is far less courteous.

Hes a dangerous person hes well-educated and hes using it to promote hate and fear. I saw the video of him getting punched [during protests at the inauguration of President Trump]; he deserved it.

I could understand some commie jumping on us because of our history and working-class background. But this was ridiculous.

As surreal as that particular episode was, its strangely fitting that it would happen in the run-up to the release of Depeche Modes most politically and socially conscious album in years. Lead single Wheres the Revolution sets the tone. But Gahan says Spirit (out March 17), the bands 14th album, is less about insurrection than it is about information.

Fundamentally, this album is about being informed, he explains. Even my son Jimmy will say to me, Be careful what you read in the New York Times. Make sure you read other stuff to balance it out. He bought me a subscription to the Atlantic so I could read the same story, but from a slightly different perspective.

Compared to the brooding, stripped-down 2013 collection Delta Machine, Spirit sees the band returning to a more classic Depeche Mode sound that helped the group (completed by keyboardist/guitarist Martin Gore and keyboardist/bassist Andy Fletcher) build up a cult fan base during the 80s.

After forming in Basildon, England, and releasing their debut Speak & Spell in 1981, the band won gradual critical acclaim with albums such as Black Celebration (1986) and Music for the Masses (1987). By 1990, singles such as Enjoy the Silence, Personal Jesus and Policy of Truth (from Violator) sent them into the mainstream.

Although its been years since theyve had Billboard Hot 100 hits on that scale, their fans still fill up arenas all over the world as a matter of course, and New York City is no exception. The band will play two nights at Madison Square Garden in September 30 years after they first played the venue.

This year also marks a personal anniversary for Gahan. The frontman moved to New York City in 1997 and cleaned up, following a period living Los Angeles that coincided with the absolute nadir of his drug addiction. His heart famously stopped for two minutes in 1996 following an overdose of cocaine and heroin. Gahans life was saved by paramedics, who thankfully revived him.

Gahan and his wife, Jennifer, have a 17-year-old daughter, Stella Rose. Their son, Jimmy, is in his 20s. Gahan also has a son, Jack, 29, from an earlier marriage.

These days, Gahans exercise regimen has left the singer looking like a picture of health. At a recent interview, hes slim, dressed in black, boasts salt-and-pepper hair (mainly pepper), and allows himself a tasteful amount of gold jewelry on his fingers and wrists.

Although Gahan still speaks with a broad southern English accent, you can hear the experience of 20 years in Gotham inform his opinions and conversation. He talks about gentrification, real estate prices and the changing face of downtown Manhattan with all the brio and savvy of a chatty yellow-cab driver.

Hes even a long-suffering New York Knicks season-ticket holder, explaining that he goes to most games with Jimmy. He was always been into basketball, and it was a great thing to do as a bonding exercise, Gahan says. Theyre not doing that well, I admit. Melo [Carmelo Anthony] puts up the points, but its better when he notices the rest of the team and pulls them in! My favorite player is probably [Kristaps] Porzingis. Hes already great, but I think hes gonna develop into something really special.

Over the years, living in New York City also brought Gahan a little closer to one of his musical heroes, David Bowie. Gahan and Bowie first met in 2002, when Bowie played his classic album Low at an invitation-only show at Roseland Ballroom. The two developed a friendly relationship as their daughters both went to the Little Red School House in the Village.

Id see David at the school Christmas concert and things like that, he says. Youd see him with his flat cap on! Then he disappeared for about a year, and the next time I did see him at another school thing, he looked different. I said to my wife, He doesnt look well. That was a couple of years before he died.

For Gahan, it was much more than just a celebrity sighting. Not only was Bowie a central inspiration for all members of the group, he was also the reason Gahan ended up as singer. In 1980, Gore, Fletcher and Depeche Mode founding member Vince Clarke were in a group called Composition of Sound, but were struggling for a real frontman. They happened to hear Gahan singing Bowies Heroes in an adjacent rehearsal room, and invited him to join. It wasnt just me singing, it was a few people singing, but I said it was me, Gahan says with a laugh. Thats how I blagged [faked] my way into Depeche Mode.

On the morning of Jan. 10, 2016, Gahans wife, Jennifer, told him about Bowies death and he immediately broke down. I hadnt cried like that in a long time, he says. I regret not talking more to him and telling him how much his music brought me through my whole life. Without punk music and people like him, I probably would have ended up being a petty thief, stealing lead off roofs!

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Depeche Mode rails against the alt-right - New York Post

What does the alt-right really want?

Last month the white nationalist Counter-Currents editor John Morgan laid out the movements principles at a talk in Stolkholm. A slick infographic of nine core demands of the alt-right was later posted online.

At first glance, the demands and language appear surprisingly tame.

So Mark Pitcavage, a researcher for the Anti-Defamation League, offered his own annotation, parsing out meanings and references to the nine parts of the manifesto that might escape everyday readers.

Alt-right: Strong, high-trust communities for our people. ADL translation: They hate non-whites and really seek a whites only society.

Alt-right: Protection from the globalist elite. ADL translation: For the Alt Right, globalist elite is mostly Jews.

Alt-right: Protection from international corporate oppression. ADL translation: They dont want trade with Jews and non-whites.

See the full annotated document here. (And heres the original graphic, without the annotation)

Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum

Excerpt from:
What Does The 'Alt-Right' Want? The ADL Explains In A Handy Graphic - Forward

Marco Rullkoetter/Getty

Readers of The Right Stuff long knew that founder "Mike Enoch" had two main interests: technology and white supremacy. Posts on the neo-Nazi site have included discussion of "a new blogging platform built on node.js," while other less techie content has alluded to the "chimpout" in Ferguson, putting Jews in ovens, and Trump's "top-tier troll" of Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In January, Enoch was outed as Mike Peinovich, a Manhattan-based software engineer. His unmasking highlighted a lingering question about the racist far-right movement that rose to prominence with Donald Trump's election: What support might the so-called alt-right have among techies?

Ever since I began investigating the extremist groups lining up behind Trump last spring, several of their leaders have made big claims to me about an alt-right following in Silicon Valley and across the broader tech industry. "The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year old tech-savvy guy working in IT," white nationalist Richard Spencer insisted when I interviewed him a few weeks before the election. "I have seen so many people like that." Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, told me he gets donations from Silicon Valley, and that Santa Clara County, home to Apple and Intel, is his site's largest traffic source. Chuck Johnson, the publisher of the conspiracy-mongering site Got News, said he gets lots of pageviews from the Bay Area.

"If you even try to posit that racism and sexism aren't why women and minorities aren't making it, that it's some combination of talent and values, people's heads just explode."

After Peinovich was outed, he also insisted to me that many techies secretly identify with the alt-right, which he attributed to a backlash against the "corporate feminist and diversity agenda" of tech companies. "The fact that speaking up about this virtually guarantees career and social suicide, as in my case, shows why so many white males in tech would be attracted to the alt-right."

None of these alt-right figures would provide any data to support their claims. As I've reported, some alt-right sites have wildly overstated their reach. Moreover, the tech industry is renowned for its globalist outlook: Public opinion surveys conducted by a Stanford political economist have found that rank-and-file workers in Silicon Valley exhibit less racial resentment and more favorable views towards most forms of immigration than average Americans.

Nonetheless, "alt-techies" as Spencer and others call them, do appear to play a role in a movement that first incubated in the backwaters of the internet and eventually spread online with the rise of Trump. Some heroes of the far right are associated with tech: They include former Breitbart News "tech editor" Milo Yiannopoulos; the infamous neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer (a.k.a. Weev); and the video gaming vlogger Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, whose "Pewdiepie" YouTube channel featuring Nazi-themed jokes has 54 million subscribers. (Last monthKjellberg apologized for the jokes and said he is not a Nazi).

There are also successful figures in the tech industry who appeal to and have commingled with the alt-right: The DeploraBall, a gathering of far-right activists and conspiracy theorists during Trump's inauguration, was co-organized by software investor Jeff Giesea and attended by tech billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel. San Francisco-based tech entreprenuer Curtis Yarvin is known for launching the pro-authoritarian "neoreactionary" movement and reportedly has been in contact with Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon. (Yarvin denies this.) Giesea and Yarvin, both of whom I interviewed, reject the "alt-right" label for its associations with white nationalism, yet they share the movement's disdain for the race and gender politics of the left. (Thiel's media representative did not respond to a request for comment from him.)

To further gauge the influence of the alt-right in tech, I interviewed seven people in the industry who embrace aspects of the movement. They included current or former employees of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter, some of whom responded to me after I reached out to them through their Facebook pages. They asked that I not publish their names, citing concerns about their jobs. I also interviewed two techies associated with the Daily Stormer; one declined to disclose his identity to me but has a posting history on the site indicative of working in tech in the Bay Area.

Three of the alt-techies I interviewed said explicitly that they were white nationalists. The others did not identify that way, but they emphasized their belief in racial or gender differences in IQ or social behavior, and strongly rejected identity politics, affirmative action, and what they see as toxic political correctness. Their views shed light on how the alt-right has found a receptive audience on the margins, at least, of the tech world.

A former product manager for a top tech company who now consults for Twitter told me that white and Asian male domination in the tech sector has more to do with innate abilities and culture than discrimination. "If you even try to posit that racism and sexism aren't why women and minorities aren't making it, that it's some combination of talent and values, people's heads just explode," he says. "They just refuse to even float the idea."

"I'm not necessarily saying any one race is bad," says "Mark," a former software developer for Yahoo and Facebook. "But we should at least agree that statistically race and sex genes do make us differ enough on average to make things uneven in certain areas."

"The history of nearly every field of science and engineering was driven by white Europeans," declares a 45-year-old computer chip designer who says he lives in Berkeley, and who posts under the name "White Morpheus" on the Daily Stormer. "Nobody will say their real feelings [about the alt-right] because a mob of fat blue-hair complainers will drive you away from your career forever. Peter Thiel coming out [for Trump] was a joy to us all, because he could show his support for the Trump train where we could not."

In 1990, Ku Klux Klan "Grand Dragon" Don Black created Stormfront as a dial-up computer bulletin board for former KKK leader David Duke's campaign for Louisiana governor. By 1995 it had evolved into the first major public website dedicated to promoting white supremacy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. But online hate speech mostly remained confined to its traditional base of neo-Nazis and Klansmen until the launch in 2003 of 4chan. Originally conceived as an anonymous message board for discussing Japanese anime and manga, 4chan attracted a cult following among techies at around the same time that its political discussion board, now known as /pol/ (short for "politically incorrect"), became a hotbed for racist jokes and ironically intended Hitler memes.

A Hitler meme on 4chan

The political glue binding the predominately young, male 4chan community is essentially anti-leftist: a disdain for identity politics and so-called "social justice warriors." This attitude thrives amid a culture of anonymity, in which status ostensibly comes from pageviews rather than one's gender, ethnic, or social background. "Larry," a software engineer for Google and alt-right fan, points to the infamous 4chan post, "There are no girls on the internet," where one 4channer profanely lectures another about how online life is a meritocracy in which gender should play no role.

Yet, hostility towards women and people of color thrives on 4chan and on Reddit, the social sharing site whose political and gaming forums /r/the_donald and /r/kotakuinaction are popular with the alt-right. In 2014, 4chan and Reddit users launched an elaborate campaign of rape and death threats against female video game developers that became known as Gamergate. They found champions in Yiannopoulos,whoarguedthat the true victims were the men whose gaming culture was being destroyed by "feminist bullies" and the "achingly politically correct" tech press, and in Mike Cernovich, a blogger who has trumpeted the neuroticism and other alleged weaknesses of women as well as what he claims to be thecriminal proclivitiesof certain ethnic groups. When former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao last year banned five "harassing subreddits," including one called ShitNiggersSay, the move unleashed weeks of bigoted trolling (a.k.a. "shitposting") and digital vandalism on the siteand a migration to a Reddit copycat site, Voat. (More recently, similar migrations took place after Reddit banned /r/altright and discussion of the fake-news scandal #PizzaGate.)

The anonymity of 4chan and Reddit make it impossible to tell to what extent they are dominated by tech workers, though an abiding interest from the tech press suggests considerable overlap. "It's definitely geek culture," says McGill University cultural anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, who has studied how 4chan gave rise to the hactivist group Anonymous. "Clint," a Valley cybersecurity startup founder and long-time visitor to the site, told me that the majority of active users on 4chan/pol/ are in tech, though typically in lower-level system administrator and tech support jobs that come with a lot of downtime during the workday. Dale Beran, who recently wrote about the political history of 4chan, argues that techies have become less dominant as 4chan and similar sites have expanded, though they still play a role: "We can define [4chan users] by their retreat into the computer, which means a lot of them have computer skillswhether that's networking or coding or whateverbut to some it may have simply been World of Warcraft."

"Most contributions that built the internet came from white people," declares one notorious hacker.

Before Gamergate, Larry, the Google software engineer, was "a standard Democrat straight-voting person," as he puts it. But reading about the movement in the tech press and on pro-Gamergate websites "did highlight some of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies with positions on the left," he says. A comment in a Gamergate thread led Larry to the Unz Review, a website run by Palo Alto tech entrepreneur and former GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz. There, Larry says he was exposed to treatises on "human biological diversity" expounding on the supposed cognitive differences between intellectually superior and inferior races.

Human biological diversity has also gained currency in the Valley through computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Starting in 2007, in series of blog posts often cited by alt-right followers, Yarvin laid out a political philosophy known as neoreaction or the "Dark Enlightenment." Combining a technocratic sensibility with reactionary political thought, neoreaction rejects Enlightenment conceptssuch as democracy and equality of the races and sexesand instead advocates something much closer to authoritarianism. Yarvin believes government would work much better if run like a tech company and helmed by an all-powerful CEO president. He spoke admiringly Napoleon, whom he considers to be "kind of the Steve Jobs of France."

Yarvin's blog combines dorky programmer lingo with dense references to obscure, proto-fascist political texts. "When I started blogging 10 years ago, the availability of completely unorthodox written content [online] was mostly confined to the pre-1923 corpus, which Google did such a nice job scanning," Yarvin told me in an email. He believes that software programmers are attracted to his writings because they "are always looking for something to do with their restless, fidgety brains. Especially if it's weird and doesn't involve dealing with physical humans."

Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who reportedly gave Trump more than $1 million during the campaign and was an adviser on Trump's transition team, has circled neoreactionary ideas. "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," hewrote on the Cato Institute's blogin 2009, adding that women and "welfare beneficiaries" have through their voting habits "rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron" (He clarified two weeks later that he supports women's suffrage and redirected blame for the supposed demise of democracy on "unelected technocratic agencies.")

Thiel is reportedly an investor in Yarvin's cloud computing company, though Yarvin told me that he and Thiel have never discussed neoreaction. Michael Anissimov, another well-known neoreactionary blogger, was formerly the media director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has received funding from the Thiel Foundation.

While a student at Stanford University in 1987, Thiel founded the conservative Stanford Review to inspire campus debate by "presenting alternative viewpoints." In the 1995 book "The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus," Thiel and former Stanford Review editor-in-chief David O. Sacks argued that multiculturalism at colleges was hurting education. In one bizarre passage, they speculated that some college date-rape cases were actually "seductions that are later regretted"a comment for which Thiel apologized last October, telling Forbes: "Rape in all forms is a crime. I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise."

DeploraBall cosponsor Jeff Giesea, also a former Stanford Review editor, worked for Thiel Capital Management in the late 1990s. Last year, Giesea partnered with far-right blogger Mike Cernovich on MAGA3X, a digital operation dedicated to waging meme warfare on behalf of Donald Trump's campaign. Enlisting a network of pro-Trump Twitter influencers such as former BuzzFeed employee Anthime Gionet (a.k.a. Baked Alaska) and right-wing troll Jack Posobiec, the group spread Breitbart News content and memes based on conspiracy theories such as #SpiritCooking and #Pizzagate. The DeploraBall stirred controversy among the alt-right when Giesea and Cernovich decided to remove Gionet from their "featured guests" list after he posted several anti-Semitic tweets. But Giesea told me that he generally agrees with the views of alt-right fellow travelers such as Yiannopoulous. In January, he told BuzzFeed: "I see Trumpism as the only practical and moral path to save Western civilization from itself."

In 2014, Jesse Jackson began pushing Silicon Valley tech companies to disclose statistics about the racial and gender composition of their workforces. By the following summer, he had pressured Google, Facebook, Apple, and many other major tech companies to reveal their paucity of black, Hispanic, and female employees and commit to making improvements. But when he appeared on Reddit that summer to answer questions about diversity in tech, he faced a virulent backlash. By far the most up-voted question began: "You are an immoral, hate-filled race baiter that has figured out how to manipulate the political system for your own gain."

The comment came from an anonymous account that was later deleted; few people in Silicon Valley are willing to question the value of diversity out in the open. "If there was [opposition to diversity policy], it's probably something someone says to themselves in the car on the way home or on the bus on the way back to San Francisco," says Reed Galen, a GOP consultant who advises tech companies and has been trolled online by the alt-right over his criticism of Trump.

Chuck Johnson, who runs the pro-Trump site Got News from his home in Fresno and claims to have received funding offers from wealthy tech investors, points to an obvious outlet for closeted alt-techies: "A lot of these people see a sort of ostracism takes place [after they question the value of diversity], and they either rebel against it internally or they go online and they have a different identity and they shitpost on Reddit."

Several alt-techies I interviewed said they were fans of "A Troublesome Inheritance," a national bestseller published in in 2014 by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade that makes a case for the existence of differences in average IQ and behavior between races. The book and others like it have been widely criticized by geneticists as misleading, overly speculative, and not based on scientific consensus, but the alt-techies claim such critiques are just political correctness. "Nobody wants to touch it or admit it for fear of being branded alt-right," Mark, the Facebook engineer, told me.

"Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary," the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night.

White supremacists see the historical dominance of Silicon Valley by white males as a reflection of the world's natural order. "The reality is that for the vast majority of all human civilization the majority of makers have been white," insists Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. Weev,a notorious trolland hacker who says he does tech support for the Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff. "Most contributions that built the internet came from white people," he says, but now "our contributions are essentially being stolen from us."

Alt-techies are scornful of South Asians working in Silicon Valley under H-1B visas. White Morpheus, the Daily Stormer reader, told me that he became a white supremacist after working with "unqualified subcontinentals who were brought in by visa fraud to drive down American engineering wages" and who "produce sub-par work product." (Before I contacted him, White Morpheus had posted on Daily Stormer about forming a neo-Nazi meet-up group in Silicon Valley and using programming tools to create more video games "like Angry Goy.")

The H-1B visa program, which Trump has vowed to reform, is unpopular among many tech workers due to concerns about its effect on wages and job security. Studies have shown that the largest recipients of H-1B visas are outsourcing firms, and that H-1B workers get paid less money than their American counterparts for the same work. But hardcore racists see an opening to turn the H-1B debate into a recruitment tool in the Valley. "Abill is being introducedin the House of Representatives that will neutralize the economic advantages these anti-American companies get from gaming the H1-b visa system," a contributor to the Daily Stormer wrote recently. "If the cucks in Congress dont block it, the not-so-humanitarian motives of big business in browning and third-worldizing America will be revealed."

"Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary," the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night. The post elicited an outpouring of solidarity from many Bay Area techiesbut not from Andrew Torba, an alum of the Y-Combinator tech incubator, who tweeted a screenshot of the post with the line: "Build the wall."

When other Y-Combinator graduates began criticizing Torba on Facebook, he waded into the fray: "All of you: Fuck off," he wrote. "Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it." Using an alt-right term meant to demean mainstream conservatives, he added: "I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a president into office, cucks."

Y-Combinator soon banned Torba from its alumni network for "speaking in a threatening, harassing way towards other YC founders," in violation of its ethics policy. Torba denied threatening or harassing YC founders and called the ban "a quintessential example of Silicon Valley censorship in action." He later turned down my request to speak with him about the incident by posting parts of my email to him on social media with the comment: "We don't interview with fake news sites."

Picking fights online may have helped Torba's startup Gab, a social media network that quickly positioned itself as a haven for alt-right-ers banned from Twitter. Gab's frog logo is reminiscent of the alt-right mascot Pepe the frog, and Torba has posted on Gab what could be construed as riffs on the Pepe hand signal and the alt-right's red pill meme. (A Gab spokesman said Torba does not identify as part of the alt-right). Trump's victory seemed to encourage other alt-techies to speak up, albeit pseudonymously.

"What if some cultures are better?" a commenter wrote a few days later on Y-Combinator's popular social forum, Hacker News. "Why should we respect foreign cultures if they don't respect our own? Why should you lose your job if you make a joke in public that some people deem offensive? Why is racism against whites and sexism against men acceptable?"

Another commenter on the thread chimed in: "Based on the tone of the comments around here lately, I'm getting a sense that HN has been populated by closeted alt-right for a while now." (A few weeks later, Hacker News announced a "political detox week" in which political stories and threads were banned.)

A similar controversy has played out in recent months on Redditanother young, male, techie dominated siteas r/The_Donald has risen to become one of the site's most active subreddits. Its participants are notorious for trolling other Reddit communities and attacking people based on their religion, race, gender, and sexual identity, as Gizmodo's Bryan Menegus has documented. Citing two former Trump campaign officials, Politico's Ben Schreckinger recently reported that Trump's campaign team privately communicated last fall with r/The_Donald's most active users to seed new trends and feed catchy memes from the site back to Trump social media director Dan Scavino.

The gaming vlogger Pewdiepie, whose YouTube channel is the world's largest, made rape jokes early in his career and sometimes uses the word "slut" as an insult. Since August, he has made nine videos featuring Nazi imagery or anti-Semitic humor, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. (He later apologized but also said that the Journal took the remarks out of context). In a vlog posted in January that has been viewed more than 7 million times, he jokes about getting banned from Fiverr, a website where freelancers offer their services for $5, after hiring people to make a video of themselves holding a sign that said, "DEATH TO ALL JEWS"drawing kudos from neo-Nazis. In February, Disney's Maker Studios said it would no longer run PewDiePie's network and YouTube canceled the release of the second season of his reality show, "Scare PewDiePie."

The alt-techies I spoke with remain aware of the risks of emerging further from the shadows. "If I posted publicly about what I told you, I'd get fired," says Larry, the Google software engineer. "Even with Trump, there is huge cultural inertia."

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Meet Silicon Valley's Secretive Alt-Right Followers - Mother Jones