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BENNINGTON University of Michigan professor Alexandra Stern was not all that surprised by the storming of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, since armed white nationalists had earlier entered the capitol in her state during protests over Gov. Gretchen Whitmers COVID-19 regulations.

Stern was the guest speaker Thursday during the fourth in a series of six forums on the events of Jan. 6 sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College.

She spoke on The Alt-Right and White Nationalism on the American Landscape.

Stern, the author of Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination, said she sees the events in Lansing, Mich., in 2020 as a dry run, both in terms of ideology and in networking for the groups involved.

At one point, armed protesters entered the state capitol in Lansing while lawmakers were speaking on the floor. Later, multiple arrests were made, including over a subsequent failed plot to kidnap the governor.

While Stern said she understands the threats posed by the proliferation of white nationalist and supremacist groups around the country, she is possibly more concerned about the spread of their ideologies throughout mainstream society.

Unlike in the 20th century, she said, the expansion of the internet and social media provided these groups with myriad new channels to spread their messages and not only to group members.

The messages usually are spread one image at a time, one idea at a time, one meme at a time, she said.

As the internet grew, for the alt-right, It was very much about changing culture, Stern said.

Former President Donald Trumps slogan, Make America Great Again, is an example of an effective political message that is benign on the surface, she said, but also connotes a familiar call for a return to an earlier, supposedly better era.

For these groups, that means before the post-World War II civil rights movement, the Voting Right Act of 1965; a relaxation of immigration quotas around the same time; the rise of feminism, gay rights, transsexual rights; and a focus on and recent celebration of diversity in American culture.

Often, Stern said, internet messages aimed at the general public contrast a supremacist nostalgia image of America that is akin to a Norman Rockwell painting or a Leave it to Beaver episode from the 1950s, with divisive social issues today.

Stern said her principal concern about the future is the effect these messages have on many young people and how that might be countered.

In combating the current rise of white nationalists, supremacist and similar ideologies around the world, Stern said new forms of social media regulation is absolutely essential.

She pointed to social media platform bans imposed on Trump and talk radio host Alex Jones as examples of effective measures that had to be considered.

Other media also are being used to spread the white supremacist ideologies, she said, including video games, which have been used to reinforce similar messages.

A 2019 survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center listed 940 hate groups the organization was tracking around the U.S., Stern said, showing that the number is on the rise.

Beyond the United States, she said, most European nations now have groups with supremacist and/or ethnocentric views that are reflected in the significant minority support for far right political parties registered in the polls.

During her research, Stern said she found white supremacist or nationalist ideology in the post-war era tends to have theoretical roots dating to the mid- to late-1960s.

The year 1965 marked passage of the federal Voting Rights Act that barred states from enacting discriminatory laws to keep minority groups from voting. That is a milestone year for many of the white nationalist groups, she said, in that they see the beginning of a decline in white-dominated government and culture.

In addition, that period also saw a loosening of immigration quotas on people coming from non-European nations that had been imposed in the 1920s.

Another crisis year noted as critical by the alt-right, she said, was 1968, when sometimes violent protests over the Vietnam War and favor of broad societal change erupted here and in Europe.

In France, a New Right movement stressing traditional values emerged, she said, and many of the writers involved in that movement or their themes proved influential to later nationalist or supremacist groups.

Living in France just two decades after the four-year German occupation, the French movement tried to express their views so as not to evoke those of the hated Nazis, she said, providing a blueprint for many others since then.

Among the common themes, Stern said, are that these groups hold anti-egalitarian beliefs that run counter to democratic values and traditions.

And at the heart of white supremacist beliefs, Stern said, are anti-Semitism and racism, even though other groups also are targeted, including women, gays, other minorities, other ethnic groups and transsexuals.

Today, there also is a rightward trending populism, she said, which is focused on anti-elite grievances, such as being violently in opposition to pandemic lockdown requirements like masking or vaccine orders, or in Europe, in opposition to the European Union.

Conspiracy theories like QAnon are in turn one of the fuels of the rise of the far right, Stern said.

In addition to the internet and social media since the early 2000s, the election of an African American, Barack Obama, as president in 2008, coupled with a major economic recession just before he took office, spurred the growth of far-right groups, she said, as did disruption from crises like climate change and the pandemic.

Prior to 2016, when Trump was unexpectedly elected, the alt-right was primarily focused on local political issues, power on the local level, such as on school boards, and with promoting their views as culturally dominant, Stern said.

By the end of Trumps presidency, she said, during which he frequently resorted to white identity politics, an already growing white nationalist/supremacist movement in the U.S. had been building for decades, making something like the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable. Today, she said, people holding similar views can likewise be found in many local and state governments and in Congress.

A central question for Americans going forward, she said, is how to we tackle as a society the fact that these ideologies have become so mainstream, are circulating daily, minute by minute, second by second, on social media?

The far right, which increasingly is also involved with paramilitary organizations, conspiracy theories, deliberate misinformation and hate group ideologies, has become a multiheaded hydra for the country to confront, Stern said.

One approach, she said, is to remain vigilant in tracking and maintaining awareness of these ideologies, and understanding how they can influence people and in seeking options to counter those messages.

Stern, a professor of history, American culture and womens and gender studies at the University of Michigan, also is the author of Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America.

Her book Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate applies the lenses of historical analysis, feminist studies, and critical race studies to deconstructing the core ideas of the alt-right and white nationalism.

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Forum speaker describes the rise of alt-right nationalism - Bennington Banner

A network of podcasts, including one which featured former President Donald Trumps eldest son as a guest in 2016, fueled the rise of one of the core leaders of the modern white nationalist movement.

Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist figurehead during the Trump era, was one of dozens of up-and-coming extremists who leveraged a network of far-right podcasts to mobilize followers and turn his movement into a household name. This movement, known as the so-called alternative right or alt-right for short, encompassed a loose set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals under the mantle of white supremacy. While early coverage of the alt-right emphasized its members and leaders fluency with internet culture specifically forums and social media the role of podcasts as a vehicle for propaganda and leadership development has not yet been examined.

The Southern Poverty Law Center analyzed Spencers breakthrough into the upper echelons ofthe white power movement through the lens of a web of 18 different podcasts popular with the extreme right between 2005 and 2020. The SPLC found that Spencers earliest efforts to market his movement to the broader extreme right were facilitated in large part by The Political Cesspool (TPC), a podcast and radio show hosted by longtime white nationalist propagandist James Edwards. Though the show has featured a variety of far-right extremists from the United States and abroad, Edwards has brushed shoulders with members of the more mainstream right, including Donald Trump Jr.

This is part two of the SPLCs four-part report examining 15 years of podcasting data across 18 different shows produced by far-right extremists. While Spencer is but one of the 882 cast members who appeared on 4,046 different episodes of these shows, he figures prominently in the web of far-right extremist content makers.

Spencer emerged as one of the most prominent white nationalist figureheads during the flurry of extremist activity around the 2016 election, although his involvement in the white power movement extends well beyond the Trump era.

In 2008, Spencer began promoting the term alternative right while an editor at the paleoconservative online publication Takis Magazine. In December of that year, Takis published a speech from far-right political theorist Paul Gottfried outlining his vision for a new independent intellectual Right. Though the speech itself never used the term, it was key to Spencer's nascent movement.

In 2011, Spencer became president of the National Policy Institute, a think tank founded by William H. Regnery II, a mega-donor to various white nationalist outlets. Under Spencers tutelage, the National Policy Institute, dedicated to ensuring the biological and cultural continuity of white Americans, rebranded age-old racial bigotries for a younger generation of extremists. It did so through a variety of media, including blogs, journal articles and podcasts. NPI also held dozens of conferences with other white nationalist figureheads. In the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 election, these gatherings drew scores of younger attendees, in part because the institute offered discounted admission for those under 30.

Likewise, Spencer was one of a core cadre of white nationalist organizers behind the flurry of far-right rallies in the first half of the Trump era. This included the August 2017 Unite the Right rally, which brought hundreds of white supremacists and other far-right extremists to Charlottesville, Virginia. The event devolved into violent skirmishes, culminating in the murder of antiracist activist Heather Heyer by James Alex Fields Jr. A few months later, at Spencers Oct. 19 appearance at the University of Florida as part of his brief college tour, three of his supporters were arrested on charges of attempted homicide for allegedly firing at protesters.

Today, he is one of over a dozen defendants named as organizers of Unite the Right in the Sines v. Kessler civil lawsuit. NPI has remained largely dormant in the years following the fracturing of the alt-right in 2018. Spencer made at least two attempts to launch new podcasts, including The McSpencer Group and Radix Live, named after one of NPIs publications, Radix Journal.

On Oct. 24, 2009, less than a year after beginning to promote the term alternative right, Spencer made his first appearance on The Political Cesspool (TPC), a podcast and radio show hosted by James Edwards. Over the course of Spencers next two dozen or so appearances on TPC, Edwards used his prominent platform within the broader far-right movement to promote Spencer as a core member of the white nationalist intelligentsia.

Edwards, a board member of the Council of Conservative Citizens and a principal member of the white nationalist American Freedom Party, started TPC in 2004 as a terrestrial radio show, though it has since branched out to internet broadcasting. TPCs mission statement includes white nationalist rhetoric, claiming that it stands for the Dispossessed Majority and is pro-White.

As part of TPCs five-year anniversary special, Spencer appeared alongside Paul Gottfried to discuss the failure of the conservative movement. Edwards introduced Spencer as the Managing Editor of TakiMag.com and an intellectual heavyweight. Within the first ten minutes of the interview, Spencer began promoting his vision for a new far-right movement.

Weve got to find a new tactic that isnt just about kicking the neoconservatives out of the [conservative] movement. I dont think thats possible or desirable. Weve got to find a new right wing, he said during the interview. Spencer added that he had begun to refer to this movement as the alternative right, a collection of different groups or individuals who are basically not falling into that lesser-of-two-evils logic that he claimed was used by some far-right extremists to justify voting for Republican candidates such as the late John McCain.

The discussion was notable in two regards. First, Spencers efforts to introduce the alternative right as a concept to TPC listeners came long before the term had begun to take root among far-right extremists. Spencers TPC appearance came less than a year after Gottfried presented his vision for a nationalist, populist right-wing in a speech at the H.L. Mencken Club. Spencer published Gottfrieds speech on Takis Magazines website, under the title The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right, in December 2009. The term stuck, and over the course of the next year, Takis Magazine, under Spencers editorship, would publish several articles laying the groundwork for this alternative right.

Second, Spencers appearance on TPC allowed him to reach a broader constituency within the far right. Edwards, a Tennessee resident, had long tailored the show for a Southern white nationalist and neo-Confederate audience two audiences that would become crucial partners for Spencer and other organizers during the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Throughout the episode, both Edwards and Spencer urged far-right activists to come together, with Edwards emphasizing that their survival depended on it. Likewise, throughout the segment, Spencer and, later, Gottfried sought to draw listeners to their causes. Spencer, Gottfried and Edwards encouraged listeners to attend the H.L. Mencken Clubs second annual meetup.

Between 2009 and 2020, Spencer appeared another 29 times on TPC broadcasts. The bibliographical details of each appearance provide a timeline for his development as a white nationalist leader, as well as for the alt-rights rise.

Most of Spencers 30 appearances on The Political Cesspool pre-date his notoriety in the popular press by several years. Through The Political Cesspool, he was able to use the airtime to establish himself as an intellectual leader within the broader extreme right, while also drawing listeners deeper into the world of far-right activism through attendance at in-person events. Spencer continued to organize, promote and attend white nationalist meetups and conferences, including infamously in 2016 when he catapulted into the public eye after yelling Hail Trump! and Hail victory! an English translation of the Nazi chant Sieg Heil during an event in Washington, D.C.

During this time, too, Spencers appearances on the show coincided with a range of notable guests. Representatives from the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist group with roots in the efforts to oppose school desegregation in the 1950s, were frequent guests, joining Edwards show some 58 times between 2005 and 2020. It also featured a variety of racist thinkers who figured into the alt-rights growth during the 2016 election. These included Jared Taylor, editor of the white nationalist publication American Renaissance, who appeared on the show 52 times during this period; Sam Dickson, a former lawyer for the Ku Klux Klan who appeared 36 times; and Kevin MacDonald, a retired university professor and author of several antisemitic tomes. MacDonald appeared 35 times. Many of these figures had, like Spencer, nurtured a deliberately more mainstream image to hide their extremist views.

But Edwards also hosted politicians, from the United States and abroad. In 2012, Rep. Walter B. Jones, a Republican from North Carolina, went on the show to discuss troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. (He later claimed he was unaware of the shows political leanings.) Rep. Nick Griffin, of the far-right British National Party, made multiple appearances on the show, joining Edwards program five times. Finally, Edwards interviewed Donald Trump Jr. in March 2016 on a sister program, Liberty Roundtable. There, the two disparaged immigrants, particularly undocumented ones. Trump Jr. later claimed Edwards was brought into the interview without my knowledge.

While Spencer continued to appear on The Political Cesspool throughout the 2010s, an array of newer white nationalist podcasts provided him a variety of different platforms from which to promote and grow the alt-right. These shows, many of which were produced by and for a younger generation of white supremacists, tended to appeal to a younger, more digitally savvy, audience.

Spencer became a regular fixture on The Right Stuff podcasting circuit in fall of 2015. On Oct. 13, 2015, Spencer joined The Daily Shoah for the first time. The show was recorded in the runup to NPIs annual conference, held around Halloween of that year. It included a brief promotional segment, dubbed the NPI Conference Haircut Contest, where Spencer judged TRS listeners undercuts a type of hairstyle where the sides of the head are shaved or buzzed, and the top is left at a longer length. NPI awarded the winner a free ticket to its annual conference, held that year in Philadelphia.

After this initial appearance on The Daily Shoah, Spencers involvement with other shows in the podcast network grew. While Spencer appeared on 95 episodes of nine different podcasts from 200920, his appearances on five of these nine shows coincided with an upswing in street mobilization between 2016 and 2018 by far-right extremists throughout the country. Spencer used many of these appearances to either promote future events or shape the narrative after a high-profile event, such as Unite the Right or press conferences.

Richard Spencers podcast appearances, over time. Each blue dot in the timeline represents one episode in which he appeared.

Some of these discussions brought together other prominent organizers as well. The diagram below shows Spencer's diverse set of co-appearances with dozens of cast members from multiple podcasts over an 11-year period, from 2009 to 2020.

Richard Spencer (green circle at center) co-appeared with dozens of guests on nine different podcast series between 2009-20

In 2016, Spencer appeared with Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer on an episode of Between Two Lampshades a spin-off of The Daily Shoah, named after the Zach Galifianakis talk show Between Two Ferns to promote a speaking engagement at Texas A&M University. Following the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017, Spencer joined two TRS podcasts to break down what happened in Charlottesville. In an episode posted Aug. 13, 2017, Spencer joined Matthew Gebert, then a State Department official and TRS organizer known in white supremacist circles as Coach Finstock; fellow Unite the Right organizer Elliott Kline, who used pseudonym Eli Mosley; and the rest of usual cast of The Daily Shoah to unpack what happened at Unite the Right. A few weeks later, on Aug. 21, 2017, Spencer joined the Fash the Nation podcast, along with Third Rail host Norman Asa Garrison III. In the first 10 minutes of the two-hour episode, Spencer and Garrison sought to shift the blame for the violence at Unite the Right from the far right to antiracist protesters.

Spencers extensive cooperation with other prominent alt-right podcasts declined in the aftermath of Unite the Right. In 2019, he launched The McSpencer Group, a podcast and talk show. While the show has managed to attract a small number of rotating cast members, Spencer himself has appeared on just two other podcasts in the SPLCs data set between 2019 and 2020, signifying a retrenchment back into his own work and away from other figures in the movement.

Link:
Inside the Far-right Podcast Ecosystem, Part 2: Richard Spencer's Origins in the Podcast Network - Southern Poverty Law Center

As an attorney who has personally taken on a conspiracy theorist who believes himself above the law, I have followed the litigation in Texas against Alex Jones with keen interest.

Alex Jones whining about the unfairness of the legal system is the height of hypocrisy. Jones built an alt-right media empire reliant on legal protections that shielded him from being held responsible for the very real harm that he caused to innocent people. His ability to spout hate and vitriol is largely protected by the First Amendment and other state and federal laws. Hes used the platform provided by the protections in the American legal system to peddle snake-oil remedies around the globe and line his own pocketbook. And yet, even in the event of a judgment, his personal assets are largely shielded by laws that prohibit creditors from taking his home, his retirement accounts, and many kinds of other assets. He thrives precisely because of the rule of law.

But sauce for the goose is now sauce for the gander. Having been haled into court for his defamatory attacks on innocent parents who lost their children at Sandy Hook, Jones steadfastly declined to abide by the rules of civil procedure and orders of the court. He refused to turn over documents and other evidence that likely demonstrated his knowledge that his statements about Sandy Hook and about the victims parents were false all along. Hes outrageously called upon his army of disbelievers to deliver the plaintiffs counsels head on a pike. Jones presumes the legal system should protect him, but should not govern him.

We saw the same duplicity in our recent litigation against another Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist, James Fetzer. There, Fetzer refused to follow the rules of civil procedure to be held to the same standard as any other litigant in our judicial system. The court applied the rules and correctly found that Fetzer had defamed our client, Lenny Pozner, whose young son was undeniably and tragically murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. A jury applied the rules given to it by the court, considered the evidence and awarded Pozner $450,000.

Fetzer, like Jones, refused to abide by court orders. His intentional, repeated violation of court orders resulted in sanctions of another $650,000. And yet, like Jones, Fetzer complains incessantly that the judge, and the legal system itself, in our case was unfair. But like Jones, Fetzer still benefits from rules and laws that enable him to shield nearly all of his assets from that $1.1 million judgment.

This double standard is representative of a larger wave of duplicity among right-wing firebrands. They wring their hands and gnash their teeth at the alleged erosion of American values. They espouse a supposed love of country and cry for a return to the good old days of law and order. But they are the first to cry foul when held to account for their flagrant violations of those very laws and rules.

Freedom of speech is treasured in America, but even fundamental rights come with limitations. Speech is protected, for instance, but it is illegal to threaten to assassinate the president. Weve enacted laws that make it a crime to shoot another person you may think wronged you in some way. We attempt to protect the greater public by outlawing drunk driving, mandating seatbelt use, and gasp! wearing masks in the face of a global pandemic. Some people, no matter the evidence, refuse to recognize or comply with these social pacts. And nothing does more to both communicate these false narratives or shield those who propagate them from even so much as the public shame that ought to attach to spreading such hurtful lies than the internet.

The American court system is uniquely positioned to address the demonstrably false, harmful speech propagated and spread through a largely unregulated internet like a viral alt-right opium. We have rules in place that dictate what behavior or speech is legally acceptable, and a process by which we can legally prove certain speech to be false. Our juries determine the cost associated with illegal, harmful speech. And today, where the majority of people understand on some level that we are fundamentally connected to and impacted by the actions of others, pursuing people who wish to take advantage of the benefits of our legal system while simultaneously and intentionally attempting to avoid legal obligations imposed by that system is critical.

From election results to international influence on our political system, the truth matters and is at risk now more than ever. I applaud the lawyers in Texas who have taken on this righteous battle, and look forward to hearing what the jury decides are the damages Alex Jones rightfully owes. Nothing short of our democracy depends on it.

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I know what conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are like. Ive taken one on in court - The Independent

The additional show of force comes as Washington remains on high alert, taking no chances ahead of Saturdays rally in support of Capitol riot defendants.

WASHINGTON Online threats from the alt-right to take a stand Friday, ahead of this weekends Justice for J6 rally, will lead to more U.S. Capitol and Metropolitan police officers on duty around the Capitol complex tomorrow, according to officers from both departments and sources directly familiar with the matter.

The additional show of force comes as Washington remains on high alert, taking no chances before Saturdays rally in support of Capitol riot defendants. U.S. Capitol Police shifts will be extended Friday, with Metropolitan Police supporting the force.

The Friday threat and mobilization have not been previously reported.

Crews quickly reconstructed the inner perimeter of 8-ft. high fencing around much of the Capitol Wednesday night into early Thursday morning, after the Capitol Police Board voted to return the security measure for the weekend rally.

Law enforcement expect approximately 700 people to attend the gathering starting at noon Saturday, with organizers from the alt-right demanding the release of jailed January 6 defendants. Matt Braynard, a former 2016 Trump campaign official, has called the defendants, political prisoners, and the insurrection a fiction contrived by the left.

WUSA9 first reported in August that Metropolitan Police will be fully activated Saturday, meaning, all days off are canceled, and all sworn members of the department will be working. The Capitol Police will also have an all hands on deck approach, Chief J. Thomas Manger confirmed to members of Congress earlier this week.

USCP contacted Maryland State Police asking for assistance ahead of the rally. MSP said they plan to provide troopers from the Special Operations Division / Mobile Field Force, who will assist with crowd control-related duties and remain on alert for any civil disturbances, according to a statement released by MSP Friday.

Braynard announced the September gathering on Steve Bannons podcast, issuing a clarion call for his followers to seek justice for Jan. 6 defendants.

As we continue to raise the profile of these individuals, it makes it harder and harder for the lefts phony narrative about an insurrection to stick, Braynard said on Bannons podcast released July 30. Whats going to define [the rally] is where its going to take place: were going back to the Capitol.

In a YouTube video, Braynard specifically asked rally attendees not to bring signs re-litigating the 2020 election, including visible markers of support for specific political candidates.

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New Capitol threat leads to greater show of force, more officers on duty Friday, ahead of Justice for J6 rally - WUSA9.com

At the height of last years Black Lives Matter uprising, a recording surfaced of a call President Trump held with state governors. In it, he made a comparison: This is like Occupy Wall Street. He urged them to waste no time in repeating the coordinated police assaults that had swept away the Occupy encampments across the country. Until the Occupy crackdown began, he told the governors, It was a disaster.

Trumps political career had a kind of origin story in Occupy Wall Street, which began in Zuccotti Park 10 years ago today. In early 2012, his eventual campaign chief and White House adviser Steve Bannon was directing a take-down film on the movement, featuring blogger and provocateur Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart suddenly died during production and Bannon took control of Breitbarts company, which he turned into the platform of the alt-right that would help land Trump in the presidency. For Bannon, as with Trump on his call with the governors, Occupy revealed an enemy that required conservatives to take off their gloves, dispense with civility, and fight for their version of civilization.

The reactionary response happened worldwide. Occupy Wall Street was part of a global movement in 2011 that spread from Tunisia and Egypt, across the Middle East, and through southern Europe. It took until autumn for what began as the Arab Spring to arrive in lower Manhattan. In New York, were still the baby movement in the world, I heard organizer Marina Sitrin tell an audience at an anarchist social center in Athens, Greece, at the time. From there it ricocheted even further, in cities and towns throughout the United States, and from London and New Zealand to Nigeria.

Wherever it appeared, the 2011 movement had in common two things: the tactic of occupying public spaces for days and weeks at a time, and the goal of unseating unjust accretions of power. Taken together, that time, space, and rebellion led to another common feature: radical experiments with what a truly accountable democracy might look like. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and buoyed by the rise of the internet, democracy was due for a reboot.

I am not sure there was as much cohesion to the opposition these uprisings faced, from Bannons media blitz to Bashar al-Assads airstrikes. On the 10-year anniversary of Occupy, though, it is the opposition that haunts me most. I wrote a whole book trying to figure out whether Occupy Wall Street was a success or failure. But 10 years on, I think the question is a distraction. Looming over anything protesters did, now, is the enormity of the crackdown that followed.

In 2011, before they were war-zones, Yemen, Libya, and Syria had nonviolent protests against intransigent regimes. The regimes struck back brutally. These nightmares began with outbreaks of hope. That hope was intolerable. Millions of people have been displaced, and hundreds of thousands killed, as a result.

In Europe, protesters did what many U.S. pundits told Occupy to do: Get into the system, elect politicians. Protest-aligned parties took national power in Greece and Spain. But the central European banks clung harder to austerity policies that put housing and decent work out of reach for a generation of young people. This wasnt as bloody as the crackdowns in the Arab world, but it had perverse effects. When the politics of providing for people who had been deprived became untenable, right-wing movements arose to blame the symptoms of austerity policies on refugees arriving from the Syrian crackdown.

In the United States, well, we eventually got President Trump, the inconvenienced owner of the building at 40 Wall Street. (I recall the drugstore on its bottom floor being a popular escape route from police.) He came to power mimicking some of Occupys messaging about economic injustice and the power of the political elite, but with a different answer: decrying immigrants, denying climate change, and I alone can fix it. Once in office, his policies gave handouts to the rich. His rhetoric deepened the divisions among the 99 percent and eroded democratic norms once easy to take for granted.

The right-wing reaction to Occupy and its related movements has been so all-consuming that its hard to remember the feeling of 2011, when it seemed like a deeper kind of democracy was on the rise. Protesters everywhere tried out radical forms of self-governance in their camps, inspired by the texture of online networks. Rather than making demands of politicians, they debated how to make politicians obsolete. Whatever ideology any individual held, together they were anarchists, in the sense of trying to root out hierarchy wherever it appeared. Egyptian Google employee Wael Ghonim created the Facebook page that brought thousands to the streets in Cairo, but he refused the mantle of leadership, calling the movement leaderless. A document passed by Occupy Wall Streets consensus-based mass assembly described its participants as autonomous political beings who were engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy.

When celebrities visited Occupy Wall Street to offer support, debates broke out about whether they should be allowed to speak or have any special treatment. Occupiers challenged each other to check your privilege, to become ever more vigilant to how inequalities of power and wealth distort the practice of equality.There was a time when the open-source website for the Occupy Wall Street assembly was a beautiful machine, publishing up-to-the-minute news and discussion and proposals a glimpse of politics moving with the speed and interactivity of the internet. If technology can aggregate peoples input instantly, why should we need a government designed for the time of horse and buggy?

Approximations of Occupys organizational details would appear on the news, recounted by perplexed reporters. For a while, the old protest chant, often repeated then, seemed true: The whole world is watching. Occupiers would talk with a straight face about the number of days or weeks it would be until a revolution came, like the ones in Egypt and Tunisia earlier that year.

The movements of 2011 put a lot of trust in social media and viral messaging, whose strength couldnt outlast the raw, old-fashioned kinds of power they were up against. Before long in Egypt and perhaps now Tunisia the democratic revolution turned into a new dictatorship. Authoritarians have taken power from Brazil to Belarus, while deepening their hold in China and Russia. On January 6th, the United States saw an attempted coup on behalf of a billionaire, the landlord of a Wall Street office tower who represents capitalist decadence like no other. Wealth inequality, it goes without saying, has only grown worse.

Now a decade older, many of those same activists are on the defensive, trying to protect what remnants of 18th century democracy we have left. Veterans of Occupy are campaigning for candidates and making policy demands, attempting to secure a more humane republicanism. They have helped organize a surge of economic populism, as well as calls for climate justice, defunding police, and canceling student debt. They learned from Occupys early failure to center racial justice and embraced Black Lives Matter. Onetime protesters have helped lead a revival of the solidarity economy, trying to inscribe democracy into daily economic life. They have backed the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Some hold positions of relative power; others are still living on the street. Some have developed software, like Pol.is, Action Network, and Loomio, that continue democratic experiments from Occupy in code. But when police destroyed the occupations, they buried the most radical features of what the anthropologist-organizer David Graeber called the democracy project.

Perhaps the protests were too utopian, not pragmatic enough, and had some things backward. But I am not interested in fixating on what the young and impatient Occupiers should have done instead. There is no simple formula for what makes social movements effective, for how to back up their numbers and networks with the power to make lasting change. But too often the focus has been on what the 2011 activists did or didnt do, rather than the reaction they awakened. Too rarely do we mourn all the hopeful visions forgotten when a phalanx of police comes to restore order.

The fact is that when a global, unarmed movement called for a democracy worthy of the 21st century, the response from those in power was no, with all the cruelty they thought they could afford. The crackdown isnt even over. Wars that began in 2011 are still raging in Syria and Yemen, and elected authoritarians are still consolidating power. Trumps favorite dictator, Egypts Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has made the crackdown a way of life. They are not done.

Democracy must be rediscovered in every generation or it withers. It must evolve with what people long for. In the early planning meetings for Occupy Wall Street, I witnessed organizers shift from making a mere demand of the system to making a space for that rediscovery to begin. I was there the night their insurgent village was torn down. That place was far from perfect, but the condition of democracy in the years since only shows how much we needed the rowdy experiments happening there.

The reaction against the movements of 2011 has demonstrated how dangerous real democracy can seem to those who gain from its decline. The consequences are everywhere around us. So much of the mess of the world right now happened because, for some, the noise of democracy was unbearable. In the decade to come, that noise needs to grow louder.

Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of, among other books, Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse.

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The Real Story of Occupy Wall Street Is Whats Happened Since - Rolling Stone