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"Women who lead, read," said Laura Bates, the feminist writer and the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, an online resource inviting women to share the sexist encounters they've experienced. Bates' words speak to a powerful truth about not just feminism, but about activism more broadly: to be an activist leader, first you'll need to get educated. Perhaps you've already explored the rich world of feminist writing, or perhaps you're adrift in the sheer surfeit of excellent choices, unsure of where to start. Wherever you're calling from, we've curated a list of exceptional feminist books both old and new.

In these fifteen books, feminist thinkers interrogate everything from intersections of racism and misogyny to Pepe the Frog's deeper meaning to online enclaves of sexist men. A feminist thinker needn't be an academic, of coursethese writers range from feminist scholars to novelists, poets to producers of feminist pornography. Whatever their trade or their topic, their work is bound to inspire you, enrage you, and galvanize you to take part in the feminist movement, whether that's marching in the streets or producing powerful change in your own workplace or home life.

1This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherre Moraga and Gloria E. Anzalda

$33.55

The fourth edition of this venerable anthology, first published in 1981, remains an enduring trove of foundational thought from women of color. Before the term intersectionality entered academic discourse, This Bridge Called My Back put in the radical work of developing intersectional feminism, challenging the hollow sisterhood of white feminists while drawing connections between race, class, gender, and sexuality. Forty years later, the panoply of perspectives contained in this anthology continues to undergird third wave feminism and emerging activist coalitions. May future generations of radical women fall just as hard for This Bridge Called My Back as their forebears did; after all, the future of feminism remains forever indebted to thisgroundbreaking anthology.

2Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot, by Mikki Kendall

In Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot, writer and feminist scholar Mikki Kendall writes, We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival, but on increasing privilege. This is the thesis of Hood Feminism, an urgent and essential text about the failure of modern feminism to address the needs of all but a few privileged women. Hood Feminism is a searing indictment of whitewashed, Lean In feminism, with Kendall calling for the movement to embrace inclusivity, intersectionality, and anti-racism. In powerful, eloquent essays, Kendall highlights how the movements myopia has failed Black women, Indigenous women, and trans women, among others, and how feminism must shift its focus away from increasing privilege in favor of solving issues that shape the daily lives of women everywhere.

3Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit

From one of our most imaginative and incisive writers comes a contemporary classic: seven sharp essays, each one an exceptionally hewn gem, beginning with the rousing title essay about how conversations between men and women are often driven off-course by mansplaining. In the ensuing essays, Solnit peers through politics, history, art, and media as lenses on cultural misogyny, arguing that seemingly isolated acts of sexism, like mansplaining, exist on a dangerous continuum of gendered exploitation and abuse, leading perilously to sexual violence. Solnit writes, Its a slippery slope. Thats why we need to address the slope, rather than compartmentalizing the varieties of misogyny and dealing with them separately. Candid, courageous, and unflinchingly honest, Men Explain Things to Me is a powerful polemic for a future where women can enjoy equal power and respect.

4The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

$11.99

To choose a single work from Toni Morrisons prolific and peerless oeuvre is a daunting task, but when in doubt, begin at the beginning. Morrisons visionary first novel is the painful and poignant story of Pecola Breedlove, an abused and unloved Black girl, pregnant by her own father, who suffers relentless oppression and cruelty in her rural Ohio town. Pecola wishes desperately for blue eyes, convinced that conventional white beauty is the ticket to a better life, but soon finds her mind colonized to the brink of madness. In 1970, The Bluest Eye put Morrison on the map as a once-in-a-century writer of preternatural gifts; in the decades since, it has remained a mainstay on banned books lists, with states citing offensive language and sexually explicit material as justification for excluding it from academic curriculum. Oprah Winfrey once said of Morrison, She is our conscience, she is our seer, she is our truth-teller. May the lightning rod of Morrisons truth strike these states, as The Bluest Eye is a groundbreaking text with an important place in the American canon. Saturated with sorrow and charged with wonder, it remains an indelible study of trauma, shame, and internalized racism.

5Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, by Rebecca Traister

Released just five days after Dr. Christine Blasey Fords historic congressional testimony and four days before Justice Brett Kavanaughs Supreme Court confirmation, Good and Mad is the rare book published exactly when the culture needed it. Through exhaustive and compelling historical research, Traister illuminates female fury as a powerful political toolone thats long been ignored and suppressed, to the great detriment of American society. Traister traces womens rage to the roots of the abolition and labor movements, exploring the forces that have sought to curb and marginalize womens voices, while also emphasizing the ways in which Black women have long laid the foundation for the activism of American women. Powered by Traisters own anger and laced through with compelling anecdotes from women about wielding righteous rage for constructive purposes, Good and Mad is galvanizing proof that hell hath no fury like half a nations population silenced.

6Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, by Julia Serano

$18.68

In this twenty-first century cornerstone of transfeminism, Serano, a transgender woman, exposes the myriad ways in which trans women have been stereotyped and disregarded in popular culture. Serano challenges the hyper-sexualization of trans women and connects transphobia to misogyny, while also debunking dangerous and deeply-rooted cultural mistruths about femininity as weakness and passivity. Her acute analysis builds to a rousing manifesto for a new framework of gender and sexuality: one rooted in inclusivity and empowerment, designed to embrace femininity in all its many varied forms.

7Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's, by Tiffany Midge

"Whats the Lakota word for intersectional feminism? Is it just an emoji of a knife?" asks prolific humorist Tiffany Midge in this uproarious, truth-telling collection of satirical essays skewering everything from white feminism to Pretendians to pumpkin spice. Midge, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, muses bitingly on life as a Native woman in America, staring colonialism and racism in the face wherever she finds them, from offensive Halloween costumes to exploitative language. This collections deliciously sharp edges draw laughter and blood alike.

8The Witches Are Coming, by Lindy West

Only Lindy West, one of our foremost thinkers on gender, could capture the agony and the ecstasy of 21st century life in one slim volume. In this searing collection of seventeen laser-focused essays, she unveils her unifying theory of America: that our steady diet of pop culture created by and for embittered, entitled white men is directly responsible for our sociopolitical moment. Adam Sandler, South Park, and Pepe the Frog all come under her withering scrutiny in this uproarious, hyper-literate analysis of the link between meme culture and male mediocrity. West crafts a blistering indictment of the systems that oppress usthe government that denies our rights, the media that denies our stories, and the society that denies our dignity.

9Girl Decoded: A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology, by Rana el Kaliouby

At once a moving memoir of one womans becoming and a fast-paced story set on the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence, Girl Decoded traces el Kalioubys personal and professional journey as a Muslim woman in the overwhelmingly white and male world of technology. Raised by conservative parents in Egypt, el Kaliouby broke with obedient daughterhood to earn a PhD at Cambridge, then moved to the United States to pursue her dream of humanizing the tech industry. As she recounts her quest to bring emotional intelligence to emerging technologies, el Kaliouby writes beautifully about the personal challenge of learning to decode her own feelings. Her efforts led her to found Affectiva, a software company pioneering artificial intelligence that can understand human emotions. As women in STEM continue to fight misogyny, racism, and countless other challenges, Girl Decoded is a rousing reminder that women can and should be able to succeed without sacrificing any part of their wholeness.

10The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, by bell hooks

$16.99

In this seminal excavation of patriarchys devastating effect on the male psyche, hooks describes an endemic pattern of psychic self-mutilation, which drives men to lead lives of spiritual barrenness when they lose touch with love, self-expression, self-knowledge. Hooks addresses common male fears of intimacy and loss of patriarchal status while encouraging men to enrich and share their inner lives. Although hooks wrote The Will to Change with an eye toward reforming the emotional and spiritual lives of male readers, it nonetheless contains troves of wisdom for women. After all, as hooks writes, Anytime a single male dares to transgress patriarchal boundaries in order to love, the lives of women, men, and children are fundamentally changed for the better.

11Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, by Kate Manne

The visionary author of Down Girl returns with a bracing and brilliant study of male entitlement, bound to become a cornerstone of contemporary feminist canon. In a far-ranging analysis, Manne explores the myriad manifestations of male entitlement in American society, from Brett Kavanaughs Supreme Court appointment to the unequal division of domestic labor. So too does her scrutiny fall on incels, the medical undertreatment of female pain, and the myth of female politicians as unelectable, among other forces that police and punish women. Manne interrogates how entitlement gives rise to misogynist violence, making for a perceptive, precise, and gut-wrenching account of a social framework with devastating consequences.

12Circe, by Madeline Miller

Disparaging tales of witches, harpies, and other female monsters are burned into our cultural imagination, but in the lush, luminous pages of Circe, a minor sorceress from Homers Odyssey receives a long-overdue feminist reimagining. Miller charts the lesser goddess Circes exile to the enchanted island of Aiaia, where Circes prison soon becomes her paradise. For centuries, she lives a free, feral life, honing her divine gifts of witchcraft and transfiguration while bedding down with lions and wolves. When Odysseus is shipwrecked on Aiaia, Miller reimagines the power dynamics of their entanglement, chipping away at Homers fabled myth of one man's greatness to expose a selfish man as flawed as any other. In Millers masterful hands, a long-overlooked goddess steps into the spotlight, giving rise to a powerful story of independence and self-determination in a mans world.

13I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems, by Eileen Myles

In the past decade, a new generation of feminists awakened to the work of Eileen Myles, whose lifetime of intimate and inimitable poetry is collected in I Must Be Living Twice. Spanning almost four decades of visionary work, this collection assembles an eclectic blend of Myles finest work, from their reminiscences on life as a young creative in New York City to more universal reflections on falling in love. Resisting heteronormative modes and subverting facile labels, Myles reminds us that poetry is a form of activismone that can shift how we understand and empathize with the world around us.

14The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, edited by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young

Can pornography and feminism coexist? At the heart of this informative and far-reaching volume is that thorny question, explored in a series of gripping and provocative essays authored by producers, actors, consumers, and scholars of feminist pornography. From plus-size porn to disability in porn to trans womens fight to be included as frequently as trans men, these essays demand an inclusive new future for erotic representationone where fantasies of power and pleasure are egalitarian, in front of and behind the camera.

15 The Feminist Utopia Project, edited by Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff

What would a feminist utopia look like? Just ask any one of the fifty-seven cutting edge feminists whose voices resound in this expansive collection, which invites us to imagine a radically different world of freedom, safety, and equality. With essays by Janet Mock, Sheila Heti, Melissa Harris-Perry, and more, The Feminist Utopia Project proposes vigorous and compelling thought experiments: how might birth control be different if it were designed by an abortion provider? What would our economy look like if it valued caregiving and domestic labor? What would good sex mean through a framework of female pleasure? Next time you feel the feminist project is doomed, dive into this galvanizing book for a curative and necessary dose of hope.

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These 15 Feminist Books Will Inspire, Enrage, and Educate You - Esquire

Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty

As federal authorities crack down on the far right after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the movements leaders have found new sources of suspicion: each other.

In the Trumpist America First movement and the far-right paramilitary group the Proud Boys, alliances are fracturing as extremists brand each other as potential informants. Now racist live-streamers are accusing their former comrades of attempting to turn over followers to law enforcement, while Proud Boys chapters are splintering from the national organization over similar fears.

Proud Boys Dealt Another Blow as Feds Crack Down

Until the FBI started closing in, white nationalists Nick Fuentes and Patrick Casey were the two most prominent figures in the racist America First movement.

The pair built up shared audiences on live-streaming platforms, and cheered as their fans, nicknamed groypers after an obese version of the cartoon Pepe the Frog, heckled more moderate Trump allies at conservative events.

But the federal heat is on after Fuentes received roughly $250,000 in a much-scrutinized bitcoin transfer, then appeared outside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot. The FBI is reportedly investigating the bitcoin transfer, though Fuentes has not faced charges over the money or the riot.

Nick Fuentes, the leader of a Christian based extremist white nationalist group speaks to his followers, 'the Groypers.' in Washington D.C. on November 14, 2020

Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty

On Thursday, Casey distanced himself from Fuentes and America First in a live-streamed video, slamming Fuentes decision to gather his followers in Orlando later this month for a conference right as other America First supporters face charges over the riot.

Some people who were at the Capitol are going to flip, Casey said in his video.

Declaring the aftermath of the Capitol riot a million times worse for the far right than the crackdown that followed the fatal white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, Casey claimed, without offering evidence, that Fuentes bank accounts have been frozen by federal authorities. He also accused Fuentes of planning to drive cross-country, rather than fly, to the Florida conference because he suspected he was on the federal no-fly list, then concealing that possibility from his followers.

Story continues

Worst of all, Casey argued, Fuentes planned to gather all of his supporters in Orlando, where they could be easily recorded by federal investigators or informants. He went on to suggest America Firsts members would see the conference for what he thinks it could be: an FBI trap.

He wants you to give him your real name, to show up to his event where your face will be visible, where your cellphone data will be in close proximity to his, Casey said.

Fuentes didnt respond to a request for comment.

Accusations that one-time allies have become federal informants arent uncommon in the extreme right, which has built up an entire lexicon of terms to describe the varieties of real or suspected federal infiltrators. But that paranoia has been ratcheted up in the aftermath of the riot, with the Proud Boysa group that has seen a slew of members indictedsplintering under accusations that leaders have become informants or otherwise been compromised by the FBI.

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was arrested in Washington, D.C., two days before the riot, and now faces felony charges over the possession of illicit firearm magazines. But a Reuters report on Tarrios history as a federal informant cast members suspicions on their own leader, even as Proud Boys who allegedly participated in the riot face federal conspiracy charges.

Proud Boys chapters in three U.S. statesincluding four local chapters in Indiananow claim to have broken with the national organization over Tarrios work as a federal informant. (Tarrio did not return a request for comment.)

We reject and disavow the proven federal informant, Enrique Tarrio, and any and all chapters that choose to associate with him, read a statement shared by the Indiana groups state-level Telegram channel and on the Alabama groups website, previously reported by USA Today. We do not recognize the assumed authority of any national Proud Boy leadership including the Chairman, the Elders, or any subsequent governing body that is formed to replace them until such a time we may choose to consent to join those bodies of government.

Proud Boys in Oklahoma also broke from Tarrios leadership, issuing a statement on messaging app Telegram in which they accused him and other national elders of failure to take disciplinary measures [which] have jeopardized our brothers safety and the integrity of our brotherhood.

Tarrio responded to the Oklahoma chapters departure with a series of memes accusing Oklahomans of being rednecks, or having sex with relatives. Anti-Tarrio Proud Boys responded with their own memes accusing their former leader of ratting out members of the group, photoshopping his face on rapper and government witness Tekashi69. Another meme played on the menacing Proud Boys motto Fuck Around and Find Out, claiming that Tarrio would instead Snitch Around and Rat Out.

But dont expect Proud Boy splinter groups to morph into peaceful book clubs. The Indiana Proud Boys, for example, are led by Brien James, a longtime member of white supremacist groups with a history of violent brawls. Other white supremacists have previously slammed James as a law enforcement risk (someone you want to keep away from you because you know hes going to do something to bring the cops over, one previously noted). Nevertheless, James took to Telegram this week to blame Tarrio and Ethan Rufio Panman Nordean, a prominent Proud Boy who was arrested on Feb. 3 over his own alleged role in the riot, of being untrustworthy.

Now we have another war boy and elder who is trying to snitch on the president? For something he knows damn well the president didnt do? You made your own choices Rufio, James wrote, adding that if you are a Proud Boy I would recommend having your chapter declare full autonomy from the national structure at the very least. (A public defender listed as representing Nordean did not respond to a request for comment.)

The Capitol riots have been followed by still more rifts internationally.

Anti-fascist activists in Manitoba, Canada, also claim their provinces Proud Boys chapter has dissolved. The CBC reported that, while the chapter had been largely inactive for the past year, the group was confirmed dead this month, when the Canadian government designated Proud Boys as a terrorist organization.

Inside the Alt-Right Meltdown After Failed Capitol Putsch

Meanwhile, Jason Lee Van Dyke, who registered the groups trademark and briefly led the Proud Boys in 2018, filed this week to surrender the trademark to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, legal documents show. Van Dyke previously told The Daily Beast he revoked Tarrios license to use the name after a Black church in Washington, D.C., sued the Proud Boys for allegedly burning their flag in a rally weeks before the Capitol attack.

I dont want any recourse or anyone thinking I have any control over this group, that I have anything to do with this group, or that I am going to have anything to do with this group in the future, Van Dyke said in a separate interview this week. He claimed hed tried to transfer the trademark to another Proud Boy, who got spooked after Canada slapped the group with a terrorist label.

There was one individual who contacted me about having the trademark transferred to him, Van Dyke told The Daily Beast. After the Canadian government made a determination of the Proud Boys as a terrorist group for whatever reason they did that, that individual told me he was out and he would not be taking over the trademark. My response to that individual and those who had been working with him on acquiring the trademark was that they had seven days to get back to me regarding who was going to take it over, or I was going to surrender it.

I did not hear back from anybody and the trademark is surrendered.

As for the America First movement, Caseys criticism of Fuentes has riled the groypers, who have been forced to choose between their two leaders. Fuentes appeared to respond to Casey on Thursday night by tweeting a video of Donald Trump talking about disloyalty.

Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones, Ali Alexander during a 'Stop the Steal,' Far-Right Rallies leaders, broadcaster rally at the Governor's Mansion in Georgia November 19th, 2020 as the state finishes the recount in the Presidential election - calling on Governor Kemp to help President Trump.

Zach Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty

But Fuentes supporters and allies have good reason to believe federal law enforcement is focusing on their group. Anthime Gionet, a Fuentes ally who goes by the alias Baked Alaska, was arrested in January after filming himself entering the Capitol. Riot suspect Riley June Williams, who wore an Im With Groyper shirt to the Capitol, allegedly stole a laptop computer from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Casey urged his followers to consider how they would react to Fuentes conference if any other far-right leader had been behind it.

You would be like, Wow, federal honeypot, federal honeypot event, Casey said. You would probably accuse the guy of being a fed.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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FBI Informant Panic Is Ruining Friendships All Over the Far Right - Yahoo News

TikTok star Kio Cyr is normally known as a positive presence on the viral video app but a recent broadcast of his has sparked concern from fans after he broke down in tears.

Kio Cyr boasts a huge presence on various social media platforms; with over 8.7 million followers on TikTok and 114,000 YouTube subscribers, its safe to say that Cyr has all eyes on him, all the time.

However, he didnt expect to be at the center of attention during a recent Twitch stream, during which he was playing a game of Minecraft that took an unexpected turn.

In a clip taken from the broadcast, viewers can see Cyr stop playing the game to rest his chin in his hand, trying to hold back tears. A short while later, the TikToker covers his face with his hands, obviously crying, before wiping his face and jumping back into the session.

Unsurprisingly, this spurred concern among his fanbase, who quickly flooded the star with messages asking about his mental health and physical wellbeing.

Kio, why do you look like that? one viewer asked in his chat.

Nooo, dont cry! another urged.

Still others questioned whether or not the TikTok star even knew he was live, with a slew of fans watching him and it appears this was the case, as, toward the end of the stream, viewers can see Kios expression suddenly become shocked as he seems to realize that he was unintentionally broadcasting.

Luckily, the influencer reassured his fans in a Tweet shortly thereafter, admitting that he had no idea he had been streaming.

Im sorry about last night, yall, Cyr stated. I didnt realize I was streaming. Thank your for the words of kindness. Im okay.

Thus far, hes been met with an outpouring of support from his fanbase, who encouraged the star to take time off for his mental health and assured him that he has their support no matter the situation.

Despite the awkwardness of the scenario, it seems that Kios accidental stream has sparked a conversation among fans about mental health while being under the influencer spotlight as he continues to receive supportive messages in wake of the incident.

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Pepe the Frog creator left baffled by Pepe emotes on Twitch - Dexerto

The number of active hate groups in the United States has fallen by about 10 percent in the past year. This isnt necessarily good news.

There were 838 active hate groups this year, compared to 940 in 2019, according to an annual report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The organization attributes the drop to the fact that these groups have become more diffuse and difficult to track, largely because of changes in technology. The pandemic has also played a role in limiting in-person activities.

Even then, 838 is still a very high number of active hate groups. In 2000, there were 599 hate groups on the list. It peaked in 2018 with 1,020 groups, which reflects a surge in extremism that has paralleled Donald Trumps rise to national office. Even if the overall number is lower this year, the SPLC warns in its latest report of a reactionary, authoritarian populism that is mobilizing on the heels of Trumps loss.

Technology and the pandemic in the last year have changed how hate groups operate, Margaret Huang, president of the SPLC, told reporters on Monday. They now have the tools to disseminate their ideas beyond their members, beyond geography, and shift tactics and platforms to avoid detection. This likely represents a transition in far-right communities away from traditional organizational structures, and toward more diffused systems of decentralized radicalization.

Thats because social media platforms have made it easier than ever for extremists to recruit new adherents and push their fringe beliefs into the mainstream. This was on full display on January 6, when militant white nationalists groups that have primarily used the internet to organize the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers stormed the Capitol alongside MAGA moms, QAnon adherents, and other groups brought together in recent years by their love of conspiracy theories and Donald Trump. Many members of all these groups had met online before the event, and their attack on the Capitol showed their alarming capacity for offline violence.

That public show of force was decades in the making neo-Nazis have been using the internet since the early 80s to recruit new followers. You can draw a line from the first neo-Nazi online bulletin boards to the online hate forum Stormfront in the 90s to the alt-right movement that helped Donald Trump rise to power in 2016.

Over the years, these groups used an evolving set of organizing techniques to spread extremist messages to larger and more mainstream groups of people online. They found ways to game the algorithmic feeds of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, so that their new audiences didnt necessarily know they were being radicalized. And theres reason to believe this is only the beginning, since these platforms tend to amplify provocative content.

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube provided a safe space for these different strains of far-right thought to mix and breed. For years this stuff was allowed to spread algorithmically, and communities were able to form and self-radicalize, Robert Evans, an investigative journalist who studies far-right groups, told Recode. All that culminated on January 6 although, of course, that will not prove to be the end of any of the chains of violence weve seen evolve over the last six years.

Facebook helped enable spread of extremist posts by pioneering the algorithmic distribution model for content shared on its platform when it introduced the Like button in 2009. This was an early example of an engagement tool user feedback on content that helps train an algorithm to give them more content the user might like. That means if you click Like on a Facebook post about a conspiracy theory, like QAnon, you would probably see more posts about conspiracy theories in your News Feed. Other social media companies, including Twitter and YouTube, have adopted similar algorithm-based recommendation engines, and some say its turned these platforms into radicalization machines.

Recently, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been making a public effort to crack down on extremist content, and after January 6, they promised to do better. Donald Trump has been banned from all three sites for his role in inciting violence at the Capitol. But at the same time, encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and Signal are seeing record numbers of new users, and some of them are extremists and conspiracy theorists who have been booted off the main platforms.

As these technology companies began to crack down in an attempt to curb the extremist elements on their platform, we saw mass migrations to other spaces, that essentially provide very little or no content moderation, explained Joanna Mendelson, associate director of the Center for Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). And unfortunately, it forces this population into an echo chamber, and surrounds them with propaganda with video footage, with memes, with a kind of state of the art ways to communicate rapidly further exacerbating the situation.

Efforts to push back against this are underway. The Biden administration is now working on a plan to combat domestic online extremism, while Congress considers a number of proposals to reform the laws that regulate free speech online. At least one bill wants to force social media companies to fix their algorithms and address their radicalization issue head on. But its unclear if any of these bills will become law, and either way, it would take time to pass and begin enforcing them.

In the meantime, extremist groups are splintering in somewhat unpredictable ways and finding new ways to spread hate and conspiracies online. Because we cant predict what exactly theyll do, it helps to look to the past white supremacists have been organizing online almost as long as the internet has existed and understand how we got here.

White supremacists have historically been early to technological trends, sometimes even shaping how mainstream Americans experienced them. Consider that The Birth of a Nation, an influential 1915 film by D.W. Griffith based on a 1905 novel called The Clansman and credited with reviving the Ku Klux Klan, was the first film to be shown at the White House. One could argue that almost a century later, tech-savvy white supremacists played a critical role in putting Trump in the White House. From the beginning, they seemed to know just how powerful and transformative the internet would be.

In 1983, a white supremacist named George Dietz connected his Apple IIe, one of the first personal computers, to the internet and took the Liberty Bell Network online. This dial-up bulletin board system (BBS), a precursor to the World Wide Web, allowed anyone with a modem and computer to read through endless screens of Holocaust denial literature and anti-Semitic diatribes. Dietz also published most of this in print, but because such literature was banned in places like Canada and Germany, the BBS systems offered international reach. Within two years of the networks launch, the Anti-Defamation League identified Dietz, a former member of the Hitler youth, as the largest distributor of neo-Nazi literature in the United States.

The concept of using computers to recruit and organize people to join the white power movement took off. Not long after Dietzs network went live, a grand dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan named Louis Beam set up the Aryan Nations Liberty Net in 1984. Beam said in a post announcing the network, Imagine any patriot in the country being able to call up and access these minds. Around that time, Tom Metzger, another former Klansman, set up the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) network, which was also a BBS system, using his Commodore 64 computer. The major reason for computer bulletin boards is that youre reaching youth high school, college and even grade school youths, Metzger told the Washington Post in 1985.

The extremists effort took a big technological leap in the 1990s, when the web enabled more advanced destinations for hate like Stormfront, a website that describes itself as a community of racial realists and idealists and allows registered users around the world to create basic profiles and post to a variety of message boards. The early aughts saw the emergence of imageboards, which work a lot like forums but revolve around the posting of images, and the rise of 4chan, an imageboard that started out as a place to discuss anime but later became a hub for the meme culture that propelled its white nationalist ideals into the mainstream. (White supremacists believe that whites are generally superior, while white nationalists have white supremacist tendencies but also call for the establishment of a white ethnostate.)

On 4chan and newer neo-Nazi hubs like the Daily Stormer, an evolution of the far right that became known as the alt-right began to attract attention in more mainstream venues about a decade ago through trolling and meme-making. The trolling, a tactic of making provocative statements for the sake of being provocative that often amounts to harassment, wreaked havoc on online communities and spread misinformation.

This often went hand in hand with hiding extreme messages in coded memes, like Pepe the Frog, a once-obscure cartoon character that members of the alt-right included in racist or anti-Semitic images so often that Pepe himself became a symbol of hate. These tactics helped these racist and harmful memes hop from platform to platform, leaving the relative obscurity of 4chan and finding some more mainstream traction on Reddit or Twitter as the alt-right learned how to game sorting algorithms in order to get their memes in front of bigger and bigger audiences. And because these groups at first just seemed like trolls being trolls, many people wrote them off.

By the time we go from the memes about Obama to Pepe the Frog, the folks on the far right are incredibly adept at figuring out how to use the algorithms to push their content forward, explained Jessie Daniels, a sociology professor at the Graduate Center CUNY.

A powerful example of this alt-right strategy happened during Gamergate. What started out in 2014 as a harassment campaign aimed at women video game developers and critics would become a full-fledged movement, driven not only by far-right figures but also outright neo-Nazis, many of whom eventually rallied behind Donald Trump and his presidential campaign.

The alt-rights racist messaging, white nationalist underpinnings, and anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment what had previously been couched in irony by the internet trolls were not condemned by Trump or his millions of followers. This was on full display when Trump said there were very fine people on both sides of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, which was organized by alt-right leaders and white supremacists. The ADL later pointed to Gamergate as the event that precipitated the rise of the alt-right, and Charlottesville as the alt-rights moment of triumph.

By the time Charlottesville happened, online hate groups had obviously expanded their reach beyond obscure internet forums. They were not only showing up in the streets but also very active on the major social media platforms, where theyd become adept at disseminating misinformation and stoking reactions that would increase engagement on their posts. As research has shown, the most engaged content often wins the favor of social media companies sorting algorithms, so these hateful posts tend to end up in front of increasingly mainstream audiences.

The fundamental metric that all these major networks are built around is who can incite the most activating emotion, who can get people to feel the sharpest, quickest burst of emotion and not only any emotion, but certain kinds of emotion, said Andrew Marantz, author of Antisocial, a book about extremist propaganda online. As long as the incentive structure is built around that, theres going to be a tendency in this direction.

Even in their early experiments with technology 100 years ago, white supremacists succeeded at inciting emotion. In 1915, The Birth of a Nation film twice depicted a fictional Klan ritual, drawn from the novel, that involved setting a cross on fire. Ten months after the films debut, a former pastor named William J. Simmons invited a group of 15 men to the top of Stone Mountain, and they burned a 16-foot cross. It was a first for the Klan and ushered in its second era. Some historians say that what were witnessing in 2021 is the emergence of the fourth Klan the third happened in response to the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s though this time, theres not really an overarching organization.

Whats different, though, is that we live in the era in which social media allows many disparate groups to communicate and make common plans like their plans to invade the Capitol, Linda Gordon, author of The Second Coming of the KKK, told Voxs Anna North earlier this year. In other words, they just have a very different communication structure. And that communication structure means that it really isnt necessary for them to have one single large organization.

This brings to mind an essay called the Leaderless Resistance written nearly 30 years ago by Louis Beam, the white supremacist who founded the Aryan Nations Liberty Net. Beam warned that the extremists should work in small groups and communicate through newspapers, leaflets, computers, etc. in order to avoid being disrupted by the federal government. The decentralized strategy doesnt sound all that different from whats happening today.

Online spaces have really helped facilitate a more diffused structure within the far right, Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst at SPLC, said. Extremists can join a number of Facebook groups or Telegram channels, and get the same sense that they are part of an in-group or that they are participating in a movement that they may have gotten from joining a more formally organized structure in years past.

That communication structure has evolved dramatically since a few ambitious neo-Nazis plugged their computers into dial-up modems and built the early networks of hate. Being an extremist is a mobile, multimedia experience now, thanks to smartphones, social media, podcasts, and livestreaming. And its not just the leaderless resistance strategy that has endured among right-wing extremists. A number of neo-Nazi themes namely those drawn from a racist dystopian novel from the 1970s called The Turner Diaries have also transcended the decades of technological advancement to crop up again during the Capitol riot in January.

The Day of the Rope is the culminating event in The Turner Diaries and depicts a group of white supremacists who try to overthrow the federal government and kill several members of Congress. The novel is credited with inciting at least 40 white nationalist attacks in recent decades, including the Oklahoma City bombing. (Amazon removed the book from its site following the Capitol riot.)

References to the Day of the Rope popped up in tweets and extremist chat rooms in the days leading up to January 6. Trump supporters showed up to the Save America March the rally where Trump told the crowd to march to the Capitol that preceded the riot with nooses. On the steps of the Capitol, rioters chanted, Hang Mike Pence! Their outcry came just after the vice president had refused to overturn the results of the election.

To an extent, the Day of the Rope has been divorced from some of its white nationalist underpinnings in order to make it go viral, said Evans, the investigative journalist. But the fact that you saw people bringing gallows and trying to kidnap democratic legislators in real life on the Capitol is the culmination of an attempt to mainstream that idea.

Its just one example of a stream of white supremacist lore, no matter how absurd, thats continuing to find its way into the mainstream on the internet. Even if its surprising to hear now, watchdogs have warned of the threat of online extremists recruiting new members online since the early days of the internet. The ADL published the first extensive report explaining how neo-Nazis were using this new technology to unite hate groups back in 1985.

The algorithms that determine what people see on social media sites have simply supercharged these efforts. Some worry that its too late to reverse the damage, and that the hate is bound to spill over into the real world.

The radicalization online the brain just soaking in this poison goes on so long that [people] just feel that theyre not going to be able to enact fascism with their house pets, and it becomes too frustrating. And they just need to see it in real life, said Michael Edison Hayden, a senior investigative reporter at the SPLC. There is that, and then there is the degree to which the echo chambers that social media creates presents a world in which doing such things no longer seems wrong.

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A group of demonstrators gathers by the New York Stock Exchange building to protest Robinhood and Wall Street amid GameStop stock chaos on January 28, 2021. (Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

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We are now barreling into our third week of financial meme hell. Video game retailer GameStops stock rose over 1,000 percent after it was championed by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. The stock fell 30 percent on Monday, however, leading many to believe a crash may be imminent.

What started as a half-serious Reddit campaign to rally around GameStop has ballooned into something much larger. Is this Occupy Wall Street 2? Or is this a second Gamergate? Are the Redditors that are leading the movement right now populist heroes? Or is this, as Elizabeth Warren has suggested, just a psychotic Internet casino that is tearing the fabric of society apart?

What cant be denied is that a Reddit community was able to harness its scale to bend the market to its will. Thats a genie you cant put back in the bottle.

r/WallStreetBets is a 7 million-strong subreddit for stock traders. It was created in 2012 by a banking technology consultant named Jaime Rogozinski. Its userswho commonly refer to themselves as retarded degeneratesbond over edgy memes, insane bets, idiotic financial trolling, and sharing what they call loss pornscreenshots of their tremendous losses. To get a sense of where the communitys values lie, Martin Shkrelithe former hedge fund manager who became a target for public hatred when, as CEO of a pharmaceutical company, he jacked up the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent, and was later convicted of fraudwas a frequent contributor. In a 2017 thread, a user asked the subreddit why they loved Shkreli so much.

r/wallstreetbets is a community that celebrates making risky plays in the stock market (aka YOLOs) while being unabashedly pro-capitalist and lacking any sort of moral scruples. Shkreli, whos considered the embodiment of wall street greed, thus makes for an excellent idol, a user named cuminme69420 replied.

Members of r/WallStreetBets have been going long, or YOLOing, on GameStop stock for over a year now. According to r/WallStreetBets users, the struggling retailer was simply undervalued by Wall Street. The chain is also a long-standing fixation for Internet communities like 4chan and Reddit. Theres an entire genre of 4chan post about GameStop.

The fact that the retailer is operating physical stores amid a pandemic and that its business relies on selling video games, which can easily be undercut by companies like Amazon, made it a target for short sellers. By borrowing shares to sell nowand buying them later to repay the loan after a stocks price has fallenshort sellers can make a tidy profit. The problem is that prices may rise, and if, for example, a stock borrowed and sold at $10 a share in hopes that it will fall to $5which would double the short sellers investmentrises instread, the borrowed shares still must be paid back, meaning that losses for traders caught in this short squeeze could be limitless. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Melvin Capital, one of the huge hedge funds that was shorting GameStop, saw a 53 percent loss on its investments in January.Current Issue

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The subreddits first big target was investment analysis firm Citron Research. According to Andrew Left, the firms founder, redditors attempted to hack into his Twitter account, disrupted company livestreams, and made threats of physical violence against him and his family. He announced last week that Citron Research would no longer be publishing short -selling reports.

Its this two-pronged attack that makes what r/WallStreetBets is doing right now so unique. It is collectively pumpingboosting the share priceof stocks shorted by hedge funds, while also waging an information war. 4chan and Reddit pursued a similar strategy in 2016 in support of the Trump presidential campaign. These communities decentralized a political movement, rebuilding it to function better on huge social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. What is happening around GameStop right now, however, is the first time this viral reality bending has been applied to something like the financial world at this scale. The GameStop pump, like Trumpism, QAnon, or Gamergate, is also a meme first and a political movement second. And ideologies born from the Internet evolve like any other kind of Internet content.

The subreddit gained 2 million subscribers as the battle with Citron Research attracted attention. By early last week, the subreddit was going down regularly, struggling to handle the amount of traffic it was getting. It also inspired a wave of conspiracy theories about whether Reddit was trying to censor the community, which, by that point, had constructed a manifesto of sorts.

These funds can manipulate the market via your network and if they screw up big because they dont even know the basics of portfolio risk 101 and using position sizing, they just get a bailout from their billionaire friends at Citadel, a user named RADIO02118 wrote last Monday. Seriously. Motherfuck these people. I sincerely hope they suffer. We want to see the loss porn.

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r/WallStreetBets users have also threatened to kill reporters and Jews. Last week, the subreddits main Discord server was shut down because of out-of-control racism and paranoid conspiracy theories. Users declare love for Pepe the Frog, throw slurs around, and idolize Elon Musk. Though there are wholesome dimensions to this. DeepFuckingValue, a Reddit user named Keith Gill who had been one of the diehards going long on GameStop, is a 34-year-old dad from Boston who just loved talking about stocks on the Internet. But the architects of the Trumpian culture war like Steve Bannon have so successfully appropriated meme culture that most content that appears in normal Internet forums for young men now is indistinguishable from what you would see in a Proud Boys Telegram group.

While it can be hard to fully articulate what r/WallStreetBets stands forand this will continue to changewhat is clear is that r/WallStreetBets decided to move the market in a particular way and then did so. This is both an objectively terrifying and thrilling idea. There is a visible queasiness on the part of CNBC anchors and market experts dissecting all of this on air.

Though the GameStop pump has already reached critical mass, we are at the stage in the meme cycle where there are too many mysterious obelisks appearing to keep track of and every new one looks worse. Following the main Discord servers going offline, numerous breakaway servers appeared, organizing stranger and weirder financial campaigns, like buying stock in AMC or Blockbuster (two other firms whose struggles in the real world would frighten off rational investors) or inflating the value of the dogecoin, a joke cryptocurrency that, up until last Thursdays 800 percent spike, was virtually worthless. Its value dropped almost 50 percent over the weekend.

Were also now seeing the trading platforms that prop up this world beginning to buckle under the pumps momentum. Robinhood, one of the most popular stock trading apps in America, suddenly, last Thursday, froze all buying of a number of Reddit-targeted stocks. This is not dissimilar to Facebooks attempts at last-minute moderation to stop the carnage inside the Capitol. There is now a raft of conspiracy theories about why Robinhood intervened. It is not difficult to imagine how this could develop into a financial equivalent of QAnon.

Things will probably get weirder. r/WallStreetBets connected virality and commerce more directly than ever before. The chaotic whims of the Internet can now directly be translated into money. And like every new trick an online community learns, meme pumping will most likely be used for fun as much as it will be for terror. And the next wave may not even involve finance.

Every sector of our society is being remade in the image of the webour media, our democracies, and now our financial institutions. Most of the digital populist uprisings weve seen around the world resulted in destruction, death, and weaker democracies, though. So, yes, r/WallStreetBets could, as some cheerleaders on both sides of the political spectrum have argued, finally make the market more fair and egalitarian. But it seems more likely to be the harbinger of waves of speculation bubbles that constantly destabilize the market.

If all it takes is a few million Internet users to upend the stock market, then whats stopping other communities from organizing their own financial assaults? For instance, before Parler went offline, it had over 23 million users. Thats three times as many users as there are on r/WallStreetBets right now. Some of those users already tried to storm the Capitol. What could a group like that do to the market?

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The Paradoxical Politics of the GameStop Pump - The Nation