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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.

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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.

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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.

Read more here:
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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Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube bans make hate groups are harder to track - Vox.com

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

The image of a frigid old socialist hunched in a folding chair, wearing brown and white patterned mittens and not looking particularly happy to be there, spread at warp speed across the internet seconds after it was captured at Joe Bidens January 20 inauguration. Within hours, hundreds of thousands of photoshopped versions of the image saturated newsfeeds and timelines, making it near impossible to scroll through any social media platform without seeing Bernie Sanders and his mittens.

Bernie showed up in famous movie scenes and iconic historical moments, alongside A-list celebrities and pop cultural ephemera. An entire genre of art historical works that include Vermonts junior senator have now sprung up. For days, the zeitgeist was fixated on Cold Bernie.

Despite its popularity, this is not the first political meme to achieve such saturation in recent political history. Just four years ago, a very different image exploded onto our screens: the punching of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer by an anonymous anti-fascist protester on the streets of Washington, DC outside of Donald Trumps inauguration.

Much like the Bernie mittens meme, the video and still images of Spencers punching were ubiquitous. Within days, millions of people had watched the white nationalist get socked in the face as he showed off his co-opted Pepe the Frog pin to an Australian television interviewer.

Spencer, who claims to have coined the term alt-right, treated the inauguration as a victory lap for his brand of Third Reichinspired reactionary politics aimed at creating a white ethno state. Media outlets from the Atlantic to Mother Jones profiled Spencer in the months leading up to the punch, providing a massive platform for his racist views. He reveled in the attention and boasted about his movement populated by memelords advancing their politics through trolling, inspired by a Dark Enlightenment philosophy built upon white grievance.

Spencer came to represent the larger white nationalist current in American politics that saw itself as ascendant alongside Trump. So when Spencer got clocked, a lot of people were very happy to watch it happen and then watch it again, and again, and again. Spencer had attempted to project strength and power to show the superiority of white male chauvinism and the growing movement he represented. Instead, he and by extension, his movement were humiliated in public.

The meme was a brief bit of comic relief in a moment of crisis and fear over the future of American democracy. Trump rode into office on a noxiously reactionary politics that promised to enshrine corporate power while targeting immigrants and other communities of color, refugees, and the poor and working class. In office, Trump attempted to make good on these promises but often failed, through a combination of his own incompetence, the fact that his ideas actually were not popular, and the pushback he was constantly met with, including by masses of people in the streets opposing him.

Today, many of those same people who protested Trump are now sharing memes of Bernie Sanders sitting masked and socially distanced at President Bidens inauguration. At the heart of the Bernie meme is the feeling felt by so many on the broad left: a great relief that Trump is out of the White House, but a lack of excitement about the warmed-over neoliberal Democrat who displaced him.

So at a pageant-like inauguration, characterized by participants like Lady Gaga sporting an enormous golden dove brooch that looked like something out of The Hunger Games, it was refreshing to see Sanders wearing a Burton snowboard jacket given to him by his son and mittens made by a Vermont teacher, looking as if he didnt feel much like celebrating when millions of Americans are out of work and a deadly virus ravages the country. Sanderss pose communicated a rejection of the political classs self-congratulations. In a single pose, Bernie seemed to take a look at Joe Biden and say to the world, Yeah, good. Ok. It was relatable.

Tens of millions of Americans are facing hunger, eviction, and foreclosure. Inequality continues to soar as the rich profit lavishly off of the pandemic. With a lack of free, publicly provided health care plaguing working people, the case has never been stronger for Medicare for All. The same goes for a Green New Deal, to put people to work building renewable energy and green infrastructure; student debt cancellation, to relieve millions from crushing debt obligations; monthly direct payments to help working people survive the COVID-19 crisis; and a break of the corporate stranglehold over our politics.

Yet the candidate who ran on this transformative agenda was not sworn in on January 20 instead, he was sitting alone in mittens, ready for the whole thing to be over with so he could get to work taking on the billionaire class.

The threat represented by Richard Spencer wasnt vanquished with his being punched. As we saw on January 6, the far right that Trump helped stoke isnt gone. Yet its also clear that the pro-Trump hordes and white nationalist hucksters represent a minoritarian fringe. Far from being ascendant, they are now marginalized. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and, with both houses of Congress in Democratic control and Biden as president, he plans to be aggressive in pushing through a progressive agenda.

As the Nazi-punching meme began to spread across the internet in early 2017, Richard Spencer fretted about its potential impact: Im afraid this is going to become the meme to end all memes. But it turns out it was just the meme that ended Spencers own disgusting career. Bernie, however, is still blowing up.

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A Tale of Two Inauguration Memes - Jacobin magazine