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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

Between three group chats Im in, the word pog appears 280 times. Its a term that has broken into the mainstream, and if youve talked to teenagers recently, chances are youve heard the word. But who is the man behind the now-iconic PogChamp?

PogChamp and its variations, pog and poggers, have grown from a niche Internet meme to a commonplace phrase for extremely online Gen Z-ers. The original PogChamp image (seen below) is used as an expression of joy or excitement.

The image originates from a 2010 YouTube video in which Ryan gootecks Gutierrez reacts to a cameraman almost knocking over a camera. In 2012, the emote was added to Twitchs global database, allowing the image to be easily sent in chat during livestreams. The name PogChamp was chosen due to Gutierrezs involvement in a promotional video in which Gutierrez and his co-host Mike Ross play pogs, a classic 90s toy. The ad ends with Gutierrez proudly claiming the two to be pog champions.

PogChamps reputation grew alongside Twitch, as it began growing prominent content creators and communities of its own through the 2010s. Eventually, these circles began growing into the mainstream, such as prominent Fortnite streamer Tyler Ninja Blevins, who appeared on the television show The Masked Singer. Twitch - and its unique culture, PogChamp included - would even seep into the world of politics, as politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Raphael Warnock, and Sen. Jon Ossoff would use the platform for GOTV campaigns.

Throughout all of this, PogChamp remained one of the most popular emotes on the platform, and grew into a universal symbol of hype and enthusiasm. Whenever something exciting happened during a Twitch stream, viewers were encouraged to drop pogs in the chat.

While the popularity of both Twitch and PogChamp grew, Gutierrezs own reputation began to sink. Gutierrez had a history of using his platform to engage with conspiracy theories. In a 2012 video, he warned about the Illuminati and encouraged his viewers to watch the conspiracy documentary series Zeitgeist. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, his affinity for conspiracy theories would be pushed to the forefront, as he took to Twitter to espouse harmful rhetoric about the virus. In March, Gutierrez suggested that a fellow streamer that tested positive for COVID-19 take hydroxychloroquine, which at the time was thought to be a potential cure in right wing circles but had been denounced by the FDA.

In August, Gutierrez doubled down on advocating for hydroxychloroquine. He continued to cite a singular article, published by far right news source The Gateway Pundit, and insisted that mainstream media and social media censorship was obscuring progress.

In a Reddit post responding to criticism on Twitter, he referred to the ongoing pandemic as a coronacircus. As it stands, the post has 0 upvotes, and 670 comments, the majority of which tell him off for his idiocy.

User ArgenAstra stated that, whenever someone asks about the pogchamp guy theyll get sent here.

Gutierrez voiced his opinions again on Jan. 6, 2021, during the insurrection against the United States Capitol. He referenced the death of Ashli Babbitt in a tweet asking, if there would be civil unrest for the woman executed inside the Capitol?

This comment pushed Twitch over the edge, as they later removed PogChamp from the platform as a direct consequence of Gutierrezs comments. On Twitter, Twitch stated it could simply not continue to enable use of the image in good conscience.

Twitch also noted that it wanted the sentiment and use of Pog to live on - its meaning is much bigger than the person depicted or the image itself. And indeed, poggers has developed into a cultural phenomenon. Many friends of mine detached from Twitch culture use poggers conversationally. Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted the phrase in October, asking if she had used it correctly. Few people reading Rep. Omars tweet would have connected her usage of the phrase to a right wing insurrectionist. Gutierrez had lost association with the symbol.

A few days later, Twitch announced that they would choose a new daily PogChamp by setting the emote to be the face of a different creator every 24 hours - the truest representation of the community. And although this decision has come with controversy of its own, as some creators have been targets of harassment, Twitch has left Gutierrez in the past. The symbol now stands for the community, for enthusiasm and for hype.

In the Internet era, symbols often outgrow their creators - usually with disastrous consequences. Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog, resents the alt-right icon that Pepe had developed into during the Trump administration. In an interview with Time, Furie states that it's completely insane that Pepe has been labeled a symbol of hate, and that racists and anti-Semites are using a once peaceful frog-dude from my comic book as an icon of hate. Still, despite many efforts to take back his image from the clutches of internet, Pepes reputation has been forever tainted by his association with racism and anti-Semitism.

PogChamp is a case study in the opposite: a creation outgrowing its controversial creator, and developing into a representation of both pure enthusiasm and the strength of the Twitch community.

And that? Thats poggers.

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PogChamp and the man behind it - North by Northwestern

Militiamen showed up proudly bearing the emblems of their groups American flags with the stars replaced by the Roman numeral III, patches that read Oath Keepers. Alt-right types wore Pepe the Frog masks, and QAnon adherents could be seen in T-shirts urging people to Trust the Plan. White supremacists brought their variant of the Crusader cross.

And then there were thousands of Trump supporters with MAGA gear flags, hats, T-shirts, thermoses, socks. One flag portrayed President Trump as Rambo; another featured him riding a Tyrannosaurus rex and carrying the kind of rocket-propelled grenade launcher seen on the streets of Mogadishu or Kandahar.

The iconography of the American far right was on display during the violence at the Capitol last week. The dizzying array of symbols, slogans and images was, to many Americans, a striking aspect of the unrest, revealing an alternate political universe where violent extremists, racists and conspiracy theorists march side by side with evangelical Christians, suburban Trump supporters and young men who revel in making memes to own the libs.

Uniting them is a loyalty to Mr. Trump and a firm belief in his false and discredited insistence that the election was stolen. The absurdity of many images only masked a devotion that inspired a mob to mount a deadly attack on Congress.

Its often all a caricature it looks like military fan fiction until its not and it crosses a very dangerous line, said Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

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How to decode the far-right symbols at the Capitol riot. - The New York Times