A big part of the problem is that millennial nazis, both brownshirts like the Proud Boys and accelerationist terrorists, have an ideology that's highly incel-influenced and as such is grounded in not just virulent racism but black hole-depth misogyny. /2
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The overwhelmingly white and male "senior extremist researcher" establishment--nonprofit and fed--cut its teeth on more traditional KKK/neo-nazi groups that focused much more narrowly on race as a primary organizing issue, and that organized primarily offline. /3
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Millennial/Gen Z white supremacy is highly, highly digital. You think the avocado toast likes "ok boomer"? I legitimately thought "ok boomer" was a nazi phrase for a month, it was that a common slam of old school Stormfront-crowd nazis that the new wave considered outmoded. /4
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So what we've got is a millennial/Gen Z digital nazi movement that's largely rejected the street/militia/prison-style organizing that senior extremist researchers were trained to investigate, that's anonymized and thus largely immune to CVE-style intervention./ 5
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(I appreciate a lot of CVE folks but have some personal skepticism about the efficacy of CVE even offline tbh, but that's a topic for another day) /6
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Anyway, as far as I can tell, funds for applied research on digital nazis has mostly gone into established nonprofits like ADL & SPLC. And like unions, nonprofit institutions are not agile by their very nature. The bigger the boat, the longer it takes to shift course. /7
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That actually isn't a slam against the big institutions. Institutions are a vital part of movement life cycle. Movements start as agile, small things, gain popular support, then stabilize and protect and conserve their wins in institutional organizations. /8
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Institutions are literally conservative. In movement work, they conserve our previous wins and successes. In the case of SPLC or ADL, these are legal victories, public distaste for hate groups, an ever-growing knowledge bank. /9
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That's not to say they don't rack up new victories in court and in folks hearts and minds still-- they do. But it's important to understand those victories as refinements and expansions of the large scale popular movement wins they preserve. /10
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It took me several frustrating years of anger at unions and union-adjacent nonprofits for not launching aggressive popular movements before I realized, institutions don't and aren't meant to *do* that. /11
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Movement instutions at their best flank, support & nurture popular movements. They don't create them. The trouble is, by the time a movement institution reaches maturity and comes to a point where it can provide that support, it's on its second or third generation of staff. /12
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That second or third generation of staff inherit the organization from folks who *were* movement organizers, built popular movements, won victories, and preserved them in that institution, be it a union or a nonprofit. /13
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What happens all too often, though, is that there's never any formal, conscious transition to the literal conservative stage of institution creation. No one likes to be like "okay, we represent the last life stage of movement here, now." /14
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So you get generations of staffers (including leaders) who never actually participated in true popular movement, don't have experience with the risk tolerance or agility that popular movement requires, but are still convinced that *they* are the movement. /15
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So they get annoyed at upstarts, the folks sparking new popular movement, because their read is that the upstarts don't respect the institution staff's authority as Movement Leaders™ or appreciate the accumulated knowledge and victories that their institutions have preserved./16
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I used to call this "Jr. Syndrome" when I worked in labor, because it happened most often with sons or grandsons of revered past labor leaders who thought their union's popular movement past meant they ought to be in charge of all popular movements, present and future. /17
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Thanks largely to Trump, we're in a moment of unprecedented antifascist popular movement in the United States right now. With each mass shooting, it's increasingly impossible to deny that there is a new violent white supremacist tide sweeping our white supremacist country. /18
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A solid chunk "amateur researchers" aren't so much pure researchers as we are popular movement organizers using research as a strategic tool for political education and mobilization. We're sparks in a popular movement, and we have agility the institutional researchers don't. /19
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We also have new lenses that allow us to see things our institutional research equivalents don't. Younger women and WOC have spent our entire adult lives online, facing just truckloads of the kind of weaponized misogyny that underlies incel murder sprees, all the time. /20
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I say I've been only doing this research for a year, but the truth is I've been doing it in online battles with pre-4chan forum boys as a teen, when Occupy boys looking to piss on my tent while I slept, to misogynist http://Philly.com commenter campaigns against me. /21
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There are a lot of ways my movement and oppo research background prepared me, too, but that lifetime experience of misogynist harassment, especially online harassment, is what gives me and many other women the ability to read this online culture in ways men cannot. /22
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That's why-- and I'm not trying to pick on this one guy, it's just one of the most instructive examples I've seen-- it's so infuriating when a woman flags an obvious nazi trolling attempt and a male researcher scoffs. /23
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We've spent our lives managing 4chan-style trolls who delight in not just the act of spamming us with rapey and otherwise violent dogwhistles and subtext, but also in the act of loudly and publicly gaslighting us for being paranoid, crazy bitches. /24
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Taunt and provoke and gaslight, taunt and provoke and gaslight. That's textbook /b/ trolling, and putting that tactic to work in service of racism and misogyny is the defining hallmark of Millennial/Gen z digital nazi culture, from Proud Boys to Atomwaffen. /25
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The Christchurch shooters manifesto is one long, disingenuous taunt. His act of massacre? Meant to provoke a race war. The way his 8chan fanclub claimed this act was a Mossad op even as they canonized the shooter for his "high score"? Classic gaslighting. /26
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This is why "amateurs" are doing most of the cutting-edge work in the field right now. It's movement work. Part of the agility of movement is its ability to quickly give platform/amplification to perspectives that institutions simply don't move quickly enough to incorporate./ 27
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And here's where I *will* call out those institutions, because they have an obligation not only to conserve past victory but support and flank new popular movement. That's a obligation they're sleeping on and sometimes even actively resisting with snark and gatekeeperism. /28
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One of the chief asks movement work makes of us is the acknowledgment that all folks bring different lenses depending on life experience, that we are sometimes blinded by our own experience and privilege to things others can see quite clearly. /28
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White supremacist hegemony is like a bunch of people with binoculars telling folks using reading glasses and telescopes and magnifying glasses that everything they're seeing is imaginary, because the binocular-users can't see any of it with their binoculars. /29
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But like! Just because you can't see pollen or read a newspaper with binoculars doesn't mean that pollen or those words aren't real. Coming to terms with your own white supremacy is recognizing that binoculars are not the only way to see the world. /30
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