Examining the Physical Manifestation of Alt-Right Gangs: From Online Trolling to Street Fighting

Reid, Shannon E.; Valasik, Matthew; Bagavathi, Arunkumar

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-47214-6_6

Cited by 7 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…The general resistance by law enforcement, particularly at the local level, to treat Proud Boys as a gang is due to the group's ability to sell the notion that they are just a “western chauvinist” men's club, reminiscent of exclusive, fraternal organizations (e.g., Elks Lodge) popularized in the 20th century (DeCook, 2018; Dickson, 2021a; Okfafo, 2022; Proud Boys, 2021; Reid & Valasik, 2020b). Proud Boys' group identity is of a Nipster 1 persona, that deploys humor, absurdity, and irony, commonly memes, to facilitate far‐right arguments against the social, cultural, and political status quo, opposing establishment politics, political correctness, immigration, multiculturalism, and feminism (Campbell, 2022; DeCook, 2018; Donovan et al., 2022; Fielitz & Thurston, 2019; Nagle, 2017; Reid et al., 2020; Sienkiewicz & Marx, 2022). Proud Boys male supremacism drives much of their nostalgic, hyper masculine, and misogynistic beliefs that women are inferior to men, and women's mass entry into the workforce, due to feminism, is depriving women from being happy housewives and are cutting in line in front of deserving men and seizing opportunities owed to them (see Blazak, 2022; Campbell, 2022; Hermansson et al., 2020; Hochschild, 2016; Kitts, 2022; Park, 2022; Stern, 2019; Sunderland, 2022).…”

Section: What Are Alt‐right Gangs?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Analogous to other gang nations or “umbrella identities” (e.g., Crips, Bloods, Folks, People, Tangos, etc.) (Lopez‐Aguado & Walker, 2021, p. 114), Proud Boys have local and regional chapters across the United States and across the globe (McCabe, 2018; Mogelson, 2022; Proud Boys, 2021; Reid & Valasik, 2020; Rogan, 2017).…”

Section: What Are Alt‐right Gangs?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The final element of Reid and Valasik's (2020) definition is criminal involvement. Proud Boys' cafeteria‐style offending ranges from disorderly conduct, public intimidation, and harassment to engaging in serious violence, including battery, assault, murder, rioting, and hate crimes (Blazak, 2022; Campbell, 2022; Dickson, 2021a; First Vigil, 2021; GEPOE, 2022; Klein, 2019; Reid & Valasik, 2020b; Valasik & Reid, 2021b).…”

Section: What Are Alt‐right Gangs?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…able and shareable without individuals needing to seek it out (Donovan et al, 2022;Hawley, 2021;Lewis, 2018;Miller-Idriss, 2020;Paxton, 2018). The ability of alt-right gangs to proficiently utilize social media platforms, specifically deploying memes, propagandize, enlist new recruits, harass rivals, and communicate with active members makes them qualitatively different from earlier far-right groups (DeCook, 2018;Klein, 2019;Miller-Idriss, 2020;Nagle, 2017;Reid et al, 2020;Reid & Valasik, 2020b).…”

Section: From Online Tweets To Fighting In the Streetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream

Valasik

Reid

2023

Sociology Compass

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The continued public presence of far-right groups, particularly alt-right gangs (e.g., Proud Boys) participating in mass demonstrations and protests across the United States has made it clear that these groups and their behavior remain a concern. The overall lack of knowledge among policy makers, law enforcement, and community residents on how to deal with alt-right gang members has limited their ability to intervene and prevent violence. The misconception that alt-right gangs are domestic terrorist organizations, primarily driven by racist ideology, ignores just how unrefined and rudimentary the beliefs that connect members together actually are. The reliance on ideology has limited the inclusion of alt-right gangs in conventional gang studies and has directly impacted gang scholars' ability to understand group dynamics among these far-right gangs. This has in turned skewed also how law enforcement is trained to identify and deal with alt-right gangs. This manuscript overviews the need to rectify the historical apathy of traditional gang scholars and law enforcement in dealing with far-right/alt-right gangs.We conclude with a discussion on how the mainstreaming of alt-right groups over the last few years has accelerated and the growing need to explicitly treat these groups as street gangs.

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Section: What Are Alt‐right Gangs?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: What Are Alt‐right Gangs?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: What Are Alt‐right Gangs?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: From Online Tweets To Fighting In the Streetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream

Valasik

Reid

2023

Sociology Compass

Self Cite

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“…A social media platform that has gained notoriety for sharing and propagating such content under the guise of free speech is Parler ( Aliapoulios et al, 2021 ). Supporters of radical groups such as Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, and QAnon have also been particularly active in certain regions of the country and on platforms such as Twitter and Reddit, and their activities oﬄine and online have been studied ( DeCook, 2018 ; Klein, 2019 ; Reid, Valasik & Bagavati, 2020 ; Fahim & Gokhale, 2021 ). These works focus on radical and extremist content shared by groups that espouse a particular cause or a philosophy, and hence, most of the supporting chatter either promotes or criticizes that philosophy.…”

Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

An efficient approach to identifying anti-government sentiment on Twitter during Michigan protests

Nguyen¹,

Gokhale²

2022

PeerJ Computer Science

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Trust in the government is an important dimension of happiness according to the World Happiness Report (Skelton, 2022). Recently, social media platforms have been exploited to erode this trust by spreading hate-filled, violent, anti-government sentiment. This trend was amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic to protest the government-imposed, unpopular public health and safety measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Detection and demotion of anti-government rhetoric, especially during turbulent times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can prevent the escalation of such sentiment into social unrest, physical violence, and turmoil. This article presents a classification framework to identify anti-government sentiment on Twitter during politically motivated, anti-lockdown protests that occurred in the capital of Michigan. From the tweets collected and labeled during the pair of protests, a rich set of features was computed from both structured and unstructured data. Employing feature engineering grounded in statistical, importance, and principal components analysis, subsets of these features are selected to train popular machine learning classifiers. The classifiers can efficiently detect tweets that promote an anti-government view with around 85% accuracy. With an F1-score of 0.82, the classifiers balance precision against recall, optimizing between false positives and false negatives. The classifiers thus demonstrate the feasibility of separating anti-government content from social media dialogue in a chaotic, emotionally charged real-life situation, and open opportunities for future research.

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Analyzing extremist social media content: a case study of Proud Boys

Nguyen

Gokhale

2022

Soc. Netw. Anal. Min.

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Examining the Physical Manifestation of Alt-Right Gangs: From Online Trolling to Street Fighting

Cited by 7 publications

References 66 publications

Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream

Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream

An efficient approach to identifying anti-government sentiment on Twitter during Michigan protests

Analyzing extremist social media content: a case study of Proud Boys

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