Misogyny and anti-feminist groups are often a gateway to alt-right organizations, experts say.

Two years ago, Emer O’Toole logged on to Twitter and found she’d been swarmed with hateful messages.

They came at her by the hundreds, a small army of mostly men calling her names and threatening her. One user Photoshopped her face onto the image of a naked woman with Froot Loops coming out of her anus.

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While she was able to laugh most of it off, the sheer volume of the attack was overwhelming.

“It was a barrage of nonsensical, targeted harassment,” said O’Toole, a professor at Concordia University’s School of Irish Studies. “It made Twitter unusable for a week. There were hundreds of these people in my mentions. … It was just an intense, viral, misogynistic madness.”

O’Toole’s apparent transgression? She’d written an article about sexism in the dictionary. In particular, how sample sentences in the definitions cited in Oxford Dictionaries tended to reinforce stereotypes about women.

Hours after the article was published, they came after her. She noticed two types of users seemed particularly incensed: online gamers and white nationalists.

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Until that point, O’Toole hadn’t made the connection, but now it seemed like the two groups were interwoven into a single toxic culture.

“It was part of a wider, almost organized type of online force that was being used to intimidate feminists,” said O’Toole, also a regular columnist for The Guardian newspaper. “ They had become radicalized, they were a new conservative force painting themselves as the rebellion.

“To them, feminism and anti-racism had been situated, ideologically, as the mainstream. … They saw it as a sort of status quo against which this alt-right vanguard had to fight back.”

She has since been swarmed by the alt-right again, and while O’Toole says she’s thick-skinned, elements of the harassment are hard to ignore.

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“The only time I’ve ever been scared is when people have taken the time to find my email address and send me death threats,” O’Toole said. “Not like ‘I’m going to kill you’, but ‘You deserve to die and here’s the ways in which you will die.’

“That’s when you think, ‘Oh, my information is all online and someone could walk into this office with a gun.’ “

Some of these lonely young men met in forums where expert pickup artists promised tips to seduce women. Others organized around a video game culture that became obsessed with the notion that the industry is marginalizing young white men to make way for women.

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Experts say the trend, if left unchecked, normalizes a culture of violence against women.

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Before “DateofLies” was a white nationalist, he was a gamer.

Today, the man behind the moniker, who has elsewhere appeared as “LateOfDies,” or sometimes simply “Date,” is best known as one of the founders of ID Canada, a group that places propaganda stickers on university campuses and around Montreal.

As far back as 2004, when he was only a teenager, DateofLies frequented the gaming site NeoGaf, where he reached out to other young men about games. He told them he worked for a video-game testing company in Montreal. Sometimes the conversations veered into dating advice.

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A few years later, Date posted in-depth instructions on how to dominate women.

“To be an efficient a**hole, you first have to be a man. Basically, don’t ever be overly nice, don’t be nice period, except when she deserves it,” Date wrote. “You are completely indifferent and insensitive to girls you don’t know, no matter how good looking they are. I never get out of a woman’s way when I’m walking down a hallway, for example.”

In a later post, he comments on the Jade Raymond controversy. Raymond worked as a producer at Ubisoft, a Montreal-based game development studio. In 2007, a horde of gamers harassed her because they said she got special treatment as a woman in a male-dominated industry. The harassment peaked when a web-comic designer drew a crude comic of Raymond engaging in sexual activity.

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Shortly after, Ubisoft sent a cease-and-desist letter to the comic’s creator.

“If I was working (at Ubisoft), I’d hate to work under Jade Raymond. What a publicity stunt that’s been,” Date said.

He also posted the offensive web comic on NeoGaf and defended its creator, saying it was “just a stupid comic.”

NeoGaf permanently banned Date’s account in 2009.

It appears that DateofLies became increasingly involved in misogynistic ideology as he got older.

A woman’s worth is connected to her “fertility and beauty.”— Men’s rights activist Roosh V

According to his Youtube channel, DateofLies developed an interest in Daryush Valizadeh in 2016 . Valizadeh , also known as Roosh V, is a controversial author and men’s rights activist . He brands himself as a “pickup artist” from the United States and has a popular YouTube channel and website. DateofLies liked two of Valizadeh’s YouTube videos in 2016.

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Valizadeh has written a series of books on how to pick up, date and dominate women. He has also argued that rape should be legalized on private property, although on his website, he claims his earlier statements about legalizing rape were meant to be a “satirical thought experiment.”

Valizadeh is an advocate of “neo-masculinity,” a philosophy he coined, in which women and men adhere to their traditional gender roles. Valizadeh says that a woman’s worth is directly connected to her “fertility and beauty.”

Amy Hale, an anthropologist who has been studying the alt-right for years, says DateofLies’ fascination with pickup artists and anti-feminism is a common path into extreme right-wing politics. Membership in these groups and activism within the men’s rights movement often overlaps with the alt-right.

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“A lot of these young men feel marginalized,” Hale said. “So you’ve got a bunch of young men who may not have the best social skills, they may not be particularly adaptable or flexible in terms of how they think about things.

“So this movement requires very fixed ideas about right and wrong in the world, and what people’s places are in the world. And a lot of them feel like they are now getting the short end of the stick and they feel a particular sense of entitlement, and they feel their identities are being threatened. And that not everything is in its right place, so this means that women need to be in their right place.”

25-year-old Toronto man identified by police as Alex Minassian drove a rented van down 16 blocks of sidewalk in North York , killing 10 people. His victims were mostly women. Last month, aidentified by police as

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Minassian was a student at Seneca College. His peers thought he was quiet and removed but harmless. According to a post Minassian published on Facebook before the deadly attack, he considered himself an “incel,” short for “involuntary celibate.”

According to the incel.me website, an involuntary celibate is a man “who is not in a relationship nor has had sex in a significant amount of time, despite numerous attempts.” The most ardent incels feel they are owed sex simply because they’re men.

Hale said men’s rights activists “got into it because they were initially pissed off that the moves of the pickup artists failed for them.” In general, they feel as if society has failed them, she said. Fascist ideas provide them with a clear hierarchy that places them at or near the top.

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After a years-long fixation with anti-feminism, DateofLies’ ideas became more radical. Starting in 2016, he began subscribing to fascist channels on his YouTube account, consuming hours of videos hosted by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke or the Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin.

There are still traces of something much more innocent on Date’s YouTube — links to videos of people playing Minecraft, Final Fantasy or the alien shoot-’em-up game DOOM. But as you scroll forward in time, the path always leads to something much darker, to videos with titles like “Feminism Is For Idiots and Uglies” or “Women’s Studies Must Die.”

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Photo by Mathieu Belanger / Montreal Gazette

At some point, Nora Loreto became numb to the death threats.

Since the Quebec City mosque shooting 16 months ago, men have sent her pictures of corpses on Twitter, they’ve detailed how they think she should die and threatened her with sexual assault.

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“You become desensitized to it,” said Loreto, a Quebec City-based journalist. “How many times can you be called a c**t and it still hurts? Twice? After a thousand times, the effect wears off.

“It’s the same with the violence.”

Loreto first drew the ire of the alt-right when she criticized Rebel Media’s coverage of the mosque shooting in January 2017. At one point, she tweeted that she had considered encouraging people to smash the camera equipment used by Rebel Media reporters.

Early in its coverage of the attack, Rebel Media incorrectly reported that the shooter was a Muslim terrorist and that mainstream media wasn’t giving that theory credence because of liberal bias. Even after the theory of a Muslim second shooter was roundly debunked, Rebel continued to refer to it in its coverage.

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“I think misogyny is a gateway drug to hatred.”— Nora Loreto

After Loreto’s tweet went viral, threats began pouring in. Within a few hours, there were thousands of notifications flooding her Twitter timeline. They followed a disturbing pattern.

“Pretty much any time someone criticizes what I write, they criticize me as a woman,” she said. “It’s very rarely about the writing. They jump immediately to ‘You stupid bitch’ and describe all the ways they want to hurt me or kill me.”

Loreto says she has also been criticized by liberals and members of the New Democratic Party, but when the far-right attacks her, it gets ugly fast.

“I think misogyny is a gateway drug to hatred,” she said. “Because for straight men who might have a hard time dating, it’s very personal. Maybe they have difficulties with their sister or their mother. It’s one thing to hate a group of people who you’ve never met and that kind of hatred is a huge problem.

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“But everyone has contacts with women, so what is it about (far-right) political orientation that makes misogyny pervasive? I think it’s just purely about power. When you attack a woman for being a woman, it’s the most basic, kind of the most boring and elementary example of you asserting your power over someone else.”

In the past, Loreto has had dozens of people call and email her boss and insist she be fired. She has had people share her personal information, and she has received threatening phone calls from the United States, despite being based in Canada and mostly writing about local issues.

Organizations like Ontario Proud, a non-profit online political group that favours Conservative politicians and causes, posted a photo of Loreto’s tweet that coincided with increased harassment, and right-wing ideologues like writer Faith Goldy, who boasts a following of more than 80,000 on Twitter, have singled Loreto out.

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“A Twitter storm is the perfect target because you can project everything you think about women on an individual,” Loreto said. “You can start to make up an identity for that person. Because they’re not real interactions. But the harm is real.”

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Two sources who know Vincent Bélanger-Mercure told the Montreal Gazette that long before they were aware of his activities in the alt-right, they knew about his militant anti-feminism.

Bélanger-Mercure joined Montreal Storm, a closed chat room used by white nationalists , in June 2017. In August, he made the trek down to Charlottesville with Zeiger and DateofLies. When he came back to Montreal, Bélanger-Mercure was engulfed in a media frenzy after his identity was revealed.

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Some of his peers at the Université du Québec à Montréal say they were not surprised.

They said Bélanger-Mercure never really fit in, not because he was shy or introverted, but because they believed he was an outspoken misogynist and racist.

Many of the women in the biology program said they felt extremely uncomfortable around Bélanger-Mercure. In 2016, a group of 10 to 15 biology students approached UQAM’s administration with a 14-page document, outlining examples of what they considered to be inappropriate and sexist messages Bélanger-Mercure had allegedly sent to them or posted on social media. They also alleged that he had sent death threats to a few of them.

According to another biology student, after UQAM’s administration received the 14-page document, a representative told the students they “would no longer be seeing (Bélanger-Mercure) around anymore.”

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UQAM said it could not confirm or deny the statement because of confidentiality reasons.

Among the offensive material, Bélanger-Mercure posted a picture of a dead fish and wrote that it reminded him of the time he “hate f***ed” his ex-girlfriend. He refers to having violent sexual intercourse with women on several occasions, according to the students.

A student who did not want to be named for fear of retribution compared Bélanger-Mercure to Alek Minassian.

“He is the same kind of person,” the student said. “I was reading all the articles (about Minassian) and I was imagining Vincent. All the profiles when they come out, it’s always the same kind of person as Vincent, the same websites he goes on. The things he publishes… or he’s single because you’re a feminist and you don’t like him so he will punish you. He’s very mad about women in general.”

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The same student said that during their time at UQAM, the biology department co-ordinated a six-week internship in the wilderness for the students to study the flora and fauna. The student said that many of the women were very afraid of being around Bélanger-Mercure with no supervision.

“He was with us in the middle of nowhere in the woods. Everybody got scared of what he could do, in the woods, with all of us sleeping in the same place. So all the women closed and locked their doors (at night).”



No incident involving Bélanger-Mercure is known to have occurred during their internship. As for his trip to Charlottesville, he told The Canadian Press, “I did it mostly ‘for the lulz,’ meaning I expected to be entertained and it was indeed the case.” In the same interview, he said while he isn’t a white supremacist, “I’m not ashamed of being white, either,” and added that attempts to make all cultures uniform “make the beauty of the world disappear.”

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There is a connection between the alt-right and anti-feminism, said Amy Hale.

“This movement (the alt-right) requires very fixed ideas about right and wrong in the world, and what people’s places are in the world. And a lot of them feel like they are now getting the short end of the stick and they feel a particular sense of entitlement, and they feel their identities are being threatened.”

Experts say a pillar of fascist ideology is the idea that social hierarchies are natural and unavoidable, and that any effort to dismantle them is an affront to human nature. This applies to the divisions between genders, ethnicities or religions. For some men in the alt-right, the first hierarchy they hoped to maintain was the one that entitled them to dominance over women.

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“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them.” — Margaret Atwood

Misogyny isn’t the only entry point. Others wind up in the far right through Islamophobia or fear of immigrants. But misogyny has played a significant role in the development of the alt-right.

Since before GamerGate, a 2015 campaign of targeted harassment against women who worked in the video game industry, the alt-right has worked to launch co-ordinated online attacks. During that period, many of the alt-right’s key leaders realized that they could marshal an army of anonymous online trolls to intimidate their political opponents.

The Daily Stormer, which describes itself as the largest alt-right site on the internet, describes its fan base as a “troll army” and regularly posts links to the personal social media accounts of its targets.

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It was through this online culture, built around harassment (especially of women), that Montreal’s alt-right developed. The users of Montreal Storm and the people who organized real-life actions met each other through the Daily Stormer. Zeiger pulled individuals out of the Daily Stormer’s message boards and began trying to organize them into a real-world force. Before Zeiger was the subject of a Montreal Gazette report, his crew was becoming more and more connected to the real-world far-right.

But before any of that real-life action happened, many in Zeiger’s crew honed their hatred on the internet, targeting women and anyone who stepped out of line.

“Margaret Atwood says men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them,” Emer O’Toole said, reflecting on her experience of being attacked by an online angry mob of alt-righters.