It’s yet another reminder that online hate has consequences. In a manifesto of sorts he posted before he shot and killed 9 black people in a Charleston church, Dylann Roof noted that he had learned his racism online. He even specified one of the hate sites that fuelled his hate: the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Now it appears he was also a regular commenter at The Daily Stormer, an especially vicious neo-Nazi “news” site.
In his manifesto, Roof wrote that he “was not raised in a racist home or environment.” As he explained, it was the Trayvon Martin case that
prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.
Emphasis mine.
After this terrible “discovery,” Roof wrote, “I researched deeper,” ultimately “[finding] out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.”
One of the places he conducted this “research” was, evidently, the Daily Stormer. A researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center has discovered that a number of passages in Roof’s manifesto are virtually identical to comments left on The Daily Stormer by someone calling himself AryanBlood1488. It seems likely that this was Roof himself.
Just as Elliot Rodger seems to have picked up some of his misogynistic beliefs from PUAhate, a site whose best-known moderator at the time was a regular contributor to A Voice for Men, Roof seems to have picked up some of his “racial awareness” at The Daily Stormer, a site appealing to many of the same people — literally the same people — who regularly read and comment on popular “manosphere” sites like the proudly racist Chateau Heartiste and Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings, which recently ran a long Naziesque screed, by Roosh himself, on the evils of “degenerate” and “cosmopolitan” Jews.
No, The Daily Stormer doesn’t see eye-to-eye on everything with pickup-oriented manospherans like Heartiste and Roosh; Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin thinks pickup artistry is “pure snake oil” and doesn’t consider Roosh to be sufficiently white. But he’s also praised Roosh’s “anti-Jew article” as “excellent.” As Anglin sees it, Roosh
no doubt sees which way the winds are blowing, and is attempting … to keep his media base in tact in the face of rising Nazism.
And it goes without saying that Anglin is as violently misogynistic as any of those I write about on this site; recent headlines on his site include Jew Announces a Bitch to be Featured on $10 Bill and God Should be a Bitch Says Church of England’s Slut Priestesses.
In the end, the various fine distinctions one can make between, for example, racist, misogynistic far-right hate sites that promote pickup artistry (like Chateau Heartiste) and racist, misogynistic far-right hate sites that don’t promote pickup artistry (like The Daily Stormer) seem less important than their innumerable similarities. They are all part of the same big ball of hate.
First Elliot Rodger, now Dylann Roof. In the past two years alone, two young men who read and commented on two specific hate sites I’ve written about on this blog have literally committed mass murders inspired by the hatreds they learned and developed online — and which they’ve spelled out clearly and unequivocally in manifestos they left behind.
Online hate has consequences in the real world. I can only hope that the authorities are paying attention.
H/T — r/GamerGhazi, which also points out that GamerGate icon Fredrick “Hotwheels” Brennan, founder of 8chan, recently published an article on The Daily Stormer advocating eugenics.
One of the bits of wishful not-actually-true truisms that people invoke from time to time is that hatred is poisonous to the hater. It can cause some health problems like high blood pressure that may shorten life, and causes some of them to commit acts of violence that get them punished, but for the most part it is depressing that hatred in real life is usually poisonous to everyone around the hater much more than the hater him or herself.
I’m not advocating anything because I haven’t even begun to think through all the implications, but reading just the horrific titles put out by Anglin and others like him, I wonder what it would be like if there was some miracle drug that could be tied to a symptom of this seething rage and only cause harm to the person when they were letting that rage out in writing or action.
I guess you could think about it like supporting the death penalty for bad thoughts in some situations. There may be some people that for biological reasons we don’t know about have no control whatsoever over this rage, and we would be punishing them for something they couldn’t change. For the most part, though, it seems at first thought that nothing bad would happen to people in this horrific group as long as they stopped engaging in rhetoric and actions that were potentially destructive to others.
I think it’s extremely important to teach Critical Thinking courses to teenagers, like we do in the UK*
*(although it’s currently only as an A-level subject, and only as an additional qualification offered to high achieving students, because Education is elitist and counter-intuitive.)
But in that first moment that Roof describes, I would at least hope that a bit of actual understanding of rhetological fallacies, how to spot when news sources are bullshitting, how to spot a hate-group with a radical agenda, etc, might help buffer a kid from buying into this nazi shit just a little bit.
Maybe only for the split-second it takes for an Appeal to Emotion to throw up a little red flag. Maybe only enough to feel a niggling doubt over a particular claim. Maybe only enough to cause someone to think it over a little longer before joining in.
But there must be some way to keep these gullible little shits from swallowing this poison hook, line and sinker.
Although, if someone’s going to get into something as overtly racist as to have “Heil Hitler” referenced in their screen-name, they’re probably the same kind of stupid fuck who would read the Hazmat label and still drink an entire bottle of cleaning product, knowingly.
Roof is a willfully hateful, remorseless little shit, and there would probably have been no amount of education to innoculate him against his desire to be a fucking Nazi shithead.
Every single photo of his smug little shit-face makes me want to vomit with rage and disgust.
Ugh. Sorry, this comment got away from me a bit. It makes me even more angry that any news source keeps trying to make out that he was a good kid, despite all the murders.
As if we don’t all start out as sweet, innocent little children before we make some very deliberate choices in our lives. As if his race doesn’t have a lot to do with the sympathy the media wants to afford him, making the whole thing a fucking moebius strip of hideous, grotesque racist violence.
@Shalimar
There are many topics for which “seething rage” is an appropriate response, and the only moral one. When I think about mass rape and murder in conflict zones, or about the way that abusers and rapists typically go on to have long lives free of any consequences for their actions, my response is seething rage. There are many other topics for which this is the response that all right-thinking people have. The emotion is not the problem, it’s the misapplication of the emotion.
Wait, hot wheels wrote a thing in favor of eugenics?
Hot wheels, the guy in the wheelchair who easily would have been one of the first people hitler pushed into a lake? Fucking a, zero fucking self awareness.
Like, I really can’t wrap my head around someone with a congenital disorder that would have gotten him thrown into the trash compactor as an infant in Nazi Germany being in favor of eugenics.
I fucking can’t. If I had any doubt that kid was a miserable irrredeemable piece of shit, it’s damn well dispelled.
Well, that’s a seething cesspool of entitlement, hate and rage. Definitively strongly misogynist and opposed to white women *not* being basically the property of the white man. Even though it’s not the main focus.
Very much reminding me of the MRA mindset. “The world and everything in it, including women, belongs to (white cis het) men. Anything that fights being controlled by, or anything that does not benefit (whitd cis het) men must be beaten into submission, or destroyed. Nothing that is not a (white cis het) man exists for its own purpose.”
Easy to see why there is so much “overlap” between male supremacism and white supremacism.
@Policy of Madness
Excellent point. I can come up with ways to differentiate, but even the most clearly-defined rules are going to have exceptions, and be dependent on the people enforcing them. Food for more thought.
@PolicyofMadness:
I’m ashamed that I misunderstood reconstruction then. Could you refer me to a good source / tear dear at me so I don’t continue in my ignorance?
@David
Speaking from a little experience in anti-fascist research in Germany, yes, websites are one of the most important foci for organizing hate groups. And it doesn’t matter if they are actually run by an “IRL” group or “just online”. And police are woefully uninformed as to what happens in fora and on websites. Anti-fascist groups and journalists have been working together in tracking neonazis on the web, connecting the dots and tracing networks.
This actually helped stop terrorists before they could strike. I remember a case in which an anti-fascist group tipped police off to a guy who had already constructed a nail bomb and wanted to plant it in a left-wing community center. He was a prominent member of the Nazi “Nationaldemokratische Partei” (the regional chairman of their youth organisation). Although he was part of organized Nazism, he acted alone and was tracked through websites that were not connected.
The SPLC needs to realize this. Urgently.
@the other EJ
To understand the failure of Reconstruction, you first need to know some things about the priorities of the United States post-Revolution, and to understand that there were lots of different groups of people with differing agendas operating separately from the state itself. The abolitionists were one such group with goals that differed from the US as a state. They began with very little power, and grew in power over time, until they began to infiltrate government, at which point the South became directly threatened by them. The South was reacting primarily to this threat by abolitionists.
As a state, however, the US mainly had the goal of remaining independent from Europe. “Manifest Destiny” was a political policy that, while colonial and racist, did not operate with the intention of being colonial and racist. The colonialism and racism was merely instrumental to the actual goal, which was independence from Europe.
(An aside: if you ever get a chance to investigate the actions of William Seward, who was Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, during the Civil War, do so. The way he played England and France off of one another to keep them both from supporting the Confederacy – which was in both of their interests to do – was political brilliance.)
This is why the North twisted itself into pretzels prior to the Civil War to try to persuade the South from seceding. The Union, as a state, was not interested in slavery at all, and was more than willing to prop it up as long as necessary. The abolitionists, who were operating independently from the state despite influencing it, were a threat to the South, but the Union government had not reached a point where it gave even the first shit about how black people were being treated. The Union government’s primary goal was always independence from Europe, and it would do whatever it took to achieve security of independence.
After the Civil War, the power of the abolitionists became very strong. The Radical Republicans were generally interested in making blacks the legal and social equals of whites (although this was not true of all of them), and for a while Reconstruction proceeded along those lines. However, there came a point – and it only took like 5 years – for the precarious position of the US with respect to Europe to overrule that. A divided country was a weakened country, and the great powers of Europe were willing to capitalize on that in any way they could. The reintegration of the South became a higher priority than the welfare of freed blacks, which had never really troubled most northern politicians anyway. Many Radical Republicans started to moderate their stance, and others were just ousted from power.
In order to remain free of European influence, the United States needed to totally dominate the Americas. It couldn’t do that with the South an occupied conquered nation. Reconstruction failed because reintegration was a higher priority for the North than the reorganization of the southern political order. The North was pretty racist, so this wasn’t a super-difficult decision overall.
@AltoFronto:
I’m currently a philosophy instructor, so I’m completely biased, but let me say that I completely agree with your suggestion to teach Critical Thinking and/or Logic to teenage students. 🙂 One thing I’m trying to do with my current course is make it more empirically informed regarding the science of how prejudice and other forms of denialism arise.
A lot of times, denialists of every stripe will explicitly appeal to the language of critical thinking in defending their claims: They see themselves as “skeptics,” if you cite the overwhelming scientific consensus in favor of the hypothesis that human activity contributes to climate change, they’ll say you’re “appealing to authority,” etc. (see this blog post by Massimo Pigliucci for more: https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/the-varieties-of-denialism/)
Roof himself almost certainly saw himself as “tough-minded realist” who had the guts to say the hard truths that sissy liberals like us refuse to acknowledge. One of the many things he failed to realize is that his racism had as powerful an emotional attraction to it as tolerance does for any of us; the “research” he did undoubtedly consisted of a one-sided diet of sources designed to confirm the hatred he already felt.
@Shalimar
This sounds like a sci-fi totalitarian dystopia. Are you seriously proposing this as a good idea?
@PoM:
Thanks, that’s very informative.
Although I suppose you wouldn’t like to be out of a blogging job, Dave, the speech on these kinds of sites should be declared illegal. They should be shut down and their authors prosecuted (where known), Even when those who are infected by its rhetoric don’t go as far as killing, they are most likely still engaging in all kinds of discriminatory and abusive practices that hurt other people. I know everyone loves the idea of free speech, but I’m afraid hate speech is going to go the way of free smoking in public places. It does harm, it’s got to go.
@Binjabreel
He actually argued that same point in the article, but presented it as a good thing.
That’s very interesting. Thanks very much for that, PoM.
I’ve read a little about Seward. The dude was a straight-up hustler. He was awesome.
The US is so overwhelmingly powerful today, and has been for about 100 years, that I think we often forget that at one time it was more like Iraq or Ukraine. A small power, trying to remain independent in an environment of great powers taking an uncomfortably close interest in its internal affairs.
There was a period of around a century when the US was, indeed, hustling for all it was worth to keep the great powers of Europe from meddling. France meddled the hell out of the 1796 election, and virtually all American actions between that point and the curbstomp that was the Spanish-American War were colored by this overwhelming need to keep up a wall against Europe.
autosoma:
“I don’t see it going away though, given that the swastika flag of Nazi Germany still sells well and gets waved a lot.”
Notably, though, it does not get waved a lot in Germany. ‘Cause that shit is illegal there, and that gets enforced. Even marches of “nationalist,” “reactionary” groups with obvious nazi skinhead hidden in their ranks (which will, however, never openly declare themselves “neo-nazi” marches because, again, illegal) will usually substitute different flags because flying the swastika flag is a good way to get arrested. Sure, some assholes probably still have them in their homes, and display them at illegal, clandestine meetings, but that’s quite a different tune than “stickered on every other car.” Most importantly, the swastika flag is not flown on official government buildings with the approval of actual legislators.
Which is not to say that banning that flag made everything magically alright. As the example of “reactionary” marches with substitute “plausible deniability” flags shows, racist assholes don’t suddenly go away when you ban their symbols. But it sends a very different message about the power they still hold, and the support they still receive, if they have to hide, dissemble, and still get scrutinized at every public appearance by the police lest they step over the line, vs. they get politicians in power to fly their symbol over government buildings. A different message both to them, and importantly, to the people they hate.
‘Cause it’s not just about how racists feel about seeing their flag officially condoned. What message does it send to a state’s black citizens to see the Confederate flag over their state’s capitol every day?
@David
I always felt it strange that they didn’t list Stormfront, considering they post other websites and personal blogs. For example, under the anti-Muslim category they list Sultan Knish – A Blog by Daniel Greenfield and Bare Naked Islam. Under the White Nationalist category they list Occidental Dissent which, far as I can tell, only consists of Bradley Dean Griffin (a.k.a. “Hunter Wallace”) talking about how the South will rise again. Black separatist groups include the website War on the Horizon. How, exactly, they separate hateful websites and blogs from hate groups is still confusing to me. Obviously there are groups that have their own websites, but still, none of the ones I mentioned seem to fit that category since they’re usually one-man operations.
@Shalimar: I don’t think the Ludivico Treatment is a good idea.
I went to a conference recently where one speaker talked about how governments everywhere are basically 20 years behind technology. I always think of that in regards to the justice system’s failure to recognize things said on the internet as “real”. I mean in that case they are far more than 20 years behind. But at least it seems things are improving.
It takes a very specific genetic profile, extreme stupidity, and a lack of reason to believe the kind of propaganda you find on websites like Stormfront. I have been on those sites, and I just find it amazing that some people, who made it through elementary school could buy their message. That is why I do not believe that Dylann Storm Roof (Storm Roof? Really, units, you’re going to name your kid Storm Roof?) was not indoctrinated at a young age. Kids learn that kind of racism. And the only way they could believe the distorted message of hate groups like Stormfront (Better get yer Stormroof ready, cause it’s gonna rain stupid.) is if it merely serves to corroborate deeply ingrained ideas. I think that kid learned his racism early in life, and it wasn’t just the occasional racist epithet uttered in a moment of road rage. I think his racism was planted by a family member and nourished over time. And I don’t care what his mixed race childhood friend had to say about his mother being the sweetest woman you could ever meet. I just don’t buy it.
@autosoma @Neurite
Larry Wilmore actually made the point that European Nazi groups use the Confederate flag as a legal alternative to the swastika to express their racist ideology on demonstrations.
The amazing thing about Roof’s hatred… the shocking, bewildering, absolutely dumbfounding thing… is how he can openly advocate white supremacy while still seeing it as unfair and manipulative that black people call white people racist. It’s this distinctly internet-community kind of logical break but actually existing in a person.
Binjabreel – from what I’ve read, Brennan (Hot Wheels) supports eugenics precisely because it would have prevented him from being born. He doesn’t believe that his mother should have been allowed to become pregnant, given the likelihood of his being disabled.
He doesn’t seem to be a very happy person, all in all.