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.
@zoon echon logon
that was cool. I double-checked the tags. Note to self: don’t do separate blockquotes in the same post.
@Nequam
I had actually forgotten Clockwork Orange, so even though it is similar to what I was suggesting, it isn’t the same. There was also a comic book Squadron Supreme mini-series 30 years ago where they brainwashed criminals to be law-abiding citizens, which I did remember but also isn’t what I was saying.
I was suggesting a hypothetical drug that could do damage to the recipient when their body released whatever chemicals are produced during ragegasms, effectively shortening their lives based on the intensity and frequency of rage. It isn’t exactly aversion, more like “doing X behavior that is harmful to others will definitely shorten your life by Y years; if you do it anyway, it was your choice to decide hurting others was worth the loss.”
The other major problem I see that no one has mentioned yet (probably because I wasn’t totally clear what I was thinking) is that it wouldn’t matter to people who were suicidal or didn’t place any value on their own life.
Thanks! That sounded like a rhetorical question, but was intended literally as a request for clarification. I still think “dangerous-but-not-violent-yet people” is a pretty slippery category (how dangerous do they need to be? who gets to decide?), but I’ve got a driver’s license test to study for and can’t get into it right now.
Ok just a little bit. Part of the problem is that you’re basing the drug on emotion rather than action. Racist stoics (who are, for the sake of argument, acting based on faulty reasoning rather than emotion) could potentially avoid this system. And, as PoM pointed out, people can feel rage over perfectly legitimate grievances (though I guess we might not give them the drug). So the connection between the harm you’re trying to prevent and what you’re doing is tenuous–some people may have ragegasms without being dangerous, some people may be dangerous without ragegasms.
The would also violate liberal principles of autonomy (probably) which I think is the more serious objection.
That’s… Intensely depressing.
Though I guess, even though we’re starting from different premises, “maybe it’d be better if he’d never been born” is indeed a hard thing to argue with, though for wildly different reasons.
Jesus, what a sad, sad asshole. I feel sorry for his mother.
Sorry to be late to the SPLC discussion above, may I throw in my 2 centavos?
Why doesn’t the SPLC list anti-feminist groups as hate groups?
I think it may be the same reason that the argument is made that violence based on sex should not specifically protected as a hate crime in hate crimes statutes and that American federal immigration law should not include specific protection for sex (gender) related persecutions that turn them into refugees – the floodgates argument.
The idea is that there are simply too many people to protect in this class. If killing women for reasons related to being women was considered a hate crime, the reasoning goes, all resources will be used up and other groups will be ignored. In the same way, if the SPLC names anti-feminist hate groups as such, they will have to divert a lot of resources to that problem – and their focus frankly is on racial hatred.
Personally, I have no problem with that, and it’s good that the SPLC did have at least a look at misogyny sites. I hope they will look in again. Just that small attention hurt the MRM immensely. The reason I have no problem with the SPLC keeping its limited resources focused on racism is because racism is so entrenched and lethal and needs continual legal attention, and the SPLC has the legal expertise, history, and influence to make a very big impact on that problem.
Women need the same help, and we need to be sure we’re getting it. NOW has a legal arm but it doesn’t seem to be doing much to me. I think we need a new Law Center that focuses on crimes based on sex (gender), the gender asylum issue, and misogyny. The SPLC canbe a great model, but I don’t want their current work to be vitiated so I am OK with their not going after misogyny in any systematic way.
The US Violence Against Women Act could be used in America for a Women’s Law Center, but it is under fierce attack and is being so burdened with expansions and exceptions that I think maybe the place to start is to get that law clean and mean. So I will be supporting keeping the VAWA an act for women, and to contribute what I can to organizations that begin to use it as intended.
And I’ll contribute to the SPLC as well, Because racism and sexism are BOTH lethal.
@Shalimar
The could-never-possibly-exist drug you’re wondering aloud about about is of a piece with phrenology and all sorts of other extremely problematic ways of trying to define a “criminal (or otherwise undesirable) type” without due process or a presumption of innocence.
This discussion of latent criminality makes me think of Psycho Pass, a very good anime. The notion of this drug also leaves out that some people can very calmly do some very awful and terrible acts.
We do need to do something about these sites. I am not sure if the courts or the legislatures will move quickly or effectively.
The boycott of Rush Limbaugh has apparently been effective. Perhaps we start boycotting hosting sites which provide these spaces. Failing that boycott the advertisers and other sites hosted by these companies.
Basically, we put pressure on companies to stop providing them services.
I don’t pretend to know how effective it would be. Still, it feels like if we force the assholes feeding this resentment onto the dark web, we lower their ability to easily radicalize people.
@neutite
I am well aware that the swastika Flag is mostly illegal in Europe, I was thinking more of usage in the US
@bernardo…
Interesting that euro neo-nazis are using the confederate flag in its place.
I know of at least one white woman who was beaten by her father as a teen for being seen in a car with a black man. I know many more who were threatened with the same. A cousin of mine was disowned for having children with a black man. That wasn’t unusual 20 yrs ago and it isn’t unheard of today.
White women are the only people your average white man can still acceptably own. Feminism challenges the oppression that makes that ownership possible. In a capitalist society where most men will never rise to any sort of power the ability to mimic the powerful men they wish they were by dominating another human being is very important to their self image.
As it was brilliantly pointed out earlier, weakness is loathed and power admired in such a culture. Yet, we are all weak. In a capitalist society most of us are in fact helpless. Our opportunities are controlled by a very powerful few. Having a human of their own to bully and even “benevolently” control gives them the illusion of power that they require to feel like “real men” which is not different in their minds to being “real people”. They like to dominate other women too but white women they want to belong only to them. No one else can play with “their” toys. If we choose men of color or any women as our lovers and partners we are refuting their ownership. When that illusion of superiority and power disappears, what is left is too much for them to bear.
Without that last shred of power, they are no better than *gasp* women and minorities. (We all no those are not the words they use, but…)Then they’d either have to admit their submission to the powers that be or they’d have to fight shoulder to shoulder against the establishment with people they want badly to be beneath them. Most of those racist, misogynist fuckwads would rather die.
– opium4themasses
That sounds like it might have an effect, at least.
One can wonder what kind of environment Roof grew up in for him to fall for the garbage written on those sites (sites that btw should be shutdown)
He says that it was with those sites that he became “racially aware” but i highly doubt that’s the only influence he had.
It also feels like he should have realized that those sites are a load of old shite. How old was he when he first started visiting them?
@Shalimar
Fucking Equilibrium innit?
On a lighter note, I can’t decide whether ‘God Should be a Bitch’ or ‘Slut Priestesses’ is a better name for a band.
Displaying the Confederate flag is more of an attempt to deny that the Confederacy or Jim Crow South were racist. There’s a whole genre of biographies of Southern figures that attempt to deny that they were personally racist or minimize their involvement in slavery or segregation.
Google, Amazon, Sears, KMart have all stopped selling Confederate merchandise.
It’s a start and while some argue that it is not a deep cut to the actual problem, it has forced racist legislators to expose biases as elections approach. I’ve been following some of the Black Lives Matter Twitter accounts and comments; one point made is that the presence of the flag in public, especially government spaces, makes them less safe. Throughout the south, streets are named for the Confederate leaders and generals who were racist to the core. The AME Emmanuel church is on Calhoun Street, for example.
I am very suspicious that Roof was groomed and helped with his site. Someone took his photos and his online name has been located in messages dating back two years from a pastebin posted by Anonymous during OpBlitzkreig, a worldwide anti nazi effort.
I agree with others who have suggested that misogyny is deeply intertwined in his twisted philosophy based on his reference to ownership of women and his reference to rape. Isn’t it ironic that slaveholders routinely raped black women during slavery but this is what he chose to use as his declaration during the executions?
There is another story making the news, not sure if MRA gang will pick up on it. A young man was found hanging in an elevator shaft after assaulting numerous Asian women because they wouldn’t talk to him. He put something heavy in a bag and bashed them in the face. Sounds like a Dean Esmay wet dream.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/06/nyc-man-attacked-asian-women-for-rejecting-him.html
Blessings
@autosoma:
They’re using everything possible: certain runes used by the actual, historical Nazis (Wolfsangel), but which are nor that well-known, symbols from Germanic and Norse (or rather, pseudo-Germanic and -Norse) mythology, regional flags that are supposed to show their ethnic heritage, the war flag of the Kaiserreich (which was used in the First World War), number codes. It’s like fascist hipsterism: always some new symbol which you have to decode.
What connects all those symbols, however, is racism. Not to say that Germanic and Norse symbols were always meant as racist, but most of the symbols they use are historically not understood to have been used by Germanic cultures, but were developed in the völkische movement at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
@EJ (The Other One)
Regarding your first comment : the exact inverse of Nietzsche’s Will to Power philosophy. Let’s call it the Will to Weakness.
– zennurse
Maybe they will, but the assailant/deceased was a black man – that reduces the chances of them bothering with it. If he was white or a light skinned asian – there’s a bigger chance they’d do their usual victim/woman blaming routine.
Sort of related to what @Lea is saying… http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/confirmed-masculinity-is-so-fragile-guys-will-overcompensate-to-avoid-being-feminine/
Or to avoid being ‘weak’ in general, I suppose.
I’m pretty bloody sick of the world at the moment.
I read about that guy. It’s exactly why every social justice movement needs intersectionality. He was using racism to justify misogyny. Much the way MRM use class based oppression to do the same.
What can men do against such reckless hate?
Bill Kristol is complaining about the left not showing respect to those who fought for the confederacy. SMDH. http://tktk.gawker.com/bill-kristol-where-s-our-respect-for-confederate-soldi-1713454752
You’re damn right I don’t respect them!
Several people in this thread have mentioned that banning or boycotting the Confederate flag won’t solve racism or have a large effect on its own. Of course it won’t. There is no one thing we could do that would solve racism. There’s no one thing we could do that would solve sexism, or poverty, or gun violence. All of these things will be solved by a lot of little things working together to change the culture.
After all, my going to work today won’t pay the rent on its own. But if I don’t go to work today, or tomorrow, or the next day, then I won’t have a job anymore and I definitely won’t pay the rent.
You have to fight the bad shit every day.