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.
Ibis,
Quite alot, I’m sure. Many of them are very supportive of MRAs and spew the same lies, false equivalencies and harassment.
prohass,
Listen. Learn. Lend support. Speak up. Same as for fighting every other kind of hate. In fact, keeping it intersectional is a requirement for making things better. The personal is political. How you live, think and interact with other people makes a difference.
deniseeliza,
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120705231207/harrypotter/images/6/6e/Applause-harry-potter.gif
The backlash against the Confederate flag and the light outing and shunning of some of the openly racist right wing groups (among people who’ve previously refused to address them) are positive steps, if only small victories.
That it took the murder of 9 black Americans for reasons explicitly stated by the terrorist to be racist for culture to adopt any level of siding with black America is of course ridiculous and worth calling out.
At least one can derive a moment or two of schadenfreude from knowing this hate filled buttcrack gets to witness the tides swinging hard against the Confederate flag and his hate groups of choice.
Been AFK a bit, catching up…
autosoma:
“I am well aware that the swastika Flag is mostly illegal in Europe, I was thinking more of usage in the US”
Yeah, I figured that’s what you were saying. I just used that as a jumping off point to contrast the fate of the swastika flag in Germany with the fate of the Confederate flag in the US (the segue in my head was something along the line of “yup, they use the swastika flag here, but funnily enough they don’t in Germany, and let’s think for a second about why that is” – I guess I didn’t make that logic clear), and how banning it won’t solve all problems, but would at least set a sign – or at least stop continually setting the negative sign that continuing to use the Confederate flag in official, state-sposored contexts still does.
Bernardo Soares:
“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.”
Yup, good point, along with all the other “plausible deniability” flags you list in your last post (runes, etc.). In a way it’s a game of whack-a-mole; they’ll always come up with some new coded symbol for their hatred. But still, the mere fact that they have to resort to this constant subterfuge, that they know the state is against them and they are constantly threatened with arrest for their bullshit, sends me as a German Jew a message about how my home country feels about me and making me feel safe. It’s a very different message than the one my black husband got seeing Confederate flags on most cars and flying off official buildings when he lived in the South.
deniseeliza put it very well – banning the Confederate flag won’t solve racism, but it’ll be a small thing that along with many other small things could start moving the culture at least a bit in the right direction.
zennurse:
“Google, Amazon, Sears, KMart have all stopped selling Confederate merchandise.”
Walmart, eBay, and Etsy, too! And Virginia is removing the Confederate flag from its license plates. And SC’s legislature is at least discussing removing the flag from the SC Capitol. Steps in the right direction, at last.
In all the noise about the Charleston shootings, this item almost passed under the radar.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/isis-inspired-suspect-justin-nolan-sullivan-was-turned-dad-n379721
Apparently you have to be a Muslim extremist rather than a white supremacist to attract the FBI’s attention.
@Grumpy
Are you shitting me.
@theluckyfrog
While I realize that taking down the flag’s an okay symbolic gesture, we really should not forget that the other side in that conflict was fighting – among other things – because they wanted a political and economical future for the country that did not include African-Americans in any gains made by the ongoing Western expansion and was complicit with internal slave trade, post-reconstruction terror and the Jim Crown regime.
@Grumpy, my word that’s a disturbing story.
At least his parents were responsible enough to contact law enforcement, as oppose to say, buying him a gun for his birthday.
The US federal government would have to have a massive de-confederization plan, similar to post war Germany to sort that problem out.
Eh, denazification was a joke, really. It only went skin deep and not often not only that. Old nazis remained in their offices, in administration, in the economy, in universities and so on, deserters (or also homosexuals who ended up in concentration camps) weren’t exonerated and so on. Things only really began to change with the social movements in the 60s. The extent of “denazification” in post-war Germany is massively overstated.
Depressing how it always seems to be the same story, no matter period or country, no?
The day will come when one of you feminists will go on a shooting spree against us Alphas and we will be there to tell everyone how they learned their hate from David Futrelle & WeHuntedTheMammoth!
Of course, there won’t be nine of us dead … because we are ALPHAS and that means we always win. Heck, the last time a feminist mangina tried to attack me I instantly went into a full slow-mo flying spin kick and sent him, also slow-mo (we can transfer it through our kicks and punches), through a full sized plate-glass window. IT WAS PROJECT BAD-ASS STYLE EPIC!!!!!! FTW!!!!! Then, as he lay groaning on the ground, I put my foot on his chest and screamed “GAMERGATE!!!!” into the air. A bunch of hot girls then ran up and started swooning over me and the police arrived soon to arrest him and give me an awesome medal for being such an ass kicker. And yes, that TOTALLY HAPPENED!
So, anyway, when some murderous MISANDRIST feminist comes to our hang outs to shoot up us ALPHAS, there won’t be some horribly body-count and sobbing press coverage. Instead, she will be disarmed by the most INTENSE slow-mo karate moves that you wish you could even see (but we won’t let you) and then we will tell everyone how they learned to hate at WHTM.
@maghavan
wat
@Miss Andry
I think I can say “it’s satire” and be correct…but I don’t really get the joke either.
Maghavan’s a regular, she’s just parodying the super mega ultra “Alphas.”
Of course, since they’re unparodyable, she still should have put a sarcasm tag. =P
@maghavan
Hah hah hah!
@others
No, removing the Confederate flag won’t solve anything. What it will do is signal that society no longer condones racism. Having the flag up at the SC statehouse currently signals that racism is OK and black people just have to deal with that. Taking it down will be a statement that this is no longer an official position.
Banning it outright is not feasible in the United States. Freedom of speech is a thing and it would legitimately apply in to any attempt by government to suppress racist speech. There is not a racism exception in the US First Amendment. It worked in Germany because a new government was being built from scratch there, and the situations are not equivalent.
What can be done and is feasible is to treat the Confederate flag as though it were the n-word. It can be rendered into a taboo. The n-word is not banned, but white people don’t generally use it anymore, and even racists typically don’t use it in front of other white people outside of known friendly company, because everyone jumps on them otherwise. If white people jump on other white people for flying the Confederate flag, it can be made a taboo.
It’s one thing white people can do, that white people have the power to do. The next time you (if you are white) see another white person with a Confederate flag, think to yourself, “Huh, how would I react if this person used the n-word directly in front of me?” and then do that.
The German case is really complicated and ambivalent. The German law has also been used for bad purposes. For example, the concept of “wehrhafte Demokratie” which states that parties can be banned if they want to get rid of or change the constitution, has historically been used more against communist/socialist parties than against the extreme right.
The interior secret service (Verfassungsschutz, literally Agency for the Protection of the Constitution) was actually build by an old Nazi spy (US occupation troops could use him because he had all the information the Nazis had gathered about Soviet Russia) who promptly used it to get his old friends out of prison and into anticommunist spy work – which suited everybody well. This is visible until today, where the Verfassungsschutz has played an unclear role in the non-discovery of a Neonazi terror group that acted freely for 10 years, but at the same time spies on a social democratic party which is represented in the Federal and several State Parliaments.
A few years ago, an online Punk shop was actually sued and its assets seized by the prosecutor of Baden-Württemberg, because they said that the swastika represented on the anti-Nazi stickers still counted as usage of an anti-constitution symbol. A good friend of mine was arrested and subsequently sued for using this sticker while attending an antifascist demonstration. He had to go through two courts before the charge was dropped.
Also, the whole ban has contributed to a situation in Germany where you’re only a Nazi if you call yourself that, use actual Nazi symbols and so on. Whereas the bunch of racists, homophobes and antisemites demonstrating against the “lying press” and for Putin, who use many of the same talking points, are often seen as “concerned citizens”.
That said, I totally agree with Neurite concerning the importance of symbolic space and how it makes you feel. While a ban is surely out of the question in the US, flying the flag on official buildings is just awful. I also agree that the ban of the swastika etc. is generally a good thing.
Unrelatedly, I just realised that this shitstack’s middle name is Storm.
A white supremacist named Storm.
What’s with right-wing bigots and aptronyms? o_O
@SFHC
The surnames of the lawyers of Beate Zschäpe, the Nazi terrorist from the NSU trio who survived, are: Heer, Sturm and Stahl – Army, Storm and Steel. They are actually public defenders who were assigned, but that continues to baffle me.
@binjabreel –
I’m pretty sure hot wheels supports eugenics because he hates himself, and hates his parents for having him (and a younger brother with the same genetic disease).
If you read the article Brennan wrote for The Daily Stormer it seems clear that he hates his father for giving up on him and his brother in late childhood, hates his mother for having children despite knowing there was a 50% chance they would inherit her disease, and hates the state for supporting his parents (and himself) with welfare and assistance programs for the disabled.
On the other hand, Brennan loves chan boards (and his own 8chan in particular) because they even out the playing field and give Brennan power he doesn’t enjoy IRL. On 8chan, Brennan is respected instead of pitied. He’s beloved, even, for his principled stance on hosting child porn and identity thieves.
Even though Brennan is routinely nasty and disrespectful to anyone he perceives as female or nonwhite, I always end up feeling really sorry for him after I write about him. He lives a miserable little existence; 8chan is basically all he has now. In many ways he doesn’t have the luxury of changing; for instance he would probably have a hard time getting hired to do regular programming work (which he did pre-GamerGate) b/c of 8chan’s notoriety.
I hope that gives you some insight into Brennan. He essentially is the king of Internet hell; and that’s the bright spot that makes his life worth living.
I’m not sure I can parse out Brennan’s exact psychology, but prejudice against one group of people tends to generalize. Ableism also tends to be based on perception of people’s bodies and, like racism and sexism, it’s connected with traditional religious attitudes and anger at people who are supported by government programs (while the people who supposedly did everything right are the *real* victims).
Brennan hates himself because he doesn’t have the power and success he wants and feels ashamed of compromising his libertarian views by accepting government support and services. So I’d guess he just wants to sit back and watch the world burn right now.
And yeah, denazification didn’t really work. A few of the worst Nazi leaders were executed, but most got out of prison by the 1950’s and a lot of ex-Nazis became officials in the West German government. There was a serious fear that a Communist or Radical Social Democrat government would come to power in West Germany.
Bernardo Soares, completely agreed that the German case is actually quite complicated and many problems remain. Indeed, agreeing with everything you outlined in your (great) post. Didn’t mean to give the impression that I think everything’s perfect in Germany. I was just oversimplifying because I’m already way too wordy, and I just wanted to focus on one specific point.
Octo and History Nerd, also agree that the original denazification was quite superficial and largely ineffective – indeed, that was why the movement in the 60s to get rid the remaining old fascists in positions of power, to finally teach about this part of history in schools instead of smothering it in silence and euphemism, etc., was so sorely needed.
I do think that the 60s movement achieved some good results in that regard, even though things were and are still far from perfect – and that some aspects of how things were eventually dealt with were more effective and positive than how the history of slavery and the Civil War has been and is being dealt with in the American South. But certainly there are no absolutes, and plenty of problems in both countries. I guess you can’t fit a full discussion of everything into internet comments – though y’all are doing a pretty impressive job already.
The simple truth about denazification is that the focus shifted from the defeated Germans to the Soviet Union, and the US, led by High Commissioner John McCloy, decided that it was more important to use whatever assets could strengthen West Germany as a tool to use against the Russians than to be picky about their pasts.
And then we went much too far in the other direction in Iraq.
One of the things I did not understand about WWII until I started reading about it after college was the extent to which the European conflict was a struggle between Fascism and Communism. Fascism was, in a very real sense, a reaction against the success of Bolshevism in 1917. When the Allies occupied Berlin (and Churchill was put back in a glass case marked Break Glass in Case of War), the hunt was on for reliably anti-Communist Germans to staff the postwar government. There were relatively few non-Nazi anti-Communists left by that point.
The pro-Communists who had survived the camps were sought after by the Soviets, who used them to construct THEIR German government. That’s why the East Germans refused to pay reparations to Israel; their leaders had had no part in the Holocaust other than being some of its victims. Of course, they used ex-Nazis just as eagerly when it suited their purposes.
Hey! The ccc guy also runs this! https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/04/23/drunken-return-of-kings-writer-embarrasses-himself-white-race-at-white-power-convo-then-quits-manosphere/
All the fine righteous indignation at Nuremberg followed by the most ignoble Realpolitik.