Misery Loves Company: The Rise of White Supremacy in the Internet Age
This article is an online version of the print article for the A/W ‘19 Lexington Line edition. The print version can be viewed here!
“I have to do it. You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
These were the last words Dylann Roof reportedly said to one of the victims who begged not to be killed in the Charleston, South Carolina church shooting. On June 17, 2015, Roof, who was only 21 years old at the time, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church—one of the nation’s oldest black congregations—and sat in on the prayer meeting with his eventual victims for about an hour.
He then sat up, said he was there to shoot black people, and murdered nine worshippers, three men and six women, including State Senator Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney. All of the victims had multiple gunshot wounds.
This wasn’t an act of randomness or spontaneity. This was precisely planned months prior. Roof had released his manifesto on his website, “The Last Rhodesian,” which was rightfully shut down right after the mass shooting. The psychotic rambling posited his own demented reasons as to why it was his responsibility to carry out this act of white supremacy.
This is not an uncommon occurrence in the realm of white supremacist terror acts.
Many white supremacists gleefully share their racist and hate-filled views on the “dark web,” where they have encountered a sense of community through underground sites such as 4chan and 8chan. Both of these user-created message board websites have a twisted, dark history of being used as a platform by alt-right extremists and white supremacists to freely proclaim their horrifying opinions and plans with no repercussions due to anonymous profiles.
4chan was launched in 2003 by a 15-year-old boy named Christopher Pool, and it quickly became a phenomenon where thousands of people were free to express their innermost thoughts without being ridiculed. This platform inflamed troll culture, in which primarily young, frustrated men competed with one another with the sole purpose to humiliate through the use of memes and grotesque images.
By 2010, 4chan became the second most popular messaging board on the internet with hundreds of thousands of users. The site quickly took an extremely sinister turn with users spending years completely submerged in an alternate world, relinquishing any sense of reality. This amplified these hateful ideologies.
In his book, It Came from Something Awful, author Dale Beran chronicles how 4chan and 8chan fueled this new age of white supremacy. He also links mass shootings to the enhancement of white terror depicted on these platforms.
As the years passed, the nihilistic culture gained momentum, and older generations of white supremacists began to influence these younger alt-right conservatives by enhancing their “claustrophobic way of thinking,” according to Beran. This not only meant misogyny and homophobia, but also anti-political correctness, anti-black, and anti-immigration doctrines.
Conservatism and far-right ideology was the lifeline these young, ill-defined boys adopted to muzzle their existential crisis; being the center of society became their sole purpose. These self-isolated individuals believed the only way to re-enter society as alpha males was by being cruel-minded.
With this altered sense of reality, they blamed minorities as the core reason why they were at the bottom of society. Questions surfaced as to why these straight white men were at the bottom and not privileged as commonly seen in society, insinuating that minorities “cheated.” This horrific explanation was continuously amplified online, and the alt-right terror epidemic radicalized disaffected white people.
As the posts continued becoming more and more troubling, 4chan eventually instated regulations, resulting in the migration to a similar messaging board site called 8chan. 8chan was launched in 2013 by Fredrick Brennan as a platform for totally uncensored speech. Eventually, it replaced 4chan. White supremacists were able to resume their absorption with hate-filled rhetoric.
Over time, people on 4chan and 8chan turned these shooters into heroes and martyrs.
Anders Breivik, a Norwegian white terrorist, was responsible for killing 77 people—the majority being teenagers—on July 22, 2011 in Norway’s capital Oslo. Hours prior to his attack, Breivik emailed his manifesto titled 2083—A European Declaration of Independence to his audience of 5,700. Isolated and angry, but supported by friends on the dark web, he felt a need to be seen and feared.
Breivik then transformed into a symbol; “going Breivik” became a term used by radicalized users to proclaim full commitment to the cause.
Elliott Rodger, the 22-year-old who killed six people—and then himself—in Isla Vista, California, became a hero as well following his 2014 attack. His act of domestic terroism inspired two mass shooters in 2018: Alek Minassian and Scott Beierle. Both referenced Rodger by name in their own online manifestos.
Mixed with self-pity and rage, many white supremacists view themselves as victims and use words such as “invasion” and “mass immigration” to describe their own interpretation of the so-called destruction of the white race.
The “Unite the Right” rally, where white nationalists protested the removal of a Confederate general statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, occurred on August 11, 2017, just a short month after a Ku Klux Klan rally in the same city. Torch-bearing white supremacists shouting “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us” marched in the main square of the University of Virginia; they were surrounded by enraged counterprotesters.
The chanting of “Jews will not replace us” is an example of how utterly unhinged ideas can gain momentum on the dark web, where like-minded individuals band together. This phrase references a conspiracy that Jews led the effort to enact the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 and, according to Abraham Miller in The Wall Street Journal, that “the act started the ‘replacement’ of white Christians by a more ethnically diverse population.” This conspiracy spiraled, and white supremacists now believe Jews are conspiring to “replace” white people with minorities, especially in the workforce.
Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old white terrorist who killed 22 people in the El Paso shooting on August 3, 2019, also published his own manifesto—The Undocumented Truth—on 8chan approximately 20 minutes before his attack. This resulted in 8chan finally being shut down after years of being “a megaphone for mass shooters, and a recruiting platform for violent white nationalists,” claims Kevin Roose of The New York Times.
These delusions become so overwhelming that these practitioners ignore the real human cost of their regressive beliefs. And the elephant in the room with all of this, of course, is the role played by Donald J. Trump.
Brent Tarrant, an Australian white terrorist, was responsible for the killing of 50 Muslims at two separate mosques—Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre—in Christchurch, New Zealand. The terrorist acts happened during Friday Prayer on March 19, 2019 and were live streamed on Facebook.
Tarrant published a 74-page manifesto, indicating that he supported Trump as a “symbol of white identity and common purpose” and also made references to “white genocide”: the idea that non-white immigration and mixed-race relationships constitute a genocidal threat to white people.
As this culture proliferated, Donald Trump was simultaneously gaining momentum in his presidential campaign. It may seem tempting to pinpoint Trump as the sole cause for the recent rise of white supremacist acts, but he is merely a symptom.
Nevertheless, he has fed into their views by signaling possible approval of their questionable ideologies, all while downplaying white supremacists as a threat. In fact, he diminishes the true context of white supremacist terror and considers them a “small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”
Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times claims, “It’s in the president’s interest to downplay white terror, given his past equivocation on white supremacist violence and use of white nationalist language.” Instead, Trump directs public attention to foreign threats as his tweets and rhetoric reach a wide range of people who ultimately interpret his words in a way that suits their agenda. This is extremely dangerous when white supremacists are, according to Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker, “intoxicated with their own sense of mission.”
To be clear, I am not saying Trump sanctions mass murder, but rather that he encourages a culture in which people provoke outrage as a way of mitigating their own insecurities. Some people have taken this to extremes, and some have named Trump as their champion.
I went to a predominantly white high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I saw the effects of this firsthand. The morning after the election, “build the wall” and “make America great again” echoed throughout the hallways, and I couldn’t turn a corner without seeing at least 20 white adolescent boys wearing red hats.
As a black woman, I felt powerless and bullied. This culture of bigotry feeds on the outrage expressed by its opponents. This is their purpose; they want to cause a reaction.
The outspoken hatred stems from their own self-loathing, and their void is filled through the oppression of others—a sinister phenomenon that has been embedded in American society throughout its history, and that we now confront more publicly than ever.