Culture Warlords

Summary, part 2

Chapter 4: Operation Ashlynn

Lavin used the fake persona of Ashlynn, a white, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed facade, to infiltrate Whitedate.net––an online dating website where European singles could find each other and preserve the future of the white race. Unsurprisingly, everyone there had antiquated views of gender norms. White men were looking for submissive women who could be the “passive guardians of aryan blood” (p. 76). 

With the Ashlynn facade, Lavin hoped to get white supremacist men to give her just enough information about themselves such that she could out them for what they were. Once there, however, she did more than that. Alarmingly, she learned that many men on Whitedate.net were members of the military and police. She also learned about being redpilled.

For white supremacists, the red pill has multiple meanings:

“The red pill was racism—the ‘difficult truth’ that society was conspiring to keep the white man down, through the media, ‘cultural Marxism,’ and other shady, Jew-tinged operations.” (p. 69)

But the red pill also meant…

“Learning the ‘truth’ about society: that feminism was a devious scheme to render men’s lives difficult and women’s lives a manicured garden path of hapless mates easily parted from their money.” (p. 73)

Either way, it became evident to Lavin that misogyny (i.e., contempt towards women, sexism) is a natural result of being indoctrinated into white supremacy beliefs. Combining racism and misogyny, white supremacists see white women as pure, pious, submissive, and cosmetic, whereas Black women are bodies they can rape and destroy.

Lavin also provides examples of such misogyny and misogynoir (i.e., misogyny specifically as it relates to Black women):

• Taylor Dumpson, the first Black student body president of American University, was harassed online by white supremacists

• Paul Nehlen, a right-wing figure, filmed his trip deer hunting where he named a deer after one of Lavin’s friends, killed the deer, and then spelled out Lavin’s friend’s name in the homemade deer sausage he made

Women of color are harassed more than white women, and white women are harassed more than white men.

Chapter 5: Adventures with Incels

Lavin begins this chapter with a description of Tommy O’Hara. Tommy is a loner, has a bad relationship with his mom, and has never had sex. He blames the fact that he has never had sex on women, who he sees as alien beings. Tommy is an involuntary celibate, also known as an incel, meaning he has been “deprived of sex by its cruel female keepers” (p. 81). Tommy is Lavin’s incel persona. Through Tommy, Lavin got to see the world of incels: a world that lived largely in chat rooms and online communities like love-shy.com, 4chan, and Reddit.

How did the incel community form?

Lavin pinpoints two cultural moments that shaped incel culture: GamerGate and Elliot Rodgers’ shooting. 

GamerGate began when Eron Gjoni posted a 10,000-word diatribe accusing his girlfriend, Zoë Quinn, of infidelities. This led to her vicious harassment (e.g., death threats, hacked accounts, personal information being leaked so she had to move), but grew into something much larger. It became a digital war over “anyone who threatened a certain view of ‘gamer identity’” (p. 83).

Becca Lewis, the co-author of a report of GamerGate’s repercussions, puts it best:

“Gamergate participants asserted that feminism—and progressive causes in general—are trying to stifle free speech, one of their most cherished values. They are reacting to what they see as the domination of the world by global multiculturalism and the rise of popular feminism. This is a retrograde populist ideology which reacts violently to suggestions of white male privilege.” (p. 83)

Next, Elliot Rodgers. Rodgers, an incel, killed seven people in a rampage in Isla Vista, California and left behind a 137-page manifesto decrying his virginity. Shortly after the news of his shooting occurred, his manifesto being shared, and the video he filmed right before the shooting went viral, incel communities blew up on the Internet. 

The community

Incels go further than your average redpilled misogynist. They considered themselves to be blackpilled. The black pill refers to an ideology of “carefully cherry-picked scientific theories, misogynistic social conclusions, and, often, a fatalism so deep an existentialist would faint,” (p. 92). Blackpilled incels view women as hypergamous (i.e., women sleep with men who are hotter than them, leaving nothing for uglier men). Blackpilled incels believe everything is over for them. Many become hopeless, despaired, and full of rage. In fact, suicidal ideation in incel communities is very common and often encouraged. Most of their rage is saved for women, who they believe owe them the right to sex.

With the rise of the incel community came the rise of incel vocabulary (e.g., a ‘chad’ is a hot guy, a ‘ricecel’ is being an incel because you’re Asian) and their own views of sex. They view men and women as having a sexual market value based on their worth and promiscuity. They attribute, in part, the reasons they have low sexual market value to things like the size of their jaw or certain centimeters of bone.

Incels and race

You might be asking what does any of this have to do with white supremacy? Incels are unlike white supremacy spaces because they have a diverse membership. That said, there is…

“significant white-supremacist activity on incel message boards; a pool of resentful, radicalized, and hatred-driven young men proved irresistible, even if not all of them were white. Racist sentiment, including pseudoscientific rhetoric that predicates sexual attractiveness on arbitrary racial hierarchies, ran alongside the rankest of misogyny” (p. 93-94).

Racialized misogyny puts people on the path to the arms of white supremacy.

Chapter 6: That Good Old-Time Religion

“Part of dismantling and understanding white supremacy is a need to understand the myths extremists tell themselves—about their own superiority, and about the origins of whiteness.” (p. 104)

To understand white supremacy, we must also understand Christian and Pagan extremists.

In the lead up to the 2020 elections, a Christgang vs Pagang mixed martial arts fight was going to be held as a fundraiser for Augustus Sol Invictus--a satanist, white supremacist lawyer who was a headline speaker at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. This may sound out-of-the ordinary, but white supremacy and Christian and Pagan extremists have a significant overlap. 

Christians and Pagans are seeking something to root their hate in: “something that from God––or from the gods” (p. 121). 

Christianity

Several myths promulgate white supremacy in Christianity, such as…

• On Easter Sunday of 1475, the body of a Christian boy was discovered in the cellar of a Jewish home. Every Jew in the city was arrested, which set up the narrative that the boy was a mythical martyr from Jewish enemies.

• The Crusades, where Christians waged war against Muslims.

• Brenton Tarrant’s (a white supremacist who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019) manifesto where he referenced a clash of civilizations where white Christians are outbred and outnumbered.

• Jon Earnest’s (a white supremacist who attacked the Poway, CA synagogue on the last day of Passover in 2019, killing one person, and wounding others) legacy which is one where he blamed Jews for the murder of Christ and encouraged others to shoot up mosques, synagogues, immigration centers, and more.

  
  

Paganism

Several myths promulgate white supremacy in Pagan spaces, such as…

• Dylann Roof’s legacy, where he believed in Vikings, Thor, and Odin;

• Norse pantheon (or, Norse mythology) which made the idea of white racial culture that deserves worship a seemingly concrete thing; and

• The Ásatrú Folk Assembly, a group founded by Stephen McNalled in 1996 because he was “disgusted by the number of black people who had begun to participate in worshipping the Norse pantheon” (p. 117).