The alt-right is killing people

On that day, college sophomore Elliot Rodger stabbed his three roommates to death before driving to a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and shooting several women. He then killed or injured several pedestrians with both gunfire and his vehicle before exchanging fire with police and eventually taking his own life. He ultimately killed six and wounded 14.

Rodger left behind a sprawling 107,000-word manifesto titled, “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” which contained passages lamenting his inability to find a girlfriend, expressing extreme misogyny and various racist positions including disgust for interracial couples (despite the fact that he was multi-racial himself).

“How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself,” Rodger wrote. “I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves.”

In a video, uploaded to YouTube just prior to his violent rampage titled, “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” Rodger tells his audience, “Well, this is my last video, it all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day in which I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you. … College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure. Within those years, I’ve had to rot in loneliness. It’s not fair.”

Rodger frequented PUAhate, a deeply misogynistic forum populated by failed “pick up artists” dedicated to revealing, “the scams, deception, and misleading marketing techniques used by dating gurus and the seduction community to deceive men and profit from them.” Discussions about women on the forum are at best objectifying and at worst, violent.

In his manifesto, Rodger fantasized about putting all women in concentration camps to starve while he watched “gleefully” from a tower. It is celebrated on some alt-right sites, like The Right Stuff’s 504um.

User “Doctor Mayhem” annotates excerpts from Rodger’s manifesto in a thread titled, “Elliot Rodger Did Nothing Wrong: Why Yellow Fever is Okay.”

“Basically, all you need to know is that seeing blonde girls with niggers made Elliot RRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEE like a billion pissed off Pepes,” Mayhem writes towards the end of his post. “We all know the end result. DEAD SLUTS! So White men of all kinds! No need to fear creating hapas! [a term denoting someone of partial Asian or Pacific Islander descent] In fact, you are a much superior man for the creation of them! LET ALL NEGLECTED HAPA BOYS KILL SLUTS IN THE NAME OF WHITE SHARIA!”

He concludes, “ALL HAIL THE PATRON SAINT OF WHITE SHARIA!”

The term, “white sharia,” allegedly coined by Sacco Vandal of the popular alt-right site Vandal Void, is a radical response to Patrick Buchanan’s argument in Death of the West: that the increase in immigration and decline of white birthrates is leading to the end of Western civilization.

Vandal argues for an end to women’s suffrage and stripping them of all political, legal, and economic power. “Our men need harems, and the members of those harems need to be baby factories,” Vandal writes. “This is not about muh dicking nor beta revenge uprisings. These are cold, calculated plans to save our dying race. … White Sharia is a blueprint for salvation.”

Rodger’s celebration at the 504um, one of the premier alt-right forums, is the rule rather than the exception, and locates misogyny at the core of the alt-right.

Take for instance “Just what are traditional gender roles?,” an article written by notorious hacker and troll Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer at the Daily Stormer — one of the alt-right’s most repugnant and successful propaganda engines — in response to those “counter signaling” the “white sharia.”

“Rape is a property crime and nothing more,” Auernheimer writes. “Regular slapping and the occasional vicious beating of a woman was a necessity in every household. Women need to be regularly disciplined to keep their heads about them.”

Auernheimer continues, “Man up, put women under your heel, throw away their birth control and make them bear your children and take care of your house. If they resist, discipline them … All we are pushing for is a return to the status of women we had in the early 19th century before Jews and their feminism ruined our civilization. This should not be controversial. If you are opposing WHITE SHARIA because you disagree with women being reduced to the status of property to be beaten and fucked at the whims of her husband, you are a faggot and a cuckold and have no place in any right-wing site, and instead belong at the bottom of festering bogs like Reddit and Voat.”

Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer’s founder and chief propagandist, has his own troubling history of vicious misogyny, tracking all the way back to high school.

According to an account published by The Atlantic, Anglin’s high school girlfriend told him that she was raped by a friend’s older brother while passed out at a party. He allegedly responded by calling her a “slut” and encouraged girls from another high school to harass her for weeks. Both the misogyny and harassing behaviors are recognizable on the present-day Daily Stormer.

In the aftermath of Rodger’s killing spree, a user at 4chan/b/ posted a photo from Rodger’s Facebook page with the note, “Elliot Rodger, the supreme gentleman, was part of /b/. Discuss.” This sentiment was echoed by other /b/ users who found similarities between his lexicon and that of the noxious board, including the term “beta,” used by men online to describe themselves as lacking the physicality, charisma and confidence associated with alpha males. It also denotes a level of isolation or withdrawal.

The term resurfaced on 4chan/r9k/ in the wake of a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, by Chris Harper-Mercer, who killed nine and wounded at least seven others at the college on October 1, 2015.

“This is only the beginning. The Beta Rebellion has begun,” one anonymous user wrote. “Soon, more of our brothers will take up arms to become martyrs to this revolution.”

Although never proven, it is widely speculated that Harper-Mercer was a user on the board as warnings against attending school the following day that circulated on the eve of the shooting. Authorities believe Harper-Mercer, who like Rodger was multi-racial, was also motivated by white supremacist ideas. The Government Accountability Office categorized the Roseburg killings as “white supremacist” in an April 2017 report.

Many on the alt-right, including some of its most notorious leaders, like Anglin, spent their early ideological years submerged in extreme image and message boards like 4chan and 8chan. Many credit them with their “red pilling” — a reference to a scene from The Matrix in which the main character chooses between remaining in a comfortable illusion or facing a harsh, but true, reality — which requires taking a red pill.

As the alt-right spread, the subculture had another effect on its adherents: the inculcation of cruelty. As Angela Nagle and Jacob Siegel wrote:

The far right knew what progressives are only beginning to realize: “Lulz” wasn’t just an amoral defiance of moral categories, it was an ethical claim. Through years of pre-political collective bullying, it trained those who would go on to become alt-right to deprogram the moral codes that might cause feelings of guilt and empathy by aestheticizing the collective dehumanization of enemies.

Anonymous and disparate interaction with online extremist content, frequently without any real-world connection to hate groups or far-right extremism, is becoming an established pattern for those on the alt-right who have gone on to commit acts violence.

Alt-right propaganda is intentionally designed to foster feelings of grievance, injustice, and animosity, particularly against those considered threats to "western civilization" — otherwise known as people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized communities.

The alt-right is giving a growing population of aggrieved young, white men a worldview that experts find is ripe for violence.  The externalization of blame for one’s own disappointing circumstances in life — and particularly its offloading onto minority communities — is one of several indicators of mass violence.

According to Dr. Eric Madfis, author of a 2014 paper on the intersectional identities of American mass murderers, young, white, middle class, heterosexual males commit mass murder at a disproportionately high rate relative to their population size in the United States.

The rate of mass murders spiked in the 1970s and 1990s. Between 1966 and 1999, there were 95 cases of mass public shootings. Between 1976 and 2008, mass murders occurred roughly twice per month, claiming an average of 125 deaths each month. A more recent study published by Mother Jones identifies 95 mass shootings in the United States since 1982. Of those, 55 (59%) were committed by white men.

FBI crime data suggests that ages 16 to 24 are peak time for violent crime. According to Dr. Pete Simi, Director of the Earl Babbie Research Center at Chapman University, "This is a period of substantial transition in an individual's life, when they're less likely to have significant attachments in their life that deter them from criminal violence."

Madfis’s 2014 paper from the University of Washington investigates the role of intersectional identities in mass murder incidents and argues that young, white males' unique downward social mobility, relative to his expectations, accounts for their overrepresentation as perpetrators of mass murder.

Today's typical mass murderer is not simply a white man with all the trappings of pride and privilege granted within the context of gender and race relations in the United States. His privileged white racial identity does not necessarily save him from the diminished socioeconomic status of downward mobility, nor does his privileged male gender guarantee the dominance of hegemonic masculinity over others. In fact, it is the very entitlements of his race and gender which make any subsequent life-course struggles and failures all the more unexpected, and thus all the more painful and humiliating.

Madfis also points out that privileged white males are often the least equipped to deal with unexpected setbacks in life. A lack of experience with failure due to relative privilege leaves young, white, middle class males uniquely unprepared to cope with difficulty or loss in life.

Only one in five mass murderers are “likely psychotic or delusional,” however, according to Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University.

Many are "wound collectors," a term coined by former FBI agent Joe Navarro to describe, "individuals who go out of their way to collect social slights, historical grievances, injustices, unfair or disparate treatment or wrongs — whether real or imagined."

"They wallow in the actual or often perceived transgressions of others and they allow sentiments of animosity and vengeance to percolate and froth at the surface by their constant and attentive nurturing of those perceived wounds," Navarro explains. "As you can imagine, in an imperfect world where there are real injustices, where people make mistakes, and stupid things are said and done, the wound collector never has to go far to feel victimized."

J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who has worked with the FBI, uses a similar term: “injustice collectors” — noting that these cumulative grievances are often blamed on one person or a group. “If you have this paranoid streak, this vigilance, this sense that other have been persecuting you for years, there’s an accumulation of maltreatment and an intense urge to stop that persecution” Meloy told the New York Times.

A 2001 study conducted by Meloy examining 34 adolescent perpetrators of mass murder found that 59% were the direct result of a triggering event. That rate jumped to 90% among adult mass murders.

Dr. Elliott Leyton, an expert on serial homicide, argues that contemporary mass murderers often target the perceived source of lost financial stability or class prestige. The alt-right, which couches its mission in terms of surviving literal extinction, routinely laments so-called reverse racism and affirmative action as well as immigration in all its forms.

The grievances collected by those motivated by the white nationalist ideology at the heart of the alt-right often do not begin with racist propaganda, but rather in the toxic communities of the men's rights movement. While driven by distinct ideologies, the style of grievances nursed by the men's rights and white nationalist communities are similarly constructed around a privileged group threatened by the visible social mobility of those that were formerly oppressed (women and minorities, respectively). The continued rise of social media has only inflamed this tension.

"Neofascists treat these [men's rights] websites as recruitment grounds. They find angry, frustrated young men and groom then in their own image," Abi Wilkinson observed in The Guardian soon after the 2016 presidential election. "The community seems to be largely white. And that's evident because race comes up, a lot. Sometimes, in the form of a kind of racial pseudo-science that advocates use to explain the dynamics of heterosexual relations. The age-old racist argument - that black men are 'taking our women' — is made regularly. Racist slurs are chucked around casually. There seems to be a significant overlap with organised white supremacy."

The perception of lost status, stolen inheritance and similar resentments, proliferates in an age where social media can be fine-tuned by a newly aggrieved individual to accelerate wound collection. Members of the far-right, prolific content creators with a semi-sophisticated propaganda dissemination strategy — most accurately described as managed chaos — recognized social media's potential early and are reaping the rewards.

The UW study also posits that, "The performance of a violent massacre provides an illegitimate opportunity for entitled white men to regain lost status and forge a powerful, successful, masculine identity through infamy." Social media may exacerbate this historical motivation behind mass murders, according to forensic scientist Dr. Reid Meloy: "Now we have a setting, a cultural and social setting, where your act of multiple homicides will be known about internationally within moments."

As recruits have become younger, so, too, have those involved in violence.

Of the 12 alleged or convicted killers connected to the nebulous, extremist politics of the alt-right in the last four years, the average age of perpetrators is 26 years old. Only three have been older than 30 with the youngest being just 17.

James Alex Fields was only 20 years-old when he drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of attendees and protestors during August’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, injuring 19 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Fields stood with members of Vanguard America during the rally and carried a shield with the militaristic, alt-right group’s insignia on it.

Vanguard America denied that Fields was a member in the aftermath of the event, issuing a statement that read, “The driver of the vehicle that hit counter protestors today was, in no way, a member of Vanguard America. All our members had been safely evacuated by the time of the incident. The shields seen do not denote membership, nor does the white shirt. The shields were freely handed out to anyone in attendance. All our members are safe an [sic] accounted for, with no arrests or charges.”

Fields clearly had some level of exposure to Vanguard America and their materials prior to the event, given his adherence to the group’s dress code and chosen affiliation among many alt-right groups present.

His interest in white nationalism dates back to his freshman year of high school. Fields’ former history teacher Derek Weimar, described Fields as “a very bright kid but very misguided and disillusioned.” According to Weimar, Fields had a fascination with neo-Nazis Fields' mother. He told the Cincinnati Enquirer that, “A lot of boys get interested in the Germans and Nazi because they’re interested in World War II. But James took it to another level. He researched everything and had an intellectual argument for all his points, which is something you just don’t see that often.”

After high school, Fields enlisted in the military; however, after only four months, he was no longer listed as active duty.

According to police records, Fields also had a troubling history of childhood domestic violence — which experts see in about 1 in 6 mass killers. In 2010, Field’s mother called 911 after he attacked her for telling him to stop playing a video game. Other records reveal that he brandished a 12-inch knife at her on a separate occasion. His disabled mother uses a wheelchair.

Just three months prior to Unite the Right, another young, white man with a history in the alt-right, 18-year-old Devon Arthurs, allegedly killed two of his roommates, Jeremy Himmelman, 22, and Andrew Oneschuck, 18, in Tampa, Florida. Arthurs, who was taken into custody by authorities after holding employees of a tobacco shop hostage, had converted to Salafism, an ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam, and begun defending ISIS online a year prior. He was previously a leader of a National Socialist group known as the Atomwaffen (“Atomic Weapon”) Division which formed on the fascist forum Iron March.

Arthurs’s fourth roommate, Brandon Russell was also a leader of Attomwaffen. Russell wasn’t home at the time of the shooting, but was later arrested on explosives charges after police discovered explosive materials and a device that could be used as a detonator in the apartment that he and Arthurs' victims shared. Arthurs told police that in the internet chat rooms that the two frequently cohabited, Russell threatened to kill people and bomb infrastructure.

In addition to Iron March, Arthurs, Russell, Himmelman and Oneschuck became friends through playing video games online and spending time together in chat rooms such as Tinychat, Discord and Skype. Another member of their Tinychat group named Catherine told Vice News, “We all connected in the sense that we were introverts that didn’t really connect with the ‘outside world.’”

Another Atomwaffen member told VICE that he “shitposted” — a term for desultory online chat — with Arthurs online within 12 hours of the shooting.

In the year leading up to the shooting, Arthurs appeared to be blending his alt-right beliefs with his newfound adherence to extremist forms of Islam. His username changed from Weissewolfe to Kekman Al-Amriki, a combination of the trollish god of “meme magic” common to 4chan and the name of an American member of al-Shabab, an Islamic militant organization.

According to VICE, Arthurs also spoke of “white sharia,” a concept exemplifying the brutal, misogynistic core attitudes of the alt-right and those it has inspired to violence.

The alt-right’s success at injecting extremist ideas into the mainstream since Griffin made his observations in 2014 has been driven by the white nationalist movement’s sprawling online presence which metastasized, drawing in more — and at times less stable — adherents. Now, they have moved into the streets.

In the runup to the 2016 presidential election, the alt-right enjoyed an unprecedented level of mainstream penetration and a correspondingly large audience through a series of opportunistic, media-manipulation campaigns.

The cornerstone of the alt-right’s tactics was an explicitly stated goal of shifting the Overton window through extreme rhetoric online. The Daily Stormer exemplified the style that came to represent the alt-right and its adherents online, both on their own sites and in the comment sections of those in the mainstream, with its vicious slogan, “Gas the kikes, race war now.”

The old white nationalist guard — a group familiar with the carnage that its most extreme adherents are capable of — met the Stormer’s radical rhetoric with equal parts skepticism and scorn. Three days after the Frazier Glenn Miller shooting, Griffin acknowledged that the white nationalist movement attracts isolated and marginalized individuals and openly worried about the potential of anonymous internet forums for breeding “self detonating lone wolf vanguardists.” Griffin, whose first recommendations was to stay grounded in reality, ended his critique by chastising the rhetoric of VNN’s founder, Alex Linder:

I’ve told [Linder] for 10 years now, publicly, that “exterminating the Jews” was a terrible idea, and I never backed away from that position. It was sound advice. Now [Glenn-Miller] has acted on his terrible idea, will probably get the death penalty, destroyed his own family, has killed three innocent people, and destroyed the lives of their families. I’m not the one who is going to have to live with that though.

The rhetorical parallels are clear between Linder and Anglin, who introduced Linder in an interview at the Daily Stormer as, “a big inspiration to me personally. He is, in a sense, the original Nazi troll. He was the first person I ever heard openly call for the extermination of Jews — this was a long, long time before we started saying ‘gas the kikes.’

Colin Liddell, who publishes what remains of Richard Spencer’s original Alternative Right blog made a vendetta out of Anglin’s tactics.

“The main function that the repetitive memes pumped out daily at the Daily Stormer serve is to isolate those who take them up from their fellow Whites,” he wrote in a September 2014 piece titled “Stormer in a Teacup.” “The racially awakened are therefore placed in cultural quarantine.”

The isolation that Liddell references echoes Griffin about the Internet bringing out the worst in those that are isolated and marginalized — two charges leveled against Anglin by Liddell in his diagnosis of the Stormer’s publishing strategy.

Anglin’s site has always carried a disclaimer that, “We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable. Anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned permanently.”

However, the disclaimer is difficult to reconcile with content like Anglin’s June 5, 2017, “PSA: An Age of Ultraviolence is Coming,” which reads:

This is just a quick PSA for all white men. … An age of ultraviolence is coming. I do not know when, but I do know that most of you will live to see it. There is rapidly approaching a time when in every White Western city, corpses will be stacked in the streets as high as men can stack them. And you are either going to be stacking or getting stacked. … There will be leaders. You need to be prepared to recognize them for who they are, and you need to be prepared to do whatever they tell you to do, exactly as they tell you to do it. You are going to be required to do things that you cannot possibly imagine yourself doing right now. And if you do not do these things, you will die.

In its just over four years of operation, the Stormer’s audience included at least three readers who were either convicted of or indicted for murder.

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Storm Roof killed nine African-American worshipers and wounded one while attending a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof, then 21, told his victims, including Reverend and State Senator Clementa Pickney, that, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

In a manifesto posted to his website, lastrhodesian.com, Roof cited the Trayvon Martin case as his inspiration for searching on Google for “black on White crime.” According to Roof, “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.”

Roof, who had no real-world connections to known hate groups, complained that, “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

Passages from Roof’s manifesto were found almost verbatim in the comment section of the Daily Stormer by user “AryanBlood1488.”

In the years since Roof’s Charleston massacre, he has become a favorite meme of Stormer users, who frequently affix bowl haircuts —similar to Roof’s — to their avatars and refer to him endearingly as “DyRo.”

Anglin even went so far as to suggest in the Stormer’s since deleted Discord server, “The Thunderdome,” that he was giving Roof a column at the Daily Stormer.

On March 22, 2017, another Daily Stormer reader, James Harris Jackson, was arrested after stabbing 66-year-old black man Timothy Caughman with a sword in Manhattan. Jackson, an army veteran, was 28 at the time of the alleged stabbing. He traveled to New York from Baltimore, Maryland, to conduct a “practice run” for what was intended to deter white women from race-mixing. He told a media source after his arrest that, “the white race is being eroded.”

In a post titled, “Real Swordsman Hours: Daily Stormer Gets Blamed for Sword Attack!” Anglin dismissed the connection between his website and Jackson’s murder before directing his readers to the “Race War” section of the Stormer.

“I’d rather this have not happened. I don’t really see that any point of value was proved by this slicing/dicing. This is why I so adamantly discourage violence. It’s bad propaganda,” Anglin wrote. “That said, I’m not going to go out of my way to condemn this guy. Why should I? Black people are killing us ‘randomly’ every single day - except it isn’t actually random, it is the exact same thing as here — these are attacks because of our race.”

Jackson told investigators that he travelled to New York to carry out the attack precisely because it is the “media capital of the world” and he wanted maximum exposure. The day after the attack, he went to a public library in the city to read about his actions before turning himself in.

After posting dozens of montages of alleged victims of a black-on-white crime epidemic — the type of images that regularly accompanied the propaganda Roof found on the Council of Conservative Citizens website — Anglin wrote, “Look at those, then ask me again if I give a single molecule of a fuck about this plastic bottles nigger [Caughman].”

Unlike Roof, Jackson claims he was involved in a white supremacist group, although the name of the group has yet to be released.