Let's Talk About the Radicalization of Young White Males Online
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The women fighting for white male supremacy
The women fighting for white male supremacy
Nicole Hemmer
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Lana Lokteff, who hosts a show on Red Ice Ice TV, a voice for the racist alt-right.
YouTube screenshot
“It was women that got Trump elected,” Lana Lokteff, one of the most prominent women in the American alt-right, told an audience earlier this year at an “ideas” conference in Stockholm. White women, she means, but when Lokteff — whose pale skin, long blonde hair, and light blue eyes help make her a living embodiment of the Aryan ideal — speaks about politics, the “white” is generally assumed. “And, I guess,” Lokteff continued, “to be really edgy, it was women that got Hitler elected.”
Hitler wasn’t really elected (he lost his race for the presidency and was appointed to the role of chancellor), but facts are fungible for Lokteff. And besides, it was the frisson of name-checking Hitler that counted for the audience.
In the corner of the world Lokteff inhabits, Hitler references are far less controversial than praise for female political power; women tend to be either overlooked or actively dismissed. But then, Lokteff is an unconventional figure: She hosts a white nationalist radio program, Radio 3Fourteen, part of the Red Ice media conglomerate that she runs with her husband Henrik Palmgren, a Swedish national. (Palmgren is media director for Richard Spencer’s fledgling AltRight Corporation, described as a “more ideological” — read: more overtly white nationalist — Breitbart.)
Despite her fervent commitment to advancing the interests of the white race, however, Lokteff faces a problem. Like many far-right movements throughout American history, the alt-right movement is as rooted as much in ideas of male superiority as it is white supremacy. The white nationalist side gets more attention, but men’s rights activism has been equally important to the movement. Women who are eager to be race warriors are seen by the white men who dominate the alt-right as, at best, subordinate partners, and, at worst, as part of the problem — yet another threat to white male power.
It is a double bind that has faced women of the far right for generations: To defend white supremacy, they must appeal to the values of tradition and hierarchy that structure racist politics. Yet gender hierarchy is also a potent part of that political tradition.
The parallels with the women who supported the Ku Klux Klan
A similar challenge confronted women white supremacists in the 1920s, a decade when feminism and white nationalism were both on the march. The popular images of the era are of women set loose from Victorian restrictions: the flapper dancing and smoking and rouging her knees, the suffragist glorying in her newfound enfranchisement, the New Woman entering government and the arts and the professions.
But women’s political ambition stirred in darker corners, too. In 1923, activists formed the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), organizing to restrict the rights of Jews, African Americans, and Catholics.
Women were hardly new to the world of organized hate, nor to the Klan itself, although the first Klan, formed in the years after the Civil War, was a strictly male organization. The original Klan operated through intimidation and vigilante violence. White women supported such actions mainly as spectators and behind-the-scenes supporters — and also as highly symbolic supposed victims of the depravities of the lower orders.
Black men whom the Klan lynched were often falsely accused of raping white women, but such lynchings were also a way of policing white women’s behavior, reminding them of the dire consequences of crossing the color line.
In photos capturing the grotesque scenes of lynchings, where white crowds numbering in the hundreds gathered to witness the murders, white women feature prominently among the smiling faces, more often than not with children in tow. They were introducing their offspring to the rituals of violent white nationalism.
While white women couldn’t don the hood or burn the cross in the 19th-century Klan, they found other white supremacist and nativist organizations to join, groups like Ladies of the Invisible Empire, Hooded Ladies of the Mystic Den, and the Order of American Women.
It took the rise of the second Klan — the one founded by William Simmons in 1915, in response to the release of the Klan-friendly film The Birth of the Nation and a rising nativism in the United States — to create a formal space for women. The new Klan was markedly different from its predecessor. Members of the 1920s Klan joined to protect the white race (although, as historian Kathleen Blee points out, they often publicly rejected the notion that the Klan was “anti-anything or anti-anybody,” but instead simply wanted “a stronger America.”) Members of the new Klan also engaged in serious vigilante violence.
But unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the 1920s Klan was a civic organization that held parades and picnics. Numbering in the millions and stretching from Oregon to Indiana to New York, its members ran openly for public office, and voted as (and for) members of the Klan. Given that women had newly been enfranchised, those electoral ambitions meant the Klan had to change. And so in 1923, the women formed, and the men embraced, the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK).
Women would not penetrate the upper echelons of the Klan — no Grand Wizard titles for them — but they would be active members, donning the white robes and hoods and canvassing for Klan candidates. The women of the Klan even engaged in acts of violence, reveling — if rarely — in the vigilante bloodlust normally reserved for men.
In Athens, Georgia, women Klan members organized a flogging of an errant husband as part of policing their neighborhood. Mamie Bittner of Pennsylvania recalled marching in a parade of thousands of Klanswomen who carried threatening clubs. Klanswomen also called on the men of the Klan to enact violence on specific people; the Georgia Realm of the Klan, a men’s group, received upwards of 20 letters a week from women suggesting possible targets.
A woman helped run PR for the Klan in the 1920s, testing gender boundaries
Though the men of the Klan tended to view the WKKK, condescendingly, as an “auxiliary” group, like the Junior Klan groups for teenagers, many women in the Klan viewed their participation in the movement as a sort of liberation.
Consider Elizabeth Tyler, who worked closely with the men of the Klan to build it into a mass movement. Married at 14 and widowed at 15, Tyler spent her early 30s as part of the “better babies” movement, a scientific approach to parenthood that sat at the intersection of public health and eugenics. Through this movement she met Edward Clarke, a promoter who helped organize “better babies” festivals in the South.
It’s tough being a woman in this crowd. But there were a few.
Zach Roberts/NurPhoto/Getty Images
Together they founded the Southern Publicity Association, a for-profit company that created promotional campaigns for organizations like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. In 1920 they offered their PR services to Simmons, founder of the modern Klan. Tyler and Clarke used novel advertising and organizational techniques to structure and sell the Klan: hiring professional promotors, creating a dues and leadership structure, and selling the Klan with the slogan “100% Americanism.” (They also violated the Klan’s pro-Prohibition, pro-morality stance when they were arrested together in 1919, in flagrante and under the influence.) Tyler was a full partner in the company’s work, making her the highest-placed woman within the Klan.
The WKKK sometimes even fought with the men’s Klan, with several local chapters of the WKKK seceding from their local male counterparts to protest men’s efforts to dominate the female branch. Such interference, the Little Rock chapter noted upon its defection, “is contrary to our principles of women, by women and for women.”
The women of the Klan were thus able to transgress traditional gender boundaries in service of upholding the Klan’s most important value: upholding traditional racial hierarchies. The women of the alt-right are navigating those same dynamics.
Largely invisible in media accounts, they nonetheless make up some 20 percent of those who claim the alt-right label. Though the images from the torchlight rally in Charlottesville focused on the men shouting “blood and soil,” there were also a few women in the horde.
Lokteff serves as the most visible avatar of these women, for at least two important reasons. Her marriage to a prominent white nationalist serves to soften her ambition, in the eyes of other men: She can be understood as a helpmeet rather than an independent woman, even as her speeches flirt with themes underscoring female power on the alt-right.
Her appearance matters, too. Men have power on the alt-right because male supremacy says they should, but women’s place has to be earned, not only through their work as race warriors but also through the way they reflect the movement’s ideal woman: white, attractive, feminine, anti-feminist. (For his part, her husband has carefully cultivated his appearance, too, adopting a quasi-Viking look.)
That last piece — anti-feminism — is key. Lokteff might preach about the power of women, but she is scathing about feminism, which has “done a lot to destroy our society, to tear up the family unit,” she has said. Men and women, she argues, are essentially different — feminism undermines “our biological roles where we function the best”— and while women can leverage their femininity to prosecute the coming race war, they can never truly be men’s equal
And yet Lokteff is carving out a career as a prominent political activist and media mogul. As she speaks of women’s power, and seeks it, she also advocates, or at least admits, their subservience.
It’s a tension the women of the Klan could not resolve, and the women of the alt-right can’t, either. They may claim power, but they can never claim equality.
Nicole Hemmer, a Vox columnist, is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.
The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.
@Y2Dre @Shook @Raymond Burrr @Red Shield @bdizzle @satam55 @Houston911 @Michael's Black Son @Sagat @Trajan @Sukairain @YouMadd? @Diasporan Royalty @MalikX @The Black Panther
@Matt504 @SupremexKing @#1 pick @Clutch Robinson
The women fighting for white male supremacy
Nicole Hemmer
Lana Lokteff, who hosts a show on Red Ice Ice TV, a voice for the racist alt-right.
YouTube screenshot
“It was women that got Trump elected,” Lana Lokteff, one of the most prominent women in the American alt-right, told an audience earlier this year at an “ideas” conference in Stockholm. White women, she means, but when Lokteff — whose pale skin, long blonde hair, and light blue eyes help make her a living embodiment of the Aryan ideal — speaks about politics, the “white” is generally assumed. “And, I guess,” Lokteff continued, “to be really edgy, it was women that got Hitler elected.”
Hitler wasn’t really elected (he lost his race for the presidency and was appointed to the role of chancellor), but facts are fungible for Lokteff. And besides, it was the frisson of name-checking Hitler that counted for the audience.
In the corner of the world Lokteff inhabits, Hitler references are far less controversial than praise for female political power; women tend to be either overlooked or actively dismissed. But then, Lokteff is an unconventional figure: She hosts a white nationalist radio program, Radio 3Fourteen, part of the Red Ice media conglomerate that she runs with her husband Henrik Palmgren, a Swedish national. (Palmgren is media director for Richard Spencer’s fledgling AltRight Corporation, described as a “more ideological” — read: more overtly white nationalist — Breitbart.)
Despite her fervent commitment to advancing the interests of the white race, however, Lokteff faces a problem. Like many far-right movements throughout American history, the alt-right movement is as rooted as much in ideas of male superiority as it is white supremacy. The white nationalist side gets more attention, but men’s rights activism has been equally important to the movement. Women who are eager to be race warriors are seen by the white men who dominate the alt-right as, at best, subordinate partners, and, at worst, as part of the problem — yet another threat to white male power.
It is a double bind that has faced women of the far right for generations: To defend white supremacy, they must appeal to the values of tradition and hierarchy that structure racist politics. Yet gender hierarchy is also a potent part of that political tradition.
The parallels with the women who supported the Ku Klux Klan
A similar challenge confronted women white supremacists in the 1920s, a decade when feminism and white nationalism were both on the march. The popular images of the era are of women set loose from Victorian restrictions: the flapper dancing and smoking and rouging her knees, the suffragist glorying in her newfound enfranchisement, the New Woman entering government and the arts and the professions.
But women’s political ambition stirred in darker corners, too. In 1923, activists formed the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), organizing to restrict the rights of Jews, African Americans, and Catholics.
Women were hardly new to the world of organized hate, nor to the Klan itself, although the first Klan, formed in the years after the Civil War, was a strictly male organization. The original Klan operated through intimidation and vigilante violence. White women supported such actions mainly as spectators and behind-the-scenes supporters — and also as highly symbolic supposed victims of the depravities of the lower orders.
Black men whom the Klan lynched were often falsely accused of raping white women, but such lynchings were also a way of policing white women’s behavior, reminding them of the dire consequences of crossing the color line.
In photos capturing the grotesque scenes of lynchings, where white crowds numbering in the hundreds gathered to witness the murders, white women feature prominently among the smiling faces, more often than not with children in tow. They were introducing their offspring to the rituals of violent white nationalism.
While white women couldn’t don the hood or burn the cross in the 19th-century Klan, they found other white supremacist and nativist organizations to join, groups like Ladies of the Invisible Empire, Hooded Ladies of the Mystic Den, and the Order of American Women.
It took the rise of the second Klan — the one founded by William Simmons in 1915, in response to the release of the Klan-friendly film The Birth of the Nation and a rising nativism in the United States — to create a formal space for women. The new Klan was markedly different from its predecessor. Members of the 1920s Klan joined to protect the white race (although, as historian Kathleen Blee points out, they often publicly rejected the notion that the Klan was “anti-anything or anti-anybody,” but instead simply wanted “a stronger America.”) Members of the new Klan also engaged in serious vigilante violence.
But unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the 1920s Klan was a civic organization that held parades and picnics. Numbering in the millions and stretching from Oregon to Indiana to New York, its members ran openly for public office, and voted as (and for) members of the Klan. Given that women had newly been enfranchised, those electoral ambitions meant the Klan had to change. And so in 1923, the women formed, and the men embraced, the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK).
Women would not penetrate the upper echelons of the Klan — no Grand Wizard titles for them — but they would be active members, donning the white robes and hoods and canvassing for Klan candidates. The women of the Klan even engaged in acts of violence, reveling — if rarely — in the vigilante bloodlust normally reserved for men.
In Athens, Georgia, women Klan members organized a flogging of an errant husband as part of policing their neighborhood. Mamie Bittner of Pennsylvania recalled marching in a parade of thousands of Klanswomen who carried threatening clubs. Klanswomen also called on the men of the Klan to enact violence on specific people; the Georgia Realm of the Klan, a men’s group, received upwards of 20 letters a week from women suggesting possible targets.
A woman helped run PR for the Klan in the 1920s, testing gender boundaries
Though the men of the Klan tended to view the WKKK, condescendingly, as an “auxiliary” group, like the Junior Klan groups for teenagers, many women in the Klan viewed their participation in the movement as a sort of liberation.
Consider Elizabeth Tyler, who worked closely with the men of the Klan to build it into a mass movement. Married at 14 and widowed at 15, Tyler spent her early 30s as part of the “better babies” movement, a scientific approach to parenthood that sat at the intersection of public health and eugenics. Through this movement she met Edward Clarke, a promoter who helped organize “better babies” festivals in the South.
It’s tough being a woman in this crowd. But there were a few.
Zach Roberts/NurPhoto/Getty Images
Together they founded the Southern Publicity Association, a for-profit company that created promotional campaigns for organizations like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. In 1920 they offered their PR services to Simmons, founder of the modern Klan. Tyler and Clarke used novel advertising and organizational techniques to structure and sell the Klan: hiring professional promotors, creating a dues and leadership structure, and selling the Klan with the slogan “100% Americanism.” (They also violated the Klan’s pro-Prohibition, pro-morality stance when they were arrested together in 1919, in flagrante and under the influence.) Tyler was a full partner in the company’s work, making her the highest-placed woman within the Klan.
The WKKK sometimes even fought with the men’s Klan, with several local chapters of the WKKK seceding from their local male counterparts to protest men’s efforts to dominate the female branch. Such interference, the Little Rock chapter noted upon its defection, “is contrary to our principles of women, by women and for women.”
The women of the Klan were thus able to transgress traditional gender boundaries in service of upholding the Klan’s most important value: upholding traditional racial hierarchies. The women of the alt-right are navigating those same dynamics.
Largely invisible in media accounts, they nonetheless make up some 20 percent of those who claim the alt-right label. Though the images from the torchlight rally in Charlottesville focused on the men shouting “blood and soil,” there were also a few women in the horde.
Lokteff serves as the most visible avatar of these women, for at least two important reasons. Her marriage to a prominent white nationalist serves to soften her ambition, in the eyes of other men: She can be understood as a helpmeet rather than an independent woman, even as her speeches flirt with themes underscoring female power on the alt-right.
Her appearance matters, too. Men have power on the alt-right because male supremacy says they should, but women’s place has to be earned, not only through their work as race warriors but also through the way they reflect the movement’s ideal woman: white, attractive, feminine, anti-feminist. (For his part, her husband has carefully cultivated his appearance, too, adopting a quasi-Viking look.)
That last piece — anti-feminism — is key. Lokteff might preach about the power of women, but she is scathing about feminism, which has “done a lot to destroy our society, to tear up the family unit,” she has said. Men and women, she argues, are essentially different — feminism undermines “our biological roles where we function the best”— and while women can leverage their femininity to prosecute the coming race war, they can never truly be men’s equal
And yet Lokteff is carving out a career as a prominent political activist and media mogul. As she speaks of women’s power, and seeks it, she also advocates, or at least admits, their subservience.
It’s a tension the women of the Klan could not resolve, and the women of the alt-right can’t, either. They may claim power, but they can never claim equality.
Nicole Hemmer, a Vox columnist, is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.
The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.
@Y2Dre @Shook @Raymond Burrr @Red Shield @bdizzle @satam55 @Houston911 @Michael's Black Son @Sagat @Trajan @Sukairain @YouMadd? @Diasporan Royalty @MalikX @The Black Panther
@Matt504 @SupremexKing @#1 pick @Clutch Robinson
White Haze
626: White Haze
SEP 22, 2017
Right-wing groups like the Proud Boys say they have no tolerance for racism or white supremacist groups. Their leader Gavin McInnes disavowed the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. But the Proud Boys believe “the west is the best,” which, one of them points out, is not such a big jump from “whites are best.” And one of the Proud Boys organized the Charlottesville rally. (The group now claims he was a spy.) What should we make of groups like this?
#626: White Haze from This American Life
#626: White Haze
@Y2Dre @Shook @Raymond Burrr @Red Shield @bdizzle @satam55 @Houston911 @Michael's Black Son @Sagat @Trajan @Sukairain @YouMadd? @Diasporan Royalty @MalikX @The Black Panther
@Matt504 @SupremexKing @#1 pick @Clutch Robinson
626: White Haze
SEP 22, 2017
Right-wing groups like the Proud Boys say they have no tolerance for racism or white supremacist groups. Their leader Gavin McInnes disavowed the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. But the Proud Boys believe “the west is the best,” which, one of them points out, is not such a big jump from “whites are best.” And one of the Proud Boys organized the Charlottesville rally. (The group now claims he was a spy.) What should we make of groups like this?
#626: White Haze from This American Life
#626: White Haze
@Y2Dre @Shook @Raymond Burrr @Red Shield @bdizzle @satam55 @Houston911 @Michael's Black Son @Sagat @Trajan @Sukairain @YouMadd? @Diasporan Royalty @MalikX @The Black Panther
@Matt504 @SupremexKing @#1 pick @Clutch Robinson
BushidoBrown
Superstar
Silicon Valley is on the verge of total and complete chaos
chickens coming home to roost
Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say It’s Gone Too Far
chickens coming home to roost
Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say It’s Gone Too Far
James Damore was fired by Google last month after suggesting that there may be biological reasons for gender gaps in tech jobs.
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say It’s Gone Too Far
After revelations of harassment and bias in Silicon Valley, a backlash is growing against the women in tech movement.
By NELLIE BOWLES
SEPTEMBER 23, 2017
SAN FRANCISCO — Their complaints flow on Reddit forums, on video game message boards, on private Facebook pages and across Twitter. They argue for everything from male separatism to an end to gender diversity efforts.
Silicon Valley has for years accommodated a fringe element of men who say women are ruining the tech world.
Now, as the nation’s technology capital — long identified as one of the more hostile work environments for women — reels from a series of high-profile sexual harassment and discrimination scandals, these conversations are gaining broader traction.
One of those who said there had been a change is James Altizer, an engineer at the chip maker Nvidia. Mr. Altizer, 52, said he had realized a few years ago that feminists in Silicon Valley had formed a cabal whose goal was to subjugate men. At the time, he said, he was one of the few with that view.
Now Mr. Altizer said he was less alone. “There’s quite a few people going through that in Silicon Valley right now,” he said. “It’s exploding. It’s mostly young men, younger than me.”
Mr. Altizer said that a gathering he hosts in person and online to discuss men’s issues had grown by a few dozen members this year to more than 200, that the private Facebook pages he frequents on men’s rights were gaining new members and that a radical subculture calling for total male separatism was emerging.
“It’s a witch hunt,” he said in a phone interview, contending men are being fired by “dangerous” human resources departments. “I’m sitting in a soundproof booth right now because I’m afraid someone will hear me. When you’re discussing gender issues, it’s almost religious, the response. It’s almost zealotry.”
Google’s main campus in Mountain View, Calif. “What Google did was wake up sectors of society that weren’t into these issues before,” said Paul Elam, who runs a men’s rights group.
CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mr. Altizer is part of a backlash against the women in technology movement. While many in the tech industry had previously dismissed the fringe men’s rights arguments, some investors, executives and engineers are now listening. Though studies and surveys show there is no denying the travails women face in the male-dominated industry, some said that the line for what counted as harassment had become too easy to cross and that the push for gender parity was too extreme a goal. Few were willing to talk openly about their thinking, for fear of standing out in largely progressive Silicon Valley.
Even so, “witch hunt” is the new whispered meme. Some in tech have started identifying as “contrarians,” to indicate subtly that they do not follow the “diversity dogma.” And self-described men’s rights activists in Silicon Valley said their numbers at meetings were rising.
Others are playing down the women-in-tech issue. Onstage at a recent event, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said harassment in Silicon Valley was “rarer than in most other businesses.”
Many men now feel like “there’s a gun to the head” to be better about gender issues, said Rebecca Lynn, a venture capitalist at Canvas Ventures, and while “there’s a high awareness right now, which is positive, at the same time there’s a fear.”
The backlash follows increasingly vulgar harassment revelations in Silicon Valley. Several female engineers and entrepreneurs this year named the men they accused of harassing them, and suddenly tech’s boys’ club seemed anything but impervious. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder, resigned as chief executive after the ride-hailing service was embroiled in harassment accusations. Dave McClure, head of the incubator 500 Startups, called himself “a creep” and stepped down. This month, the chief executive of Social Finance, Mike Cagney, also quit amid a harassment scandal.
In the aftermath, many stood up for gender equality in tech. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, asked investors to sign a “decency pledge.” Many companies reiterated that they needed to improve work force diversity.
Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, has asked investors to sign a “decency pledge.”
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“In just the last 48 hours, I’ve spoken to a female tech executive who was grabbed by a male C.E.O. at a large event and another female executive who was asked to interview at a venture fund because they ‘feel like they need to hire a woman,’” said dikk Costolo, the former chief of Twitter, who now runs the fitness start-up Chorus. “We should worry about whether the women-in-tech movement has gone too far sometime after a couple of these aren’t regularly happening anymore.”
But those who privately thought things had gone too far were given a voice by James Damore, 28, a soft-spoken Google engineer. Mr. Damore, frustrated after another diversity training, wrote a memo that he posted to an internal Google message board. In it, he argued that maybe women were not equally represented in tech because they were biologically less capable of engineering. Google fired him last month.
After months of apologizing by Silicon Valley for bad behavior, here was a young man whom some in tech’s leadership could potentially get behind.
Paul Graham, who founded an influential start-up incubator, Y Combinator, posted two articles about how the science behind Mr. Damore’s memo was accurate. Another start-up investor, John Durant, wrote that “Charles Darwin himself would be fired from Google for his views on the sexes.”
And the investor Peter Thiel’s business partner, Eric Weinstein, tweeted, “Dear @Google, Stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.”
Mr. Durant declined to comment. Mr. Graham said in an email that there needed to be more distinction between fact and policy, and Mr. Weinstein said there was “a sea of brilliant women” and that more needed to be done to “figure out how to more fully empower them.”
The push for gender equality “created divides that I didn’t anticipate,” said Joelle Emerson, next to the screen at a meeting in San Francisco. Her company, Paradigm, designs diversity strategies.
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Now men’s rights advocates in Silicon Valley have galvanized.
“What Google did was wake up sectors of society that weren’t into these issues before,” said Paul Elam, who runs A Voice for Men, a men’s rights group. He said his organization had seen more interest from people in Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley has always been a men’s space, others said. Warren Farrell, who lives in Marin County, Calif., and whose 1993 book, “The Myth of Male Power,” birthed the modern men’s rights movement, said, “The less safe the environment is for men, the more they will seek little pods of safety like the tech world.”
This turn in the gender conversation is good news for Mr. Damore. “The emperor is naked,” he said in an interview. “Since someone said it, now it’s become sort of acceptable.”
He added, “The whole idea that diversity improves workplace output, it’s not scientifically decided that that’s true.”
Mr. Damore filed a labor complaint against Google in August and said more than 20 people had reached out about joining together for a class-action suit about systemic discrimination against men. He is represented by Harmeet Dhillon, a local firebrand lawyer.
“It’s become fashionable in Silicon Valley for people like James, a white man, to be put into a category of less desirable for promotion and advancement,” Ms. Dhillon said. “Some companies have hiring goals like ‘We’ll give you a bonus if you’re a hiring manager and you hire 70 percent women to this organization.’ That’s illegal.”
Google declined to comment.
Two men who worked at Yahoo sued the company for gender discrimination last year. Their lawyer, Jon Parsons, said the female leadership — Yahoo’s chief executive was Marissa Mayer, before Verizon bought the company — had gone too far in trying to hire and promote women. He tied the suit into today’s women-in-tech movement.
“When you’re on a mission from God to set the world straight, it’s easy to go too far,” Mr. Parsons said. “There was no control over women hiring women.”
He said that his clients, Greg Anderson and Scott Ard, had faced gender discrimination in Yahoo’s media teams and that other teams like cars were headed by women, which to Mr. Parsons was a sign of problems.
“No eyebrows are going to rise if a woman heads up fashion,” Mr. Parsons said. “But we’re talking about women staffing positions — things like autos — where it cannot be explained other than manipulation.”
Those leading Silicon Valley’s gender equality push said they were astonished that just as the movement was having an impact, it opened up an even more radical men’s rights perspective.
“It’s exhausting,” said Joelle Emerson, who runs Paradigm, a company that designs diversity strategies. “It’s created divides that I didn’t anticipate.”
“The whole idea that diversity improves workplace output, it’s not scientifically decided that that’s true,” Mr. Damore said.
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
One radical fringe that is growing is Mgtow, which stands for Men Going Their Own Way and pronounced MIG-tow. Mgtow aims for total male separatism, including forgoing children, avoiding marriage and limiting involvement with women. Its message boards are brimming with activity from Silicon Valley, Mr. Altizer said.
Cassie Jaye, who lives in Marin County and made a documentary about the men’s rights movement called “The Red Pill,” said that the tech world and the men’s rights community had “snowballed” together and that the rise in the number of people in Mgtow is new.
On the Mgtow message boards, members discuss work (“Ever work for a woman? Roll up your sleeves and share your horror story”), technology (“The stuff girlfriends and wives can’t stand — computers, games, consoles”) and dating (mostly best practices to avoid commitment).
“I think there are a lot of guys living this lifestyle without naming it, and then they find Mgtow,” said Ms. Jaye, who calls herself a former feminist.
Mr. Altizer leads Bay Area Fathers’ Rights, a monthly support group for men to talk about the issues they uniquely face. He became interested in the community after a divorce and said his eyes were opened to how few rights men have. As for the numbers of women in tech, the effort for parity is absurd, he said.
“I’ve been on the hiring side for years,” Mr. Altizer said, adding that he is not currently hiring people. “It would be nice to have women, but you cannot find applicants.”
Follow Nellie Bowles on Twitter: @NellieBowles
I saw a YouTuber disscuss this article in a recent video: Big Trouble In Little Nazi: Why The Alt-Right Is "In Shambles" - It's Going Down
It seems like the Alt-Right is in Shambles.
It seems like the Alt-Right is in Shambles.
Free White & 21
AAGang
The women fighting for white male supremacy
The women fighting for white male supremacy
Nicole Hemmer
Lana Lokteff, who hosts a show on Red Ice Ice TV, a voice for the racist alt-right.
YouTube screenshot
“It was women that got Trump elected,” Lana Lokteff, one of the most prominent women in the American alt-right, told an audience earlier this year at an “ideas” conference in Stockholm. White women, she means, but when Lokteff — whose pale skin, long blonde hair, and light blue eyes help make her a living embodiment of the Aryan ideal — speaks about politics, the “white” is generally assumed. “And, I guess,” Lokteff continued, “to be really edgy, it was women that got Hitler elected.”
Hitler wasn’t really elected (he lost his race for the presidency and was appointed to the role of chancellor), but facts are fungible for Lokteff. And besides, it was the frisson of name-checking Hitler that counted for the audience.
In the corner of the world Lokteff inhabits, Hitler references are far less controversial than praise for female political power; women tend to be either overlooked or actively dismissed. But then, Lokteff is an unconventional figure: She hosts a white nationalist radio program, Radio 3Fourteen, part of the Red Ice media conglomerate that she runs with her husband Henrik Palmgren, a Swedish national. (Palmgren is media director for Richard Spencer’s fledgling AltRight Corporation, described as a “more ideological” — read: more overtly white nationalist — Breitbart.)
Despite her fervent commitment to advancing the interests of the white race, however, Lokteff faces a problem. Like many far-right movements throughout American history, the alt-right movement is as rooted as much in ideas of male superiority as it is white supremacy. The white nationalist side gets more attention, but men’s rights activism has been equally important to the movement. Women who are eager to be race warriors are seen by the white men who dominate the alt-right as, at best, subordinate partners, and, at worst, as part of the problem — yet another threat to white male power.
It is a double bind that has faced women of the far right for generations: To defend white supremacy, they must appeal to the values of tradition and hierarchy that structure racist politics. Yet gender hierarchy is also a potent part of that political tradition.
The parallels with the women who supported the Ku Klux Klan
A similar challenge confronted women white supremacists in the 1920s, a decade when feminism and white nationalism were both on the march. The popular images of the era are of women set loose from Victorian restrictions: the flapper dancing and smoking and rouging her knees, the suffragist glorying in her newfound enfranchisement, the New Woman entering government and the arts and the professions.
But women’s political ambition stirred in darker corners, too. In 1923, activists formed the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), organizing to restrict the rights of Jews, African Americans, and Catholics.
Women were hardly new to the world of organized hate, nor to the Klan itself, although the first Klan, formed in the years after the Civil War, was a strictly male organization. The original Klan operated through intimidation and vigilante violence. White women supported such actions mainly as spectators and behind-the-scenes supporters — and also as highly symbolic supposed victims of the depravities of the lower orders.
Black men whom the Klan lynched were often falsely accused of raping white women, but such lynchings were also a way of policing white women’s behavior, reminding them of the dire consequences of crossing the color line.
In photos capturing the grotesque scenes of lynchings, where white crowds numbering in the hundreds gathered to witness the murders, white women feature prominently among the smiling faces, more often than not with children in tow. They were introducing their offspring to the rituals of violent white nationalism.
While white women couldn’t don the hood or burn the cross in the 19th-century Klan, they found other white supremacist and nativist organizations to join, groups like Ladies of the Invisible Empire, Hooded Ladies of the Mystic Den, and the Order of American Women.
It took the rise of the second Klan — the one founded by William Simmons in 1915, in response to the release of the Klan-friendly film The Birth of the Nation and a rising nativism in the United States — to create a formal space for women. The new Klan was markedly different from its predecessor. Members of the 1920s Klan joined to protect the white race (although, as historian Kathleen Blee points out, they often publicly rejected the notion that the Klan was “anti-anything or anti-anybody,” but instead simply wanted “a stronger America.”) Members of the new Klan also engaged in serious vigilante violence.
But unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the 1920s Klan was a civic organization that held parades and picnics. Numbering in the millions and stretching from Oregon to Indiana to New York, its members ran openly for public office, and voted as (and for) members of the Klan. Given that women had newly been enfranchised, those electoral ambitions meant the Klan had to change. And so in 1923, the women formed, and the men embraced, the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK).
Women would not penetrate the upper echelons of the Klan — no Grand Wizard titles for them — but they would be active members, donning the white robes and hoods and canvassing for Klan candidates. The women of the Klan even engaged in acts of violence, reveling — if rarely — in the vigilante bloodlust normally reserved for men.
In Athens, Georgia, women Klan members organized a flogging of an errant husband as part of policing their neighborhood. Mamie Bittner of Pennsylvania recalled marching in a parade of thousands of Klanswomen who carried threatening clubs. Klanswomen also called on the men of the Klan to enact violence on specific people; the Georgia Realm of the Klan, a men’s group, received upwards of 20 letters a week from women suggesting possible targets.
A woman helped run PR for the Klan in the 1920s, testing gender boundaries
Though the men of the Klan tended to view the WKKK, condescendingly, as an “auxiliary” group, like the Junior Klan groups for teenagers, many women in the Klan viewed their participation in the movement as a sort of liberation.
Consider Elizabeth Tyler, who worked closely with the men of the Klan to build it into a mass movement. Married at 14 and widowed at 15, Tyler spent her early 30s as part of the “better babies” movement, a scientific approach to parenthood that sat at the intersection of public health and eugenics. Through this movement she met Edward Clarke, a promoter who helped organize “better babies” festivals in the South.
It’s tough being a woman in this crowd. But there were a few.
Zach Roberts/NurPhoto/Getty Images
Together they founded the Southern Publicity Association, a for-profit company that created promotional campaigns for organizations like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. In 1920 they offered their PR services to Simmons, founder of the modern Klan. Tyler and Clarke used novel advertising and organizational techniques to structure and sell the Klan: hiring professional promotors, creating a dues and leadership structure, and selling the Klan with the slogan “100% Americanism.” (They also violated the Klan’s pro-Prohibition, pro-morality stance when they were arrested together in 1919, in flagrante and under the influence.) Tyler was a full partner in the company’s work, making her the highest-placed woman within the Klan.
The WKKK sometimes even fought with the men’s Klan, with several local chapters of the WKKK seceding from their local male counterparts to protest men’s efforts to dominate the female branch. Such interference, the Little Rock chapter noted upon its defection, “is contrary to our principles of women, by women and for women.”
The women of the Klan were thus able to transgress traditional gender boundaries in service of upholding the Klan’s most important value: upholding traditional racial hierarchies. The women of the alt-right are navigating those same dynamics.
Largely invisible in media accounts, they nonetheless make up some 20 percent of those who claim the alt-right label. Though the images from the torchlight rally in Charlottesville focused on the men shouting “blood and soil,” there were also a few women in the horde.
Lokteff serves as the most visible avatar of these women, for at least two important reasons. Her marriage to a prominent white nationalist serves to soften her ambition, in the eyes of other men: She can be understood as a helpmeet rather than an independent woman, even as her speeches flirt with themes underscoring female power on the alt-right.
Her appearance matters, too. Men have power on the alt-right because male supremacy says they should, but women’s place has to be earned, not only through their work as race warriors but also through the way they reflect the movement’s ideal woman: white, attractive, feminine, anti-feminist. (For his part, her husband has carefully cultivated his appearance, too, adopting a quasi-Viking look.)
That last piece — anti-feminism — is key. Lokteff might preach about the power of women, but she is scathing about feminism, which has “done a lot to destroy our society, to tear up the family unit,” she has said. Men and women, she argues, are essentially different — feminism undermines “our biological roles where we function the best”— and while women can leverage their femininity to prosecute the coming race war, they can never truly be men’s equal
And yet Lokteff is carving out a career as a prominent political activist and media mogul. As she speaks of women’s power, and seeks it, she also advocates, or at least admits, their subservience.
It’s a tension the women of the Klan could not resolve, and the women of the alt-right can’t, either. They may claim power, but they can never claim equality.
Nicole Hemmer, a Vox columnist, is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.
The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.
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I done warned y'all about this Seabiscuit faced heffa
BILL O'REILLY: It's a mob mentality; it is an anti-Trump demonstration, that is what it has morphed into. But there is two kinds of dissent. And nobody is saying the players don't have a right to their opinion about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You do. And if you want to feel America is an evil country where the white supremacists stalk innocent blacks, if you want to believe that, you're free to believe that. But it's not true. It's not true.
So there is informed dissent and then there is pack dissent. That's where we're into now, pack dissent. Okay, he says one thing, I say another. And the league and the owners have lost control of it. But the American people I firmly believe 65%, maybe 70% of the American people do not like this situation, are offended by this situation...
A lot of people believe propaganda and there is nothing we can do about it. One of the reasons I wrote Killing England is so that everybody can now know what really happened, how we got our freedom.
I would love to go to every NFL locker room and give these guys the book. Would they read the book? Most of these guys would not. Because, again, they're caught up in emotion. This is emotion what's happening now. But the wider picture is and you pointed it out in your monologue. The far left wants to drive the narrative that the USA is an evil country. Why? They want to change everything. The constitution, the economic system, the leadership, the electoral system. They want across the board change. They use stuff like this to do it. These players are being used.
HANNITY: How does this end?
O'REILLY: First of all the league is going to have to do something. And what they should do, as I wrote a column for The Hill about it, is say, 'We know some of you don't like the country or want to get a point across. But this is the wrong forum. This is not the forum to do it. So if you don't want to stand up for the national anthem stay in the locker room and then come out. We don't want any political demonstrations because we don't allow pro-American demonstrations.'
The league does not allow that. There were many, many Giant players, New York Giant and Jet players after 9/11 wanted to show on their uniforms their solidarity with the families and the NFL wouldn't allow it.
HANNITY: We have the slaughter of cops in Dallas and the Cowboys wanted to honor the local police. and they wouldn't let them.
O'REILLY: And they wouldn't let them. So you have to be consistent. So the league says, already, you guys who don't want to stand up for the national anthem, you stay in the locker room after it's over, you can come out. That's it, okay, alright?
HANNITY: Let me ask you a broader, bigger question. You talked about this for many years on your show. You have your podcast now and your columns. But every two and four years and then when we have these other bigger issues emerge the issue of race it is used as a wedge issue. The Missouri radio ad that said if you elect Republicans the black churches are going to burn. The James Byrd ad. Al Gore saying when he's running for president to a predominantly black audience Republicans have the wrong agenda for African-Americans, changing his cadence. They don't want to count you in the census. That is a lie. And it divides the country. And it is dividing the country along racial lines in a way that is hurtful to the country.
O'REILLY: And then the media drive in and the entertainers drive it. But there is a reason why it's happening. A year ago you didn't hear the words white supremacist. Didn't hear it. Nobody heard it. It was white privilege. And in my Levittown neighborhood about eight miles away from Hannity's home I had guys in undershirts falling apart -- where is my white privilege, alright? That's what you had a year ago. It's morphed into white supremacists now and people are are buying it. Why? Because the far left agents, and I think they're evil, want to destroy the constitution in the sense that they want it all changed. Who forged it? Slave owners, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington. We can't have a constitution that they made. We have to have a new one. That's the endgame.
HANNITY: You were on my radio show and I think this was the most important point you made that I agreed with that I think is the most dangerous for the country. Because you took on the monument issue. Now you can add the NFL issue now and institutions in this country that are under fire every day. I'll add to that the two-to-four year playing of the race card the only -- one of the big weapons in the playbook of the Democrats. But ultimately you say if they get rid of the monuments, if they get rid of our history, they can take a knee during the anthem and diss the flag, then ultimately it's really the constitution they want to change. I want you to make that point.
O'REILLY: They're after a -- they don't want capitalism. They don't want the electoral college. They don't want white people generally calling the shots. So they have to mobilize minority Americans to be angry.
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FBI has 1,000 open investigations into violent white supremacy, domestic terrorism
FBI has 1,000 open investigations into violent white supremacy, domestic terrorism
ABC News
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
WATCH Senate confirms Christopher Wray to lead FBI
The FBI has about 1,000 open investigations into potential domestic terrorists, including people who may be linked to extremist white supremacy, white nationalism and environmental movements, the agency's new chief, Christopher Wray, told Congress today.
During his first testimony as FBI director, Wray said domestic terrorism is “a very, very serious” matter that the investigative agency spends “a lot of our time focused on.”
"We have about 1,000 open domestic-terrorism investigations as we speak," Wray told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Kevin Lamarque/REUTERS
FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on "Threats to the homeland" on Capitol Hill in Washington, Sept. 27, 2017. more +
In the past year alone, 176 people in the U.S. have been arrested on suspicion of links to domestic terrorism, he said.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, noted that inside the United States there have been nearly three times as many domestic terrorist attacks carried out by white supremacists and anti-government activists than by people inspired or otherwise tied to international terrorist groups.
Most Americans "would assume that the threat from ISIS influence is much greater, and the reality and the facts don’t support that," the Missouri senator said.
Wray said the FBI has a “significant number of agents who are working very, very hard” against domestic terrorism.
He noted that while there are no laws specifically focused on domestic terrorism, as there are for internationally-linked terrorism, federal authorities are able to charge domestic terrorism suspects with other offenses, such as for weapons violations.
He said the FBI’s 1,000 or so investigations into potential domestic terrorists are in addition to about the same number of probes by the FBI into “homegrown violent extremists” such as those who may be inspired by ISIS.
FBI has 1,000 open investigations into violent white supremacy, domestic terrorism
ABC News
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
WATCH Senate confirms Christopher Wray to lead FBI
The FBI has about 1,000 open investigations into potential domestic terrorists, including people who may be linked to extremist white supremacy, white nationalism and environmental movements, the agency's new chief, Christopher Wray, told Congress today.
During his first testimony as FBI director, Wray said domestic terrorism is “a very, very serious” matter that the investigative agency spends “a lot of our time focused on.”
"We have about 1,000 open domestic-terrorism investigations as we speak," Wray told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on "Threats to the homeland" on Capitol Hill in Washington, Sept. 27, 2017. more +
In the past year alone, 176 people in the U.S. have been arrested on suspicion of links to domestic terrorism, he said.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, noted that inside the United States there have been nearly three times as many domestic terrorist attacks carried out by white supremacists and anti-government activists than by people inspired or otherwise tied to international terrorist groups.
Most Americans "would assume that the threat from ISIS influence is much greater, and the reality and the facts don’t support that," the Missouri senator said.
Wray said the FBI has a “significant number of agents who are working very, very hard” against domestic terrorism.
He noted that while there are no laws specifically focused on domestic terrorism, as there are for internationally-linked terrorism, federal authorities are able to charge domestic terrorism suspects with other offenses, such as for weapons violations.
He said the FBI’s 1,000 or so investigations into potential domestic terrorists are in addition to about the same number of probes by the FBI into “homegrown violent extremists” such as those who may be inspired by ISIS.
Opinion | When White Supremacists Ruled Washington
When White Supremacists Ruled Washington
By BRENT STAPLES SEPT. 27, 2017
The Washington National Cathedral has removed stained-glass windows portraying Stonewall Jackson, above, and Robert E. Lee. Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency
Southerners who rose to federal office after the Civil War achieved something the Confederate Army had not: They seized control of Washington and bent it to their will. The Washington National Cathedral illuminated the era of white supremacist domination this month when it dismantled ornate stained-glass windows that portrayed the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as saintly figures.
The windows, installed in 1953, contained the Confederate flag and were the handiwork of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an activist group of well-heeled Southern ladies that was at the height of its influence in the early 20th century, when it raised prodigious amounts for monuments.
The clergy at the National Cathedral began to see the windows differently two years ago, after the white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine African-Americans in a church in Charleston, S.C. The victims were still being buried when the Very Rev. Gary Hall — then the cathedral’s dean — preached a moving sermon calling for the windows to be dismantled because they celebrated “a cause whose primary reason for being was the preservation and extension of slavery in America.”
Mr. Hall repeated a common misunderstanding when he suggested that the U.D.C. had been a relatively harmless group that was “mainly concerned with fostering respect for Southern heritage.” In truth, the organization did more to advance white supremacist ideology during the first several decades of the 20th century than any other organization in American history.
Its leaders glorified the Ku Klux Klan. They romanticized slavery as a benevolent institution that featured happy, faithful and well-fed bondsmen and women. They spoon-fed these values to the young through racist primers and essay competitions that rewarded children for parroting white supremacist views. This distorted version of history nurtured a generation of well-known segregationists and formed the basis of Southern resistance to the civil rights movement.
The white supremacist agenda pushed by the U.D.C. was ascendant in Washington when the Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913. Wilson promptly filled his administration with segregationists who worked diligently to segregate as much of the work force as they could. Highly paid black workers were driven out or confined to lower-paying jobs, undercutting the nascent black middle class. Many black workers were barred from offices, bathrooms and lunch tables that they once had shared with white co-workers.
The officially sanctioned segregation that took root during the Wilson era deepened under President Warren Harding, whose Southern-born commissioner of public buildings and grounds segregated even the tennis courts near the Washington Monument. The dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 was staged as a Jim Crow event, with black dignitaries banished to a weed-strewn Negro-only seating section where they were roped off from whites and guarded by Marines.
By this time, the ever-resourceful U.D.C. was campaigning to have “mammy monuments’’ — depicting the enslaved black women who had cared for the master’s children — erected in every state. A year after the Lincoln dedication, the Senate voted to appropriate a huge sum to be spent on such a monstrosity in the capital, on Massachusetts Avenue near Sheridan Circle. Mercifully, the bill failed in the House.
As the Yale historian David Blight has written about the episode, “The nation was only narrowly spared the ironic spectacle of unveiling a major memorial to faithful slaves on a prominent avenue in Washington only one year after the dedication of the temple of freedom and union the country has known ever since as the Lincoln Memorial.”
In 1931, some U.D.C. members set out to colonize the most visible house of worship in the country. At one point it suggested memorials for Generals Lee and Jackson, as well as for Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. Finally, in 1953, the cathedral settled on the stained-glass design with Lee and Jackson.
As it turns out, the cathedral dean who presided over the installation was Francis B. Sayre Jr., an early supporter of the civil rights movement and a grandson of Woodrow Wilson, whose tomb rests in the Cathedral. As Mr. Hall said after the Charleston massacre, neither he nor the church could live, as Mr. Sayre did, with the contradiction of supporting both the civil rights movement and a memorial to men who fought to preserve chattel slavery. The windows had to go.
BushidoBrown
Superstar
BushidoBrown
Superstar
when we gonna address the radicalisation of young black males on the internet?
Free White & 21
AAGang
when we gonna address the radicalisation of young black males on the internet?
Negged ho
