15. Online or Off: There is no White Nationalist Extremism without Male Supremacist Extremism
Patriarchal Traditionalism, Extreme Misogyny, and White Nationalism are Indivisible
Unmanned is a reader-supported publication. If you’ve found this essay useful and thought-provoking, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support means a lot and makes it possible for me to dedicate more time to in-depth feminist writing, research, and advocacy. Thanks for reading and sharing!
More than enough has been said about Charlie Kirk this past week but it turns out that little outside feminist circles (this Kate Manne piece, as always, resonates) addresses the relationship between male supremacy and extremism in the United States. Given the Right’s explicitly anti-feminist agenda and the administration’s actions over the past year, you’d think it would be impossible to ignore the centrality of male supremacy as a throughline across the movement. But. apparently, it’s not.
An op-ed published this weekend, for instance, is emblematic of this erasure. It delved into extremism described as tied to our “brain-poisoning meme politics.” The article acknowledges white supremacy, but conspicuously misses the core gender dynamics underpinning both this shooting and broader patterns of extremism. Like countless others with similar framing, it described last week’s shooting as a “revolting death spectacle” that marks a new kind of political event. This conclusion, however, hinges on not acknowledging the public and live-streamed killings of Black people as political spectacle and on taking for granted the power to define what counts as political to begin with. It requires ignoring years of women being targeted online with violence threats, often through meme-based disinformation, by violent extremists taking “real world” actions.
As the Southern Poverty Law Center recently explained in a report titled, “From Screens to Schools: Male Supremacy’s Impact and Prevention Strategies,” male supremacy “ is a facet of all other supremacist ideologies” that they track and its organized adherents “have outsized influence on society.”
There is no way to understand Kirk’s shooting, the morass of online right-wing culture, or widening extremist violence today without contending with violent male supremacy or, specifically, Gamergate as the quintessential model of organized hate, networked and distributed harassment, and cultivated extremism.
Your Slip is Still Showing
For years, right wing communities, mainly of men, organized coordinated online attacks on Black women and, in 2014, Gamergate (2014), a campaign of misogynistic abuse accelerated by an act of intimate abuse. Gamergate evolved into years of widespread, targeted harassment of women in the gaming industry, three in particular who experienced life-altering doxxing and threats of violence intended to silence and intimidate not only them but also people who wrote about or helped them. Explicitly “anti-DEI,” it was an illiberal movement that sought to fortify gaming as a young, male, mainly white arena. Both episodes were generally relegated to “culture war” or “people who are too online” events.
Notably, in 2014, one of Gamergate’s targets, a feminist video-game critic, cancelled a public appearance at Utah State University, less than two hours away from where Kirk was shot, after a "massacre style attack" was threatened. She declined to speak because she felt that the minimal security measures offered by the school and local law enforcement were inadequate to protect public safety.
As a model for right-wing extremism, Gamergate mobilized online communities using platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. It was also one of the first mass examples of a decentralized, weaponized mis/disinformation campaign, setting the stage for QANON and Pizzagate. Just as we have seen this past week, Gamergate thrived on the rapid spread of false information, conspiracy theories, hyper-intense commentary, and targeted attacks via viral memes, comments, articles, videos, and more. Notably, Gamergate has been identified as a hate movement in which transphobia was evident. All in all, however, what characterized Gamergate was its all-purpose sense of immense grievance, especially male grievance.
At the time, many commentators noted that Gamergate illustrated “the politicization of absolutely everything” and that it did not reflect solely right-wing concerns. Many Gamergaters, as Ezra Klein wrote in Vox at the time, “see themselves as liberals” and “feel dismissed and even hated by the social justice left….They’re for equal pay and they voted for Barack Obama, so why are they being made the enemy just because the women in their games have skimpy outfits?” I mean it’s not as if the left doesn’t have its own flagrant misogyny.
Gamergates’ primary targets were white women, but Black women activists had already been navigating widespread and targeted misogynoir in predominantly white digital spaces, organized harassment campaigns that received far less media attention. Operation Lollipop and #YourSlipIsShowing impersonated and harassed Black women, often using racially charged slurs and imagery. Writer Shafiqah Hudson used the latter expression to call out harassers masquerading as feminists or members of marginalized groups in order to propagate hate or sow confusion.
All of these tactics were honed on women first and ignored. The deliberate use of ambiguous memes as “humor,” spreading mis/disinformation, doxxing and impersonating people, stalking and trolling, and attempts to sow division, all of these are now part and parcel of extremist violence playbooks.
Online or Off, Don’t Give Patriarchal Traditionalism a Pass
Today, extremism is the focus on attention, but extremism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s easy to see and name the extremist violence and extreme misogyny but it’s far harder to see, name, and condemn it’s ideological foundations, often wrapped in benevolent sexism, faith, notions of love, and social norms.
Kirk built much of his fame and political organizing around defending Christian gender hierarchies, praising traditional masculine roles, and denigrating feminists and feminism. He was a patriarchal traditionalist advocating for white male patriarchal power in ways that were more palatable compared to others’ more extreme and more overt male supremacist claims. His approach worked hand-in-hand with that of a man he was, until his death, purportedly at war with, marking a MAGA schism that will undoubtedly complicate all of our lives and flummox a political chattering class dangerously and irremediably unable to let go of binaries.
Consider the carnival of misogyny that took place online immediately after Trump’s election in 2024. On Election Day, the words “dumb cunt” exceeded 64,000 mentions on X. “Get back in the kitchen” and “Your body, my choice” were the two top narratives on social media, overtaken only by “Repeal the 19th.” Black women and students of color across the country woke up to text messages reading “You have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation . . . be prepared to be searched down once you’ve entered the plantation.” Men on college campuses celebrated with signs that listed women and enslaved people as “Types of Property” and proclaimed, “Homo sex is sin.”
The person responsible for “Your body, my choice”? Nick Fuentes, the man who is currently front and center in Kirk coverage. In the months after the election, boys and men in schools, at home, and on streets proudly took up the phrase. One school district in Wisconsin issued a warning to parents after “students” were chanting it a “other students.” At domestic violence shelters, women and counselors are reporting the use of this expression by men who abuse and threaten to kill the women they theoretically love.
Most media reports typically describe Fuentes as “an influential white nationalist,” which is true but he’s also clearly, by his own terms, an influential male supremacist. Labelling him only “a white nationalist” erased and continues to erase the key role of patriarchal masculinity and violence in MAGA’s rise and agenda. At this point, it feels like a deliberate obscuring of how “white power” is also, always, ultimately the assertion of male power over women, a pairing (see Christian Ortiz’s excellent history of patriarchal white supremacy) that continues to be essential to colonial and imperial violence, expansion, and power. White nationalist masculinity is constructed in opposition to men who are racialized and as threats (hence, stranger rape myths). It’s a masculinity defined around the “necessary” protection of girls and women in hierarchies that give men control over them.
Sure, there is, increasingly, diversity within right-wing movements and their masculine ideals. Several years ago, the Proud Boys, for instance, began to downplay explicit white supremacist rhetoric to focus on cross-racial anti-feminism and defense of traditional patriarchal masculinity, as ideological appeals. Nonetheless, white nationalism remains the ultimate goal of many of these movements and it’s impossible to assert and exercise control over a population’s race or ethnicity without controlling reproduction, and that means controlling women. This is true regardless of whether or not women are active agents of violent white supremacy, as so many are.
Kirk represented the socially palatable and chivalrous alter ego to the crass misogyny of Nick Fuentes and the worst actors of the Manosphere. He proudly promoted a vision of society in which girls and women are expected to submit to men, not pursue higher education, prioritize marriage and having babies over financial independence and careers, and accept traditional gender hierarchies with men as providers and authority figures. He denigrated feminism as a sickness, a cause of unhappiness and mental distress. He blamed women for boys’ and men’s misconduct, spread dangerous ideas about consent and rate, and questioning the legitimacy of sexual assault claims. He praised women’s obedience and silence as virtues. So, even though he presented his views in less overtly vitriolic tones than other male supremacists, his rhetoric was designed to reinforce patriarchal power and erode women’s rights and opportunities.
(For more on the relationship between patriarchal traditionalism, intersectional supremacist violence, and extremism I highly recommend, From Patriarchal Traditionalism to Misogynist Incels and the Alt-Right, edited by Emily K. Carian, Alex DiBranco, and Chelsea Ebin.)
Memes are Metamodern
It’s striking this week how unprepared adults, parents, law enforcement, and media seem to be despite the many years in which these cultures have grown and expressed themselves.
From an abstract perspective, which, frankly, we can little afford today, it is interesting to think about how confusing the shooters’ use of symbols, language, and memes are. All can be seen as possibly reflecting a baseline drive for chaos and also a nihilism distinct to right wing accelerationism, but they also exemplify metamodernism, characterized by an unstable oscillation between irony and sincerity. The unseriousness of the medium exists in sharp contrast to the seriousness of its content.
A meme, for instance, can simultaneously be a joke, a provocation, and a declaration of belief. We are all now continuously moving between the suggestion of authentic feeling and ‘truth’ and a deeply ironic or sarcastic detachment, in which nothing is meant to have meaning at all. Did the shooter reference fascism on his bullets? Or a satire of fascism? Was he talking about a game? Or a furry subculture? This fluidity of intent and meaning is deeply disorienting to people not basted in online media and gaming. All analysts seem to be able to do for sure is throw their hands in the air and say that he was “very online.” The medium’s wink-wink tongue-in-cheek form not only complicates meaning, but also how identity is performed, perceived, and policed online. Deliberate or not, ambiguity provides ways to subvert mainstream norms, a transgression young men often seek. But it also allows misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic depictions and beliefs to thrive all while being described as jokes. This ambiguity and call to “humor?” is evident and key, for instance, in the use of social media by key members of the current administration.
The logic and tactics of earlier meme-rich harassment and organization networks is everywhere in today’s political media sphere. “Flooding the zone”? Gamergate successfully used early versions of this now banal tactic by saturating online discussions with images, hashtags, constant mentions, memes, and coordinated harassment campaigns designed to overwhelm and confuse targets and the general public, developing strategies that now define online information warfare. Like Gamergate, much of the organizational structure of right-wing online activism and recruitment today is intentionally leaderless and fluid, leveraging anonymity, specialized in-group words and language, rapid meme production, and mob tactics to generate maximal disruption with minimal accountability. This week, as was also the case with Gamergate, nonstop online commentary, speculation about conspiracies and motives, and a flood of meme-based propaganda quickly filled our screens, cultivating a widespread sense of dread and ongoing siege, justifying further harassment and threats of greater violence. Gamergate 101. Memes, as any of the women embroiled in episodes of prolonged harassment can tell you, aren’t funny, harmless, and meaningless. These connections aren’t random, senior Right wing strategists are open about using Gamergate networks and tactics to recruit young men to their causes during the past decade. A 2019 oped put it this way: Gamergate’s “most powerful legacy is as proof of concept of how to wage a post-truth information war.”
Over the years, Gamergate tactics evolved, adapting to serve an explicitly white male Christian nationalist agenda, as evidenced in today’s “too online” Groyper culture (excellently explained here by airplane mode’s Liz Plank). All of the core patterns of Gamergate are evident: sensationalist propagandistic videos, memes, misinformation, coordinated harassment campaigns, threats, and attempts to manipulate broader political or cultural narratives for in-group advantage.
This is why in reddit threads today comparisons to Gamergate are being mocked as “stupid” “libshit's QAnon." After a sociologist mentioned the precedent set by Gamergate on Bluesky, one commenter noted, “the sociologist who is specialized in sexual violence is gonna lecture us about the Kirk assassination. Any real scientist would know to stay in her lane.”
“Getting the joke,” a politicized in-group sociality, comes from participating in specific memes. It imparts an elitism of specialized knowledge. Memes are still largely generated by young, white men and proliferated on platforms where they dominate. Political memes in particular are filled with sexist illusions, transphobic themes, anti-LGBTQ content, and debates about moral legitimacy. In alt-right circles, memes effectively use humor, irony, and coded imagery to normalize and obscure how white nationalism inherently fuses rigid patriarchy with its racial ideology.
It’s not only about memes, of course. On the day Kirk was assassinated, in fact, while his assassination was being aired on screens everywhere, a 16-year old in Colorado shot two schoolmates and then killed himself. He frequented a website, the same one at least two other school shooters have, called WatchPeopleDie, which features videos of extreme sexual violence, killings, and animal cruelty. The website is part of a “network originated,” an analyst has explained, “as an effort to accelerate the collapse of modern society by exacerbating social tensions and dividing society through violence, and has roots in white supremacy and fascism.” In other words, a right wing accelerationist network. Despite ample evidence of male supremacist hate, no mention is made of male supremacy in any of the news coverage I have seen.
Laundering gendered risks and male supremacy out of existence
It’s hard not to conclude, if you were aware of or part of this history, that the primary difference between today’s ugly expression of “meme politics” and earlier iterations is that this time a very prominent white man was killed in an environment of extreme political polarization and volatility. What is happening now, however, in the wake of Kirk’s killing and in terms of the role of the internet, meme culture, stochastic terrorism, and “troll army” activation, is old hat.
For years and still today, when public women encounter threats to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, and life, what happens to them isn’t automatically considered a major “political” event or a serious threat. Instead, it’s more likely to be represented in terms of private safety, personal problems, or if public, in “culture war” and not political terms, as though violent misogyny, misogynoir, and transmisogyny are not based on political belief systems and objectives.
This is how, for instance, almost all reports about the threat of deep fakes break the problem down into two categories: nonconsensual pornification (96% of which is of women) and political disinformation (most of which also affects women but in ways that also applies to men more generally). This distinction makes no sense of if you are a woman politician because nonconsensual pornification of a woman candidate or politician IS political disinformation. This male-centered distinction in defining risks and problems actually hurts women leaders because it refuses to acknowledge the political relevance of the gendered way they experience the risks represented by deepfakes, relegating women’s nonconsensual sexual depictions as private, individual issues that are juxtaposed with public and political ones.
Male supremacist violence is core to all other forms of supremacist violence, even when, in fact, especially when in many instances, women are its champions. You’d never know this, however, because most mainstream commentary erases male supremacy in language, framing, and analysis.
“You’ll hear a wide variety of gender-neutral terms: the alleged "shooter.” The college-age "suspect.” The “killer.” The “person” who did this,” explained Jackson Katz, co-founder of the Young Men Research Initiative. “It’s almost as if the pundits and “experts” are intentionally attempting to avoid saying out loud that this act—like the overwhelming majority of both mass shootings and political violence—was done by a man.”
This doesn’t mean other people can’t or aren’t violent, but it is a good marker of the fact that in our society, young white men feel an entitlement to violence that others don’t.
People See What They Want to See or The Logic of Lulz
During the peak harassment and targeting period of Gamergate, law enforcement and media repeatedly failed to take threats against women seriously or to respond adequately. In fact, the women were often dismissed for not being able to “take a joke.” The episode and its meaning were sidelined, much like the assassination of Minnesota state officials Melissa Hortman, the murder of her husband, and the shooting of John Hoffman, like the attempted murder of Rep. Nancy Pelosi and subsequent injuries to her husband, have been today.
What might have happened if media, political analysts, law enforcement, and lawmakers had taken Gamergate seriously as a political force? If the hate and harassment directed at women, minorities, and trans people were recognized as dangerous anti-democratic developments. Taking Gamergate seriously would have meant confronting the roots of coordinated misogyny, racism, and the tactics that foreshadowed far-right mobilizations, including the rise of the alt-right, conspiracy networks, and violent events such as the January 6 Capitol riot. Instead, the failure to act allowed a template of harassment, disinformation, and radicalization to evolve and spread unchecked into contemporary political life, spurring violence and extremist recruitment across social platforms.
Things are Changing, but Not Fast Enough
The related idea, expressed in the oped I mention above, that as a result of this shooting, “we can no longer ignore that we live in an era where the online and the lived are indistinguishable,” speak only to a stunning privilege that most of us don’t enjoy. If you are a teacher, a professor, an advocate for social justice, a journalist, a climate change scientist, a public health official who promotes science the division between the online and "real” world disappeared years ago.
As I type, more news reports are surfacing about Trey Reed, a 21-year old college student in Mississippi found hanging from a tree, a death law enforcement is attributing to suicide but that almost no one with any grounding in American history thinks is suicide. If he was lynched it will be yet another truly sad and tragic sign of where we stand as a country. It will, like Kirk’s shooting, also be an indicator of increasing ritualized violence as an expression of white masculinity.
In 2018, both the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) started to pay attention to male supremacy and the role it plays in the extremist movement and hate-based ideologies they research and track. When I spoke to the SPLC in 2013 and 2014 male supremacy, misogyny, and misogynoir were not on their radar, so this shift, while late, is an important one. In 2019, in recognition of the need to understand the threats posed by this movement, the Institute for the Study of Male Supremacism was started in recognition, says its founder and Executive Director Alex DiBranco, that male supremacy "as a motivating ideology for far-right mobilisation and acts of mass violence has been slow to evolve.” I appreciate all of these efforts, but until our public intellectuals, media analysts, and politicians name male supremacy and confront it as the fascist political engine it is, indivisible from white supremacy, our social understanding of extremism will remain woefully incomplete, and our political responses will remain fatally flawed.
The ideas I’ve written about here are part of my upcoming book, All We Want is Everything, out in November. If you’ve found them useful and of further interest, please check it out. Preorders really help authors and are much appreciated!