Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism

by Seyward Darby

white women’s singular capacity to sow hate in ways both loud and quiet, blatant and not.

At a conference in late 2016, Spencer elicited a heil Hitler salute in honor of Trump’s victory, and he later got socked in the face during a media interview, launching a thousand “punch a Nazi” memes.

Good times

White supremacy lurks in mediocrity and civility as much as it fuels slurs and violence. It conceals itself in the false promises of Christian kindness, race blindness, and e pluribus unum.

Over time, I would realize that she often looked inflexible, like doing even the most ordinary things was unnatural. She moved through the world as if it didn’t feel like home. The only time I would see her at ease in her body was when she handled dead ones.

Oregon, a state with a constitution that banned black people from living there until 1926 and that didn’t ratify the Fifteenth Amendment until 1959.

She wore T-shirts with swastikas on them in public. Maybe, she thought, someone would see the symbol and ask what it was all about; then she’d be able to recruit them. (This never happened.)

She told herself the NSM was a legitimate political group with intellectual underpinnings—never mind that she’d never been able to convince another neo-Nazi to read Mein Kampf and discuss it with her.

“What does a racist joke do,” writes journalist Joe Bernstein, “except create the cognitive distance necessary to do harm, dissolve the bonds of moral obligation?”

the women-are-wonderful effect. Psychologists coined the phrase based on research showing that people tend to assign more positive attributes to women than they do to men, qualities like “happy,” “good,” and “nurturing.”

It was a searing reminder of another way in which the women-are-wonderful effect is problematic: It risks blinding people to the ways in which women can be terrible.

Stormfront had similar content woven into its channels, including the Women’s Forum, which promised “sugar and spice, and everything nice.”

🙄🙄

For tens of thousands of voters, open racism and adoration for Hitler weren’t disqualifying attributes in a candidate.

Sounds familiar 🤔

Covington also stressed normalcy: He believed that NWF acolytes should fit into wider society, which meant no Nazi insignia on their clothes or visible racist tattoos. By seeming run-of-the-mill, they might gain a foothold alongside millions of white Americans whose less strident racism was a cultural norm.

Her father owned a ranch near Fresno where he branded his cattle with swastikas.

What a dork

“When the girls were little, they were like daughters or something,” he said, his voice muffled over the prison’s landline. “Now they’re growing into women, and being a natural male…they’re like sisters, daughters, fantasy sweethearts, I don’t know what else.”

Grooooooossssss

Keeping her body covered meant that it was hers and no one else’s. “It is freeing, actually, to feel like I’m taking something away from men,” she told me.

“Tired,” Ayla once typed in red letters over an Instagram image of two transgender women of color; “woke,” she wrote over an adjoining photograph of a large white family.

Deep

“So I.…um…well…how do I say this? I wiped my ass with my student loan bill!!!! ROFL!”

Gnarly if true

She described three types of antifeminism. “Man dominant” was the crudest form, resting on the principle that men should subjugate women because male dominance is natural, necessary, and rooted in love. “Woman superior” held that female power resided in women’s lofty moral sensibility and sexual desirability—not to be confused with their sexual desire. Women’s authority was innate yet limited, physical yet passive. (“She’s ethereal,” Dworkin wrote, “she floats.”) The last type, “separate but equal,” emphasized that the sexes were destined for different spheres of existence, neither of which was better than the other. Women bearing and nurturing children was just as important as men providing for them financially or fighting wars to protect them.

The text promised to teach women “how to cause a man to protect you,” “how to bring out the best in your husband without pushing or persuasion,” and “how to be attractive, even adorable, when you are angry.”

🤨

Passionate Housewives Desperate for God,

That sounds like a weird porn title

In other posts, Ayla warned of the ways in which she thought feminism undermined families. She observed that working women often filled caretaking roles—teachers, nurses, secretaries—for clients, bosses, and customers, when they should have been filling them at home. “What a backwards world we live in where Mom doesn’t simply serve her own family in this function,” Ayla wrote. Meanwhile, she believed that a liberal arts education taught young people how to speak foreign languages and talk about philosophy but not how to live everyday lives: to cook healthy meals, sew their own clothes, or change a flat tire.

I hate this woman so much

She graded movies according to what she dubbed “SUD” criteria—sass and selfishness, ungodliness, disrespect—and included the Disney blockbuster Frozen on the no-watch list because its “main theme is about ‘being who you are’ without exception or compromise even if it harms, confuses or hurts your community. That’s selfishness.”

“Why would God create a sun that gives us cancer yet then not allow us to develop sunblock for thousands of years? It makes no sense. God created the sun to help people not to harm them,”

Omfg

Ayla seemed to be saying that young men couldn’t necessarily control their sexuality, but young women knew exactly how to use theirs.

She had two more children—both girls, both born at home. She called them her “homemakers,” while the boys were her “heroes.”

“I like statistics, I like facts, I like science, I like trying to think things through logically and get my emotions out of the situation and say, where are the safest places for my children to be? That’s me, as a mom,” Ayla said. But what she claimed as truth was not—studies and scholars had widely discredited the statistics she cited. The institutions still propagating them were conservative Christian media and right-wing “think tanks” like the Family Research Council.

She begged European men to “shut the door” of their countries and to tell women no more often. “Please. We need it,” she said, comparing grown women to little girls at carnivals who, once you give them treats, won’t stop demanding more.

While it was true that the number of reported rapes in Sweden had increased dramatically in the last quarter century, the reasons why weren’t clear. Perhaps it was decreasing stigma among survivors, who now felt safer reporting. Maybe it was Sweden’s legal definition of rape, which lawmakers had broadened.

Ayla compared SJWs of color to women who go to the hospital for a prescheduled caesarean. “They don’t have to push, they don’t have to risk anything, they don’t have to break a nail,” she said. “If something goes wrong, because life is life and things go wrong, no matter who you are, where you’re at, they can absolve themselves from guilt.”

Of course she’s one of those women that shames other women for getting c-sections 🙄🤮

AMERICA LOVES MOTHERS. Or so it claims. In reality, it loves wielding mothers as symbols more than it does the actual women who bear and (or) raise children.

She was white, which meant she enjoyed certain things. “Like Lord of the Rings,” she said. “That’s a great example. It’s a very white European story. That’s not to say that Asian people or African people can’t enjoy that story, and certainly some of them do, but by and large…it’s not their thing. They have their own things that they enjoy.”

WHAT

Because America felt white to her, ipso facto, whiteness was American.

But she saw unions across races as threats to diversity, by which she meant distinct racial populations. “I don’t want Africans to all start interbreeding with the Chinese, and Africans and Chinese disappear from the planet, for example,” she explained.

LOL SURE

“Yeah, we’re not novel readers,” Lana agreed.

Shocker

So huge is the burst of conspiracism that in June 2019, the FBI released a bulletin calling it a security risk.

Lest anyone doubt the revolutionary power of female bodies, Lana invoked centuries’ worth of wars waged, freedoms protected, and civilizations supposedly built on behalf of white women. “It’s the ultimate romantic gesture,” she said.

I can’t

“When women get involved, a movement becomes a serious threat.”

“Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s worldview,” Jon Krakauer writes. “A narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt.”