Two stories about White men on the Internet

On all the ways we protect the lie, and a few ways we could choose to build a better truth

When you build a society on the lie of racial hierarchy, on the myth that only one segment of society is actually truly human, that lie will find so many ways to kill. Most days, it will kill in quiet, barely acknowledged ways— an expectant mother ignored by doctors, a water main bursting with lead, a child shuffled from in-school detention to penitentiaries. Some days, though, the deaths will be harder to ignore, even for a society so skilled at ignoring death. Some days the lie will be live-streamed by a young white man with an arsenal of weapons and a chorus of online voices in his ear reassuring him that the lie is actually the truth. Some days the people killed, both by the man and the lie, will have just been buying groceries. They will have been parents and children and grandparents and great-grandparents, Aaron and Ruth and Pearly and Katherine and Heyward and Celestine and Roberta and Marcus and Andre and Geraldine.

When you build a society on a lie, that lie will seek every outlet possible to grow and metastasize. There will be prominent, respectable voices who make honeyed, sympathetic arguments about why the lie is still necessary from the floor of Congress and the studios of major television networks. There will be a million reasons given by hundreds of millions of people as to why their little piece of the lie— their kids’ school, their city’s zoning policy, their own voting patterns— isn’t the one that matters. And then, there will be those for whom the lie isn’t an embarrassing, shameful part of their story, but the central part of their identity. And those people, it turns out, are always organizing, always connecting, always ready to welcome new converts into the fray.

Here’s a story about not seeing the organizing taking place right in front of your eyes.

I moved to Sweden in 2005. The fellowship that paid my bills had very limited expectations for my productivity or efficacy, so I had a decent amount of time on my hands. I was also extremely homesick. So I started a blog. That was a pretty common move in 2005. I have no doubt that the back channels of the internet are still littered with old, forgotten travelogues like mine, founts of amazing insights such as “people are quieter here!” and “when you don’t understand a culture or language, you frequently make a lot of boneheaded mistakes in public.” If I remember correctly, I had not one but multiple posts about how Swedish Mcdonald’s was offering a special burger called “El Maco Grande.”

Every once in a while, though, bigger, more important things would happen in the world and I would drop the jokey pretense and do some Self-Serious Blogging. I don’t have to tell you what I sounded like when I did so, because that’s basically still what I do here. In October, 2005, I wrote one of those serious blogs because the immigrant suburbs around Paris were on fire. The uprising began when White French cops chased a group of Black French youth around the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The kids hid in an electrical substation and were electrocuted. Two of them died. Word of the chase spread, and soon French citizens of African and Middle Eastern descent were out in the streets, expressing a righteous rage at decades of police brutality and employment discrimination and daily French racism.

I can’t remember what I wrote, but it wasn’t incredibly trenchant. I drew the very obvious line between conditions in French suburbs and their Swedish counterparts, where Black, Middle Eastern and Balkan immigrants and refugees were excluded in a million small and large ways from the gilded promise of the Swedish folkhemmet. I pressed publish and then went on with my day, expecting that at some point the same dozen friends and family members who represented the extent of my readership would reply back with their general agreement and I wouldn’t feel like I was a continent away from the people I loved.

Instead, when I logged back on a bit later, I suddenly found my dusty little blog brigaded with comment after comment from usernames I didn’t recognize. I was accused of being either a fool or a race traitor, an either willing or unwilling puppet of a nefarious Muslim conspiracy to conquer Europe and leave the White race in shambles. I blocked the comments, which of course didn’t help matters at all. They kept coming. With a little bit of sleuthing, I traced my new visitors back to a website hosted by a mysterious character named Fjordman. Whoever he was, his blog was a buzzing gathering place for unrepetanant European racists and Islamophobes. I’m still not sure how my blog found my way there, but for a day or so, I was that micro-community’s main character, my supposed brainwashed naïveté an alternate source of pity and scorn. They laughed at my thin-skinnedness and stupidity, lavishing praise on each other (and especially Fjordman himself) for his comparative open-mindedness and intellect. I was a useful, albeit temporary foil. As soon as they wrung all the fun they could from me, they got bored and went onto the next target.

They moved on, but, for a few days at least, I didn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about Fjordman’s blog. I was shaken and scared, less so because I thought I was in any danger but because I had no idea that Internet outposts like this existed (I was, as it turns out, deeply naive, just not in the way that crew accused me of being). I knew that there were virulent White supremacists in the world, but I didn’t know at the time that they cultivated and tended to spaces that felt like communities, places where they made each other feel welcome, where the outside world’s definition of care was reframed as hate and the liberal world’s definition of hate was reframed as care and solidarity.

Eventually, because I didn’t know what to do with any of those feelings, I moved on as well. I forgot about Fjordman and his little army of internet trolls. Whatever they were, I assured myself, they were fringe, a bunch of sad and lonely outcasts living their lives in front of a computer screen. I moved back to the U.S., started climbing my way up the kind of nonprofit ladder that I assured myself would lead to a changed world and left the trolls behind.

And then, on July 22nd, 2011, a Norwegian man named Anders Behring Breivik detonated a fertilizer bomb outside of the Prime Minister’s office in Oslo. He then traveled to Utøya island, site of a Labour Party youth camp, and opened fire. In total, he killed 77 people that day, the deadliest attack on Norwegian soil since World War II. It didn’t take long after his arrest for details of his motives, worldview and radicalization to become public knowledge. For years, the world learned, Breivik had been an active participant in far-right Islamophobic and White Nationalist online communities. He had a number of blogs and message boards that he frequented, but his hero was a fellow Norwegian, Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, better known by his Internet pseudonym, Fjordman.

There is absolutely nothing unique or surprising about Payton S. Gendron’s story. While I could perhaps be forgiven back in 2005 for being naive about the existence of online spaces where “bored” malcontents feed off each other and help one another spiral further and further into their darkest impulses, we have seen this story far too many times by now. Payton Gendron didn’t need to seek out an obscure Norwegian blogger for inspiration before opening fire on an East Buffalo supermarket. He had Oak Creek and El Paso and Christchurch and Poway and Charleston. He had a robust community that was ready to welcome him when he felt alone and only slightly committed to the lie and see to it that the lie became his life.

We know this story. We know that there has always been a symbiotic relationship between the explicit liars and the would-be subtle liars in suits. We know to tsk tsk Tucker Carlson and various House and Senate Republicans for playing footsie with Great Replacement rhetoric, but we also know that won’t stop either the message boards or the prime time broadcasts. Mass killers like Payton Gendron are extremely useful for more mainstream conservatism; they always have been. The fact that he would do that whereas all you would do is vote for immigration restrictions and lower capital gains taxes is proof that there’s nothing monstrous about your belief system. Just as previous generations of “Reagan Democrats” could look at the Klan and see a comparative innocence in their own defense of State’s Rights, so too can a Tucker Carlson viewer innocently demure that when their favorite mouthpiece talking about being replaced, he just means that Democrats are going to bus in illegal immigrants to vote. He would never tell his viewers, never tell you, to shoot up a supermarket. Only monsters do that.

Then again, it isn’t just conservatives who benefit from the contrast. Without the supermarket shooter, how else would the rest of us justify the little daily ways the lie remains so useful for us. Don’t blame us, we voted for the party that kneeled in kente cloth before throwing “defund the police” activists under the bus and letting a child tax credit expire ignominiously.

When I look back at my first encounter with Fjordman and Anders Breivik, the lesson I take isn’t that I failed to renounce them whole-heartedly enough, nor that I could have bravely and single-handedly deradicalized them (I am, for the record, a believer in deradicalization, but not as a primary political tactic). It’s that, for so many various predictable reasons, there will always be communities organizing around the maintenance of the great lie. White supremacy holds too central a place in all of our lives— from the explicit racist to the self-righteous liberal- for it to ever go quietly. And a good percentage of that organizing will take the form of the communities that welcomed Breivik and Gendron into their arms. They will offer safety and belonging and common cause, but all of it will be predicated on the swallowing of the most poisonous of all poison pills.

The question then, as it always has been, is whether White communities will be offered any counter-organizing against the lie. And here I don’t mean whether White people show up to marches when there are explicit Nazis and White supremacists to decry. We do a decent job of that. Wherever there are fascists marching, the anti-fascists will be there and vice versa. What I mean is, will we build the kind of communities that offer an alternative not just to the big lie of White supremacy, but its nefarious twin— the myth that we’re all just out for ourselves, individually.

The question isn’t whether more White people can hold up “White Silence is Violence” signs and then go home. It’s whether we will build and sustain counter-movements that, even when they don’t appear to be explicitly “anti-racist,” offer White people a source of community free from the lie of White supremacy. We have a choice, for example, as to whether White communities that have been decimated by Opioid epidemics only be offered canards about how a wall with Mexico could have saved their town, or whether more places follow the example of Greg McNeil, an Ohio dad who lost his son to the epidemic and now is organizing to both increase community-level access to Narcan and to pass laws cracking down on over-prescription. We have a choice as to whether states like Idaho be left solely to reactionary elected officials who make hay off manufactured national controversies, or whether more groups heed the model of organizers like Reclaim Idaho, who’ve proven that when you actually offer neighbors the opportunity to provide their neighbors with better health care and schools, they’ll respond with kindness and generosity and hope. We have a choice as to whether the great lie and its various siblings are allowed to have their way in school boards across the country or whether organized neighbors can remind one another that their hopes for their kids are more abundant than their fears.

Six years passed between the moment when I first discovered Fjordman and his acolytes and the day the deadly, tragic consequence of their hate were revealed to the world. We are currently living in a world where we receive those same reminders every few months now, with increasing rapidity. Back in 2005, I made the mistake so many of us do, of assuming that just because I wasn’t paying attention that the threat disappeared. But we don’t need any more reminders. The threat is always there. The lie must be protected, and there will always be scores and scores who will make it their life’s work to organize in its defense. The question for the rest of us isn’t merely how effectively we decry them, but whether we are even more committed to building a more beautiful and abundant world, to welcoming more and more White people into communities that won’t allow them to accept the lie, but do give them the opportunity to help build something better.

End Note: Buffalo is one of my favorite cities in the country, in part because of an inspiring community of activists there working hard to imagine a different future in Western New York. One group that I’ve admired for a number of years now is Black Love Resists In The Rust. I’m sending them a donation today and encourage anybody with Buffalo in their hearts this week to learn about their work and do the same.