It’s hard out there for a racist.
While hating people who don’t look like you has always existed, 2016 certainly seems like it was the comeback special for racism. The Trump election, the rise of the so-called alt-right, fake news, and glowing profiles of white nationalists have all emboldened the worst people in our society to once again be proud of their shitty views.
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Much like what Pulp Fiction did with John Travolta in the early 90s, 2016 has thrust white nationalism back to the forefront of our collective psyche, forcing our society to—again, much like Travolta—stare continuously into its insane, twinkling, dead eyes.
Thankfully, the movement seems to be, at least at this moment, contained mostly to screeching Twitter eggs and anonymous forum posters who rarely meet up in real life. However, the truth is that behind each one of those accounts screeching “cuck,” “ZIONISTS,” or “refujihad!!!” exists a real life person (almost always a dude) physically typing the tirade.
The thought of the human side of this cyber hatred is a scary one, right? And it raises a massive questions. Mainly, what is life like for these people? Is it fun? is it normal? Can anyone actually put up with the real world selves of these people in a romantic sense? Do they all, like I assume, breathe really, really heavily?
To answer at least one of these question I, like any sane person would, decided to see if the fleeting online popularity of the alt-right has translated into dating success for its followers.
So, I went to the source and talked to a self-described white national and member of the alt-right who started a dating site for his brethren to find love.
“Our society, the education [system], and the media has created an anti-white ideology among people. People that want to be with their own kind, that’s seen as a negative,” the man who wanted to be referred to as Stonewall, told VICE.
“So when you find somebody and you start expressing some of these ideas, you know, they might think you’re racist or a horrible person and they might split up with you just because you’re expressing these ideas.”
“It’s hard.”
So, how the hell do racists date? Well, for many cyber hatemongers, online dating is the way to go.
A lot of them utilize sites like Plenty of Fish, Ok Cupid, and so on with a statement in their profiles like “If you’re not white, don’t message me,” but for many that’s not enough. This is where sites like WASP Love, Where White People Meet, and Stormfront (an infamous neo-Nazi forum) enter—all sites that, willingly or not, cater to racists who want to find love.
I started my journey into this weird world with a simple Google search for “alt-right dating.” It brought up a site called WASP Love, which advertises itself as a dating site for traditional Christians, white nationalists, Quiverfulls, confederates, southern nationalists, and the alt-right.
“The patriarchs of the Old Testament continually warned against marrying strange wives which would lead to idolatry,” reads a post by Stonewall, its founder. “We must obey the wisdom of our fathers by only marrying within our own race.”
Stonewall, a staunch Christian from Alabama, told VICE that he created the site in early 2016 and it has around 300 active members so far. He says it’s not a unique concept in the least and that dating sites for white supremacists have occasionally popped up over the years but they fizzle out quickly.
Stonewall explained that his views haven’t ended any relationships but that he knows quite a few people for whom they have, and knows a lot of white nationalists that struggle with meeting women. But he added the market for an online dating site for white supremacists and neo-Nazis is ripe.
“If you look at the Alexa ratings for the Daily Stormer [a neo-Nazi site], which doesn’t get more hardcore than that, they’re number 5,000 for the United States, that’s huge,” he said. “There is definitely a market for this view, the alt-right is booming right now and I think it’s just going to increase.”
Stonewall said he’s happy with the growth his site has shown in its brief existence but there is one small little problem.
“What we have to do now is beef up the female members,” Stonewall said. “Obviously, you probably figured out, the alt-right and so-forth is predominantly male but there are still a lot of women out there so we’re going to try and reach them.”
The site allows users to message each other, join groups and share updates, it works almost like a stripped down Facebook.
Stonewall said he is networking the site on several white nationalist and alt-right Facebook pages and forum communities. For a time he advertised on Twitter but his account was taken down for violating hate policy.
He said he faced some backlash on several neo-Nazi sites, including Stormfront, where members complained that by advertising WASP Love as a racist dating site for Christians he was discriminating against the atheists and pagans in the group–which is, you know, amazing.
“A big part of the problem I have with white-nationalism is that a lot of them are focused on paganism,” he said. “You post this to some forums and some people say that you just need to find a girl that’s traditional and you just red pill her.”
Now, red pilling isn’t an online dating thing nor is it something that exists only in the neo-Nazi, white supremacist community. Although it probably goes by all sorts of names, you can find the process in all sorts of fucked up places online.
Red pilling (they’ve also referred to it as “awakening”) takes its name from the famous scene in The Matrix where Neo is offered a red pill and a blue pill but the process is older than that. It’s an old school form of brainwashing where you isolate the subject (your romantic partner in this case) from opposing views and, using literature that matches your ideology, convince them to adopt your beliefs. This, Stonewell said, has been a tried and true method of dating in the neo-Nazi world for a long time.
This brought me to Stormfront, the stomping ground of online fascists, which has the dubious honour of being called “the Web’s first major racial hate site” by Wikipedia. Started as a website in 1996 by a former KKK leader to further the white pride movement, the site itself gets several million views a month and is seeing a surge in popularity following the Trump election. It’s views allegedly increased by roughly a million between Sept 15 to Nov 30.
And in the bowels of this site lies a strange yet hilarious section, one for “white singles” to meet and mingle. A lot of it is just white supremacists posting answers to set questions in a desperate attempt to make the perfect racist love connection.
Take this post from a user named Boeck. He describes himself as a 25-year-old, ripped-as-hell dude who plans to get married and “have many children.” Boeck’s interests are “Germany and German culture, national socialism, Hitler, golf, chemistry, genealogy” and he desires his ideal woman to be “1-7 years younger than me… 100% White BUT with less German heritage than myself… athletic, racist, nazi, respectful and thinks I’m the greatest man on earth.”
Another user named Joshua83 who wrote an almost 600 word post, is looking to be “married and have beautiful Aryan children” and enjoys “Racialism, history… preservation and defense of the White Race, and traditional old fashioned values.” For his “one interesting fact about yourself” Josh admits he’s a chaste virgin.
Four hundred words of Josh’s epic post were the attributes he wants in his woman which include having to be “a chaste virgin, preferably one who is either Scottish or German but as long as you are 100% white that is the most important thing” and “clean, honest, loyal (both to our race and to me and our children.)”
Finally, rounding out the big three, there is Where White People Meet, the self-described “not racist” dating site for white people to, well as the name states, meet white people. Paradoxically, the founder of the site states that anyone can join the site and race doesn’t matter which is… weird.
The site is frequently referenced on Stormfront, where it was embraced initially but quickly dropped for reasons we’ll touch on shortly. The founder said that he got the idea after seeing sites like JDate and BlackPeopleMeet.com. It’s run by a couple in Utah and their son monitors it to keep the dialogue as clean and non-racist as they can.
“It’s about equal opportunity,” the site’s founder Sam Russell told the Washington Post. “The last thing in the world I am is racist. I dated a black woman once. I helped raise a young black man … I just believe it’s hypocrisy to say ‘one group can do this, but another can’t.’”
While it may not have been their goal, Where White People Meet is frequently recommended on racist forums but ironically most say that too many minorities have now joined up.
“The site is already filling up with Hispanics, Indians looking for a green card, and the occasionally black person who always has to crash the party,” a Stormfront user wrote shortly after its launch.
Now just because these sites exist, doesn’t mean they actually work. As Stonewall alluded to, racist cupid’s biggest problem is that the alt-right and white nationalist communities are made up of mostly men. There are some women in the mix but they’re certainly few and far between.
In short, they’re a cyber skinhead sausage party.
One of the most active areas of Stormfront is the dating advice board which is chock full of men looking to find a nice, decent white lady. Some are so hard done by they even threaten to stop being racist (the horror!) or just live out their lives as a celibate.
“I am a handsome intelligent hard working man with money, the problem is that I can’t find a good decent white woman,” wrote one lovesick user. “I am not going to settle for anything less.”
“I would live out my life alone before I would settle for less.”
Well, we hope so buddy… we sure hope so. So while racists are rejoicing in their comeback right now, at least we can take solace in the fact that they’re not getting laid.
It’s not a huge win but, hey, in 2016 you take what you can get.
Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.