Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Putin’s Lube-ratory) in August retweeted a notorious white nationalist’s defense of the so-called Google Manifesto.
However, if you go right now to Rohrabacher’s Twitter page, the retweet no longer appears.
Fortunately, I made the screen grab below before it mysteriously disappeared.
The retweet also caught the eye of Atlas Forum, where it was parlayed into a conversation titled, “Topic: Congressman Dana Rohrabacher retweets white supremacist.”
But Supreme Dark Lord, a.k.a. Vox Day, a.k.a. Theodore Robert Beale, the author of the retweet Rohrabacher retweeted, swears he is not a white supremacist, which makes one wonder why his post was taken down.
Our story actually begins in July, when James Damore sent an internal memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” that cost him his engineering job. In what is now known as the #GoogleManifesto, Damore suggested his employer’s policies to boost diversity skirted the law and that men rise higher in the tech world than women do because of biological differences. Google staff engineer Collin Winter went on to post that he keeps a blacklist of people who mistreat coworkers so he can keep them off his team. Beale, as Supreme Dark Lord, retweeted that with: “A Google manager brags about how he keeps an internal blacklist based on his spying on employee emails. #GoogleManifesto.” That’s what Rohrabacher retweeted.
So who is this Beale/Vox Day/Supreme Dark Lord dude? He is a writer, editor, video game designer, blogger and alt-right activist who reportedly called Barack Obama a “bad black man” and an African American sci-fi author a “half savage” (as part of Beale’s own defense that he is not a white supremacist). He has also been credited with saying, “The answer for those who support Western civilization, regardless of sex, color, or religion, is to embrace white tribalism, white separatism, and especially white Christian masculine rule.” (Click here for a fascinating profile of Beale in The New Republic.)
He recently announced the creation of “Voxiversity,” his online “university” teaching about war, history, religion, philosophy, immigration and male-female relations. Voxiversity is funded through Charles C. Johnson’s FreeStartr, a “free speech” crowdfunding website. Johnson is the right-wing blogger who set up Rohrabacher’s controversial meeting in London with exiled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Soon after, Johnson donated the maximum legal amount of $5,400—in Bitcoin—to Rohrabacher’s campaign war chest.
Some have branded Johnson a Holocaust denier, at worst, or a Holocaust minimizer, at best. He argued in a since-deleted Reddit discussion that 250,000 Jews, and not 6 million, died in concentration camps, and he also questioned the existence of gas chambers. That he accompanied Rohrabacher to a meeting with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky)—to discuss the goods received from Assange in London—was condemned by the head of the Anti-Defamation League.
The ADL is also aware of Beale, having included him on what Vox Day called a “hit list” of figures from the Alt-Right and “Alt-Lite.” It’s curious that would put his knickers in a bunch since Milo Yiannopoulos also branded Beale an “Alt-Right figurehead,” and he seems to be fine with Milo. But the Alt-Right tracking AngryWhiteMen.org reports Beale reacted to the ADL move by first claiming he’s “not the slightest bit interested in defending myself against these liars” before claiming the civil rights organization “was founded in evil from the beginning” and is filled with “shameless liars” and people “who cry ‘Holocaust’ for profit.”
But don’t call Beale a Neo-Nazi—at least not to a Neo-Nazi. We Hunted the Mammoth, a website that “tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism,” reported in September that several Daily Stormer fans refused Beale’s demand to take down posts accusing him of being a pedophile because they don’t think he is enough of a Nazi to hang with the Alt-Right. Beale threatened to unleash his “flying monkey” squad and “Legal Legion of Evil” on the offending commenters, according to reporter David Futrelle.
It’s all ever so confusing, even if you bring it back to Damore, who posted this on Twitter Sept. 20: “The KKK is horrible and I don’t support them in any way, but can we admit that their internal title names are cool, e.g. ‘Grand Wizard?'” Failing to acknowledge that Klan titles are cool only makes the hate group more attractive, Damore essentially claims in this follow-up tweet: “If you make the actual KKK the only place where you can acknowledge the coolness of D&D terms, then you’ll just push people into the KKK.”
Or the 48th Congressional District seat, one supposes.
Note: The preceding is an extended version of what appears in the Nov. 24 print edition.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.