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White nationalist and male supremacist author identified

Hatewatch has identified a previously pseudonymous author and ideologue whose writings in the 2000s and early 2010s heavily influenced the “manosphere,” a loose network of blogs, forums, websites and influencers who support rolling back women’s rights, reject feminism and advocate for rigid gender roles.

Christopher Moore, 60, is a former academic who has written under the pen name “Francis Roger Devlin” or “F. Roger Devlin” since the early 2000s. He is the author of the highly influential 2006 essay “Sexual Utopia in Power” and a 2015 book by the same name. Both works argue that men are victimized by policies and other efforts to promote sexual and gender equality, which he argues have “made men less attractive to women” and “probably contributed significantly to the decline in Western birthrates.” White nationalists and more mainstream far-right figures have credited Moore’s work as Devlin with shaping the male supremacist movement, or “manosphere,” into what it is today.

“Everyone who has read Devlin seems to have started a blog or YouTube channel,” David Futrelle, a researcher on the radical right, wrote in 2013, referring to “Devlin’s” essays as a “Manospherian urtext.”

Moore’s essays and commentary present sexual liberation and declining birth rates in white-majority countries as intertwined. In so doing, they provide a bridge between the more overt white nationalist groups and broader male supremacist circles, whose adherents may be less politically inclined.

Under the Devlin pseudonym, Moore has spoken at various conferences hosted by radical-right groups within the U.S. and Europe. He has served as a contributor to several white nationalist publications, penning over 200 articles for those outlets since the mid-2000s, in addition to editing, authoring and translating several books.

Moore, along with co-founders Michael Polignano and Greg Johnson of the white nationalist website Counter-Currents, registered a nonprofit called the Homeland Institute in Texas in July 2022, according to records from the Texas secretary of state. A self-styled think tank that launched in 2023, the Homeland Institute publishes articles and online public opinion polls focused on the “great replacement,” a racist and antisemitic conspiracy theory that falsely claims there is an ongoing effort to replace white populations in white-majority countries.

Hatewatch reached out to Moore over an email address that one reporter had used to correspond with him previously but did not receive a response in time for publication.

From the Council of Conservative Citizens to ‘F. Roger Devlin’

Moore created his Francis Roger Devlin persona in the early 2000s.

Speaking under his pseudonym at an invitation-only white nationalist event hosted by the Scandza Forum in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2023, Moore explained that his first foray into the radical right took place in the 1990s when he was a graduate student. Moore said that while working late-night shifts at a bookstore, he would read the works of the late Sam Francis, a radical-right intellectual who saw elites, including mainstream conservatives, as operating against the interests of white Americans.

“And all from Sam Francis, I eventually found my way to the Council of Conservative Citizens,” Moore told the audience. “In 1999, I attended one of their meetings where Jared Taylor spoke. And within a few years, I was, you know, I was writing for them, writing for Jared, and some other sites, since about 2006.”

A former adviser to paleoconservative presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, Francis worked closely with one of the leading white nationalist groups at that time, the Council of Conservative Citizens, after he was ostracized from more mainstream conservative groups in the mid-1990s. Jared Taylor is the head of American Renaissance, a self-described “race-realist, white advocacy organization” that has served as an intellectual bulwark for the racist right since its founding in 1991.

Moore first began using the Devlin pseudonym in 2004, when he published the book Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought. Kojève, who was born in Russia, was a European philosopher whose interpretations of German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel influenced a slew of other prominent 20th-century thinkers. The book appears to be a revised version of Moore’s doctoral dissertation, which also focused on Kojève, that he completed at Tulane University in 1996, per university records.

In the summer of 2006, Moore, as Devlin, published the influential essay “Sexual Utopia in Power” in The Occidental Quarterly, a journal published by the Charles Martel Society, a secretive white nationalist group.

In a 2021 appearance on Edward Dutton’s podcast, The Jolly Heretic, Moore described the inspiration for his essay.

“The ideas that came out in ‘Sexual Utopia in Power’ are basically the result of slumming about on the internet, looking at dating sites, pickup sites,” he said.

As Devlin, Moore continued to write for The Occidental Quarterly and joined its editorial advisory board in early 2009, according to online archives. At the time, the Quarterly board consisted of several prominent racist academics, including Richard Lynn, the late president of the pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund, and Kevin MacDonald, a now-former psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach, whose work has sought to portray antisemitism as a logical reaction to Jews’ roles in American society.

Since the late 2000s, Moore, as Devlin, has contributed to a range of white nationalist websites, including VDARE, the now-defunct National Policy Institute’s Radix Journal, Counter-Currents and American Renaissance.

Moore has also spoken for international audiences. Most recently, he presented at a 2023 event hosted by Logik Förlag, a far-right Swedish publishing house with connections to defunct neo-Nazi political party Party of Swedes, in Stockholm, Sweden. The event celebrated the Swedish-language release of Moore’s 2015 essay collection, Sexual Utopia in Power.

In April, Moore published a dispatch in American Renaissance about VDARE and its spring conference at the Berkeley Springs Castle in West Virginia, calling the gathering “a celebration of hope and defiance.” “Devlin” did not speak at the event, which VDARE held despite an ongoing investigation by the New York attorney general into whether the group violated state nonprofit law.

Moore’s impact on the male supremacist movement

Moore’s work promotes a reactionary outlook on gender relations and sexuality that criticizes both liberal feminism and mainstream conservative critics of the sexual revolution.

Though Moore is a minor figure among the broader male supremacist movement, some of the core concepts in his essay “Sexual Utopia in Power,” as well as in his book by the same name, have served as inspiration for pickup artists, misogynist incels (i.e., involuntary celibates) and so-called men’s rights activists, as David Futrelle documented in 2013. His work continues to receive periodic mentions on one of the most highly trafficked incel forums, as well as other male supremacist communities on Reddit and elsewhere.

“Roger Devlin is the only alt-righter who I have a modicum of respect for because of his authorship of ‘s*xual utopia in power,’” wrote one user on an incel forum in July 2020. The so-called “alt-right” was a term used by members of the movement, researchers and journalists to refer to a big-tent approach to white supremacist organizing in the mid-to-late 2010s.

Male supremacist communities, whose members portray themselves as victims of an oppressive system that favors women, latched onto Devlin’s reworked concept of “hypergamy.” The concept of hypergamy originally emerged from Hindu law in the 19th century and described women marrying men from a higher caste or class. For women in patriarchal societies where they cannot work or own property, this practice is the only available avenue for financial security and protection.

“Those in the manosphere selectively draw upon cherry-picked studies and sources to ‘prove’ that women always engage in this process of ‘mating up,’ asserting that rigid biological gender differences in sexual desire cause such hypergamous tendencies,” Catherine Baker, a postdoctoral researcher at Dublin City University and a fellow at the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, told Hatewatch in an email.

“Such simplistic stereotypes, though culturally commonplace, do not account for the complex interplay of physiological, socio-political and cultural influences on sexuality,” Baker continued.

In contrast to the term’s original definition, Moore portrayed it in his writing as the driving force for women’s sexual instincts writ large. In the hands of Moore and later male supremacist thinkers, “hypergamy” served as an explanation for their belief that feminism and the sexual revolution have deprived men of their unique role in society and resulted in many men being unable to find mates.

“An important aspect of hypergamy is that it implies the rejection of most males,” Moore writes in “Sexual Utopia in Power.”

To that end, women, Moore argues in the same essay, are driven by their “hypergamous instincts,” meaning they “are inclined to believe that only the ‘best’ (most sexually attractive) man is worthy of them.” The sexual revolution and feminist movement, in Moore’s telling, have not sought to make men and women equals; rather, he argues, they gave way to an “eternal dream of irresponsible freedom.”

“In the feminist formulation, [it’s] freedom for women, responsibility for men,” Moore writes.

In more recent media appearances, Moore claimed these instincts have spurred the growth of the misogynistic incel movement. In response to a question about “rising inceldom” in a 2021 podcast, for instance, Devlin blamed society for giving “large numbers of men no possibility of finding a mate.” In another podcast, he said these discrepancies were a result of women competing for “higher status” men at the expense of others.

“When monogamy breaks down, you don’t get promiscuity in the literal sense,” Moore, as Devlin, said on a May 2022 episode of The Political Cesspool, a radio show hosted by white nationalist James Edwards. “You don’t get random mating, and you don’t get more sex for the average man. What you get is Darwinian mating. What you get is women competing to mate with the most attractive men. You know, the highest status or the richest or the best looking or the famous.”

Hypergamy in today’s male supremacist movement

Hypergamy, as defined by Moore, has served as one of the foundational beliefs for a range of manosphere communities, including incels.

For these communities, researcher Catherine Baker told Hatewatch, the term is used “as a casual explanation as to why they find themselves unable to find a sexual or romantic partner,” as well as “to scaffold anti-feminist rhetoric, positioning feminism as rapidly accelerating women’s proposed hypergamous tendencies.”

Misogynist incels, for instance, use the term to justify their belief that the world is divided into a social hierarchy based exclusively on physical appearance. In their worldview, a minority of attractive and thus high-status men, known as “Chads,” dominate this hierarchy. Incels constitute the lowest caste. They believe the top 20% of men in this hierarchy have sex with 80% of women and that no woman would willingly have sex with an incel. They blame “female hypergamy” for their own status because women are only interested in mating with men of a higher status.

In a 2023 thread on an incel forum titled “Economic consequences of feminism,” one user identified “increased hypergamy” as one of the consequences of women in the workforce.

“We created BS jobs to accommodate for women in the workforce which led to increased inflation/cost of living and increased hypergamy by giving them financial freedom to incur in their degenerate behavior,” the user wrote.

In another thread, a user linked hypergamy with the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, alleging it was responsible for falling birth rates in European countries “due to women being too picky and refusing to have children with anyone who isn’t Chad.”

Moore’s version of hypergamy has also influenced key male supremacist figures, including Andrew Tate.

“You’re talking about high-status males,” Tate said in a video with male supremacist YouTuber Hannah Pearl Davis. “It’s always been that way. Now you have a whole contingent of men who aren’t dead. They didn’t die in a ditch. But they’re lonely as fuck jerking off.”

Tate continued, “I think women have a biological instinct to find the best mate they can because it gives them the highest chance of survival and the harsh realities of the world. And if they look at a man who’s not capable, they don’t feel an attraction to him.”

To combat these supposed instincts, Tate and other purported “alpha male” influencers, including Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes, sell costly courses that claim to help men increase their social market value and become desirable.

These same figures cite hypergamy to justify hostility toward women and defend invasive policies to regulate their sexual freedom.

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian academic and male supremacist thinker, has referenced the concept of hypergamy in his videos and talks. In a 2017 video on the biblical Book of Genesis, for instance, Peterson referenced the concept and said that “women mate across and up dominance hierarchies.” Peterson has also described men struggling to find partners as a cause of gender-based violence. In the aftermath of the 2018 Toronto van attack – in which a self-described incel rammed a van into a crowded intersection, killing 11 people – Peterson told The New York Times that the killer “was angry at God because women were rejecting him.”

“The cure for that is enforced monogamy,” Peterson continued, noting that he believed that women would otherwise only choose high-status men.

Male supremacists “draw from a range of cherry-picked sources, including pop psychology texts, mainstream academic sources and online blogs, combined with self-generated theories,” to support their theories, Baker told Hatewatch. These include theories from evolutionary psychology, whose ideas have sometimes been popularized and adopted by more mainstream figures that male supremacists have cited to justify their belief that differences in behavior between the sexes are biologically rooted, universal and absolute.

“Such work is often drawn upon to construct and denounce feminist political positions as … contrary to inarguable scientific findings, despite the controversial and highly contested character of these ideas within academia,” she added.

Identifying Moore

Hatewatch identified Moore, who resides in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, by matching information through statements he made about his dissertation and 2004 book on Kojève, as well as material in public records and data breaches leaked to the public internet.

In his 2021 appearance on Edward Dutton’s podcast, Moore, under the Devlin persona, explained the origins of his 2004 book on Kojève.

“My academic background is in philosophy, and a version of my dissertation was actually published as Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought on Hegelian philosophy of history and so forth,” Moore told Dutton. “It’s sold a lot less well than my book about sex. Apparently, more people are interested in sex than Hegelian philosophy of history, as it turns out.”

Hatewatch obtained a copy of Moore’s dissertation, which focused on Kojève, from Tulane University. Records indicate that Moore completed his studies at Tulane in 1996, earning a doctorate in political philosophy.

After completing his doctorate, Moore taught at the Santa Fe, New Mexico, campus of St. John’s College. A spokesperson from the school told Hatewatch that Moore taught there in 1997 and 1998. Records also indicate that Moore attended St. John’s as an undergraduate, completing his degree in 1985.

Hatewatch was able to identify the connection between Moore and Counter-Currents, one of the websites that he writes for as Devlin, through corporate registration records for the Homeland Institute, a white nationalist public policy group. Counter-Currents’ co-founders, alongside Moore, first registered the Homeland Institute in Texas. Moore used his full legal name on the corporate paperwork.

Counter-Currents raised money for the institute via its website prior to its launch. Although the Homeland Institute has its own website, director and mailing address, in a 2023 fundraising appeal, Counter-Currents described the Homeland Institute as “our new non-profit research arm.”

In December 2022, prior to the Homeland Institute’s official launch, Moore spoke as Devlin at a Counter-Currents retreat outside Atlanta on “the problem of winning ordinary conservatives over to the cause of White Nationalism.”

Image at top: Under the pen name “Francis Roger Devlin” or “F. Roger Devlin,” Christopher Moore has spoken at conferences hosted by radical-right groups and contributed to several white nationalist publications.

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