Abstract
Since 1965 no Republican candidate has attracted more than 15% of the Black vote (Thurber, 2023). However in 2016 Donald Trump 18% of Black men voted for Trump, during the 2020 US Presidential Election this rose to 20% and the Black male vote is yet to be seen in 2020. This paper examines how the rise of the Black male YouTube influencers have aided the transmission of right-wing Christian-inspired ideologies into the mainstream. Thereby invoking Hjarvard’s Religious Mediation Theory (2016), which points to the role media plays in pushing religious ideas into the public square in societies where memberships to religious institutions is falling. This is done through a textual analysis of transcripts from 321 YouTube videos produced by the late Kevin Samuels, a Black Christian YouTube Celebrity, and comparing them to the views expressed in Dylan Roof’s prison diary, written after he murdered nine, unarmed, innocent Black people. Roof is a self-identified, Christian, white supremacist who claims he was radicalized completely online (Berman 2016; Roof 2015). This contends the emergence of the Black manosphere had created an environment in which, men Enriche Tarrio, former Leader of the Proud Boys, who played a leading role in the insurrection of January 6, and Ali Alexander the founder of the #StopTheSteal hashtag are being radicalized by the operation of social media recommendation algorithms in the same way as Dylann Roof (Praiser 2011; Winter et al, 2020).
