The Quest for (White) Love
A website that has sometimes been described as a “Tinder for Nazis” was hacked in the autumn of 2025. Leaked data offers a glimpse into a dark, but also rather pitiful, subculture.
Just a decade ago, Christiane Horn lived in Paris. She had arrived there as a young and talented pianist, but her music career had gradually stalled. She had married a man whose Jewish father was a Holocaust survivor.
Her ex-husband told the German newspaper Die Zeit that he cannot say exactly when she became radicalised.
That is not really surprising. To the extent that the word radicalisation makes sense, it is a gradual process that can move quickly or slowly, in fits and starts — not an on-off switch. Still, a former acquaintance of Horn offers a clue in an interview with the same newspaper. In 2016 — the year after the Islamist terrorist attacks in Nice, at the Bataclan, and against the editorial office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — she began to believe that the attacks were actually so-called “false flag” operations. Online videos convinced her that the Israeli intelligence service Mossad had played a role.
According to her ex-husband, something dark had entered the relationship — something he initially did not see, or did not want to see.
In December 2017, the relationship ended after a dinner during which she reportedly launched into a hateful tirade against Black people and immigrants. “I left her for political reasons,” the ex-husband told Die Zeit.
Without revealing this to her husband, Horn — under the name Liv Heide — had by then already begun building the website WhiteDate, a dating site for what she called Europids. In other words: for white Europeans. In the years that followed she promoted the website, among other things through interviews with far-right influencers. The goal, she explained in a podcast in 2019, was to “revive the exclusively white community” in order to stop what she believed was a genocide against white people.
In 2021 she published an article about the “Jewish question” on the website Occidental Observer, an American website characterised by white nationalism and antisemitism.
The dating site also had its own YouTube channel, although it was shut down in 2019. The videos carried titles such as “Communities über Alles”, “Eugenics is Everywhere”, and “Hail our White Men”.
Christiane Horn herself remained anonymous. She did speak in some of the videos — a feminine voice with a clear German accent — but she never showed her face, not even in interviews with other channels.
Under the name Liv Heide she largely stayed under the radar. Her website was nevertheless mentioned in reports by the German intelligence service as an example of a site “by extremists, for extremists”. Some outsiders also took an interest. Among them was the American Jewish journalist Tal Levin, who in 2020 published the book Culture Warlords. In it, Levin — then known as Talia, but who later came out as a trans man — went undercover in various far-right online environments. One of them was WhiteDate, where Levin created a profile called Ashlynn, “a crudely drawn caricature” of a blonde woman who liked guns, lived on a farm in Iowa, and openly swooned over far-right ideology.
The fake Ashlynn quickly received messages from white power supporters: a Scandinavian who invited her to go moose hunting, a Swiss university lecturer, a British security guard.
Most of the suitors were Americans. Several of them referred to YouTube influencers to explain how they had been radicalised.
Levin writes:
When they wrote to me, they wrote about their cats, about their dinners of pinto beans and pork, about their love of Xbox gaming, about gas prices, the motorcycles they owned. They wrote about guns. They wrote a lot about guns. And just as often they wrote about their desire to maintain the purity of whiteness; about the white children they hoped I or some other willing woman would bear them; and about the sinister Jews controlling the world, about the "cucks" (cuckolds) running the government, about the "Marxists" brainwashing kids, about "white genocide," and their favorite fascist YouTube channels.
WhiteDate had far more male than female users. In fact, well over 80 percent of registered users were men.
It was therefore perhaps not the best place to find a date. But the website also served other purposes. It functioned as a kind of meeting place. There one could find recommended reading on racial theory and on the “Jewish question”, and although it stated that “terrorism is not the answer”, the manifesto of the so-called Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was also recommended because he “definitely had interesting thoughts about the modern world.”
On the site’s forums users shared videos and discussed everything from metaphysical interpretations of Norse runes to permaculture, sports and language learning. There were sub-groups for different regions and countries, for self-declared blackshirts, for health discussions, for photography, music, and dog lovers.
Many of them, however, had little activity.
On one of two Norwegian subforums there was little more than a message about skiing and a complaint about the lack of Scandinavian women on the site. On the other there was a message from a man who wrote:
I think that since women have so much power in today’s society, it would really be noticed if women themselves began to resist the ideology that admittedly has brought them external power, but at the expense of women’s traditional characteristics and values. At the expense of the family. Participating on websites like this is an expression of such resistance. What do you think?
It was a cry into the void. He received no replies.
The number of Norwegian users on the site was low. There were few Scandinavians at all. Most were Americans. A few hundred were Germans. A few hundred French. A few hundred British.
Altogether, however, the site had several thousand users. A small minority of them were paying members.
WhiteDate also had a problem. The site ran on the content management system WordPress, with a large number of plugins — a recipe for security vulnerabilities, sometimes of the most banal kind.
In 2025 this was exploited by a hacker using the pseudonym Martha Root. She extracted large amounts of information: data users had submitted when registering, ranging from contact information to which subgroup of “Europids” they believed they belonged to (Alpinid, Dinarid, East-Europid or Nordid). It also included photos with EXIF metadata revealing where they had been taken. It included the site’s forums. It even included direct messages sent between users.
Apparently these had also been accessible to the site’s administrators.
At the end of December, Root — dressed as a pink character from the children’s television series Power Rangers — took the stage at a hacker conference in Hamburg.
On stage she shut down WhiteDate, its associated Twitter account, and a couple of other websites run by Christiane Horn.
Although the appearance was partly performance, the shutdown was real. WhiteDate remains offline.
Martha Root also published some of the extracted information on the website okstupid.lol. Other parts of the material have not been made public but have been made available to journalists.
The British newspaper The Observer, for example, identified several British users: activists in the far-right group Patriotic Alternative, a man who had stood for election for Britain First, and a female local politician from the Conservative Party. The latter was also identified by name.
The Swedish newspaper ETC has also managed to identify several dozen of the 71 Swedish users, though without naming them publicly. The paper nevertheless points out some common characteristics:
Many of the Swedish users describe their political orientation as pro-white. Others add labels such as National Socialist, fascist or “fully red-pilled”, meaning someone who believes they have seen through the lies of liberal democracy about human rights, LGBTQI issues and feminism.
[…] There are organised and violent Nazis here, but also people with no digital traces suggesting far-right extremism — apart from the fact that they registered on a race-biological dating site for far-right extremists.
Notes on the antiliberal has also had access to far more information than what has been made public. This includes user data belonging to around thirty Norwegians, although some are probably people from other countries who merely claimed to be in Norway.
Some of these users made an effort to conceal their identities. Others did not.
None of them will be identified here. There are several reasons for that. The hacking itself raises significant ethical questions, even when the victims are people who chose to register as users on a relatively openly far-right website.
It is worth remembering that the hacking of the adultery website Ashley Madison in 2015 was linked to suicides.
Using information from such a data leak also raises significant ethical questions for a journalist. These are not people who sought the spotlight of public attention. Some were looking for love. Some were simply looking for community.
In some cases, the loneliness is almost tangible. The vulnerability. The sense of exclusion.
And although several clearly express far-right sympathies, they are also victims — both of a rather cynical business model combined with poor data security, and of a hacking attack.
Some appear to be people who should be protected from themselves. Many did little more than create a user profile without being active. Some of the material is now quite old. People change.
Nevertheless, the leaked data tell some stories worth dwelling on. They provide a glimpse into a dark but also rather pitiful subculture.
One example is a woman who appears to be American and who — as a woman on the site — is flooded with messages. Several times she contacts the administrator to warn about men she suspects are actually Latinos.
“This man seems very suspicious,” she writes in one message.
She insists she is very familiar with the facial features of such men and claims that the man she is warning about “looks like he is Hispanic or of mixed race […] Please investigate this man.”
“Agreed, I have deleted and banned him,” the administrator replies, thanking her for the help.
“My pleasure. Have a wonderful day ♡.”
Among the Norwegians on the site is one man who openly says he became a Nazi in 2015 as a result of reading so-called frogposting on Twitter — a reference to internet-based far-right meme culture that at the time embraced the cartoon frog Pepe as a symbol.
It is a fairly typical story of modern far-right radicalisation.
Internet culture is also present in other ways. One user who says he comes from another European country but lives in Norway claims to be left-wing. Yet alongside what appears to be a mirror selfie he has uploaded a bundle of far-right internet memes telling a very different story:
For many WhiteDate users, the internet seems to have been the pathway to extremist ideas.
Among the Norwegian users, however, few have left other digital traces pointing toward far-right extremism. Their profiles primarily serve as a reminder that the people drawn into this dark rabbit hole are often quite ordinary.
One thing does stand out, however. Many of them — almost all — claim in their dating profiles that they have an above-average IQ.
Notes on the Antiliberal is written by Norwegian journalist Øyvind Strømmen. It will include articles on the radical right, extremism, conspiracy theories and other challenges to liberal democracy. This article is available in the original Norwegian on oyvindstrommen.substack.com.