Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist

by Eli Saslow

At New College, political correctness could sometimes become a contest of one-upmanship, and there was social cachet to be won by pointing out prejudice in its smallest manifestations. One student admitted that he liked to wear glasses despite having twenty-twenty vision, and then another student said that was “ableist,” because he was appropriating the legitimate struggle of disabled people. “Maybe so,” countered another student, but in fact there was no such thing as “disabled people,” and that phrase was a micro-aggression against “people with disabilities.” And then there was Derek, the white nationalist prodigy living anonymously in his dorm room, helping to moderate the world’s largest white pride website and calling in to his own political radio show five mornings each week.

In elementary school, Derek learned the version of Jefferson commonly taught in American history: his great egalitarianism, his famous phrasing in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” In his school textbook, Derek and his classmates read perhaps Jefferson’s most famous quote about black slaves, one that had been chiseled onto his monument in Washington, helping to inspire the civil rights movement. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” Jefferson famously said. But Don encouraged Derek to do a bit more digging about that statement, and eventually Derek found the rest of Jefferson’s quotation buried in an old white nationalist newsletter: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably.”

The red pill was the revelation of a thorny, hidden truth buried within America’s founding, and the more Derek dug into American history, the more red pills he found. There was the popular effort to repatriate slaves back to Liberia in the early nineteenth century. There was Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, which had been named after U.S. president and proud white nationalist James Monroe. There was Abraham Lincoln, the great abolitionist, debating in public with Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858. “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality,” Lincoln said. “And I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” It felt to Derek as if he were being let in on a secret. White nationalism wasn’t just a fringe racist movement but something much more forceful and dangerous: a foundational concept embedded in the American DNA.

Because there was nothing else to do that day—and nowhere else to go with classes canceled—Derek wandered by the event on his way to lunch and stopped at the edge of the quad to listen. In front of him he saw a few of his professors, Matthew, Moshe, and at least two hundred other students. For a brief moment, he wondered: If this many smart people were so affronted by his beliefs, could they all be wrong?

And then he had come to New College as a history major, where his classes and his assigned readings revealed a more nuanced Middle Ages—a version that contradicted much of what Derek read on Stormfront. If European whites were really a genetically superior race, then why had Europe lagged so far behind Islamic culture in technology, art, and science for much of the Middle Ages? Why was it Baghdad that had become the world’s largest and greatest city in the ninth and tenth centuries—a place with superior doctors and libraries, where pale-skinned European emissaries were sent to learn from dark-skinned Arab scholars about astrology, algebra, and the science of distilling alcohol? And if races were really better off segregated, then why had one of the greatest medieval territories been Al-Andalus in Muslim-controlled Spain, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived together in all shades of brown, combining to make advancements in art, philosophy, and architecture?

As he traveled through Europe, Derek read historical texts from the eighth to the twelfth century, trying to trace back the modern concepts of race and whiteness, but he couldn’t find them anywhere. Instead, the facts of history pointed him to another conclusion: The iconic European warriors so often celebrated on Stormfront had never thought of themselves as white, Derek decided. Some of them had considered skin color not a hard biological fact but a condition that could change over time based on culture, diet, and climate. They had fought not for their race but for religion, culture, power, and money, just like every other empire of the Middle Ages.

But now, at the restaurant, Don stared across the table at Derek and tried one final time. “How did this happen?” he said. “I still don’t understand any of this.” “Then maybe you won’t,” Derek said. “Everything you advocated for is finally beginning to catch on,” Don said. “Don’t you see that?” “Of course,” Derek said, because it was the one point on which they still agreed. “We’re coming up to the critical moment. That’s why I’m trying to warn people.”