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

by Eli Saslow

the son of Don Black, who founded the internet’s largest hate site, Stormfront.org; and the godson of David Duke, a former KKK Grand Wizard.

Instead, he mostly listened as his white Republican neighbors told him about the reasons they felt their culture was under threat: the new highway signs in Spanish, urban crime, outsourced middle-class jobs, a collapsing economy, and a societal insistence on political correctness.

Exactly the fears the Trump evoked

“People are just waiting for white candidates to come along who are brave enough to talk about these things, and when that happens, whites will go streaming to the polls.”

That’s what happened in 2016

“Which way are the Republicans going to go? I’m kind of banking on them staking their claim as the White Party. We can infiltrate. We can take the country back.”

They were trying to save whites from an “inevitable genocide by mass immigration and forced assimilation.” Theirs was the righteous cause. They were the social justice warriors. “What’s happening right now is a genocide of our people, plain and simple,” Derek said. “We are Europeans. We have a right to exist. We will not be replaced in our own country.”

I’m now convinced that any successful white revolution in this country will come largely from inside politics.”

National polls by organizations like Reuters and the Associated Press often indicated that most whites considered America a white-European country. Most whites said they wanted their heritage preserved. Most preferred living in neighborhoods that were predominantly white. Most held entrenched prejudices about immigrants and minorities, even if they didn’t self-identify as racist. And now, for the first time, those same national polls also showed that a majority of whites felt “under attack.”

“I believe that white people have a real interest in this country. This is a racially diverse place, and there are a lot of problems for it. We have gangs. We have conflict. I’m not a hateful person, but I will talk in public about what other people won’t say.”

“We are the reasonable people here because we are the ones who are really in favor of the common man,” Derek said one day on the show during a conversation with Duke. “The people who are opposed to us are these arrogant, terrible liberals and multi-culturists who say that the basic white American is inherently a bad person and the only way they will be redeemed is by bringing in these people from third-world countries to take their jobs or fill their neighborhoods. It is an ideology based on hatred of us, of white people, who are living in a country that’s being destroyed by a population brought in from the third world. We are the ones who have the best interests of America at heart.” “That’s right,” Duke said. “I learned a long time ago that whatever they call us, that’s exactly what they’re guilty of.” “They call us haters, discriminators, racists,” Derek said. “Government policy today is genocidal,” Duke said. “Why isn’t it a crime to wipe white people out of the United States?”

On the air, he repeatedly theorized about “the criminal nature of blacks” and the “inferior natural intelligence of blacks and Hispanics.” He said President Obama was “anti–white culture,” “a radical black activist,” and “inherently un-American.” There was nothing micro about Derek’s aggressions. He knew that if his views were discovered at New College, he would be vilified on the forum and ostracized on campus.

“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.”

“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.”

Of course the movement would rise again once white people felt threatened. It was easy for whites to be generous and egalitarian so long as it wasn’t costing them anything—so long as the American economy kept booming and whites continued to enjoy a vastly disproportionate share of the country’s rising power and wealth. But what would happen when Spanish began to overtake English? Or when America’s culture and identity started to fundamentally change? Derek believed the answer was written into the country’s history: America had always defined itself as white, and when pressed, it would do so again.

He helped publicize new polling data that showed more than 40 percent of whites believed they experienced more racism than minorities. “People are finally waking up!”

The conspiracy-minded “Patriot movement” had doubled in size during the last year, and the number of domestic paramilitary groups had exploded from 78 before President Obama’s election to at least 330 active militias training for a potential war against their own federal government.

The far-right Tea Party movement, consisting mostly of disenfranchised whites, had helped to elect dozens of antiestablishment congressmen in 2010, and now some of those new legislators were proposing laws in Congress to end affirmative action and birthright citizenship.

radical conspiracy theorist: Donald Trump, the New York business mogul, who was making a spectacle out of his search for President Obama’s long-form birth certificate. “I’m starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country,” Trump told Fox News, and in a series of news-making interviews he parroted white nationalist talking points by insinuating that Obama was inherently “un-American.” Trump’s charade made him a hero in the Tea Party movement and earned him 7 percent of the American news cycle that April of 2011, according to the Pew Research Center. “A shameless opportunist perfectly willing to exploit racism for personal benefit,” the SPLC said of Trump and others in the so-called birther movement.

“Race is socially constructed and has no basis in the hard sciences, biological or otherwise,” James had explained that year to one audience of anarchists in Baltimore. “But it has been structured into every part of society, conditioned into individuals and bonded to emotions from early on in life. Race itself isn’t real, but it has real meaning.”

Trump, the bombastic businessman, had gone one step further by insinuating that in fact Obama wasn’t American but instead a Kenyan-born Muslim who had also fudged his transcripts from Columbia and Harvard. Don and Derek didn’t much care about the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate, but they were buoyed by the fact that by mimicking white nationalist rhetoric, Trump had amassed a massive following on the far right. He was polling near the front of the 2012 Republican presidential field, even though he repeatedly said he would likely only run as an independent and that he probably wouldn’t run at all.

A gay student wrote several times to ask Derek why the United States shouldn’t, in fact, belong to Native Americans, the original majority. “Also,” she wrote, “what is your great concern about a white minority?”

Observing the Sabbath meant that from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday he was not allowed to work, drive, write, use his phone, turn on lights, or do much of anything beyond read the Zohar and pray in the dark apartment.