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

by Eli Saslow

white-European country. Most whites said they

Matthew had already experienced enough shaming at New College to believe that exclusion only reinforced divides. He was an observant Jew among atheists, a political conservative in a place of radical liberals, an aspiring hedge fund manager in a school of rabid anticapitalists. The previous year, while his freshman roommate plotted radical protests to preserve the environment and composted dinner leftovers in their communal bathroom, Matthew had founded New College’s first

“There is no better way to make sure Derek keeps these abhorrent views than if we all exclude him,” Matthew said. But nonjudgmental inclusion—Matthew believed that tactic had potential, and the more he researched Derek, the more convinced he became. On Stormfront,

“This isn’t an issue about race or prejudice,” Duke insisted back then. He said securing the border was about protecting America’s culture and its economy. And

“I’m not convinced he’s one of us—not by a long shot—but he’s smart enough to know that a lot of white people in this country are fed up and angry. They are looking for someone who will express that for them. If Trump wants to win, this kind of strategy might get him elected. It depends what else he has to say.”

America’s inner cities were overrun by “gangs and thugs,” and “right now, if you walk down the street, you get shot”—and then to prove that point he re-tweeted a crime statistic suggesting that 81 percent of white murder victims were killed by blacks. A few days later, after criminologists told Trump that his number was wildly off base—that in fact it was only 14 percent—Trump said, “What? Am I gonna check every statistic?”

Twice in 2016, Trump publicly shared messages on Twitter from a white nationalist account called @WhiteGenocide, thereby spreading Don and Derek’s favorite maxim to fifteen million Twitter followers. When two of Trump’s supporters in Boston beat up and peed on a homeless Hispanic immigrant in 2015 while chanting, “Trump is right,” Trump reacted just as Don had done whenever another murderer was connected to Stormfront.

“We have been trying to recruit these same disaffected whites that Trump is going after—it’s the exact same audience,” Don said, shortly after Trump secured the Republican nomination in the late spring of 2016. “Everybody may not want to call themselves a white nationalist. That sounds a little scary, but it’s the same principle. He is tapping into the fact that race is still a huge part of identity. He’s accelerating the timeline of our movement by several decades by making many millions of people more racially aware. Before, nobody really knew what a white nationalist was. Now he’s given us this incredible platform.” That realization made Don think again about Derek: If only he had stayed! “It’s hard to even fathom the impact he could be having right now,” Don said. Don knew of several white nationalist organizations that had arranged trips to the Republican National Convention in July 2016, including an unofficial delegation from Stormfront. One white nationalist from California was selected to participate as a delegate; another white nationalist, the radio host James Edwards, was granted a press credential and an interview with Donald Trump Jr. The media circus surrounding the convention created a gigantic megaphone for young white nationalist leaders—“the