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

by Eli Saslow

Don had been leaning on his only child more than ever lately, relying on him for rides to white nationalist meetings and help managing the growing business of Stormfront, which crashed under the weight of a record 120,000 users on the night of Obama’s election to the presidency.

He sent six-year-old Derek out for Halloween dressed as a white Power Ranger, helped to decorate his childhood bedroom with a Confederate flag, and brought him to speeches where Don expressed doubt about the full severity of the Holocaust. Derek was socialized on Stormfront, and he began spending his nights in the private chat rooms as soon as he could type.

he shared white pride songs and inflammatory bedtime stories about “the liar and philanderer Martin Luther King.”

In his late twenties, he and several other white supremacists were caught by the FBI with dynamite, tear gas, and a van full of ammunition on their way to overthrow the tiny island nation of Dominica, which Don hoped to turn into a white utopia.

the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-watch group, published a report connecting Stormfront to more than a hundred murders.

The conversation continued even as Derek’s mind stayed locked in place: She was Jewish.

Derek made his own conclusions public while still in his teens. “Jews are the cause of all the world’s strife and misery,” he wrote on Stormfront in 2008. “Their motivation comes from the destabilization of the White race.”

Jews were not just another minority but an insidious enemy—the one race capable of undermining white Europeans.

Even though Jews already had their own ethno-state in Israel, they had pushed for greater control in the United States by supporting more lenient immigration policies and more wars to protect Israel’s interests in the Middle East.

He had publicly written that “Jews are NOT White.” He had said race mixing was not only a bad idea but also a traitorous act. White Europeans needed to date white Europeans; anything else risked polluting the gene pool and accelerating the ongoing white genocide, he often said.

Just one year earlier, on Stormfront, another white nationalist had come to the message board asking for advice about a new relationship. “I’ve started dating a woman who’s really smart, pretty, funny, and cool. All is well…except she mentioned that some great, great relative was Native American. Her whole family looks textbook white. Am I being overly critical?”

Like most others on the message board, Derek’s advice had been unequivocal. “Yes, this does make you a bastard,” he had written. “You need to be decisive. It does you good, and her too.”

overnight talks edging toward dawn with his Jewish girlfriend and then early mornings spent by himself in the courtyard outside, calling in to his white nationalist radio show as Rose continued to sleep, laughing along as his co-host mimicked a Jew by whining about Israel in a nasal, high-pitched voice.

Children could play a white pride version of the video game Doom, shooting watermelons at villains who had black faces, talked in gangster slang, and wore big golden chains. Or visitors could cast a ballot in the fake presidential campaign Derek created, listing Don Black and Robert E. Lee as candidates for president and Adolf Hitler as a possible running mate.

But first he went into the gymnasium with a 2009 issue of Details magazine, with Bradley Cooper’s blue eyes staring out from the cover. Inside the magazine there was a gigantic picture of Derek spread across two glossy pages under the headline “Derek Black: The Great White Hope.” In the photo, he wore his usual black-brimmed hat, which the author had described as “the sort of gear one might wear on horseback while herding minorities out of the country.”

Nothing in December. Nothing in January or February, and after a while Derek began to think a custodian had thrown out the Details magazine while the students were away during winter break. Maybe that was the end of it, he thought, and gradually during his time in Europe he returned to the familiar patterns of his double life.

He called in to his radio show each day, delighting in the spread of the white genocide concept onto conservative radio. 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 country’s largest civil rights groups. During that spring of 2011, the SPLC was focused on what it called “explosive growth on the radical right.” For the first time, the SPLC counted more than 1,000 designated hate groups in the United States, and it described Stormfront as being at “the head of the monster.” 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.

As Tom finished his thesis research in April, the SPLC had also begun to write about another person whom it considered a radical conspiracy theorist: Donald Trump,

when he and Don were invited to appear on an episode of the Jenny Jones talk show titled “How to Confront a Racist.”

The show’s producer sealed the deal by offering free airfare to Chicago and two tickets for Don and Derek to visit Disney Quest.

in truth Derek spent three days holed up alone in his room in Munich while he read every forum post. He had expected to feel some relief at being freed from his double identity, but instead he found himself mourning all of the relationships he’d lost.

On the forum, the fallout was even worse than he’d feared. These were smart people whom he respected, and now they were calling him an “idiot,” “a hatemonger,” a “Hitler,” and a “fraud.”

He sat for hours in a straight-backed chair at a Spartan desk in a country where he knew almost nobody and watched as each new classmate joined in on the thread, his relationships disappearing one message at a ...

She didn’t know what else to say, so they set up a time to Skype later that night. When Derek called, he could see a few of Rose’s friends seated behind her, and Rose explained that they had come to offer her emotional support. She had spent the day in her room, fighting off anxiety and hiding on a campus where she was now the object of speculation and derision. A neo-Nazi with a Jewish girlfriend? Had he been using her for cover?

Was there a colossal misunderstanding? Had his views dramatically changed in the months between writing these awful posts on Stormfront and meeting her at New College? “Just knowing him, I thought there had to be an explanation where he didn’t actually believe this stuff,” she said.

But instead Derek fumbled through apologies and then tried for one of the first times in his life to explain his ideology to an outsider. He wasn’t a white supremacist, he said, but in fact a white nationalist—or, better yet, a racial egalitarian. He told her that he believed all races were in fact equal but that whites were better served living apart from other races.

He told her words like “racist” had been invented to demonize well-meaning white people. He said races had inherent biological differences, and for evidence he cited discredited studies based on flawed data

He said the cornerstone of his belief was fear of a white genocide, and for proof he showed her recent census data that indicated the rising minority population in the United States. For the better part of an hour, Rose sat on the computer with a pit in her sto...

None of it made any sense to her. Her confusion hardened into impatience and then eventually into anger...

Duke had spent much of the last decade moving across Europe after being awarded a PhD from a Ukrainian university and then devoting himself to growing white nationalism in what he called “our ancestral homeland.”

In the late 1960s, Duke and Don Black had met as teenagers in the white supremacy movement and become close friends. Don went to the University of Alabama, and Duke went to Louisiana State, where he fell in love with a blond classmate from Florida named Chloe Hardin, who shared his racial convictions. They’d married and had two daughters before getting divorced, and then several years later Chloe reconnected with Duke’s best friend.

She and Don began to date, eventually securing Duke’s support, and they were married in the late 1980s with Duke serving as best man. Derek was born a year later, and ever since he could remember they had operated as a blended family: Don and Duke working together on behalf of white nationalism; Duke often joining the Blacks for Thanksgiving and Christmas in West Palm Beach; Don helping to raise Duke’s two daughters and Duke promising to guide Don’s son, Derek, just as he was doing now.

And so one afternoon he stepped up in front of the small crowd, and within a few minutes he’d traded away his anonymity for a lifetime of infamy. He talked about how whites were “the master race.” He said Nazi Germany was the ideal country, and “you can call me a Nazi if you want to.”

He said only ten thousand Jews had died in the Holocaust, not six million. And after about half an hour, the usual smattering of fifty or so students in Free Speech Alley had grown into a frenzied crowd of more than three hundred, according to news reports at the time. One black student stretched out his hand toward Duke’s hand, noting their similarities, and asked Duke to explain the difference.

“Yours is black,” Duke said. Then the student took out a knife and cut into his own skin, and a white student in the crowd did the same. They joined their hands together and held them defiantly in the air. Both bleeding. Both red. Duke laughed and shouted back at them, “I could go across the street to the scientific laboratory and get the...

For the first time, he wasn’t worried about being liked. For once he didn’t care about whose feelings he was hurting or whether his ideas were politically correct. He was free to become his true self, and that meant putting a photograph of Hitler above his desk, hanging a poster of a Nazi soldier on his wall, and draping a swastika flag over the dorm room window.

That meant buying a cake each year to celebrate Hitler’s birthday.

That meant leaving LSU after his junior year, rejuvenating the Klan, remaking himself into a state-elected politician, winning a majority of white voters in a failed bid to become governor of Louisiana, running for president of the United States,

They went out to dinner at a nice restaurant in Munich. Then Duke and his girlfriend drove home to Austria, and Derek went back to the quiet of his room. It was true that a part of him wanted to somehow prove his indifference to the hysteria at New College by redoubling his commitment to white nationalism, just as Duke had done. Derek read back through the forum thread, which now included more than a thousand emails, and this time, instead of feeling just hurt and vulnerable, he began to feel angry, even inspired.

he landed on an idea: an international conference for Stormfront members, the first of its kind, focused on verbal tactics to out-argue “anti-whites.” Derek proposed the idea to his father, and Don loved it. They had traveled to dozens of conferences together, so why not host one? Derek scheduled a date for that upcoming September, and Don booked a meeting space that could hold a few hundred people in Tennessee. “Verbal Tactics for Anyone White and Normal,” Derek wrote on the invitation, promising that the conference would “give our people the offensive” after “decades of one-sided venom against White families.”

During his last week in Europe, Derek worked to book nearly a dozen keynote speakers for the conference, including Duke.

Juan, Derek’s friend from the previous year, sent an email inviting Derek to his dorm for a beer. Juan had read through some of Derek’s Stormfront posts over the summer—“all this bizarre and horrifying stuff about brown people,” he remembered—but ultimately Juan trusted his own instincts more than what he read on the internet. If Derek truly despised brown people, why had he spent dozens of hours cultivating a friendship with a Peruvian immigrant? Juan decided to believe that Derek was already in the inevitable process of changing his views. “Glad you are indeed coming back,” Juan wrote to Derek. “NCF can learn a lot from you, and you can learn a lot from it as well.”

Race itself isn’t real, but it has real meaning.”

He went to visit Rose at her dorm to try to make amends, and she told him not to come back.

Many of those people had brought their conspiracy theories to Stormfront, where the chat rooms had grown from 30,000 users to nearly 100,000 in the last five years.

Citizens; and James Edwards, the host of a popular new white nationalist radio show in Memphis. Each speaker focused on the same topic: strategies for mainstreaming white nationalism by changing its rhetoric.

“Gen-o-cide,” said Duke. “Say it with me now. This is the murder of our very genes. Repeat that over and over.”

Derek wrote his own post on the message board. “Staying on the genocide message demoralizes/embarrasses anti-whites,” he reiterated. “Stay on the offensive, because you are right.”

He had been chased by white supremacists on a trip to the Leaning Tower of Pisa and harassed on the street by anti-Semites while visiting rabbis in Ukraine and Poland.