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“Jews are NOT white,” Derek had written. “They worm their way into power over society.” “They manipulate.” “They abuse.” “This has to be the cutoff that Jews are expelled and do not come back.”
One of Matthew’s roommates, a sophomore named Allison Gornik, had tried to dissuade Matthew from inviting Derek. “Even if you’re not physically afraid of him, what he’s doing is spreading bigotry that’s actively hurting people,” she told Matthew, and when he decided to proceed with the dinner anyway, Allison went into her room and closed the door out of protest. Shabbat dinner was one of her favorite parts of each week—a family meal with roommates who felt like her surrogate brothers, a safe and loving tradition. And now there was an infamous white nationalist on his way to their dorm,
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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.
Sometimes, after a few drinks, he had begun railing to his New College friends about the “Looney Tunes” socialism that he saw on campus and especially on the forum. In some ways, the incessant, in-your-face liberalness of New College had made him become more conservative.
“There is no better way to make sure Derek keeps these abhorrent views than if we all exclude him,” Matthew said.
“The goal was really just to make Jews more human for him,” Matthew said. They sat at the table for a few hours and haltingly worked their way into a safe conversation, careful to avoid discussion of Derek, or his family, or his background, or his beliefs.
“What’s Derek Black’s talent? Being a racist?” a student wrote on the forum, when the contestant list was published hours before the show.
A few classmates had been curious about the song Derek played, and so overnight they did a little research. The songwriter Mason Jennings? He had performed at civil rights rallies and written a tribute song about Martin Luther King Jr. The lyrics of “Adrian”? They were inspired by Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Beloved, about the psychological effects of slavery. “That song he chose?” one forum email read. “It’s a song about a LYNCHING. He’s trolling us.”
For the first time at New College, Derek decided to respond on the forum. It hadn’t been his intent to insult or inflame his classmates, and he wanted to explain himself. “Honestly, I hadn’t interpreted it as being about a lynching, per se,” he wrote. “I imagine more of a 19th century Wild West scenario myself, sort of like a jeering town crowded all around. I hear it more as a poor person condemned unjustly and made an example of by a cruel and self-righteous crowd.” He saw it, in other words, as a song about himself.
“God. This is so fucking disturbing,” wrote one classmate, Bárbara Suárez. A few months earlier, Bárbara had been one of the students who cornered Derek when he came to the party in Palm Court, yelling at him until another student whisked Derek away, and now she and Derek began to have a direct conversation over email.
On her first day at New College, she had attended a privilege workshop with James Birmingham in which she continued to stand still while other students flew ahead of her up the stairs. Standing still because she had been poor and working class. Standing still because she had been born outside the United States. Standing still because she spoke with an accent. Standing still because she had experienced oppression and discrimination as a result of her race.
She knew how to recognize a lynching where Derek saw a tragic hero in the Wild West.
“You choose to ignore anything that might point to your privilege,” she told him. “You preach the values of individual responsibility, but you are quite keen towards dodging the bullet whenever any of your public statements shed some light on your real stance on race.”
pleased. A gay student wrote several times to ask Derek why the United States shouldn’t, in fact, belong to Native Americans, the original majority.
The story said, among many other things, that men automatically assumed conversational and societal power over women, and Derek thought that was probably true.
Derek’s half sisters had occasionally complained that Duke had bypassed them as potential white nationalist leaders and instead anointed Derek simply because he was a man. “I understand the concept of male privilege,” he wrote to a classmate. But white privilege?
Derek was unnerved, and he asked to meet with the student body president a few days before the event. He particularly dreaded having the SPLC on campus; the organization had published his online “extremist file” alongside a collection of domestic terrorists, and it had spent the last three decades working to dismantle Derek’s ideology and his parents’ professional lives.
When some of Matthew’s other friends privately denigrated Derek’s character, calling him a racist and an oppressor, Matthew insisted on treating Derek with respect, even compassion. “In some ways, he just has way bigger versions of the same hang-ups we all have,” Matthew told a friend once.
Really?
What if he was cultivating a Jewish friend to protect himself against charges of anti-Semitism, in the same way David Duke had once befriended members of the Neturei Karta, a small sect of Orthodox Jews who oppose Zionism?
“It’s the third-worldization of the United States,” Derek said one day. “It’s an erosion of our culture. It’s Jewish control.”
Derek had always insisted that the best way to expand white nationalism was to reinforce feelings of white grievance and victimhood—to pit whites against minorities by hammering home what he saw as the travesties of cultural erosion and white genocide—and during President Obama’s first term that tactic had also become increasingly popular on the far conservative right.
and as Newt Gingrich, a 2012 presidential candidate, said Spanish was “the language of the ghetto.”
“If I could go back to a point in history, like rewinding a tape, I would do it all different. I really would,” he said, and in some ways his model for a better approach had become that of his son. “I would take a much softer path from the very beginning. I would be less confrontational. I would try to have fewer enemies. I would work more from within the system, rather than escaping from it. I would be patient about taking people where they were politically and then slowly moving them in my direction, rather than just shocking or scaring the hell out of them, which is what I usually did.”
Don’s father ran a small construction company, relying on business loans from the town’s Jewish banker and cheap work from crews of black laborers. The groups seemed to coexist well enough in the rural quiet of Athens, at least from the perspective of the white boss who could afford to buy a house in one of the subdivisions his company built. “My parents were content going along with the status quo,” Don said.
Don was prepared to hitchhike to the conference, but instead his parents gave him a ride to the Birmingham bus station, where Don had arranged to carpool to Virginia with two other teenagers who had also been writing postcards to the NSWPP.
And here came the other, also nineteen, getting off a bus from Mobile with shaggy clothes and a crude swastika tattooed onto his shoulder, which would later be used to identify him as a serial killer responsible for murdering more than fifteen people in an attempt to start a race war.
They believed their white ancestors had been forced to learn survival skills in cold northern climates, whereas blacks had been able to lounge in the heat of Africa. As a result, Don thought whites had become smarter, more disciplined, and more resourceful.
And now the great white gene pool was endangered by desegregation, immigration, and a rising Jewish political influence.
Duke would go back to LSU the next semester and finally summon the courage to stand up and speak at Free Speech Alley, until his crowds of dissenters grew so big he hired a security guard to protect him on campus. Franklin would begin privately planning his self-described effort to “spark a race war,” eventually bombing three synagogues and using a sniper rifle to shoot “as many evildoers” as he could: an interracial couple outside a shopping mall in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1977; another interracial couple in Atlanta in 1978; Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, as payback for publishing photos in
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And Don would go quietly back to Alabama, back to the library, back to the same worn copy of Our Nordic Race.
He didn’t believe in sparking a revolution through violence, murder, or detonating bombs like Franklin.
You sure?
But he was also zealous and impatient, and a few months later Don made another one of the mistakes he would soon come to regret. He went to Georgia for the summer between his junior and his senior years of high school for what he described to his parents as a six-week internship: volunteering for the gubernatorial campaign of J. B. Stoner, a segregationist and a Ku Klux Klan member once convicted of bombing a black church.
This contradicts the claim that he didn’t believe in violence🤔
At twenty-two, he was initiated into the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan by his close friend Duke, who had taken over the Klan as a side job while he and his new wife, Chloe, ran a day care in the basement of a Baptist church.
seemed to Don as if whites were always losing, each day another step deeper into the abyss. How could he sit patiently by, relying on the cold process of intellect as increasing rates of immigration and interracial marriage polluted the gene pool?
Duke left the Klan in 1979 to pursue a political career and anointed Don the Grand Wizard.
“We are a non-violent Klan,” Don said then, but there were also several more militant Klan organizations at the time, like the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the United Klans of America. Those groups attacked and killed civil rights leaders, Vietnamese immigrants, and four elderly black women in 1980.
No matter how often Don condemned those killings and spoke about his own group as the “family-friendly, more educated Klan,” they were all co-opting the same Klan history of fear and violence. They were all ultimately dressed in the same hoods and robes.
So, when another white nationalist offered Don a Hail Mary solution in 1982—a chance to join a ready-made revolution that was already under way—Don went against his better judgment and decided to take it. The plan, which they referred to as Operation Red Dog, was to overthrow the tiny Caribbean island nation of Dominica with a small army of white supremacists from the United States and Canada.
How is this nonviolent?
As the operation neared, that fantasy compelled Don to look past all the glaring flaws in their plan: that their white supremacist army consisted of only ten men; that many of those men were alcoholics or petty criminals with no military experience whatsoever; that their hope was to invade Dominica by water, sailing from Louisiana across the choppy Gulf of Mexico on a leaky, hurricane-battered boat; that their success in overthrowing the government depended on teaming up in Dominica with a group of local mercenaries, black soldiers who also wanted control of the country and had no interest
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Violent again. 🤔
“Perhaps we were naive,” he told the jury. “Perhaps we were stupid. Perhaps I was duped. But what we were doing was motivated by the highest principles, by patriotic motives.”
Like most of his co-conspirators, Don was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
the close-quarters living of Big Spring also required that he treat everyone with respect. “I wasn’t going to get jumped by someone looking to make a statement against the KKK,” Don said, so he learned to moderate his beliefs in mixed company, saying less about race as he worked in the commissary alongside inmates who belonged to Mexican gangs or the Nation of Islam.
Don absorbed an important lesson: If Don wanted political power, it was sometimes best to maneuver through back channels.
They changed tactics together over the next several years, focusing less on Jews and more on third-world immigration, swearing off the Klan, and starting the National Association for the Advancement of White People. Their goal was to reposition white nationalism not as a hateful cause but as a modern civil rights movement for whites.
They decided not to make race a talking point, but instead to make it the subtext to every issue. Duke blamed Louisiana’s high murder rate on black aggression. He said he was against minority set-aside programs, against welfare culture, and against affirmative action. “We demand an America based on merit,” his campaign brochure read. “Equal rights for all. The truth is that today, better qualified white people face racial discrimination.”
And now there was Derek, whom she found impossible to understand. How could there be such a chasm between how he acted and what he believed? How could someone who seemed mild and kind promote something so hateful and oppressive?
She signed up for an account so she could see Derek’s posts on Stormfront, where some of the discussion that spring was about the ongoing trial of Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik. He had massacred seventy-seven people the previous summer, most of them teenagers attending a government-run summer camp outside Oslo, because he wanted to attract attention to his fifteen-hundred-page manifesto about the genocide of the white race, the ills of multiculturalism, and his feeling that Norway had become a “dumping ground for surplus births of the third world.”
But on their radio show, Don and Derek also sympathized with Breivik’s assertion that the Norwegian government was partly at fault for the massacre. If races were kept more separate, they said, everyone would be happier, safer, and better off.
A few people saw her getting into Derek’s car one morning and decided to unfriend her on Facebook. Others emailed her quotes from Derek’s radio show and warned her about enabling a charming white supremacist. She was worried about the same things, so each time she began to feel closer to Derek, a series of familiar questions echoed in her head. What was she doing? Why, instead of confronting this infamous white nationalist and challenging his beliefs, was she making his campus life more pleasant and comfortable?
Sometimes she would tell herself to back away, and she would decline one of Derek’s invitations, only to then change her mind and join him on an adventure at the last minute. She liked him. She trusted him. She was attracted to him.
