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

by Eli Saslow

Maybe Derek would listen to him, she suggested. But Matthew told her that his friendship with Derek was primary and also potentially transformative in and of itself. He wasn’t willing to risk it on an intervention about Derek’s beliefs.

Despite all of his lectures about verbal tactics and disarming the liberal enemy, Derek had virtually no practice talking about white nationalism with people who explicitly disagreed with his ideology. “Why waste the time?” Don had told him once. Instead, Don had taught him to spread their ideas by recruiting whites who said things like “I’m not racist, but…”

In part because of his relationship with Matthew, Derek said that he had begun to like and accept Jews. He now considered them white, and he no longer understood why other white nationalists saw them as such a problem.

He said he wasn’t a white supremacist, because he no longer believed whites were necessarily better than other people. He was simply a white nationalist, which meant he thought whites needed to be protected within their own border, like an endangered species.

Derek told Allison that he still thought races had inherent biological traits. He mentioned his belief that whites had a slightly higher average IQ score than minorities and that blacks had higher levels of testosterone, which he thought led to a greater propensity for violence.

Their conversation on the roof had remained mostly civil and productive, largely because Allison also had the advantage of being white. Derek didn’t feel implicitly challenged by her racial identity; Allison didn’t feel personally threatened by his beliefs.

They were trying to make sense of each other, and as the summer wore on, they used each online chat to examine their differences, searching out the possibility of common ground.

Late in the summer, another news alert of a “Stormfront shooter” flashed across cable news. This time, the shooter’s name was Wade Michael Page, forty. His target was a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, on August 5, 2012. His motive was ethnic cleansing, six dead and four wounded in the name of white supremacy. For the last decade, he had been a registered user of Stormfront.

Stormfront’s audience had grown over the years to include at least half a dozen murderers—incidents Don referred to as “a series of very unfortunate coincidences.”

There was Richard Baumhammers, who searched for love on the Stormfront Singles dating page in 2000 before launching on ...

There was Luka Magnotta, a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian, who in May 2012 filmed his killing of a Chinese immigrant and then dismembered the body with an ice pick, mailing out limbs to politicians and elementary schools.

His left shoulder was tattooed with a Celtic cross, a white power symbol that Stormfront used as its logo.

instead of empathizing with the victims of that Sikh temple massacre—five men and one woman who had been preparing the temple’s food for a Sunday service—Don and another co-host known as Truck Roy began to rationalize the shooter’s motives.

“Take this Punjab region of India,” Truck Roy said. “If somebody was flooding that with tens of millions of non-Indians and overrunning their neighborhoods, I bet you’d have more than one Sikh that snapped every once in a while. The most logical explanation is you have a white genocide going on. You see our young white men, especially the ones that have nothing to lose, and they are sitting around watching their neighborhoods getting eaten up, watching white kids getting forced assimilated in their schools and workplaces, and eventually you are going to reach a breaking point. That’s probably what happened here.”

Derek didn’t say anything on the radio that day, and Allison wasn’t listening to the show. But somebody else at New College did hear the justifications made on behalf of the shooter on Derek’s show, and that student sent a message to Allison, who later emailed Derek. “Hey, not my business and I’m sure you know this anyway, but be careful of things you say/how you say things,” she wrote.

“To my recollection, I’ve said nothing about that guy,” Derek responded. “Not to say I disagree with anything Roy or my dad said. I also sometimes wonder why you’d put up with being my friend when so many people at our tiny school think these things about me. With friends who don’t seem affected by it, I just presume the benefits trump the negatives or that they’re just impervious to self-righteous posturing by people who act out against me on campus.”

She wanted to calm down before she responded to him, but no amount of time was making her feel any better. He didn’t disagree with anything Roy or Don said.

I’d say I fall into the first category that the benefits of our friendship trump the negatives.

Maybe because I’m extremely tired,

Point is, these NCF kids can do their research and make their conclusions and that’s all they can do, because you haven’t given them anything else to go on. The impetus is not on them to approach you. It is not the job of someone who’s potentially scared/intimidated by someone else to approach that person to see if they are in fact scary/intimidating.

A few weeks after they returned to school for fall semester, Derek sent a copy of the conference invitation to Allison. “I think you should come,” he told her.

The two of them had begun arguing about white nationalism with increasing frequency during the first weeks of the semester, and Allison still felt unsure about exactly what Derek believed.

Huh?

Allison thought Derek was being dishonest about his beliefs,

No shit

Only then could she know for sure if he was telling her the truth about his views, and only once she knew his actual views could she possibly begin to dismantle them.

Really?

Just a family reunion where people have also come to hear speeches.”

The 2012 presidential election was two months away, and racial hate crimes in the United States had ticked back up to the historic levels of 2008.

In the Republican Party, the 2012 primary had become a race to the far conservative right on immigration issues, with one candidate after the next proposing ideas that were once popular only on forums like Stormfront.

Rick Santorum tried to please Tea Party activists by saying he wanted to make English the country’s official language, mandatory for all residents. Herman Cain suggested building an electrified border fence, twenty feet high and coi...

Even Mitt Romney, the party’s eventual nominee, had moved away from his centrist roots and suggested an immigration policy of “self-deportation.” His idea was essentially that lawmakers could make life in America so difficult for immigrants—by withdrawing government assistance, eliminating their jobs, and increasing police patrols in minority neighborhoods—that they would become miserable and choose to leave on their own.

And how would she explain her relationship to Derek, which they were still figuring out themselves?

She cared about him. “It has very much crossed my mind, too. I won’t deny it,” she wrote back to him. But she also didn’t want to tag herself in pictures with him on Facebook or be seen walking across campus holding his hand. As much as she hated to admit it, she cared about what her classmates on campus would think, and some of them would think she had lost her mind.

She still had doubts about whether she had made the moral choice in befriending him. In no way was she ready to publicly date. She rejected his offer as kindly and as honestly as she could. “Things are nice now,” she had written to him. “Can’t we just let it be nice?”

He gravitated to the speakers with the best academic credentials, like Canadian psychologist Philippe Rushton or California State professor Kevin MacDonald, and Derek accepted as fact their theories about whites having larger brains than blacks and Jews possessing a unique psychology that allowed them to manipulate other groups.

Among white nationalists, Don was revered for his loyalty and generosity. He had once put his family home up as collateral to pay the jail bond for a young skinhead. Another time, he allowed an itinerant Stormfront chat room moderator to park his trailer in the family driveway and live on their property for two years.

They became fixtures at the Council of Conservative Citizens Conference in Nashville and at American Renaissance in Louisville, the most academic conference and also Derek’s favorite, where racial scientists talked about genetic destiny and the possibilities of forced sterilization for minority women.

He went to see the movie Sleepy Hollow at a theater in Washington with an undercover FBI informant named Todd Blodgett, who had infiltrated the higher ranks of the white supremacy movement and then taken a liking to Derek. “An exceptionally bright kid being brainwashed into the realm of racist hatred,” Blodgett said of Derek then, so Blodgett made it a part of his job to occasionally take Derek away from conferences for short outings, hoping to give the boy’s mind a break.

There he was at sixteen, seated behind his first radio mixer board, broadcasting speeches live on his internet radio show. There he was at twenty, an elected politician, playing guitar onstage in an attempt to cheer up a conference crowd after Obama’s election, performing a cover song from 1972 called “The Monkey That Became President.”

one of whom was a white nationalist donor who had written Derek into his will,

Everything about the conversation disgusted her, but what good would it do to speak out? She was alone in the woods of Tennessee, and she wasn’t going to persuade dozens of the country’s preeminent white nationalists to change their beliefs.

Why so much militant terminology? Why was everyone so obsessed with Jews?

Matthew was confused and then upset that Allison had lied to him. What more could she possibly need to know about Derek and his beliefs? What was so ambiguous about white supremacy, bigotry, and oppression?

Matthew had studied demagogues like Hitler and Duke enough to know they could be charming and convincing, and he warned Allison to be careful.

But this second Stormfront conference did reaffirm for Matthew exactly where Derek stood: at the forefront of the white nationalist movement, right where he had been a year before, when he first started coming to Shabbat dinners.

They saw pictures of Derek posing arm in arm with Duke, offering him another conference podium from which he could spread his racial bigotry and Holocaust denial.

Chaim and his seven siblings were assigned to share two lice-infested bunks and four slices of bread per day.

Moshe read Duke’s autobiography, which contained passages about Duke’s own visits to concentration camps, which Duke considered mostly a hoax. Duke said gas chambers in the camps were designed only to disinfect clothing so that Jews would not get lice.

He said Holocaust survivors were evidence that the Holocaust hadn’t really been so bad. He said the Holocaust was mostly just “a device used as the pillar of Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder.”

And so Moshe wondered, all of that sacrifice, and for what? So Derek could talk with them about music, or religion, or contra dancing at Shabbat dinner and then go back to Tennessee for the weekend and speak to another audience of neo-Nazis and anti-Semites?

“He’s still basically a Nazi after all this time,” Moshe told Matthew once.

And now he had a new friend, Allison, who was willing to go with him from their liberal college to a white nationalist conference in Tennessee. Maybe she was on her way to becoming a white nationalist, too, Moshe sometimes thought. Maybe, all this time, it was actually Derek who had been doing the persuading.