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

by Eli Saslow

“The future is bright,” Don said in Memphis. “We have more potential now than we’ve ever had. I’ve never seen so many mad people. Their country is being taken away from them. They are looking for answers and we will provide those answers. I’m now convinced that any successful white revolution in this country will come largely from inside politics.”

“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.”

Don was about to turn sixty, with his only son away at school and his wife working long hours for the sugar company. He fought back against the long silence of his days by listening to news on both the radio and cable TV, and lately so much of what he heard sounded vaguely familiar. 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. Andrew Breitbart, a conservative media mogul, manipulated the tape of a speech by Obama appointee Shirley Sherrod to make it look as if she were racist against whites. Radio host Rush Limbaugh went on the air to warn his listeners, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay! Right on.’ ” Don monitored the news as Lou Dobbs railed to his CNN audience about “rampant illegal aliens” who were “overtaking the country” and as Newt Gingrich, a 2012 presidential candidate, said Spanish was “the language of the ghetto.” Don heard Glenn Beck tell his viewers on Fox News that Obama had a “deep-seated hatred of white people,” and he watched as U.S. representative Steve King, of Iowa, said Obama was “on the side of black people.”

He had spent most of his life forcing his way in front of a microphone to create more enmity between whites and minorities, but why risk the backlash when more mainstream voices had begun doing that work for him?

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.

Don had taught him to spread their ideas by recruiting whites who said things like “I’m not racist, but…”

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 coiled in barbed wire, with enough voltage to kill a human being. Michele Bachmann said she could do one better by building a “secure double fence” along every foot of the border. 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. In 2012 the Republican Party had essentially decided to forfeit the minority vote. It had chosen, as Derek once predicted, to become an overwhelmingly white party, and now the decisive question of the election was whether enough white voters remained.

“It’s not just that you’re wrong,” she told him. “It’s that you’re actually hurting people.”

“If you don’t want people to be afraid of what you’re advocating,” she told him, “then maybe you shouldn’t be advocating for it.”

On election night, Bill O’Reilly explained Romney’s defeat to his massive audience on Fox News by saying, “It’s not a traditional America anymore. There’s 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things and who is going to give them things? President Obama. Whereby twenty years ago, President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney, the white establishment is now the minority.”

James thought there was a naive assumption among some of his liberal classmates that the world was a fair marketplace of information, in which the best ideas naturally won out. But ideas didn’t fight political battles; people fought them, and in James’s experience people who were systematically oppressed—by gender, by class, by race—always had to work harder to get their ideas heard. The concept of civil discourse was the creation of a privileged class that didn’t want their lives disrupted by protests or emotional arguments. “Revolutions don’t happen at polite dinner parties,” James wrote, and as the forum thread continued, he posted again and again: Can anyone give me an example of any radical (and yes, white supremacy—the notion not the movement—no longer being the ruling ideology would be a radical change) social change that was primarily the result of “cooler heads prevailing”? Do you really think Women’s Suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement happened via “calm heads,” via sterile debate and civil discourse? Because they didn’t. They happened by putting blood, sweat and tears and rage into a social movement through a diverse range of tactics both “violent” and nonviolent. You cannot just chime in with “civil discourse” without understanding that “civil discourse” has historically been the arena of the ruling classes and a defense mechanism against listening to the “uncivilized.” I am not arguing for violent tactics. I’m arguing against this fantasy that “calm, cool-h...

James posted an image of a kickboxer pummeling a Nazi, and hours later Allison saw it on the forum and decided to write a public response. She had spent the last year sitting with Derek, Matthew, Moshe, and others at polite dinner parties. And even if the result wasn’t exactly revolutionary, she believed those conversations had opened Derek’s mind and begun to change his thinking. What she worried now was that the forum would undo that goodwill and push Derek back into a corner, where he would again see the campus as his liberal enemy. The way to fight perceived hatred is not with hatred. These threads make me sick. If you have a problem with white nationalist ideology (which I certainly do and I think it’s safe to say the vast majority of people here do) then go fight oppressive structures. Or at the very least, educate yourself about privilege and racial issues and classism and discrimination and get informed. Educate others. Those are helpful, positive directions to go in. What is not a positive direction to go in is to attack a person. If the aim is to draw attention and awareness to him, then that mission has been accomplished so many times the NCF community is saturated in knowledge. If the aim is to try to change or challenge his belief systems, the way to accomplish that is not through public contempt or ostracism. There has been enough discussion about this one person to last a lifetime, and all it’s doing now—and all it’s been doing for a long while now—is harm. ...

Instead, the facts of history pointed him to another conclusion: The iconic European warriors so often celebrated on Stormfront had never thought of themselves as white, Derek decided. Some of them had considered skin color not a hard biological fact but a condition that could change over time based on culture, diet, and climate. They had fought not for their race but for religion, culture, power, and money, just like every other empire of the Middle Ages.

A large section of the community I grew up in believes strongly in white nationalism, and members of my family whom I respect greatly, particularly my father, have long been resolute advocates for that cause. I was not prepared to risk driving a wedge in those relationships. After a great deal of thought since then, I have resolved that it is in the best interests of everyone involved, directly or indirectly, to be honest about my slow but steady disaffiliation from white nationalism. The things I have said as well as my actions have been harmful to people of color, people of Jewish descent and all others affected. I will not contribute to any cause that perpetuates this harm in the future. Advocating for redress of the supposed oppression of whites in the West is by its nature damaging to all others because of the privileged position of white people in these societies. Promoting a victim complex for whites does not recognize the oppressed experiences of others, and that’s what my efforts have done. It is impossible to argue rationally that in our society, with its overwhelming disparity between white power and that of everyone else, racial equity programs represent oppression of whites. More importantly, white nationalism’s staunch opposition to the gains in numbers and in influence of non-whites makes it a movement by nature committed to suppressing these people. It has become clear to me that white nationalism is not a movement of positive identity or of asserting cultu...

For all of Don’s life, theirs had been an insurgent movement, explicitly condemned by nearly every establishment politician as a basic requirement of electability, but now it felt as if they had covert allies in surprising places. A few weeks earlier, the Supreme Court had voted 5 to 4 to overturn a key part of the Voting Rights Act, allowing for a new wave of voting restrictions throughout the South and effectively erasing one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s signature achievements on the fiftieth anniversary of his March on Washington. The resurgent Tea Party Caucus had stalled Obama’s attempts at immigration reform by relying on nativist talking points. Alabama congressman Mo Brooks had gone on Laura Ingraham’s radio show to echo the idea of white genocide by warning constituents of the “war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party.” Iowa representative Steve King had become one of the most powerful Republican voices against immigration, and he used his platform to peddle misinformation and anti-immigrant stereotypes. “For every one immigrant who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling seventy-five pounds of marijuana across the desert,” King said. He also told voters that America could not restore the country to greatness with “somebody else’s babies.”

He had barely thought about Trump in the four years since, but now Derek went on his computer in the summer of 2015 and watched a replay of Trump’s speech announcing his presidential candidacy. What Derek heard sounded like something directly out of his past. For eighteen months, he had been trying to forget about white nationalism, but now he wondered if it was beginning to surface all around him. He sent a link of the video to Allison. “Sound familiar?” he asked her.

The United States has become a dumping ground,” Donald Trump said that day. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,” he said. “I would build a magnificent wall,” he said. Don listened to the speech at home in South Florida and watched his computer monitor as Stormfront’s daily traffic surged to twice its normal rate. Don had been waiting four decades for a major political candidate to make what he called “a direct, edgy appeal to our people,” but he never imagined that message would come from Trump. Like Derek, Don had always dismissed Trump as a vapid celebrity who cared more about money and ego than he ever would about culture or race. But now, in Trump’s speech, Don heard echoes of a strategy he and Duke had pioneered together thirty-five years earlier when they tried to rehabilitate the Klan’s image by shifting its focus from cross burnings in the Deep South to rallies against illegal immigration on the California border. Duke started the Klan Border Watch in 1977, and for two weeks he drove around the desert with binoculars and a few hundred other Klan members while the national news media trailed behind them. “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 so, on behalf of the Klan in the late 1970s, Duke proposed the idea of building a wall, much as Trump was suggesting now.

“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.” What Trump said during those next months was that he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the United States. He said he was the “law and order candidate” in the age of Black Lives Matter. He said he was qualified to be president in large part because of his “beautiful, terrific genes—a wonderful inheritance.” He said his primary goal was to erase the legacy of Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, who Trump continued to insinuate was a foreign-born Muslim. He said 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?”

Trump’s racist innuendo drove so much traffic to Stormfront that Don was able to upgrade his software and move to a larger web server; Don and Duke went on their radio shows and told tens of thousands of listeners to start volunteering for Trump. “You’re going to meet people who have the same mind-set,” Duke said. The frenzy over Trump’s campaign made “white nationalism” and “alt-right” two of the most popular search terms on Google; a group of white nationalists led by Jared Taylor recorded a robo-call for primary voters in Iowa that said, “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”

Chloe waited in line for hours at an outdoor airport hangar with her daughters, and they returned home with stories not just about Trump’s speech but about the size and the energy of the crowd. So much righteous anger and passion, they told Don. So many people reveling in their freedom from political correctness—a silent majority that had come alive to chant at protesters, flip off television cameramen, and dress in T-shirts emblazoned with white nationalist talking points. “Put the White Back in White House,” read one. “Fuck Muslims.” “Screw Your Feelings.” “Politically Incorrect and Proud of It!” Chloe told Don that the spectacle reminded her of Duke’s rallies in the 1980s, when he routinely drew thousands of whites to hear him speak in rural Louisiana.

Trump’s rise reminded him of what he had always known as a white nationalist and what he had spent the last years trying to forget. “Intrinsically, white people in this country always expect that their interests should come first,” Derek told Allison that summer. “American history is so fundamentally based on white supremacy that it’s still the basis for most of our culture and our politics.”

“You knew a moment like this was inevitable,” Don told Derek over the phone that summer, and it was true, because in fact they had often predicted it together on the radio. Eventually, the white supremacy embedded into America’s history would again rise fully to the surface, Derek had told his listeners. Sure, maybe whites could accept or even encourage multiculturalism when it posed no imminent threat to their interests. It was easy for whites to be humane and benevolent when they were still securely in place at the top of the social hierarchy—when the economy was booming, and everyone had jobs, and a disproportionate share of the wealth and power was still going to white families. But now a black man had risen to the country’s most powerful position, income growth had stagnated for middle-class whites, and a presidential candidate was promising to “take the country back.” It was the moment Derek had spent the first twenty-three years of his life trying to instigate. To be a white nationalist had always meant rooting for chaos and delighting in upheaval.

Except now white nationalists felt as though they had won the biggest popularity contest—a presidential election—and the Klan was hosting a celebratory march in North Carolina, and neo-Nazis were wearing T-shirts that showed Trump and Hitler walking side by side.

For several weeks after the election, Don kept the TV on for twenty or more hours each day, monitoring Trump’s political appointments and celebrating many of them on the radio. “Some of what he’s doing here is actually turning me into an optimist,” Don said one day. “It’s still early, of course, but he’s bringing in an army of people who appear sympathetic to our point of view.”

For Trump’s national security adviser: General Michael Flynn, who once shared a tweet that read, “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” For attorney general: Jeff Sessions, who once said immigrants “create culture problems.” For senior policy adviser: Stephen Miller, who had organized anti-Islam events with the help of his classmate Richard Spencer when they were both at Duke University. For adviser to Customs and Border Patrol: Julie Kirchner, who had previously worked at an anti-immigration group founded by a white nationalist. For chief strategist: Steve Bannon, the co-founder of Breitbart News, which he described as “the platform for the alt-right.”

No checks and balances can redeem what we’ve unleashed. The reality is that half of the voters chose white supremacy… It’s now our job to argue constantly that what voters did in elevating this man to the White House constitutes the greatest assault on our own people in a generation, and to offer another option… Those of us on the other side need to be clear that Mr. Trump’s callous disregard for people outside his demographic is intolerable, and will be destructive to the entire nation.

Tucker Carlson, Don and Chloe’s favorite and a new hero among the alt-right. Carlson had become a master at repackaging white nationalist talking points on what he called “alien immigrants” and “cultural erosion.” The SPLC had named Carlson’s show the most racist news program on cable TV, and in the America of 2017 it was also the most popular show on cable TV, with a nightly audience of over three million.