Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism

by Seyward Darby

Women who policed the color line did so in the name of decency and virtue, patriotism and pride, science and God. They justified their white supremacy as maternal responsibility.

was alone with the kids and they took me in as family,” Widner said. She eventually exited the movement after seeing women, including young mothers, being used as sexual objects, and discovering that male leaders preferred exotic dancers and pornography to respectable marriages. Widner’s new husband, also a former white nationalist, described having a similar realization. “What hypocrites! I mean, nobody cared about their kids, or their family,” he said.31

To speak for one’s own isn’t to speak against anyone else. They parrot the language of the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and other causes that have demanded a more egalitarian society. White nationalists are posing a challenge: If other groups can rally around their history, why not white people? This is a false equivalence, shorn of context, nuance, and power disparities.

she said, brushing tears from her cheeks. “There’s no reason these people should be in our countries. The second greatest commandment is to love thy neighbor as thyself, and we’ve become so obsessed with loving our neighbor halfway around the world that we’ve forgotten our literal neighbor next door.”

What qualifies as traditional isn’t precise—the only requirement is that it derive from a mythical, unspoiled version of history and celebrate clearly defined masculine and feminine archetypes.

She lived in Utah, where there was a Mexican restaurant on every corner and avocados and tortillas on endless offer at grocery stores. Plus, she lamented, liberal culture had served white America a big dish of “propaganda,” telling them that European food was boring and flavorless. “It’s quite the opposite!” Ayla promised. “It’s simply bursting with flavor and charm.”

“Slavery is being taught in a polarizing narrative,” Ayla once said, referring to public school curricula.

“Why do we build walls? We have walls for protection,” the text reads, set against a colorful image of the biblical city of Jericho as its walls tumble down at God’s behest. Grey, a tradwife who hosted the now-defunct podcast Good Morning White America, told me in an email that she wrote the book “to help explain to my children why having a wall around our country is justified and a good and normal thing.”

Sarcasm was the closest she came to trolling, the modus operandi of the alt-right’s self-proclaimed “shit posters,” who used base humor as a Trojan horse for racist ideas.

For a while, “Wolfie James” was the avatar of Anna Vuckovic Gebert, a midthirties wife and mother whose husband, also a white nationalist, worked at the State Department until the SPLC exposed his politics.

In a pamphlet entitled The Bible: Handbook for Survivalists, Racists, Tax Protesters, Militants and Right-Wing Extremists, Peters wrote, “A BIGOT AND A RACIST IS ANOTHER GREAT HERO OF THE BIBLE or at least he would be so labeled by modern standards.…There was a time in America when interracial marriage was against the law and integration was not only socially but religiously unacceptable. In those days, America had no racial problems nor a killing plague such as AIDS.”

“They change the delivery and the packaging to make it more palatable, but the message is the same,” he said in 1988. “That’s the real danger.”28 Mainstream conservative Christians and the far right shared antifeminist, homophobic, and other intolerant beliefs; the ideological intersections could be gateways.

The basic argument, illustrated in cartoons, was that women drag politics to the left in Western countries; if their suffrage were gone, white people’s problems, including low birth rates, would vanish.

She was white, which meant she enjoyed certain things. “Like Lord of the Rings,” she said. “That’s a great example. It’s a very white European story. That’s not to say that Asian people or African people can’t enjoy that story, and certainly some of them do, but by and large…it’s not their thing. They have their own things that they enjoy.” She said she wasn’t a white supremacist.

To the extent that this was true, America’s origins of violence and prejudice didn’t seem to matter to Ayla, who once said on Gab that “colonization was the best thing that ever happened to the world.” Because America felt white to her, ipso facto, whiteness was American.

Ayla had always wanted to be a role model. White nationalism had made her one.

Opposite Unite the Right supporters were concerned citizens, interfaith clergy, Black Lives Matter activists, and members of antifa, white nationalists’ favorite leftist bogeymen.iii

White nationalists had a fast answer for everything. Ayla joined a chorus of people accusing the media of lying. They insisted that there’d been violence only because the police hadn’t done their job—in fact, cops had been aggressive toward peaceful white nationalists.

“God rest her soul,” Ayla tweeted. “Coroner report says she died of a heart attack, she was clearly morbidly obese, the media is spinning this hard.” This cruel lie may have originated on the far-right website Occidental Dissent. Whatever its source, the rumor spiraled across the internet. People joked on social media that Heyer had died of “landwhalitis” and “that voracious appetite.” Never mind that the official cause of her death was blunt force trauma to the torso and that the manner of death was homicide.

“They bring their women, they put them out on the front, and now one of them is dead,” Ayla said in a YouTube video. The implication was clear: The enemies of white nationalists were the enemies of womanhood.

The Nazi flags, the racist slurs, the violent things said on Discord—none of that mattered in comparison to white birth rates and loving your own kind. What could possibly be controversial about that? “Tell me, please,” Ayla demanded. “It’s ridiculous.”

Antifa is short for “antifascists” or “antifascist action.” It refers to militant left-wing activists who are part of a loose and secretive nationwide network. Antifa saw a spike in support after the 2016 election, and activists have showed up to protest many far-right rallies and other events. Still, the vast majority of people who oppose white nationalism are not part of the antifa movement.

Another generalization she found reasonable was that black Africans weren’t as advanced as white Europeans and their descendants in America. “They actually did very well in the bush,” Lana said. “That’s how they lived probably for millions of years. It’s when they get in touch with a lot of the modern world that it starts creating problems for them.”

Get in touch with a lot of the modern world—a cringeworthy phrase that crammed the violence of colonialism and human bondage into the suggestion of a friendly phone call.

Honesty, in Lana’s book, couldn’t be bigotry. Nor could common sense. Problem being, what she considered truth was mostly opinion or outright lies. What sh...

In our conversation, Lana seemed to be pushing the idea that, should people dip a toe into the far right, they would find it teeming with sensible people and ideas.

In fact, FBI data from 2015 showed that Dyer had it exactly backward: White-on-white murders happened at five times the rate black-on-white ones did. The year prior, the disparity was even wider.5 Like so much of life in America, murder hews to racial lines. Meanwhile, the data on hate crimes show no violent campaign against white Americans.

Shifting attention to antifa was a fallacious strategy the far right employed with vigor, to the point that, in 2019, Trump would suggest that the leftist cohort be labeled a terror organization. I ignored Lana’s whataboutism. “So you shouldn’t denounce people who advocate violence?” I asked. Lana seemed to calculate a course correction, a semantic one. “Alt-right people don’t. I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘Oh yeah, let’s go out and kill people,’” she replied. “People try to link people to us that aren’t us.” Later, in an email, Lana wrote that she wanted “to be crystal fucking clear” that she was “not implying” that Roof was on her “side.”

This possibly could’ve been prevented by having an honest discussion about it in the media. It never happens.” The bottom line, she insisted, was that “the altright has NEVER killed anyone.”

I would remember this particular comment when, in 2019, a white woman at a Trump rally in my hometown—the one where the crowd chanted “Send her back”—gave several quotes to a reporter, explaining why she supported the president. She was sixty-four, a retired nurse. “Everything he says is how I feel,” the woman said. “He’s speaking for me.”

Lana used surfaces as conduits for misinformation. She persuaded people to believe impossible things: conspiracy theories, fictions, fallacies, revisionist history. Her self-curation made her something of a cipher. It was also what made her so adept at navigating a movement rife with misogyny, conflict, and cruelty.

“That kind of indoctrination, looking back, is very abusive,” Lana said in an interview on Renegade Broadcasting, a far-right talk radio platform. “It really keeps you in a place of fear.” She said that it took her until adulthood to kick the habit of believing in Jesus Christ.2

No one, it seems, is immune from the psychic glitch of sometimes believing that what’s wrong is right. Among the chinks in our intellectual armor is a susceptibility to repetition. Research shows that people become more credulous of an idea the more times they encounter it.

Kilts aside, this is the essence of propaganda: Repeat, repeat, repeat, and make people believe. In the context of white nationalism, the work of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) shows how repetition can displace truth.

A 2011 poll found that 48 percent of white Americans still believe that the main cause of the Civil War was states’ rights, not slavery. In 2018, an SPLC study found that “only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Most didn’t know an amendment to the U.S. Constitution formally ended slavery.

Research shows that people sometimes double down on their misperceptions when presented with the truth.

“I know that hell hath no fury like the vindictiveness of those who are hurt by the truth being told to them.”

A recent case in point is a 2012 poll that indicated 85 percent of Republicans believed government unemployment statistics were being manipulated in favor of the Obama administration. The stronger their political knowledge—the better educated they were—the more likely people were to believe in the conspiracy theory.25

People embrace conspiracism for the same reasons they find God or start reading the future in the stars: They’ve experienced anxiety, ostracism, or a sense of losing control. They are seeking stories to explain what’s happening. Narratives become sources of power, validation, even superiority.

Life in contemporary America may be enough to incline a person toward conspiracism.

What matters is the sense it seems to make, and the power and purpose it imparts to believers.

If anxiety is conspiracy theories’ fuel, technology is their propulsion.

Today, unfounded theories saturate the internet, each more far-fetched than the next: Pizzagate, QAnon, Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying and liberals putting her body double on the Supreme Court. So huge is the burst of conspiracism that in June 2019, the FBI released a bulletin calling it a security risk. “Based on the increased volume and reach of conspiratorial content due to modern communication methods, it is logical to assume that more extremist-minded individuals will be exposed to potentially harmful conspiracy theories, accept ones that are favorable to their views, and possibly carry out criminal or violent actions as a result,” the bulletin stated. “The Internet has also enabled a ‘crowd-sourcing’ effect wherein conspiracy theory followers themselves shape a given theory by presenting information that supplements, expands, or localizes its narrative.”29

Conspiracists are like snake oil salesmen of the digital age, and they often imbibe what they’re selling.

The idea that the opposite was true originated on the far right. Since the end of apartheid, white nationalists had held up South Africa as evidence that, when white people lose power in places where they’ve long held it, annihilation is nigh.

Depictions of victimhood grab people’s hearts, not their minds.

She reserved special disdain for “white race traitors who suffer from a pathological mental disease”—that is, the conviction that white supremacy is a serious problem.

Lana called the Holocaust a “religion” that no one was allowed to doubt, and she criticized the “massive brainwashing operation” that insisted Nazis only did terrible things. “I used to be there, too,” Lana said in a monologue. “This is where most truthers, anarchists, left and right, CNN and Fox, Christian and atheists, join as one: on the Nazi issue. It is politically correct to demonize Hitler.”

Lana interviewed early adopters of the alt-right label. She agreed with Richard Spencer when he told her that SJWs—or “granola communists”—did white nationalists a favor by being “a bunch of people who no one would conceivably want to sleep with.”

The people who understood, who really got it, should blog, make YouTube videos, and get the word out. They should mock their critics and test the limits of discourse. The white race depended on them provoking liberals and shaping the future.