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January 5 - January 14, 2021
“And 95 per cent of the persons who sought to line up with the Ku Klux Klan were women. Why not?…The Klan stands for the things women hold most dear.” Tyler may have been exaggerating about her correspondence, though it’s impossible to say to what extent. What mattered was that she was projecting strength and esprit de corps. She wanted women reading the article to believe that the Klan was respectable, powerful, even progressive.
She ran a handful of experiments. She would create a new YouTube account, watch videos from mainstream sources, and see where the platform suggested that she go next. It pointed her toward what she described as “hard core” videos that endorsed conspiracy theories and fake news—the disinformation that, come November, would wreak havoc on American politics.
The queue of disinformation can feel endless, which seems to be the point. If a person likes what they hear, there’s plenty more where it came from.
This is what Tim Murdock described in his 2014 interview with Lana as “consistent messages”—a flood of digital material that hits the same points. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and make people believe. And who delivers the messages matters. “Women are just as effective, if not more,” Murdock told Lana. “You can get away with saying a lot more than I can get away with.”
“Take it from me,” the former Third Reich official said in an unapologetic 1981 interview, “you have to reach them where their lives are—endorse their decisions, praise their accomplishments.”5
man she went out with briefly broke up with her in a text that said, I cannot date you anymore because I do not believe that you will teach our children that all cultures are equal and to love everyone equally. “He was right,” Hargraves told her YouTube viewers. “I’m absolutely not going to teach my children that—that’s garbage.”i
The exchange fit neatly into a rubric that Lana described to me. When selling white nationalism to other women, she explained, it was important to focus on “the really simple double standards.” Simple, I suppose, in the sense that they were tapered to the point of falsehood, or premised on inaccurate statistics, or derived from personal anecdotes instead of rigorous study.
The subtext seemed to be that women were dumb and malleable. Lana would never have said that outright. When it came to recruitment, she preferred serving up compliments to shaming. She told women that their blond hair and blue eyes—or, if they didn’t have those traits, their white skin—were rare and enviable. “A lot of these white girls are tired of being told that white is boring, white is common, white is not diverse,” she told me. If flattery didn’t work, Lana tried other techniques. She asked women: Wasn’t it terrible that the mainstream media attacked “average housewives” like Ayla?
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During the 2016 primary season, a New York Times analysis of U.S. counties found that “one of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants.”11 The findings held fast through the election: Cities with larger shares of white voters went for Trump. Generally, the less white a county’s population, the more heavily it opposed him.12
Lana and her female guests made it their business to remind viewers that they were better than anyone who opposed their movement—intellectually, spiritually, and genetically. And should an adversary come after one of their own, they would degrade them mercilessly.
In a Twitter message, I asked Lana why she and other far-right women attack physical appearance. Lana had recently compared Christine Blasey Ford, during her congressional testimony about alleged sexual misconduct by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, to Dana Carvey in Wayne’s World. “Lighten up,” Lana told me, adding that “trauma” wasn’t a guy “rubbing up against her or whatever decades ago.” When I asked her the same question after she publicly called a female journalist fat, Lana replied that the target of her cruelty was “clearly unhealthy. What would her fellow comrades say about
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Did Lana know this history? Perhaps not. More troubling was the possibility that she did and just didn’t care.
She read tracts about Norse mythology and was drawn to the god Odin, ruler of Valhalla. She also embraced Carl Jung’s idea of a “collective Aryan subconsciousness.”4
Christensen fashioned a new theology urging Aryan people to save themselves from the ravages of modernity—capitalism, pollution, multiculturalism, Judeo-Christian beliefs—by reverting to a tribal state and honoring the gods of their ancestors.
Christensen visited prisons to recruit Odinists. She staged religious services and informational seminars for audiences that were literally captive. As a result of the converts she gained, Odinism became recognized as a religion under Florida law.
Christensen insisted that she wasn’t a white supremacist.
He advocated leaderless paramilitary resistance and denounced Christianity as kumbaya nonsense. “God is not love,” he said. “Compassion between species is not the law of nature. Life is struggle and the absence of struggle is death.”7
A one-time Vietnam War protester with undergraduate degrees in Spanish and Portuguese literature and a master’s in economics, Katja had met her husband through prison correspondence. She published Lane’s religious writings under the auspices of what the couple called 14 Words Press.
Initially a complement of sorts to Christian Identity, by the turn of the millennium, Odinism had become the more influential racist faith.i It was a belief system for skinheads uninterested in anything that looked like their parents’ religion; a pathway to radicalization for the environmentally conscious and incarcerated; an affirmation that whiteness wasn’t America’s original sin but something ancient and vital; and a tradition rich in symbols and rituals that weren’t white hoods and cross burnings.
Today, there’s a Wotansvolk settlement in rural Tennessee, a self-proclaimed “Odinic wolf cult” near Lynchburg, Virginia, and nodes of pagan alliances all over the country.11
As ever, she flattered the men in the room, assuring them that women wanted to sleep with them. “Like in school, when the pretty girl dated the guy no one noticed before, all of a sudden, everyone noticed that guy. Well, nationalism has become that guy,” she said. “We have winning arguments, and remember, women choose winners.”
To women, Lana offered insight and a warning. Deep down, she said, they wanted only three things: beauty, family, and home.
While women “are too emotional for leading roles in politics,” Lana argued, they have always had political power, should they choose to tap into it. To that end, she had instructions: Be like Freyja or a Viking wife. “Be loud,” she said. “When women get involved, a movement becomes a serious threat.”
MGTOW.” That’s the acronym for “men going their own way,” a virulent subculture of the manosphere in which men swear off women entirely. Lana had on more than one occasion pointed out that not having sex wasn’t conducive to propagating the white race. MGTOW acolytes—or miggies—weren’t pleased with her take.
“Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s worldview,” Jon Krakauer writes. “A narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt.”21
Did she crave the energy and tenacity of a movement more than its stated goals? Perhaps so, which posed considerable risks should the world ever go—really go—the far right’s way. There was another reason Lana reminded me of Serena Joy in The Handmaid’s Tale. In Gilead, Serena Joy’s life is different than it was before, because the new order followed through on its pledge to install a brutal patriarchy. Women aren’t allowed to read, much less be involved in public life. “She doesn’t make speeches anymore. She has become speechless,” the narrator says of Serena Joy. “She stays in her home, but
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One side says, Invite them over; you don’t want to be rude. Isn’t that how you change hearts and minds? Except fuck that, the other side jumps in—that’s just “white niceness,” as an acquaintance of color once aptly described it.
They came with pen and paper, ready to take notes. I came with a recorder, hoping to gain insight into what it meant to face down white nationalism in your own backyard. Mostly, it seemed to involve confusion.
Lana didn’t wear a Klan robe or keep a Nazi flag flapping in the breeze outside her home. Her belief system, however, was all but indistinguishable from women who did. She inflicted injury by unilaterally limiting the definition of harm and then doing what fell just outside it. If a person was hurt by what she said or did, it wasn’t her problem.
Except, of course, it was. Lana provoked fear and antipathy as a matter of business. Bigotry had become her livelihood.
Lana, Ayla, and other white-nationalist women I encountered subscribed to the “fake news” narrative that Trump has amplified as president, the notion that most journalism is deliberately distorted to undermine right-wing voices and ideas.
I suspect, however, that there was another reason they dismissed my work. White nationalists have always wanted to tell their stories on their own terms—unscrutinized, mythologized.
LANA’S AND AYLA’S online moves are pertinent to a question that lingers here, at the end of the book: What can America do about the hate movement? Tech companies can identify and ban hate speech, but this process inevitably becomes a game of Whac-a-Mole. It’s not enough, and it never will be. Similarly, bringing the law to bear on hate speech and crimes is necessary but remedial—levying penalties for specific wrongdoing won’t vaccinate America against far-right extremism.
“An emphasis on the disorganized aspects of Aryanism obscures its strategic and structured dimensions,” argue the authors of the book American Swastika.
Magnifying my gloom were encounters with white people who identified as moderate or liberal who made statements that I recognized as precisely the kind of bait white nationalists use to make their case to the mainstream. At a dinner party, a friend of a friend I’d never met before, a little younger than I, went into full All-Lives-Matter mode.
The least Americans can ask of one another is to have frank conversations about whiteness, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable. People concerned about the rising tide of hate can also get involved in antiracist initiatives that seek to empower populations of color, tackle inequality, facilitate dialogue about prejudice, and root discriminatory ideas out of American life.i They can demand better media coverage of race and vote bigots and xenophobes out of office. They can support the work of groups like Life After Hate, which helps people leave far-right groups. But first and foremost,
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Women are the hate movement’s dulcet voices and its standard bearers. As purveyors and keepers and caretakers, they arguably tap into a wider spectrum of power than men do.
SO MUCH OF history is made up of small moves. Hope, too, dwells in increments.
Rae began to wonder: Did her community of hate misidentify what was problematic in her life? Maybe it wasn’t people with black or brown skin or Jews with their purported monopoly on successful careers. Maybe the problem was being working class in an economic system that cared about what it got from someone like Rae, not what it could provide her.
