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April 28 - May 7, 2021
On roadsides and in yards, MAGA signs stood alongside Confederate flags.
Among them were neo-Nazis and Klan members who found common cause in their opposition to liberal politics—“distinctions among white power factions melted away,” writes historian Kathleen Belew, and “anti-communism was used as an alibi for racism.”18 The alibi stuck, and others followed: Heritage not hate. It’s okay to be white. All lives matter.
In the intervening years, enterprising groups and leaders had packaged white nationalism as what Barbara Perry calls “button-down terror”—a seemingly modern, palatable version of the movement. It was intended to appeal to Americans who didn’t want to be skinheads or separatists but who agreed that the country would benefit by doubling down on white supremacy.
Jardina’s groundbreaking research shows that some 20 percent of white Americans—roughly forty million people20—now have “strong levels of group consciousness,” meaning they “feel a sense of discontent over the status of their group.” These people tend to be less educated but not financially vulnerable. “Most own houses, have average incomes similar to most whites in the United States, are employed, and identify as middle class,” Jardina writes. And white women are more likely than white men to hold “exclusionary views about what it means to be American, preferring boundaries around the
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In his seminal history of the movement, journalist Leonard Zeskind notes that its supporters have never been “paranoids or uneducated backwoodsmen with tobacco juice dripping down their chins, the ‘extremists’ of popular imagination. As a movement, white nationalists look like a demographic slice of white America.”22
We know relatively little about how to combat hate effectively; while scholars of the subject have toiled in the margins, the federal government has cut funding for programs to counter right-wing extremism and blocked the dissemination of data on the subject.25 Only in 2019 did the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledge that white supremacy is a national security threat.
there is other work keeping the flames of hate alive. That work is often done by women.
Don Black told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The potential of the Net for organizations and movements such as ours is enormous. We’re reaching tens of thousands of people who never before had access to our point of view.”5 He was right. The number of Stormfront users grew, and so did the number of racist websites. By the end of the 1990s, the far right had a sprawling digital ecosystem of chat rooms, journals, newsletters, and audio programming.
Cloaking was a matter of strategy, an effort to widen what sociologists call the Overton window—the range of ideas considered viable or tolerable in public discourse.
“We keep looking back to race because of its familiarity,” journalist Angela Saini writes in her book Superior: The Return of Race Science. “For so long, it has been the backdrop to our lives, the running narrative. We automatically translate the information our eyes and ears receive into the language of race, forgetting where that language came from.”
“Social camaraderie, a desire for simple answers to complex political problems, or even the opportunity to take action against formidable social forces can co-exist with, even substitute for, hatred as the reason for participation in organized racist activities.”
The socialization of hate can last weeks, months, or years, feeding on personal discontent and wider social anxieties to reach clarifying moments—“awakenings,” the criminologists call them, that “might be likened to quenching a long-standing thirst for ‘truth.’”
Hate is a failing, but not an isolated one. In a perverse twist on the cliché, hate takes a village.
“If someone is drawn to this site and to our cause,” she wrote one day, “they should be encouraged to look around here some more and not automatically jumped on for saying things like ‘But I have known some really nice black people…’ Can’t all white people have a place here, as long as they support our cause and don’t come here to argue and convince us we shouldn’t be so ‘racist’?”
Corinna wasn’t always sure that she believed what she was saying when she echoed her new friends’ views, but she wanted to. If playing a part graduated to instinct, maybe they would like her even more.
White nationalism’s professed goal is protecting the white race from extinction, which necessarily requires having babies, and Corinna had already done her part.
“They’re all saying the same things. They’re all dressed the same,” she said of people at neo-Nazi gatherings. “And you feel, yes, I’m part of this now. I have a home here.”
Although the new editors would later denounce Rockwell’s racist and anti-Semitic views, on at least one count, they seemed to agree with him: Men and women inhabiting traditional gender roles was vital to any grand political project.
He was a showman who nurtured a cult of white struggle and heroism, while draping bigotry with the appealing camouflage of common sense, social tradition, and religious faith.
Rockwell wasn’t the only figure after World War II who drew a blueprint for neo-Nazism. Also influential was a woman named Savitri Devi, who in 1962 joined Rockwell and others in founding the World Union of National Socialists. Devi was born Maximiani Portas in 1905, into a well-to-do family of Greek, French, British, and Italian heritage. A passionate supporter of the Third Reich, she took the name Savitri Devi after moving to India, believed by some racist thinkers to be the birthplace of the so-called Aryan race that migrated to Europe and established Western civilization. Devi was a vocal
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They provoked fear. In at least one instance, Corinna distributed literature in the neighborhood surrounding Congregation Beth Israel, a Portland synagogue.
The NSM dubbed the Phoenix rally “America First,” a slogan that, in the early twentieth century, had been used by isolationist politicians and the Klan; Donald Trump would later invoke it in his race to the White House.
memory is “an unreliable, self-serving historian,” equipped with “an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.”
Many white Americans rationalize their racism—or even refuse to call it that—by insisting that it isn’t as bad as someone else’s. They could spit on immigrants instead of complaining in private about foreigners stealing American jobs. They could put Jewish people in camps instead of muttering about how they have too much power. They could lynch black people instead of making jokes about their intelligence.
“What does a racist joke do,” writes journalist Joe Bernstein, “except create the cognitive distance necessary to do harm, dissolve the bonds of moral obligation?”26 Talking about bigotry as a matter of degrees and justifying it by way of comparison is for the benefit of the people doing it.
Disbelief about women’s complicity in the worst forms of bigotry stretches across time and cultures. Feminist historians of the Holocaust have documented the postwar fable of “the apolitical woman,” a victim of the Third Reich even if, as a proud German, she participated in its work.
For tens of thousands of voters, open racism and adoration for Hitler weren’t disqualifying attributes in a candidate.
By seeming run-of-the-mill, they might gain a foothold alongside millions of white Americans whose less strident racism was a cultural norm.
American policy makers’ frenzied focus on radical Islam diverted attention from other homegrown threats that fed on simmering resentments—the kind embedded in the country’s existence, liable to flare up under the right conditions.
A former neo-Nazi, a woman called Bonnie, told researchers in a 2017 study about an incident at a Jack in the Box restaurant where, in her recollection, a Hispanic server got her order wrong and then refused to address the problem. Bonnie’s response was to yell, “Fuck you, you fucking Beaner, get out of my country.” She also said, “White power!” and even threw a Nazi salute.
she even went on dates with a few black men, reveling in the fact that Covington had no idea she was defying him.
Why Islam? Corinna didn’t seem to understand why anyone would find her choice strange. She liked how the religion gave structure to her days. The mosque was a place to go where there were people she knew. She liked that Islam was a topic she could learn about from books. Keeping her body covered meant that it was hers and no one else’s. “It is freeing, actually, to feel like I’m taking something away from men,” she told me.
Corinna was also sticking it to the racists she’d once considered friends. She bragged online about ordering a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and a Nike hijab to wear while working out so that she could “offend multiple people.” For good measure she tacked on the hashtag #umadbro.
At thirty-eight, she was a nationalist and a traditionalist. At twenty-eight, she’d been a liberal and a feminist.
Ayla had changed her mind. Whereas she’d once believed in LGBTQ rights, she now called for making same-sex relationships taboo.
considered herself anticapitalism and antigovernment. “I do not recognize the police state however I have no need to currently violate any of their laws,” she wrote.
Later, driving her sons home from the service, she explained “what it means to be gay and why it’s absolutely fine to be so and how mommy doesn’t agree with church about it and it made me so sad I felt sick.” Well, then, we should go to another church, her older son said. It’s not that simple, Ayla replied. I really believe our church is the truest church on earth. I don’t want to leave.
Ayla wondered if she was on the wrong side of the political divide. Maybe feminism wasn’t the answer—maybe it was the problem.
In the South, research shows that white women have played a critical role in moving politics to the right.
The diffuse nature of choice feminism also plays into the hands of forces keen to demonize women’s liberation as overly sensitive, aggressive, and hysterical.
“Why would God create a sun that gives us cancer yet then not allow us to develop sunblock for thousands of years? It makes no sense. God created the sun to help people not to harm them,” she said.
lmao WHAT
Ayla related to the book. Like Johnson, she believed that she’d been seduced by liberal thought in her twenties, before realizing that Christianity was the only guide she needed.
AMERICA LOVES MOTHERS. Or so it claims. In reality, it loves wielding mothers as symbols more than it does the actual women who bear and (or) raise children.
Yet it’s possible to acknowledge the rampant, persistent sexism of the far right while also giving women the credit they deserve. They aren’t being duped or forced into hate. They have agency, they make choices, and they locate power in places other than standard political authority.
“they made possible a murderous state in the name of concerns they defined as motherly.”
She used the language of “heritage not hate,” a phrase first popularized by white Southerners after the Civil War in an effort to make the sins of the Confederacy seem less horrible and its symbols like mere vessels of history.
Any good mother, she went on, knew that her children should learn about color blindness, not conflict.
Exactly like the arguments of those teaching against critical race theory
husband, also a white nationalist, worked at the State Department until the SPLC exposed his politics.
The modern evangelical movement has racist roots.
others likely hoped that a more oblique approach—racism with plausible deniability,19 as Lee Atwater once put it—would minimize claims that their faith was intolerant.
