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April 28 - May 7, 2021
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.”
HAHAHAHA tell that to all my LOTR buff friends
Because America felt white to her, ipso facto, whiteness was American.
She didn’t acknowledge that purifying America would be impossible to achieve without violence.
Like Ayla, Kessler was once liberal; a graduate of the University of Virginia, he’d voted for Barack Obama and participated in the Occupy movement before getting involved in men’s rights activism and the alt-right.
She talked about the alt-right becoming a political party.
“I think a lot of people harbor our views,” Lana told me. “They just need permission to say that ‘I feel them’ and ‘I believe them.’”
maybe it was because Lana sensed that she would have more capital on the far right if people either believed she was already a mother or couldn’t tell for sure.
THE ROAD FROM grunge-loving teenager to anti-Semitic pundit was a meandering one.
“The tiniest bit of knowledge can make us feel like an expert,” authors Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach write in their book, The Knowledge Illusion. “Once we feel like an expert, we start talking like an expert. And it turns out that the people we talk to don’t know much either. So relative to them, we are experts.”14 On and on the cycle goes, reinforcing knowledge that isn’t. “This,” Sloman and Fernbach note, “is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous.”
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.
people are more likely to perceive statements that they’ve encountered on multiple occasions as true even if they already know the statements are false.
The organization lobbied for the creation of state commissions to determine which textbooks schools could distribute, then ensured that the selections
were “fair and impartial” to the Confederacy.
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. Fewer than half (44 percent) correctly answered that slavery was legal in all colonies during the American Revolution.”
“I know that what is contained herein will be bitterly denied,” former Union soldier James McElroy wrote in his 1879 account of life in a brutal Confederate prison, an early challenge to the narrative of the Lost Cause. “I know that hell hath no fury like the vindictiveness of those who are hurt by the truth being told to them.”23
Lana’s methods reminded me of a statement that Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the head of the Nazi women’s league, once made about appealing to women. “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
I wondered if the pursuit of white nationalism—the struggle, as believers would call it—was the endgame for people like Lana. 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.
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.
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?
“An emphasis on the disorganized aspects of Aryanism obscures its strategic and structured dimensions,” argue the authors of the book American Swastika.5 Today, that emphasis downplays the endurance and adaptability of the hate movement over time.
The idea that white nationalism is going anywhere, much less anytime soon, is wishful thinking.
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.
She made false equivalences—for instance, that “ban white men” was just as dangerous as saying that America should ban Muslims or black people. Attempts to bring power disparities and other context into the conversation were met with retorts about people just needing to be nicer to one another. In another instance, standing in a breakfast buffet line, a middle-aged writer told me that I needed to be very careful with my book lest it hurt women (white ones, presumably).
The least Americans can ask of one another is to have frank conversations about whiteness, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable.
They can support the work of groups like Life After Hate, which helps people leave far-right groups.
combating hate requires understanding it—not what it seems to be or what we hope it amounts to, but what it actually is. That includes who supports it, why they do, and how their experiences reflect a reality we all share.
Outsiders discount or overlook the women of white nationalism at America’s peril. The same goes for minimizing or ignoring the factors that push some women toward a politics of exclusion and hate.
There is a strain of kumbaya in the stories of people who’ve exited the hate movement. In my interviews, women who used to be white nationalists described a hand they didn’t expect, thrust through the surface of hate’s murky pool, offering them its grip.
But now, at home caring for her daughter, worrying about money and the future, 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.
The kinship that the women at the mosque offered was genuine, and they didn’t want anything in return from Corinna. They just seemed glad she was there, practicing Islam alongside them.
When a call to prayer emanated from the gym’s loudspeaker, the women rushed to the middle of the floor. They left their shoes in a pile and stood in a line on a blue tarp. One used her cell phone to find the direction of Mecca. “A little to the left!” she instructed, and the group edged that way. Then they fell silent. I could hear the crinkling of plastic, gentle whispers, and the whir of traffic outside.
This is a really sweet image!
Adolf Hitler lost a presidential race, but the Nazis earned enough votes in a parliamentary election in 1932 to become the dominant party in the Reichstag.
Research indicates that the party’s ascent to power was due in no small part to its success in garnering support from women, particularly those of the Protestant middle class.
