More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 19 - January 31, 2021
Flattened and facile, white nationalism possesses a near-apocalyptic sense of urgency: The time is now or never for white people to protect their own kind. For women, that means bearing white babies, putting a smiling face on an odious ideology, promising camaraderie to women who join their crusade, and challenging white nationalism’s misogynistic reputation.
Heritage not hate. It’s okay to be white. All lives matter.
Or, as with Corinna, a person eager for human connection might find a racist community, present themselves as a potential ally by saying all the right things, and forge friendships that solidify their place in a cause. Hate becomes a cure for loneliness.
Hate is a failing, but not an isolated one. In a perverse twist on the cliché, hate takes a village. A seeker finds a creed and a community where they can test out how white nationalism feels to them, how the language of hate rolls off their tongues in conversation or flies from their fingertips onto computer screens. They can hear how it echoes back to them, delivering the validation that they’ve been craving all along.
Gaede, who’d once floated the idea of starting a matchmaking service for white nationalists, wondered why Corinna was dating but not trying to have more children. She was displeased when Corinna said that her tubes were tied, a decision she didn’t plan to undo. In Gaede’s eyes, according to Corinna, her value as a white woman plummeted.
EXITING HATE IS similar to embracing it. It involves a search for place and purpose, born of personal need. A person doesn’t necessarily exit because a veil lifts and they are suddenly able to see hate for what it is. They leave because it makes sense to them and for them.
“The reality is, people rarely change their personality or ideals during adulthood, and if they do, it needs to be something they do on their own, for themselves.”
“Why is it that no matter what a skinhead does, he considers himself to be ‘fighting on the front lines’?” she wrote in a September 2012 post. “Whether it’s playing foosball with the bros, whining at his mom that he needs more clean laundry or knocking stuff off the shelves at 7-11 in a drunken fit at 3am, he is ON THE FRONT LINES!!! Fighting for the GREAT WHITE RACE!!!”
Female pioneers in various spheres of American life linked their pro-woman agendas with bigoted ones.
STOP also alluded to the particular privileges of being a white woman, situated in the social hierarchy above racial minorities and within favorable distance of white men.
Beale also argued that feminism begot lax immigration policies: When white women secured rights and opportunities, birth rates declined and the demand for certain jobs—cleaning houses, for instance—surged. Liberals jumped at the chance to fill population and labor gaps with people of color and opened borders accordingly. Feminism, Beale concluded, was a tool used by liberals and globalists to “weaken national sovereignty.”
Ayla compared SJWs of color to women who go to the hospital for a prescheduled caesarean. “They don’t have to push, they don’t have to risk anything, they don’t have to break a nail,” she said.
ANALYSES OF THE far right often dismiss the elevation of motherhood as a way of keeping women subservient to men by convincing them that they have more power than they actually do. As Corinna’s story shows, the hate movement can sideline women who aren’t dedicated to having and raising children.
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. In theory, though, it’s more effective from a PR standpoint than lynchings, cross burnings, and slur-filled pamphlets.
Her answer sidetracked the real matter at hand: the divisive potential of far-right women. Lana seemed to agree heartily with her movement’s gender politics. She disavowed feminism—white women didn’t need it, she told me, because “our men have already propelled us like crazy.” When I asked about sexist comments made by high-profile men in the alt-right, Lana countered by paraphrasing David Lane: Men in the movement “love women,” she said, “and they want a future for women and children.” How could love be sexist?
Countering Lana’s replies might fill a book of its own. There would be a chapter on how misogyny and love can be intertwined. Another on why a woman embracing her body isn’t an invitation for a man to touch it. How a woman might have a rape fantasy and simultaneously fear being violated. Who gets to use the word “pussy” and how. Suffice it to say, there was an unbridgeable gap in our conversation.
As the century barrels on, could white women prove increasingly vulnerable to hate’s allure? What might the consequences be?
